The Night America Sank 2 Japanese Battleships in 30 Minutes

 It sits on the north coast of Guadal Canal like a loaded gun pointed at every sea lane in the South Pacific. As long as American aircraft operate from it, Japanese ships cannot move through the surrounding waters in daylight. The Tokyo Express, Japanese destroyers racing down the long channel between the Solomon Islands under cover of darkness, dropping supplies, running back before dawn, has become the only way Japan can feed its garrison.

 Every attempt to retake Henderson Field by land has failed. Thousands of Japanese soldiers are dead in the jungle, stopped cold in frontal assaults against marine positions they could not break. A Japanese strategic assessment prepared in October 1942 states the situation without decoration. Success or failure in recapturing Guadal Canal Island and the vital naval battle related to it is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or for us.

Japan chooses a new approach. Two battleships armed with special fragmentation shells will bombard Henderson Field from the sea on the night of November 12th. Destroy the aircraft. Destroy the runway. And in the darkness that follows, 13,500 troops will land unopposed. The plan is sequential and fragile.

 Every step depends on the one before it. If the airfield survives, the troop transports, slow, unarmed, loaded with men, will be slaughtered at dawn. The bombardment must succeed. Everything depends on it. Two battleships are chosen for the mission. Hi and Kirishima. They depart Trrook on November 9th. They are coming.

The waters between Guadal Canal and Tsavo Island have already earned a name. Iron Bottom Sound. The wrecks of warships litter the seafloor. Japanese, American, both. From months of attrition, warfare neither side can afford and neither can stop. The channel is 30 mi long and 15 mi wide, enclosed, dark, and unforgiving.

On a tropical night under overcast that blotss the stars, visibility is close to zero. The water is warm. Sharks patrol it constantly. Into this water on the night of November 12th, Steam’s Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callahan with 13 American ships, two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, eight destroyers.

 His flagship is USS San Francisco, a ship without modern radar. His radar equipped vessels are positioned toward the rear of his column behind the ships they could have guided. Coming toward him are two Japanese battleships and 14 destroyers carrying more than 500 shells designed to reduce Henderson Field to rubble.

 At 1:45 in the morning of November 13th, the two formations collide at less than a mile. No maneuvering room, no warning. The Japanese battleships cannot depress their guns low enough to hit the destroyers, pressing in at point blank range. USS Lafé passes within 20 ft of Higayai’s hole, so close the battleship’s batteries cannot reach her, and rakes Hanai’s bridge with 5-in fire, wounding Admiral Abe and killing his chief of staff.

 One officer who survives the night will describe what follows as a barroom brawl after the lights had been shot out. Ships on both sides fire at anything that moves. The darkness does not discriminate. Also present in the formation, flying his flag aboard the light cruiser Atlanta, is Rear Admiral Norman Scott, the officer who had defeated the Japanese at the Battle of Cape Espiron a month before, the more experienced surface commander in the sound.

 At some point in the melee, a salvo from USS San Francisco strikes Atlanta. Scott is among the dead, almost certainly killed by his own fleet, in his own battle, in his own darkness. Minutes later, a 14-in shell from Hayi strikes a steel girder directly above Rear Admiral Callahan on San Francisco’s bridge.

 Callahan and most of his staff die instantly. Command of 13 ships in a pointblank night battle devolves to individual captains who cannot see each other and cannot reach anyone on the radio with authority over the whole force. Scott and Callahan are the only two American flag officers killed in a surface engagement in the entire war. Both on the same night, both in the same dark water within minutes of each other.

The battle grinds on without them. Ship by ship, gun by gun. By the time it ends, the Americans have lost two cruisers and four destroyers. 1,439 men are dead. Among them, 690 men aboard the light cruiser Juno. Struck by a torpedo from the submarine 26. As the battered American force retires from the sound, Juno goes down in approximately 20 seconds of her crew of 700. 10 survive.

 Among the dead are five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa. Thomas, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert Sullivan. All serving together aboard the same ship, gone together in the same water. The Japanese do not emerge unscathed. Heay struck 30 times or more by large caliber shells is left staggering at reduced speed when dawn comes.

 American aircraft from Henderson Field find her a few miles from Guadal Canal. Repeated attacks through the daylight hours finish her. She becomes the first Japanese battleship sunk in the war. Admiral Yamamoto is reportedly furious. He relieves the commanding admiral of his command and shortly before noon picks up the telephone and calls Vice Admiral Noataka Condo.

Henderson Field is still standing. American aircraft are still flying. The Americans have absorbed the worst possible night and held the strategic line. They lost the battle. They did not lose the war. The day of November 13th passes in a blur of motion. While the wounded from the nights fighting are still being pulled from the sound, aircraft from Henderson Field are hunting the Japanese transport convoy bearing the 38th division toward Guadal Canal.

Seven of 11 transports are sunk during daylight alone. The remaining four press on, but Yamamoto’s second bombardment fleet is already at sea. Condo’s force built around the battleship Kirishima is coming south. In Numea, New Calonia, Admiral William Holy takes stock of what he has.

 His carrier force has been reduced to one ship, USS Enterprise. Still damaged from the Battle of Santa Cruz. His cruiser force has just been destroyed. His destroyer screen is depleted. What remains, the only offensive weight left, are two battleships, USS Washington and USS South Dakota. 40,000 tons of steel a piece, nine 16-in guns each, carrier escorts their whole existence to this point, never committed to a solo night surface action, never operated together as a unit.

 Hy had promised the Marines on Guadal Canal he would give them everything he had. This was everything he had. The orders go out. Washington and South Dakota detach from enterprise and turn north. It is the first time the United States Navy has committed battleships to a night surface action in the Pacific War.

 The man Holy just sent north was born in Natley, Kentucky in 1888. Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee graduated from the Naval Academy in 1908. one of hundreds of officers who passed through Annapapolis in the early years of the century and went to sea in a navy, still learning what it was. Nothing about him announced itself.

 He wore wire rimmed glasses. His uniform was habitually slovenly. He had the look of a quiet academic, a professor between lectures, not a man who commanded battleships. In the summer of 1920, Lee walked into the Olympic shooting events in Antworp and walked out with seven medals, five of them gold.

 He tied for the most medals anyone had ever received at a single games. The record stood for 60 years. His discipline was marksmanship, an individual sport built entirely on stillness, precision, and the capacity to send a projectile exactly where you intended to go under pressure without flinching. He had also during the 1914 Vera crews expedition killed three snipers with a rifle personally.

By 1942, Lee had applied those instincts to battleship gunnery and from there to something more specific. Radar. The SG surface search radar system was new and most flag officers understood it approximately the way they understood equipment installed by someone else for someone else’s purposes. Lee understood it differently.

He had studied it, interrogated it, mastered it. He was by November 1942 the United States Navy’s foremost flag level expert on radar integration. It was said by men who worked alongside him that he knew more about radar than the radar operators. He understood the guns of a battleship as an extension of the law of ballistics.

 The same law that had governed every shot he had ever fired with a rifle or with a 16-in naval gun. The tools changed. The principal did not. He had a dry sense of humor and a cool demeanor. The record does not describe a man capable of panic. Now he was 54 years old, wearing wire rimmed glasses on the flag bridge of the most capable surface combatant in the Pacific Fleet.

 Heading north through a moonless tropical night toward the worst stretch of water in the Solomon Islands. He was about to fight the first battleship duel in history, decided entirely by radar. At 8:48 in the evening of November 14th, a Japanese float plane circles above Iron Bottom Sound. It spots the American formation below.

 Two columns of ships moving north at speed and radios a report to Admiral Condo aboard his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago. Two cruisers and four destroyers. Condo receives the report. He assesses it. His own force includes the battleship Kiroshima. Two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and multiple destroyers. Against two cruisers and four destroyers, his escort force alone is more than sufficient.

 He plans to destroy the American ships with his screening vessels, preserve Kiroshima for the bombardment of Henderson Field, and complete the mission A had failed two nights before. He is confident by every metric available to him, he has every reason to be. The report is correct about the destroyers. USS Walker, Preston, Benham, and Gwyn.

 Four destroyers exactly as described, but the two cruisers are not cruisers. They are Washington and South Dakota. Nine 16-in guns each SG radar that can see through total darkness for 10 miles in any direction. They are the two newest, most capable surface combatants in the American fleet, and Condo has just decided to destroy them with ships that cannot fight them.

 He does not know this. He has no reason to know it. The Americans have never before committed battleships to a solo night service action in the Pacific. The rules have changed tonight, and nobody told Condo. He is walking toward the most decisive engagement of the Guadal Canal campaign, fully confident he is about to win it easily.

 Task Force 64 enters Iron Bottom Sound in the late evening of November 14th. Six ships, Washington, South Dakota, and four destroyers in the van. Total darkness beneath tropical overcast. The volcanic cone of Savo Island looms ahead as a shadow against the slightly less dark sky. The smell of fuel oil and burned metal hangs in the air.

 The residue of two nights of battle. Dark shapes break the surface in places. The wreckage of ships sunk in earlier actions. The men aboard Washington can see them from the deck as they pass. Guadal Canal’s PT boats are already prowling the sound. Lee transmits his identity over the voice radio in plain language, wanting no part of a friendly fire engagement in the dark.

 The transmission is later recalled by those who hear it. This is Ching Chong China Lee. Refer your big boss about Ching Lee. Call off your boys. The PT boats are skeptical and engage anyway, but make no hits and eventually pull back. At 10:30 in the evening, the SG radar aboard Washington resolves two columns of ships to the northnorthwest, 18,000 yds out, making 21 knots coming south.

 The information reaches the bridge. Lee takes a drag from a cigarette, looks over to Captain Glenn Davis and says quietly, “Well, stand by Glenn. Here they come.” Word passes to the gun crews. The standard loading cycle for a 16-in main battery weapon takes 30 seconds. Washington’s crews do it in 15. The three turrets trained to starboard and wait.

 What happens next almost ends the battle before Washington fires a single shot. Condo’s advance units find the American destroyers first. The light cruiser Sendai and her escorts illuminate the van. Japanese destroyers launch their type 93 long lance torpedoes. The most capable naval torpedoes in the world with a range and explosive payload American ordinance cannot match.

 The American destroyer screen takes the full weight of the attack. Walk absorbs a torpedo and multiple shell hits. She explodes and goes down. Preston is sunk. Benham and Gwyn are crippled and fall out of the battle. Four destroyers. The entire screen are gone or broken within minutes. Then South Dakota’s electrical systems fail. Her radar goes dark.

 Her communications go out. She is in an instant a 40,000 ton ship operating blind in the middle of a night battle. Power is restored, but it comes back just in time for Japanese search lights to find her. A targetgo illuminates her at 11:58. Every Japanese ship in range opens fire simultaneously. Three 14-in shells from Kiroshima.

 16 8-in shells from a Targetgo and Taka. 6-in rounds from the light cruisers. 27 hits in total. Fires erupt across South Dakota’s upper decks. Her communications are destroyed. Her gunnery control goes dark. 39 men are dead. She is to every observer in the sound a ship being beaten to pieces.

 On the bridge of a targetgo, Condo watches. The report reaches him. Kiriroshima’s first salvo has struck the enemy ship’s formast. The enemy’s main battery has gone silent. He watches the American battleship burning. He believes the battle is won. His force begins its turn toward Henderson Field. Washington is less than 2 miles away.

She has been there the entire time. No Japanese ship has seen her. No Japanese system has found her because the Japanese fleet has nothing equivalent to the SG radar on Washington’s director tower. Lee is watching the same burning South Dakota. Washington’s radar is tracking every ship in Condo’s fleet simultaneously. Her guns are loaded.

 The range is confirmed. 8,400 yd, less than 5 miles in total darkness. Lee gives the order. At exactly midnight, Washington opens fire. All nine 16-in guns, armor-piercing rounds. Her gunnery officer notes the target as a Congo battleship at a range of 8,400 yd. The shells are designed to penetrate armor plating, drive deep into a hull, and detonate from the inside.

 Kirishima’s armor was designed in 1914. By 1942, shell technology had advanced far beyond what her designers anticipated. Her thin exterior plating does not stop Washington’s rounds. It triggers their fuses, ensuring the shells penetrate and explode where the ship cannot absorb it. The armor meant to protect Kirishima helps to destroy her.

 The Japanese are firing back, but Condo’s bombardment force came to the sound. Loaded with fragmentation shells. Ordinance designed to shred airfield facilities, kill troops in the open, destroy runway surfaces. Against the armor of a battleship, they are the wrong weapon entirely. They tear through South Dakota’s superructure. Fires across her upper decks.

 Her communications destroyed, 40 ft of antenna blown away. South Dakota’s official action report will later conclude that her strength, buoyancy, and stability were not measurably impaired. She looked like a dying ship. She was never in danger of sinking. Washington fires for approximately 7 minutes. Nine 16-in hits on Kiroshima.

Approximately 45 in hits. Her forward turrets are knocked out. A jammed rudder forces her into a slow, helpless circle to port. Water pours through holes below the water line. The attempt to take her under tow fails. At 3:25 in the morning, Karishima rolls over to port and capsizes.

 Before she goes in the final minutes, as the ship heels over and the sea rises, the emperor’s portrait is passed by hand from the dying warship to the destroyer Asagumo, standing alongside in the dark. On every Japanese warship, it is the most sacred object aboard, the last thing to be saved, always. Men pass it across the water. Then Kirishima goes down 7 and a half miles northwest of Tsavo Island, upside down into the dark.

Condo’s force withdraws. Henderson Field is never bombarded. The transports never land. The title of this documentary claims 30 minutes. The truth is more stark. Washington’s guns fired for approximately 7 minutes. Kishima was effectively dead in less than 10. The battle the title calls 30 minutes took seven to decide.

 Dawn comes on November 15th over a sound littered with the wreckage of 5 days of killing. Tanaka’s four remaining transports unable to reach Guadal Canal’s beaches safely run themselves ground near Tacifera. Henderson Fields aircraft find them in the morning light. Shore artillery joins the work. Of the 13,500 troops Japan intended to land, approximately 2,000 reach shore with nothing but the clothes they are wearing.

 No weapons, no supplies. General Alexander Vandergrift, commanding the Marines on Guadal Canal, sends a message to the fleet. He thanks the aircraft. He thanks the ships. Then he writes, “Our greatest homage goes to Callahan Scott and their men who with magnificent courage against seemingly hopeless odds drove back the first hostile attack and paved the way for the success to follow.

 The Japanese Navy never again commits cruisers or battleships to the waters around Guadal Canal. The Tokyo Express continues, destroyers running supplies under cover of darkness. But the ambition is gone. The Supreme effort has failed. In February 1943, Japan evacuates approximately 11,000 surviving troops from Guadal Canal.

 The campaign is over. The first major Allied offensive victory of the Pacific War. Historian Eric Hamill, assessing what those four days in November produced, writes that the Japanese never got better, while after November 1942, the US Navy never stopped getting better. The fork in the road had been reached. Japan had taken the wrong path.

 There was no way back. Willis Lee received the Navy Cross for the action of November 14th and 15th. He was promoted to vice admiral in 1944 and given command of all the Pacific fleet fast battleships, the force he had done more than any single officer to define. He fought at Ewima. He fought at Okinawa.

 He spent the remaining years of the war doing what he had always done, mastering the present rather than defending the doctrine of the past. On August 15th, 1945, Japan surrendered. 10 days later on August 25th in the harbor at Portland, Maine, Vice Admiral Willis A. Lee, Junior suffered a heart attack in a motor launch, fing him out to his flagship.

 He collapsed before he reached the ship. He died in the harbor. He had not yet received word that the war was formally and finally over. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, who commanded Kiroshima through her last minutes, was formerly relieved of command 9 days after the battle.

 He went on to command Japanese forces in Manila in 1945. His refusal to evacuate the city contributed to one of the most destructive urban battles of the war. Over a 100,000 Filipino civilians died in the ruins. Iwabuchi did not survive it either. Admiral Condo, who watched South Dakota burn and turn toward Henderson Field with full confidence, was not reprimanded.

 He remained in command of a major fleet formation at truck. Admiral Abe, who lost Hayi on the first night, was relieved by Yamamoto and forced into retirement. History distributed its consequences with no regard for proportion. USS Washington went on to support the landings at Ewoima and Okinawa. After the war, she was mothballled at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

 She held the record for enemy tonnage sunk among all American warships. She was the only battleship to sink an enemy battleship in a 1:1 surface engagement, a distinction she holds to this day and will never share because that kind of battle was never fought again. She was never preserved as a museum ship. She was scrapped in 1961.

She exists now only in records, action reports, and photographs. There is nothing physical left of her in the world. Karishima still lies on the floor of Ironbottom Sound, 7 and 12 miles northwest of Tsavo Island, upside down in the dark. Silt has crept across her steel across eight decades. She’s a war grave.

 She will likely be there long after the last document describing her has crumbled to dust. The ship that won is gone. The ship that lost remains.