The Battle of Cape St. George

On the night of 24–25 November 1943, in the waters between Buka island and Cape St. George at the southern tip of New Ireland, five American destroyers of Destroyer Squadron 23 intercepted five Japanese destroyers returning to Rabaul. In less than two hours the Americans sank three of them – Ōnami, Makinami and Yūgiri – without losing a single ship. It was the last surface action of the Solomon Islands campaign and also the cleanest victory won by American destroyers in the night battles in those waters. Chronologies attribute it to “Admiral” Arleigh Burke; in November 1943, however, Burke was a captain and, as a squadron commander, was customarily styled commodore. He became an admiral only after the war.

Bougainville after the landing

Since the landing of the US Marines at Empress Augusta Bay on 1 November 1943, the beachhead around Cape Torokina on Bougainville had been growing rapidly. The Japanese fleet, which had tried to destroy it, lost the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay on the night of 1–2 November, and the heavy cruisers brought to Rabaul were damaged in the carrier raids of 5 and 11 November. Admiral Mineichi Koga withdrew his heavy ships from Rabaul and could no longer throw large surface forces against the beachhead.

The Japanese command at Rabaul, moreover, concluded that the landing in the weakly defended Torokina area was probably just a feint and that the Americans’ real objective was the airfields on Buka, at the northern tip of Bougainville. Instead of concentrating its forces against the beachhead, it therefore decided to reinforce the Buka garrison. The task was entrusted to destroyers – the same ones that since the autumn of 1942 had been running troops and supplies to the Solomons by night as the “Tokyo Express”. Three destroyer-transports, Amagiri, Yūgiri and Uzuki, under Captain Katsumori Yamashiro, embarked 920 Army troops. They were escorted by two modern Yūgumo-class destroyers, Ōnami and Makinami, under Captain Kiyoto Kagawa, who commanded the whole force. On the way back the ships were to take off some 700 naval air personnel from Buka – Allied air raids had made the airfield there unusable.

“Thirty-one-knot Burke”

The Japanese force was spotted by reconnaissance aircraft. Admiral William Halsey, commanding in the South Pacific, sent against it Destroyer Squadron 23 – five modern Fletcher-class ships known from their emblem as the “Little Beavers”. Burke personally led Destroyer Division 45 (Charles Ausburne, Claxton, Dyson), while Division 46 (Converse, Spence) was commanded by Commander Bernard Austin. The order from Halsey’s staff, sent on 24 November, began with the words: “Thirty-one-knot Burke, get athwart the Buka–Rabaul evacuation line about 35 miles west of Buka.” The nickname, given with a touch of irony, is usually linked to a boiler defect in Spence that limited the squadron’s speed to 31 knots instead of more than 34; another version connects it with an earlier report by Burke of his speed of advance. The joke soon turned into a tribute to a commander who always pressed forward. Nine PT boats also entered the strait between Buka and Bougainville in case the destroyers failed to make contact.

For months Burke had been developing a tactic that Commander Frederick Moosbrugger had used successfully in August at the Battle of Vella Gulf: the squadron splits into two columns; one, unseen by the enemy, closes in on radar and launches torpedoes without giving itself away by gunfire, while the other covers it and opens fire once the torpedoes have struck home. His standing rule was that the destroyers should attack on making contact without waiting for orders – the lessons of earlier night defeats, such as the one at Tassafaronga, showed that hesitation cost ships.

The action

The Japanese landed the troops and supplies on Buka, took off the airmen and set off back. Just after midnight on 25 November the PT boats picked up four ships on radar but took them for friendly vessels; the Japanese destroyers fired on them and tried to ram PT-318, and a torpedo from PT-64 missed. At around 1.41 a.m. Dyson’s radar detected the two escorting destroyers heading west towards Cape St. George. In poor visibility the Japanese did not spot their enemy. Burke led his own division into a torpedo attack; the ships closed to about 5,000 metres and at around 1.55 a.m. fired a spread of torpedoes before the Japanese realised what was happening. Ōnami, hit by several torpedoes, blew up and sank at once with all hands, Captain Kagawa among them. Makinami, hit by a single torpedo, lay dead in the water; Converse and Spence finished her off with torpedoes and gunfire.

Moments later radar detected the three overloaded destroyer-transports about 12 km away. They were fleeing north, and Burke’s division gave chase; Converse and Spence stayed with Makinami. According to participants’ accounts, at one point Burke, acting on a hunch, briefly turned off course – and Japanese torpedoes that had missed their target exploded in the wakes of his ships. At around 2.22 a.m. the Americans opened fire, and a few minutes later the Japanese ships split up and fled in different directions. Uzuki was hit by a single dud, Amagiri escaped unscathed, and Burke concentrated his whole squadron on Yūgiri, which sank after a hard fight at around 3.28 a.m. Burke broke off the pursuit of the other two ships at 4.04 a.m.: his destroyers were running short of fuel and ammunition, and before dawn they had to get out of range of the Japanese aircraft at Rabaul. At first light only friendly P-38s appeared over the squadron.

The reckoning

The Japanese achieved the aim of the operation itself: the 920 troops reached Buka, and most of the evacuated airmen returned to Rabaul aboard Amagiri and Uzuki. But they paid with three destroyers, two of them among their newest. According to post-war tallies, some 650 Japanese sailors and soldiers were killed; the submarine I-177 picked up 279 survivors of Yūgiri from the water, and I-181 eleven more. On the American side no ship was sunk or seriously damaged. The battle is often described, in the words of instructors at the US Naval War College, as an “almost perfect action” by destroyers – a combination of radar superiority, surprise and a torpedo attack delivered without hesitation.

The battle showed how much the picture of night fighting in the Solomons had changed in a year. As recently as 1942 Japanese destroyers, with their excellent Type 93 torpedoes and superbly trained crews, had been winning night engagements even against cruisers, while the Americans lost them through hesitation, rigid formations and a failure to understand what radar could do. As late as early October, in the naval Battle of Vella Lavella, Japanese destroyers had covered the evacuation of a garrison and sunk the American destroyer Chevalier. Off Cape St. George it was the Americans who could see in the dark, fired first and acted on their own initiative, while the Japanese were taken by surprise.

Place in the war

The Battle of Cape St. George brought to a close the era of night destroyer battles in the Solomon Islands. The Japanese navy made no further attempts at larger Tokyo Express-style supply runs to Bougainville, and the garrisons of Buka and Bougainville were left effectively cut off and dependent on their own resources. Over the following months the American offensive bypassed Rabaul: the fortress was hemmed in from the air and from the sea, with the surrounding islands taken in early 1944, and left to wither behind the front. The fighting on Bougainville itself, on the other hand, went on until the end of the war.

Burke’s “Little Beavers” fought a series of further actions up to February 1944 – shelling coasts, escorting convoys and attacking Japanese ships in the Bismarck Archipelago. The squadron received the Presidential Unit Citation, and its commander became chief of staff in March 1944 to Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force. In time Arleigh Burke became one of the most important figures of the post-war US Navy – he was Chief of Naval Operations from 1955 to 1961 – and an entire class of American guided-missile destroyers now bears his name. The battle itself is commemorated by the guided-missile cruiser USS Cape St. George, in service since 1993.