In the dark off Guadalcanal, Mikawa's cruisers sink four Allied warships in under an hour
Two nights after Marines waded ashore on Guadalcanal, the Allied warships guarding their transports were running on half crews and short sleep. Just after 1 a.m. on August 9, 1942, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa's column of seven cruisers and a destroyer slipped past a gap in the Allied patrol lines and opened fire in the strait north of Savo Island. Within an hour they sank HMAS Canberra and the American cruisers Vincennes, Astoria, and Quincy, suffering almost no damage themselves. Mikawa then withdrew north without touching the invasion transports still anchored offshore.
This was, in Naval History and Heritage Command's own reckoning, one of the costliest single defeats in U.S. naval history. Yet Mikawa's decision to withdraw rather than destroy the transports let American forces hold Henderson Field, the airstrip that anchored six more months of grinding campaign on Guadalcanal.
QWhy did Chicago's captain barely use his ship's radar during the battle?
Captain Howard Bode of the cruiser USS Chicago switched his radar on only intermittently that night, worried that its transmissions might reveal his ship's position to any nearby Japanese vessels. It was a reasonable-sounding precaution in August 1942, when radar was still new enough that commanders weren't sure whether it gave away more than it revealed. The tradeoff proved costly: intermittent radar meant intermittent warning, and Chicago was among the ships caught flat-footed when Mikawa's column appeared out of the dark.
QWhat did Japanese floatplanes do to Canberra and Chicago right before the shooting started?
Japanese scout planes dropped flares directly over Canberra and Chicago, lighting up the Allied ships just before Mikawa's cruisers opened fire. The illumination stripped away any advantage of darkness the Allied vessels might have had and gave Japanese gunners a clean silhouette to aim at from the surrounding blackness. Crews already worn down from days on half-crew rest cycles had no warning beyond the sudden glare overhead. The first Allied sailors to die that night never saw the ships that killed them.
QDid any Allied crew actually see Mikawa's ships coming and just not report it?
Japanese floatplanes flew ahead of Mikawa's force dropping flares to illuminate the Allied anchorage, and multiple Allied ships heard the aircraft and saw the flares that night. None of the ships that observed them treated the sightings as an actionable warning, and no alert went out up the chain of command. A widely repeated postwar claim held that an Australian reconnaissance crew spotted the Japanese force hours earlier and delayed reporting it to have tea before landing, a story later shown to be false.
