US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

218 Ampbibi&ns Came To Conquer
ground work for a lot of later Marine abuse of Richmond Kelly Turner.
This extremely terse and stimulating order, which made possible the success-
ful WATCHTOWER Operation, had this important paragraph:
IX. Coordintitiotsof Command
a. Under the Commander, South Pacific Force, the Commander of the
South Pacific Amphibious Force will be in command of the naval, ground and
air units assigned to the amphibious forces in the South Pacific area.
b. The New Zealand Chiefs of Staff are in command of any United Nations
units assigned to New Zealand specifically for the land defense of the
Commonwealth of New Zealand.”
The Commanding General, First Marine Division (Major General Alex-
ander A. Vandegrift, USMC) received registered copy No. 35 of the
order. The Commandant of the Marine Corps received five copies.
I have been unable to locate, in the files of COMINCH, any letter of
protest or comment from Marine Corps sources in regard to this order. The
specific requirements of the order assigning command of the ground and
air units to Commander Amphibious Force South Pacific are not mentioned
in any of the better known Marine Force accounts of the Marine Corps
Operations at Guadalcanal.37 And yet each of these accounts creates the
impression that Rear Admiral Turner was exercising command responsibilities
during the WATCHTOWER Operation when he should not have
done so.
Rear Admiral Turner’s position was that the directive was drafted in a
section of the COMINCH Staff headed by a senior colonel in the Marine
Corps (DeWitt Peck, later Major General). It was cleared with Marine ofiicers
in the Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps before it was
initialed by the top echelon of COMINCH Staff and signed by Admiral King.
There were no questions raised in regard to the command relationships,
although the draft went through several other changes.a8
On 13 May 1942, Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, Commander Amphibious
Force, Pacific Fleet raised the question of command relationships between
his command and that of Commander Amphibious Corps, South Pacific
MCOMINCH, letter, FF1/A3–1/A16-3 ( 5), Ser 00322 of 29 Apr. 1942, subj: LONE WOLF
Plan,
= (a) Hough, Ludwig, Shaw, Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, pp. 240, 241, 341-342; (b) John L.
Zimmerman, The Guad&fcd?ml Campaign, Marine Corps Monograph (Washington: Historical
Branch, Headquarters U. S. Marine Corps, 1949), pp. 93, 128, 153, 154; (c) Isely and Crowl,
U.S. Marines and Amphibious w~r, pp. 153–57,
= LONE WOLF drafted by F1232 (Capt. B. J. Rodgers) in COMINCH Pacific Section of the
Plans Division. This section was headed by Colonel DeWitt Peck, USMC, who was F123.