Just after midnight on November 15, 1942, off the island of Guadalcanal in the waters American sailors already called Ironbottom Sound, a Japanese battleship steamed toward a rendezvous with fire. The Kirishima, 36,000 tons of steel and pride, carried eight 14-inch guns and a captain who believed he was closing in on a pair of weak American cruisers. He was wrong. Eight thousand four hundred yards to the north, a darker shape had been tracking the Kirishima for nearly 20 minutes.
Radar antennas turned in silent mechanical patience. A voice whispered coordinates in a steel room. Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee Jr. , a man with thick glasses and the calm of a chess professor, gave four quiet words into the darkness: “Open fire.
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Nine 16-inch guns fired as one. The night split open. A wall of white flame erupted from the muzzles of the USS Washington. The first salvo struck the Kirishima’s superstructure like the blow of a god.
Steel tore and crumpled backward. Fires broke out. Men who had been standing moments before simply vanished. To understand how a Japanese battleship ended up dying in that place on that night, one must go back three months to a green, malaria-ridden island in the southern Solomons.
On August 7, 1942, 19,000 U. S. Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. They were the spearhead of America’s first offensive in the Pacific War, sent to seize a half-built airstrip the Japanese had carved from the jungle.
That strip would become Henderson Field, and Henderson Field would become the pivot around which the entire South Pacific turned. The Japanese counterattacked within 48 hours. On the night of August 9, seven cruisers under Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa slipped past Allied lookout posts and attacked the transport protection force off Savo Island. In 32 minutes, four heavy Allied cruisers were burning wrecks.
More than a thousand American and Australian sailors died. The strait between Savo and Guadalcanal earned its name that night: Ironbottom Sound. Guadalcanal itself was a crescent of jungle and volcanic ridges, 90 miles long and 30 miles wide. Before the war, almost no one in America had heard of it.
In the summer of 1942, Japanese engineers began carving an airstrip on its north coast. American reconnaissance spotted the construction, and the strategic implications were immediate. From an airfield on Guadalcanal, Japanese bombers could reach the shipping lanes between the United States and Australia, threatening to cut off the Allied supply line to the entire southwest Pacific. Admiral Ernest King in Washington forced through Operation Watchtower over the objections of nearly every other senior officer in the U.
S. armed forces. The Marines who landed had trained for it only once. Their loading was chaotic.
Within 48 hours of the Savo Island disaster, the American transports withdrew, leaving the Marines ashore with two-thirds of their heavy equipment still in the departing ships’ holds. For the next six weeks, the 1st Marine Division fought its own war with whatever ammunition it had, food it could seize from captured Japanese stocks, and aircraft that arrived at Henderson Field squadron by squadron. They ate captured rice. They fought malaria and dysentery.
They held the perimeter through night attacks and banzai charges in fighting so close that men killed each other with entrenching tools. The “Cactus Air Force,” as the Henderson Field pilots called themselves, became the center of the campaign. They flew captured Japanese fuel and spare parts stripped from wrecks. They slept in the mud beside their planes.
They flew until they collapsed. Every day they remained operational was another day the Japanese navy could not move freely in daylight anywhere within 200 miles of Guadalcanal. That strategic knot drew both naval powers into Ironbottom Sound. Japan could not supply its army by day because Henderson Field controlled the skies.
It could resupply only at night, by fast destroyers. But destroyers could not carry the heavy equipment needed to break the American perimeter. Only transports could carry that equipment, and transports could not survive daylight within range of Henderson Field. The only solution was to destroy Henderson Field.
That was the mission Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe was sent to carry out on the night of November 12. That was the mission Mikawa’s cruisers attempted before dawn on November 14. That was also the mission Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo was now sailing south to accomplish in the early hours of November 15, with the newest battleship the Imperial Navy could risk in those waters. If Henderson Field could be silenced for even one day, Tanaka’s transports could land the 38th Division at Tassafaronga Beach in daylight.
Seven thousand fresh Japanese troops with artillery and supplies would hit the exhausted, thinly stretched Marine perimeter, and a single successful landing might break them. Everything depended on the Kirishima’s guns reaching Henderson Field. Everything depended on stopping her. For months through September, October, and November, the two navies had bled each other in those black waters.
Japanese destroyers ran what the Americans called the Tokyo Express, night runs that delivered troops and supplies before dawn. American cruisers ambushed them off Cape Esperance. Japanese battleships shelled Henderson Field into craters. Both sides lost carriers, cruisers, and men.
Neither could land a knockout blow. By the second week of November 1942, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s patience was running out. He assembled a strike force: two battleships, a screen of cruisers and destroyers, and 11 transports carrying 7,000 men of the 38th Infantry Division. The mission was blunt and desperate: flatten Henderson Field, land the reinforcements, and return Guadalcanal to Japanese hands for good.
The two battleships were the pride of the Kongo class: Hiei and her sister Kirishima. Both had been at Pearl Harbor. Both had hunted Allied ships across the Indian Ocean. Both had fought at Midway.
They were fast, sleek, lethal beasts at 30 knots, able to outrun any true battleship afloat. Yet they had been born in the shipyards of an enemy. The Kongo class was designed in 1911 by a British marine engineer named George Thurston at Vickers works in Barrow-in-Furness, England, using British steel-making methods and British-designed guns. When Japan attacked Allied fleets in 1941 and 1942, it did so largely thanks to the naval engineering of the very empires it was fighting.
The Hiei’s keel was laid in the Mitsubishi yard in Nagasaki in March 1912. She was launched in December 1913. Twenty-nine years later, she was sailing toward the last dawn of her life. On the night of November 12, 1942, Hiei led a force toward Henderson Field under Admiral Abe.
Waiting in the dark was an improvised American task force under Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, with Rear Admiral Norman Scott aboard the light cruiser Atlanta. Neither American admiral knew anything about the other’s ships. Neither had trained for what happened next.
At 1:48 a. m. , in almost total darkness, the two columns collided. American cruisers opened fire on their own ships.
Japanese searchlights flared and were shot out in the same instant. Torpedoes crossed in the black water. The destroyer Akatsuki exploded like a flare. Hiei took more than 80 hits and lost steering.
Admiral Scott was killed on Atlanta’s bridge by friendly fire from San Francisco. Admiral Callaghan was killed 30 minutes later on San Francisco when a 14-inch shell pierced the command bridge. Two American admirals died in a single night, the greatest loss of American admirals in one engagement in U. S.
Navy history. Crippled at dawn, Hiei was attacked by torpedo bombers and dive bombers from Henderson Field, the very airfield she had been sent to destroy. Wave after wave all day. By sunset on November 13, her crew scuttled her.
She was the first Japanese battleship lost in World War II. Yamamoto’s plan was destroyed, but he did not give up. Kirishima remained, and there was still a chance to bombard Henderson Field into silence. At noon on November 13, Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo sortied south from Truk anchorage in his flagship, the heavy cruiser Atago.
He was 56 years old, aristocratic and cautious in the tradition of Togo and Yamamoto. He commanded the Second Fleet, the Combined Fleet’s striking force. Now he sailed on a mission that had already cost a battleship and two American admirals in two days. Beside Atago sailed her sister Takao, the light cruisers Nagara and Sendai, nine destroyers, and the single battleship Yamamoto could spare: Kirishima.
On her bridge stood Captain Sanji Iwabuchi, 49 years old, a stern-faced officer whose devotion to the samurai code bordered on fanaticism. He had commanded Kirishima for less than a year. Iwabuchi believed with religious certainty that his ship’s honor required a legendary bombardment. He was a man considered harsh even by his fellow commanders.
His subordinates would later remember that he often spoke of the ship’s honor, referring to Kirishima’s crew as his sons who had the honor to represent the Emperor. He considered it his personal responsibility that no shame of any kind ever attach to his battleship’s name. He would not surrender. He would not flee.
He would not under any circumstances allow his ship to fall into American hands. Hours later, that determination would determine the way Kirishima ended her life. It also cast a longer shadow, because Iwabuchi did not die that night. When a man like Iwabuchi is denied the death his honor demands, he becomes a man determined that next time will be different.
The next time he faced defeat, it was on land, and the consequences were far worse than losing a battleship. That reckoning waited two and a half years in the future. On the American side, Admiral William Halsey, the new South Pacific commander, made a decision that defied all Navy doctrine. He was sending battleships into Ironbottom Sound.
Battleships were precious, slow to build, expensive to maintain, and terrifyingly vulnerable in the confined, mine- and torpedo-filled waters around Guadalcanal. Admirals had spent the war so far protecting them, hoarding them, refusing to risk them in the Solomons’ godforsaken waters. Halsey did not care. He detached two from Task Force 16: USS Washington and USS South Dakota, with four destroyers: Walke, Benham, Preston, and Gwinn.
He gave them to a man who had never fought a night surface battle in his life: Rear Admiral Willis Augustus Lee Jr. Willis Lee was 54 years old, thin and quiet, with glasses so thick his men joked he could barely see the guns he had spent his life perfecting. Born in a small farming community in Natlee, Kentucky, he entered the Naval Academy at 16. He had commanded destroyers in World War I.
He spent the interwar years patiently, quietly, becoming perhaps the best naval gunner in the world. In the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, Lee won five gold medals, one silver, and one bronze: seven medals in a single Games, a record among American shooters that stood for decades. He was not a swaggering admiral. He gave no speeches.
He did not seek glory. He studied. He read gunnery manuals until midnight. He took apart the new SG surface-search radar sets with his own hands, learning their circuits one by one until he understood their capabilities better than the engineers who designed them.
He believed before almost any other American officer that radar would decide the night war in the Pacific. Whoever sees first kills first. Halsey once said of him: “Ching Lee is one of the few officers I know who understand radar down to the last vacuum tube in it. ”
Lee was something rare: a technician who happened to wear an admiral’s stars.
His fascination with the mathematics of gunnery began at Annapolis, where he graduated in 1908, 106th in a class of 201. His academic record was undistinguished. But his interest in the abstract sciences of shellfire and fire control was extraordinary from the start. Between the wars, while most of his peers rotated through administrative posts and cultivated the political skills needed for promotion, Lee spent his shore tours in the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington.
He worked on specifications for new gun systems. He evaluated foreign designs. He studied the emerging science of radio direction finding, and when they appeared, early primitive radar sets. By all accounts he was an unusually quiet man.
He rarely raised his voice. He did not drink heavily. He did not swear. He did not seek the wardroom banter that socialized the fleet.
When he wanted to think, he sat in silence with a gunnery table book open before him, calculating ballistic corrections in his head for his own amusement. The crews respected him. They did not always know how to interpret him. In the weeks before the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, junior officers on the Washington noticed the admiral roaming the combat information center for hours, watching the SG radar operators at their screens, occasionally asking a question in his quiet Kentucky drawl.
Most of the time he just watched. He was learning his instruments. He was learning how to understand his men. He was practicing in the quiet of his mind the sequence of decisions that would be required when the shooting started.
On the night of November 14, 1942, when the shooting did start, Willis Lee did not need to hesitate. He had already made every decision a thousand times in the darkness of his mind. That is why he could stand on Washington’s bridge watching a Japanese destroyer force withdraw behind a smoke screen and simply say in his usual voice that the SG radar would keep tracking them. That is why he could watch the destroyers ahead of him being torn apart by Long Lance torpedoes and order his remaining destroyers to withdraw without a single moment of visible emotion.
That is why he could watch South Dakota stagger under 27 hits while keeping Washington on her original course, dark and silent, waiting for the range to close on the battleship in the middle of Kondo’s formation. Everything he had done for 30 years had prepared him for the next seven minutes. He was ready. On Washington, Captain Glenn B.
Davis ordered full speed. On South Dakota, Captain Thomas Gatch prepared his crew for the ordeal ahead. The two ships had never worked together. The four destroyers had been yanked from different escort duties, chosen not for training or compatibility but simply because they had fuel in their tanks.
Task Force 64 was an improvisation thrown against the best night-fighting navy on earth. And its commander, with his thick glasses on Washington’s bridge, said almost nothing. Sunset, November 14. The two forces approached each other in the dark South Pacific.
Kondo from the north believed he faced at most a light American force. Lee from the south knew he faced the battleship Kirishima, because his radar operators had been watching the sky for hours, and because coastwatchers on the islands had reported Kondo’s force forming. Kondo sailed to bombard. Lee sailed to intercept.
Between them in the black water off Savo Island waited the ghosts of Astoria, Quincy, and Vincennes, of Atlanta and the two American admirals killed in a single night, of a burning Hiei somewhere beneath the waves. That graveyard was about to swallow a battleship. The only question was which one. The morning of November 14 began gray and hot over the Solomon Sea.
The men on the Japanese heavy cruisers sailing north away from Guadalcanal heard the rising drone of American aircraft. Vice Admiral Mikawa had led a pre-dawn bombardment of Henderson Field. His cruisers had spent 35 minutes firing 8-inch shells at the airfield’s perimeter. When they turned to leave in the gray twilight, they believed the field had been silenced.
They were wrong about that too. Around 8 a. m. , Henderson Field launched what it had left.
Dive bombers, Avengers, and Wildcat escorts found Mikawa’s retiring column. A 1,000-pound bomb hit Kinugasa amidships, exploding her boilers. She lost power and steering, settled by the stern with 511 of her crew still aboard, and capsized shortly after 10 a. m.
A burning American plane crashed directly into Maya’s superstructure, killing 37 men. Chokai took near misses that opened holes in her hull. The battered Japanese force limped north, wounded and bleeding oil into the sea. Those were just the escorts.
Somewhere south, in open water, sailed the real prize: Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka, 50 years old, the best destroyer man in the Imperial Japanese Navy, the mastermind of the Tokyo Express. He led the most important convoy of the entire Guadalcanal campaign: 11 transports loaded with 7,000 men of the 38th Infantry Division, the reinforcements Yamamoto believed could still turn the tide. November 14 became a slow, 12-hour execution for Tanaka. American aircraft came in wave after wave from Henderson Field and from the Enterprise, still damaged from Santa Cruz but launching everything she had.
One transport disappeared entirely in a single strike. Another burned from bow to stern. Others capsized. By dusk, six of Tanaka’s eleven transports were on the bottom of the Solomon Sea or burning and sinking.
His destroyers pulled thousands of drowning soldiers from the water and transferred them to surviving ships. Tanaka pressed on with his four remaining ships. He had orders and he would obey them. Far to the north, on Atago’s bridge, Kondo received the reports.
Hiei was lost. Six transports destroyed. Daylight was now American in the eastern approach. But night belonged to the Imperial Navy.
It had always belonged to the Imperial Navy. Their optics were the best in the world. Their Type 93 torpedoes, the Long Lance, 24 inches in diameter, oxygen-powered, with a lethal range of 22 miles, were a technological marvel the Americans did not even know existed until they were hit by them. Their cruiser crews trained for night combat with a religious devotion no Western navy could match.
Kondo intended to use the night like a swordsman uses his blade. At sunset he split his forces. The light cruiser Sendai under Rear Admiral Shintaro Hashimoto turned south along the eastern side of Savo with three destroyers, seeking any American vanguard. To the west, the light cruiser Nagara pushed south with six destroyers.
In the center, the heart of the striking force, Kondo himself turned south with Atago, her sister Takao, and the great dark bulk that gave the operation its purpose: Kirishima. On Kirishima’s bridge, Captain Iwabuchi felt the deck vibration under his feet. Thirty-six thousand tons of steel, eight 14-inch guns loaded with bombardment ammunition, ready to turn Henderson Field into a graveyard of steel and coral. He believed with absolute certainty that within hours those guns would speak.
He was thinking of glory. He was not thinking of radar. Two hundred miles south, Admiral Willis Lee was thinking of nothing else. Task Force 64 had sailed north all day along the western edge of the Solomons, clinging to open ocean away from Japanese air patrols.
Two battleships led the column: Washington first, Lee’s flag flying from her signal mast, South Dakota second with Captain Gatch on her bridge. Ahead in a defensive line steamed the four destroyers: Walke, Benham, Preston, and Gwinn. None had ever fought together. They were selected almost at random.
Lee did not complain. He just got on with the job. For hours he studied his radar plot. He rehearsed in his quiet mind the gunnery solutions he might need.
He spoke to Captain Davis in short, low sentences. He knew the U. S. Navy had never fought a battleship-to-battleship engagement in the Pacific War.
He knew that if the coastwatchers were right, he was about to fight one. Around 10 p. m. , Task Force 64 crossed into waters west of Savo Island.
Lee turned his column east, sliding along the northern edge of Ironbottom Sound. His two battleships and four destroyers were now inside a 12-mile-wide kill zone, ringed by dark islands on every side. At 10:10, the lookouts on Sendai spotted them. The Japanese light cruiser was patrolling the northeastern approaches.
Her optics picked up the American column in the dark at nearly 14,000 yards. Hashimoto raised his binoculars, counted the shapes, and identified them in a clear, confident voice: “Two cruisers, four destroyers. Two cruisers. ”
It was one of the most consequential misidentifications in the entire Pacific War.
The two lead ships of Lee’s column were not cruisers. They were USS Washington and USS South Dakota: 35,000-ton battleships, each carrying nine 16-inch guns, each displacing more than three times the weight of any American heavy cruiser. In daylight, at an exercise, no observer in the world would have mistaken them. But it was not daylight.
It was moonless darkness at 12,000 yards. The report reached Kondo on Atago’s bridge. He read it, believed it, and made his decision. He would continue the bombardment.
If the American escort was just two cruisers and four destroyers, his cruisers and destroyers could handle them. Kirishima would head south toward Henderson Field exactly as planned. In that moment, Vice Admiral Kondo made the error that would cost him a battleship. He was sailing toward two of the most powerful warships in the U.
S. Navy, and he did not know it. At 10:16 p. m.
, in the combat information room aboard Washington, the surface-search radar picked up the Sendai group at nine miles. Willis Lee read the screen as a preacher reads scripture. At 10:17, Washington opened fire. Her nine 16-inch guns thundered into the night.
Star shells burst in brilliant white light over the water, exposing Sendai and her destroyers for a long second. The shells fell short. Water columns rose 40 feet beside the Japanese ships. One hit.
Hashimoto ordered a smoke screen and reversed course. Within a minute, the Sendai group vanished behind billowing gray-black smoke. Radar does not care about smoke. Washington’s radar held the Japanese ships in track throughout.
The battle had begun. Kondo still believed he faced light cruisers. Willis Lee knew he did not. And in the darkness west of Savo, one small Japanese destroyer was about to change everything.
Her name was Ayanami. She was a 2,000-ton destroyer of the Fubuki class, carrying nine torpedo tubes loaded with Long Lance torpedoes. Hashimoto had detached her earlier to scout the western channel while Sendai swept the east. She was the only Japanese ship near the western entrance to Savo, alone against four American destroyers and two battleships, and she was about to fight the battle of her life.
Around 11:30, an Ayanami lookout spotted the American column coming through the west side of Savo. She turned, trained her tubes, and fired eight Long Lance torpedoes in a fan pattern aimed at the head of the American formation. Then she opened fire with everything she had. The American destroyers replied.
Walke and Preston, at the head of the column, spotted the muzzle flashes and turned toward them. Five-inch guns began firing. In the darkness, three ships traded shells at ranges under 6,000 yards. At about 11:32, one of Ayanami’s torpedoes hit Walke near her number two magazine.
The explosion ignited the powder rooms. The entire forward section of the destroyer disintegrated in a blue-white flash that lit the entire strait. Walke capsized and sank. Her depth charges exploded as she went down, killing men swimming for their lives.
Eighty American sailors died with her. Less than a minute later, Preston took two 5-inch hits directly in her after engine room. Her boilers ruptured. Her aft funnel collapsed onto her deck in a shower of sparks.
Fire spread rapidly through the engineering sections. She began to list heavily to starboard. At 11:36, her captain ordered abandon ship. Preston rolled onto her side and vanished, sinking stern-first.
One hundred seventeen Americans died with her. On Benham, next in line, the crew watched their sister ship sink before their eyes. Seconds later, a torpedo hit Benham’s bow. The explosion ripped open the forward deck.
Benham did not sink, but it was finished as a fighting unit. She staggered south with damaged engines, her bow shattered, water pouring into her forward compartments. The fourth destroyer, Gwinn, took a 5-inch hit that damaged her torpedo tubes. Her torpedoes slid uselessly into the sea, unable to be launched.
In less than 10 minutes, one Japanese destroyer had crippled or sunk all four American destroyers in Willis Lee’s formation. It was one of the most extraordinary single actions by a single warship in the entire Pacific War. But Ayanami had spent herself doing it. Her muzzle flashes revealed her position.
Washington’s radar picked her up, and now Willis Lee’s battleship turned her 16-inch guns on the small destroyer. At about 11:38, Washington fired. Ayanami was hammered by 16-inch shells and by the secondary 5-inch battery. Her superstructure disintegrated.
Her forward magazines caught fire. She stopped dead in the water, burning, her surviving crew fighting fires they could not control. She burned for hours. Finally, before dawn, her own escorts scuttled her.
She had done her job. The American destroyer screen was destroyed. Walke was lost. Preston was lost.
Benham was crippled. Gwinn was disarmed. Willis Lee’s battleships were now alone in the darkness with no screen, sailing into the heart of Kondo’s ambush. At 11:48, Lee ordered both Benham and Gwinn to withdraw.
It was the last sound tactical decision made on the American side for the next quarter hour. Because to understand what happened next, one must go back 15 minutes to the moment the lights went out on the bridge of USS South Dakota. It was not enemy fire. It was not a torpedo.
It was a human error in a deep compartment inside the battleship, committed by a man doing exactly what he had been trained to do. The ship’s engineering officers had been fighting a losing battle all evening with electrical faults in the newly commissioned battleship. South Dakota had been in service no more than eight months. Her electrical installations, rushed in the frantic pace of wartime fitting-out, were temperamental.
They had ordered the tie-breakers between electrical bus sections closed and locked. It was a violation of standard practice, intended to prevent power loss section by section during combat. Instead, it meant that any fault anywhere in the electrical system would spread through the entire ship rather than being isolated. At 11:33, amid the exchange of fire, a single fault occurred and triggered a cascade.
Every breaker in the ship tripped in sequence. South Dakota went dark. Every light, every radar, every fire control director, every radio, main battery director, secondary directors, SG surface-search radar, SC air-search radar, fire control plotting rooms: all went out in a single instant. For six minutes in the middle of a night battle in the heart of Ironbottom Sound, the second-newest battleship in the U.
S. Navy was blind, deaf, and mute. Captain Gatch did not panic. He gave the orders any battleship captain might give: restore power, restore fire control, restore communications.
The six minutes could not be restored. When power came back around 11:39, the radar picture was fragmented. The gunnery plot was lost. South Dakota was sailing, in her captain’s own later words, in a fog of war from which she never fully emerged that night.
Ahead of her in the water were the burning wrecks of Walke and Preston. Doctrine and Lee’s explicit orders required South Dakota to turn to port and pass safely south of the burning destroyers. Gatch, on an incomplete picture, turned to starboard. It was the second fatal error of the night on the American side.
South Dakota now sailed between the burning destroyers and the Japanese ships to the north. The fires of Walke and Preston lit the battleship from behind. Her 35,000-ton silhouette stood out against the flames like a target on a rifle range. At that moment, less than five miles north, the searchlights of the heavy cruiser Atago snapped on.
Kondo had found her. He saw one lone American battleship illuminated by the glow of burning wreckage, no escorts, no protection, no sign of any second warship. He believed South Dakota was the only battleship in the American force. He turned every gun he had on her.
Atago opened fire. Takao opened fire. The sister destroyers of Ayanami opened fire. Long Lance torpedoes streaked from Asagumo’s and Teruzuki’s tubes.
In four minutes, South Dakota was hit 27 times: 14-inch shells from Kirishima, 8-inch shells from Atago and Takao, 5-inch shells from the destroyers. Some penetrated her armor. Some exploded in her superstructure. Her radars were torn apart.
Her radio antennas were cut. Fires broke out along her upper decks. Captain Gatch himself was hit in the neck by shrapnel that nearly killed him. Thirty-nine of his men were killed and 59 wounded.
South Dakota staggered, blind and bleeding, under the blows. But every torpedo missed. Every Long Lance fired with the Imperial Navy’s terrifying precision passed her: some ahead, some behind, some beneath her hull without exploding. In one of the greatest unexplainable miracles of the Pacific War, no Type 93 torpedo hit the American battleship.
And while Kondo’s entire striking force fired on South Dakota, no one ever saw Washington. Lee’s flagship, dark and silent and undetected, held her course three miles to the north. Her SG radar was working at full capacity. Her main battery directors were locked on target.
The fire control plot showed one large target in the middle of Kondo’s formation, larger than any other, exactly where a battleship should be. Ching Lee, with his thick glasses on the bridge of USS Washington, watched the plot. He waited until he was certain. He waited until the range was right.
Then, at exactly 12:04 a. m. on November 15, 1942, he gave the order. Nine 16-inch guns fired as one.
The night over Ironbottom Sound turned brilliant white. A wall of flame erupted from the muzzles of the Washington, so bright that the crew of the destroyer Gwinn, miles to the south, said later they thought a magazine had exploded. Armor-piercing shells weighing 2,700 pounds screamed across the dark water at 8,400 yards, so close, so precisely calculated, that the first salvo hit the Kirishima dead-on. A Japanese battleship, and no one saw it coming.
Every eye on Kirishima’s bridge was on South Dakota, blazing in the south. Captain Iwabuchi had ordered his 14-inch guns loaded with bombardment ammunition: thin-walled high-explosive shells designed to destroy airfields, not to penetrate warship armor. His main battery was trained on what he believed was the only threat in the water. He was wrong about that, as he was wrong about so much that night.
The first salvo from Washington tore Kirishima’s superstructure like a scythe through wheat. Two 16-inch shells hit her forward. One exploded near the base of her towering pagoda mast. Another exploded deep in her hull below the waterline.
Fires broke out along her upper decks. The pagoda itself, that distinctive towering lattice of platforms and rangefinders that marked every Japanese battleship, began to burn from within. The second salvo was already in the air. Over the next seven minutes, Washington fired without stopping: 75 16-inch shells and 107 5-inch shells, all directed at Kirishima from ranges between 8,400 and 5,800 yards, point-blank for battleship guns.
At least nine 16-inch shells hit their target. Possibly 20 to 40 5-inch shells hit as well. Kirishima broke. Her steering was destroyed within the first two minutes.
The rudder jammed in a hard turn to starboard. She began circling helplessly in the dark water, unable to respond to her helm, unable to flee, unable to hide. Two of her four main turrets were out of action. Her secondary batteries were smashed.
Her forward magazines were flooded to prevent explosion. Fires raged from bow to stern. The pagoda collapsed on itself, destroying the fire control stations and half the bridge crew with it. Captain Iwabuchi survived, but the ship around him was dying.
He realized then what had hit him. He could now see the gun flashes in the north, two miles away, in an area he had believed empty. A second American battleship, one no one on the Japanese side knew existed. The truth was finally out: Hashimoto’s misidentification hours before, Kondo’s decision to press south, the searchlights on South Dakota that had simultaneously hidden Washington in equal darkness, every choice had led to the same result.
On Washington, Captain Davis ordered cease-fire at 12:07 a. m. Kirishima had stopped replying. She was no longer a target.
She was burning wreckage, drifting in a slow, involuntary rotation, her upper decks glowing with the light of her own fires. Willis Lee ordered a course change to the northwest. He did not celebrate. He did not send any signal.
He simply moved his flagship out of the path of the torpedoes he knew were coming. Kondo, finally realizing what had happened, ordered every ship in his formation to fire torpedoes at Washington. The heavy cruisers Atago and Takao launched their Long Lances. The destroyers Oshio and Kageru added theirs.
Dozens of Type 93 torpedoes streaked through the darkness toward the American battleship. Willis Lee, watching his radar, ordered a radical evasive maneuver. Washington heeled over, her wake curving in the water. The torpedoes ran in the tracks their firing crews had calculated, but Washington was no longer in those tracks.
Every one missed. At 12:25 a. m. , Kondo had seen enough.
His flagship was damaged. Takao was damaged. Kirishima was a column of fire. His defensive formation was scattered.
And the American battleship he had not known existed was disappearing into the darkness to the northwest without a scratch. Kondo cancelled the bombardment. He ordered his remaining ships to withdraw. The great attack that was supposed to flatten Henderson Field, save Guadalcanal, and avenge the disaster of two nights before had ended in total failure.
Behind him, Kirishima turned in her burning water. Iwabuchi’s damage control teams worked through the night, flooding magazines, dragging hoses through wrecked compartments, pulling the wounded from rooms filled with smoke and steam. The list increased. Water rose in her lower decks.
Her rudder could not be freed. For nearly three hours, Kirishima staggered, rolled, and burned. Around 3 a. m.
on November 15, Iwabuchi accepted the truth. His ship could not be saved. The engineering officer reported the port engine room was flooding and could not be pumped out. The list exceeded 12 degrees.
The fires forward could no longer be reached. If the flames reached the forward magazines, everything aboard would end in a single violent flash. Iwabuchi did not intend to let the Americans take his ship. He ordered his surviving crew to abandon her.
Then he gave the order reserved in Imperial Navy tradition for the captain who can no longer fight: open the Kingston valves. The Kingston valves were large sea cocks in the bottom of the hull, designed to control flooding. Opened deliberately, they allowed seawater to enter on the ship’s own terms rather than the enemy’s. The engineers of Kirishima went down into the burning, sinking depths of their battleship and opened the valves.
At about 3:25 on the morning of November 15, 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Kirishima slowly turned onto her side in the black water northwest of Savo Island. She rolled completely upside down. Her keel rose briefly toward the stars. Then she slid bow-first into the deep water and disappeared.
Two hundred twelve of her crew went down with her. Captain Iwabuchi survived, taken off by the destroyer Asagumo with most of his surviving officers and men. He would command again. His course from that night eventually led him to a shore command in Manila in February 1945, where his scorched-earth policies contributed to the destruction of the city and the deaths of approximately 100,000 Filipino civilians trapped in the fighting, before he killed himself inside a burning fortress with American troops surrounding it.
That is another story. On that night, in those waters, he had lost his ship. In the morning, over the burning water northwest of Savo, another quieter drama unfolded, largely forgotten in the history books. At dawn, small groups of American sailors from Walke and Preston were still clinging to floating wreckage in the strait.
They had been in the water for more than five hours. The tropical sea was warm enough that hypothermia was not an immediate threat, but sharks were. Ironbottom Sound was already known for its sharks, attracted by the increasing quantities of blood and remains poured into the strait month after month. The destroyer Meade, arriving at dawn from Tulagi, moved slowly through the wreckage, picking exhausted men from the sea.
By the end of the day, more than 300 American sailors from Walke and Preston had been rescued alive. Many were wounded, many burned, all unable to speak from exhaustion. They had survived what most naval historians would later call the fiercest surface battle of the Pacific War. At the same time, in the same waters, Japanese destroyers were picking up their own men.
Kirishima had sunk slowly enough that most of her crew had escaped before she rolled. The destroyers Asagumo, Teruzuki, and Samidare picked up hundreds of survivors, including Iwabuchi and his men. In the early hours of November 15, American and Japanese rescue boats passed within a few miles of each other, collecting the survivors of the same battle in complete tactical silence. Neither side interfered with the other’s rescue operations, one of the small unofficial gestures of humanity that emerged from the Pacific War in the hours before dawn brought the aircraft back to resume killing.
By mid-afternoon the rescue operations were over. The wreckage of a battle that had involved a battleship, two cruisers, and four destroyers on one side, and a battleship, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, and nine destroyers on the other, drifted slowly out of Ironbottom Sound with the tide. Fuel oil covered the surface for miles. Life jackets, wooden splinters, and uniform caps of men who had not lived long enough to swim floated among it.
Kirishima was already at a depth of nearly 4,000 feet. She would have to wait 50 years to be found. Ayanami, still burning from Washington’s fire from earlier in the night, was scuttled by her sister ships before dawn. The small destroyer that had almost single-handedly crippled Willis Lee’s fleet followed Kirishima to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound.
The dawn of November 15, 1942 revealed the price. The U. S. Navy had lost three destroyers: Walke, Preston, and Benham (scuttled the next day by Gwinn when it became clear her damaged hull would not get her to Espiritu Santo).
Two hundred forty-two American sailors died. The Imperial Japanese Navy lost one battleship and one destroyer. Two hundred forty-nine Japanese sailors died. The meaning of those numbers went far deeper than arithmetic.
To the north, in open sea, Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka still had four transports and orders that could not be withdrawn. He drove his surviving ships toward Tassafaronga Beach at dawn, deliberately beaching them so the troops aboard could disembark directly into the surf. Dawn brought Henderson Field. The pilots who took off that morning went to work.
Hours of sortie after sortie, bombing and strafing the beached transports, setting the ships on fire, killing the soldiers wading ashore, destroying the cargo, supplies, ammunition, and artillery the entire operation had been created to deliver. Of the 7,000 men of the 38th Infantry Division who had left Shortlands two days before, only about 2,000 made it to shore alive. The rest were dead in the water or scattered along the coast. Almost none of the cargo made it to shore at all.
The reinforcement of Guadalcanal had failed utterly. In the weeks and months that followed, the strategic verdict of that November night became an unchangeable reality. The Combined Fleet would not risk more battleships in the Slot. The Tokyo Express continued for a time, but it could carry only men, not the tons of supplies the island needed.
Malaria, starvation, and American artillery began to finish what the battles had not. On the last day of December 1942, at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, an Imperial conference formally approved what the Navy had already accepted: Guadalcanal would be evacuated between February 1 and 7, 1943. Japanese destroyers made three night runs to the island and evacuated the survivors: 13,000 gaunt, hollow-eyed men pulled from the jungle that had swallowed a Japanese army. The rest, more than 20,000, were dead.
Most had not been killed in combat. Most had starved. The Battle of Guadalcanal was over, and with it Japan’s last real hope of turning the strategic tide in the Pacific. The men who fought that night lived very different fates.
Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo was quietly shuffled into less important commands in the following years. He survived the war. He died in Tokyo in 1953, aged 66. Captain Thomas Gatch of South Dakota recovered from his wounds, commanded the ship in later operations, and finished his career as a rear admiral.
Captain Glenn Davis of Washington received the Navy Cross for his conduct that night and rose to vice admiral before his death in 1963. Willis Augustus Lee Jr. , the man who won the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal with a single seven-minute artillery strike, continued to command battleship squadrons through the rest of the war. He led Battleship Squadron 2 through Leyte Gulf, the Philippines, and the Marianas.
He never sought fame. He gave no interviews. He wore the same thick glasses and spoke with the same quiet voice. In August 1945, only weeks after the Japanese surrender, Willis Lee died of a heart attack aboard a small boat off Casco Bay, Maine.
He was 57. He never saw the victory parades. He never wrote his memoirs. To the American public his name was almost unknown then, and it is almost unknown today.
But everyone who studies the naval war in the Pacific knows what Ching Lee did. On the night of November 14–15, 1942, he ended the Japanese hope of retaking Guadalcanal. In August 1992, an expedition led by oceanographer Robert Ballard, the man who had found Titanic seven years before, surveyed the bottom of Ironbottom Sound with sonar and cameras. Dozens of wrecks were located.
Ballard found Kirishima. She lay upside down on the seafloor, her keel pointing toward the surface. Her hull was largely intact, but she had rolled completely over before reaching the bottom. Her great pagoda mast had collapsed beneath her.
The cameras moved along her hull, briefly illuminating the plates of a battleship designed in England, built in Nagasaki, sailed at Pearl Harbor, and killed off Guadalcanal. There is a name for the strait where Kirishima lies. American sailors who fought there gave it in bitter, weary mockery in the long autumn of 1942, when it seemed every warship sent into those waters ended up in the depths: Ironbottom Sound. Nearly 50 warships lie there: American cruisers, Japanese battleships, destroyers, transports, submarines, Australian ships.
More than 20,000 men are buried there, sailors of both empires sleeping side by side in a cemetery no one planned to build. On the night of November 14–15, 1942, in seven minutes of gunfire, Willis Augustus Lee ended the Japanese hope of retaking Guadalcanal. He did it with radar, with patience, and with the quiet skill of a man who had spent his entire life learning how to aim a gun. He did it while a battleship burned south of his position and another circled helplessly to the east.
He did it while a thousand men were dying in the water around him. And when it was over, he simply turned his ship to the northwest and sailed away. The Pacific War lasted two years and nine months after Kirishima sank. There would come Tarawa, the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the fire raids on Tokyo, and the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But the moment the tide of war truly turned in the South Pacific, the moment the Imperial Japanese Navy had its last real chance to reverse the course of the war and missed it, came in those seven minutes when the guns of the Washington thundered over Ironbottom Sound. Kirishima rolled slowly onto her side and slid into the darkness. She still lies there.
She always will.