USS Indiana, 8 September 1942.
On the morning of November 23, Halsey wrote to his commanders to describe the array of new naval forces flowing into the South Pacific. The Saratoga was coming back. With the antiaircraft cruiser San Juan and a squadron of destroyers, she would re-form the nucleus of Task Force 11. The Enterprise, with the antiaircraft cruiser San Diego and Hoover’s old Desron 2, would continue to comprise Task Force 16. Lee, shorn of the South Dakota now but soon to be given two more fast battleships, the repaired North Carolina and the brand-new Indiana, flew Task Force 64’s flag in the Washington. With the fuel oil bottleneck finally easing, two older battleships, the Maryland and Colorado, would come south as Task Force 65 under Rear Admiral Harry W. Hill.
Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, whom Halsey relieved of command of Task Force 16 because a better-qualified aviation man, Rear Admiral Frederick C. Sherman, was available, would take the cruiser striking force, Task Force 67, with the heavies Northampton, Pensacola, New Orleans, the light cruisers Honolulu and Helena, and six destroyers. Task Force 66 came into being as well, with eight destroyers.
Five days later, Halsey announced their new strategic objective, Rabaul. He wrote MacArthur saying that New Guinea couldn’t be secured until the Japanese strongpoint in the Bismarcks was under American control. He also staked the Navy’s claim to the job, arguing that the attack against Rabaul “must be amphibious along the Solomons with New Guinea land position basically a supporting one only. I am currently reinforcing Cactus position and expediting means of operating heavy air from there. It is my belief that the sound procedure at this time is to maintain as strong a land and air pressure against the Japanese Buna position as your lines of communication permit, and continue to extract a constant toll of Japanese shipping, an attrition which if continued at the present rate he can not long sustain.” The attrition wasn’t easy on the Americans, either. Even with the new naval units on hand, Halsey’s plan to surge toward Rabaul, much like MacArthur’s similar concept earlier that year, seemed ambitious with the limited amphibious resources he had immediately at hand.
In late November Halsey received his fourth star, elevating him from vice admiral to admiral. When it was discovered that Nouméa was short of four-star pins for his epaulets, the Navy obtained a pair of two-star pins from a Marine major general and had them reconfigured by a repair ship’s welding shop. After Vice Admiral William L. Calhoun presented Halsey with the makeshift four-star insignia, Halsey turned in his three-star pins and said, “Send one of these to Mrs. Scott and the other to Mrs. Callaghan. Tell them it was their husbands’ bravery that got me my new ones.”
Whatever else could be said of William F. Halsey, no one would complain that he didn’t lead from the front. He had felt the concussion of Japanese gunfire. And as November came to an end, the Japanese would demonstrate that they had a few good salvos left in them.
After the steel-mauling battles of November, both fleets were left to improvise. The night of November 30–December 1 saw the first attempt by the Tokyo Express to deliver supplies using drums lashed together with ropes. Destroyers would steam in close to shore, then drop the drums overboard for small craft to retrieve for the troops. Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka was the architect of the new approach.
In the face of the daily distress calls from the supply-straitened Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal, the officers of Destroyer Squadron 2 were resigned to the new role forced upon them. Tanaka’s chief of staff, Commander Yasumi Toyama, lamented bitterly, “Ahhh, we are more a freighter convoy than a fighting squadron these days. The damn Yankees have dubbed us the Tokyo Express. We transport cargo to that cursed island, and our orders are to flee rather than fight. What a stupid thing!” For the crews of fighting ships, the life of the blockade runner was “a strenuous and unsatisfying routine.”
On November 27, Tanaka steamed south from the Shortlands on a high-speed convoy run. Their sortie was not long a secret. Quickly the American patrol planes spied them from above the clouds: eight destroyers, six serving as transports, laden with supplies, magazines at half capacity, carrying eight torpedoes instead of the usual sixteen, to save on weight.
Planning for its reception was well along. As Tanaka was leaving Rabaul, Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid was sitting down to apply the knowledge the surface fleet had purchased with the lives of more than four thousand men to date. He was rewriting Task Force 67’s operations plan. Op Plan 1–42 applied recent experience methodically. The confusions of early battles would be banished by forethought. Ship captains would know what to do automatically. Certain procedures would be established and used by default. The task force would be organized and deployed to reflect a best-practices approach to battle. Norman Scott’s improvised doctrine of night battle would be refined, encoded as doctrine, and circulated for general use.
Except for the use of the radar, whose virtues were now well recognized, the new doctrine sounded a lot like what the Japanese had been doing from the start. As the enemy was scouted by radar (the Japanese used ship-launched floatplanes to the same end), the destroyers would surge forward independently at first contact to make a surprise torpedo attack. Then, as the time of their impact came, the cruisers, till then standing off at more than twelve thousand yards, would open fire while their aircraft lazed overhead dropping flares. If targets were lost, star shells could be used, but searchlights were strictly forbidden. All that was needed to turn the plan to a victory were more good ships and another cast of sailors willing to risk their lives to put ordnance on target first.
As the ships most recently assigned to Task Force 67 licked their wounds and headed home for repair, as new steel plates replaced those shattered in battle, a new task force came together at Espiritu Santo. Its haphazard nature was, once again, a reflection of the perpetual emergency besetting Admiral Halsey. He would refer to its composition as “a compromise dictated by necessity.” Cruisers were borrowed from carrier task forces, destroyers from convoy assignment. They would be the same men who had lined the rails at Espiritu Santo and given the San Francisco a thunderous cheer. They came together at the end of November as a reconstituted Task Force 67 and made ready to fend off the Tokyo Express once again.
At Naval Base Guadalcanal, Lloyd Mustin and his operations team were working on the fly, too, trying to find a way to better use the daring but undisciplined PT boat force assigned to the area. The squadron now had fifteen boats, up from just four a few weeks earlier. But given the fluid and occasionally slipshod organization at Tulagi, Mustin found it hard to coordinate their sorties with the other naval forces in the area. Some destroyer commanders resisted involving their tin cans with the “hooligan Navy,” mainly out of fear that it would be difficult to keep from stepping on one another’s toes. “I thought we had better improve that,” Mustin said, “or somebody was going to get hurt.” Having seen the value of the intelligence that PT skippers acquired during their patrols in Savo Sound, Mustin chose, in the name of better cooperation, a PT boat man as his assistant operations officer. They figured out how many boats were available nightly, determined how frequently they could be used, set up patrol schedules, and began innovating new approaches to attacking the Japanese submarines and destroyers in the waters off Guadalcanal. Finding that Japanese destroyers could catch and run down PT boats on a clear night, he settled on a game of cat and mouse. The young PT boat officers learned to avoid being silhouetted in open water while avoiding flat water that would show their wakes, and to attack using diversions, with some boats working as decoys while boats closer to shore rushed in. As they changed their schemes, the Japanese did, too.
On the night of November 30, however, the PT boats were ordered to stay put at Tulagi. Something larger than they were cut out for was brewing that night. It was another run of the Tokyo Express, eight destroyers under Rear Admiral Tanaka. A large American force was gathering at Espiritu Santo to intercept him.
True to form, the Navy, on the eve of the mission, replaced Kinkaid with a new commander. Kinkaid balked at his reassignment from a carrier task force and wanted no further part of the South Pacific. And so, as Dan Callaghan had supplanted Norman Scott, as Cassin Young and Joe Hubbard had relieved Charles McMorris and Mark Crouter on the San Francisco, Rear Admiral Carleton Wright now became the officer in tactical command of Task Force 67. Long of service in the South Pacific but new to surface combat, Wright flew his flag in the newly arrived Minneapolis, leading a scratch team of four other cruisers—the New Orleans, Pensacola, Honolulu, and Northampton.
These newcomers to the Ironbottom Sound surface striking force, most of them reassigned from carrier escort duty, were a bit like replacement troops going forward to the front lines from rear-area antiaircraft battalions. They wore the same uniforms and wielded the same weapons, but they weren’t wise in the bitter discipline of close combat. None of the four cruisers had had any part in the four surface actions fought in Savo Sound to this point. It could not be said, either, that they were commanded by the officer best equipped to prepare them for that new type of fight. The only surface-force flag officer alive who had fought and beaten the Japanese Navy, Willis Lee, was back in port with his squadron, tending to the Washington at Nouméa. Though both were veteran cruiser commanders, neither Kinkaid nor Wright had fought a night action before, nor executed a tactical plan such as they were now designing.
They departed Espiritu Santo’s Segond Channel anchorage at 11:30 p.m. on November 29, following a van composed of the destroyers Fletcher, Drayton, Maury, and Perkins. When they reached the eastern entrance to Lengo Channel at nine forty the next night, Wright’s task force encountered some friendly transports. Augmenting his tag team, Halsey ordered two of their escorts, the Lamson and Lardner, to fall in astern the Northampton. And so another pickup squad with fresh leadership and big ideas headed north toward its destiny.
Order of Battle—Battle of Tassafaronga
(November 30, 1942)
U.S.
TASK FORCE 67
Rear Adm. Carleton H. Wright
Minneapolis (CA) (flagship)
New Orleans (CA)
Pensacola (CA)
Northampton (CA)
Honolulu (CL)
Fletcher (DD)
Drayton (DD)
Maury (DD)
Perkins (DD)
Lamson (DD)
Lardner (DD)
Japan
REINFORCEMENT UNIT
Rear Adm. Raizo Tanaka
Naganami (flagship)
Takanami (DD)
Oyashio (DD)
Kuroshio (DD)
Kagero (DD)
Makinami (DD)
Kawakaze (DD)
Suzukaze (DD)
