After Midway, both Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur were of the opinion that the counteroffensive should be launched . . . There were difficulties. Nimitz, as Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas, controlled the marines, the transports to carry them to the beachhead, and the carriers and gunnery vessels needed to support them. The Solomons however were all within MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area. Accordingly, Nimitz and MacArthur each, with some reason, insisted that the entire campaign should be under his command. The latter moreover had his own idea about how to attain the objective. Give him the fleet and its carriers and the 1st Marine Division, said MacArthur, and he would go in and recapture Rabaul in a single uninterrupted operation.
There is much to be said for MacArthur's bold strategy. Rabaul was growing steadily more formidable. With each month of delay it would be harder to capture. Once it was in allied hands, the Japanese in the Solomons and on Papua would be hopelessly cut off, the threat to Australia and United States-Australia sea communications would be entirely removed, and the way would be open for an Allied advance on the Philippines. But the Navy was unalterably opposed to sending scarce carriers and its single division of amphibious troops across the reef-strewn, virtually uncharted Solomon Sea into the teeth of a complex of enemy air bases. Later on, with more carriers and more amphibious troops at their disposal—and more experience in using them—naval strategists could afford to be more daring. They would in fact stage amphibious assaults on the most strongly defended enemy positions using air support from carriers only. But in the present circumstances they favored the step-by-step approach as the more likely to achieve success and avoid disaster. They insisted moreover that Pacific Fleet forces should remain under naval control.
Here was an impasse that could be settled only in Washington, for Nimitz and MacArthur was each supreme in his own area. Here also was another of the many difficulties resulting from divided command within a single theater. Should the entire Pacific been put under a single officer? There were convincing arguments for such a move. There were equally strong arguments that with a military front extending from the Aleutians to Australia, the strategic problems of the various areas were on too large a scale for one officer to grasp. Proponents of the latter view decried uncritical adherence to the principle of unified command. These advocated unified command only within a geographic entity that gives coherence to operations. Their opinion prevailed, and for better or worse, MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area and Nimitz' Pacific Ocean Areas remained separate and independent commands, responsible only to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It was within the Joint Chiefs that the differences were resolved. In a series of conferences, General Marshall and Admiral King reached agreement and on 2, July 1942 issued a directive that substantially followed the Navy's proposals. The opening operations, seizure and occupation of the Santa Cruz Islands, Tulagi, and adjacent positions, would be under the strategic control of Admiral Nimitz. To facilitate command problems in this first step, the boundary between The South Pacific and the Southwest Pacific Areas was shifted westward to 159˚ East Longitude, just west of Guadalcanal. As soon as a suitable base had been secured in the Tulagi area, the strategic command would pass to General MacArthur, who would coordinate a move up the Solomons with a second thrust—up to the Papuan Peninsula to Salamaua and Lae. The two Allied advances would then converge on Rabaul. Target date for the initial invasions, called Operation WATCHTOWER, was set for 1 August.
Admiral Nimitz, anticipating the Joint Chiefs' directive, had almost completed basic planning for Operation WATCHTOWER by the first week in July. Vice Admiral Ghormley, as Nimitz' deputy in the South Pacific Area, would exercise strategic control, with Vice Admiral Frank "Jack" Fletcher, of Coral Sea and Midway fame, in tactical command of the Expeditionary Force. From King's staff, where he had headed the War Plans Division, came Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner to command the Amphibious Force. The 1st Marine Division, which would make the assault, was to be commanded by Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, who had learned the business of fighting in the jungles of Nicaragua and the theory of amphibious warfare on the staff of the Fleet Marine Force.
A month was of course an uncomfortably brief period in which to assemble forces, work out details, and complete training and rehearsals for so complex an operation as an amphibious assault. Moreover, adequate reinforcements and proper air and surface support were hard to come by. The invasion of North Africa, planned for November, had top priority for everything. MacArthur's three divisions, assigned to the protection of Australia, could not be touched. South Pacific bases would have to be stripped of part of their defense forces to provide garrison troops to follow up the marines. Little wonder the somewhat baffled participants in Operation WATCHTOWER soon began calling it "Operation Shoestring."
While Fletcher and Turner were conferring with Nimitz at Pearl Harbor, there came the startling news that an American patrol plane had sighted an airstrip under construction on Guadalcanal. This information put a more urgent complexion on the WATCHTOWER project. Obviously Guadalcanal would have to be included in the Tulagi-Santa Cruz plan, but King and Nimitz would allow no more than one additional week to prepare for the extended operation. D-day was set definitely for 7, August. The airfield had to be captured before the Japanese could complete it. Whoever first put it into operation might well be the victor.
In the latter part of July the situation took another turn when a Japanese convoy landed 1,800 troops near Buna, on the Papuan Peninsula directly opposite Port Moresby. This invasion was a source of grave concern to MacArthur, particularly as the Southwest Pacific Forces had been on the point of occupying the Buna area themselves. But in the South Pacific the news was received with a certain measure of relief. Japanese attention was focused on the old target of Port Moresby, not upon the end of the Solomons chain. Rabaul was looking southwest instead of southeast. Surprise was possible.
Steaming from points as widely separated as Wellington, Sydney, Noumea, San Diego, and Pearl Harbor, the various components of the Watchtower Expeditionary Force, some 80 vessels in all, met at sea on 26 July south of the Fijis. Here Admiral Fletcher held council aboard his flagship, the carrier Saratoga. Admiral Ghormley, then shifting his headquarters to Noumea, could not be present. He at no time saw the fleet over which he exercised a distant control or met all his top commanders to discuss operation plans. After a less than satisfactory landing rehearsal in the Fijis, the fleet steamed westward. In the Coral Sea it shaped course due north and headed for Guadalcanal through rain squalls that grounded all aircraft, including Japanese search patrols.
Guadalcanal, part of the drowned volcanic mountain range forming the Solomons, rises steeply in the south from a narrow coastal flat. Only on the north side of the island are there plains broad enough to provide level ground for airfields. Here on Laguna Plain, mostly rain forest traversed by numerous creeks and small rivers and broken here and there by coconut plantations and grassy fields, the Japanese had landed and begun their airdrome. This was the main Allied objective. The secondary objective was the Japanese seaplane base in the Tulagi area, 20 miles to the north . . .
--Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and E. B. Potter
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Part IV: Chapter 1: The Invasion is Mounted
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