US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

Tough Toenails Paring 593
where they had a more or less private drinking room. [The Admiral Turner
Room in the Circle de Noumea, a cobwebby French Club.]
Walking there and back and walking from the dock to Admiral Halsey’s
morning conference is about the only exercise that Turner had, as far as I
could observe while I was with him around Noumea, 76
Regarding this period, his Flag Captain reports as follows:
The Kelly Turner Club in Noumea was where Turner and his staff drank
heavily and relaxed. I was a member of this club, also its liquor supplier.
Turner was lots of fun and forgot his problems here.TT
A war correspondent who was in Noumea and in Guadalcanal at this
time wrote about Rear Admiral Turner:
. . . [He] gives forth an impression of extreme weariness . . . . solemn
owlish expression . . . . skinny and gaunt . . . . a chain smoker down to
the last soggy half-inch . . . . face leathery and lined with Character.’s
When all was said and done, Rear Admiral Turner worked his head off
in the logistical battle of the Lower Solomons and in the move to the Middle
Solomons. The record of dozens of letters indicates this. It was after this
initial phase of a rough and tumble contest with a first-class fighting
Japanese Navy was over and won, that Rear Admiral Turner started to find
in a nip at the bottle the necessary uplift to willingly wrestle another four
or five hours of work each clay after completing a normal 12 hours.
Like any newcomer to the tropics, he found it difficult to put in his long
accustomed 18-hour working day. He had bouts with malaria, his bones
ached, at times his head spun. But he kept going.’g
Not all the members of the COMPHIBFORSOPAC Staff have the same
remembrance of Rear Admiral Turner’s imbibing habits in all the details.
They all agree that this habit of taking a swig at a bottle, in contradistinc-
tion to a late afternoon cocktail ashore, did not take hold until after the
Russells had been seized and the final planning for TOENAILS was well
underway. One placed it definitely as just after his first serious bout with
malaria which sent him to the hospital ship Solace.so
No member of his staff interviewed had ever seen him under the weather
from drinking during this period and the majority say that the change from
mAnderson.
“ Rodgers.
“ Driscoll, Paci/ic Victory, pp. 58, 59.
WRKT Medical Record, 1942–1943.
mStaff Interviews.