Savo Island
By the evening of the second day the invasion of Guadalcanal was progressing successfully. More than ten thousand Marines had landed and were in the process of securing their major objectives. Nineteen cargo vessels were beginning to move their stores of food, ammunition, and equipment ashore.
Although taken by surprise, the Japanese responded aggressively to this challenge. Within hours Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa launched a naval counterstrike from Rabaul, six hundred miles away. He personally led a task force of five heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and one destroyer south to destroy the invasion force off the beaches. Unfortunately, this threat was not detected by air search as it approached.
At 1:42 a.m. on August 8, 1942, Mikawa’s fleet passed Savo Island and made contact with the U.S. screening force, deployed about thirty miles north of the invasion beaches. In half an hour the U.S. Navy suffered one of the worse defeats in its history. Surprised and outmatched in night gunnery tactics, the U.S. force lost four heavy cruisers and more than one thousand men. At 2:20 a.m. Mikawa reassembled his largely unscathed but scattered ships, and pondered briefly what to do next. The now undefended transport fleet lay exposed only miles away.
At this moment, Admiral Mikawa made one of the most fateful decisions of the war. Considering his “victory” and the possibility of air attacks after daybreak, he turned north, away from the invasion beaches. The transport fleet and the 1st Marine Division that it sustained were spared. The most perilous moment of the Guadalcanal campaign had passed.
This decision, made in darkness and under the stress of combat, saved America’s first offensive effort in the Pacific. This is another moment when we can see evidence of God’s providential hand moving to change the odds in a desperate struggle.
Daniel answered, “O king, live forever! My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight.”
—Daniel 6:21–22