“Admiral, you’ve got to see this,” said his duty officer, who had never before interrupted the boss’s sleep. “It isn’t good.”1 With disbelieving eyes, King read Turner’s dispatch reporting the loss of four Allied cruisers with heavy loss of life, and the hurried withdrawal of the transports and cargo ships from Ironbottom Sound. He asked that the dispatch be decoded again, in the vain hope that it was somehow mistaken. It was not. The news kicked King in the teeth. WATCHTOWER was his invention, his hobbyhorse, and his responsibility. He had insisted on the risky expedition with full knowledge that Allied shipping resources and airpower were strained to the snapping point. He had trodden over the well-reasoned joint objections of the region’s two theater commanders. “That, as far as I am concerned, was the blackest day of the war,” he later said. “The whole future became unpredictable.”2 The next morning, in his office on the second “deck” of Main Navy (the headquarters building on Constitution Avenue), he studied the track charts forwarded by Turner and tried to envision how the Japanese fleet could have stolen into Ironbottom Sound undetected.
