Wasp and Hornet. The morning passed with no reports of the enemy, either above or below the sea. Some time after noon combat air patrol shot down a two-engined flying boat beyond the range of the carriers. At 2:20 o’clock Wasp turned into the wind to launch and receive planes.
Commander Takaichi Kinashi, skipper of submarine I-19, watched this maneuver through his periscope. His joy was unbounded. Wasp was in an awkward position and none of her six circling destroyers seemed to have sighted his submarine yet.
Captain Forrest Sherman aboard Wasp sounded the routine whistle for a turn, and bent on 16 knots to return to his base course, and Commander Kinashi sent a spread of four torpedoes hissing toward the swinging ship.
“Torpedoes!” starboard lookouts yelled.
Captain Sherman ordered rudder full right. But the Long Lances were running fast and true. Two of them struck forward to starboard and a third broached and dove to strike the hull fifty feet forward of the bridge.
Wasp was whipsawed. She leaped and twisted like a stricken monster. Planes were lifted and slammed to the deck. Men were hurled against steel bulkheads, generators were torn from their foundations, and the great ship took a dangerous list. Fires broke out, and Wasp was a floating torch whose smoke and flames were ominously visible to Hornet a half dozen miles away.
Now Hornet had to meet her own ordeal, for submarine I- 15 had joined the attack. Her skipper loosed his own spread of steel fish. They sped unseen toward Hornet, until destroyer Mustin on Hornet’s port bow sighted a wake ahead and to port. Mustin swung hard left to avoid it, hoisted the torpedo warning and gave the alarm by voice radio.
Hornet got out of the way.
But one of I-15’s torpedoes passed under Mustin’s keel and ran 500 yards into the side of North Carolina. A great roar, a pillar of water and oil shooting into the sky, five men killed—and a gash 32 feet long and 18 feet high was torn twenty feet below North Carolina’s water line. But battleships are built to take it. Forward magazines were flooded as a fire-prevention measure and within five minutes the great vessel had lost her list and was steaming majestically along at twenty-five knots.
Destroyers are not so husky, and another of I-15’s torpedoes tore into O’Brien to deliver what was to be her death wound: she would break up and sink while attempting to return to West Coast ports.
And now Wasp was a holocaust. Flames raged out of control. At three o’clock a shattering explosion shook her, killing men on the port side of the bridge and hurling Admiral Noyes to the deck, his clothes burning. Captain Sherman evacuated the bridge. He conferred with his officers on the flight deck and concluded that the ship was lost.
“Abandon ship!”
Wounded were gently lowered over the side onto life rafts and floating mattresses and then Wasp’s men jumped and dove for their lives. Destroyers picked them up. Of 2247 men aboard, 193 were lost and 366 wounded. All but one of Wasp’s airborne planes landed safely on Hornet, and Rear Admiral Norman Scott in cruiser San Francisco, now in command of the group, ordered destroyer Lansdowne to sink the ship that had fought German U-boats in the Atlantic and saved Malta.
Lansdowne fired five torpedoes. All hit, three exploded, and at nine o’clock that night Wasp went to her death in the Pacific.
Hornet was now the only American carrier operational in the Pacific. O’Brien’s special antiaircraft firepower was lost to her, North Carolina was also out of the fight for Guadalcanal, and Washington was the only new battleship still available.
And four thousand Marines had lost half the protection required to get them safely through the waters of Torpedo Junction.
News of Wasp’s sinking sweetened the bitter taste in Admiral Yamamoto’s mouth. Commander, Combined Fleet, had been chagrined to receive reports of the American carrier force at the very moment when his ships were low on fuel. He had had to spend three days refueling at sea at a point two hundred miles north of Guadalcanal, and had missed the chance to strike.
Then, on September 15, he had heard reports of the Kawaguchi disaster, and had been filled with bitter anger.2 Rather than waste more valuable fuel sailing aimlessly around, he had ordered his ships back to Truk. Enroute, he received Commander Kinashi’s joyful report of having destroyed Wasp.
At Truk a conference was held between Yamamoto’s staff and General Hyakutake’s staff. It was decided that more troops would be needed in addition to the Sendai Division already assembling at Rabaul. Tokyo was notified and two days later Imperial General Headquarters assigned the veteran 38th or Nagoya Division to Hyakutake.
Japan’s high command also instructed Hyakutake to suspend the Port Moresby operation indefinitely. On September 14 his troops had looked down on the lights of the Allied port, but now they were to retire to Buna to await the successful conclusion of Operation Ka.
In the meantime three new carriers then training in home waters would join Yamamoto at Truk. They would not arrive, however, until the second week in October, much to the consternation of some officers who believed that to delay a full-scale counteroffensive for almost a month was to grant the enemy a respite which might prove suicidal for Japan. They wanted to strike immediately, break in on the Americans while they still had their backs to the wall.
But Isoroku Yamamoto was adamant. He wanted those three carriers. Besides, it would take nearly a month to get the Sendai Division into Guadalcanal.
The loss of Wasp was to deepen Admiral Ernest King’s conviction that the desperate situation at Guadalcanal could not be retrieved without more airplanes for Henderson Field. King made this conclusion clear at a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 16.
General Arnold replied that the need was landing fields, not planes. If Guadalcanal had more than eighty or a hundred planes the craft would sit idle on the fields and their pilots would get stale. In England planes and pilots could be used against Germany every day.
“There should be a reconsideration of allocation every time there is a new critical situation,” King said. “The Navy is in a bad way at this particular moment.”3
It was an astounding admission from King the confident, and the Navy’s commander-in-chief followed it up by asking for Lightning fighters for Guadalcanal. Arnold reluctantly agreed to divert fifteen of them from the North African invasion scheduled for November. That was all he could spare, and he could not say when he could spare them. King insisted that the South Pacific had to be saturated with such planes, and Arnold exploded:
“What is the saturation point? Certainly, not several hundred planes sitting on airdromes so far in the rear that they cannot be used. They will not do us any good, and may do us some harm.”4
King left the meeting in exasperation. Next day, his pen impelled by reports of the Wasp disaster, he prepared a memorandum for General Marshall. Of sixty-two Wildcats delivered to Guadalcanal since August 20 only thirty were operational. The Navy, he wrote, could not “meet this rate of attrition and still operate carriers.” It was therefore “imperative that the future continuous flow of Army fighters be planned, starting at once, irrespective of, and in higher priority than, the commitments to any theater.”
King had ceased to make requests. Now he was demanding.
Although shaken by the loss of Wasp, Admiral Turner was also aware that Guadalcanal probably could not be held without the Seventh Marines, as well as a valuable load of aviation gasoline
