Robert Leckie - Challenge for the Pacific

FROM LEE’S PRESENT POSITION IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO REACH SAVO BEFORE 0800 TOMORROW.

Halsey was stunned. Mikawa would have a clear path to Henderson Field.

In the early afternoon of Friday the thirteenth the Tokyo Express moved toward Guadalcanal again.

Tanaka’s eleven transports were in a four-column formation sailing at eleven knots with a dozen destroyers deployed to the front and either side.

Tanaka was still in flagship Hayashio , which means “Fast running tide.” The tide, it seemed to Tanaka, who had heard of the disaster which had overtaken Abe, was running fast against Japan. 13

At eight o’clock that morning Enterprise was still 280 miles south of Henderson Field. But she launched planes, some of which reached Guadalcanal in time to join the attack on Hiei , and continued to steam north.

All day long Big E remained buttoned up with her men at battle stations while her scout planes fanned out in search of the Japanese carriers and her combat air patrol flew overhead. But no enemy ships or aircraft were sighted. At dusk her men were secured from General Quarters and went below. Mighty South Dakota and Washington and their destroyers slid away from the screen and vanished into the darkness ahead. They could not stop Mikawa tonight, but they would at least be in the battle zone by tomorrow.

Enterprise ran steadily north at twenty-five knots.

It was happening again. It was not supposed to happen, Callaghan and Scott were supposed to have ended it, but there it was: Louie the Louse, flares, the lethal thunder-and-lightning of the sea cannonade, and flames engulfing Henderson Field.

Admiral Mikawa had brought six cruisers and six destroyers down to Savo. With flagship Chokai, Kinugasa, Isuzu , and two destroyers, Mikawa guarded the western gate at Savo while heavy cruisers Suzuya and Maya , escorted by light cruiser Tenryu and four destroyers, entered the Bay to bombard.

They hurled about a thousand rounds of eight-inch shell into the airfield, until six little torpedo boats under Lieutenant Hugh Robinson crept from Tulagi Harbor to launch torpedoes at them and scare them off.

Mikawa sailed jubilantly north on that morning of November 14, delighted to see his success celebrated in the intercepted plain-language radio message which Vandegrift had sent to Halsey: being heavily shelled.

In Washington the news that the Japanese had once again penetrated American defenses to batter Henderson Field produced a pessimism and a tension unrivaled throughout the campaign. Upon receipt of reports that heavy Japanese reinforcements were sailing down The Slot unopposed, even President Roosevelt began to think that Guadalcanal might have to be evacuated. 14

Mikawa’s guns had wrecked eighteen American planes and had churned up the airstrips. But they had not knocked out the field entirely, nor had Admiral Kondo sent any aircraft from Hiyo or Junyo down to protect Mikawa from likely pursuit. At dawn of the fourteenth, while fires still raged and ammunition dumps exploded, pilots raced to their armed planes and took off.

They found Mikawa’s ships. They put two torpedoes into big Kinugasa , leaving her to be sunk by pilots from Enterprise , who also bombed Chokai, Maya , and Isuzu . Admiral Mikawa, who had intended to provide indirect cover for Admiral Tanaka’s ships, was forced to retire to the Shortlands.

Tanaka sailed south all alone.

Since dawn, when a few Flying Fortresses had been driven off by covering Zeros, Tanaka the Tenacious had stood on Hayashio ’s bridge anxiously scanning the skies. He had seen flights of enemy planes but they did not attack him. He conjectured that they had gone after Mikawa. He was positive that they had not been frightened off by the handful of Zeros circling overhead; all, it seemed, that Admiral Kondo to the north could spare from the crowded decks of Hiyo and Junyo .

At noon Tanaka’s ships were only 150 miles from Guadalcanal, and it was then that the American planes came hurtling out of the sun and the slaughter known as the Buzzard Patrol began.

They flew in from everywhere: from Espiritu Santo, from the Fijis, from Henderson Field, from the decks of Enterprise still closing Guadalcanal at high speed. They flew in to bomb or launch torpedoes or to strafe, banking to fly back to base again or to land at Henderson where cooks, clerks, typists, mechanics, Seabees, even riflemen, had formed a human chain to hand along the bombs and bullets that would shatter the Tokyo Express forever.

Wildcats and Airacobras and the newly arrived twin-tailed Lightnings went flashing and slashing among Kondo’s pitifully few Zeros and the other eagles racing to the rescue from Rabaul. They shot them down while the Dauntlesses dove or the Forts unleashed their high-level patterns or the Avengers came in low with their fish, and then they, too, went after the transports, screaming in at masthead level to rake the decks of ships already slippery with blood.

They struck five times, from noon until sunset, these pilots of the Buzzard Patrol, and they put six transports on the bottom while sending a stricken seventh staggering back to the Shortlands. Admiral Tanaka’s destroyers were powerless to protect their transports. They could only scurry among these burning, listing, sinking charges to take aboard survivors or to fish a weaponless, terrified soldiery from the reddening waters of The Slot.

They were red, and so were bunks and bulkheads glowing with heat and visible beneath decks torn open as though by a monster can opener. American pilots sickened in their cockpits to see the slaughter that they were spreading, but they did not remove their hands from gun-buttons or bomb releases. Every enemy soldier spared meant a Japanese alive to kill Americans on Guadalcanal. And the bullets continued to spurt among the bobbing heads, and bomb followed bomb into smoking, settling ships.

Tanaka the Tenacious plowed on.

He had only four of his original eleven transports, his destroyers were widely scattered by hours of evasive zigzagging, but he was nevertheless determined to make Tassafaronga. After nightfall relieved him of his ordeal, he withdrew to the north. He would wait there until morning, resuming course after Admiral Kondo had bombarded Henderson Field.

Nobutake Kondo was already rushing south with mighty Kirishima escorted by cruisers Atago, Takao, Sendai , and Nagara and nine destroyers. Kondo was infuriated by two days of disaster. He would brook no further delay, no additional losses of ships and men, and he would personally see to the obliteration of the enemy airfield. Kondo was not only spoiling for a fight, he expected one.

In this, Ching Chong China Lee would not disappoint him.

Rear Admiral Willis Lee received the first part of his alliterative nickname at the Naval Academy, and the next two parts during extensive service in China, a land in which his last name, although spelled Li, was far from rare, and where he had befriended a Marine major named Vandegrift.

On the night of November 14, Ching Lee came to Vandegrift’s aid, leading the battleships and destroyers he had detached from Kinkaid’s force the night before. Screened by destroyers Walke, Benham, Preston , and Gwin , Admiral Lee took Washington and South Dakota around Guadalcanal’s western tip. He went sweeping west of Savo, but found nothing, only the glare of Tanaka’s burning transports.