III.

A CRIMSON TIDE

Chester Nimitz had had a bellyful. There were the day-to-day frustrations of managing war across the far-flung Pacific and the pressures of finding ships and planes to sustain his line commanders. His Washington masters demanded answers Nimitz did not have, and forced him to defend subordinates in whom he had his own doubts. Both King and Nimitz had lost faith in Frank Fletcher as Pacific carrier chief. King was very critical of Admiral Ghormley in the South Pacific. Early in September the COMINCH and CINCPAC held another of their periodic get-togethers at San Francisco, joined by Navy secretary James Forrestal, just returned from the South Pacific. Ernie King wanted assurances on Ghormley. Forrestal backed the SOPAC, which pleased Nimitz, but returning to Pearl Harbor the CINCPAC found a letter from Ghormley that revived his concerns. Between diatribes on British colonials, dark expressions of suspicion about Ernest J. King, and fears of diminished carrier strength (at a time the Wasp had yet to be sunk), Ghormley defended his cautious tactics and suggested he needed no greater authority—where many agreed operational command was precisely what SOPAC lacked.

Admiral Nimitz decided to visit the South Pacific himself. The seaplane carrying his party alighted on the water at Nouméa on September 28. The CINCPAC boarded flagship Argonne. Also there were General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, leader of the Army Air Force, returning from an inspection of MacArthur’s command, and General George Kenney, who had come with Arnold for the conference. Nimitz got an earful. Bob Ghormley had worked in his little office on the Argonne for months. He had not left the ship, not to visit Marines on Guadalcanal, not even to coordinate with MacArthur. When Hap Arnold chided Ghormley for his sedentary manner, the SOPAC commander, his back up, told off the Army air boss in no uncertain terms. No one could question Ghormley on how he exercised command.

Nimitz and Ghormley both knew they had been pleading with the Army for planes. The CINCPAC also knew, even if Ghormley did not, that as an informal member of the Joint Chiefs, Arnold had resisted additional aircraft for the Pacific, even torpedoing already approved programs in favor of sending more to Europe. Only recently had Arnold agreed to provide some of the new, higher-performance P-38 fighters to the South Pacific. Antagonizing Hap Arnold was not smart, even less where Hap had a point. The SOPAC’s exhaustion was obvious even to George Kenney. “I liked Ghormley,” Kenney recorded, “but he looked tired and really was tired. I don’t believe his health was any too good and I thought, while we were talking, that it wouldn’t be long before he was relieved.”

There was more. Admiral Nimitz had discovered that the Washington, a new fast battleship assigned to SOPAC, had been left behind at Tongatabu, far from the battle zone. Ghormley pleaded fuel shortages. SOPAC was deficient on tankers, but the harbor was full of merchantmen awaiting cargo transshipment—theater logistics were a nightmare. And the admiral still resisted running warships up to contest the nightly Japanese dominance of Ironbottom Sound. Ghormley had been defensive on this when writing CINCPAC, and Nimitz nudged him now, suggesting he had been holding too tightly on to his cruiser-destroyer strike force.

Twice during the conference aides entered with action messages for the SOPAC, and both times the admiral seemed to have no clue what to do. Then came an eye-opening exchange between Ghormley and Kenney. SOPAC officers naturally appealed to the SOWESPAC air commander for mass strikes on Rabaul. Kenney replied that his airmen wanted to knock out Rabaul’s airfields, even burn down the town, but that several requirements of the New Guinea fight had to be met first. Kenney refused to say when Rabaul might be attacked. Admiral Ghormley responded that he appreciated what SOWESPAC was doing and wished them luck over Rabaul when they got there. Nimitz bristled at such flaccidity.

Next day Admiral Nimitz hopped a B-17 flight to Cactus. Even now Ghormley failed to seize the moment to visit the front. The aircraft went off course in stormy weather and found Guadalcanal almost by chance—CINCPAC’s air staff officer had to use a National Geographic map. They were an hour late, landing in rain, taxiing through mud, then disgorging Nimitz, disappointing Marines who hoped the plane carried nurses or chocolate. General Vandegrift, who wished Nimitz to see the real conditions under which his men fought, was privately pleased.

Vandegrift met the plane and squired the admiral around Henderson, then to see Bloody Ridge and some of the perimeter. Later they joined Roy Geiger for a nuts-and-bolts talk on flying planes from Cactus. The two boss men talked long into the night on everything from naval regulations to Vandegrift’s mission of defending Henderson, which he felt was threatened by Kelly Turner’s latest brainstorm—creating a new air base elsewhere on Cactus. It must have gratified Nimitz when the Marine, thinking about aggressive ship handling in Ironbottom Sound, advocated changing Navy regs to make skippers more venturesome, less anxious about running their ships aground. That was exactly what a young Lieutenant Nimitz had been charged with so many years before.

In the morning Admiral Nimitz awarded a number of medals, including the Navy Cross to Alexander Vandegrift. A dozen recipients were Cactus fliers. Then Vandegrift bundled the admiral into his B-17, wanting to get him out before rain turned Henderson into mud or the Japanese noontime raid hit. The aircraft failed on its first try and had to wait for a break in the weather. Back in Nouméa, Chester Nimitz ordered Ghormley to upgrade the facilities on Cactus, providing Quonset huts for the airmen, Marston mats for the entire runway, better fuel and ordnance storage, plus reinforcements. He overrode SOPAC’s objections about garrisoning islands far from the combat zone. Returning to Pearl Harbor, Nimitz professed himself satisfied with the situation in the South Pacific, though in truth he was far from happy. Admiral Nimitz told Time magazine the men on the spot “will hold what they have and eventually start rolling northward.”

TWO WALKS IN THE SUN

The advent of the 7th Marines afforded Alexander Vandegrift fresh opportunities. The Marine general was not content on the defensive. As a young officer he had served in China at the outset of its civil war and knew the costs of passivity, shown by the Chinese nationalists there. Happy to make an incursion with the Marine Raiders when he brought them over from Tulagi, Vandegrift did the same with his reinforcements now. He probed Japanese positions. Aerial photography showed the main body of Japanese stood west of a river called the Matanikau. The Marines knew little more than that. A probe would reveal the situation. It would also invigorate Marines who had sat far too long in their foxholes.

Vandegrift nominated Red Mike Edson to lead and told him to use any troops he wanted. Elevated to command the 5th Marine Regiment, Edson selected one of its battalions, included his old 1st Raider Battalion, and called on the fresh 7th Regiment for a unit too. The latter choice fell on Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller’s 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (1/7), a solid unit led by a famous Marine. The Raiders and the 1/7 were to swing to the south, skirting Mount Austen and crossing the river to establish precisely where the enemy might be. The 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, would be at the Matanikau’s mouth in reserve.

Nothing went according to Edson’s plan. The overland trek across foothills, through jungle and elephant grass, slowed to a crawl. Chesty Puller’s 1/7 tarried. The Marine Raiders got into a fierce firefight, climbed a hill to obtain better positions, and ended up defending themselves. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel B. Griffith, who had succeeded Edson in charge, was badly wounded and his deputy killed. Puller’s men followed the Matanikau to the sea, unaware the Raiders were trapped behind them. Chesty had sent a reinforced company back to base as bearers and guards for wounded, and these men were commandeered for a rescue mission to the Raiders. As a result of bombs that wrecked Vandegrift’s radio center, a message from Griffith had been misunderstood to mean the Raiders were on the far side of the Matanikau. So division called on Jack Clark of the naval support unit, who sent Higgins boats to carry the 1/7 Marines to save the Raiders. But there was no one to rescue, and the relief party was itself surrounded just inland from the beach. Puller and Edson were standing together at the river mouth when the Higgins boats chugged past, ignoring their frantic efforts to wave off the craft. Finally Puller boarded destroyer Ballard offshore and signaled his trapped men to move off in another direction. They were extracted, but not before Coast Guardsman Douglas A. Munro, diverting the enemy with some of the Higgins boats, fell dead. The fiasco cost 140 men.

September gave way to October, with General Vandegrift deciding to extend his perimeter to the Matanikau. He planned a new operation using six full battalions, almost half his troops, under direct command. This time most of Edson’s 5th Marines advanced along the coast; the 2/7 would cross the Matanikau and take up blocking positions, while Puller’s battalion and the reinforced 3/2 Marines made a right hook inland and marched to the sea. Puller would capture Point Cruz. The Japanese might be pocketed. In that case Edson should continue over the river, pass Point Cruz, and make for the enemy base at Kokumbona.

The operation began early on October 7. Red Mike quickly ran into trouble and asked for help. Vandegrift sent the 1st Raiders. All stalled. Blissfully ignorant of American plans and intent on reaching good jump-off positions for their own offensive, General Maruyama of the Sendai Division had ordered his Aoba Detachment to advance also. The result was fighting on both banks of the Matanikau. Rain delayed movement late into the next afternoon. Some Marines in the enveloping force wavered, and neither 3/2 nor 1/7 could complete the encirclement. That afternoon Vandegrift received a vexing dispatch from Ghormley. SOPAC intelligence believed a large Imperial Navy task force was on the way. Though by then he had three battalions across the river, Vandegrift decided to pull back and defend the Matanikau line. On October 9 Marines began laying out new defenses.

Japanese troops were indeed marshaling for a big push, though intelligence was wrong about timing. On their side everything depended upon the buildup. Arrival of the 2nd Sendai Division would be the leading edge, dribbling in from the Tokyo Express. Lieutenant General Maruyama Masao arrived between the first and second Matanikau battles. Maruyama’s October 1 order of the day—captured by the Americans—was highly suggestive. “This is the decisive battle,” Maruyama had said, “a battle in which the rise or fall of the Japanese Empire will be decided. If we do not succeed in the occupation of these islands, no one should expect…to return alive.” Lieutenant General Hyakutake landed on Guadalcanal on October 9 with his Seventeenth Army forward headquarters. His own plan echoed Maruyama’s, stating, “The operation to surround and recapture Guadalcanal will truly decide the fate of the control of the entire Pacific area.”

Hyakutake left his chief of staff, Major General Miyazaki Shuichi, at Rabaul as a relay between the battlefront and IGHQ. Lieutenant General Sado Tadayoshi’s 38th Division had begun moving up from Borneo, and liaison officers were already at Rabaul. Special provisions were made for the 150mm heavy guns of the Army’s 4th Artillery Regiment, supposed to help neutralize Henderson. A Navy delegation visited Guadalcanal to survey conditions and reported that for effective bombardment the guns would need to be on the west bank of the Matanikau—one reason the Japanese contested this ground so fiercely and ordered that Aoba Detachment attack.

The Tokyo Express had gone into high gear. Some troops would complete their voyage to Starvation Island by ant runs—the Japanese employed enough barges to deliver half a dozen loads every day. There were four rat missions during the last week of September, and the Navy ran the Tokyo Express almost nightly during the first half of October. The Army’s heavy equipment, in particular tanks and the 150mm guns, would arrive on a pair of missions by seaplane carriers Nisshin and Chitose. The long-ballyhooed “high-speed convoy” would deliver the balance of the Army troops. Hyakutake had scheduled his offensive for October 21. The Imperial Navy bent every effort to make that possible.

POTENT FORCES

In the South Pacific, Allied fleets deployed thin resources to meet vast demands. Destroyers were especially hard-pressed in SOPAC. Not only were they vital for convoy protection and to cross Torpedo Junction, but they had to sweep harbor entrances during the entry or exit of fleet units, screen the task forces, conduct antisubmarine patrols, protect oilers refueling the fleet at sea, bombard enemy shores, and engage the Japanese fleet. American ships maintained one of several levels of alert. The highest form of readiness, battle stations, was called Condition 1. In Condition 2 half the guns were manned and the ship prepared to maneuver. Condition 3 was for normal cruising. Vessels in these waters almost never set Condition 3. Battle stations were the norm every day at dawn, whenever approaching Guadalcanal, often in its anchorage, and anytime action impended. Mostly skippers set Condition 2. This cycle of constant medium to high readiness played havoc with men’s lives—sailors had to eat on the run or at their action stations, grab sleep when possible, and perform at peak despite their constant demanding work. Guadalcanal convoys were timed to enter the eastern approach, the Lengo Channel, before dawn, arriving early at the anchorage. Escort commanders decided whether to up-anchor and skedaddle when things got too hot. The importance of unloading usually had them standing in Ironbottom Sound when the JNAF came, though ships might get under way to avoid damage.

Task Force 64, the SOPAC cruiser-destroyer flotilla, had been reconstituted since Savo Island. Still, with SOPAC’s meager forces and the available warships constantly called upon for anything and everything, it was difficult to prepare for surface combat. Rear Admiral Norman Scott led the unit. Scott had skippered one of the light cruisers that escaped Savo because she had been in the anchorage to protect the transports. He had no intention of allowing that tragedy to repeat. The Imperial Navy had had better night tactics. Scott made his ships practice night maneuvers whenever they could be spared. Gunnery exercises were numerous. At least twice in late September, Admiral Scott held night maneuvers with his complete force.

The Americans had one key advantage with their radar, then a newfangled gizmo, and a word constructed of an acronym that stood for “radio detection and ranging.” The technical development of radar had gained momentum quickly. An SC-type radar used longer-wavelength pulses, well suited to detecting targets at altitude, hence its utility for discovering enemy aircraft. The innovation of powered revolving antennae increased coverage to a full 360 degrees, and that of the “planned position indicator” enabled radarmen to “see” targets in a spatial relationship to the emitter. This became the basis for the aircraft carrier’s practice of positive control over intercepting fighters, vectoring them to engage specific targets. The SC radar was becoming widely distributed and now equipped all battleships and aircraft carriers, many cruisers, and late-model destroyers. But with its long radio wavelength (150 centimeters), the SC equipment had poor target discrimination closer to the surface, where signals were absorbed by landmasses and vegetation or broke up amid wave action. A new machine, the SG-type radar, had a micro waveform (10 centimeters) that promised excellent performance close to the surface, discriminating ships from land, even vessels of different sizes, and this became the basis for radar-directed gunnery. So far only the newest vessels had that equipment. The Japanese were far behind, their first, primitive radars installed in the summer of 1942.

By October a number of Norman Scott’s warships featured SC radars, and a couple had the SG-type also. Integrating technology into seamanship posed the next great challenge. The use of radar data in gun laying was one headache—could it be translated directly into direction and azimuth instructions or should it be fed to gun directors? Another problem was the effect of gunnery on radar. In a number of ships, when main batteries fired, the radars were knocked off-line and had to be repaired. These problems would eventually be worked out, and the first practical solutions came at Guadalcanal.

When SOPAC knew the Tokyo Express was coming, Task Force 62, Kelly Turner’s amphibious force, might strengthen convoy escorts with cruisers, or Scott could bring his surface action group up to engage them. In October, the operating tempos of the two sides meshed to produce the first round of what became a crucial passage. Initial contenders were the JNAF and Tokyo Express versus the Cactus Air Force. Anxious to prepare the way for the Japanese Army, the Navy sent bombers by day, the Tokyo Express at night. With Nimitz still returning to Pearl Harbor, the South Pacific erupted.

The Eleventh Air Fleet opened with a fighter sweep on October 2. Bombers, included as decoys, turned back short of Cactus, and most of the Zeroes went on. Japanese airmen downed six Wildcats, including those of two pilots Nimitz had just decorated, damaging several more. Tsukahara’s fliers repeated the formula the next day, but Cactus air was prepared, dispatching nine JNAF fighters and badly hitting another. That was a critical day at sea also. Seaplane carrier Nisshin steamed down The Slot carrying nine of the Japanese guns, their gunners, and General Maruyama. Scout bombers found her late in the afternoon but were driven off by Zeroes. The SBDs jumped Nisshin that night while unloading. The ship sprang a leak from a near miss, and Captain Komazawa Katsumi cut short the mission with two artillery pieces still aboard. The Cactus Air Force struck twice again, missed, and B-17s tried their luck too, but were put off their aim by a Chitose floatplane crashing into a bomber, shearing off a wing. The responsible airman, Warrant Officer Katsuki Kiyomi, actually survived the collision and parachuted to safety.

The Americans attempted to come back the next day. Commander Air Solomons (AIRSOLS) arranged for Hornet planes to hit Shortland while Army B-17s struck the Buin complex. Amid cloud cover the attackers could not find their targets. That night the Express ran, as it did on October 5, when Cactus fliers pounded the destroyer sortie, damaging two ships. Mikawa assigned light cruiser Tatsuta and seaplane carrier Chitose to augment the Reinforcement Unit, now facing a backlog of matériel to land, including eight of the 150mm howitzers plus a number of other artillery pieces.

Coastwatchers and aerial reconnaissance assumed primary importance. Radio intelligence had temporarily been blinded. On September 30, the Imperial Navy modified its entire system of communications, copying some U.S. methods, changing call signs, and introducing a revised D Code (the Japanese name for JN-25). At that moment the most recent CINCPAC monthly estimate had a good understanding of Mikawa’s fleet strength. Weekly reports on Japanese fleet dispositions issued in Washington by the F-22 section of the Office of Naval Intelligence, based primarily on radio direction finding, agreed with CINCPAC’s accounting in dispatches sent on September 29 and October 6.

Pearl Harbor credited the JNAF with twelve to eighteen floatplanes and two patrol bombers at Shortland, and twenty-seven medium bombers, forty-five Zeroes, forty-eight floatplanes (half scouts, half the Zero seaplane version), and a dozen patrol bombers in the Rabaul area. Intelligence assessed that forty-five Zeroes and fifty-four Bettys were in the pipeline to the front.

Officers commented on Japanese intentions in their appreciation of October 1: “For the past six or seven weeks the Japs have been assembling planes, troops and ships in the general Rabaul area. There are no indications whatever of a move in any other direction.” But Pearl Harbor was complacent: “While the Japs may want to start such an [offensive] effort in the near future,” they had suffered heavy losses already, with Allied planes and submarines taking a steady toll, so that “all this has definitely slowed up their preparations.” CINCPAC tabulated Japanese losses and damage during September at several aircraft carriers, an equal number of cruisers, a battleship, plus lesser vessels, a distinct overestimate. In reality Yamamoto’s fleet was at its greatest strength since the invasion.

Disturbing indications mounted. The CINCPAC bulletin on October 6 mentioned Army and SNLF troops in the Solomons and predicted an impending attempt to overcome the Marines. Two days later the bulletin expected constant Tokyo Express runs, and the fleet intelligence summary noted the flow of aircraft to Rabaul, located the Sendai Division’s chief of staff on Guadalcanal, and commented that the Japanese Seventeenth Army was “increasingly associated” with the island. Next day Admiral Mikawa was thought to have gone to Buin. Then, on October 10, the CINCPAC summary mentioned the Nagumo and Kondo forces in relation to the Solomons, again associated the Seventeenth Army with Cactus, located the Sendai Division as possibly on the island with the Kawaguchi Brigade, listed several SNLF units as “implicated” in the islands, and ominously led with this: “The impression is gained that the enemy may be getting ready for larger-scale operations in the Guadalcanal area.” According to codebreaker Edward Van Der Rhoer, Op-20-G—hence Washington and presumably Pearl Harbor—knew the Japanese would lead off with a cruiser bombardment of Henderson.

The fat was in the fire. At SOPAC, Admiral Ghormley finally agreed to send U.S. Army troops to Cactus, and the 164th Infantry Regiment began loading out on October 8. Their move would be covered by the Hornet task force. The Japanese were intent on completing their transport schedule. Early on October 11 they put in motion the latest heavy reinforcement, employing both the seaplane carriers Chitose and Nisshin bearing artillery, and half a dozen destroyers in escort, most bearing troops. A daytime JNAF fighter sweep followed by a bomber raid tried to cripple the Cactus Air Force, which had just opened Fighter 1 to supplement Henderson Field. Weather and interceptors rendered the strikes ineffectual. But there was a third arrow in the Japanese quiver, a cruiser group sent to administer a naval bombardment. The enemy was bearing down at that very moment.

Norman Scott’s surface action group left Espíritu Santo on October 7. With just three cruisers and three destroyers, Task Force 64 was on the weak side, and at the last moment other warships in the area, light cruiser Helena and a pair of destroyers, joined Scott. Helena sported one of the new SG radars. Admiral Scott wanted to hunt. He had a healthy awareness of Tokyo Express activity and a desire to avenge Savo. From west of the Solomons, Scott closed The Slot, timed to arrive off Savo near midnight, then steamed back to his holding position. For two nights Task Force 64 encountered nothing. On the third, the night of October 11–12, Scott found game. On Guadalcanal, Cape Esperance happened to be the closest point, and the battle took that name.

Rear Admiral Goto Aritomo led the Japanese flotilla, composed of three ships of his own Cruiser Division 6 plus two destroyers. A thirty-two-year Imperial Navy veteran, Goto was a torpedoman and had led the Navy’s premier night-fighting unit before taking up these heavy cruisers, which had fought at Guam, Wake Island, and the Coral Sea before their stupendous Savo victory. Goto missed at least two chances for warning: Commander Yokota Minoru’s I-26 had seen a U.S. cruiser but radioed the information too late, while the Japanese reinforcement group unloading at Guadalcanal, which Scott’s force must have passed, apparently saw nothing. The Japanese had no radar, but they had honed their night skills, with specially trained lookouts and excellent equipment, including low-light, high-magnification glasses.

Admiral Scott’s Americans, on the other hand, only beginning to experience the use of radar, nearly squandered that advantage. Light cruiser Helena detected Goto first, at almost fourteen nautical miles, closing at thirty-five knots. Helena, which had never operated with Task Force 64, did not report her sighting. Heavy cruiser Salt Lake City also detected the Japanese with her less advanced SC radar, but remained silent. So did light cruiser Boise, with an SG radar, which assumed Admiral Scott had the information. Helena finally passed along her sighting at 11:42 p.m., and a couple minutes later Boise did too, but ambiguities in language and navigation terms left confusion as to the Japanese position and even whether there were different groups of them. By that time the range had shrunk to less than 5,000 yards, and Goto’s vessels were plainly visible. Aboard the Helena an officer grumbled, “What are we going to do, board them?”

Lookouts on the Japanese flagship, heavy cruiser Aoba, finally saw three U.S. vessels at 11:43. Admiral Goto tentatively reduced speed to 26 knots, but just a moment later the Helena opened fire followed by the rest of Scott’s ships. Goto had been steaming directly at the Americans, disposed in a line across his course, creating the sailors’ dream of “crossing the T” of an adversary, where all guns could shoot at the enemy, who could reply only with weapons on the bow or stern. The Aoba, leading the Japanese line, was quickly reduced to a wreck, both forward eight-inch gun turrets smashed, her bridge hit by heavy-caliber shells. The Boise landed a salvo, including a dud shell on the flag bridge that mortally wounded Goto and killed two of his staff. Rear Admiral Scott, worried his ships were shooting at one another, ordered a halt, resuming fire once he felt more confident.

The Japanese force disintegrated. Aoba veered to port to bring her broadside to bear, only to offer the Americans a bigger target. She staggered off, struck more than forty times, but lived to fight another day. Saima Haruyoshi, a petty officer with the damage control detail, was sleeping at his battle station in the stern when the shells began to fall. He did not feel the first hit, but after that, destruction came quickly. One shell wrecked the number three turret, in the compartment immediately forward. When Saima tried to open the hatch, flames drove him back. There were dead, wounded, and fires everywhere. They had to pile up the bodies to get at the fires.

Destroyer Fubuki, haplessly caught as Scott steamed across her course, was blasted to pieces. Captain Araki Tsutau of the Furutaka, second in the Japanese line, turned to starboard, followed by the Kinugasa. The Furutaka came around to support her flagship, sustaining more than ninety hits, but she scored twice on the Boise, once against a forward magazine. The shell, of a type the Imperial Navy had designed to hit water and travel beneath the surface to impact a ship hull, actually functioned as advertised, recording the only known wartime success for this munition. The magazine hit would have blown Boise up save that seawater pouring into her from the hole extinguished the fire. Furutaka finally succumbed. The Kinugasa was slammed four times but punched back at the USS Salt Lake City with eight hits. Aoba was badly damaged. The Imperial Navy vessels survived the huge numbers of hits due only to high-quality design, brave seamen, and the proportion of duds among the American shells.

The Boise would be out of action for six months, the Salt Lake City for a full year. And Admiral Scott had not been entirely wrong about friendly fire—destroyers Farenholt and Duncan were both hit by U.S. shells, the latter mortally.

Goto Aritomo’s death sent shudders through the Imperial Navy. Goto was the first Japanese admiral to die on his bridge in a surface battle. Yamaguchi Tamon had gone down with flagship Hiryu at Midway, but he had elected to stay behind when sailors were abandoning ship. Worse, Navy gossip had it that Goto died believing the Aoba a victim of friendly fire, not enemy action. After Aoki Taijiro, captain of the carrier Akagi at Midway, Goto became the second member of Etajima’s class of 1910 to succumb in the war. That was important to a lot of Imperial Navy officers who, at that very moment, were leading the fleet against the Americans on Cactus. Among Etajima classmates on the scene were Goto’s boss, Mikawa Gunichi of the Eighth Fleet; Kusaka Ryunosuke, chief of staff of the Kido Butai; and Kurita Takeo, leading a force of battlewagons. His close friends included destroyer master Tanaka Raizo, now heading Kido Butai’s screen, and battleship commander Abe Hiroaki, both of whom had been a class behind Goto; as had Hara Chuichi, driving a cruiser division in Abe’s Vanguard Force. The Japanese officers redoubled their determination.

“WHERE IS THE MIGHTY POWER OF THE IMPERIAL NAVY?”

Marines had standing orders to examine the dead enemy for documents that might help divine intentions and movements. Many Japanese defied orders not to keep diaries. These were fodder for the Americans, part of the pillar of combat intelligence. Some documents Vandegrift’s staff exploited immediately. The bulk went to Nouméa, where SOPAC translated and examined them. During the second Matanikau battle a captured diary, translated at SOPAC, yielded a soldier’s plaintive cry, “Where is the mighty power of the Imperial Navy?”

The complaint hardly needed to be heard. Admiral Yamamoto issued preparatory orders for his fleet sortie on October 4. The Tokyo Express chugged, and the Eleventh Air Fleet roared into Cactus, but it was a race with the Americans. The morning after Cape Esperance, the U.S. convoy bearing the 164th Infantry arrived. Destroyer Sterett, among its escorts, dropped anchor. Unloading had barely begun when the air raid sirens sounded and the ships weighed again. On the bridge, Lieutenant Herbert May grabbed the skipper and pointed to planes breaking through the clouds. “Christ, Captain—look, there’s a million of ’em.” Lieutenant C. Raymond Calhoun, Sterett’s gunnery boss, fired the main battery at maximum elevation to disrupt the Japanese V-of-Vs formation; then they were past. Calhoun watched. “The pilots exhibited excellent discipline. They kept tight formation and never wavered…. Their aim was excellent and we watched a perfect pattern fall smack on Henderson Field.” Several hours later the JNAF repeated the performance in every detail save direction of the attack.

The Cactus Air Force got in its own licks. They helped track down Cape Esperance survivors, and they attacked destroyers that had been detached from the Japanese artillery convoy to rescue them. One enemy warship, crippled, had to be scuttled. Meanwhile, sharp as they had looked from the Sterett, Japanese bombardiers did not actually crater Henderson, so U.S. missions continued into the afternoon, blasting another destroyer to the bottom. Undeterred, Rear Admiral Joshima, the R Area Force commander leading the mission, immediately sailed on another artillery run in the Nisshin.

Yamamoto’s operation gathered momentum. Combined Fleet planned to wallop Henderson in conjunction with the sailing of the high-speed convoy. This would open with a battleship bombardment—the C-in-Cs notion of putting the Yamato alongside Guadalcanal—followed by heavy cruiser shellings on succeeding nights. In a way Yamamoto’s flagship would be at Guadalcanal—Yamato had sent expert lookout Lieutenant Funashi Masatomi to the island as an observer and installed him atop Mount Austen with radio gear.

The morning after Cape Esperance, Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo and his bombardment force, led by battleships Kongo and Haruna, left the main body. Suffering from fevers a few days earlier, Kurita was back on his mark. Rear Admiral Tanaka escorted. Battleship Kongo carried incendiary AA shells of a new type, tested at Truk in early October, which promised to be very effective. Haruna had older shells that could still be destructive. Theirs became the first opportunity to avenge Goto’s death.

For a prelude, Admiral Kusaka Jinichi sent his Rabaul bombers to hit Henderson, flying a course like the Sterett had seen—out to sea, avoiding coastwatchers and approaching from the south. This time the runway was damaged. Then the Japanese Army chimed in with the first shells from its 150mm howitzers, quickly christened “Pistol Pete,” impeding American efforts to repair the Marston matting. Kusaka followed with several night intruders that arrived at intervals, twin-engine Nells the Marines knew as Washing Machine Charlie.

Kurita arrived off Guadalcanal late in the evening of October 13. He made a high-speed circuit of Savo, set an easterly course past Lunga Point, then swung onto the reciprocal track, with the two battleships’ fourteen-inch guns pummeling Henderson and the U.S. positions for ninety minutes. Kurita launched floatplanes to illuminate the scene. The warships pumped out 918 shells, mixing their time-fused incendiaries with armor-piercing shells, both to destroy aircraft in the revetments and to dig under the runways. Captain Koyanagi Tomiji had his Kongo space her salvos at one-minute intervals. The pace allowed Lieutenant Commander Ukita Nobue, gunnery officer, to ensure accurate gun laying. Marine shore batteries that replied—they were beyond range anyway—were engaged by the battleships’ secondary armament, and searchlights were used to blind the Marine gunners.

Those on Guadalcanal remember this simply as “The Night.” General Vandegrift, who records that he used to go to sleep every evening about 7:00, after listening to the shortwave broadcast from San Francisco, refrains from commenting on The Night, though he surely must have awoken. In the same passage Vandegrift notes his first act every morning was to inspect the previous night’s damage. Marine Bud DeVere, a control tower operator at Henderson’s “Pagoda,” recalls a continuous ordeal of Pistol Pete shooting them up, Washing Machine Charlie harassing them, then the battleships. At Cactus Crystal Ball, radioman Phil Jacobsen was trying to relax in a bunker the Seabees had built to protect their intercept gear when he saw a star shell burst almost directly overhead. He had barely sought cover when all hell broke loose. After The Night, whenever it rained, their receivers went on the blink.

Lieutenant Bill Coggins, with 2/1 rifle battalion, located a full mile from Henderson, remembers the Marines had become inured to naval bombardments, but that, from the beginning, everyone realized this was different—star shells, tight six-gun salvos, heavy blast concussion. Far away though they were, the baseplate of a fourteen-inch shell landed awfully near the E Company cookhouse. When greenies of the Army’s 164th Regiment arrived to replace Coggins’s men the next day, wily Marines frightened them with promises of greater horrors to come. Captain Nikolai Stevenson, whose C Company of the regiment’s 1st Battalion was relieved that night by Army newbies, pulled into reserve near Henderson. He was playing poker when the fireworks started. “All at once the murmuring night exploded into ghastly daylight…. The concussion knocked me halfway over as I dived headlong for the puny cover of the ditch, where I lay shaking among the fallen palm fronds.” Japanese shells roared and screeched, like subway cars tearing through a thousand bolts of cloth strung together. Warren Maxson, also of the 1st Marines, counted five air raids that night. Lieutenant Merillat of Vandegrift’s staff remembered the alarming series of “Condition Red” alerts—always announced by siren for incoming air raids—followed by the bombardment: “The shelter shook as if it were set in jelly. Bombs, artillery, big naval shells made it sheer hell.”

From an American point of view the one good aspect of The Night was that it marked the appearance of a new piece on the board, the Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat. These high-speed seventy-foot craft, each armed with .50-caliber machine guns, a 20mm cannon, and torpedoes, would contest Ironbottom Sound full-time. The convoy that brought Army troops had also deposited the first elements of PT Squadron 3. They based at Tulagi. Four PTs came out to fight Kurita’s fleet, attacking shortly before the bombardment ended. Commander Ukita on the Kongo recalled the PT boats’ intervention, but stoutly insisted Kurita’s worst fear was of running aground on the treacherous shoals and reefs in the channels. Destroyer Naganami contemptuously brushed off the PTs, but those gnats would be back, gnawing painfully at the Imperial Navy.

By morning Cactus had descended into crisis—Henderson Field holed, Fighter 1 damaged. Only seven SBDs and thirty-five fighters could fly; forty-one men were dead, including two more of those Admiral Nimitz had decorated so recently. The Pagoda was demolished. Roy Geiger ordered it bulldozed. Aviation gas was mostly destroyed, enough left for just one mission. Mechanics worked desperately on crippled planes. This was the day of the high-speed convoy, which had left on the thirteenth with six transports and eight destroyers. Scout bombers found both it and a fresh Japanese surface force—Admiral Mikawa with cruisers Chokai and Kinugasa—the latter bouncing right back to seek vengeance for Cape Esperance. Naturally, Japanese bombers struck at midday. Only late that afternoon did Cactus scrape together a flight of four SBDs and seven Army fighter-bombers to fling at the convoy. Draining the gas out of a couple of B-17s permitted a second wave of nine SBDs before dark. They achieved nothing save the loss of one plane and the crash of another.

Now the night cast Mikawa Gunichi as avenging angel. His cruisers lashed Henderson with 752 eight-inch shells. U.S. radio intelligence reported Mikawa at sea, probably in Chokai, that very day, but Cactus had had to choose between cruisers and convoy. While nowhere as destructive as Kurita’s battleship bombardment, Mikawa’s shells inflicted more damage on planes and renewed the craters that pockmarked airfields.

To complete their mastery of Ironbottom, the Japanese may have sent a midget submarine sortie into the anchorage. Orders for the mission exist. It was to have been launched from seaplane carrier Chiyoda, which had shuttled eight of the craft to the Solomons. These small two-man subs, notably used at Pearl Harbor and at Sydney, Australia, were to invade the sound around midnight. But there is no evidence of their actual presence. Some American small craft, escorted by a pair of the new PTs, crossed undisturbed from Guadalcanal to Tulagi that night. Admiral Ugaki complained that plans for the midgets’ employment were incomplete, and notes that he ordered a study, puzzling since Combined Fleet staff had discussed using the subs in the very first days of Watchtower. Ugaki recommended putting the boats at Kamimbo and loosing them when there were suitable targets. It is not clear whether Yamamoto overruled him. The Japanese did set up a midget sub base at the designated place, and other sorties did run from there. Months later the American salvage ship Ortolan found a midget and raised her long enough to recover this day’s attack order and other documents, but a storm broke her grip and the submersible was lost.

At dawn on the fifteenth, Marines were outraged to see Japanese transports unloading in broad daylight across the sound. But Cactus air was in disarray. Roy Geiger demanded his men find gas, and they did—an officer remembered fuel barrels had been cached in swamps and groves, and several hundred were found and laboriously hauled to the strips. That brought two days’ supply. Guadalcanal called upon SOPAC to fly gasoline aboard its daily flights and even bring a load on submarine Amberjack. Mechanics rushed repairs. Starting early, scratch flights of SBDs and Army planes took off to hit the transports at Tassafaronga Point. Fighters engaged R Area Force floatplanes and Japanese interceptors—ominously, from Kido Butai’s Carrier Division 2—to open the way, strafing ships when they had the chance.

Mitsukuni Oshita, a chief petty officer on destroyer Hayashi, was impressed at the way the Americans pressed their attacks in the face of murderous flak. Half the Japanese transports, damaged, withdrew. The others, also damaged, were beached—hopefully to be emptied later. The Nankai Maru and Sasago Maru were hit by the first U.S. wave, Azumasan Maru in the second attack, the Kyushu Maru later. An American bomb wrecked the Kyushu Maru’s wheelhouse, killing her captain and all the bridge crew. Ignorant of this, the ship’s engineers kept her at full speed until she ran up on the beach. The ammunition aboard another ship cooked off and she blew up. The Nankai Maru, the only cargoman not to catch fire—and the only damaged ship that tarried to unload—would be the only vessel of this group to escape. Men of the Independent Ship Engineering Regiment struggled to unload the supplies. The Japanese estimated the ships were 80 percent emptied. They would be furious in turn when U.S. warships appeared to shell the stacked supplies, destroying many. Beach crews were heavily hit too, with the regimental commander killed and one of his companies wiped out but for eight men.

Yet the Army troops had landed. They could not be stopped. With a Tokyo Express on October 17 the program was fulfilled. Captain Inui Genjirou brought his 8th Antitank Company, now without any guns, to help move the supplies. The men were so exhausted he had to rest them for a day, and they could do little to combat the fire that broke out in a nearby dump. But one of Inui’s companies, thrilled to get cigarettes, labored to move the rice sacks away. Inui himself enjoyed the first coffee he had had since leaving Java.

General Geiger so focused on the supply battle that the day’s Japanese air raid went virtually uncontested. Come night the Imperial Navy returned. This time it was Rear Admiral Omori Sentaro with heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya. Commander Nagasawa Ko, whose home prefecture of Fukushima would be devastated by tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns of 2011, was Omori’s senior staff officer and recalled later that the Japanese had expected to be sunk. On the Myoko the crew were given rifles and instructed to get to shore and fight as naval infantry. Instead they faced no opposition. The warships pounded Henderson Field with 1,500 more eight-inch shells (some sources report 926). Yet next morning the Cactus Air Force could still fly ten dive-bombers and seven Army fighter-bombers. Geiger’s maintenance crews plus the Seabees literally saved Guadalcanal.

American commanders recognized the crisis even if the Japanese did not. And they spoke up. Vandegrift cabled SOPAC and demanded every ounce of backing. Slew McCain, the AIRSOLS commander, did the same. Ghormley repeated the essence of their appeals in a dispatch to Nimitz. And the SOPAC had Rear Admiral George D. Murray’s Hornet task force mount a carrier raid on the R Area Force floatplane base at Rekata Bay. Results were indeterminate.

At Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz decided he had had enough. Ghormley’s dispatch struck him as more weak-kneed passing of the buck. Aircraft carrier Enterprise, having completed repairs, was rushing to the South Pacific to increase the Allies’ paper-thin strength. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, whom CINCPAC had appointed to lead the “Big E’s” task force, had gone ahead to get a feel for the situation. Nimitz huddled with his inner circle late into the night discussing the SOPAC command situation. On October 16, Admiral Nimitz asked Admiral King for authority to substitute Halsey for Ghormley. The COMINCH approved. Just as “Bull” Halsey reached Nouméa, Nimitz sent him a message: The Bull would supplant Bob Ghormley as theater commander. The aggressive Halsey led the next battle, the most important yet. Allied leaders already knew it was upon them.

BLOOD UPON THE SEA

Despite the Imperial Navy’s changed codes and communications, Allied intelligence assembled an increasingly alarming picture of its activities. Indications piled up from radio traffic analysis, from the coastwatchers, from combat intelligence, from observation and aerial reconnaissance, even a few from Ultra proper. After Cape Esperance—itself an intelligence windfall, because the Allies captured 113 survivors of the warships Furutaka and Fubuki, whom they plied for information—the picture darkened further. Starting the next morning, the Allies observed a rapid increase in the volume of messages sent on the Japanese radio nets, especially those used to report radio fixes on Allied ships. Meanwhile a snooper discovered Kido Butai, reporting carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers 400 miles northeast of Cactus. Intelligence also detected the enemy intercept of that scout’s message, plus Imperial Navy sighting reports, an increasing number of them from I-boats. The fighting around Cactus certainly indicated the Japanese were not giving in.

The captured seamen revealed to Allied intelligence the actual Imperial Navy vessels engaged at both Cape Esperance and Savo, furnishing information that was accurate, if not at first believed, because it did not accord with the claims of U.S. commanders. Richmond Kelly Turner circulated this data on October 21. The prisoners knew nothing of Yamamoto’s current plans, but they possessed a wealth of knowledge of Japanese procedures, equipment, and operational methods.

On October 15, codebreakers reported that the pattern of radio traffic showed Yamamoto had taken direct command of operations. Combined Fleet became a heavy originator of messages. Ultra also provided radio bearings for a fleet unit containing at least two aircraft carriers, and reported an unidentified radio emitter on Guadalcanal—likely Lieutenant Funashi’s Navy observation post—that had begun providing fairly accurate tabulations of Cactus air strength. The next day Ultra confirmed the traffic flow from Combined Fleet and reported that the Japanese appeared to have focused all their attention on the Solomons. Pearl Harbor was on edge. The CINCPAC war diary for October 17 read, “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea…in the Guadalcanal area…our supply of the position will only be done at great expense.” Nimitz did not believe the situation hopeless, but it had become critical: “There is no doubt now that Japs are making an all-out effort in the Solomons, employing the greater part of their Navy.” Ultra noted quiet, or an unchanged Japanese situation, over several succeeding days. Starting on October 19, Ultra tabulated a reduction in high-level, high-priority message volume, ominously suggesting Yamamoto’s offensive was under way. The next day it furnished a new location for the Kido Butai and associated carrier commander Nagumo with surface fleet boss Kondo.

But Allied intelligence was not omniscient. As had happened before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, there were doubts about the Japanese aircraft carriers. The Combined Fleet had five of these ships, with the large carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, plus the light carrier Zuiho in Carrier Division 1, and the slower fleet carriers Hiyo and Junyo in Carrier Division 2. At the end of September, Washington’s weekly estimates located Carrier Division 1 not far from Rabaul, when it rode at anchor at Truk, except possibly the Zuikaku, which intelligence believed en route to Yokosuka. A week later it put the Zuiho also in Japan—and continued to believe the Zuiho in Empire waters right through the estimate of October 20, the last to appear before the battle. The Zuikaku the Allies estimated back in Truk on October 13, and they continued to place Carrier Division 1 there a week later, even though Japanese carriers had already been seen at sea, with locations for them repeatedly remarked in Ultra.

The record for Carrier Division 2 was worse. It was continuously placed in Empire waters right through the estimate of October 27, the day after the impending battle. The combat intelligence unit at Pearl Harbor wavered on locating these carriers, indicating they were in Japan on October 6, reporting a “slight” possibility of the Philippines on October 11, and a possibility the two ships might be in Empire waters a week later. In reality, Rear Admiral Kakuta Kakuji’s Carrier Division 2 had sailed from Japan for Truk on October 2 and sortied for the operation with the rest of the fleet nine days later. At least Pearl Harbor consistently believed that two big carriers were involved, and held them to be Shokaku and Zuikaku. On October 23, Pearl Harbor intelligence shifted to declare that “at least” two carriers must be among the enemy fleet.

Estimates for surface gunnery ships were skewed because Admiral Norman Scott reported inflicting much greater losses at Cape Esperance than was true. There was also another complication, according to Commander Bruce McCandless: ONI mistakenly believed all four Aoba-class cruisers lay at the bottom of the sea. When Scott claimed on October 18 to have sunk three heavy cruisers and four destroyers and possibly dispatched another tin can and a light cruiser (actual losses had been one heavy cruiser and one destroyer), these were scored to units other than the Imperial Navy’s Cruiser Division 6, which had the Aobas. This effectively minimized Japanese heavy cruiser strength. When the Myoko and Maya bombarded Cactus, ONI believed the former was anchored at Yokosuka and the latter at Palau. As for battleships, the October 20 estimate carried as “possibly damaged” one of Admiral Kurita’s vessels that had smashed Cactus on The Night, placed the Yamato and Mutsu as possibly at Rabaul, and credited the fleet in the Solomons—again “possibly”—with the Ise, then in Empire waters.

Fortunately other pillars of intelligence clarified. The combination continued to furnish a clearer picture. Rabaul would be covered by aerial photography at least a half dozen times during the last ten days before the battle. Estimated aggregate tonnage there ranged between 170,000 and 250,000 tons. At the high point, Simpson Harbor contained two oilers and forty-one merchant ships, with a light cruiser, a minelayer, three destroyers, and several aviation tenders. General Kenney’s SOWESPAC B-17s finally kicked off their Rabaul bombing on October 22, claiming to have blasted a cruiser, a destroyer, and eight merchantmen for 50,000 tons, and, two nights later, to have left the Nisshin wreathed in flames from a direct hit amidships, claiming her utterly destroyed. The Nisshin was at Shortland that night and no ship of her type lay at Rabaul.

As for Admiral Kakuta’s carriers, the first to intervene at Guadalcanal when he sent fighters to help screen the high-speed convoy while it unloaded, a scout plane signaled a carrier northwest of Kavieng on October 16, which put new light on the arguments over Carrier Division 2’s location.

The Japanese center of gravity had to be the Shortland-Buin complex, and there Allied intelligence benefited from coastwatchers as well as aerial spies. Reports covered that area virtually every day. Interestingly, the several separate forces counted here on October 15 totaled two aircraft carriers, four battleships, seven heavy and an equal number of light cruisers, twenty destroyers, and three aviation ships. An oiler and seventeen cargomen were reported the next day. If the intelligence estimates on Imperial Navy disposition were to be believed, those figures could not be accurate. But Kurita’s battleships stopped here briefly after The Night, Kondo’s fleet with Kakuta’s carriers were in the area, and Shortland was the center of Mikawa’s Eighth Fleet operations, with his typical tally some cruisers, aviation ships, and a dozen or so tin cans. The net impression, perfectly correct, was of Japanese might assembled for a big blow.

American air reconnaissance on October 17 recorded two cruisers and seven destroyers, and noontime aerial photography on October 20 revealed a heavy cruiser, four light cruisers, and seventeen destroyers. The other vessels were gone. Additional overhead imagery the next day disclosed the presence of five additional warships, with a different mixture of the cruiser types. On October 24 there was nothing at Shortland but a few tin cans. Over subsequent days sightings of all kinds showed Mikawa’s base reverting to its usual strength. The specifics could have been mistaken. What was inescapable was the sense of a mission force assembled, then launched.

Chester Nimitz did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. SOPAC’s forces were divided among its cruiser-destroyer group, a unit with new battleships Washington and South Dakota, now titled Task Force 64, and the Hornet’s carrier group. The Enterprise group, steaming as fast as possible, promised to reach the theater in time. By October 17, Nimitz knew the Japanese had seen Task Force 64. CINCPAC remained in doubt regarding locations of enemy fleet units, but he knew they were out there, and Ultra had provided some carrier positions and even radio call signs. On October 20, via COMINCH, Nimitz appealed to the British Admiralty for an Indian Ocean offensive to distract the Japanese from the Solomons.

The next day, in conjunction with new SOPAC chief Bull Halsey, the plans were set. The Enterprise (Task Force 16) and the Hornet (Task Force 17) would join on the twenty-fourth as Task Force 61 under Rear Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, and sweep north of the Santa Cruz islands, on the flank of any approaching Japanese fleet. At first CINCPAC foresaw the task force as being unable to act until the following day, but later it seemed they might be ready shortly after uniting. The battleships were sent on a midnight romp through Ironbottom Sound. No Japanese were found, so they moved to strengthen the carriers’ defenses. On the twenty-second a snooper saw the Kido Butai. Nimitz foresaw that for at least several weeks the Japanese would be able to throw more troops, planes, and ships into a battle than SOPAC. That could not be avoided. CINCPAC would apply calculated risk. “From all indications,” Nimitz’s war diary recorded on October 22, “the enemy seems about ready to start his long expected all out attack on Guadalcanal. The next three or four days are critical.”

In Truk lagoon on the morning of October 11, Yamamoto and Ugaki witnessed a momentous event from the fantail of the Yamato. Admiral Nagumo’s ships raised anchor and gingerly began their egress. Dark gray warships disappeared beyond the coral reefs of Truk’s north channel. After lunch the towering battleships of Admiral Kondo’s fleet, with Kakuta’s Carrier Division 2, departed south-side. Yamamoto, so sensitive of late, had begun micromanaging, questioning details. One big one was that the operations plan did not cover what to do in case of failure. Ugaki justified that with the comment that the fleet could not afford to fail. Everything had been done to ensure victory. Now was the time. The determined reinforcement program had put major Army units on Guadalcanal, and Navy efforts were near to suppressing Henderson Field. The day after the fleet sailed, Seventeenth Army chief of staff General Miyazaki and Navy staff officers Genda and Ohmae came up from Rabaul to plead for a battleship bombardment of Cactus. They were startled to learn one had already been laid on and was about to occur. Victory—that had a nice ring, rolled off the tongue easily, and it seemed close.

But Imperial Navy doctrine could be an obstacle. Under Yamamoto’s plan, Nagumo’s Striking Force of carriers would sail alongside Kondo’s battleships and cruisers of the Advance Force. Japanese doctrine accorded primacy to battleships, making Vice Admiral Kondo the overall commander. There were many aspects of carrier employment that would seem peculiar to a surface warfare specialist, and Kondo Nobutake had no experience of aeronaval operations. This might prevent success.

The fleet command was aware of the problem. Admiral Hara Chuichi had encountered it at Coral Sea and Eastern Solomons. After the second action Ugaki had Hara in for a long talk. Distilling his experiences, Hara sensitized Ugaki to the dangers in traditional doctrine. Though Hara sailed now as a cruiser commander, his contribution had been helpful. In the course of planning this operation, Ugaki brought Kondo and Nagumo together several times. The two were Etajima classmates and friends, so they were inclined to cooperate. But the reticent Nagumo was not the man to educate Kondo, gracious as he was, in carrier operations. That role fell to Third Fleet chief of staff Kusaka Ryunosuke, who had known Kondo since they had been boys in middle school together. Before leaving Truk, Kusaka coached Kondo on the finer points of aircraft use, and he induced the force commander to agree that in matters involving carriers, Nagumo would exercise control.

So the fleet went to sea. Vice Admiral Kondo maneuvered in the waters northeast of the Solomons. By night they steamed south to attain favorable dawn launch positions. During the day they would turn north and head toward Truk—if battle came, the Japanese wanted to be headed for safety, not destruction. This cautious approach disgusted many. In the screen, Commander Hara Tameichi on his destroyer Amatsukazi was among those discomfited by the seeming reluctance to close with the enemy. It bothered Yamamoto too. He had imagined an aggressive sortie beyond the Solomons into the Coral Sea, cutting through Torpedo Junction to isolate Guadalcanal. That would have forced the Allies into the open to restore communications. As Combined Fleet saw Kido Butai diverge, Ugaki nudged Kondo and Nagumo to adopt a forward-leaning posture. But neither Ugaki nor Yamamoto made this a direct order.

Rear Admiral Kusaka counseled caution. Kusaka could not escape feeling the American carriers, as at Midway, would appear on Nagumo’s flank. A sortie into the Coral Sea invited that. Kusaka was determined not to take the risk until the enemy carriers were accounted for. In the Imperial Navy, chiefs of staff had great power, and Kusaka used his to shield Nagumo from the complaints of inaction. When a new staffer aboard flagship Shokaku asked why the fleet did not stop this indecisive to-ing and fro-ing, Kusaka told him off, saying he was still an amateur at battle. The staff chief used the example of the sumo wrestler, who repeatedly left the fight to get salt to improve his grip, an act known as shikari. The fleet was doing shikari.

Kusaka fended off Ugaki as well. But as the days passed without action, morale suffered. The surface fleet was engaging the enemy. The Army, supposedly, was fighting. The Kido Butai did nothing. There were two key questions: the Army’s attack and the location of Allied fleets. Actually Hyakutake’s troops were still cutting their way through the jungle, struggling to reach assault positions. They literally hacked the “Maruyama Trail,” named for the leader of the Sendai Division, through the harsh land. The date of the Seventeenth Army attack was postponed once, then again. General Hyakutake pleaded insuperable difficulties. At Truk, Admiral Ugaki complained that the Army did not understand that postponements of a day here and there, of little consequence to a soldier, were serious for a fleet burning oil and wearing its ships. Delay pressed against operational limits. Had the Army kept its promises, the naval battle would have occurred before the arrival of U.S. carrier Enterprise, affording the Japanese overwhelming superiority. Aboard Amatsukaze, Commander Hara recalled “waiting impatiently,” a Navy that “stamped its feet in disgust.”

Intelligence on the Allied fleet posed the other big headache. The Imperial Navy had an inkling of new Allied forces. The Owada Communications Group had reported a task force leaving Pearl Harbor in mid-October. Ready to inform the Japanese was a low-grade aviation codebook captured from a U.S. torpedo bomber downed at Shortland on October 3. The first concrete information came ten days later, when a Chitose floatplane spotted a carrier and a battleship through a hole in the clouds. Also that day, Lieutenant Commander Nagai Takeo’s I-7 sent a floatplane over the harbor at Espíritu Santo at dawn, determining that there were no U.S. carriers there. Traffic on Japanese direction finding and intelligence radio nets spiked, especially on Rabaul circuits, something Allied codebreakers noticed. On the fourteenth Nagumo’s combat air patrol shot down an Allied scout. The Kido Butai (the text will use this term for all the Kondo-Nagumo forces for the moment) went looking for American carriers on its run south next day and found nothing but a tug towing a fuel barge toward Cactus. There had been an Allied convoy, but SOPAC had recalled it.

Continuing this shadow sumo bout, Japanese codebreakers recorded a high volume of Allied operational traffic, and on October 16, Rabaul added at least a dozen radio fixes on Allied ships. Aerial searches revealed a battleship group and a carrier force. With Nagumo out of position, the Eleventh Air Fleet sent out two attack units that encountered nothing but a tanker, which they hit but could not sink. Submarines supplied numerous sighting reports, establishing that Allied battleships were steaming south of Cactus. A few days later, Lieutenant Commander Tanabe Yahachi of the I-176 got close enough to attack, and his torpedoes put the U.S. cruiser Chester out of action for more than a year.

At the initiative of Kusaka Ryunosuke, the fleet tried another ploy to locate the American carriers. Kusaka imagined them lurking at the edge of Torpedo Junction. He convinced Nagumo to conduct a special search using the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma of Rear Admiral Hara’s Cruiser Division 8. These had been designed specifically as scout vessels. Carrying five floatplanes and capable of supporting more, they were ideal for work with the Kido Butai. Indeed, these cruisers had been sailing with Nagumo since Pearl Harbor. Hara had commanded carriers and knew their habits and workday cycles. For this operation his cruisers were with Abe Hiroaki’s Vanguard Force, still part of Nagumo’s command. On October 19, the Japanese carrier boss set Hara on a dash forward to the Santa Cruz islands. The Tone, screened by a single destroyer, sent aerial scouts to search. They found nothing. Admiral Abe recalled Hara when an Emily patrol bomber from Jaluit sighted a U.S. carrier near Nouméa. A few days later the Chikuma repeated the exercise in an easterly direction. Again no result.

Meanwhile the Japanese scouted Nouméa on October 19 with a floatplane from Lieutenant Commander Kobayashi Hajime’s I-19. No American carriers there. I-boats and air searches sighted battleships and cruisers but not carriers. Japanese intelligence circuits went wild, according to Allied monitors. By October 22, the Allies knew the Japanese were recording and tracking their radio call signs, and a couple of days later reported that the Imperial Navy had installed and was operating a radio direction finder on Guadalcanal itself.

The South Pacific cruise took its toll on the Imperial fleet. By October 17, Admiral Ugaki worried that the Kido Butai, running short of fuel, would be unable to maneuver. As an emergency measure one of Kondo’s tankers, emptied by the fleet, took half the oil from each of battleships Yamato and Mutsu at Truk and, after topping off from another vessel, went back out. The Japanese suffered their first important loss that day, in Kakuta’s Carrier Division 2, when a fire broke out in the generator room of his flagship, Captain Beppu Akitomo’s aircraft carrier Hiyo. Damage control extinguished the blaze, but Commander Matoba Shigehiro, Hiyo’s chief engineer, thereafter could not produce more than sixteen knots, hardly enough for a fleet engagement. Hiyo stayed in formation for the moment, but with growing strain on Matoba’s engines, on October 22 she blew out a condenser, cutting steam to some boilers. Admiral Kakuta shifted his flag to Captain Okada Tametsugu’s Junyo. Lieutenant Kaneko Tadashi led half of Hiyo’s planes to Buin, while the rest crowded onto Junyo. Escorted by destroyers, Beppu sailed Hiyo to Truk at her best speed, six knots. This loss reduced Japanese strength even before the battle.

The quandary continued. On October 22, an I-boat surfaced off Espíritu Santo before dawn and treated the SOPAC base to a rare harassing bombardment. Part of the Kido Butai refueled on October 24. In his cabin on the Shokaku, even Nagumo Chuichi chaffed. Hara Tameichi relates this scene: Puzzling over the assorted sighting reports and an American news story that mentioned expectations for imminent battle in the South Pacific, Nagumo spoke to his senior staff officer, Commander Takada Toshitane. What to do? Takada mentioned the high level of radio emissions from Allied submarines and aircraft. Nagumo asked for his chief of staff. Kusaka reported on the progress of refueling. Nagumo ordered him, once the oilers had finished, to inform the fleet that major battle impended.

A similar conversation took place on Kakuta’s flagship. Commander Okumiya Masatake, the admiral’s senior staff officer, drew attention to the date October 27—Navy Day in the United States (today annual naval festivities are part of Armed Forces Day, at that time Navy Day, dreamed up by active officers but enshrined in 1922 by the Navy League of the United States), which was celebrated on the birthday of Theodore Roosevelt, the father of the “Great White Fleet.” In conjunction with the expectations expressed in the American press, it seemed SOPAC might engage that day.

Back on the Shokaku, Commander Takada, no doubt aware of Admiral Kusaka’s views, suggested consulting Combined Fleet. Kusaka assented, but, after a few moments’ thought, turned the idea on its head, sending a dispatch that warned of a trap and recommended halting the fleet until the Army captured Henderson Field. He mentioned the idea of rescheduling to October 27. Ugaki’s return message was direct: “STRIKING FORCE WILL PROCEED QUICKLY TO THE ENEMY DIRECTION. THE OPERATION ORDERS STAND, WITHOUT CHANGE.”

Admiral Ugaki’s version of this story appears in his diary. Kusaka’s dispatch reached Yamato in the evening. Though sent before noon, it was delayed in retransmission by a relay vessel. Ugaki acknowledged that October 27 might be a better moment for battle, but the Kido Butai’s failure to attain assigned positions could endanger the entire plan. Combined Fleet sent the Army a different message declaring that if the offensive did not begin immediately, lack of fuel would require the Navy’s withdrawal. But Ugaki felt Kusaka’s eleventh-hour démarche outrageous and arbitrary. His urgent reply: “THIS COMMAND HAS THE WHOLE RESPONSIBILITY. DO NOT HESITATE OR WAVER!”

Everything hinged on the Japanese Army. Admiral Yamamoto recognized that. As they stood together on Yamato’s upper deck, he told Ugaki that the Army chief of staff must be more anxious for victory than anyone. Only the Army could actually capture Henderson Field. American bombardments and air attacks had robbed Seventeenth Army of about a third of the supplies from the high-speed convoy, and the remainder, those to sustain the fight, had to be carried by the men themselves. General Hyakutake split the Army into two detachments under his overall control. To attack along the coast, around the Matanikau, would be Major General Sumiyoshi Tadashi, the Army’s artillery commander, with two infantry regiments plus the tanks and guns. Inland, under tactical command of Sendai Division boss Lieutenant General Maruyama, the other group would make the direct attack toward Henderson Field.

The difficulties of the land slowed preparations. Except for Sumiyoshi’s men along the Matanikau, in increasingly well-known terrain, the Japanese were largely navigating by compass bearing through thick jungle. No one had surveyed Guadalcanal or produced accurate maps. And the soldiers starved. Hungry men had trouble hacking their way through the undergrowth. Rough country plus rudimentary navigation meant errors in reckoning positions. Thus Hyakutake’s postponements. To divert the Americans and keep to some semblance of the schedule, General Sumiyoshi ordered one regiment across the Matanikau to probe the Marine defenses. The unfortunate Colonel Oka led this maneuver, never intended as the main assault. On October 23 his troops tried to attack but bogged down in the jungle. At Truk, Admiral Ugaki, learning of Oka’s failure, reflected on the dishonor the colonel heaped on his regiment’s flag. Sumiyoshi’s other regiment, with the tanks, was to attack across the river as part of the main offensive, most recently scheduled that very day. But General Sumiyoshi was prostrated with malaria, and his staff never circulated the postponement notice. The attack along the Matanikau went ahead on the original schedule. It gained little—though Marine General Vandegrift indeed turned his eyes there. The Marines crushed the developing attack with 6,000 rounds of artillery fire.

Hyakutake’s main attack by Maruyama’s force had been set for nighttime. But the tactical commander found himself short of the assembly area. Chronic neuralgia also impaired Maruyama’s faculties. He pleaded for another postponement. The troops finally swung into action on October 24. This operational group divided into two wings plus a reserve. Each wing, one of them led by General Kawaguchi, comprised a reinforced regiment. Maruyama kept another regiment in reserve. They would attack up Bloody Ridge and to its right.

In U.S. Marine lore, that night through the next went down as “Dugout Sunday.” Vandegrift had made preparations too, and his forces were well fortified. With the addition of the U.S. Army 164th Infantry, Vandegrift was slightly superior in men, considerably advantaged in artillery, and now better supplied. One Japanese officer ruefully told comrades that for every shell loosed against the Americans, they answered with a hundred.

The redoubtable Chesty Puller and his battalion had redeployed to the sector Maruyama attacked. Vandegrift sent them a battalion of the green 164th Infantry, making up for a Marine unit hastily pulled away to the Matanikau. The Japanese went in. Unlike in the Matanikau sector, Maruyama had but a single mortar battalion to support him. Kawaguchi’s column wandered into the jungle and hardly participated. A fulminating Maruyama relieved Kawaguchi. Colonel Nakaguma Nomasu’s regiment bore the brunt of the fight. Their only chance lay in the fact that Puller had had to extend his line to take over the front vacated by the absent Marine battalion, and that Marine artillery had expended most of its ammunition in the Matanikau action. A spirited attack began after midnight on October 25. Puller slowly fed the 164th Infantry reinforcements into his 1/7 Marine line as the fighting progressed. Nakaguma made only a few shallow penetrations. The Japanese left almost 1,000 bodies in the barbed wire.

Following Maruyama’s attack, the Army notified the Navy that Henderson Field had been captured. Carrier planes were sent to verify this. Soon afterward, Lieutenant Funashi reported from his observation post that battle raged in Henderson’s vicinity. The situation remained obscure. Based on General Hyakutake’s instructions and the original capture claims, Admiral Mikawa initiated what was to have been the coup de grâce of the offensive—a variety of actions by several units. One was the landing of a unit called the Koli Detachment to complete the conquest of the airfields from the beach side. A group of three destroyers would also deliver fuel and bombs to the newly captured Henderson Field to enable Japanese planes to fly from it immediately. A formation of tin cans led by a light cruiser would interdict Guadalcanal waters from the west, while another did so to the east. Mikawa recalled them when aerial observers determined that the Americans still held Henderson.

But the Army begged for a naval bombardment, and Mikawa sent back three destroyers, hoping a sudden shelling might stun the Americans into relinquishing their hold. Combined Fleet ordered Rear Admiral Takama Tamotsu’s group, with light cruiser Yura and five destroyers, to back this sally, unnecessary since the Destroyer Squadron 4 leader had already reversed course for that very purpose. After daybreak, the Navy observation post reported a U.S. light cruiser in the anchorage. Two World War I–vintage tin cans, not a cruiser, actually lay off Tulagi, where they had delivered fuel and torpedoes for the PT boats and towed in four new craft. They cleared harbor once they saw the first Japanese destroyers, which gave chase and inflicted some damage. The Japanese then nearly ran down a pair of U.S. naval auxiliaries before returning to their bombardment mission. At that point shore batteries and the Cactus Air Force intervened, driving off the destroyers.

Cactus airplanes caught up to Yura. When the first bomb hit, Lieutenant Kamimura Arashi was at the engineering control station, his body vibrating as the engines strained into a high-speed turn. Kamimura staggered with a direct hit on Yura’s number three boiler room. Men in the other two were wounded by fragments. The Yura lost power, fires broke out; then more hits followed. Captain Sato Shiro ordered, “Abandon ship.” He signaled other vessels to fight to the end. Sato refused to leave, tying himself to Yura’s bridge. The sailors evacuated to destroyers. While standard accounts state the Yura had to be scuttled, Lieutenant Kamimura believed the cruiser was breaking up as her crew left.

Through the afternoon the Cactus Air Force beat off renewed JNAF attacks with more losses on both sides. But that was only a prelude for the ground battle, when General Maruyama again hit Vandegrift’s perimeter, this time with a better-prepared night attack. Chesty Puller’s Marines and the U.S. Army infantry had by now taken separate sectors, with Puller on Bloody Ridge. Maruyama hit both and committed his reserve, whose commander, as well as Maruyama’s tactical leader, Major General Nasu Yumio, were killed. The weight of the Japanese attack fell on the newly blooded 3/164, which acquitted itself well. Meanwhile, the wing formerly led by General Kawaguchi again failed to engage. On the Matanikau front, Colonel Oka launched his troops against the 2/7 Marines and succeeded in taking one hill, but they were ejected by Marine counterattacks. Although General Maruyama claimed he had penetrated the U.S. perimeter, that was an illusory result. Staff officers, including Colonel Tsuji, told Seventeenth Army the attack had failed. General Hyakutake ordered a stand-down on the morning of October 26. The Army offensive had collapsed. Navy observers reconfirmed the American hold on Henderson at 5:15 a.m. But by that time the Imperial Navy was embroiled in its own battle.

Rear Admiral Kusaka discounted Combined Fleet’s peremptory orders. In his view Ugaki was a blowhard with no battle experience, a neophyte not worth listening to. The fleet held to its routine, making the usual run south on the night of October 24. Frustration increased. In the morning Nagumo detached Rear Admiral Abe Hiroaki’s Vanguard Force to take station ahead of the carriers. Abe had battleships Hiei and Kirishima, Cruiser Divisions 7 and 8, and a destroyer squadron. Shortly after 10:00 a.m., a U.S. scout discovered the Kido Butai in position roughly 230 miles northeast of Henderson. Kusaka heard that a snooper had been downed by patrol fighters. Nagumo turned north. Carrier planes, then the Navy observation post, advised that the Americans were still at Henderson, affirmed by the bombing that cost the Yura. Unknown to Nagumo, Kinkaid had actually sent an Enterprise strike wave against him that afternoon, but with Kido Butai’s turnaway, and no tracking data, the planes found empty sea. They returned in the dark. A Wildcat plus seven TBFs and SBDs, out of gas, had to ditch.

There was no escaping Combined Fleet’s constant prodding, however. Late that afternoon, alone in the flag plot on the Shokaku, Nagumo had another heated exchange with his chief of staff. Kido Butai’s commander was ready to fight. Kusaka still advised caution. The same conversation had occurred repeatedly before staff. Admiral Nagumo had had enough of that unpleasantness. The time had come to attack without remorse. Ugaki’s latest dispatch could not be ignored. The carriers would advance. Nagumo wanted his chief of staff to decide to head south.

“I admit I’ve objected to your suggestions,” Kusaka replied, “but you are the commander and must make the final decisions.” Then the chief of staff repeated his litany: The American fleet had yet to be found; now that they themselves had been discovered, the B-17s from Espíritu Santo would surely reacquire them. If they went south they must expect things to happen. Besides, Kusaka continued, as chief of staff his place was merely to assist. Only the two men were present, staring each other down, and Nagumo Chuichi did not survive the war. Kusaka attests that Nagumo insisted. The chief of staff gave in: “It’s your battle. If you really want to head south, I’ll go along with your verdict.”

In the gathering dusk of October 25, the Kido Butai came about and set a southerly course at twenty knots. It was one of those enchanting South Pacific evenings, the night warm and the moon shining. At 9:18 p.m. the fleet received Yamamoto’s latest operations order, noting the Army’s plan to storm Henderson Field, forecasting a high probability that Allied naval forces would appear northeast of the Solomons, directing that the enemy be destroyed.

Japanese forces assumed battle dispositions (from this point the text will refer to forces individually). A hundred miles west of Nagumo, Vice Admiral Kondo steamed with his Advance Force, built around battleships Kongo and Haruna, with heavy cruisers and destroyers. Rear Admiral Kakuta maneuvered the Junyo, screened by a couple of destroyers, a few miles beyond Kondo. Rear Admiral Abe Hiroaki’s Vanguard Force, after briefly rejoining Nagumo, was posted sixty miles ahead. Abe assumed a line-abreast formation, his ships eight to ten miles apart in search mode. Sweating on the Shokaku’s flag bridge, Kusaka worked to prevent a Midway-like surprise. He arranged for morning scouts to depart Abe’s ships at 4:15 a.m., reaching the ends of their search legs at dawn. A second search wave—which Kido Butai had not bothered with at Midway—would follow. The carriers armed strike planes in momentary readiness for launch. One more advantage: Nagumo would have the weather gauge at the start, steaming directly into the wind and able to launch immediately, whereas his opponents would have to alter course in order to throw their warbirds into the air.

Like the Americans, the Imperial Navy posted mobile radio detachments aboard key fleet units. During the night, monitors informed Kondo and Nagumo of strong transmissions. Signal strength indicated proximity, so while the Japanese could not read the intercepts, they knew the emitters had to be nearby snoopers. In fact, this was a PBY piloted by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Clute of Patrol Squadron 11. Soon after midnight Clute’s radar-equipped Catalina found Abe’s Vanguard, which he reported and tracked for a time before attacking it. Clute launched two torpedoes at the destroyer Isokaze. In the darkness Clute imagined her a cruiser. Commander Toyoshima Shunichi, the destroyer skipper, saw the PBY six miles away, waited until it had committed to its drop, then went into a tight turn. Clute’s torpedoes missed. No score.

The PBY attack disturbed Nagumo, but he could draw a little comfort from the fact that it was the Vanguard, not Kido Butai, that had been sighted, though radio emissions could still be heard. Complacency disappeared at 2:50 a.m., when another snooper, Lieutenant Glen E. Hoffman’s Catalina, appeared directly over the carriers and tried her luck with four bombs. Alarm bells sounded only as the munitions fell. They missed close to starboard, spraying water on the superstructure of Captain Nomoto Tameteru’s carrier Zuikaku. On the flagship, consternation. Staff officer Takada almost fell down the ladder racing to Nagumo’s cabin to tell him the Zuikaku was safe. Nagumo and Kusaka were sitting together. Kusaka’s stomach tied up in knots. He was indignant. Nagumo looked at his chief of staff. “What you said before was true,” the admiral conceded. “Reverse course, full speed.” The Kido Butai turned through 180 degrees, increasing to twenty-four knots. The moon disappeared behind clouds, ominous, since increased darkness would make it harder to see the enemy. For an hour Kido Butai rushed defensive preparations, disarming and draining gas from the ready strike aircraft. Having carrier decks crammed with armed planes was another Midway error the Japanese were determined to avoid. But no Americans came; there would be no attack this night.

Aboard the Junyo, which received immediate notice of Nagumo’s maneuver, air officer Okumiya had the staff duty watch, and forwarded the order to Kondo’s flagship, cruiser Atago. Kondo’s and Kakuta’s forces followed suit about half an hour after the Kido Butai. Abe’s Vanguard turned north after that. The Japanese launched their dawn search as planned. The second-wave scouts left Nagumo’s carriers at 4:45 a.m., an hour before dawn. Nagumo then prepared a combat air patrol of twenty-two fighters and a strike wave of seventy planes. At that point Nagumo, Kondo, and Kakuta, plus Abe, were headed north, with the latter between Kido Butai and Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid’s Task Force 61. The Japanese were primed for battle.

At Nouméa another admiral huddled over his charts. Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, newly minted SOPAC commander, knew little about the theater and had had less than a week to learn. Halsey understood that a huge Japanese offensive impended, and he had the advantage of intelligence—which had accurately informed him that “Y-day,” the moment the enemy had picked to set off their fireworks, would be October 23. The top officers—Kelly Turner, Vandegrift, and new AIRSOLS chief Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch—had briefed Halsey on the overall situation. He recognized Guadalcanal’s crucial importance. The Allied fleet already plied Torpedo Junction. Bull Halsey did know about aircraft carriers—he reckoned their combat power increased with the square of the number—so two carriers were as strong as four single ships, and he hastened the rendezvous of the Hornet and Enterprise forces into Task Force 61 under Kinkaid. Halsey recalled, “The crescendo of the fighting ashore made it plain that the climax was rushing toward us. I thought that the twenty-fifth would precipitate it.” For a brief moment that seemed so. The Kido Butai was spotted once and that abortive air strike sent after it. But the enemy proved elusive. Halsey sent Norman Scott’s surface flotilla on a night sweep through Ironbottom Sound. Again nothing. The Bull felt in his bones that battle must be just hours away. He ordered to all his commands: “ATTACK—REPEAT—ATTACK.”

Admiral Kinkaid had already put his task force in motion toward the seas where the enemy had been sighted. He too was certain of battle. Kinkaid assigned flagship Enterprise to conduct the morning search and put up antisubmarine patrols, while the Hornet readied a strike. On the Enterprise, Air Group 10 skipper Commander John Crommelin gave his pilots a pep talk, telling them they were all that stood in the way of Japanese victory in the Pacific. He would work them to the bone, Crommelin warned; they could not afford to waste a single bomb. The crews manned their planes. Amid final aircraft checks, Kinkaid received a retransmission of Glen Hoffman’s sighting. Recalling the fiasco of the previous afternoon, he elected to await precise information before striking. The Enterprise turned into the wind, and sixteen Dauntlesses began their takeoff rolls. They were scout bombers armed with 500-pound munitions. It was 6:00 a.m. The sun was just peeking over the horizon. The SBDs struggled for altitude. They would fly in eight pairs on preselected search vectors.

Lieutenant Commander James R. (“Bucky”) Lee, boss of Scouting 10 (VS-10), gave himself the most promising sector. But first honors went to lieutenants Vivian Welch and Bruce McGraw of Bombing 10. Barely an hour from the Enterprise, both planes saw a Japanese scout pass in the opposite direction. Figuring that bird had to have a nearby roost, they pressed on. Just twenty minutes later they glimpsed warships ahead. It was Abe’s Vanguard Force. The two crews counted ships, checked, and compiled a careful contact report, tabulating two battleships, a heavy cruiser, and seven destroyers steaming north at twenty knots. They did not spot Hara’s two cruisers, which had become slightly separated from the main formation. There were no carriers. Welch and McGraw flew to the limit of their range, hoping to find Nagumo. They did not. Turning back, they overflew Abe again. Admiral Abe now ordered a northwest course and went to battle speed, thirty knots. About 6:45 a.m., two more search bombers came up and attacked, diving on Captain Kobe Yuji’s cruiser Tone. Flak from the heavy ship and her consorts threw off the SBDs’ aim, and both missed. The defenders thought they had shot the planes down. Abe’s flotilla went to battle stations. On destroyer Akigumo, Lieutenant Yamamoto Masahide noticed that the sea that morning was quiet and the sky quite beautiful.

Bucky Lee was as good as he had hoped. He and wingman Ensign William Johnson at that very moment encountered Kido Butai. Lee saw a carrier, then two—clouds covered Zuikaku—and reported them headed north-northwest at fifteen knots. Lee eventually glimpsed the third ship, but Japanese lookouts spotted him too, and fighters intercepted. If he found the carriers, Commander Lee planned to summon his scouts and attack. Instead he had to limp away, damaged, though the Dauntlesses claimed three Zeroes. But others heard Lee’s report and closed in. One pair was driven off, damaging several more Zeroes.

Another flight was the Dauntlesses piloted by Lieutenant Stockton Strong and wingman Ensign Charles Irvine. At Eastern Solomons it had been Strong who first spotted the Ryujo, and now he had John Crommelin’s words echoing in his head—no bombs to waste! He had refrained from attacking Ryujo, an act of omission that now obsessed Strong. He was a hundred miles from Bucky Lee. But the SBDs reached the position, emerging through a cloud right above light carrier Zuiho. The Americans were in the sun for Zuiho’s lookouts. Captain Obayashi Sueo’s sailors hardly saw them, and the covering Zeroes were nowhere around. Strong and Irvine dived. The flak began as they dropped through 1,500 feet; then the Zeroes came and the next minutes were hot indeed. Both planes made it to Enterprise with gas for just one landing approach. Commander Crommelin put Strong in for the Medal of Honor. He got the Navy Cross. Enterprise’s after-action report recorded the attack on a Shokaku-class carrier.

Captain Obayashi thought his gunners had gotten one of the American planes. They got him instead. Two 500-pound bombs hit Zuiho’s flight deck aft, holing it, wrecking the flak guns and the arresting gear needed to land planes. At an estimated sixteen yards in diameter, the hole was nearly as wide as her flight deck, rendering Zuiho useless as a floating airfield. This was a tremendous disappointment for Obayashi’s sailors, who had spent almost the entire war training fliers in the Inland Sea. A brief sortie with battleships, an aircraft ferry cruise to the Philippines, and the Midway operation, in which Zuiho had seen no combat, made up her entire war record. Now, in the first minutes of her first real battle, Zuiho was out of action. It was 8:30 a.m.

Admiral Kinkaid did not await his scouts’ return. His staff plotted the Japanese carriers to the west-northwest between 185 and 200 miles distant. Kinkaid increased speed to twenty-seven knots at 7:08 a.m. and altered course to close on the enemy. The first-wave strike from Hornet was halfway through its launch within a half hour, twenty bombers and torpedo planes in the formation. The Enterprise, operating independently, launched twelve strike aircraft at 7:50. Both units had Wildcats for fighter escort. The Hornet launched another wave of twenty planes, also with an escort, and evenly divided between dive-bombers and torpedo planes, about 8:15. At the moment of the Zuiho attack, these waves were already winging for Nagumo.

The Japanese were actually ahead of this curve. A Kido Butai scout filed the first sighting report at 6:50 a.m. Admiral Kusaka insisted—and Nagumo agreed—on immediate attack with overwhelming force. Nagumo ordered his strike unit aloft at 7:10 a.m. The carriers began launching immediately and had finished inside twenty minutes. Zuiho planes were in this group, as well as on patrol duty, so her damage did not prevent her contributing to the battle. Lieutenant Commander Murata Shigeharu led the whole unit, its knife edge twenty Shokaku torpedo planes and twenty-one Zuikaku dive-bombers. Zeroes from all three ships escorted them. The carriers immediately began cycling a second wave, which departed more raggedly. Lieutenant Commander Seki Mamoru led nineteen Shokaku dive-bombers off at 8:10, and Lieutenant Imajuku Jiichiro followed with sixteen Zuikaku torpedo bombers at 8:40. In addition, at 8:05 Nagumo directed Abe’s van to engage the Americans with guns.

Far to the west, Rear Admiral Kakuta ordered out his initial strike wave at 9:05. It consisted of seventeen Val dive-bombers and twelve Zero fighters under Lieutenant Shiga Yoshio.

Japanese and American strike waves passed within sight of one another as they sped toward their targets. Both sides warned their carriers of incoming aircraft. The Zuiho’s Zeroes peeled off to destroy two Enterprise TBF Avengers and shot up a couple more torpedo bombers so badly that they had to abort. Enterprise Wildcats claimed two enemy and the TBFs three more, but the strike lost its fighter escort. The Hornet wave droned on, scattered but unblooded.

Captain Charles P. Mason’s Hornet had just finished returning seven Wildcats to combat air patrol when, within minutes, Commander Murata’s planes swept in. It was 8:55. The Enterprise was luckily concealed beneath a squall. Murata went for the enemy he could see. Kinkaid’s fleet had the protection of an extremely strong combat air patrol of thirty-seven F-4F Wildcats from both carriers. They engaged as quickly as they could. Unfortunately radar operators were confused. The blip of the incoming Japanese aircraft merged on their screens with that of the outgoing U.S. strike. Radarmen remained uncertain until the enemy were only forty-five miles out—fifteen minutes at a typical cruise speed, less at battle speeds. Air controllers on the “Big E,” which had the duty, positioned interceptors low to conserve fuel. The Japanese closed from above, and very fast.

Flak was tremendous. A cruiser on every quarter ringed the Hornet, and beyond them lay a second ring of six destroyers. One light cruiser was the new antiaircraft ship Juneau. But Commander Murata, the Imperial Navy’s torpedo ace, calm and calculating, kept his pilots’ shoulders to the wheel. Captain Mason threw Hornet into a series of frantic gyrations at twenty-eight knots, putting his rudder hard over, port then starboard, hoping to throw off the enemy. The first two attackers got only near misses and were both flamed. Japanese planes kept coming. Murata’s force was nearly annihilated, losing seventeen of twenty-one Vals, sixteen of twenty Kates, and five of twelve Zeroes. But in just three minutes beginning at 9:12, the Hornet suffered several crippling bomb hits, damage from a pair of planes that crashed aboard, and two torpedo impacts to starboard. By 9:25 Mason’s ship was dead in the water, her forward engine room flooding, and fires raged on the signal bridge, the flight deck, the hangar deck, the mess, and the petty officers’ quarters. Moreover, the water mains were disabled. More than a thousand Hornet sailors formed bucket brigades, combating the flames with water, literally pail by pail.

Kinkaid’s strike formations were still winging toward the enemy. They struck within minutes of Hornet’s fight for life. Hornet’s airmen had been split up when the Japanese intervened against the strike planes. Her torpedo unit never found the enemy. Lieutenant Commander William J. (“Gus”) Widhelm’s dive-bombers came up behind the Nagumo force, which was speeding north. Shokaku’s radar actually detected them almost a hundred miles away, enabling fourteen of twenty-six patrolling fighters to intercept. But only two Dauntlesses were knocked out. Gus Widhelm also did not make it, forced to ditch when his engine gave out during the approach.

Communications experts of the Japanese mobile radio units, having identified the U.S. frequencies, came on the air to mimic American pilots, inserting false information. This was a tactic the U.S. radio units eschewed, probably because Japanese naval slang was even more difficult than the language itself—and few enough Americans were fluent in that. Santa Cruz may have been the first time the Japanese practiced this form of deception. Some American pilots were angry at colleagues for providing bogus information, until they worked out that none of them had talked the talk. Nevertheless the enemy’s radio deception had only marginal impact.

Eleven Hornet SBDs reached the carriers, and the key punches were thrown by Lieutenant James E. Vose Jr.’s flight. Five planes pushed over above Shokaku about 9:27 a.m. Captain Arima Masafumi evaded some bombs, but three struck her flight deck from midships aft, smashing guns and damaging the hangar deck. In the flattop’s wake was Hara Tameichi’s Amatsukaze, which had stopped briefly to rescue two ditched airmen. Hara, who had been with Ryujo when she was crippled at Eastern Solomons, was horrified. He felt the Ryujo had been a second-string warship, but Shokaku was strictly first-team, with expert crew and a crack air group. How she could succumb so easily mystified him.

Twenty minutes later Admiral Nagumo sent a dispatch bearing the grim news but also some hope. Kido Butai was headed northwest, with Zuiho on fire and both she and Shokaku unable to handle aircraft. On the other hand, the task force leader added, an American carrier was also on fire. Not long afterward, with Shokaku’s communications failing, destroyer Arashi, then carrier Zuikaku took over as focal points for task force message traffic.

Meanwhile the Enterprise attack force also sought big game. Reduced to five Avengers and three Dauntlesses, plus escort, by the midcourse firefight, Commander Richard K. Gaines winged past Admiral Hara’s small Tone group, then eyed the Vanguard Force in the distance. Hoping it contained carriers, Gaines continued, found it did not, and flew beyond that. Short of fuel, Gaines turned back to hit the Vanguard. Abe’s ships had formidable defenses, in all seventy-six heavy flak guns, ninety light weapons, and the main batteries of the big ships. Destroyer Isokaze, then battleship Kirishima, were the first to sight the enemy. Abe had gone to flank speed, making thirty-three knots.

Avenger torpedo bombers assaulted heavy cruiser Suzuya, identifying her as a Kirishima-class battleship. Captain Kimura Masatomi ordered his main battery into action. Big guns split the sky with two dozen eight-inch rounds. Kimura began to weave his ship. All his AA guns spoke, firing ninety-seven five-inch shells and 921 25mm bullets during the fight, over in just seven minutes. The Suzuya ceased fire at 9:38. The American torpedoes missed, though Ensign Evan K. Williams would be awarded the Navy Cross for his bravery in the attack.

A second Hornet strike group followed a few minutes behind the Enterprise planes. This comprised nine SBD Dauntlesses and ten TBF Avengers under Commander Walter F. Rodee. The torpedo bombers attacked cruiser Tone, wearing Admiral Hara’s flag. Captain Kobe fought hard, claiming two Avengers. The Japanese saw only half the TBFs launch their torpedoes, and all were avoided. Two sailors were slightly wounded. Against this attack the Tone expended 112 eight-inch and 220 five-inch shells, plus 4,075 25mm rounds.

In the most sustained American air attack of the day, between 9:26 and 9:51 Dauntlesses plastered Captain Komura Keizo’s Chikuma in two matches. Lookouts began spotting U.S. planes shortly after 9:00 a.m. Komura engaged with his main battery. First in were nine Hornet SBDs led by lieutenants John Lynch and Edgar Stebbins. Americans hit with a 1,000-pound bomb on the port wing of the bridge, wrecking the main battery director at 9:26. The ship immediately began to list. Standing next to the compass, Captain Komura fell backward at the sudden incline. A young ensign, Ogawa, stood behind him. As Komura fell, Ensign Ogawa was hit by a shell splinter. Had he not been there the captain would have been killed. Komura was wounded nonetheless. Ogawa died from his wounds late that night. The executive officer was killed too. Komura ordered torpedoes jettisoned just before another bomb struck Chikuma’s starboard torpedo room. Next came several Enterprise SBDs under Lieutenant (Junior Grade) George Estes. They made near misses, one of which destroyed a Jake floatplane on its catapult. Frantically defending themselves, Chikuma sailors counted twenty-one attack planes, while observers elsewhere in the Vanguard recorded as many as forty or fifty. Some 190 sailors were killed and 154 wounded. Chikuma expended seventy-seven eight-inch and 353 five-inch shells. Her light flak spit out 1,805 25mm rounds.

From the Tone, Admiral Hara could see considerable damage to Chikuma’s foremast and afterdeck. The ship reported boiler room trouble, and the damage itself hindered communications. At 10:25 Hara sent a flag signal reporting what he knew about the Chikuma to Abe, recommending she withdraw to Truk under escort. Twenty-five minutes later the Vanguard commander approved Chikuma’s departure and instructed destroyers Tanikaze and Urakaze to accompany her. She left at twenty-three knots, now her best speed, at 11:08 a.m.

For the Japanese this was the time of decision. Over the next hours a series of choices set a new phase of the Battle of Santa Cruz. At 11:00 a.m., Admiral Kondo returned Kakuta’s carrier Junyo to Kido Butai’s tactical control. Both Kakuta and Kondo were proceeding generally northeast now, toward the carrier task force. By 10:55 the Japanese knew of two U.S. carriers, in separate groups, and that one was crippled. They had yet to confuse themselves with a “third” flattop—actually the stricken Hornet. Shokaku and Zuiho were leaving the battle zone. Admiral Nagumo was out of the picture. The Zuikaku remained undamaged and at 11:15 took over as communications ship for Kido Butai. The Japanese fleet retained two effective aircraft carriers against one American, and Junyo was prepared to launch a second attack unit. Abe’s Vanguard steamed east at twenty-six knots in a surface foray. The outcome now hung on the most minute factors: on split-second timing and sudden opportunity.

On the flag bridge of the Enterprise, Tom Kinkaid faced important decisions of his own. The “Big E’s” task group, a dozen miles from Hornet’s, could only watch. When the other flattop got hit, Admiral Kinkaid lost direct communication. He could see the towering plume of smoke—obvious and ominous—but knew not what it meant. At 9:41 he called the Hornet group’s escort boss, Rear Admiral Howard H. Good, to ask whether Enterprise needed to land the other carrier’s aircraft. That was when Kinkaid learned that Task Force 61 was in dire straits. The immediate question became whether to continue to close with the enemy. Every minute counted, and half his offensive firepower was dead in the water, burning. At this point Kinkaid thought that the Japanese were down one Shokaku-class carrier (the mistakenly identified Zuiho), but U.S. strike aircraft had yet to inform him of their other results. Intelligence had repeatedly referred to two big Jap carriers, and morning searches had found two, plus a light carrier. The Japanese Junyo had not been seen by any Allied search nor identified in intelligence. On the other hand, the Imperial Navy had powerful surface forces, which the admiral understood were headed north but that could bear down on him at any moment.

Kinkaid chose to play a waiting game. He swung the Enterprise group to a southeast course at twenty-seven knots. He then altered to the southwest so as not to open the range too much for returning aircraft—and from the distressed Hornet. For a time he would be nearby, and she might recover. The picture would also clarify once he learned more of the strike results. At 9:49 he informed SOPAC of the damaged Hornet. Bull Halsey’s reply was immediate: “OPERATE FROM AND IN POSITIONS FROM WHICH YOU CAN STRIKE QUICKLY AND EFFECTIVELY. WE MUST USE EVERYTHING WE HAVE TO THE LIMIT.”

That was the intention. Captain Osborne B. Hardison, the “Big E’s” skipper, advised sending an unescorted strike, launched whenever possible with everything available—at that time just ten Dauntlesses. But the Enterprise faced huge challenges. There were not just Hornet’s planes to land, and returning aircraft to recover; there were also the combat air patrol fighters to be landed, refueled, and returned to the air. Even before radioing Halsey, Kinkaid had twice been warned of new attackers approaching. The carrier’s mobile radio unit under Marine Major Bankston T. Holcomb told him of Japanese radio chatter. The enemy duly appeared on radar at 9:53 about forty-five miles away. Based on more of Holcomb’s information, Admiral Kinkaid ordered a west-southwest course. Throughout the day radio intelligence continued intercepting messages, some heard as far away as FRUMEL, others at FRUPAC. These were the JNAF contact reports.

The warnings were of Lieutenant Commander Seki Mamoru’s group of nineteen Val dive-bombers from the Shokaku. Seki immediately saw the Hornet, but the Kido Butai had already broadcast notices of two American carriers, so he lingered, to be rewarded at 10:00 a.m. with sight of the Enterprise. Commander Seki ordered his attack eight minutes later. Of the twenty-one Wildcats then on patrol, only eight were at medium altitude; the others circled low, probably to catch torpedo bombers. While Seki had no aircraft of that sort, there was a torpedo incident—a fish broke free of an Avenger forced to ditch, and the torpedo went active, circled, and hit the destroyer Porter, which had stopped to rescue the aircrew. Just two fighters managed to engage the Vals before they attacked, and only one Japanese was lost before diving. Wildcats desperately stuck to some of the bombers as they dropped, and got more of them, but could not disrupt the attack.

Enterprise had her own ring of protective warships. They included the fast battleship South Dakota, the new AA cruiser San Juan, heavy cruiser Portland, and seven destroyers in addition to the Porter. Seki positioned his aircraft to attack from up-sun and led the charge. His plane, smashed to pieces by intense flak, crashed into the water, Seki’s bomb a near miss. Under the lash of the dive-bombers, Captain Hardison maneuvered expertly, and the next half dozen all missed. Then came a glancing hit, a 250-pound bomb that punched through the “Big E’s” flight deck forward and exploded in front of the bow. A second bomb impacted less than a dozen feet behind the number one elevator, triggering an explosion and fires on the hangar deck and exploding on the second deck, where it wiped out a damage control party and started a blaze in the elevator shaft. Finally, a near miss shook the Enterprise and opened some of her plates, leaking seawater into the ship. Lieutenant Arima Keiichi, a flight leader in Seki’s squadron, led his planes into the dive, releasing bombs a minute after pushing over, at about 550 feet. Arima was not certain the carrier they attacked was the Enterprise, but he could see her wake churning. Hornet, dead in the water, could not have been Arima’s target. With Seki, Arima had been in the strike that damaged the Enterprise at Eastern Solomons. This time too, at great cost, that goal was achieved. Commander Seki and nine crews were lost, but by 10:20 a.m., “Big E” was afire, with an elevator damaged.

Only fifteen minutes later, Enterprise radar detected another enemy wave, sixteen Zuikaku Kates under Lieutenant Imajuku. They approached a weakened combat air patrol, some of which was nearly out of ammunition. Controllers divined that Imajuku’s were torpedo planes and positioned the interceptors accordingly. Captain Hardison’s adroit ship handling prevented the attacks, fiercely driven home, from connecting. Two Japanese planes went for battleship South Dakota without success, and Seaman Kiyomi Takei crash-dived the destroyer Smith, wrecking her bow and igniting a fearsome blaze. Eight Kates including Imajuku’s were torched without touching the carrier, although toward the end of her violent maneuvers the Enterprise’s radar antenna seized up. The only real damage was to destroyer Smith, and that would have an importance we will return to later. It was 10:52 a.m.

Despite defensive success, the “Big E” had been damaged. The status of the number one elevator was uncertain and the air gang dared not use it. The number two elevator jammed in the down position for some moments, sending shivers through the crew. The Enterprise resumed limited flight operations at 11:35. By that time the combat air patrol was virtually nil and the radar only just coming back online. When it did, the scope registered a blip just twenty miles away. It was Lieutenant Shingo’s seventeen-plane strike from the Junyo. More wild gyrations, intense flak, more desperate fighter engagements. Six dive-bombers dropped on the Enterprise, scoring one very near miss (ten feet from her side) that sprang new leaks. Listening to the radio feed on the Junyo, an officer shouted with joy. Admiral Kakuta turned to staff officer Okumiya and smiled. “Our men have become quite proficient,” Kakuta enthused. “The ship functions as a team. Perhaps we shall compensate for Midway.”

Several Junyo bombers dived on Captain Thomas L. Gatch’s battleship South Dakota. Though she was struck with only 250-pound bombs, a direct hit on her number one turret shook its roller-bearing track, wounded Gatch, and momentarily disrupted steering, sending the warship careening through the flotilla. While this hit is recorded as having caused little damage, in actuality it put three sixteen-inch guns out of action. A month later, at a crucial naval battle, the South Dakota could not use this turret. The San Juan, also bombed, leaked from near misses and briefly lost steering control.

The after-action reports of Enterprise and Hornet attest to the incredible bravery and skill of sailors on both ships. Crews fought potentially fatal fires and made imaginative repairs. The Enterprise managed to resume air activity—crucial, since no fewer than seventy-two airplanes were orbiting her, hoping to land. She recovered planes until the entire flight deck filled up, then cleared them before resuming. At 12:25 handlers started pumping gas again; at 12:51 they sent off fresh patrol fighters. But refugee aircraft were waiting to land as late as 12:40, and some had to ditch. Later the “Big E” sent thirteen SBDs to Espíritu Santo just to get them off the ship. By the end Enterprise had aboard some forty-one F-4Fs, thirty-three SBDs, and ten TBFs, a number unflyable. Loss of the elevator inevitably slowed down flight operations.

Despite some success, Admiral Kinkaid could not escape the realization that the Enterprise had become the only American aircraft carrier in the Pacific. She could no longer be risked. At 11:35 Kinkaid ordered a southwest course toward safety. An hour later Task Force 61 shifted course and increased to twenty-seven knots. The “Big E” secured from general quarters at 5:37 p.m. Damage was more serious than thought. Two near misses had sprung rivets or deflected plates—in places as much as two and a half feet inward—opening fuel tanks to the sea over almost a hundred feet of hull. In one area all the frames, floors, and bulkheads had buckled. Leaks threatened to become serious. Her stem was laced with fragment holes, a few up to a foot wide, and she was taking water, down four feet by the bow. On the hangar deck the floor of a fifty-foot section near the number one elevator was heavily damaged and the decks below blown out. Two bomb hoists were questionable. The bridge gyroscope had failed. Several radios and a direction-finding loop were out. Some of these repairs could be done only in port. Although she was launching and recovering aircraft, the carrier was not battleworthy. In a renewed engagement Enterprise would have been gravely disadvantaged. Even high waves might threaten her seaworthiness. Kinkaid’s message offering a fuller description of the damage went out almost simultaneously with SOPAC orders where Halsey instructed him to retire.

The Bull sent another dispatch, “MOST SECRET,” to Admiral Chester Nimitz. Kinkaid’s task force had yet to reach Nouméa. In his message Halsey asked for help—one or more British aircraft carriers to be sent to the South Pacific. At Pearl Harbor, Nimitz agreed. The CINCPAC forwarded Halsey’s appeal to COMINCH, to Ernie King, on an urgent basis. The United States should beg Great Britain for the loan of Royal Navy aircraft carriers. A second Nimitz dispatch went to Bull Halsey: SOPAC should prepare a coordinated defense plan for its rear bases. At Pearl Harbor they appreciated the severity of the South Pacific situation.

Bull Halsey might send messages, but so too could Yamamoto Isoroku. The portents were good at Truk, where the weather was fair and Combined Fleet staff woke up to initial reports of the Americans spotted. Admiral Ugaki considered that most factors favored his side and expected a daylong battle. With confusing search reports plus the Hornet’s success at putting out her fires, staff soon thought the Americans had three carriers, but then believed two disabled, leaving just one, against two Japanese. Later, staff settled on the illusion that there were four U.S. carriers and would eventually report that number as sunk. That fantasy would not be dispelled until battle commanders returned and their accounts were compared. But the notional third American carrier unduly influenced Japanese decisions.

Meanwhile, on its northerly heading the Kido Butai would soon be more than 300 miles from the Americans. A staffer’s comment that this distance should favor Japanese aircraft, which had longer ranges, provoked Ugaki, who wanted to shout at him, “Damn fool!” Instead the chief of staff demanded a strictly worded attack order. At 1:00 p.m. Combined Fleet cabled, no doubt on the basis of radio fixes, that the enemy was retiring southwest, seriously damaged. Yamamoto ordered Kondo to take the Abe force too and pursue the enemy.

Kondo’s Advance Force was already headed in that direction, having shifted to east of south, then to the southeast. At that point Kondo was about 260 miles from Kinkaid’s noontime position. Admiral Abe’s Vanguard Force was closer. Abe put up a pair of floatplanes to report on the Americans at 1:18 p.m. Twelve minutes later Kondo instructed Abe to shift east-southeast and advance, using his planes to discover and track the Americans. The Imperial Navy’s gunnery ships were hard on Kinkaid’s trail.

The Japanese flattops were also on the move. Captain Nomoto Tameteru led the rump of Kido Butai around to the southeast at 1:30. Nomoto had his Zuikaku, the heavy cruiser Kumano, and four destroyers. He was running on sheer adrenaline, having been continuously on the bridge of his carrier for more than two days. At 1:11 Zuikaku put another strike into the air with seven Kates, two Vals, and five Zeroes. Like the “Big E,” Zuikaku had to land aircraft from all the departed flattops. Once the planes landed it became a question of which were still usable. Many returning aircraft were badly shot up. Lieutenant Arima, for example, landed aboard with his Shokaku-based dive-bomber. It was damaged, but Arima felt he could have flown again if necessary. Pressures mounted on Captain Nomoto, a twenty-six-year Navy veteran, and his air officer, Commander Matsumoto Makoto. Zuikaku was the only operational carrier left from Nagumo’s original force. In the end Nomoto’s midafternoon strike would be Zuikaku’s last. Admiral Nagumo had been unable to transfer off the Shokaku due to the need to get that wounded ship out of the danger zone as quickly as possible. She could not stop to put off Nagumo until at least out of Cactus air range.

Similar scenes took place on carrier Junyo. Shortly after 1:00 p.m., Rear Admiral Kakuta reported launching a strike wave of seven torpedo planes and eight fighters. Soon afterward the survivors of her own first strike began returning, lurching above the waves, so low Junyo’s radar never detected them. Only the Zeroes flew formation. Just a half dozen dive-bombers appeared. Other planes, again like the Americans, had to ditch. Japanese destroyers did a brisk business in rescues. The Akigumo stopped to take on board a man who waved very energetically. He turned out to be an Etajima classmate of her chief engineer, Lieutenant Yamamoto Masahide.

As on Nomoto’s flattop, the planes were shot up, but Admiral Kakuta wanted another attack. He sent Commander Okumiya to the flight deck to see which could fly. Okumiya found six Vals and nine Zeroes in reasonable shape, whereupon Captain Okada, Junyo’s skipper, ordered them armed. Beyond the question of aircraft came the matter of pilots. In the Junyo’s ready room a scene occurred that must have figured in the dreams of many World War II pilots. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Kato Shunko, a big, jovial fellow who was among the best-liked men in the air group, wanted no more part of the hellish American defenses. Kato jumped from his seat, exclaiming, “Again? Am I to fly again today?” Commander Okumiya felt embarrassed. As senior staff officer he would stay behind, safe. Group leader Shiga Yoshio intervened. “This is war! There can be no rest in our fight against the enemy.” Lieutenant Shiga added, “We cannot afford to give them a chance when their ships are crippled. Otherwise we will face the same ships again. We have no choice.” Kato relented. Both pilots would return safely, and Kato’s bomber flight scored another hit on the Hornet.

Meanwhile the Hornet restored some power, hoping to get under way—crucial, since an attempt to tow her failed. Her bucket brigades had prevented the fires from getting out of control, and chemical foam began to contain them. Destroyers Morris and Russell hove alongside and strung fire hoses, and then Hornet sailors really quelled the blazes. Commander Edward P. Crehan, chief engineer, decided several boilers could be relit and, by rerouting steam, might work the turbine of at least one shaft. Cruiser Northampton got a towline across and began to pull. The line parted but the Hornet moved, at least for a time. Combined with the disappearance of fires, this confused the next shift of Japanese scouts, who began reporting a third U.S. carrier. However, there could be no doubt the flattop had been stricken. Rear Admiral George D. Murray, the force commander, shifted his flag to heavy cruiser Pensacola at noon. A couple of hours later Captain Mason reluctantly decided Hornet was endangered, ordering all but essential sailors off the ship. Almost 900 seamen decamped to destroyers. Gradual flooding continued, and Hornet began to list. Mason warned his remaining men to prepare to leave.

Coxwain Richard J. Nowatzki was among the damage control party, his battle station as a sight setter on the aftermost starboard-side five-inch antiaircraft mount. Once the initial evacuation had been completed, shortly before 3:00 p.m., Nowatzki was among the team struggling to save the ship. A new towline rigged, the carrier slowly began moving. Thus the Hornet’s brave crew fooled Japanese pilots that afternoon. Their next onslaught came soon after. The Americans had been so successful at fighting Hornet’s wounds the JNAF crews thought they were socking a fresh U.S. flattop. Gathering clouds contributed to their confusion. Coxwain Nowatzki could see the Japanese planes line up to attack. The Zuikaku fliers, according to Nowatzki, and confirmed by the log of the light cruiser San Diego, obtained two further torpedo strikes, a solid heavy bomb hit, and another near miss; the Junyo’s two attacks scored additional bomb hits. The torpedoes were decisive. The ship righted momentarily, then listed even more extremely to starboard. Hornet began to flood more rapidly. The new blitz forced Admiral Murray to abandon his latest attempt at a tow. With the extreme list the blood of dead and injured sailors pooled on the deck, coursed through the gun tubs, and poured into the sea. Coxwain Nowatzki could see sharks circling below. The sailor and his mates agreed that if they had to go overboard it would not be on that side. Remaining crew began to abandon ship shortly after 4:30. Captain Mason finally left the bridge. By dark all surviving crew were taken off. Some 111 sailors died.

Meanwhile Admiral Kakuta’s Carrier Division 2 united with Captain Nomoto’s Zuikaku, and Kakuta assumed command. At midafternoon the Imperial Navy again had a functional carrier task force. After recovery of the last planes that night, the strength available to Kakuta’s Kido Butai would be twenty-five torpedo planes, twenty-two dive-bombers, and fifty fighters. Kakuta’s two carriers were untouched. Their only opposition, the Enterprise, was in a damaged condition that impaired her fighting ability. For all practical purposes, by the late afternoon of October 26, 1942, the Imperial Navy had the only effective carrier force in the South Pacific.

It could have been worse. Commentators, if not veterans, have long belittled the Imperial Navy’s proclivity for dividing its forces into many detachments. The intense Japanese focus on surface warfare in the face of the growing primacy of airpower has also been derided. And impediments to the Imperial Navy’s performance due to its traditionalist doctrine have been noted. But the detachments had specific tactical roles. That of the Advance Force was to dash ahead and crush the enemy with guns. At Eastern Solomons that maneuver had been carried out, but fizzled because the Americans had left. At Santa Cruz the traditionalist Japanese might have succeeded—they had this one glittering opportunity—in putting U.S. carriers under battleship guns. The pursuit phase of Santa Cruz bears instructive lessons. The main actors, as at Eastern Solomons, were Kondo Nobutake and his Advance Force, along with Abe Hiroaki and the Vanguard. Both had battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.

Japanese sailors missed their first opening early. Until afternoon Admiral Abe had been under Nagumo’s command, and he had ordered Abe forward for a surface attack at 8:05 a.m. At that time Kinkaid’s staff placed the Kido Butai 185 to 200 miles from Kinkaid, and the Allied fleet was headed for the Japanese at twenty-seven knots. Kinkaid did not withdraw until 11:35. With Kinkaid’s turn into the wind to launch, plus various defensive maneuvers, however, the fleet essentially halted its forward movement at or about 8:30, without being too precise, and continued in the general area. The air attacks on several of his heavy ships delayed Abe, yet he might have gained about fifty miles before Kinkaid’s retreat. By 11:30 the Vanguard could have been within about a hundred miles of Task Force 61. Abe’s tardiness wasted that opportunity.

Naturally the carrier action tended to absorb admirals’ attention, so perhaps not too much should be made of this, but at 1:00 p.m. Yamamoto reinvigorated the pursuit, putting Admiral Kondo in charge and Abe under command. Kondo’s original operations order had directed him to attain striking distance of the Allies so as to “apprehend and annihilate any powerful forces in the Solomons area as well as any reinforcements.” Kondo had not done much about this so far. What he would do once Yamamoto spurred him remained to be seen. By now Kinkaid had gained some running room, being roughly 240 miles distant from Kondo’s Advance Force and less than 200 from Abe. But the Japanese had ships capable of thirty-four knots, and anything that slowed Kinkaid could have been fatal. His headlong retreat, apart from anything else, would increase the Enterprise’s seaworthiness difficulties. Kinkaid might not have been able to sustain flank speed without endangering the “Big E.” As it was, the Japanese gained twenty to forty miles by late afternoon.

Allied intelligence potentially contributed to the problem with its estimates of just two Japanese carriers. Kinkaid believed from scouts and intercepts that both were crippled. A belief that the enemy air threat had been eliminated suggested Kinkaid could take his time nursing damaged warships, favoring a determined Japanese pursuit. Bull Halsey’s order summoning Kinkaid home to base helped the admiral escape such a temptation.

At this point Japanese confusion over the “third carrier”—still Hornet—reveals its true importance. Scouts kept touch with the Hornet rather than flying the full search legs that would have disclosed Task Force 61’s presence. The Kido Butai afternoon strikes went for the third carrier instead of Kinkaid. No doubt Admiral Kondo also found distasteful the idea of a long stern chase taking him constantly nearer to SOPAC’s Espíritu Santo–based aircraft. On the other hand, Kondo and Abe had both been frustrated by their fruitless surface attack missions at Eastern Solomons, and this time they might have been expected to display more dash. Kondo Nobutake kept his silence, but he is recorded as saying of Santa Cruz, “I got the impression that…when two different fleets were combined, the commanding officer of the main task force should be assigned to take the responsibility [for] both.” Use of the term “task force,” which for the Japanese always denoted an aircraft carrier group, suggests that Kondo felt Nagumo should have had command. But Nagumo was absent. There was no one but the Advance Force leader. From his perspective, Hara Tameichi writes that Kondo “made only a halfhearted advance” and that Abe proved “too cautious.” Just so.

In the end there was a pursuit—focused on the third carrier. The Vanguard Force took the lead. At 2:00 p.m., aware there could be no immediate surface action, Abe had his crews secure from battle stations. Nevertheless, at 2:30 the Vanguard cruisers were making thirty knots and on twenty minutes’ notice for flank speed. At 2:41 Kondo ordered night action preparations. Little more than a half hour later a scout reported an enemy flattop minimally under way—more grist for the third-carrier fantasy. Light cruiser Nagara put up a floatplane at 4:30 intended as a spotter for night combat. The scout proceeded to Hornet’s position. Only then—more than two hours later—did it begin searching to the south. Meanwhile, at 5:00 p.m., the Kondo and Abe forces rendezvoused, with the Vanguard taking station a dozen miles from the Advance Force. The two units began assuming night battle formation ten minutes later. Vice Admiral Kondo had now assembled a powerful surface fleet of four battleships, six heavy and two light cruisers, plus fifteen destroyers. By sunset Kondo had closed to within sixty miles of the “third carrier.”

There were some misgivings at Truk. Chief of staff Ugaki ruminated that prewar exercises established that unless the adversary was nearby and close contact cemented before dark, a night action against an enemy retiring at high speed always failed. In this instance Yamamoto apparently overruled Ugaki. His dispatch to the fleet at 7:05 noted that the “largest part” of the Americans near the Santa Cruz islands had been destroyed. Allied ships—including “capital ships”—might well be in the area rescuing survivors. “THE COMBINED FLEET WILL ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THESE FORCES.” Kondo should conduct a night battle or, if circumstances required, a dawn engagement.

In actuality the enemy was the derelict Hornet. By this time tin cans Mustin and Anderson were frantically trying to sink the flattop themselves. Captain Mason of the carrier stood on the Mustin’s bridge next to her skipper, Commander Wallis F. Petersen. First they tried torpedoes, launching an incredible sixteen fish at the carrier. More than half hit. Hornet still floated. Then came gunfire, 130 five-inch shells into the ship. When that did not work, the destroyers shot everything they had, 300 rounds of main battery and even flak guns. The Hornet blazed from stem to stern but would not go under. That was when Petersen saw pagoda masts and realized Japanese warships were upon them. He retreated posthaste. Commander Petersen was given the Navy Cross for keeping his ships in harm’s way to perform this hazardous task.

The heavy cruiser Suzuya, wearing Rear Admiral Nishimura Shoji’s Cruiser Division 7 flag, was the first to spot smoke on the horizon. By 9:30 p.m. the Suzuya could actually see the burning American carrier. Also on the scene was Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo, leading Kondo’s battlewagons from the Kongo. Both Kurita and the ship’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Ukita, remembered watching the blazing flattop. Not far away, Rear Admiral Kakuta’s Kido Butai saw the horizon lit by Hornet’s flames. Japanese commanders briefly debated how they might get a towline on the carrier and pull her to Japan, but they dared not approach to rig one. Instead, after midnight, destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo put four of their own torpedoes into the flattop. The Hornet disappeared beneath the waves. She remains the only fleet carrier ever sunk by surface torpedo attack—although, of course, that credit needs to be shared with many JNAF airmen as well as Japanese and American gunners and torpedomen. Aboard the Akigumo, Lieutenant Yamamoto recalled the crew’s dismay when the fleet was recalled instead of continuing the pursuit.

This episode marked the end of the Battle of Santa Cruz. The destroyers of Abe’s van, it might be noted, were down to 30 percent fuel at this moment. Yet he and Kondo remained in the area through the next afternoon, searching for downed fliers or enemy ships. A few American aircrew were among those rescued. Meanwhile Vice Admiral Nagumo finally managed to transfer to the destroyer Arashi at 7:30 that night, and resumed command of Kido Butai when he reached the Zuikaku at 3:30 p.m. on October 27, America’s Navy Day. Early that morning Combined Fleet C-in-C Yamamoto issued orders that, if searches proved negative, the Kondo fleet should return to Truk at its convenience. On the Allied side there were a few final ignominies. The destroyer Mahan and the battleship South Dakota collided while evading a supposed I-boat. A real submarine, Commander Ishikawa Nobuo’s I-15, got in a potshot at the Allies’ other battleship, the Washington, but the torpedo did not touch her.

Hirohito’s imperial rescript after the battle read, “The Combined Fleet is at present striking heavy blows at the enemy Fleet in the South Pacific Ocean. We are deeply gratified. I charge each of you to exert yourselves to the utmost in all things toward this critical turning point in the war.” Hirohito added that he believed the situation critical, and regretted the loss of fliers, seamen, and soldiers.

Admiral Kinkaid joined a lengthening list of those on both sides who overestimated their battle results. Assembling exaggerated reports from his aviators, Kinkaid forwarded to Pearl Harbor an impressive summary of damage, starting with two Shokaku-class fleet carriers (one hit with two bombs, the other four to six). The list continued with two bomb hits on a Kongo-class battleship, bomb hits to both Tone-class cruisers (four on one, five on the other), three torpedo strikes on a Nachi-class heavy cruiser, and a bomb on an unidentified light cruiser. An Atago-class heavy cruiser was listed for possible hits by both bombs and torpedoes. For a couple of days after the battle, CINCPAC and COMINCH alike continued reporting the enemy fleet carriers eliminated. Radio traffic analysis soon revealed these results to be illusory. In reality the Shokaku, Zuiho, and Chikuma were the only warships touched in the battle. None sank. Yura, the only Japanese warship destroyed, was lost off Guadalcanal and did not even figure in Kinkaid’s Santa Cruz tally.

After the war, Americans interrogating Imperial Navy veterans went to some lengths to induce them to concede Santa Cruz a defeat. They were unsuccessful. The instances of American veterans, observers, and historians arguing that the U.S. fleet obtained a victory here—some have even claimed it a strategic victory—is remarkable. Those who advance such arguments base themselves either on the continued Allied hold on Guadalcanal or on the heavy losses among Japanese airmen. Some Japanese, such as submarine commander Orita Zenji, fault the Imperial Navy for not carrying out its offensive in September, when the force balance favored Japan even more. But the naval action aimed to facilitate a land battle, and in the earlier time frame the Japanese Army had yet to prepare their big offensive.

By any reasonable measure the Battle of Santa Cruz marked a Japanese victory—and a strategic one. At its end the Imperial Navy possessed the only operational carrier force in the Pacific. The Japanese had sunk more ships and more combat tonnage, had more aircraft remaining, and were in physical possession of the battle zone. SOPAC was rushing to coordinate defense plans for its New Hebrides bases, desperately trying to repair the only aircraft carrier it had left, and begging for the loan of a British warship of this type. Sinking another U.S. aircraft carrier by surface torpedo attack (German battlecruisers had dispatched the British Glorious with guns in 1940) was also a notable achievement. Arguments based on aircrew losses or who owned Guadalcanal are about something else—the campaign, not the battle. Disputes over Santa Cruz are sterile. The more important story of the following days and weeks is of how the Imperial Navy squandered this hard-won victory.

One clue is furnished by an episode at Nouméa. With the ship damaged, Enterprise’s air group went to Henderson Field, eventually returning. Thomas Powell was an enlisted seaman and a gunner on an SBD of Scouting 10. At Nouméa the airmen, now grungy, were issued fresh uniforms, but the only stocks available were officers’ khakis, not seamen’s blues. So Powell looked like an officer when he got to the pier to go out to “Big E.” Admiral Kinkaid’s barge, the only boat at the dock, took the sailors aboard. Thinking them officers, Kinkaid invited those in khakis to sit with him in the stern sheets. The admiral proceeded to tell these “officers,” including Powell, that they ought not to be so unhappy with the tragic losses, at least those on the destroyer Smith. When a Japanese plane crashed aboard her, Kinkaid explained, its impact had thrown clear the bodies of the enemy pilot and his radioman, and one of them bore a copy of the current Japanese aircraft code. Bull Halsey and his cohorts were about to use that codebook to their great advantage.