Book Review: Neptune's Inferno

Although the naval battle of Midway (June-4-6, 1942) is often called the "turning point" of the Pacific War between the United States and Japan, many historians consider the six-month-long Guadalcanal campaign to be the true pivot point on which the tide of battle turned in favor of America and her Allies.

Midway, for all its merits as an "incredible victory" for the U.S. Pacific Fleet and a morale boost for the nation six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, had been a defensive engagement; the breaking of Japan's JN-25 naval cipher code, cool-headed leadership on the part of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the availability of three U.S. carriers, bad planning on the part of the Japanese, the carefully-laid ambush of the Japanese carrier force, the bravery of U.S. aviators and a great deal of good luck all contributed to stopping Japan's eastward advance and a possible invasion of Hawaii.

However, the United States could not have defeated Japan by merely holding the Imperial Army and Navy to the territory that Japanese forces had conquered in the first six months of the war; to beat the enemy, American naval, ground and air forces would have to advance across the vast expanse of the Pacific in a series of combined-arms assaults against a plethora of island strongholds which stretched from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska all the way to the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.

Guadalcanal, one of the islands in the Solomon chain, was chosen by Admiral Ernest J. King - the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations - as the target of America's first offensive in the Pacific, spurred on partly by the discovery that the Japanese were building an airfield on the island's northern coast. This airbase, in theory, could have allowed Japanese bombers to threaten the long sea line of communication and supply between Australia and the United States.

After outmaneuvering the ambitions of Gen. Douglas MacArthur to lead an Army-dominated drive against the Japanese in the formidable base at Rabaul, King and the Navy carried out the hastily-planned Operation Watchtower, the landing of the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and two smaller islands on the morning of August 7, 1942, exactly eight months after Pearl Harbor.

Because the Guadalcanal campaign was a complicated series of air, land and sea battles which took place over a six-month-long stretch of time, James D. Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal deals exclusively with the purely naval aspects of what was a true trial-by-fire for the American surface fleet in the Pacific.

Though most of the public remembers the Pacific War for the pre-eminence of the aircraft carrier as the heart of the modern U.S. Navy, Hornfischer's book points out that although carriers - or the absence of them - were both strategically and tactically important for both sides, the naval struggle for control of the seas around what the Japanese would later call "Starvation Island" was fought mostly by cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats, submarines and a handful of battleships.

Neptune's Inferno - an apt title, given the fact that a total of 67 warships (29 Allied, 38 Japanese) and nearly 9.000 sailors (almost 5,000 of them from the U.S. and Australian navies) went down to watery resting places - is a fascinating account that tackles both the Big Picture of overall Japanese and American strategy and the narrower, more focused point of view of individual ships, their skippers and their crews. (The Marines' land operations are mentioned, too, of course, but only briefly and in context to the sea battles.)

The narrative is incredibly detailed; Hornfischer's accounts of the various engagements are so vividly descriptive that the reader can see the flashes of a cruiser's eight-inch main battery flash against the darkness of a night in the South Pacific or the splashes of shells "straddling" their targets, smell the sickening scent of burning flesh, oil and blood, feel the heat of the tropic sun or the bone-jarring concussion of torpedoes striking a ship's hull, hear the klaxon sounding the call to "General Quarters" and know the many intimate details of life aboard a warship in 1942 and 1943.

No men on a ship were wiser to the way things worked than the sailors who stood invisibly in the wardroom's midst. The white-jacketed mess attendants and cooks - a lowly caste within S Division, which saw to the supply and sustenance of the crew - mostly were black enlistees. Like all enlisted men, they cultivated what scraps of control and power were left to them. The ladder of ranks and ratings had its peculiarities, with voids on middle rungs and true power residing at the bottom and the top.

Battleships and carriers had separate dining facilities for junior and senior officers. On cruisers, all the officers dined together except for the captain, who had his own cabin. When he was in command of the San Francisco, (Admiral Daniel) Callaghan made a practice of eating with his men. He used the wardroom to break down barriers and accelerate the growth of his young officers. The mess attendants and cooks had as good a view of the goings-on as anyone.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal is not just a tribute to the bravery and skill of America's naval personnel during the bloody campaign, but it also points out that the fleet's officers, particularly some of its admirals and ship captains, were capable of making terrible mistakes. Some, such as Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher's decision to pull the carriers out of the Guadalcanal area three days after the initial landings, nearly doomed Operation Watchtower by forcing the amphibious ships' commander, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, to retire the transports before the Marines' supplies were offloaded. Other officers, including the commander of the USS Chicago, acted inexplicably badly in battles such as the deadly fracas off Savo Island on the night of August 8, 1942, when a Japanese strike force of cruisers and destroyers surprised and sank four Allied heavy cruisers and damaged another, along with two destroyers, with only moderate damage to three Japanese cruisers.

The book also examines the good, the bad and the ugly elements of the battle from the Japanese side. Hornfischer points out the strengths of the Imperial Japanese Navy - better training at night fighting, superior torpedoes and dogged determination on the part of some admirals - as well as its weaknesses - underestimating the Americans' ability to adapt to tactical situations, unclear strategic goals and the piecemeal commitment of naval, air and ground reinforcements to Guadalcanal based on poor intelligence analysis of Allied forces and intentions.

The book is illustrated throughout its four parts with maps which chart various stages of each naval battle, as well as two inserts of black-and-white photos from various archives. There are also helpful order-of-battle and organizational charts to help the reader understand who the "players" are on the various watery "playing fields" around Neptune's horrible inferno,