Saratoga's bombers catch the Ryūjō; the carrier goes down after dark
By late August 1942, U.S. Marines had held Guadalcanal for two and a half weeks, and Japan was moving a carrier force south to break the American grip on it. On August 24, dive bombers and torpedo planes launched from USS Saratoga found the light carrier Ryūjō near Santa Isabel Island and hit her with three to five bombs and possibly a torpedo. She burned through the afternoon and sank that night. Destroyers Amatsukaze and Tokitsukaze pulled survivors from the water, along with aircrews from Ryūjō's returning strike force who ditched nearby.
Saratoga's strike proved American carrier aviation could find and kill a Japanese flattop in open water, a sign that American carrier aviation could locate and destroy Japanese carriers just weeks after Coral Sea and Midway. The battle also cost Japan aircrews it could not easily replace, buying the Marines on Guadalcanal time to finish Henderson Field.
QWhy did Japan send its smallest carrier ahead of the main fleet?
The Ryūjō was detached from Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's main carrier force, which still held the larger Shōkaku and Zuikaku, to strike Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. The mission reportedly grew out of a request from Nishizō Tsukahara, the Japanese naval commander at Rabaul, who wanted the American airstrip neutralized ahead of the fleet's arrival. That detachment left the light carrier exposed, without the heavier air cover the rest of the force carried, when American search planes came looking.
QHow did a Japanese scout plane's sighting time line up with the American strike?
At 14:25, almost simultaneously with events unfolding elsewhere in the battle, a Japanese scout aircraft launched from the cruiser Chikuma spotted the American carrier force. That sighting set the retaliatory Japanese air attack in motion within hours, the same attack that would later put three bombs into Enterprise. The near-simultaneous timing meant both fleets were closing in on each other's carriers at almost the same moment on August 24.
QWhy did Enterprise keep flying planes after being hit?
One of the three bombs that struck Enterprise punched through her flight deck and exploded below, killing 35 men. Despite that, her damage-control teams worked fast enough that the carrier resumed flight operations within an hour of being hit. The recovery stood in sharp contrast to Ryūjō's fate the same day, when fires from the American strike proved impossible to contain and she sank that night.
