Why Admiral Nimitz Risked Flying Into Guadalcanal Himself | Pacific War

September 30th, 1942. The B7 carrying Admiral Chester W. Nimmits had become lost over the Solomon Sea before Guadal Canal finally appeared ahead. Below lay Henderson Field, a battered air strip attacked by Japanese bombers in daylight and threatened by warships after dark. The American Marines holding it had endured 7 weeks of combat, interrupted supply, dysentery, and the growing spread of malaria.

Nimmits had come to answer one question. and the dispatches reaching Pearl Harbor could not settle. Could Guadal Kunnel still be held? At Numea, nearly a thousand miles away, Vice Admiral Robert Gormley carried responsibility for the South Pacific campaign from an improvised headquarters aboard the repair ship Argon. He was exhausted, physically unwell, short of ships and aircraft, and burdened with authority that did not fully match his responsibilities.

He had not yet visited Guadal Canal. Nimitz did. He walked the front lines. He saw Edson’s Ridge. He met Vandergrift and the American Marines holding the island. The next morning, his B17 nearly crashed while leaving Henderson Field. 18 days later, command of the South Pacific changed hands. This is the story of what Admiral Nimttz saw on that island.

It is the story of what he did not see in the reports crossing his desk in Hawaii. And it is the story of how less than three weeks after that B17 came down at Henderson Field, one of the most important commands in the Pacific War changed hands. To understand why Nimmits came, you have to understand what he was flying into.

And to understand that, you have to go back to the beginning of the campaign 7 weeks earlier. On the 7th of August 1942, the first marine division under Major General Alexander Vandergrift went ashore on the north coast of Guadal Canal, the largest island in the Solomons. Vandergrift was a soft-spoken 55-year-old Virginia who had spent his life in the core.

He was not a man who raised his voice. He was not a man who wasted words. He had come up through the small wars of the inter war years and by the summers of 1942 he was leading American ground troops into the first major American offensive of the Pacific War. The wider operation involved nearly 19,000 American marines striking the Guadal Canal Tulagi area and the nearby islands.

About 11,000 of them landed on Guadal Canal itself. They took the beach with less resistance than they had feared. They pushed inland through jungles so thick a man could not see 50 ft ahead. They captured the half-built airfield the Japanese had been carving out of the coastal plane. They renamed it Henderson Field. It was named for Major Loftton Henderson, a Marine dive bomber commander killed while leading his squadron against the Japanese carrier force at Midway 2 months earlier.

Now his name was fixed to a strip of dirt in the Solomon Islands, and the men who took it did not yet know how much blood would be paid to keep it. 2 days after the landing, the situation at sea began to unravel. Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher withdrew his carriers after concluding that continued exposure to Japanese land-based aircraft placed them at unacceptable risk.

The transports continued unloading, but after the Allied cruiser screen was shattered at Tsavo Island, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner withdrew the transports before the job was complete. The battle at Tsavo Island came on the night of the 8th of August. A Japanese cruiser force under Vice Admiral Ganichi Macawa came down the slot between the islands under cover of darkness.

They found the Allied screening ships unprepared and out of position. In less than half an hour of pointblank naval gunnery in the dark, four allied heavy cruisers went to the bottom. Three American, the Historia, the Quincy, and the Vincens. One Australian, the Canbor. More than a thousand sailors died. It was one of the worst defeats in the history of the United States Navy.

The stretch of water where those ships sank would earn a name from the men who fought over it in the months to come. They called it Iron Bottom Sound. for the sheer number of ships that came to rest on the floor of it. Much of the planned equipment for the American Marines was still aboard the transports when they withdrew.

Food was tight enough that Vandergrift soon reduced the men to two meals a day. Barbed wire, sandbags, and trenching tools and heavy construction equipment were critically short. No one ashore knew when regular supply runs could be made safe. For several critical days after Tsavo, the American Marines on Guadal Canal were left without carrier cover with inadequate supplies and with no guarantee that the sea lanes could remain open.

They were not completely abandoned. Four fast transports burst arrived by the middle of August with ammunition, aviation fuel, and personnel. But from the foxholes around Henderson Field, it often felt as if the war had left them behind on the wrong island. They dug in. They repaired the airfield. They set up a perimeter and they waited to be attacked.

The attacks came. They came from the sea in the form of Japanese destroyers racing down the slot in the dark. The American Marines called those runs the Tokyo Express. Some nights the express landed men. Other nights it hammered the airfield with gunfire. Some weeks it came almost every night.

Other weeks it came after a few nights of silence. But it kept coming. They came from the air. Japanese bombers came down from Rabbal under the protection of zero fighters whose range, climbing ability, and low-speed maneuverability gave them dangerous advantages over the American Wildcats. Every day, American pilots flying off Henderson took off in wornout planes to meet formations that could destroy them if they made a single mistake.

And they came on the ground. Wave after wave of Japanese infantry pushed through the jungle to try to retake the airfield. In the middle of August, a battalion under Colonel Kona Ichiki attacked the American Marine perimeter at the Tanaru River. Ichiki badly underestimated the strength of the marine perimeter.

Rather than wait for the rest of his regiment, he launched a frontal attack with roughly 900 men. His detachment was destroyed. Ichiki committed suicide, but the Japanese kept coming. They understood what the American Marines had taken. If the Americans held Henderson Field, they denied Japan the forward airfield it had been building and gained the power to contest the daylight waters surrounding Guadal Canal.

If the Japanese retook Henderson Field, they could restore their air position in the southern Solomons and place the Allied line of communication to Australia under far greater threat. There was no compromise. One side would keep the airfield, the other side would break. For 6 weeks, the American Marines held. They held through the shelling.

They held through the daily air raids. They held through jungle rot and dysentery and the poor rations that came in when the transports could reach them. And the poorer rations they lived on when the transports could not. When their own food ran short, they ate captured Japanese rice out of captured Japanese stores and were glad to have it.

They held because Vandergrift had decided quietly and without drama that they would, and because the men in the foxholes had decided the same thing, one foxhole at a time. By the middle of September, the campaign had reached its most dangerous point yet. On the nights of the 12th and 13th of September, a Japanese force under Major General Kiyotake Kawaguchi came at the American Marine perimeter from the south.

Their objective was a low, bare rise of ground just south of Henderson Field. If the Japanese broke through on that ridge, the road to Henderson Field and Vandergrift’s command post would open before them. The Marine position could be split at its most vulnerable point. On the American side of the line, roughly 840 American Marines under Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson dug in on the ridge and waited.

Edson was a lean 45-year-old verter with pale blue eyes and the calm of a man who had already been shot at more times than he could [music] count. He commanded a mixed force of raiders and paramarines. He knew the odds. He waited anyway. The Japanese came through the dark in waves of nearly 3,000 men. They came screaming. They came at close quarters.

They came with the confidence of soldiers whose army had spent most of the previous 9 months advancing from one victory to another across Asia and the Pacific. The American Marines held them barely. By the second night, the fighting had rolled back so far it reached almost to Vandergrift’s own command post.

Machine gun crews fired until their barrels burned out. Officers picked up rifles. Cooks and clerks and headquarters staff went forward with whatever weapons they could find. Artillery batteries dropped their fire almost onto the American positions to break up the Japanese assault. When dawn came on the 14th, the ground in front of the American Marine Line told the story of how close it had been.

They called it Edson’s Ridge. Some called it Bloody Ridge. Either name was accurate. The Japanese pulled back. Kawaguchi’s force melted into the jungle to regroup. Vandagramri’s American Marines held Henderson Field. But holding is not the same as winning. Every night the Tokyo Express came back was another night. The American Marines had simply not lost yet.

And from the outside, from the charts and the message traffic a thousand miles away in the quiet harbor at Numea, it did not look like holding at all. It looked like a slow bleed on an island whose name was beginning to appear in American newspapers. Although few people at home understood how close the campaign remained to failure, because the admiral in command of the whole operation was reading about it from far away and had not yet come any closer. His name was Robert Lee Gormley.

He was 58 years old, Vice Admiral, United States Navy, commander of the South Pacific Area. He had graduated near the top of his class at the Naval Academy. He had served with distinction through decades. Before the war, he had done fine work in London as the senior American naval representative to the British at a moment when that relationship mattered as much as any assignment in the Navy.

Gormley was not a coward. He was not incompetent, and he was not a man given to panic. He had been given enormous responsibilities. He commanded a vast ocean area with limited authority, too few ships, too few aircraft, an inexperienced staff, and a legit distinction that in the summer of 1942 could not reliably deliver everything the fight required.

He was working himself toward exhaustion aboard the repair ship Argon, which had been pressed into service as the floating headquarters of the South Pacific Command. He was also suffering from abscessed teeth, adding physical pain to exhaustion and the strain of command. But one omission had come to symbolize the distance between his headquarters and the battlefield.

In nearly 2 months of fighting, Gormley had not yet visited Guadal Canal. His dispatches to Pearl Harbor were heavy with worry. They asked for more. They said the men were barely hanging on. They carried the sound of an officer who was not sure this could be done. And a report cannot carry what a place feels like when you are standing in it.

It cannot carry the weight in a tired man’s voice or the look on the face of a general who has not slept in a week or the sound of the Tokyo Express in the night. It flattens everything down to lines on a page. Those same dispatches crossed another desk. Chester Nimtt studied Gormley’s dispatches at Pearl Harbor, thousands of miles from the fighting.

But the messages did not give him the clear judgment he needed. They contradicted each other. One said the situation was desperate. The next said the airfield was holding. They asked for reinforcements. And then they asked again, and the asking had a tone to it that a careful reader could not miss. A tone of an officer who was running out of confidence faster than he was running out of men.

Nimmitz needed to determine whether the American Marines on Guadal Canal could continue holding Henderson Field and what the Pacific Command would have to do to keep them there. He was not the only man asking. In Washington and throughout the Pacific commands, senior officers understood that Guadal Canal remained dangerously vulnerable.

Few could agree on how much additional strength could be spared to save it. There were competing demands from Europe. There were competing demands from General MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific. There were only so many carriers left after the losses of the summer and Washington was reluctant to risk the remaining ships in another naval catastrophe.

Nimtt sat at Pearl Harbor and read the paper and the paper would not answer the question. So in September of 1942, he began an inspection tour through the South Pacific. Nimttz had developed a habit of inspecting critical commands personally when reports alone could not settle his judgment.

The journey took him thousands of miles from Pearl Harbor. It carried him across isolated island bases through weather that could kill an airplane as surely as a bullet over waters where Japanese submarines still hunted and Japanese long range aircraft still flew. Every leg of the trip carried real risk. His staff understood the risk.

They watched him go anyway. By the 28th of September, his transport came down at Numea. Gormley was waiting. The two men had known each other for decades. They had come up in the Navy together. Gormley was more than a subordinate. He was a respected officer and a close friend, a man Nimttz himself had helped place in the South Pacific job earlier that year. They trusted each other.

They had trusted each other for a long time. Nimmits found a commander visibly worn by illness, overwork, and the burden of a campaign that was consuming men and ships faster than the South Pacific command could replace them. Gormley greeted his commander with the courtesy of a career officer and brought him aboard the Argon.

The Argon was not a proper headquarters ship. She was a repair ship that had been pressed into service as a floating command post because there was nothing else to give Gormley. His office aboard her was small, hot, and poorly suited to the command of a vast theater of war. The headquarters was attempting to direct the campaign from Numea, while Gormley and his chief of staff had not yet seen Guadal Canal for themselves.

The briefings Nimmits received there did little to ease his concern. As the hours passed, he began to build in his own mind a long list of deficiencies. problems in planning, problems in coordination, problems in logistics, problems in the aggressive employment of the forces already available, problems that were not the fault of any one man, but that added up to a command not fighting at the intensity the situation required.

He thanked Gormley, he rested, and in the morning on the 30th of September, he boarded a B17 for the final leg to Guadal Canal. It was a leg Gormley himself had not yet made. The flight did not go smoothly. Somewhere along the route, the B7 became lost over the open sea. The surviving accounts do not preserve every navigational detail, but for a dangerous stretch of the flight, Guadal Canal was nowhere in sight.

Over open ocean with cloud hiding landmarks and radio navigation still limited. Even an experienced crew could miss an island and run dangerously short of certainty. A Japanese interception could have killed the Pacific Fleet commander before he ever reached the island. No fighter found them. Eventually, they picked up the green line of the coast and the strip of red dirt cut into the coastal plane.

They brought the bomber down onto Henderson Field. Chester Nimtt stepped onto Henderson Field. He could have limited the visit to the airfield, accepted a formal briefing, and departed. That alone would have allowed him to report that he had visited Guadal Canal. He did more. Accounts of the visit show that Nimttz did more than accept a briefing.

He inspected the conditions around the American Marine perimeter. He examined the ground where Edson’s men had held two weeks earlier. He met the American Marines holding the line and he understood in a way no dispatch had ever been able to make him understand how thin the line had been and how many men had come at it.

Then he found Vandergrift. Nimttz met Vandergrift face to face. The surviving accounts do not preserve every word or gesture. They preserve what followed. Nimttz reaffirmed that Henderson Field must be held and promised all the support he could provide. Whatever Nimttz heard from Vandergrift, strengthened his confidence that the position could still be held, provided the men on the island received adequate support.

For the exhausted American Marines, who had seen few senior commanders on the island, the presence of the Pacific Fleet Commander carried a message no radio dispatch could deliver. Their position had not been forgotten. Their fight mattered. The senior American naval commander in the Pacific had come all this way through contested skies to stand on their piece of ground.

Nimttz also met members of the battered air force operating from Henderson Field. It was a mixed command of Marine, Navy, and Army pilots and ground crew. Everyone called it the Cactus Air Force after the code name for Guadal Canal itself. They took off between craters in worn out planes to meet Japanese formations that came nearly every day.

Their losses were severe. Their aircraft were worn and replacement parts often had to be salvaged from damaged machines. Nimtt spoke with them. He asked what they needed. He listened to the answers. Before leaving, Nimttz personally presented Navy crosses to six Marines whose actions had already distinguished them across the Pacific.

Vandergrift, [music] Merritt Edson, Evans Carlson, whose raiders had struck the Japanese base at Montoal two months earlier. William Rupertis, Edwin Pollock, and John L. Smith, the fighter squadron leader whose pilots had defended Henderson Field through some of the worst air combat of the campaign.

He pinned the ribbons on them one at a time in front of American Marines who had spent weeks uncertain whether enough ships, aircraft, and reinforcements could reach them in time. And by being there at all, he told them something no dispatch from Pearl Harbor ever could. Washington had not forgotten them. This island mattered.

Their fight mattered. Night fell. The frogs and insects of the jungle started their evening noise. Somewhere beyond the horizon, the threat of another Tokyo Express run remained. The men on the perimeter went to their positions and waited to see what the darkness would bring. Nimtt spent the night on Guadal Canal.

The next morning on the 1st of October, the visit came close to ending in disaster. As the B17 lifted off from Henderson Field on the return leg, the aircraft nearly crashed on takeoff. The details vary in the surviving accounts. The essential fact does not. Had the aircraft failed to clear the field, the United States could have lost its principal naval commander in the Pacific at one of the most dangerous moments of the campaign.

The consequences would have reached far beyond Guadal Canal. He got out and he brought back two things with him. He now knew with the certainty of a man who had walked the ground that Guadal Canal could be held if it was properly supported. He had seen the line. He had talked to the general holding it. He had weighed the whole thing against what was actually there instead of against a stack of paper.

But he also brought back the long list of deficiencies he had gathered at Numea. Problems in planning, coordination, and logistics. gaps in the aggressive employment of the forces already on hand. Nimttz did not relieve Gormley immediately. He returned to Numea with a list of deficiencies that needed correction.

Then October made the situation more urgent because October brought catastrophe. During the night of October 13 to 14, the Japanese battleships Congo and Haruna entered the waters off Guadal Canal and bombarded Henderson Field for roughly 80 minutes with nearly 1,4in shells. Aviation fuel burned in great pools. Aircraft on the ground were destroyed or damaged.

American Marines pressed themselves into the earth as the shells came in. By dawn, only 42 of the 90 aircraft that had been operational the previous day could still fly. Then the Japanese landed more troops. The Tokyo Express ran harder. Fresh Japanese infantry moved into position for what looked like a major offensive to take the airfield once and for all.

On October 16, as the crisis deepened, Gormley sent a dispatch to Pearl Harbor. He warned that the Japanese effort now appeared to be all out. He warned that his available forces were, in his own words, totally inadequate to meet the situation. He urgently requested every possible aviation reinforcement. Nimttz read the dispatch.

Then he consulted the officers whose judgment he trusted. The surviving record preserves the conclusion, not every word spoken in the room. His staff was unanimous. Gormley should be relieved. It was not a small thing to say. To relieve a theater commander in the middle of a battle that was still hanging by a thread was to send a tremor through every headquarters in the fleet.

In this case, it would put a decades old professional friendship under the hardest possible strain. The safe move, the move that protected everyone’s reputation was to leave things as they were and hope to give Gormley another month, another chance, another benefit of the doubt. Nimttz did not make the safe move.

On the 16th of October, he sent a message to Admiral Ernest King in Washington. King was 63 years old, hard, brilliant, and feared by his own subordinates. He was the chief of naval operations, the man to whom Nimmitz answered. Nimttz told him that in light of Gormley’s latest dispatch and what he had observed during his own inspection, he was considering replacing Gormley with Vice Admiral William F. Holly.

He asked for King’s comment. The reply from Washington came back the same day. It contained one word, affirmative. The change was made on the 18th of October. William Frederick Hally was 59 years old, broadshouldered, bull necked, a carrier admiral of the old school. Newspers called him Bull, a nickname he never particularly liked.

To the men who knew him, he was Bill Hollyy. He had a reputation in the fleet as an officer who preferred to hit the enemy rather than wait for the enemy to hit him. A severe case of dermatitis had kept him out of midway earlier that year where Raymond Spruce took the carrier force in his place. Now in October, he was healthy again and he was on his way south to take command of a carrier task force in the South Pacific.

That was what he thought he was doing. His sea plane came down in the harbor at Numea. A whaleboat came alongside before the flying boat’s propellers had fully stopped. As Hollyy stepped aboard, Gormley’s flag lieutenant saluted and handed him a sealed envelope. Inside was a message from Nimmits. He was to assume command of the South Pacific area and South Pacific forces immediately.

Holly later preserved his reaction in his memoir. Jesus Christ and General Jackson, he said. This is the hottest potato they ever handed me. Within hours, he was aboard the Argon. Gormley met him on the quarter deck. Holly later remembered that his old friend was cordial, although both men were plainly uncomfortable.

Gormley briefed his replacement on the situation as he understood it. He handed over his command. He packed his things. He went home. The relief placed a painful strain on old professional friendships. It did not end Gormley’s naval career. He continued to serve the country. He held other important commands through the war.

He served until his retirement in 1946. His relief at Guadal Canal would remain the defining episode of his historical reputation. And now comes the part of this story that is hardest to believe unless you have seen it happen with your own eyes. The material situation did not transform overnight. The American Marines were still sick, exhausted, and facing a major Japanese offensive.

No new fleet had suddenly appeared off the island. The Tokyo Express was still forming up beyond the horizon. The airfield was still cratered from the October bombardment, but morale changed before reinforcement could. Lieutenant Commander Roger Kent was an air intelligence officer on Guadal Canal at the time.

He later remembered the reaction when the news of the command change reached the men. In his own words, “One minute they were too limp with malaria to crawl out of their foxholes. The next they were up and running around whooping like kids. Word ran through the perimeter faster than Word had any right to run. Hollyy had the theater.

Hollyy, the man they knew, the man who fought the American Marines on the line. Men who had been shelled, underfed, weakened by disease, and uncertain whether enough support would reach them in time, understood in an instant what the change meant. Whatever came next, it would come at the enemy, not away from him. Whatever was in the pipeline in the way of ships and planes, and men would arrive with somebody at the top of the chain who was going to spend it.

The spirit of the island shifted before the enemy ever knew a thing. The difference was not that Gormley lacked information or courage. Nimttz concluded that Gormley’s failing health, the limitations of his headquarters, and his increasingly cautious command style were no longer equal to the crisis. His visit did not decide the campaign by itself, but it allowed him to compare the reports with the men and ground behind them and to judge the command responsible for turning those reports into action.

Holly went to work immediately. He read himself into the theater. He shook up the staff. He sent aggressive orders down the line. On October 22nd, Vandergrift flew to Numea and argued that the reinforcements intended for Guadal Canal could not be diverted elsewhere. Hollyy answered with a promise later preserved in the Marine Corps history.

You go back there, Vander. I promise to get you everything I have. Within weeks, the situation began to shift. At the end of October, in the Battle of Santa Cruz, the American carriers Enterprise and Hornet fought a hard action against the Japanese. Hornet was lost. Enterprise was damaged but survived. Returning to the Guadal Canal fight after hurried repair, the Japanese lost pilots and aircraft they could not easily replace.

Then from November 12th through November 15, American and Japanese ships and aircraft fought a connected series of savage actions around Guadal Canal, including two major night surface battles. On the first night, an American cruiser force under Rear Admiral Daniel Callahan collided almost bow-to- bow with a Japanese force, including the battleship Heay. Callahan was killed.

Rear Admiral Norman Scott was killed. The fight became a chaotic close-range brawl, but he was crippled and the next day finished off by American aircraft. On the night of November 14 to 15, the American battleship Washington under Rear Admiral Willis Lee met the Japanese battleship Kushima in the dark near Tsavo Island.

At close range, Washington struck Kiroshima with at least nine 16-in shells and at least 17 5-in shells, inflicting catastrophic flooding and damage. Fatally crippled and abandoned by her crew, Kiroshima sank hours later northwest of Tsavo. The November naval battles did not end Japanese supply efforts. Japanese destroyers and even submarines would continue to try to feed the island for weeks.

But those battles shattered Japan’s ability to reinforce Guadal Canal on the scale required to win the campaign. From that point on, the Japanese could deliver too little, too slowly, and at a devastating cost. On the 9th of December, Vandergrift handed command on Guadal Canal to Army Major General Alexander Patch. The exhausted First Marine Division began withdrawing to Australia to rest and refit.

Nearly every man had lost weight, disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion had left large numbers physically weakened, but they had held the airfield. The campaign was not over. Japanese forces would remain on Guadal Canal for two more months. The final Japanese evacuation was completed during the night of February 7 to 8, 1943.

On February 9th, American forces linked up near Cape Espirans and declared Guadal Canal secure. Together with Coral Sea and Midway, Guadal Canal marked a broader reversal. Japan had lost the initiative in the South Pacific and would never completely [music] recover it. There were two men at the top of this story. Robert Gormley had served the United States with distinction for decades.

He had been given an almost impossible command with far too little in the way of ships, aircraft, staff, [music] and logistics. He was working himself into physical collapse to make that command function. He was a capable officer placed in a new and badly improvised command at a moment when the United States could not afford a slow learning curve.

Chester Nimitz did something Gormley had not done. He got on an airplane. He flew into a place where the shells fell most nights. He walked the ground where the line had almost broken. He looked at the men holding it. He listened to the general in the command post. He came back knowing what the paper on his desk had not been able to tell him.

The visit did not create Nimitz’s method of command. It revealed it. When reports could not resolve the problem, he was willing to move closer to the men, the ground, and the danger. It was not a matter of nerve alone. Both men had spent their lives in the Navy. Both had earned their stars the hard way. It was a matter of a habit of mind.

When the answer would not come to Nimttz, he went to the answer. He carried that habit for the rest of the war. He would go on to command the Pacific Fleet and the Pacific Ocean areas through the remaining years of the fighting. Terowa, the Marshals, the Marianas, Lee Gulf, Ewima, Okinawa. Command decisions moved hundreds of thousands of men across the largest ocean on Earth.

All of it eventually led to the deck of the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay on the morning of the 2nd of September 1945 when the Empire of Japan bowed its head and signed the surrender that ended the war. Few Americans in the whole conflict carried more weight on their shoulders and few carried it as quiet. The official histories record the admirals and the decisions.

They record the battles and the ships and the dates. They tell the story from the top down. That is what histories do. Family memories preserve the men who lived beneath those decisions. The American Marines in the foxholes around Henderson Field. The pilots of the Cactus Air Force who took off between craters. Sailors on the ships that fought in Iron Bottom Sound and never came home.

The Army soldiers who came in to relieve the First Marine Division in December and January and fought their own battles into February. History books were written about the men at the top. The men who did the fighting are remembered mostly by the families who knew them. If someone in your family served on Guadal Canal or in the Solomons or anywhere in the Pacific in those years, write his name below. His unit if you know it.

One thing you remember him saying or one thing your mother or your grandmother told you about him when he was gone. Anything. Because time is running short. Someday, and it is not far off, the last man who was on that island will be gone. And when he is, the only thing left of what he did will be what someone else remembered.