The night battle off Guadalcanal

On 12 November 1942 the four-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal began – the last great Japanese attempt to regain control of the waters around the island and to recapture Henderson Field. On the night of 12–13 November, in the channel between Guadalcanal and Savo Island, the American cruisers and destroyers of Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan barred the way to the two battleships of Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe, which were to smother the airfield with shells. There followed one of the most chaotic naval engagements of the whole war: the ships of both sides became intermingled in the darkness and fired at one another at ranges of a few kilometres, sometimes a few hundred metres. Both American admirals, Callaghan and Norman Scott, were killed; the Americans lost an anti-aircraft cruiser and four destroyers, and a few hours later a Japanese submarine sank the damaged cruiser Juneau together with the five Sullivan brothers. Abe, however, turned back without shelling the airfield, and his flagship, the battleship Hiei, was finished off by aircraft on 13 November. She was the first Japanese battleship lost in the war.

The fourth attempt

After the defeat of the October land offensive in the Battle for Henderson Field and the tactical victory of their carriers in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the Japanese high command did not give up on Guadalcanal. General Harukichi Hyakutake, commander of the 17th Army, was preparing another offensive for November, this time with the 38th Infantry Division. For that he needed not only men but heavy weapons, ammunition and food – and these could not be brought in by the night runs of destroyers that the Americans called the Tokyo Express. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto therefore allotted the army eleven large transports, which were to carry some 7,000 soldiers with their equipment and supplies from the Shortland Islands. The convoy was escorted by twelve destroyers under Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka.

The slow transports could only reach the island, however, if the aircraft on Henderson Field were put out of action. The plan therefore repeated the pattern that had worked in October, when the battleships Kongō and Haruna destroyed half the aircraft on the airfield. On 9 November Abe’s force left Truk with two fast battleships – the flagship Hiei and her sister Kirishima – the light cruiser Nagara and eleven destroyers. The battleships carried special incendiary fragmentation shells designed for bombarding land targets. On the night of 12–13 November they were to flatten the runways and aircraft, and the next day the transports would unload the troops undisturbed.

Turner’s convoy and Callaghan’s force

American intelligence, largely thanks to reading Japanese radio traffic, knew at the beginning of November that a major operation was in preparation. Admiral William Halsey, commander in the South Pacific since October, was himself reinforcing the island’s garrison. Rear Admiral Richmond Turner was bringing two convoys of reinforcements and supplies to Guadalcanal, which arrived on 11 and 12 November. They were covered by two groups of warships, Callaghan’s and Scott’s. Scott, the victor of the Battle of Cape Esperance, had more experience of night fighting, but Callaghan was senior to him by a few days and took command of the whole. He had previously been chief of staff to Admiral Robert Ghormley and had commanded a cruiser, but had never yet led a force in battle.

On the afternoon of 12 November Japanese torpedo bombers from bases in the northern part of the archipelago came in over the unloading transports. Most were shot down and the ships were unloaded almost without loss, but a burning bomber crashed into the superstructure of Callaghan’s flagship, the heavy cruiser San Francisco, killing several dozen men and destroying the secondary conning station along with some of the fire-control equipment. The same day reconnaissance aircraft spotted Abe’s force approaching from the north. In the evening Turner withdrew the transports and left every battleworthy warship to defend the waters off the island. Callaghan had two heavy cruisers, San Francisco and Portland, the light cruiser Helena, two anti-aircraft cruisers, Atlanta (with Scott aboard) and Juneau, and eight destroyers. It was a force clearly weaker than the Japanese one, which had two battleships in its line.

Callaghan arranged his ships in a single long column: four destroyers in the van, the cruisers in the centre, four destroyers in the rear. He issued no battle plan to his captains. Five ships had the modern SG radar, but none of them was at the head of the column, and Callaghan did not choose one as his flagship. Many historians regard these decisions as the source of the confusion that followed.

The Japanese, too, did not arrive in good order. On the way Abe’s force ran into a violent rainstorm, and a series of course changes broke its formation into several groups. The ships entered the channel not from the north but from the west, past Savo Island, with their decks stacked with bombardment shells rather than armour-piercing ones.

A brawl in the dark

A few minutes after one in the morning on 13 November, the radars of the American ships, Helena’s first, detected the Japanese. The reports, however, reached Callaghan late and in fragments – the radio net was overloaded, and the admiral on San Francisco’s bridge, without a working SG radar, was trying to match radar readings with what he could see through binoculars on a moonless night. He issued one course change after another, probably hoping, as Scott had at Esperance, to cross the Japanese force’s T. The column began to fall apart, and the leading destroyers almost ran into the Japanese ships. Abe, surprised by the enemy’s proximity, hesitated for a moment over whether to turn back and reload his guns with armour-piercing shells, but decided to press on.

At about 1.50 a.m. the Japanese destroyer Akatsuki and the battleship Hiei switched on their searchlights and illuminated Atlanta at a range of roughly three kilometres. Ships on both sides opened fire almost simultaneously. It was then that Callaghan gave his famous order: “Odd ships commence fire to starboard, even ships to port” – although no plan had assigned numbers to the ships and the formation no longer existed. For roughly the next forty minutes a dozen or so American and a dozen or so Japanese ships fought intermingled in a small area, often at ranges at which the battleships’ heavy guns could not be depressed far enough. An officer of the destroyer Monssen later likened it to “a barroom brawl after the lights had been shot out”.

The illuminated Akatsuki drew the fire of several American ships and sank within minutes. Atlanta took dozens of shells and a torpedo that cut her power. Disabled, she drifted into San Francisco’s line of fire, and the heavy cruiser’s shells – in the darkness and confusion – killed Rear Admiral Scott and most of his staff on her bridge. The destroyer Cushing, leading the American column, was shot to pieces by the cruiser Nagara and destroyers. Laffey crossed Hiei’s bow with a few metres to spare and raked her superstructure with gun and machine-gun fire; on the battleship’s bridge Abe was wounded and his chief of staff killed. Moments later Laffey was hit by Hiei’s shells and a torpedo from the destroyer Yukikaze, and blew up. The destroyer Barton was torn in two by two torpedoes from Amatsukaze, commanded by Commander Tameichi Hara, and Monssen, which mistook Japanese star shells for signals from friendly ships and answered them with her own lights, took dozens of hits in two minutes.

Hiei, her searchlights blazing as she steamed through the very centre of the American formation, became the target of almost everyone. According to post-war tallies she was hit by at least 85 shells, including several dozen 203 mm rounds from San Francisco and Portland. Some of them flooded her steering-gear compartment, which sealed the ship’s fate. Hiei and Kirishima, however, managed to concentrate their fire on San Francisco, passing at a range of about two kilometres. One shell hit the bridge, killing Rear Admiral Callaghan, the ship’s captain, Captain Cassin Young, and most of the officers there. The cruiser probably survived only because the first Japanese salvoes were bombardment shells rather than armour-piercing ones. Portland took a torpedo in the stern that jammed her rudder, and Juneau a torpedo from Amatsukaze that broke her keel. On the Japanese side the destroyer Yūdachi was disabled.

At about 2.26 a.m. both sides broke off the action. The senior surviving American officer turned out to be Helena’s captain, Captain Gilbert Hoover, who gathered the surviving ships and withdrew to the east. Only Helena and the destroyer Fletcher were still fit to fight.

Abe turns back

The road to Henderson Field lay open to the Japanese. Kirishima, Nagara and most of the destroyers had only light damage, and the American force had practically ceased to exist as a fighting unit. Abe, however, did what Vice Admiral Gun’ichi Mikawa had done after the Battle of Savo Island: he called off the operation and ordered a withdrawal to the north. Historians cite several possible reasons for the decision – the expenditure of much of the bombardment ammunition, the scattering of the ships, which would have taken a long time to reassemble, the threat of morning air attacks from an airfield that could not now be destroyed, and finally Abe’s own wounds, the deaths of his officers and the loss of communications aboard the wrecked Hiei. At three in the morning Yamamoto postponed the landing by a day and ordered Tanaka’s convoy back to the Shortlands.

The death throes of Hiei

Dawn on 13 November revealed a battlefield strewn with wrecks. Near Savo drifted the damaged Portland, Atlanta and the destroyer Aaron Ward, and on the Japanese side the abandoned Yūdachi, the badly damaged Amatsukaze and Hiei, her rudder jammed, slowly circling a few miles north of the island. Portland, though unable to steer herself, sank the wreck of Yūdachi with gunfire. The tug Bobolink spent the whole day criss-crossing the channel, helping damaged ships and picking up survivors.

Hiei became the target of every aircraft the Americans had within range. She was attacked by Marine Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers from Henderson Field; by dive bombers and torpedo bombers from the carrier Enterprise, which had left Nouméa on 11 November while still under repair after the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands and sent her aircraft to the island’s airfield; and by Army B-17 heavy bombers from Espiritu Santo. Fighters from the carrier Jun’yō and from land bases failed to protect her. Abe transferred with his staff to the destroyer Yukikaze, and an attempt by Kirishima to take the battleship in tow was abandoned for fear of submarines. According to various tallies Hiei was hit during the day by five to eight torpedoes and several bombs. In the evening her crew abandoned ship, and the escorting destroyers, according to most sources, finished her off with torpedoes. The statement often found in chronologies that Hiei was sunk by the airmen from Enterprise simplifies matters: they were only one of several attacking groups, and the ship was ultimately scuttled by her own destroyers. The battleship went down north-west of Savo; according to Japanese figures 188 men died aboard her. She was the first battleship Japan lost in the Second World War. A furious Yamamoto relieved Abe of his command, and soon afterwards the admiral was placed on the retired list.

That same evening Atlanta was also sunk. The anti-aircraft cruiser, in which some 170 men had died, could no longer be saved; after her crew had been taken off she was scuttled with demolition charges off Guadalcanal.

Juneau and the Sullivan brothers

The surviving American ships – San Francisco, Helena, Juneau and two destroyers – left for Espiritu Santo and repairs before noon on 13 November. Juneau, running on one propeller and down by the bow, kept close to San Francisco. A few minutes after eleven the Japanese submarine I-26 (of the B1 type) fired torpedoes at San Francisco. They missed her, but one struck Juneau in the same place that Amatsukaze’s torpedo had hit during the night. Most probably a magazine exploded: the cruiser broke in two and vanished beneath the water within a few dozen seconds.

Captain Hoover, convinced by the force of the explosion that no one could have survived, and fearing further submarine attacks on his damaged and poorly escorted cruisers, did not stop to search for survivors. He merely passed, via a B-17 flying over the force, a report of the sinking with a request for help, which according to American accounts did not reach Halsey’s headquarters in time. Yet more than a hundred of the crew had survived the sinking. Wounded, without water or food, on a few rafts or in nothing but life jackets, they drifted for eight days. They died of wounds, exhaustion, thirst and shark attacks. When a seaplane and the destroyer Ballard finally found them after eight days, and three others had reached San Cristobal Island on their own, only ten in all were still alive. Altogether 687 men of a crew of nearly 700 died. Halsey, angered by Hoover’s decision, relieved him of command of Helena; years later he admitted that he had acted hastily.

Among the dead were the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa – George, Francis, Joseph, Madison and Albert – who after the attack on Pearl Harbor had enlisted in the Navy together on condition that they serve in the same ship. According to survivors’ accounts, at least two of them survived the sinking and died in the water. Their deaths became a symbol of the war’s sacrifices in the United States; the Navy named the destroyer The Sullivans after them, and their story influenced later American regulations shielding from front-line service the sole surviving sons of families that had already lost children in the war. The Navy, moreover, long concealed the full extent of the losses suffered in this battle.

The toll of the first night

In the night battle and over the following day the Americans lost the anti-aircraft cruisers Atlanta and Juneau and the destroyers Barton, Cushing, Laffey and Monssen; San Francisco, Portland, Aaron Ward and Sterett had to go for lengthy repairs. According to the figures usually given, some 1,400 sailors were killed – a number that includes Juneau’s crew – among them both admirals. Callaghan and Scott were the only American admirals killed in a surface engagement during the war; both were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The Japanese lost the battleship Hiei and the destroyers Akatsuki and Yūdachi; their losses in men are usually estimated at 550–800 killed.

In numbers, then, it was a clear Japanese victory, and the Japanese sailors, trained in night fighting and armed with the excellent Type 93 torpedoes, once again showed their superiority in such encounters. The aim of the operation, however, was not achieved: the airfield survived and the convoy had to turn back. The historian Richard B. Frank wrote that for ferocity, close range and confusion the engagement had no equal in the whole war, but that its result was not decisive – the sacrifice of Callaghan and his ships bought Henderson Field one night’s respite and delayed, but did not prevent, the Japanese landing.

Place in the war

The decision came over the next two days. On the afternoon of 13 November Tanaka set out again for Guadalcanal with the eleven transports, and Yamamoto ordered Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō to assemble a new bombardment force around Kirishima. On the night of 13–14 November Mikawa’s cruisers shelled Henderson Field, though without doing much damage, and on 14 November aircraft from the island and from Enterprise sank most of the transports. On the night of 14–15 November Rear Admiral Willis Lee’s American battleships sank Kirishima. Only 2,000–3,000 Japanese soldiers and a small part of the supplies reached the island. It was the last major Japanese attempt to retake Guadalcanal; in December Tokyo decided on evacuation, and in February 1943 it withdrew the remnants of the 17th Army from the island.

The first night of the battle played a key part in this outcome. Had Abe’s battleships destroyed the airfield as they had a month earlier, the aircraft from Henderson Field would not have sunk the transports the next day, and the entire 38th Division with its heavy equipment might have landed on the island. General Alexander Vandegrift, commander of the Marines on Guadalcanal, wrote after the battle that the greatest homage was due to Callaghan, Scott and their men, who “with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds” had driven back the first blow, and that the men on the island lifted “their battered helmets” to them. The battle also exposed the weaknesses of the American fleet – chaotic command, poor use of radar, the lack of a plan – and hastened the changes that in 1943 gave ships combat information centres, which gathered radar reports in one place. Japan, for its part, lost its first battleship and learned that in the waters off Guadalcanal not even capital ships were safe while the American airfield was operating.