The Battle of Savo Island

On the night of 8/9 August 1942, less than two days after the US Marines had landed on Guadalcanal and Tulagi, a Japanese cruiser force slipped unnoticed into the channel between Guadalcanal and the Florida Islands and in about forty minutes shattered the Allied screening force. The American heavy cruisers Vincennes, Quincy and Astoria and the Australian Canberra sank or were finished off the next morning, the cruiser Chicago was badly damaged, and more than a thousand Allied sailors were killed. The Japanese lost a few dozen men and not a single ship in the battle itself. In all, the Americans lost three cruisers and the Australians one.

The Battle of Savo Island, known in Japanese sources as the First Battle of the Solomon Sea, was the first of a series of night actions in the waters around Guadalcanal, which sailors soon called Ironbottom Sound after the number of wrecks lying there. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison described it as probably the worst defeat the US Navy had ever suffered in a fair fight, and naval historians today rank it alongside Pearl Harbor among the greatest defeats of the American fleet.

A landing without cover

Operation Watchtower, the first American offensive of the Pacific War, had from the outset been prepared in haste and with modest means. Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher covered it from the south with three carriers: Saratoga, Enterprise and Wasp. The amphibious force – the transports carrying Major General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1st Marine Division – was commanded by Rear Admiral Richmond Turner. Turner also had under him the screening force of eight cruisers and a dozen or so destroyers, led by the British Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley, a Royal Navy officer seconded to the Royal Australian Navy and a holder of the Victoria Cross from the previous war. Crutchley’s flagship was the Australian heavy cruiser Australia.

The landing on 7 August took the Japanese by surprise. The airfield on the Lunga River was taken almost without a fight, and by the evening of 8 August the Marines had also seized the fiercely defended islets of Tulagi, Gavutu and Tanambogo. The Japanese response, however, came at once from Rabaul on New Britain, some thousand kilometres away. On 7 and 8 August bombers and torpedo aircraft from the airfields there attacked the invasion fleet several times. They set on fire the transport George F. Elliott, which went to the bottom, and badly damaged the destroyer Jarvis, paying for this with the loss of several dozen aircraft. The Americans lost a dozen or so carrier fighters in this fighting.

These losses, the fear of further torpedo-bomber attacks and dwindling fuel stocks led Fletcher, on the evening of 8 August, to report to his superior, Vice Admiral Robert Ghormley, that he was withdrawing the carriers to the south. The admiral believed that after Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea and Midway the United States could not risk losing another of its few carriers. Turner accepted the decision bitterly: without air cover he could not keep the transports off Guadalcanal, and he decided to unload as much as possible overnight and leave the next day. In the evening he summoned Crutchley and Vandegrift to a conference on his flagship. Crutchley went to it in Australia, leaving the southern group of the screen without its flagship.

Mikawa sets out from Rabaul

Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa, commander of the newly formed 8th Fleet at Rabaul, reacted to the news of the landing with lightning speed. He sent two transports carrying several hundred naval infantry towards Guadalcanal, but recalled them when it became clear that the Americans had landed in strength; one of them, Meiyō Maru, was sunk on 8 August by the American submarine S-38, and several hundred men died with her. At the same time Mikawa gathered every ship he had to hand. He left Rabaul on the afternoon of 7 August in his flagship, the heavy cruiser Chōkai, with the light cruisers Tenryū and Yūbari and the destroyer Yūnagi. At sea he was joined from Kavieng by Rear Admiral Aritomo Gotō’s 6th Cruiser Division with four older heavy cruisers: Aoba, Kinugasa, Furutaka and Kako. The battle plan was drawn up by an 8th Fleet staff officer, Commander Shigenori Kami, and approved by headquarters in Tokyo.

Mikawa was counting on the areas in which the Japanese navy had a clear advantage: years of training in night fighting, excellent optics and the powerful Type 93 torpedoes of unprecedented range, of whose existence the Allies had no idea. At night he also had no need to fear American aircraft. His plan was simple: to enter the channel south of Savo Island, attack with torpedoes the ships screening the anchorage off Guadalcanal, then turn towards Tulagi and leave the channel north of Savo.

The Japanese force did not pass unseen. On the evening of 7 August it was reported by the submarine S-38, and before noon on 8 August two Australian Hudson reconnaissance aircraft from Milne Bay spotted it off the coast of Bougainville. The reports, however, reached Turner many hours late and with an inaccurate description: the ships were said to include “seaplane tenders”. At their conference Turner, Crutchley and Vandegrift therefore concluded that the Japanese were preparing an air attack from seaplane bases rather than a night action. Morison, in his history of the navy, later blamed the crew of one Hudson, who were alleged to have reported the Japanese ships only after landing and having their tea. This story circulated in the literature for decades, but later research undermined it, and in 2014 the US Naval History and Heritage Command found the accusations unjustified. Turner was, moreover, convinced that the channel down which Mikawa was sailing in the afternoon, the so-called Slot, was being patrolled by aircraft of Rear Admiral John McCain’s land-based air command. For reasons never explained these flights did not take place, and no one informed Turner.

Night off Savo

Crutchley divided his ships into three groups. The southern group, with the cruisers Canberra and Chicago (without the departed Australia) and two destroyers, guarded the passage between Savo and Cape Esperance on Guadalcanal. The northern group, with the American cruisers Vincennes, Quincy and Astoria and two destroyers, patrolled the passage between Savo and the Florida Islands. The eastern group, with the light cruisers San Juan and Hobart, guarded the eastern entrances to the channel and took no part in the fighting. West of Savo two radar-equipped destroyers, Blue and Ralph Talbot, were to give early warning of the enemy. Their patrol lines were not coordinated, and the radars of the day, as it turned out, lost targets against the background of the nearby islands. The crews, exhausted by two days of constant alert in stifling heat, were at a reduced state of readiness: half the men were at the guns, half resting. The captain of Chicago, Captain Howard Bode, who had taken command of the southern group in Crutchley’s absence, did not move his ship to the head of the formation and went back to his cabin to sleep.

Shortly before 1 a.m. on 9 August Mikawa’s lookouts spotted the destroyer Blue. The Japanese column passed about two kilometres from her with dozens of guns trained on her, but the American destroyer turned at the end of her patrol line and noticed nothing. At 1.31 a.m. Mikawa gave the order: “All ships, attack.” Seaplanes launched earlier from the Japanese cruisers dropped flares over the ships of the southern group, which were also silhouetted against the still-burning George F. Elliott. At about 1.43 a.m. the destroyer Patterson was the first to sight the enemy and broadcast the warning: “Warning! Warning! Strange ships entering harbor!” It was already too late. Canberra had time only to increase speed and turn towards the Japanese before, within a few minutes, she was hit by some twenty-odd heavy shells, by various counts, and possibly a torpedo as well. The ship lost power, caught fire and listed without having fired a single round from her main guns; her captain, Captain Frank Getting, was mortally wounded. A torpedo struck Chicago in the bow. Bode took his ship west, away from the battle, and for several dozen minutes warned neither the northern group nor Turner.

Mikawa meanwhile turned north-east towards the second group of Allied cruisers. In doing so his column accidentally split into two parts, which caught the American ships in a crossfire. The captains of Vincennes, Quincy and Astoria were asleep; their ships were steaming slowly at ten knots, and the lookouts who had seen flashes to the south were not sure what was happening. At 1.50 a.m. Japanese searchlights illuminated the American cruisers and the first salvoes fell on them. On Astoria the captain, woken in the middle of the action, briefly ceased fire for fear of shooting at his own ships. Quincy was caught in the crossfire, took several torpedoes and sank at 2.38 a.m.; her captain was killed on the bridge. One of Quincy’s last salvoes hit Chōkai’s chart room, a few metres from Mikawa, killing and wounding several dozen men. Vincennes, hit by dozens of shells and at least three torpedoes, sank at 2.50 a.m. Astoria, ablaze and without power, stayed afloat until midday on 9 August. On the other side of Savo the Japanese also spotted the destroyer Ralph Talbot and damaged her badly, but the ship escaped into a rain squall.

Mikawa’s decision

At about 2.20 a.m. Mikawa conferred with his staff. His ships were scattered, reloading the torpedo tubes would take time, and they had already used up a considerable part of their ammunition. He did not know how many Allied ships remained in the channel. Above all, though, he was convinced that American carriers were operating nearby and would attack his cruisers at dawn, and Japan was no longer building new heavy cruisers and could not replace them. Some of his staff officers urged an attack on the transports, but Mikawa ordered a withdrawal. He did not know that Fletcher’s carriers were just then heading south and would have posed no threat to him in the morning. The transports, on which the supply of the Marines on Guadalcanal depended, survived.

On the morning of 9 August, once the decision had been taken to withdraw the whole fleet, Turner ordered the crippled Canberra to be sunk if she could not leave together with the other ships. After her crew had been taken off, destroyers finished her off with shells and torpedoes. The same day Japanese aircraft from Rabaul tracked down the lone, damaged Jarvis south of Guadalcanal and sank her with all hands, more than two hundred men; this ship is not usually counted among the losses of the battle itself. Mikawa too did not come out of the expedition unscathed: on the morning of 10 August, almost home, the cruiser Kako was sunk by the American submarine S-44, and about 70 of her crew were killed.

Losses and assessment

Japanese losses in the battle itself were small: the cruisers Chōkai, Aoba and Kinugasa were damaged, and 58 men were killed. Allied losses are usually given as 1,077 killed (1,023 by other counts) and several hundred wounded. The numbers killed on individual ships vary from source to source: on Quincy between about 370 and 389 men died, according to various figures, on Vincennes between about 320 and 342, on Astoria between about 220 and 235, and on Canberra 84 or 85, including her captain. Chicago returned to service only after several months of repairs.

The most important consequence of the battle, however, was what happened afterwards. On the afternoon of 9 August Turner, after a brief postponement at Vandegrift’s request, withdrew all the transports and warships from Guadalcanal. They left with a large part of the equipment, artillery, ammunition and food still not unloaded, as well as some of the troops intended for the island. About 11,000 of Vandegrift’s men on Guadalcanal and several thousand on Tulagi were left without cover from the sea or the air. The Marines went on to two meals a day, supplementing their rations with captured Japanese rice, and finished building the airfield with Japanese machinery. For the following weeks the Japanese controlled the waters around the island, especially at night, and their ships could bombard the perimeter and bring in reinforcements with impunity.

The inquiry

The defeat demanded explanation. In the winter of 1942 and the spring of 1943 Admiral Arthur Hepburn, on the orders of Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, questioned most of the commanders who had taken part in the operation. His report identified many causes of the defeat: crew fatigue, a failure to understand the limitations of radar, unreliable communications, convoluted orders, a lack of air reconnaissance and the premature withdrawal of the carriers. He recommended formal censure only for Captain Bode, for failing to warn the rest of the fleet. In April 1943 Bode shot himself in Panama. Fletcher, Turner, Crutchley and McCain suffered no professional consequences, though for many Marine officers Fletcher’s withdrawal would forever remain a betrayal.

Turner himself later wrote that the navy had at the time been obsessed with a sense of technical and mental superiority over the enemy, which bred a “fatal lethargy of mind” and a confidence without readiness, and that this psychological factor was in his view a more important cause of the defeat than surprise itself. The navy also drew technical lessons: cruisers were given emergency diesel-electric generators, firefighting systems were redesigned, and before action ships were cleared of flammable materials, of their shipborne aircraft and of petrol-driven motor boats, which at Savo had turned decks into torches.

Place in the war

The Battle of Savo Island was the US Navy’s most painful defeat at sea in the whole war, but its strategic significance proved smaller than it might have been. Mikawa sank warships but did not touch the transports, and it was these vessels that in the following months, in small convoys and by day, carried reinforcements and supplies to Guadalcanal. The historian Richard B. Frank believes that had the Japanese attacked the transport fleet on the morning of 9 August, they would have had a much better chance of recovering the island. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto congratulated Mikawa on his victory, but before long the Japanese navy began to reproach him for a wasted opportunity.

The Japanese command, reassured by the easy victory, also underestimated the American forces on the island, putting them at a few thousand men, and began sending small army detachments to Guadalcanal. The first of them, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki’s detachment, landed less than two weeks later. Savo also marked the start of the struggle for control of the waters around Guadalcanal, which lasted until the winter of 1942, with the battles of Cape Esperance in October, the night battles in November and Tassafaronga at the end of November. The cruiser Chicago, which had survived the night off Savo, was sunk in January 1943 in the Battle of Rennell Island. The American fleet learned to fight at night only in the course of those months, paying for the lesson with further ships, and the airfield on the Lunga, held despite the defeat of 9 August, became the pivot of the whole campaign.