The Battle of Vella Gulf

On the night of 6/7 August 1943, in Vella Gulf between the islands of Kolombangara and Vella Lavella in the central Solomon Islands, six American destroyers under Commander Frederick Moosbrugger laid an ambush for four Japanese destroyers carrying troops to Kolombangara. Guided by radar and invisible against the backdrop of the mountainous island, the Americans fired their torpedoes before the enemy realised the danger. Three Japanese ships – Hagikaze, Arashi and Kawakaze – were sunk; the fourth, Shigure, escaped with an unexploded torpedo through her rudder. Not a single American ship was hit. The Battle of Vella Gulf was the first such clear-cut victory for American destroyers in night torpedo combat – a field in which the Japanese had held the upper hand since the start of the Pacific War.

Background

Since the end of June the Americans had been fighting for New Georgia and its airfield at Munda, the first objective of the Solomons offensive within Operation Cartwheel, which aimed to isolate the Japanese base at Rabaul. The Japanese brought in reinforcements by night in fast destroyers – runs the Americans called the Tokyo Express – to Vila on the southern tip of Kolombangara, from where they were moved on to New Georgia. Two earlier attempts by Rear Admiral Walden Ainsworth’s cruisers and destroyers to cut these runs had proved costly for the Americans: in the Battle of Kula Gulf on 6 July they lost the cruiser Helena, and in the Battle of Kolombangara on 12/13 July the destroyer Gwin, with three cruisers damaged. In both clashes the Japanese long-range torpedoes (the Type 93) proved more dangerous than American gunfire.

On the night of 1/2 August another Japanese destroyer convoy delivered some 900 troops to Kolombangara without loss. Fifteen American torpedo boats fired dozens of torpedoes without scoring a single hit, and the escorting destroyer Amagiri rammed and cut in two the boat PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy – the episode known as the sinking of PT-109. On 5 August the Americans at last captured Munda airfield. The Japanese command at Rabaul concluded that Kolombangara, whose garrison already numbered some 10,000–12,000 men, would become the next line of defence, and decided to send another transport there.

Two plans

The Japanese plan was to repeat the three previous successful runs: the same route through Vella Gulf and Blackett Strait, the same timing and, to a large extent, the same ships. The force was commanded by Captain Kaju Sugiura, commander of the 4th Destroyer Division, in the flagship Hagikaze; behind her came Arashi, Kawakaze and Shigure (the last two of the Shiratsuyu class). Between them the ships carried some 950 troops and supplies – this time all four were serving as transports. Shigure’s captain, Commander Tameichi Hara, one of the most experienced Japanese destroyer officers, protested against repeating the same route; in his memoirs he wrote that a fourth run along the same course was asking for disaster. His objections were overruled.

The Americans – forewarned, according to most accounts, by intelligence, and on 6 August also by an aircraft that had sighted the Japanese ships – sent Task Group 31.2 to Vella Gulf: the destroyers Dunlap, Craven and Maury of Destroyer Division 12, and Lang, Sterett and Stack of Commander Roger Simpson’s Destroyer Division 15 (Benham-class ships), under Moosbrugger’s overall command. For the first time in the area, American destroyers were to operate independently, without the cruisers to whose formations they had until then been tied. Moosbrugger used a concept that Commander Arleigh Burke, transferred to another post just before the battle, had been developing in the region for months: one group of destroyers attacks with torpedoes from concealment, without giving itself away with gunfire, while a second, positioned to one side, covers it and stands ready to strike the enemy if he turns. Dunlap, Craven and Maury retained their full torpedo armament, while Simpson’s ships had exchanged some of their tubes for anti-aircraft guns. The Americans had modern centimetric SG radar; none of the Japanese destroyers had radar at the time.

The course of the action

On the evening of 6 August the American destroyers entered Vella Gulf from the south and steamed north along the western shore of Kolombangara, close in to the land. The night was dark and the weather poor. At 11.33 p.m. (other accounts say 11.23 p.m.) the radars detected four ships approaching from the north in line ahead, about 500 metres apart. Moosbrugger led his three destroyers on a course opposite to the Japanese, with the enemy to port. When the range had fallen to a few kilometres, Dunlap, Craven and Maury fired 24 torpedoes in about a minute and immediately turned away to starboard, withdrawing at high speed under cover of the dark mass of the island. The Japanese lookouts, peering into the darkness without the help of radar, spotted the American ships only when the torpedoes were already in the water.

At around 11.46 p.m. the torpedoes reached their targets. According to some tallies based on Japanese records, Hagikaze took two hits, Arashi three and Kawakaze two; the explosions set fuel and ammunition ablaze, and the troops crowded on the decks had nowhere to go. Shigure managed to turn and fire eight torpedoes of her own, which missed; one American torpedo passed through her rudder without exploding. Hara withdrew into the darkness and reloaded his tubes; according to his memoirs he turned back towards the scene of the action, but in the face of the enemy’s superiority he finally broke off and sailed for Rabaul.

Simpson’s ships, meanwhile, had turned to port, crossed the Japanese line of advance and opened fire on the burning wrecks as soon as the first explosions came. Stack finished off Kawakaze with torpedoes, and she capsized and sank. Shortly after midnight Arashi, shelled and hit by another torpedo, went to the bottom, followed by Hagikaze, finished off by gunfire. The whole action lasted less than an hour. The Americans lost no ships, and the only recorded casualty on their side was a sailor who crushed his hand while loading a gun.

The toll

The Japanese lost three modern destroyers and most of the men aboard them. According to tallies based on Japanese data, about 1,200 people died: 685 soldiers being carried to Kolombangara, 178 crew members each from Hagikaze and Arashi, and 169 from Kawakaze. Other studies give slightly different figures, but all of the same order. American ships cruising among the survivors after the battle tried to pick them up, but most of the Japanese refused rescue, in keeping with the view prevailing in their army and navy that captivity was a disgrace. Some 300 survivors, including Captain Sugiura, swam ashore on Vella Lavella; some of them held out there until they were moved back to Kolombangara.

Two of the American destroyer captains, Lieutenant Commanders Clifton Iverson of Dunlap and Frank Gould of Sterett, were awarded the Navy Cross for that night. Two American warships later bore the name of the battle: an escort carrier of 1945 and a guided-missile cruiser in service from 1993 to 2022.

Significance

The Battle of Vella Gulf ended the period in which Japanese destroyers ruled the waters of the Solomons by night. Since the Battle of Tassafaronga in November 1942 the Americans had repeatedly found that their ships, hampered by the cruiser formation and opening fire with their guns as soon as they sighted the enemy, gave away their own positions, while the Japanese fired torpedoes from the darkness. This time the roles were reversed. Several factors combined to bring this about: the destroyers’ independence and a plan that allowed their commander to act on his own initiative, the advantage of radar, the ban on opening fire before the torpedoes struck, and the correction – after many months of complaints – of the most serious defects of American torpedoes, which had previously often failed to explode or run too deep. Japanese routine also played its part: a fourth run along the same route at the same time.

The immediate effect was to block the supply of Kolombangara. The Japanese no longer dared send destroyers there in the old way and switched to much slower barges with far less capacity. For Admiral William Halsey this was one of the arguments for bypassing the heavily garrisoned island rather than attacking it: on 15 August 1943 the Americans landed on weakly defended Vella Lavella, west of Kolombangara, and the Japanese evacuated the cut-off Kolombangara garrison at the turn of September and October. In the months that followed, American destroyers, now operating on the same principles, won several more similar victories, among them the Battle of Cape St. George in November 1943, where Burke’s squadron sank three Japanese destroyers. The tactics tried out in Vella Gulf became the model for American night fighting until the end of the Pacific War.