Hit Hard, Hit Fast, Hit Often

(See Cover)

Admiral Chester William Nimitz measured his words. With his own hand the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet wrote last week:

Halsey's conduct of his present command leaves nothing to be desired. He is professionally competent and militarily aggressive without being reckless or foolhardy. He has that rare combination of intellectual capacity and military audacity, and can calculate to a cat's whisker the risk involved in operations when successful accomplishments will bring great returns. He possesses superb leadership qualities which have earned him a tremendous following of his men. His only enemies are Japs. . . . For his successful turning back of the Jap attempt to take Guadalcanal in mid-November he has been nominated by the President for the rank of Admiral, which reward he richly deserves.

Reports on a Battle. At the moment when these words of praise were being weighed in the map-plastered office of CINCPAC in Pearl Harbor, other words were being weighed even more carefully in an office 2,000 miles to the southwest.

There the words were on little yellow slips of paper clipped into cardboard folders. The words on the yellow papers were not tributes. They were reports on the battle which provoked the tributes.

The face which looked down on those reports was itself like a battlefield. Everything about it was big, broad, strong. The weather had been on it, and personal suffering behind it. The huge mouth looked like command, and above it, the nose was pugnacious. The eyes were aggressive. They and their screen of brow above the weariness below were as impressive and busy-looking as a couple of task forces. The face, as it read the reports, was thoughtful. . . .

Contact. Time after time Admiral* William Frederick Halsey had said: "Now if these were Japs, this is how I would strike. . . ."

The reports showed that the stubborn Japs had organized everything which they thought necessary to retake Guadalcanal once & for all. They formed a powerful bombardment task force, including battleships, which was to come in with the most terrifying kind of attack, night shelling, and pound the will to resist out of the U.S. beachhead. Then convoys of transports with over 20,000 troops and with all essential weapons, such as tanks and heavy artillery, were to effect landings. Then, perhaps with the help of carrier-based air attacks, the entire force was to do its final job. That was what the Japs thought.

The Japs came piecemeal, in several task forces; but most of their strength poured down "the slot"--the channel down the middle of the Solomons. They were confident. The U.S. Navy had not, in over three months of fighting, done much fighting with surface units: only once (on the night of Oct. 11-12) had the Japs met a determined effort to cut their line of reinforcements. They had a surprise in store.

Friday the 13th was not lucky for the Japs.

At 2 a.m. a U.S. task force of cruisers and destroyers under Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan drove in on the Jap bombardment group. The U.S. flagship was the heavy cruiser San Francisco, the afterpart of whose superstructure had been messed up a bit by the crash of a Jap torpedo pilot the day before. Behind her steamed a column of heavy and light cruisers. Destroyers flanked the line of battle.

Admiral Callaghan struck as his commander would have wanted. It was almost a Nelsonian stroke. At first he brought his battle line to bear on the forward ships of the oncoming Japanese lines. He engaged a Jap cruiser with his main batteries and a destroyer with his secondary batteries, and sank both. The rest of his line swung its guns on to the Jap formation behind him.

Gunnery & Guts. On carriers where Halsey had been Admiral, the men had said: "'The Admiral will get us in, then it will be up to the Captain to get us out."

Admiral Callaghan swung his task force right into the main Jap forces. Without hesitation, he drove his ship, whose biggest guns were 8-in., to within 2,000 yards of a Jap battleship, which carried 14-in. guns. He led his force right between two Japanese groups, so that when he pulled out the Japs fired on each other. ("I hope," said Admiral Nimitz, telling about this later, "that the Jap gunnery was up to the usual excellent standard which they have always shown against us.")

The San Francisco, in running the gantlet, had crippled the Jap battleship, but a 14-in. salvo found the cruiser's bridge and killed Admiral Callaghan and Captain Cassin Young (who when blown into the water off the Arizona at Pearl Harbor swam back to his ship and resumed the fight). It knocked out Lieut. Commander Bruce McCandless, 31, third in command on the bridge at the time. When McCandless came to, he saw that he was "Sopus"--Navy for senior officer present. It was up to him to get the ship out. He got to his feet, took command of the ship, kept her proudly at the head of her column until the battle was over.

Attack-Re-Attack. On all the ships in the Fleet, the Halsey battle cry was memorized: Hit hard, hit fast, hit often.

The few times the Japs had been hit, while reinforcing the Solomons, they had been hit and run from. But this time there was a new spirit in the U.S. task forces. The Americans came in slugging again and yet again. Another U.S. unit under Rear Admiral Norman Scott took part. He, too, was killed.

The next night the Americans attacked once more. A task force under Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr. attacked what was left of the Japanese. Lee's force included two battleships. Judging by their performance, they were probably 16-inchers of the North Carolina or improved South Dakota types. The Jap forces contained altogether four battleships. Whether the battlewagons trained guns specifically on each other was not clear this week, but it is certain that the U.S. 16-inchers did plenty of hurt to the enemy.

Between these attacks there were intermediate attacks. PT-boats, submarines and planes from Henderson Field attacked by night & day.

Day after Admiral Lee's battle, a U.S. force found four Japanese cargo vessels beached about seven and one-half miles west of U.S. positions on Guadalcanal. With the help of aircraft from Henderson field, the vessels were destroyed.

The Balance Shifts. Visiting Guadalcanal just before this battle, Admiral Halsey said: Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs.

Adding the score of the final engagement, announced last week, to that previously announced (TIME, Nov. 23), the Japs suffered the following sinkings: one battleship, another battleship or a very large cruiser, eight cruisers, six destroyers, eight troop transports, four cargo ships. They also lost a huge number of ground troops who had been taking their last ferry trip--between 20,000 and 40,000, Admiral Nimitz estimated.

Announced U.S. losses: two light cruisers and seven destroyers. U.S. losses might eventually prove to be more severe. Certainly damage must have been great. The San Francisco had most of her bridge blown away by the braid-killing salvo of 14-in. shells. Other ships undoubtedly took similar unannounced damage which will take time to repair. But the Japs suffered damage too.

Thus was written another important chapter in the story of Pacific attrition. Gradually, the balance of power was shifting toward the U.S. With greater powers of production and regeneration, the U.S. was on its way to preponderance--but not there yet.

The box on page 30 shows how the pitched battles of the Solomons have favored the U.S. Not included there, however, are the losses which were suffered in the Solomons period when U.S. forces were misused in sluggish defensive tactics--when the Wasp was sunk and several other ships damaged, in mere routine patrolling.

Taking the Solomons balance sheet and superimposing it on the balance of earlier battles, it shows the U.S. is gradually creeping up on the Japs. In the most vital category--carriers--the U.S. last week was still behind. The U.S. had three still going (not counting converted carriers, too slow for battle), the Japs perhaps five (counting small converted battle carriers). New U.S. carriers should close that gap within a few months.

In the critical cruiser and destroyer categories the U.S. is catching up. New construction is fast relieving the destroyer problem, and the smashing of eight Jap cruisers obviously reduced and may even have eliminated the Japs' numerical margin.

Return of the Wagon. Admiral Halsey, who had served most of his life on destroyers before he became an aviator, said last week: Battleships will have a decided role in this war before it ends.

The battleship finally came into its own. After Pearl Harbor many misinformed people thought they knew the answer when ex-Navy Flyer Al Williams asked: "What has any battleship done to date, in this war, but sink?" Midway and Alexander De Seversky between them reinforced this feeling, by overstressing the great importance of aircraft (particularly land-based planes) over the sea, and fostering the assumption that in all naval situations airplanes would be as dominant as they were at Midway.

The older battleships, incapable of much more than 22 or 23 knots, were, as most Navy men realized, useless for the time being, until absolute superiority in carriers might be achieved. But the new ships, fast, carrying a terrific punch, proved themselves from the day they finished speed trials. They joined aircraft-carrier task forces and were invaluable in screening and anti-aircraft work. Now they had fought and won against Jap forces outnumbered four to two.

The major surface engagements of the Pacific war have been fought at night--unlike most of the great engagements of naval history. Tommy Hart's action in Macassar Straits, in which four-piper destroyers put to rout a vastly superior force, was a brilliant example of how an inferior force, well used, can do great things in the dark. Halsey's battle showed how well a strong force, particularly one with 16-in. battleship rifles, can do by night.

Weapon of This War. No one loves carriers better or uses them better than Halsey. Sending carriers into one recent battle, he signaled: Attack. Repeat: Attack.

One thing which made it possible for the Astoria, the Quincy and the Vincennes to be so sweetly avenged was the absence of Jap carriers. Said Admiral Nimitz: "The total absence of their carriers might be taken to mean the Japs had no carriers [unlikely] or did not want to risk them again after the October engagement"--in which one was possibly sunk, another badly damaged. Or they may have been holding their carriers back in order to deliver a final knockout punch to Henderson Field.

Carriers may be, as Seversky has said, transition weapons which will be rendered useless by tremendously long-ranged planes --but probably not in this war. Fighters, torpedo planes and dive-bombers--the special weapons of naval air war--are not yet able to span Pacific distances from land bases. So carriers must take them to the enemy, however vulnerable the carriers themselves may be.

Schism Narrowed. Admiral Halsey cabled Secretary Knox: In the Southern Pacific neither we of the Navy nor those of the Army and Marine Corps recognize any division between the services. All are united in service to the United States.

With Douglas MacArthur advancing and Bill Halsey victorious, the schisms of the South Pacific seemed to be disappearing. All along there had been excellent cooperation between fighting men whenever they joined on the actual fronts. Now, with equally aggressive commanders leading both Army and Navy in the area, the divisions at the top were narrowing. Admiral Halsey and General MacArthur established and maintained hour-to-hour contact. Devices were being found to erase the arbitrary line which has divided their command.

The command situation was improving. But cooperation, depending upon personal relations which might be changed overnight, could never equal actual unity of command. That was still wanting.

Toward Tokyo. Admiral Halsey once pointedly said of naval warfare: You can't make an omelet without breaking the eggs.

It was a mistake to assume that having won this battle, Halsey will henceforth be immune from losses. He may still suffer heavily. His victory is no guarantee that the Japs will not try again, powerfully and perhaps dangerously. In the battle of Guadalcanal, he had: 1) repulsed the strongest Japanese attempt to take Guadalcanal; 2) bitten heavily into Japanese strength; 3) restored the Navy's confidence in itself and public confidence in the Navy; 4) given the Marines and Army on Guadalcanal a chance to clean out Japanese observation posts and main forces, possibly win absolute superiority on the island.

The next offensive step would logically be an assault in force on Buin, at the southern extremity of Bougainville Island. That is the point from which Jap task forces have hopped for Guadalcanal. On the way Rekata Bay, a Jap naval air base, would have to be eliminated on the flank. After that, Rabaul--the heart of the Japanese system in the lower Pacific.

Halsey's battle saved Guadalcanal. It did not make all these future steps automatic or easy. But it made them possible.

In the mind of Bill Halsey there is only one ultimate aim: the still distant assault on Japan itself. Just before he saved Guadalcanal, he talked of that assault and said: I hope I'll be there.

-TIME'S cover, showing Admiral Halsey with three stars, was painted and printed before he was nominated for promotion from Vice to full Admiral last week.

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