The battleship duel off Guadalcanal

On 14 and 15 November 1942 the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal was decided. During the day on 14 November American aircraft from Henderson Field, from the carrier Enterprise and from Espiritu Santo attacked a convoy of eleven Japanese transports carrying reinforcements to the island and sank seven of them. On the night of 14–15 November, in the channel by Savo Island, there took place one of only two battleship duels in the entire Pacific war. The modern American battleship Washington of Rear Admiral Willis Lee, directing her fire by radar, turned the Japanese battleship Kirishima into a blazing wreck within minutes; Kirishima capsized and sank at 3.25 a.m. on 15 November. The Japanese beached the last four transports on the island, where aircraft and artillery destroyed them in the morning. A mere 2,000–3,000 soldiers got ashore on Guadalcanal. Japan, although in those four days it sank more warships than it lost, had lost the struggle for control of the waters around the island and never again attempted to retake it.

After the first night

The night battle of 12–13 November had cost the Americans two admirals and several ships, but it forced Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe to withdraw before his battleships could shell Henderson Field. The damaged Hiei sank on 13 November after a day of air attacks, including by aircraft from Enterprise, which the Japanese had believed knocked out of action after the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, however, did not abandon the operation – he merely postponed it by a day. On the afternoon of 13 November Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka once again led out of the Shortland Islands eleven transports carrying some 7,000 men of the 38th Infantry Division with their heavy weapons, ammunition and food, escorted by twelve destroyers. The task Abe had failed to carry out was taken over by two other forces. The cruisers of Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa’s 8th Fleet were to shell the airfield that same night, while Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō, commander of the 2nd Fleet and Yamamoto’s deputy, was ordered to assemble around the surviving Kirishima a new force to strike on the night of 14–15 November.

On the night of 13–14 November the American cruisers and destroyers that had survived the first battle were already heading south for repairs, and new ones had not yet arrived. Mikawa therefore entered the channel unopposed. Two heavy cruisers, Suzuya and Maya, shelled Henderson Field for about half an hour while the rest of the force covered them near Savo. The bombardment, however, was much weaker than the October bombardment by battleships: according to American figures it destroyed or damaged a dozen or so aircraft but did not put the airfield out of action. At about 2.30 a.m. the Japanese withdrew towards Rabaul.

The day of the aircraft

On the morning of 14 November the Americans put everything they had into the air. Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and Marine and Navy torpedo bombers took off from Henderson Field, further strike groups flew from Enterprise, cruising some 370 kilometres south of the island, and B-17 heavy bombers came from Espiritu Santo. Mikawa’s retiring force was spotted first. The aircraft sank the heavy cruiser Kinugasa, which took more than 500 men down with her – the third and last Japanese heavy cruiser lost in the fighting for the Solomon Islands – and damaged Maya, Chōkai, the light cruiser Isuzu and the destroyer Michishio.

The main target, however, was closer. Tanaka’s convoy was steaming south-east down the channel between the chains of the Solomon Islands that the Americans called “the Slot”, without a carrier of its own and covered only by a handful of fighters from land bases and from the carrier Jun’yō. From late morning until dusk, waves of American aircraft – the airmen from Henderson Field took off, bombed, landed, refuelled and returned, often several times – broke through the cover again and again and attacked the slow, heavily laden ships. Tanaka recalled after the war how the bombs fell on the transports one after another while his destroyers, manoeuvring among the burning hulls, picked soldiers out of the water. By evening six transports had sunk, and a seventh, badly damaged, turned back and sank later. The destroyers rescued several thousand men and took them back to the Shortlands; the number of soldiers killed is usually estimated at around 450, though some authors give more. Almost all the weapons, ammunition and food aboard the sunken ships, however, were lost.

Despite this slaughter Tanaka, on orders from above, pressed on with the four surviving transports and four destroyers. After dark, however, he stopped west of Guadalcanal to await the outcome of the clash that was about to take place off Savo.

Lee’s force

Kondō assembled his force near Ontong Java atoll, refuelled out of range of the aircraft on Guadalcanal and on 14 November headed south. He flew his flag in the heavy cruiser Atago; besides her and Kirishima he had the heavy cruiser Takao, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai and nine destroyers; two more joined from Tanaka’s escort during the battle. On the way two American submarines reported his movements, and one of them fired torpedoes at him without success.

Admiral William Halsey had no battleworthy cruisers left near the island. He therefore decided to send into the confined waters between Guadalcanal and Savo two new battleships from Enterprise’s screen, Washington and South Dakota, with four destroyers. This ran counter to pre-war doctrine, which did not envisage using precious capital ships in night fighting in a small stretch of water full of islands and reefs, but Halsey judged that he had no alternative. The force was hastily assembled: the battleships had been operating together for only a few days, and the four destroyers, Walke, Benham, Preston and Gwin, came from four different divisions and had been chosen only because they had the most fuel. Its commander, Lee, was however one of the American fleet’s foremost experts on gunnery and radar.

The night of 14–15 November: the destruction of the destroyers

On the evening of 14 November Lee’s ships entered the channel and began patrolling around Savo: four destroyers in the lead, Washington behind them and South Dakota at the rear. A first-quarter moon gave visibility of several kilometres. Kondō divided his forces. The light cruiser Sendai with two destroyers swept the waters east of Savo, the destroyer Ayanami circled the island to the west, Nagara with four destroyers went ahead of the main body, and Kirishima with the heavy cruisers brought up the rear. At 10.55 p.m. the American battleships’ radars detected the Japanese at a range of about 18 kilometres. Japanese lookouts sighted the enemy at roughly the same time, but Kondō took the American battleships for cruisers.

At 11.17 p.m. Washington and South Dakota opened radar-directed fire on the Sendai group, which, however, slipped out of range unharmed. A few minutes later the American destroyers joined the fight, running into Ayanami and the Nagara group. The Japanese replied with accurate gunfire and spreads of Type 93 torpedoes, and their superiority in night fighting proved crushing. Preston, hit by several of Nagara’s shells, caught fire and sank; Walke lost her bow to a torpedo and went down within minutes; Benham also lost her bow and had to be scuttled the next day; and Gwin took a shell in her engine room. In less than a quarter of an hour Lee had lost his entire screen. The destroyers had nonetheless done their job: they had drawn upon themselves the first blow and the torpedoes that might otherwise have hit the battleships. Washington, passing the sinking ships, set Ayanami on fire with her secondary armament, and life rafts were thrown from her deck to the survivors in the water.

South Dakota under fire

At this point the American force came close to disaster. South Dakota suffered a series of electrical failures – according to post-war findings because a circuit breaker had been locked closed during repairs in breach of safety regulations – and for several minutes the battleship lost her radar, communications and some of her guns. Swinging to starboard to avoid the burning destroyers, she ended up silhouetted against the fires, clearly visible to the Japanese. Kondō, convinced by reports of the sinking of the American destroyers that the way was clear, turned his force towards Guadalcanal. Around midnight Japanese searchlights illuminated South Dakota, and Kirishima, Atago and Takao concentrated their fire on her. The battleship took at least 26–27 hits from shells of various calibres. According to American reports none penetrated her main armour, but the shells wrecked her superstructure, fire-control positions and communications; according to American figures 39 men were killed. All the torpedoes fired at her missed. Lee later described the ship as having been rendered “deaf, dumb, blind and impotent”. Shortly after midnight South Dakota withdrew from the action without informing the admiral.

Washington and Kirishima

The Japanese, busy with South Dakota, did not notice the second battleship. Washington had for some time been tracking a large target by radar, but Lee held his fire because he could not rule out that it was the straying South Dakota – he had lost contact with her, and her position lay in his radar’s blind spot. When the Japanese searchlights and salvoes lit up South Dakota, all doubt vanished. From a range of about 8 kilometres – point-blank for 406 mm guns – Washington opened radar-directed fire on Kirishima. According to various tallies, within a few minutes she hit her with anything from several to at least twenty main-calibre shells and a dozen or more 127 mm rounds. The Japanese battleship, built before the First World War as a battlecruiser, was not designed to withstand such shells. Her main turrets were put out of action, fires broke out, water poured in through holes below the waterline, and with her steering damaged Kirishima began circling helplessly to port.

At about 0.25 a.m. Kondō ordered all ships capable of fighting to destroy the remainder of the American force. Washington drew the pursuit north-west towards the Russell Islands and evaded several spreads of torpedoes fired by Japanese destroyers. At about one o’clock Kondō, judging that the way for the transports was clear, broke off the action and ordered a withdrawal, without attempting to shell Henderson Field. Aboard Kirishima, meanwhile, the fight to save the ship was lost: the fires reached the magazines, which had to be flooded, and the increasing list put the boilers out of action. The captain ordered the ship abandoned. At 3.25 a.m. on 15 November Kirishima capsized and sank north-west of Savo. According to the figures usually cited, 212 men died aboard her, and the destroyers Asagumo, Teruzuki and Samidare picked up more than a thousand survivors. Earlier, at about two o’clock, the wreck of Ayanami had also been scuttled.

The morning of 15 November

Tanaka, convinced that the obstacle had been removed, led the last four transports to Guadalcanal during the night and at about four in the morning on 15 November ran them aground on the beach at Tassafaronga, west of the American perimeter. His destroyers immediately sailed north. From dawn the ships were attacked by aircraft from Henderson Field and shelled by American field artillery, and the destroyer Meade closed the shore and shelled both the wrecks and the supplies stacked on the beach. All four transports burned out. Of the roughly 7,000 soldiers who had sailed from the Shortlands, by most estimates only 2,000–3,000 got ashore, with a small fraction of the ammunition and food.

The toll

In the second night battle the Americans lost the destroyers Preston, Walke and Benham, while South Dakota and Gwin were badly damaged; according to the figures usually given, some 240 American sailors were killed. The Japanese lost Kirishima and Ayanami, and a similar number of men killed. Over the four days of the battle as a whole the United States lost two cruisers and seven destroyers, Japan two battleships, a heavy cruiser, three destroyers and eleven transports. The Americans paid for this with the lives of two admirals and a much larger number of sailors, but this time they achieved their aim. Henderson Field remained in operation throughout, and the Japanese offensive for which the convoy’s reinforcements were intended could no longer take place.

Yamamoto treated Kondō far more leniently than Abe. Kondō, deputy commander of the Combined Fleet and a member of the influential circle of battleship officers, kept his command – unlike Abe, who lost his post for withdrawing on the first night.

Place in the war

The battle was the turning point of the Guadalcanal campaign. After 15 November the Japanese never again managed to run a large convoy to the island. They could deliver food and small numbers of replacements only by night runs of destroyers and submarines, which was not enough even to feed the soldiers already there. The “island of starvation” had begun: in December Japanese units were losing dozens of men a day to hunger, disease and American fire. The Americans, by contrast, could now freely supply and reinforce their troops, and by the end of the year they had brought two fresh divisions to the island. On 12 December the Japanese navy proposed abandoning Guadalcanal; on 31 December, with the Emperor’s consent, Imperial General Headquarters decided on evacuation; and at the beginning of February 1943 destroyers took the remnants of the Japanese forces off the island.

On receiving news of the outcome of the battle, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “It would seem that the turning point in this war has at last been reached.” That same week the Allies landed in North Africa and the British were pursuing Rommel, beaten at El Alamein – the autumn of 1942 became a turning point for the Allies on several fronts at once. The American historian Eric Hammel summed up the battle thus: on 12 November 1942 the Japanese navy had better ships and better tactics, but after 15 November its commanders lost heart, and the navy itself lacked the strategic depth to face the growing American fleet – “the Japanese never got any better, while the American navy, after November 1942, never stopped getting better”.

The duel between Washington and Kirishima showed above all what radar meant in the hands of a commander who understood its capabilities. All autumn the Japanese had won night engagements through training, superb optics and torpedoes – and they demonstrated that superiority once again by destroying the American destroyers within a quarter of an hour. But a single battleship, firing blind under radar direction, destroyed an enemy capital ship before the latter even noticed her. It was one of only two battleship duels in the entire Pacific war – the other was fought in October 1944 in the Surigao Strait. For the next year and a half, until the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the two fleets fought no battle on such a scale, and the initiative in the Pacific passed slowly but irreversibly into American hands.