Halsey takes command in the South Pacific

On 18 October 1942, at the most difficult moment of the fighting for Guadalcanal, Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, relieved Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley as commander of the South Pacific Area and handed the post to Vice Admiral William Halsey. The change took place literally overnight: Halsey flew into Nouméa expecting to carry out an inspection and on arrival was given sealed orders to assume command. Within hours the news that the most aggressive admiral in the US Navy was now in charge had reached the marines on Guadalcanal, and many of them remembered it as the turning point of the campaign.

A campaign on the brink

By mid-October the American position on Guadalcanal was worse than at any time since the August landing. On the night of 11 October Rear Admiral Norman Scott’s cruisers had won the Battle of Cape Esperance, but only two nights later the Japanese battleships Kongō and Haruna turned the airfield into a sea of craters and burning fuel. The bombardment of Henderson Field on the night of 13–14 October destroyed or damaged about half the aircraft of the “Cactus Air Force”, and on the following nights cruisers shelled the airfield. On 15 October a Japanese convoy unloaded at Tassafaronga in broad daylight, bringing thousands of troops, heavy artillery and tanks. The commander of the Seventeenth Army, Lieutenant General Harukichi Hyakutake, had already reached the island, and it was clear that the largest Japanese offensive yet was in preparation.

In those days people in Washington and Pearl Harbor spoke openly of the possibility that the island could not be held. Asked by journalists on 16 October whether it would hold, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox replied that he would not make any predictions, only that he believed every man would give a good account of himself. On the island itself General Alexander Vandegrift had some 23,000 men, including the Army’s 164th Infantry Regiment, which had arrived on 13 October, but his troops had spent two months under fire on meagre rations, worn down by malaria and dysentery.

Why Ghormley went

Robert Ghormley, an old teammate of Halsey’s from the Naval Academy football team at Annapolis, was a respected staff officer and a diplomat in uniform: before taking over the South Pacific he had served from 1940 as the Navy’s special naval observer in London. In the spring of 1942 he built the area command from scratch, first in Auckland and then aboard the ship Argonne anchored in Nouméa harbour, and directed the preparations for Operation Watchtower. From August onwards, however, his reports to Pearl Harbor grew steadily more pessimistic. Ghormley never once visited Guadalcanal and rarely left his flagship; he was swamped by administrative work, and his fear of losing his last carriers and transports made him sparing with support for the marines. On 15 October he reported that his forces were “totally inadequate” to meet the coming blow.

Nimitz, who had visited Nouméa and Guadalcanal at the end of September, already had his doubts. On 15 October he conferred with his staff and concluded that Ghormley was too tired and too pessimistic to remain in command at so critical a moment. The next day, with the approval of Admiral Ernest King, he ordered the change. Years later Nimitz’s biographer, Elmer B. Potter, noted that Ghormley was found soon afterwards to have abscessed teeth, which may have been one cause of his exhaustion. Some modern historians judge Ghormley more kindly than those around him did in 1942, pointing out that he worked with extremely slender means and that many of his fears were justified. That does not alter the fact that in October 1942 the Navy needed a commander who would restore belief in victory.

“The hottest potato”

Halsey was returning to the fight after a four-month absence. From the first days of the war he had commanded a task force built around the carrier Enterprise, led raids on the Marshall Islands and Wake, and it was his ships that carried the bombers of the Doolittle Raid within range of Japan. At the end of May, however, a severe skin complaint put him out of action just before the Battle of Midway. After his recovery Nimitz intended to give him command of a carrier force in the South Pacific. Because the Enterprise, damaged in August in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, was still under repair, Halsey set off on 15 October on a familiarisation tour of the area’s bases and flew to Nouméa, which since the spring had been the main American base in that part of the ocean (American troops had been stationed there since March).

When his flying boat landed in Nouméa harbour on 18 October, a launch carrying Ghormley’s flag lieutenant came alongside. The officer handed Halsey a sealed envelope containing Nimitz’s signal: “You will take command of the South Pacific Area and South Pacific forces immediately.” In his memoirs Halsey described reading it twice and exclaiming: “Jesus Christ and General Jackson! This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!” The change was awkward for him, since Ghormley was an old friend, but the two men carried it out without delay and without public recrimination. Ghormley returned to the United States and later took command of the 14th Naval District in Hawaii.

From then on Halsey commanded all land, sea and air forces in an area stretching from New Caledonia and the New Hebrides to the Solomon Islands, including Army ground and air units. Two days later he ruled that naval officers in his area need no longer wear ties with their tropical uniforms. He justified this on grounds of comfort and uniformity with the Army, but, as the historian Richard B. Frank observed, his subordinates read the gesture as a sign that their commander was taking off his coat and getting ready for a fight.

The news on Guadalcanal

On Guadalcanal the news acted like a shot of adrenaline. One Marine officer recalled that one minute the men had been too limp with malaria to crawl out of their foxholes, and the next they were running around whooping like children. Halsey was known in the Navy as a commander who attacked, and his motto “Hit hard, hit fast, hit often” had gone round the American press early in the year. For soldiers who for weeks had felt abandoned by the fleet, his name meant that the Navy had no intention of evacuating them or leaving them to the Japanese.

The conference at Nouméa

The most important conversation took place a few days later. Halsey summoned Vandegrift to Nouméa, and on 23 October they were joined aboard the Argonne by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Thomas Holcomb, who happened to be touring the Pacific, the commander of Army ground forces in the area, General Millard Harmon, the commander of the amphibious force, Rear Admiral Richmond Turner, and the commander of the Americal Division, Major General Alexander Patch. The official US Army history dates the conference to 20 October; most accounts, including Vandegrift’s memoirs, place it on the evening of 23 October. Vandegrift and Harmon described the situation on the island, and Halsey then asked bluntly whether the marines were to withdraw or would hold the island. “I can hold,” Vandegrift replied, “but I have to have more active support than I have been getting.” Halsey answered: “All right. Go on back. I’ll promise you everything I’ve got.”

Decisions followed the words. Halsey cancelled the occupation of Ndeni in the Santa Cruz Islands that Ghormley had been preparing, which Harmon had long regarded as a dispersal of effort, and sent the 147th Infantry Regiment earmarked for it to Guadalcanal instead. The whole Americal Division was to move to the island in stages, its place in the defence of New Caledonia being taken by the 43rd Infantry Division arriving from the United States. The transfer of the 8th Marine Regiment of the 2nd Marine Division was scheduled for early November. At the same time Halsey demanded more aircraft and ships from Washington, and in one of his first orders sent the only two carriers he had – the repaired Enterprise and the Hornet – north of the Santa Cruz Islands to face the Japanese fleet. He later wrote to Nimitz that from the first day he “had to start throwing punches”.

Place in the war

The change of commander did not immediately alter the balance of forces: throughout October and November the Japanese had more ships in the waters of the Solomons, and the Americans still had to count every aircraft and every barrel of fuel. It did, however, change the way the campaign was fought. Ghormley had thought above all about what must not be lost; Halsey thought about where he could strike. In the weeks that followed he risked his last carriers in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, and in November he sent two new battleships into the confined waters around Guadalcanal, which decided the outcome of the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal and the fate of the island. In November 1942 he received his fourth star as a full admiral.

Halsey commanded the South Pacific Area until mid-1944: after the capture of Guadalcanal he led the advance up the Solomons as far as Bougainville and worked with General Douglas MacArthur to isolate Rabaul. For the Americans, the Nouméa conference of October 1942, at which the question “can you hold or not?” was asked, was the moment when the defensive on Guadalcanal turned into a determined fight for victory.