Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesFriday, November 13
From the desk
Start with 1942: at 01:48 off Guadalcanal, the battleship Hiei and the destroyer Akatsuki switched on searchlights and lit the cruiser Atlanta from 3,000 yards. Within minutes, Callaghan's thirteen ships and Abe's fleet were firing at point-blank range in a moonless dark. Worth a longer look is 1775, when Guy Carleton barely escaped Montreal as winds delayed his fleet and Montgomery's troops closed in. For a short read, try 1956, when the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling against Montgomery's bus segregation, five weeks before the boycott ended.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1942Featured · This day in history
Searchlights snap on at 3,000 yards, and a night battle breaks out off Guadalcanal
Shortly after 01:25 on November 13, 1942, Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe's force of two battleships, a light cruiser and eleven destroyers slipped into the sound from the west side of Savo Island, to bombard Henderson Field. Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan's thirteen American ships were already in the sound when, at 01:48, the destroyer Akatsuki and the battleship Hiei switched on searchlights that lit the cruiser Atlanta from 3,000 yards. Within minutes the two fleets were firing at almost point-blank range in a moonless, weather-darkened melee.
Ironbottom Sound, off Guadalcanal, Solomon IslandsStory page →
The American Throughline
Guadalcanal was the first sustained American offensive against Japan, and the night of November 13 decided whether Henderson Field, the base holding the island, would keep its aircraft. The U.S. Navy lost heavily in a confused fight, and the bombardment was stopped. Sailors called the water Ironbottom Sound, and the name stuck.
Did you know
QWhat did Callaghan order as his formation fell apart, and why did it confuse his captains?
As the American column lost its shape, Callaghan issued a line that has been quoted ever since: "Odd ships fire to starboard, even ships fire to port." The order assumed ships still sat in a neat sequence with enemies on both sides. By then the formation was disintegrating and vessels from both navies were intermingling in the dark, so the numbers told a captain little about where his target was. The American ships did carry radar, but communication problems and the lack of a cohesive battle plan wasted that advantage. The order became the shorthand for how the night went.
QWho commanded the American battleships that fought after the night of the 13th?
Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee Jr. His force was built differently from Callaghan's: the battleships Washington and South Dakota, screened by four destroyers. It fought the engagements of November 14 and 15. That matters because on November 13 none of Callaghan's thirteen ships was a battleship, while the Japanese brought two. The whole sequence, from November 12 to 15, is now treated as a single Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, the decisive engagement among the campaign's naval battles. The cruisers and destroyers of the first night fought one phase of it, and the battleships of Lee's force fought another.
QHow long did the Pacific go without another major naval battle afterward?
About eighteen months. Guadalcanal was the last major naval battle in the Pacific until the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Japan's reaction to the outcome was not another push at Henderson Field. The following month it decided to evacuate Guadalcanal, and the evacuation was completed by early February 1943. The Japanese infantry meant to retake the airfield never arrived in the numbers planned, since most of the transports carrying them had been sunk. A battle that opened in the dark between Savo Island and Guadalcanal ended with an island abandoned, and the surface fleets spent the next year and a half elsewhere.
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1956civil-rights
Supreme Court affirms Browder v. Gayle; Alabama's bus segregation laws fall
For eleven months, Black residents of Montgomery had walked or piled into carpools rather than ride the city's buses. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court summarily affirmed a three-judge district court panel in Browder v. Gayle, which had held on June 5 that enforced segregation on Montgomery buses violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The affirmance effectively invalidated Alabama's laws requiring segregated buses. The boycott ended five weeks later, on December 20.
United States Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.Story page →
The boycott is remembered through Rosa Parks and the mass meetings, but the legal result came from a federal lawsuit argued by attorney Fred Gray for four women arrested on city buses. The Court's affirmance put the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause behind the end of segregated buses in Alabama.
Did you know
QWhich of the four Browder v. Gayle plaintiffs had been arrested the earliest, and how long before the boycott began?
Claudette Colvin, arrested on March 2, 1955, more than nine months before the boycott started on December 5. Aurelia Browder followed on April 19, 1955, and Mary Louise Smith and Susie McDonald were arrested in October 1955. All four arrests came before the boycott began. The plaintiffs were selected for one shared experience: each woman had been arrested for refusing to give up a seat on a Montgomery bus. The lawsuit was built from those earlier incidents, The case bears the name of Browder, not the name of the woman whose December arrest set the boycott in motion.
QWho dropped out of the lawsuit before it was decided, and why?
Jeanetta Reese. She was initially a plaintiff in the case but withdrew because of intimidation by segregationists. Her departure is the clearest sign of the pressure surrounding the suit: putting a name on a federal complaint against the city's bus system carried personal risk, and at least one person stepped back from it. The four women who remained, Browder, Colvin, McDonald and Smith, were the ones whose names stayed on the filing through the district court ruling of June 5, 1956, and on to the Supreme Court's affirmance on November 13.
QHow did the boycott's carpool system keep people getting to work, and who was behind some of the wheels?
Boycott leaders organized a system of carpools in which car owners volunteered their vehicles. One detail in the arrangement cuts against the expected picture of the city's divisions: some white housewives drove their Black domestic servants to work. Household employment tied many of the city's families together, and for those employers a worker stranded without a bus was a practical problem at the breakfast hour. The carpools had to be sustained through a full winter, spring and summer while the lawsuit moved through the courts, so the volunteer drivers were still on the road when the Supreme Court's order arrived.
1775military
Montreal falls to Montgomery without a fight; Carleton slips away by river
The Continental Army's first major campaign had already taken Fort St. Johns, and the British garrison's militia was melting away. On November 13, 1775, General Richard Montgomery's troops occupied Montreal without significant fighting after General Guy Carleton decided the city could not be held and withdrew. Carleton barely escaped: some Americans had crossed the river downstream, and winds kept his fleet from leaving right away. Montgomery now held a foothold in the Province of Quebec.
The invasion of Quebec was the Continental Army's first major initiative, aimed at taking the province and persuading French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolution. Montreal was its first real prize. Seven weeks later, the attack on Quebec City ended in American defeat, and the northern campaign ended there.
Did you know
QHow did the Americans try to bluff Carleton's fleet into surrendering near Sorel?
A boat carrying a truce flag approached Carleton's fleet near Sorel with a demand that he surrender. The message carried a threat: gun batteries downstream, it claimed, would otherwise destroy the convoy. The batteries were real, but they were not nearly as powerful as the Americans claimed. It was a bluff made with a white flag, aimed at a commander who had just lost a city, a garrison's worth of militia, and the wind. The capture of Montreal was less a battle than a squeeze: desertion behind Carleton, water and weather around him, and an adversary who needed him to believe the worst about the river ahead.
QWho was James Livingston, and why did his regiment march with Montgomery toward Quebec City?
James Livingston led the 1st Canadian Regiment, a unit that joined Montgomery's column on its way to Quebec City after Montreal fell. The regiment mattered beyond its numbers. The whole invasion rested on the hope that people already living in the province would take the American side, and a regiment under that name was the campaign's thesis in uniform. Montgomery's own force was shrinking as enlistments expired, so any recruit who arrived on the road north was a gain. Livingston's men were part of the force that left Montreal behind, while about 200 troops stayed on under General David Wooster to hold the city.
QWhat did Montgomery say to the people of Quebec once he held Montreal?
Montgomery did not stop at occupying the city. He published messages addressed to the inhabitants of Quebec, the written half of a campaign that was supposed to win the province as well as invade it. He also held discussions with American sympathizers about calling a provincial convention, a body that could have given local support an organized, political form. The conversations point to what the Americans thought they had bought on November 13: not just a garrison town on the Saint Lawrence, but a chance to build a revolutionary movement there. The convention talks are as far as the surviving account goes, and the military situation left little time to pursue them.
