Hornfischer at the Marine Corps University

Author James Hornfischer asks me to let you know that he will be speaking Thursday, 24 October, at 3pm, delivering the Erskine Lecture, discussing the Guadalcanal campaign, at Quantico/Marine Corps University in Little Hall. Attendance is open to the entire Quantico community including friends and guests of the author.

Book signing and conversation with WW2 veterans to follow in the WWII Gallery.

Mr. Hornfischer is, of course, the author of a number of Navy-oriented books, including The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour, Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of her Survivors, and with SEAL Marcus Luttrell, Service: A Navy Seal at War. In addition to these excellent works, the book that will most likely be the topic of his appearance in Quantico is the remarkable Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal.

We discussed this last work with him on Midrats Episode 84:

Popular Military Internet Radio with Midrats on BlogTalkRadio

If you can break free to attend, email me for information on who to contact to make that happen.

Book Updates

First, the editors of Maritime Private Security: Responses to Piracy, Terrorism, and Waterborne Security Risks in the 21st Century face the -um- appear at the Heritage Foundation where they discuss the book and answer questions about - well - about piracy and, um, maritime private security. As I write this, the video is not up yet for viewing, but it should be there soon.
UPDATE: Video is up:

Second, James D. Hornfischer's excellent book Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal is now out in paperback with a new cover design and a ranking as a “Best of 2011” by Military History Quarterly.

Night attacks at sea, failure and successes in command, death, destruction and great, great courage make for a compelling tale.

Guadalcanal Days 2 and 3: The Battle of Savo Island

 UPDATE: Let's do this like historians - up to this addition, I've given you the result and the lessons learned, but left out an explanation of how things came to pass. Start with the fact that the U.S. Navy and Marines caught the Japanese by surprise and invaded the lightly held (maybe 800 Japanese) but vital island of Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942. See my previous post and the links therein covering how this was accomplished and why here. Now, let's get into RADM Morison's The Two Ocean War as he sets the scene:

Early in the morning of 7 August news of the American landings reached Vice Admiral Mikawa at Rabaul. His decision was prompt and intelligent - to send reinforements to the Tulagi-Guadacanal garrison, and to assemble a task group to attack the American ships unloading there. {Note by E1: The ship carrying the troops is sunk by an American submarine around midnight on 8 August. It's the task force that is the focus of the battle]
***

Mikawa's naval reaction is a very different story. One hour after receiving the bad news from Tulagi, he began collecting ... a task group to attack the American Expeditionary Force. It was a "scratch team," the ships had never trained together before, but it proved to be good enough for the task in hand. Heavy cruisers Chokai (flagship), Aoba, Kako, Kinugasa and Furutaka, light cruisers Tenryu and Yubari and one destroyer, Yunagi, made rendezvous in St.George Channel around 1900 August 7 and started hell-bent for Guadalcanal. Mikawa's battle plan . . . was to enter Ironbottom Sound in the small hours of the 9th, strike the warships guarding the expeditionary force, shoot up the unloading transports, and retire. An excellent plan; but the chances of detection were great, as the striking force had to steam in full daylight down the "Slot" between the central Solomon Islands before entering the cover of darkness.

Owing to a series of blunders on our side, [5/7/2013 UPDATE NOTE: AN INACCURATE ALLEGATION BY MORISON HAS BEEN TOTALLY REFUTED BY A NUMBER OF SOURCES PLEASE SEE COMMENTS BELOW - THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED TO REFLECT WHAT IS NOW KNOWN]  . . . one (or more) sighting(s) of Mikawa's force that day (was/were mishandled) . . .  Admiral Turner did not receive it (them) until over eight hours had passed. (Further what was reported evidently was miscontrued) On that basis (i.e. the misunderstanding of what was seen) Turner made the bad guess that the Japanese were not coming through that night, but intended to set up a seaplane bases at Santa Isabel Island, some 150 miles from Savo, and attack later. [As indicated here below and in other places, Admiral Turner and/or his staff got it wrong in many, many ways.]

Dogmatically deciding what the enemy would do, instead of considering what he could or might do, was not Turner's only mistake on that fatal night. He allowed his fighting ships to be divided into three separate forces to guard three possible sea approaches by the enemy. Rear Admiral Norman Scott with two light cruisers and two destroyers patrolled the transport area between Tulugi and Guadalcanal, and never got into the battle.
***[Note by E1: Morison lays out the other groups, commanded by Royal Navy Rear Victor Crutchley, VC - but coordination among his ships was - uh - lacking]

Turner was so certain that the enemy would not attack that night he made the further mistake of summoning Crutchley, in Australia, to a conference on board his flagship . . . some 20 miles away . . . This action of Turner's stemmed from the worst of all blunders that night: Admiral Fletcher's decision to retire his three-carrier task force from covering position, depriving the landing force of air covernext day. **** He commenced this withdrawal at about 1810 August 8 without consulting Turner, who was below him in the chain of command. That was why Turner felt he had to confer with Crutchley and Vandegrift {Marine commander] to decide whether the partially unloaded transports should depart that night, or risk more Japanese air attack without air protection. Consequently, cruiser Australia and the O.T.C. [Officer in Tactical Command] were not on hand when badly needed, and the depleted cruiser group south of Savo Island was commanded by Captain Bode of Chicago, who acted as if dazed.

And then the confusion began.

From HyperWar: The Battle of Savo Island [ONI Combat Narrative], a discussion of what Samuel Eliot Morison called, ". . . [P]robably the worst defeat ever inflicted on the United States Navy in a fair fight":

The disposition of our cruisers and the remaining destroyers was governed by "Special Instructions to the Screening Group," issued by Rear Admiral V. A. C. Crutchley, R. N., commander of the escort groups and second in command of the Amphibious Forces. To protect the disembarkation area from attack from the eastward, the American San Juan and the Australian Hobart, both light cruisers, were assigned to the area east of longitude 160° 04' E., guarding Lengo and Sealark Channels. They were screened by the destroyers Monssen and Buchanan. At 1850 these ships began their patrol at 15 knots on courses 000° and 180° between Guadalcanal and the Tulagi area.

As a precaution against surprise from the northwest, two destroyers were assigned to radar guard and antisubmarine patrol beyond Savo Island. The Ralph Talbot was north of the island, patrolling between positions 08° 59' S., 159° 55' E. and 09° 01' S., 159° 49' E. The Blue was stationed west of the island between positions 09° 05' S., 159° 42' E.4 and 09° 09' S., 159° 37' E., patrolling on courses 051° and 231° at 12 knots.

The area inside Savo Island, between Guadalcanal and Florida, was divided into two patrol districts by a line drawn 125° T. from the center of Savo. It was upon the vessels patrolling these sectors that the Japanese raid was to fall. The area to the north of this line was assigned to the heavy cruisers Vincennes, Astoria, and Quincy, screened by the Helm and Wilson. The last-named replaced the Jarvis, which had been damaged by a torpedo during the day's air attack. This group was patrolling at a speed of 10 knots on a square, the center of which lay approximately midway between Savo and the western end of Florida Island. At midnight it turned onto course 045° T. and was to make a change of 90° to the right approximately every half hour.

The area to the south of the line was covered by the Chicago and H. M. A. S. Canberra, screened by the Patterson and Bagley. H. M. A. S. Australia was the flag and lead ship of this group, but at the time of the action she was absent, having taken Admiral Crutchley to the conference aboard the McCawley. Capt. Howard D. Bode of the Chicago was left in command of the group, although the Canberra ahead of his ship acted as guide. The group was steering various courses in a general northwest-southeast line--the base patrol course was 305°-125° T.--reversing course approximately every hour.

Admiral Crutchley's instructions were that in case of a night attack each cruiser group was to act independently, but was to support the other as required. In addition to the Melbourne warning, a dispatch had been received indicating that enemy submarines were in the area, and night orders placed emphasis on alertness and the necessity for keeping a sharp all-around lookout. The destroyers were to shadow unknown vessels, disseminate information and illuminate targets as needed. It was provided that if they should be ordered to form a striking force, all destroyers of Squadron FOUR except the Blue and Talbot were to concentrate 5 miles northwest of Savo Island. This arrangement was to cause some confusion during the battle.

and

"The fact must be faced that we had an adequate force placed with the very purpose of repelling surface attack and when that surface attack was made, it destroyed our force," said Admiral Crutchley. After full allowance for the element of surprise and for the fact that the attacker at night enjoys an immense advantage, there remain many questions about the action which cannot be answered.
***
The redeeming feature of the battle was the splendid performance of our officers and men. They had been on the alert for days and had had about 48 hours of continuous, active operations immediately before the battle. In spite of this, their conduct under the most trying circumstances was beyond praise, and they made it, in the happy phrase of one of our officers, "a night in which heroism was commonplace."

HMAS Canberra sinking

Instead of repeating the ONI Combat Narrative here, please go read the Hyperwar link. It is well worth your time.

You can also find a report in the USNI Solomons Campaign series at Execution at Savo Island by CDR Bill Ballard:

There is no shortage of lessons learned from Savo Island.  To pull out just a few of the big ones:

Communication between supporting/-ed commanders: With the entire operation in its infancy, URR’s lesson of streamlined dissemination and obtaining of INTEL and aerial reconnaissance information is still applicable.  Allied shore-based reconnaissance aircraft were either under the command of COMSOPAC or COMSOWESPAC, with little effective communication or coordination.  COMSOWESPAC aircraft detected (and mis-identified) Mikawa’s force the morning of the 8th; by the time it reached CTF 62 it was too late to send any more aircraft to either further identify or attack them.

Capability vs. Intent: Be ready for what your enemy CAN do to you, not what you think your enemy WILL do to you.  Taking two seaplane tenders out of the mis-identified formation, there were still five ships that were capable of reaching Savo that night.  Taking this into account, had some or all of TG 62.6 been in Condition I through the night, with a real plan or set of PPR’s in place…

Trusting your Technology: Only if you understand its limitations.  On a tactical level this battle was less a case of visually targeted torpedoes defeating RADAR-directed gunnery and more a case of over-reliance on incorrectly employed RADAR leading to the complete surprise of TG 62.6.  Even though in training BLUE and RALPH TALBOT exhibited RADAR detection ranges greater than Japanese visual detection ranges, the long wave SC RADAR’s performance suffered terribly near land.  Additionally, their assigned search tracks at times left 20 mile gaps between the two ships. (Bates, pg. 350)  Interestingly, the most capable Allied RADAR, the SG RADAR, was aboard SAN JUAN and never saw action.  One wonders what the outcome could have been if, between Crutchley, Scott and their staffs, they had decided to put SAN JUAN in one of the picket stations.

Technology vs. Tactics, Training and Procedures (TTP): The action at Savo commenced with both sides well within the effective range of their preferred weapons.  This is the range at which training pays off.  Simply put: the IJN had trained; the USN hadn’t.  Of the Allied ships, only ASTORIA had conducted any recent night target practice, and it had been at least eight months (more than likely indefinite in the case of QUINCY and VINCENNES, recently arrived from the Atlantic) since any other cruiser had conducted either night target exercises or a night battle problem. (Bates, pg. 356)

US Navy losses: From here:

Battle of Savo Island
Navy 936 dead 11 wounded
Marine 33 dead

UPDATE: Added some additional paragraphs from the ONI report to set some background.

Sunday Ship History: Guadalcanal Campaign August 1942

Sixty-nine years ago today began the Guadalcanal Campaign, August 1942 - February 1943:

In the six months between August 1942 and February 1943, the United States and its Pacific Allies fought a brutally hard air-sea-land campaign against the Japanese for possession of the previously-obscure island of Guadalcanal. The Allies' first major offensive action of the Pacific War, the contest began as a risky enterprise since Japan still maintained a significant naval superiority in the Pacific ocean.

Nevertheless, the U.S. First Marine Division landed on 7 August 1942 to seize a nearly-complete airfield at Guadalcanal's Lunga Point and an anchorage at nearby Tulagi, bounding a picturesque body of water that would soon be named "Iron Bottom Sound". Action ashore went well, and Japan's initial aerial response was costly and unproductive. However, only two days after the landings, the U.S. and Australian navies were handed a serious defeat in the Battle of Savo Island.

A lengthy struggle followed, with its focus the Lunga Point airfield, renamed Henderson Field. Though regularly bombed and shelled by the enemy, Henderson Field's planes were still able to fly, ensuring that Japanese efforts to build and maintain ground forces on Guadalcanal were prohibitively expensive. Ashore, there was hard fighting in a miserable climate, with U.S. Marines and Soldiers, aided by local people and a few colonial authorities, demonstrating the fatal weaknesses of Japanese ground combat doctrine when confronted by determined and well-trained opponents who possessed superior firepower.

At sea, the campaign featured two major battles between aircraft carriers that were more costly to the Americans than to the Japanese, and many submarine and air-sea actions that gave the Allies an advantage. Inside and just outside Iron Bottom Sound, five significant surface battles and several skirmishes convincingly proved just how superior Japan's navy then was in night gunfire and torpedo combat. With all this, the campaign's outcome was very much in doubt for nearly four months and was not certain until the Japanese completed a stealthy evacuation of their surviving ground troops in the early hours of 8 February 1943.

At the end of the old Victory at Sea episode the narration compares the Marines on Guadalcanal to the Greeks at Thermopylae, the English at Waterloo.

The Marines turned the tide of war and stopped their enemy. The Japanese will advance no further. And, as the surviving Marines wave goodbye, one of the greatest tales of heroism slips out of focus - into history. For these men go the honors accorded to the Greeks at Thermopylae, the Colonials at Valley Forge, the British at Waterloo and, now, the Americans at Guadalcanal.

And what of the American Navy? It began badly as Japanese land-based aircraft ripped into the shipboard logistics train followed by a sea battle that shook the fleet:

The long fight for Guadalcanal formally opened shortly after 6AM on 7 August 1942, when the heavy cruiser Quincy began bombarding Japanese positions near Lunga Point.

In the darkness a few hours earlier, what was for mid-1942 an impressive invasion force had steamed past Savo Island to enter the sound between the two objective areas: Guadalcanal to the south and, less than twenty miles away, Tulagi to the north. These thirteen big transports (AP), six large cargo ships (AK) and four small high-speed transports (APD) carried some 19,000 U.S. Marines. They were directly protected by eight cruisers (three of them Australian), fifteen destroyers and five high-speed minesweepers (DMS).

Led by Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, this armada was supported from out at sea by three aircraft carriers, accompanied by a battleship, six cruisers, sixteen destroyers and five oilers under the command of Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who was also entrusted with the overall responsibility for the operation.

The great majority of these ships (9 AP, 6 AK and most of the escort and bombardment ships), with Marine Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift and the bulk of his Leathernecks, was to assault Guadalcanal a few miles east of Lunga Point. Tactically, this part of the landing went very well. There were few enemy combat troops present, and these were some distance away. The first of the Marines came ashore soon after 9AM at "Red" Beach, a stretch of grey sand near the Tenaru River. By the afternoon of the following day they had pushed westwards to seize the operation's primary object, the nearly completed Japanese airfield near Lunga Point. The surviving Japanese, mainly consisting of labor troops, quickly retreated up the coast and inland, leaving the Marines with a bounty of captured materiel, much of which would soon prove very useful to its new owners.

Low flying Japanese bombers attack the fleet of ships supporting the invasion of Guadalcanal

While the Marines consolidated their beachhead and began to establish a defensive perimeter around the airstrip, the landing of their supplies and equipment proceeded less well. Typically for these early amphibious operations, arrangements were inadequate to handle the glut of things brought ashore by landing craft. Mounds of supplies soon clogged the beaches, slowing the unloading of the ships offshore. A series of Japanese air attacks, which forced the ships to get underway to evade them, didn't help, and when the catastrophic outcome to the Battle of Savo Island and the withdrawal of Vice Admiral Fletcher's carriers forced the the big transports and cargo ships to leave on 9 August, none of them had been completely unloaded. Though the Marines had taken their objective, supply shortages would plague them in the coming weeks, as the Japanese hit back by air, sea and land in an increasingly furious effort to recover Guadalcanal's strategically important airfield.

 The fleet withdrawal has been a sore spot in Navy and Marine relations for years. As this series proceeds, I think you will see that the Navy paid in full any IOUs it owed to the Marines as a result of that forced evacuation. And paid them with blood and raw courage of the highest order.

A couple of years ago, a group of Navy and Marine bloggers put up a series of posts at the U.S. Naval Institute Blog on the Solomons Island Campaign that I will reference as I go along - it began with Steeljaw's The Solomon Islands Campaign: Prelude to the Series, followed by his The Solomons Campaign: Geographical and Political Background, AT1(AW) Charles H. Berlemann, Jr's The Solomon’s Campaign: Status of the United States Fleet and Plans After Midway, URR's The Imperial Japanese Navy after Midway and The Solomons Campaign: WATCHTOWER — Why Guadalcanal?. To bring you up to the invasion, URR posted The Solomons Campaign: Guadalcanal 7-9 August, 1942; Assault and Lodgment.