Guadalcanal Begins: Pacific War Turns at Last

American and Japanese warships collided in the pitch-black waters off Guadalcanal in one of the most chaotic and violent naval engagements of the Pacific War. The three-day Naval Battle of Guadalcanal became the decisive clash that broke Japan's ability to contest the strategically vital Solomon Islands, shifting the momentum of the entire Pacific theater. By November 1942, Guadalcanal had become a grinding attritional struggle. U.S. Marines had seized the island's airfield in August, but Japan was determined to take it back. The Imperial Japanese Navy assembled a powerful force including two battleships, a cruiser squadron, and eleven transport ships carrying 7,000 reinforcements. Their mission was to bombard Henderson Field into rubble and land fresh troops to overwhelm the exhausted American garrison. The first night action on November 13 was a close-range brawl fought at distances sometimes under a thousand yards. Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan led a cruiser force directly into the Japanese formation in near-total darkness. The result was a confused melee where ships from both sides fired on their own vessels. Callaghan and Rear Admiral Norman Scott were both killed. The Americans lost two cruisers and four destroyers, but they turned back the bombardment force and saved Henderson Field. Two nights later, the battleship USS Washington settled the matter. In a devastating 7-minute barrage, Washington's 16-inch guns wrecked the Japanese battleship Kirishima, which capsized and sank. American aircraft from Henderson Field then destroyed seven of the eleven Japanese transports, leaving thousands of reinforcements stranded on beached hulks.