World Battlefronts: The First Offensive

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Bull's-Eye. Ghormley's first objective was soon announced. It was Tulagi, one of the best harbors in the Solomons, which the Jap had held since early June for his Indies defensive screen and for a jump-off place if he should decide to head south across the Australian supply line again.

The course to Tulagi would have been perilous enough without the Jap to meet, for the waters around the Solomons are dark and mysterious to mariners. The best charts of the area are dangerously tentative in their locations of coral reefs and small islands, dangerously lacking in soundings off shores still unexplored.

Admiral Ghormley must have known generally what resistance he would meet. Tulagi was the scene of the Navy's first attack in the Battle of the Coral Sea, a blistering aerial surprise that caught a Jap force flatfooted, littered its tiny (one square mile) harbor with the hulks of nine or ten ships, including five cruisers. Since then, it had been regularly scouted.

Around Tulagi, the bull's-eye, are other rings of the Navy's target. Most important of them passes through the island of Guadalcanal, said to be the only spot on the Solomons where a big system of air-dromes could be established. For the rest, the Solomons are precipitously mountainous (highest peak 10,000 feet), bordered with miasmic mangrove swamps, inhabited by ebony-black natives with an incurable habit of roasting and eating white visitors.

Ding Dong. The fighting that accompanied the attack was of that bitter kind that can be expected in landing on a hostile shore against a determined enemy. The Japs announced that their planes went out and engaged the attacking vessels in a raging storm. As usual they made exaggerated claims of losses inflicted on the U.S.—asserted that they had sunk a battleship and 21 other warships and transports.

The U.S. communiqués admitted that stiff resistance was encountered, admitted that at least one U.S. cruiser was sunk, two cruisers, two destroyers and one transport damaged. But they announced that initial surprise had been achieved, that many enemy planes had been downed and surface vessels put out of action.

More important, it was announced after three days of fighting that landings had been made, a pretty good indication that the Marines who accompanied the fleet had obtained good footholds. But the Navy also said that "the enemy has counterattacked with rapidity and vigor. Heavy fighting is still in progress." In short, it was a ding-dong battle, with U.S. planes, presumably carrier-based, fighting land-based Jap planes, and troops of both sides fighting hand to hand.

Man from Moscow. When Ghormley became a maker of battles, even his old classmates found that they really knew little of their friend. They could describe his thin grey hair, his stern mouth, his droop-lidded eyes. They could discourse on his geniality when he relaxed over a drink, on the calm, unexcited way of his command of a battleship, of his respect for the opinions of his staff officers before his own decisions were made. But few of them had ever got to the inside of the man. When they tried, by thinking back over his friendship, they decided that inside was all Navy. In Ghormley's reserved, detached life there had been little room for anything else.