Coming off the heels of Midway and Coral Sea, our book club for Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, heads to the South Pacific for our longest chapter yet, an account of the string of naval battles around Guadalcanal. While each is individually less famous, there's a strong argument that the whole campaign was even more pivotal than the actions discussed in the previous chapter, as well as the last time the two navies met on equal terms.
As usual, we'll begin with the recitation of the errors. Here, Morison spends less time on the Hudson that spotted the Japanese on the way to Savo Island than he did in The Struggle for Guadalcanal, and as such is less unfair to the crew. (In that one, he's so unfair to the crew that the US Navy officially apologized decades later.) Second, there's the bashing of Fletcher that we talked about last time, which is often hilariously over the top. We also see him disliking someone else, Capt. Bode of Chicago, although with somewhat greater justification. Still, it's kind of weird to see him speaking highly of Callaghan, who screwed up far worse than Fletcher ever did. I'm also confused by his claim about there being shells on the decks of the Japanese battleships in the opening stages of First Guadalcanal, which does not match my understanding of what happened there. I was under the impression that the Japanese initially opened fire with the bombardment shells, but couldn't find confirmation in later accounts either way. In any case, I can't see how you'd end up with shells out on deck while trying to get them back to the magazines, and suspect Morison got carried away here.
Beyond that, it's a very solid account of the battles, although with effectively no analysis of why they turned out the way they did, which gives me something to talk about. The Japanese, knowing they would be outnumbered in a war with the US, had sought to equalize this by fighting at night, and it had been a major pillar of their training in the interwar years. The Americans had not taken this nearly as seriously, and while their advantage in radar should have been enough to compensate, they were still figuring out how to use it. Also barely gestured at is the superiority of Japanese torpedoes, which were significantly larger than their American counterparts, and ran on pure oxygen for greater range and speed. These "Long Lances" (a name coined by Morison himself) had also been the beneficiaries of an extensive (and expensive) test program, which the Americans hadn't bothered with for their torpedoes. We'll see even more of this in future chapters.
And of course I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about the battleship action we see here, one of only three times in the war when US battleships fought their Axis counterparts. South Dakota suffered a power loss due to the shock of her guns firing, and with the radar cut off, maneuvered into a position that silhouetted herself against a burning destroyer, turning her into a punching bag for the Japanese fleet and exacerbating the power loss as hits lead to shorts throughout the superstructure. And we have more exciting battleship combat to look forward to next week, when we go back to the Atlantic.
Comments
Them running on Oxygen means having a air distilation plant on board. I am sure that made damage control more fun.
I think so, although I can’t speak to any examples offhand. Or maybe they purged the system before battle, which I think would be possible.
Edit: There's a pretty good description of the plan in the Naval Technical Mission to Japan reports. Apparently, one of the big issues was that it didn't work very well when the ship was rolling more than 5 deg, and in that case, the Captain may have to chose to lower the purity from 98% to 93%. But I don't see any reason you would have excess pure oxygen on board outside the torpedoes after it was shut down.
See IJN Furutaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JapanesecruiserFurutaka#BattleofCapeEsperance and IJN Suzuya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JapanesecruiserSuzuya(1934)#BattleofLeyte_Gulf
Both had torpedoes explode on deck, although the accounts above don't specify if it was the warhead of the torpedo or pure oxygen air flask that caused the explosion.
Those few words should mention Washington's pounding of Kirishima. Morison here mentions nine 16" hits out of 75, and Lee's after action report claimed eight, but later Japanese scholarship and Dr. Ballard's 1992 underwater photography of poor Kirishima estimate 20 (!) hits out of those 75. That's some mighty fine shootin', Admiral Lee. You belonged in the Olympics with marksmanship like that. Oh wait, you were.
Ok, we can't have time machines. But wouldn't it be nice to post a letter to the past? Lee died in 1945 and Morison died in 1976. Wouldn't it be nice to let them both know how insanely great a job Washington's crew did with on that tense, dark night in 1942 when everything was at stake?
@Chantry
Technically, that was the torpedoes themselves, not the oxygen plant. There was definitely an increased risk of accidents, and it probably would have been a little bit worse if the oxygen flask was breached, but I'm not sure that was a huge contributor compared to the warhead.
Admiral Lee’s performance is all the more impressive when it is considered that at the time USS Washington was the only operational U.S. ship. Despite facing a battleship, four cruisers and 8 destroyers by himself, with the entire rest of his force either sunk or hors de combat, he kept his cool and in a few minutes arguably won the entire Guadalcanal campaign.
Although it is poetic to link Washington’s gunnery performance to the fact that Lee was a crack shot and Olympic marksman, in reality it was because it was said that "knew more about radar than the radar operators,". In stark contrast to Admiral Callaghan two nights before, who had five ships with radar but did not make one of them his flagship and suffered defeat accordingly, Lee fought the battle via the glow of a phosphor screen, carefully approaching undetected until he could be certain he wasn’t targeting the South Dakota before opening fire at the near point blank range (for a battleship) of 9,000 yards. It was a masterful performance; Lee’s tactical and technical acumen make him one of the Navy’s greatest WWII admirals, if far too unknown compared to others. The difference between his command and Callaghan’s the night before directly led to the USN developing the Combat Information Center (CIC) concept for controlling ships and battles via consolidated sensors and communication, and every U.S. combat ship has a CIC to this day.
It is a cruel twist of history is that as commander of the Pacific Fleet’s fast battleships, Lee commanded Task Force 34 at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. If Admiral Halsey had not been careless (foolish? incompetent?) and assigned TF 34 to guard the San Bernardino Strait on the night of 24 October, then in the early morning darkness of the 25th Lee would have had the chance to repeat his success at the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, only on the grandest scale. He would have been commanding the six most modern and powerful battleships on earth, all equipped with the very best radar, as a Japanese fleet of four battleships (including the mighty Yamato) and six heavy cruisers sailed right at him to their doom under the fire of radar controlled gunnery directed by the foremost expert of such gunnery on earth: Vice Admiral Willis Lee. It would have been to battleships and surface warfare what Midway was to aircraft carriers and aviation, a historically decisive victory, and given how people love battleships ‘San Bernardino’ would probably be a mononym for such victory the way ‘Midway’ is. A crushing blow sinking multiple battleships at once, especially if it had included the Yamato, would probably have left Lee as historically famous as Spruance and Fletcher, instead of his relative obscurity today. Yet due to Halsey’s tactical blunders during the battle, Lee could only submit in his after action report: “No battle damage was incurred nor inflicted on the enemy by vessels while operating as Task Force Thirty-Four."
Good points all, and San Bernardino is one of the great "what-ifs" of the war. Regarding Lee though, it's more than poetry. The same drive to understand/plan/practice/perfect his own rifle marksmanship drove his entire career:
We are agreeing strenuously, I know. He was a great person, a great leader, and an example to us all. Except, I guess in the chain smoking department. That can get you by age 57 no matter what sort of person you are.
@ Steve-O
Here is a link to analysis of the hits and where they hit on page 27 at the link:http://www.navweaps.com/indexlundgren/KirishimaDamage_Analysis.pdf
Kirishima never had a chance.
@Bean I've read of at least one case where an explosion involving pure oxygen was a direct cause of a Japanese warship sinking, I believe it was a cruiser, I just can't remember the book or the name of the cruiser.
"However, the use of oxygen did make the torpedoes more prone to explosion and many Japanese cruisers were lost to torpedo explosions following damage from bombs or shell hits." Under the engines section: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WTJAP_Main.php
@Chantry,
That was a phenomenal read, thank you for the link.
One thing I could not help but notice is that all of the main battery hits except one were basically in the hull, while all of the secondary hits were in the superstructure except two. For all of the main battery to be targeted at the waterline is obvious, but was it intentional for the secondary armament to be aimed higher, via a design in the fire control system to move point of impact above the water, just as parallax correction attempted to get widely separated main guns to hit the same spot? 5" shells would of course have no chance of penetrating battleship armor, so it would make sense to use such weapons "defensively" by attacking the superstructure (defensively in the sense of not trying to sink the ship but to prevent it from engaging effectively by destroying rangfinders, spotlights, spotters, etc.). But was this intentional or just a quirk of how the hits landed given that only two of the five secondary mounts were firing? (What if the entire starboard secondary battery had been brought to bear - Kirishima would have taken about another 25 hits!)
Washington did all this in less than seven minutes, with only 5m24s of actual firing. One can only marvel further at the absolute folly of Admiral Halsey. Had TF34 been waiting at the San Bernadino Strait, the six battleships in 10 minutes could have landed some 218 major caliber hits, and 458 secondary. That's 1.1 hits per second, or each of the four Japanese battleships taking a round every 3.5 seconds on average. Kurita's Center Force would have been devastated.
I haven't been commenting lately, but I've caught up, and thank you for keeping this going!
You've put your finger on what made this chapter more boring to me, I think - Morison doesn't go into why things happened the way they did.
My other big question is, were both sides making the right decisions committing so many ships and troops to Guadalcanal? Or could one side or another have better ignored the island in the first place or cut their losses partway through? Unlike the previous chapters, the answer isn't obvious, and Morison doesn't really analyze the alternatives.
@Onux If I understand your question correctly, the 5" inch guns had their own directors and fire control.
At fairly short range of 9,000 yards I don't the fire control of any of the guns would have been able to concentrate the shells more closely together.
As to South Dakota, from what I remember, that while the damage was serious, she was never in any jeopardy of sinking.
Did Morrison go into detail about why things happened the way they did in the series? I think I mentioned before that its been something like a decade since I read the whole thing, so my memory is faulty.
Again, I really like the charts with the tracks on them. The one included is fairly confusing due to the enormous number of varied tracks but if you spend the time, you can follow it well.
Again, Morrison's dislike of Fletcher is apparent, but what I also found odd is his dismissal of the one captain's suicide in the second half of a compound sentence. His treatment of Bode was unpleasant as well.
Lee managed the fight with Kirishima magnificently. The percentage of hits achieved by the main caliber guns probably exceeds almost every other capital ship fight out there.
I can't imagine why Morrison would have thought that the Japanese would have had shells and powder sitting around on deck. The powder would have been the same used in a ship to ship fight as in a shore bombardment fight. Sure, the shells would be different, but where the hell would you have shells piled up? There's only so much space in the ammunition hoists and that's it. Its a completely different situation than the frantic re-arming of the carrier planes, as the ammunition handling system is wildly different.
I wonder how much of the secondaries "only hitting the superstructure" is just selection bias. I think the Kongos had an external belt, so any waterline hits from a 5" are just going to mess up the paint a bit, and that's probably not visible to Ballard. That said, I could see the two different FC teams being under slightly different orders, and the 5" directors are definitely not built around the assumption that the target is at sea level the way the 16" system mostly is.
@Evan
In retrospect, it was clearly a loser for Japan, but that's true of basically everything they did after mid-1942. It was pretty helpful for the US in terms of protecting supply lines to Australia, and we did come out better in the end.
@Belushi
It's been about that long for me, but I think there was at least some analysis there.
@Evan
It was absolutely the right decision for the US. Guadalcanal was close to* the direct route from Hawaii or the West Coast to Australia. Allowing a Japanese airbase there to intercept shipping was risking encirclement of Australia, especially as Port Moresby was being threatened at the same time. In hindsight we know that the Battle of the Coral Sea in May and Midway in June were turning points, but that wasn't obvious when the Japanese first occupied Tulagi next to Guadalcanal and the 1st Marine Division was ordered to the South Pacific - both in May. Despite the setback to a sea invasion at Coral Sea the Japanese continued to threaten Port Moresby overland via the Kokoda Track until September; as for Midway the US was losing carriers at every battle too, and it wasn't until December of 1942 that the US had parity with the Japanese in operational carriers in the Pacific - in August and September the Japanese had more operational carriers than the US did worldwide.
For the Japanese, the equation was different. The US got the airfield the Japanese mostly built on Guadalcanal operational, while the Japanese planes had to come from Rabaul, meaning that Japanese planes had a long flight and limited time on station to attack us ships or support their own, while US planes could wait and be ready. Still, the Japanese badly mismanaged the campaign. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics, and the Japanese kept scoring tactical victories in the many surface battles but giving up the resulting operational/logistical advantage by sailing away. As a result the US Marines on the island kept being resupplied, and the US Navy kept patching up damaged ships at Tulagi so they could be sailed back for permanent repairs, while Japanese troops and the Imperial Navy kept waisting away from lack of supplies or damaged ships beached or scuttled and thus lost. There were a few opportunities in August or October where the Japanese could have seized control of New Georgia Sound ("The Slot") if they had been more aggressive.
There were larger picture logistical failures. The Japanese invaded Bougainville in March 1942 but didn't get an airfield operational there until November (apparently, there were multiple airfields on the island and details are scarce) or operational on New Georgia Island until December, both too late. They staged their ships out of the Shortland islands instead of the New Georgia islands (which they could have done if they had an airstrip there sooner to provide air defense) which reduced them to dash in and out runs by destroyers acting as supply ships (the "Tokyo Express") instead of proper supply by transports.
*Technically New Caledonia is right along the great circle route, but if you have Port Moresby and Guadalcanal then New Caledonia is the next logical step.