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In six months of fighting around Guadalcanal, the Japanese Navy won nearly every night battle. They sank more ships, killed more sailors, and inflicted the worst surface defeat in American naval history — all in the first week.
When it was over, both sides had lost exactly twenty-four warships. It looked like a draw. It wasn't. Those same six months destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy as an offensive force. It never came back.
The officer who commanded Japan's last tactical victory in the campaign — a clean, decisive win — wrote after the war that Japan's fate was sealed there.
How does a navy keep winning battles and lose everything? And what were the Americans doing with their defeats that Japan couldn't do with a victory?
The answer isn't factories. It isn't steel. It isn't what most people think — and it only becomes clear when you watch what both sides did in the hours after a battle ended.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dispatchh
Like if you think this story deserves to be remembered.
Comment below — where are you watching from?
In six months of fighting around Guadalcanal, the Japanese Navy won nearly every night battle. They sank more ships, killed more sailors, and inflicted the worst surface defeat in American naval history — all in the first week.
When it was over, both sides had lost exactly twenty-four warships. It looked like a draw. It wasn't. Those same six months destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy as an offensive force. It never came back.
The officer who commanded Japan's last tactical victory in the campaign — a clean, decisive win — wrote after the war that Japan's fate was sealed there.
How does a navy keep winning battles and lose everything? And what were the Americans doing with their defeats that Japan couldn't do with a victory?
The answer isn't factories. It isn't steel. It isn't what most people think — and it only becomes clear when you watch what both sides did in the hours after a battle ended.
Subscribe for forgotten WW2 stories ▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@ww2dispatchh
Like if you think this story deserves to be remembered.
Comment below — where are you watching from?
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LearningTranscript
00:00October 14, 1942. Henderson Field on the island of Guadalcanal.
00:05First light. Men climbed out of foxholes half full of water and stood looking at an airfield
00:11that no longer looked like an airfield. The runway was a line of craters. Along the edge,
00:17aircraft sat broken open, wings folded into the mud, some still burning. The place smelled of
00:24aviation gasoline, thousands of gallons of it, burned off in one night. 83 minutes. That was
00:31how long it had taken. Two Japanese battleships, Kongo and Haruna, had stood 10 miles offshore,
00:38beyond the reach of anything the Marines had on that island, and put 973 14-inch shells into a strip
00:45of cleared jungle. The men who lived through it just called it the bombardment, and for the rest
00:50of their lives, that was enough. The count that morning? 48 of the 90 American aircraft on Guadalcanal
00:57destroyed or wrecked beyond flying. 41 men dead, six of them pilots. Nearly all the fuel gone.
01:06By any measure a professional would use, the Imperial Japanese Navy had just executed a perfect
01:12operation. Two capital ships. No losses, no return fire. An enemy airfield erased in an hour and a
01:20half. Now watch what happened next, because this is the thing I want you to hold onto for the next
01:26hour. Within a few hours, one runway was open again. Not repaired, open. Engineers filled craters
01:34with whatever they could push into them. Marines went from wreck to wreck, draining gasoline out of
01:39ruptured tanks by hand, a gallon at a time, into anything that would hold it. And that afternoon,
01:45a Marine major named Jack Cram landed a PBY Catalina flying boat on that cratered strip,
01:52weaving between the holes. Cram was the personal pilot of General Roy Geiger, the man commanding
01:58all air operations on the island. Slung under his wings were two torpedoes he had carried up from New
02:04Caledonia for a torpedo squadron that no longer existed. It had been shot off the field before he
02:10arrived. So Cram had two torpedoes and nothing to put them on. He went to Geiger's chief of staff
02:18with an idea that was, by his own admission, insane. 12 miles up the coast, Japanese transports
02:25were unloading troops almost unopposed. Cram wanted to rig a manual release and attack them
02:31in a flying boat. A machine built to fly slowly for a long time and never to be shot at.
02:40Geiger gave
02:41his blessing. The next morning, October 15th, the ground crews pieced half a dozen flyable fighters
02:48out of the wreckage, and a dozen dive bombers came up with them. 30 Japanese Zeros were circling over
02:54the landing beach at 15,000 feet. Cram pushed the Catalina over from a mile out. That aircraft was
03:02built to fly at 160 miles an hour. The needle went to 270. The wings groaned. He leveled at 75
03:12feet,
03:12with anti-aircraft fire coming off the destroyers, held it, and released both torpedoes at point blank range
03:19into the side of a transport. Then five Zeros came for him, and the flying boat ran for home,
03:26with its crew firing .30 caliber machine guns out the waist blisters. Cram came over Henderson Field
03:33with one Zero still fastened to his tail. A Marine and a Wildcat, in the landing pattern with his gear
03:40already down, extended his turn, shot the Zero off him, and Cram put the Catalina down on the same
03:47broken runway he had taken off from. 36 hours after the Imperial Japanese Navy had, on paper,
03:55destroyed that airfield, the airfield was sinking their ships.
04:00Before we go on, if you want more stories about the men who held that field, take a moment to
04:06like
04:06this video and subscribe. It helps these stories find the people who care.
04:11Now the reason I started with the bombardment is not that it was the worst night on Guadalcanal.
04:17It wasn't. It's that the bombardment is the entire campaign compressed into 83 minutes.
04:25Here is what happened on that island, and in the water around it, between August of 1942 and February
04:31of 1943. Seven major naval battles. Dozens of smaller actions. And in most of the night surface fights,
04:39the Japanese Navy won. Not narrowly. They won the way a professional beats an amateur. Faster,
04:47better trained, with better torpedoes and better night optics. And in the first week,
04:52they inflicted the worst defeat in the history of the United States Navy.
04:56When it was over, both sides had lost 24 warships of destroyer size and above.
05:02Look at that number for a second, because it looks like a draw, and it is not a draw. It
05:08is the most
05:08misleading statistic of the Pacific War. Those same six months finished the Imperial Japanese Navy
05:15as an offensive force. It never recovered. Not the ships. Not the men.
05:23The officer who commanded the last Japanese tactical victory of the campaign, a man who won
05:28cleanly and completely. Wrote after the war that Japan's fate was sealed there.
05:34So here is the question this whole story turns on. The Japanese were not losing these battles.
05:41They were winning them. And every victory left them weaker than the Americans they had just beaten.
05:48Something in the American system took a defeat and turned it into something usable.
05:53Ships, tactics, men, time. Something in the Japanese system could not do that with a win.
06:01What was it? That's what we're going to find. And I'll warn you now, the obvious answer,
06:08American factories, American steel, the weight of production, is not the answer. It's not even close.
06:15And by the end, you'll understand why it couldn't have been.
06:19To get there, we have to go back to the first night of the campaign. August 9, 1942. Savo Island.
06:27Six days before Henderson Field had a name. That night, a Japanese admiral named Gunichi Mikawa
06:34took eight ships into the anchorage in the dark and destroyed four Allied heavy cruisers in about 37
06:40minutes, killing more than a thousand men and losing 35 of his own. Total victory. Not one American
06:47ship in that column survived intact. And then, with the American transports lying in the water in front
06:54of him, still carrying much of what the Marines needed ashore, and completely at his mercy, Mikawa
07:00turned around and went home. What he left floating off that beach decided the next six months of the
07:06Pacific War. 1.30 in the morning. August 9, 1942. The stretch of water between Guadalcanal and Savo
07:14Island. Water that within six months would have a new name, Iron Bottom Sound, for how much steel
07:21ended up on the floor of it. The heavy cruiser Quincy was steaming a slow patrol box. Her crew had
07:28been at
07:28some level of alert for two days and were dead on their feet. Then Japanese searchlights came on and
07:34held her, and shells began arriving before anyone on that ship fully understood there were enemy warships
07:40in the anchorage. Quincy was hit so fast that she barely functioned as a warship. Her float plane caught
07:47fire on the catapult and turned her into a lit target. A turret was smashed. A five-inch magazine went
07:55up.
07:55Almost everyone on her bridge, including her captain, was killed or wounded inside a few minutes.
08:01But before she went down, Quincy got off a handful of main battery salvos into the dark.
08:08I want you to follow one of those shells, because it matters more than anything else that happened that
08:14night. It struck the Japanese flagship Chokai just behind the navigating bridge. It wrecked the operations
08:21room. It killed around 30 men. It destroyed every chart on board. And it landed roughly 20 feet from
08:28where Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa was standing. Mikawa was not touched. Quincy sank about 20 minutes later,
08:37with 370 of her men. Now the totals, and they are ugly. 1,077 Allied sailors killed.
08:464 heavy cruisers on the bottom. Quincy, Vincennes, Astoria, and the Australian Canberra.
08:54Another cruiser and 2 destroyers damaged. On the Japanese side, 58 men dead, 34 of them on Chokai,
09:02and not one ship lost. That is not a defeat. That is an execution. And it happened to a navy
09:11that believed,
09:12until the searchlights came on, that it was the better equipped force. Then Mikawa gave an order
09:18that historians have been arguing about ever since. He turned north, went around Savo Island, and left.
09:27Here is what he was leaving. Sitting in that anchorage, barely moving, were the American transports.
09:34The ships carrying the food, the ammunition, the fuel, the engineering equipment, and the heavy weapons for
09:41the entire marine division that had landed two days earlier. Their escort was gone. He had just
09:48destroyed it. They were helpless. Mikawa's reasoning was professional and, on the information he had,
09:55defensible. If he stayed to finish the transports, Don would find him inside the strike range of American
10:02carriers. His ships were scattered and low on torpedoes. He had no charts left for the return
10:08passage. So he chose to leave with an enormous victory rather than gamble it. What he didn't know
10:15is that the American carriers had already pulled out. He could have stayed until sunrise and had the
10:21anchorage to himself. And on the way home, he lost a heavy cruiser anyway. On the morning of August 10th,
10:28an old American submarine, the S-44, put three torpedoes into Kakko off New Ireland. She capsized and blew up
10:37with 68 mana board. So the ledger on Mikawa's perfect night finally read,
10:43Four allied cruisers sunk, and one Japanese heavy cruiser sunk. A cruiser Japan could not replace.
10:51Hold that thought. We'll be doing this arithmetic again.
10:56Now here is what the Americans did with the worst night in the history of their navy.
11:01The transports did not run. They kept unloading through the daylight hours of August 9th,
11:07while everyone aboard knew exactly what had happened a few miles away in the dark,
11:11and only pulled out that afternoon. They left roughly half of what the Marines were supposed to get.
11:18The Marines went on to rations of two meals a day and stayed. Then they went to work on a
11:24half-built
11:25airstrip. They had almost no engineering gear. Most of it was in the holds of the departing ships.
11:32So they used the enemies. The Japanese construction unit that had been building that strip had run
11:38into the jungle on the 7th and left everything behind. Rollers, trucks, a narrow-gauge rail line,
11:44even the food. Marines finished a Japanese airfield with Japanese equipment while eating captured
11:51Japanese rice. On August 18th, the strip was declared usable. On August 20th, two days later,
11:59the men on that island heard aircraft engines from the wrong direction. From the sea. 19 Marine
12:06Wildcats and 12 Dauntless Dive Bombers came in off an escort carrier and landed on a runway that had
12:11been a muddy scar in the trees 11 days earlier. General Alexander Vandegrift, commanding the division,
12:18watched them come down and said afterward it was one of the most beautiful sights of his life,
12:23and that he was close to tears, and that he was not alone.
12:27That is the first thing I need you to understand about this campaign. And it isn't about courage.
12:32Everyone in this story was brave. It's about what each side was counting.
12:39Mikawa counted warships. By that measure, he had won the most one-sided surface action of the modern era.
12:46He had. What he had not touched, because it wasn't on the list of things a fleet commander destroys,
12:52was a strip of leveled dirt about a mile long. And that strip of dirt was the only object in
12:59the
13:00Southern Solomons that actually decided the war. But I want to be careful here. Because one night
13:06proves nothing. Mikawa's withdrawal can be written off as bad luck and bad intelligence,
13:12and plenty of people have. The question is, what happens when this pattern repeats?
13:17It's not once. Seven times. Over six months. With different admirals and different ships.
13:25And every single time, Japan wins the fight and comes out of it worse off than the enemy it beat.
13:31That is not luck. Luck does not run in one direction for half a year.
13:37Two weeks after Tsavo, on August 24th, a Japanese dive bomber put a bomb through the flight deck of the
13:44American Carrier Enterprise. And three more went in around her. She was badly hurt. And she turned east
13:51and went away. And that is where this story gets its first real answer. Because the moment a ship is
13:58wrecked, a question appears that nobody makes films about. Where does it go to be put back together?
14:04And how long does it stay there? The two navies had built completely different answers to that question.
14:11One of them was about to lose the war with it. Ten past five in the afternoon. August 24th, 1942.
14:19About 200 miles east of Guadalcanal. More than 30 Japanese dive bombers came down on the Enterprise
14:25in a five-minute attack. Three bombs hit her. Four more went into the water close enough to hurt.
14:32The second one was the bad one. It went through the flight deck beside the after elevator and detonated
14:39eight feet below, setting off 40 rounds of five-inch powder. Roughly 75 men were killed. The flight deck
14:47was pushed upward. Fires took hold below. Her damage control parties had those fires under control in
14:54about an hour. And here is the part that always stops me. She was landing her own aircraft again that
15:02same evening. She was taking planes aboard before dark. Then, at 10 to 7, the ship tried to kill
15:10herself. Water and firefighting foam from the second bomb had drained down a vent trunk into the steering
15:17motor room. The rudder swung hard left, then hard right, and jammed there. Enterprise was making 24 knots
15:25a few minutes inside a formation of her own ships. She missed the destroyer bulge by a margin her captain
15:31described as extremely small. Down in the steering engine room, men were working in smoke and heat
15:38with no ventilation, and several of them went down, overcome, dragged out, replaced by the next men in.
15:45That went on for 38 minutes, while an 18,000-ton carrier drove in circles through her own task force.
15:53Then, the standby steering unit came alive, and the ship answered her helm. Enterprise turned east under
16:00her own power. Now, I want to give you a set of dates and hold on to them, because they
16:05are the
16:05first real piece of our answer. She docked at Pearl Harbor on September 10th. She came out of dock on
16:12September 13th. Three days. Repairs were finished on October 7th. On October 16th, she was back in the
16:21South Pacific with a squadron aboard, ready to fight. Bomb to battle line. Seven and a half weeks,
16:28and most of that was ocean. Now the other side of the same battle. That same day, the seaplane carrier,
16:35Chitose, took near misses from Saratoga's dive bombers. Not a direct hit. Near misses, which opened her
16:42hull below the waterline. She could not steam home. She had to be towed by a destroyer, 900 miles north,
16:49to the Japanese fleet base at Truk. And at Truk, she came alongside a ship called Akashi.
16:56I need to tell you exactly what Akashi was, because most people who know this campaign well
17:01have never heard the name. Akashi was the only purpose-built repair ship in the Imperial Japanese
17:07Navy. Not the main one. The only one. 433 repair engineers aboard, the best German machine tools money
17:16could buy in the 1930s. And a design requirement written by the Navy itself. This single vessel was
17:23expected to handle 40% of the repair needs of the entire combined fleet. One ship.
17:30For a fleet fighting across 5,000 miles of ocean. Everything Akashi couldn't do went home.
17:38Kure, Yokosuka, Sasebo. From the waters off Guadalcanal that is well over 3,000 miles,
17:46one way, in a damaged ship, through submarine water. And here's what wading in that queue actually cost.
17:54Shokaku, one of the two best carriers Japan had, was hurt at Coral Sea in May. She reached Kure on
18:02the
18:0217th of May. She entered Dry Dock on the 16th of June. Read those two dates again. The damage took
18:1110 days to fix once she was in the dock. Getting into the dock took a month. By then the
18:18Battle of
18:18Midway had been fought and lost without her. So compare the two systems as a man on either deck
18:25experienced them. An American carrier is bombed on the 24th of August and is back in the fight on the
18:3116th of October. A Japanese seaplane carrier is near-missed on the 24th of August and gets towed
18:38to an anchorage where 400 men on one ship decide whether she goes home or not. Now, before you
18:44conclude that this is just the rich country beating the poor one, stop. Because in the autumn of 1942,
18:50where the shooting actually happened, the United States Navy was the poorer force. Badly poorer.
18:57Watch how fast it fell apart for them. August 31st. A Japanese submarine, the I-26,
19:04torpedoes the carrier Saratoga. She is out of the war for three months.
19:10September 15th. The I-19 fires a spread of six torpedoes and produces what may be the most
19:16destructive single submarine salvo in naval history. The carrier wasp is hit three times
19:23and burns until she has to be scuttled. Torpedoes from the same spread run on and cripple the new
19:29battleship North Carolina and sink a destroyer. Count what that leaves.
19:35In the last week of September, in the entire Pacific Ocean, the United States had one undamaged fleet
19:42carrier, the Hornet, an Enterprise sitting in a dock in Hawaii. One. Against a Japanese Navy that
19:50still had four carriers ready and two battleships to spare for shelling airfields. So this was never
19:56about America having more. In that autumn, at that place, America had less. The difference was the
20:04length of the road back. Not how many ships you owned, how many days it took to turn a wrecked
20:10one
20:10into a fighting one, and how far you had to drag it to find out. That is our first real
20:17layer of the
20:18answer. But I want to be honest about its limits, because it does not explain the thing that actually
20:24killed the Japanese Navy. Steel can be welded. A hole that is torn open in August can be fighting in
20:31October. The men are a different problem entirely. Which brings us to the other war going on over
20:38that island every single day. The one that wasn't fought by admirals. Where the exchange rate was so
20:44strange that neither side understood what was happening until it had happened. Go back to the
20:50very first morning, August 7th. A Japanese fighter pilot took a bullet across the skull over Guadalcanal,
20:57went blind in one eye, and flew a crippled Zero 560 miles back to Rabul, on and off consciousness
21:04the whole way, because there was nowhere closer to land. His name was Saburo Sakai, and he was one of
21:11the finest pilots alive. What that single flight cost Japan is the next piece of this. August 7th, 1942.
21:20Rabaul, on the island of New Britain. The great Japanese base, 556 miles from Guadalcanal.
21:27That morning, when word came that the Americans had landed, 18 Zeros took off to escort bombers south.
21:34It was the longest fighter mission anyone had flown in that war. 556 miles out. Fight. 556 miles back,
21:44on whatever fuel was left. One of those pilots was Saburo Sakai, and he was one of the best fighter
21:52pilots alive in 1942, flying the best carrier fighter in the world. Over Guadalcanal, he shot
21:59down a marine wildcat flown by James Sutherland after a long, close, brutal duel. Then he saw a
22:07formation of aircraft below him that he took for more fighters. They were not fighters. They were
22:13American dive bombers, Dauntlesses, and a Dauntless has a man sitting backwards in the rear seat with
22:19a machine gun. Sakai came in behind them, and every rear gunner in that formation opened up at once.
22:26A bullet went across his skull. It blinded him in one eye, paralyzed one side of his body,
22:32and filled his cockpit with blood. Then he flew home. 556 miles, more than four hours,
22:41drifting in and out of consciousness, half blind, because there was no closer place to put an aircraft
22:46down. He landed at Rabaul, made his report, and collapsed. He would not fly in combat again for two
22:54years. Hold that image, because we are about to run the exact same accident on the other side of the
23:01line. Over Guadalcanal, a marine pilot gets shot up. His engine quits, or his aircraft catches fire.
23:08Here is what that meant, in the words of the men who lived it.
23:12If the plane wasn't burning, you glided back and put it down dead stick on the field.
23:18If it was burning, you got out over the field and came down in the trees, and the marines walked
23:23you
23:23back in. And then, very often, you flew again that afternoon in a different airplane. Same sky,
23:32same island, same event. A fighter pilot loses his machine. On one side, it costs an airframe. On the
23:40other side, it costs a man, permanently, along with everything in his head. That is not courage or
23:47cowardice. That is geography. And it was running 24 hours a day for six months. Now look at what it
23:55did to the finest fighter unit Japan possessed. The Tainan Air Group had produced more aces than
24:02any other fighter unit in the Imperial Navy. Sakai was one. So were Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, Junichi Sasai,
24:10Toshio Ota, names that were famous inside Japan, printed in newspapers like those of national athletes.
24:18Between August and November of 1942, the Tainan lost 32 pilots killed over the Solomons. Sasai was
24:26killed on the 26th of August, Ota on the 21st of October. On the 1st of November, the unit was
24:33reorganized out of existence. Three months. That is how long it took to consume a formation that had
24:41taken Japan a decade to assemble. Now the American totals for the whole campaign. Through January of
24:491943, the Cactus Air Force, every Marine, Navy, and Army pilot who flew off that muddy strip,
24:55lost 148 aircraft shot down, another 43 destroyed on the ground, 86 more in accidents, nearly 300
25:04aircraft and 94 airmen killed or missing. Stop on those two numbers for a second. Almost 300 machines,
25:14under 100 men. In the Japanese columns, the two figures track each other almost exactly,
25:20because when a Japanese aircraft went down over Guadalcanal, the pilot went with it. There was
25:26a physical reason, and I'll give it to you the way a pilot described it, rather than the way a
25:30manual
25:31would. A Japanese fighter pilot of that period said that his Zero caught fire easily, and that when he
25:37was hit, he would usually break off the fight rather than risk burning. He was flying an aircraft with no
25:43armor behind the seat and no self-sealing tanks, because every pound of that had been traded away for
25:49range and agility. The Americans made the opposite trade, and their pilots came home riddled and
25:56landed. Now here's the question that should be bothering you. Everyone loses pilots. Why couldn't
26:03Japan replace hers? The answer is not that the Japanese didn't try. It's what their system had been
26:10built to do in the first place. Japanese naval flight training was the most selective in the world,
26:16and deliberately so. In some pre-war years, fewer than a hundred candidates were accepted.
26:22Every pilot who flew at Pearl Harbor had at least 600 hours in the air. Formation leaders had over 1
26:29,500.
26:30The service had been designed to produce a small number of superb men over a very long time,
26:36and to keep them forever. Which works beautifully. Right up until the morning,
26:41somebody starts killing them at a rate of 10 a week. And now, the strangest fact in this entire story,
26:49and then I'm going to leave it alone, because it won't make sense yet.
26:53In the middle of 1942, the United States Navy took Lieutenant Commander John Thatch, the man who had
27:00just invented the tactic that let inferior American fighters survive against the Zero, and proved it in
27:06combat at Midway, and pulled him out of the war. They did not give him a carrier air group. They
27:13sent him to
27:13Florida, to a training command, to teach beginners and make instructional films. Their best fighter
27:20tactician, at the moment of greatest crisis, taken off the board on purpose. The Japanese did the opposite
27:27with theirs, and every single thing that happened afterwards follows from that difference.
27:33But we can't get at it yet, because the argument only becomes visible when you watch a battle that
27:38Japan won. Which brings us to the 26th of October, 1942, off the Santa Cruz Islands. That day, the Imperial
27:46Japanese Navy sank the American carrier Hornet, wrecked the Enterprise, and drove the United States Navy
27:52out of the waters north of Guadalcanal. It was the last carrier victory Japan would ever win.
27:59And in the four weeks that followed, the two fleets that fought it went in directions so different,
28:04that when you lay them side by side, the whole war stops looking like a mystery.
28:08Quarter past 11 in the morning, October 26th, 1942, off the Santa Cruz Islands.
28:1524 Japanese dive bombers came down on the Enterprise. Two bombs hit her, and two more went into the water
28:22alongside, close enough to open her plating. 44 of her men were killed, and 75 wounded. One of those
28:29bombs went through the forward part of the flight deck and broke the forward elevator in half.
28:34Remember that elevator. It is going to matter more than anything else in this part.
28:4060 miles away, the carrier Hornet was being systematically taken apart.
28:4460 miles away, the one that was sent to the Enterprise.
28:4564 bombs, two torpedoes, and a Japanese dive bomber flown deliberately into her stack.
28:5061 her power went. Her fires spread. By afternoon, her crew was going over the side.
28:5662 which left a few dozen American aircraft in the sky with no ship to land on.
29:0263 they flew to the Enterprise. 61 now picture the situation on that deck.
29:0763 enterprises hold, and burning aft. Her forward elevator is a dead hole in the middle of the flight deck.
29:13She is under intermittent attack, and she is now taking aboard not only her own returning squadrons, but Hornets orphans
29:20as well.
29:21Aircraft low on fuel, some shot up, some with wounded gunners, landing where the parking space forward is unusable.
29:29They took them. All they could.
29:32Aircraft were packed nose to tail up the bow, because there was no way to strike them below.
29:38By nightfall, the accounting looked like this.
29:41The Americans had lost the Hornet and a destroyer.
29:44Enterprise, the battleship South Dakota, a heavy cruiser, an anti-aircraft cruiser, and two destroyers were damaged.
29:53The Japanese had lost no ships at all.
29:56Santa Cruz was a Japanese victory.
29:59Nobody serious disputes it.
30:02Now here's the other column, and this is where the whole war turns.
30:07American aircrew killed that day.
30:09Twenty-two.
30:12Japanese aircrew killed that day.
30:14A hundred and forty-eight.
30:17Read that again.
30:20Those two numbers came out of the same battle, over the same water.
30:24The man who led the torpedo attack on Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Commander Shigeharu Murata, one of the most experienced strike
30:33leaders alive, was killed at Santa Cruz.
30:36So were the squadron leaders behind him.
30:39Japan lost more carrier aviators that day than she had lost at Midway.
30:44And then look what her ships did.
30:47Shokaku, hit hard, went home to Japan.
30:50She was under repair until March of 1943 and did not return to the fighting front until July.
30:57Nine months.
30:59The light carrier Zuiho, damaged, went home too.
31:03She got back as far as Truk at the end of January.
31:07Zuihaku wasn't damaged at all.
31:09She took no hits.
31:10She went home anyway because she had absorbed the surviving aircraft of two other carriers and had no complete air
31:17group left to fight with.
31:19She spent months training replacements and did not come back to the South Pacific until February of 1943, in time
31:27to help evacuate the island.
31:30So count what the winner of the Battle of Santa Cruz had available for the decisive month of the campaign,
31:36which was three weeks away.
31:38One carrier.
31:39Junyo.
31:41That's it.
31:42Japan sank an American carrier and lost the use of her own carrier fleet in the same afternoon.
31:49Now the four weeks on the American side, and I want you to watch this one closely because it is
31:54the single best illustration in the entire war of what I have been trying to show you.
32:00Enterprise limped into Noumea in New Caledonia on the 30th of October.
32:05For 11 days, she was, in the flat language of the reports, completely incapacitated.
32:12Halsey threw every engineer and repairman in the theater at her.
32:16The repair ship Vestal arrived the next day and started work.
32:20At Noumea, she completed 158 separate jobs on 21 ships.
32:26And it wasn't enough, because there simply were not enough trained fleet repairmen in the South Pacific.
32:32So, the Navy went and got 75 Seabees, Construction Battalion men, Company B of the 3rd, and put them aboard
32:40a fleet carrier.
32:42Then, on the 11th of November, the Japanese came south again in force, and Enterprise had to sail.
32:48She was not finished.
32:50Nowhere close.
32:51Her damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Herschel Smith, described what left harbor that day.
32:57Decks still shaking to air hammers, welder's arcs still sparking, a bulge in her side forward, no watertight integrity, an
33:06oil tank still leaking, and that forward elevator still jammed exactly as the bomb at Santa Cruz had left it.
33:13Pearl Harbor privately assessed her as operating at about 70% of her combat efficiency.
33:19The Vestal's repair party stayed aboard.
33:22So did the 75 Seabees.
33:24They sailed with her, into a battle, and they kept working through it, welding and cutting and shoring, inside a
33:32carrier that was being attacked, under round-the-clock supervision, while her aircraft flew off the deck above their heads.
33:40Nobody told those construction men they were going.
33:43There wasn't time.
33:44They simply went, and Halsey later sent a dispatch commending them by name of unit.
33:50Now put the two pictures side by side.
33:53The Imperial Japanese Navy, having won the battle, sent its damaged carriers 3,000 miles home, and got them back
34:00in the spring and summer of the following year.
34:03The United States Navy, having lost the battle, sent its damaged carrier back to sea in 12 days, with the
34:11repair crew still on board, welding as she went, at 70%.
34:16And I want to be precise about what that difference is, because it is not simply money.
34:22It is a judgment about what a wrecked ship is.
34:25One Navy treated a damaged carrier as an object to be restored to standard.
34:30The other treated it as a weapon that still worked, at a discount, right now.
34:37Where Enterprise was going on the 11th of November was the roughest 48 hours the United States Navy fought in
34:44the entire Second World War.
34:46Thirteen American ships were about to go into iron-bottom sound, in the dark, against two Japanese battleships, at ranges
34:54where big guns could not be depressed low enough to aim.
34:59Two American admirals would be dead inside 20 minutes.
35:03And two nights after that, on the same patch of water, the United States Navy did something it had not
35:09managed once in 11 months of war.
35:12And the way it happened tells you exactly what the Americans had been doing with all those defeats.
35:18Half past one in the morning, November 13th, 1942.
35:22Iron Bottom Sound.
35:25Thirteen American ships were steaming in a single line in the dark.
35:29Five cruisers with eight destroyers strung out ahead and behind.
35:33Coming the other way were two Japanese battleships, Hiei and Kirishima.
35:38A light cruiser and 11 destroyers.
35:41Their job was to shell Henderson Field flat, the way Kongo and Haruna had done a month earlier.
35:48The American job was to stop that from happening.
35:52Nobody had told the American commander, Rear Admiral Daniel Callahan, how to fight two battleships with cruisers, because there was
35:59no way to do it.
36:01The two forces did not so much meet as interpenetrate.
36:05The American column drove straight into the Japanese formation and through it.
36:09Within a minute or two, ships of both navies were inside a few hundred yards of each other, firing at
36:16point-blank range, some of them illuminated by their own searchlights.
36:21Men who survived it described a barroom brawl with the lights turned out.
36:25Here is a detail that decided how many Americans lived.
36:29Abe's battleships had their magazines loaded with the thin-walled fragmentation shells meant for bombarding an airfield.
36:36Those shells went through American cruisers without doing what an armor-piercing round would have done.
36:41That accident of loading is one reason there was anybody left at all.
36:45At about two in the morning, Hiei's third salvo hit the bridge of the American flagship, the heavy cruiser San
36:51Francisco.
36:53It killed Admiral Callahan and all but one of his staff instantly.
36:58Secondary hits mortally wounded her captain, Kassin Young.
37:02When it was over, there were two men alive in that pilot house, a quartermaster and a lieutenant commander named
37:08Bruce McCandless.
37:10McCandless was 31 years old.
37:12He was not the captain.
37:13He was not the executive officer.
37:15He was not on anybody's list to command a heavy cruiser in a night action.
37:20And he now had one.
37:22And the decision he faced was this.
37:24The rest of the American line was steering off the flagship.
37:28If San Francisco pulled out, the others would follow her out.
37:32And the Japanese battleships would go on and do to Henderson Field what had been done to it in October.
37:38He stayed in.
37:40A ship with most of her guns wrecked kept trading fire with two battleships because turning away would have unraveled
37:46the whole line.
37:47Below him, water was coming into the hull.
37:50The senior surviving officer aboard was the damage control officer, Lieutenant Commander Herbert Schoenland, which meant that by the book,
37:58Schoenland now commanded the ship.
38:00He and McCandless made a deal over the voice tube in the middle of the battle.
38:05Schoenland would stay below and keep her afloat.
38:08McCandless would fight her topside.
38:10And a boatswain's mate first class named Reinhardt Kepler kept working a hose into burning compartments and carrying wounded men
38:18out, badly hurt himself, until he died of it.
38:22Three medals of honor came off that one ship.
38:25San Francisco took over 45 hits and did not sink.
38:30Now the price of the night.
38:32Two American cruisers lost, including the Juno, torpedoed by a submarine while withdrawing the next morning and gone in 20
38:40seconds with almost her entire crew.
38:42Five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa among them.
38:46Four destroyers lost.
38:48Rear admirals Callahan and Norman Scott both killed, the only two American flag officers to die in a surface engagement
38:56in the entire war.
38:58The Japanese lost two destroyers.
39:00By the arithmetic everybody uses, another Japanese victory.
39:04Except for two things.
39:06Admiral Abe canceled the bombardment and withdrew.
39:10Henderson Field was not touched, which meant that at first light, the aircraft on it went hunting.
39:16And the battleship Hiei, hammered at close range all night, could no longer steer.
39:22She spent the day being worked over by Marine and Navy aircraft from that airfield and from the Enterprise.
39:28And by evening, she was gone.
39:30The first Japanese battleship lost in the war.
39:34And on the 11th of November, remember, the Enterprise had left harbor with welders still aboard.
39:40This is what the 70% carrier was for.
39:44Now the second night, and this is the one I've been building toward.
39:4848 hours later, the Japanese came back to finish the job with the battleship Kirishima.
39:55Halsey had almost nothing left to send, so he sent the only thing he had.
40:00Two fast battleships, Washington and South Dakota, into narrow, shoal-strewn water at night.
40:09Halsey admitted afterwards that this flouted one of the firmest doctrines taught at the Naval War College.
40:15The man he sent with them was Rear Admiral Willis Lee, who happened to be the Navy's leading flag officer
40:21on the use of radar.
40:23Just after midnight, South Dakota suffered an electrical failure, lost her radar and her gunnery circuits, and was promptly lit
40:31up by searchlights and pounded.
40:34Thirty-eight of her men died, which left Washington alone against a battleship, four cruisers, and nine destroyers.
40:42And undetected, because in all that confusion, nobody had found her.
40:47She had been tracking Kirishima on radar the whole time.
40:51At 8,400 yards, in the dark, without a searchlight, Washington opened fire.
40:58Seven minutes.
41:00Seventy-five 16-inch rounds and over a hundred five-inch.
41:04At least nine main battery hits and about 40 from the secondaries.
41:09Kirishima's steering went, she flooded, she burned, and her crew scuttled her before dawn.
41:15Not one Japanese shell hit Washington's hull.
41:19I want you to sit with the distance between those two nights, because it is only 48 hours.
41:26On the 13th, American ships blundered into a Japanese formation in the dark and were butchered at knife range.
41:32On the 15th, an American battleship killed a Japanese battleship in seven minutes, without ever being seen.
41:39The difference was not new equipment.
41:42Washington's radar had been aboard for months.
41:44What had changed was that somebody had worked out how to fight with it,
41:48and had put a man who understood it in command.
41:51That is the shape of the answer we've been chasing.
41:54American defeats were going somewhere.
41:56They were being written up, argued over, taught, and turned into the way the next crew fought.
42:02But before you accept that, I have to show you the night it failed.
42:07Two weeks later, in the same water, the U.S. Navy went in again, with radar, with surprise,
42:13with everything it had supposedly just learned.
42:15And eight Japanese destroyers carrying drums of food handed the Americans the most humiliating defeat of the entire campaign.
42:2220 past 11 at night, November 30, 1942, off Tassafuranga Point on Guadalcanal.
42:30Eight Japanese destroyers were coming down the coast under Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka.
42:36Six of them were not really warships that night.
42:38They were trucks.
42:40Their decks were stacked with steel drums, 200 and more per ship, half filled with food and medicine, sealed so
42:48they would float.
42:49The plan was to stop, roll them over the side on ropes, and run before dawn.
42:54Because the Japanese soldiers on that island were starving.
42:57And the Americans knew they were coming.
43:00An Australian coast watcher named Paul Mason, sitting in the bush on Bougainville, had radioed the moment they left harbor.
43:08So Rear Admiral Carlton Wright took five cruisers and six destroyers into Iron Bottom Sound to meet them,
43:14with radar, with warning, and with the hard lessons of the previous three weeks behind him.
43:21Commander William Cole, leading the four van destroyers in Fletcher, got exactly the position every destroyer captain dreams about.
43:29Japanese ships on his radar, perfectly placed for torpedoes.
43:34He asked permission to fire.
43:37Four minutes passed before he got it.
43:40Four minutes at 30 knots is a different geometry.
43:44By the time the American torpedoes went into the water, the firing angle was gone.
43:49Every one of them missed.
43:52Then the cruisers opened fire.
43:54And in that darkness, the muzzle flashes did what muzzle flashes do.
43:58They drew a line of light straight back to five American cruisers.
44:03Tanaka's reaction took seconds.
44:06Cut the cargo loose.
44:07Turn.
44:08Fire everything.
44:09What came back out of the dark were Japanese torpedoes.
44:13And the American column was hit almost simultaneously.
44:16Minneapolis.
44:18Hit.
44:19New Orleans.
44:21Hit.
44:22Pensacola.
44:23Hit.
44:25Northampton.
44:26Hit twice and sinking.
44:28Roughly 400 American sailors died in a few minutes.
44:33The Japanese lost one destroyer.
44:36The picket Takanami, which had absorbed the opening salvos of an American cruiser division alone.
44:42That is the Battle of Tassafuranga.
44:44And it is the most complete tactical defeat the United States Navy suffered in that campaign.
44:50Inflicted by eight ships delivering groceries.
44:54Now I want to take you aboard one of those cruisers.
44:57Because what happened next is this entire story in one hull.
45:01The torpedo that hit the New Orleans went into her port bow and set off her forward magazine.
45:07The first fifth of a 588-foot warship simply came off.
45:13The severed bow then swung around and dragged down her own side, tearing her open as it went.
45:19More than 180 of her 900 men were killed, including damage control parties who stayed at their stations sealing bulkheads
45:27and drowned doing it.
45:30She did not sink.
45:31She went to Tulagi, across the water, and the crew put camouflage netting over her to hide from Japanese aircraft.
45:39Then they went into the jungle with axes and cut down coconut trees.
45:43Over eleven days, the men of the New Orleans built themselves a bow out of coconut logs.
45:49Because that would have collapsed under forward pressure, they took her to sea stern first and steamed 1,800 miles
45:57backwards to Sydney.
45:59There, they were given a temporary bow and they sailed backwards again to Puget Sound.
46:04New Orleans came back.
46:06She fought at Saipan.
46:08She fought at Okinawa.
46:10She finished the war with 17 battle stars.
46:13Now hold that beside what Tanaka's victory produced for Japan, because we finally have all the pieces of the answer.
46:21Start with the Americans, on the losing end at Tasafuranga.
46:25Halsey rebuked Cole for his handling of the destroyers.
46:29The action was pulled apart in writing, at length, by people whose job it was.
46:34And in February, a commander named Arleigh Burke arrived in the South Pacific, studied that battle, and drew a conclusion.
46:43Destroyers should be turned loose to attack on their own initiative, exactly the way Tanaka's had.
46:49That became American destroyer doctrine, and it stayed that way.
46:54Read that again.
46:55The U.S. Navy took the tactics of the man who had just humiliated it, and adopted them.
47:02Now Japan, and I want to be fair, because the easy version of this story is wrong, the Japanese were
47:08not stupid, and they did try to learn.
47:11After Midway, Nagumo's staff wrote a new doctrine that for the first time formally put the carrier above the battleship.
47:18They emphasized damage control training.
47:21They moved fueling and arming onto the flight deck.
47:24They put more fighters in their air groups.
47:26They opened the flight schools wider.
47:29But look at what the same Navy did with the information.
47:33Midway was announced at home as a victory.
47:36Two of the sunken carriers were kept on the Navy's books, listed as having no crew.
47:43Wounded survivors were held in separate hospitals and not allowed visits from their families.
47:48The unwounded were shipped to the far edges of the Empire, where they could not talk, and many died there.
47:56Not one senior officer was relieved.
47:59An organization that hides a defeat from itself has destroyed the only thing a defeat is good for.
48:06And here is the last piece, the one in the title.
48:10A victory gives you nothing to examine.
48:12There is no board of inquiry into a knight that went perfectly.
48:17Tanaka fought a flawless action off Tassafuranga.
48:21And the correct professional conclusion for the Imperial Japanese Navy was that everything it believed about knight fighting was right.
48:28So nothing changed.
48:31Meanwhile, the bill for that flawless action came due anyway.
48:35The drums went into the water, and American aircraft strafed them at first light.
48:41Of 1,500 drums dropped on a later run, all but 310 were destroyed before the soldiers could get them
48:47ashore.
48:48The men on the island went on starving.
48:51And every destroyer and every trained crew spent winning those battles came out of a stock Japan had no way
48:57to replace.
48:58So the answer to the question we started with is this.
49:02Every American defeat produced three things.
49:05A ship that came back.
49:06A document that changed how the next crew fought.
49:09And a man who survived to teach.
49:13Japan's victories produce none of them.
49:15Because there is nothing to fix, and nobody comes home from the bottom of the sea.
49:20Defeat was raw material.
49:23Victory was a receipt.
49:25Two months after Tassafuranga, Japan ran the finest operation of her entire campaign in those islands.
49:31It took three nights.
49:33It worked perfectly.
49:35The Americans never laid a hand on it.
49:37And it was the end of everything.
49:39The night of February 1, 1943.
49:4320 Japanese destroyers came down the slot toward Guadalcanal.
49:47The Americans watched them come and drew the obvious conclusion.
49:51Ships that size, moving that fast, at night?
49:54It was another reinforcement push.
49:57And they braced for it.
49:58It wasn't.
49:59Over three nights, the 1st, the 4th, and the 7th of February, those destroyers took 10,652 men off that
50:09island and carried them away.
50:11And the Americans never worked out what was happening until the beach was empty.
50:16As a piece of seamanship, it was close to perfect.
50:19It may be the most skillful thing Japan did in the entire campaign.
50:23And you should see what came aboard those destroyers.
50:27The men being lifted off were skeletal.
50:30Their own soldiers had stopped using the island's name and started calling it Starvation Island.
50:36They had been fed by drums thrown over the side in the dark, most of which never reached them.
50:42Here is what Guadalcanal cost Japan all in.
50:4638 ships.
50:49683 aircraft.
50:51Around 19,200 dead.
50:54And of those, only about 8,500 were killed in combat.
50:59The rest died of hunger and disease on an island their navy kept winning battles to reach.
51:05Now I want to go back to where we started, on a runway.
51:09The morning after the bombardment, men came out of their holes and looked at 48 destroyed aircraft and a cratered
51:16strip,
51:16and started filling holes and draining gasoline out of wrecked wings by hand.
51:22That afternoon, Jack Cram landed a flying boat between the craters.
51:26The next morning, he flew it at a Japanese transport at 270 miles an hour and put a torpedo into
51:34her side.
51:35Nothing about that was a plan.
51:37Nobody in Washington had designed it.
51:40It was just what those particular men did, on that particular morning.
51:45And the same instinct shows up in every part of this story.
51:48At Tulagi, with axes and coconut logs.
51:52In a steering engine room full of smoke.
51:55On the bridge of the San Francisco, with everyone dead.
51:59The strip itself is still there.
52:01It is the international airport of the Solomon Islands now.
52:04And airliners land on the same ground the marines leveled with captured Japanese rollers.
52:10Passengers walk out into the heat with no idea that the earth under those wheels is the thing the entire
52:16Pacific War turned on.
52:19So, what happened to them?
52:22Jack Cram kept the name Mad Jack for the rest of his life.
52:26He got the Navy Cross for that flight, went on to command an experimental marine night bomber squadron, and retired
52:33in 1959 as a general officer.
52:36Bruce McCandless, who found himself commanding a heavy cruiser at the age of 31 because everyone senior to him on
52:42that bridge was dead, received the Medal of Honor.
52:46He stayed in the Navy and retired a Rear Admiral.
52:49His son, Bruce McCandless II, became an astronaut.
52:53And in 1984, he flew the first untethered spacewalk in history.
52:58A man alone in the dark, a long way from any ship.
53:02Which is a family trait if ever there was one.
53:06Herbert Schoenlund, who stayed below in the flooding to keep San Francisco afloat while McCandless fought her, also received the
53:13Medal of Honor, and lived until 1984.
53:17Reinhardt Kepler, the bosun's mate who kept going back into the fires, received his after his death.
53:24The Navy named a destroyer escort for him.
53:28Saburo Sakai, the pilot who flew 556 miles home half-blind on the first day of the campaign, survived the
53:36war with one eye.
53:37He spent the rest of his life saying, to anyone who would listen, that he had never wanted it.
53:45The Enterprise, the ship that went to sea at 70% with welders still working inside her, became the most
53:53decorated American warship of the war.
53:5620 Battlestars.
53:58She was sold for scrap in the late 1950s, despite a campaign to save her.
54:03And there is nothing left of her, but an anchor.
54:06The New Orleans, the ship with the coconut bow, fought until the end and was scrapped in 1959.
54:14But not all of her.
54:16In July of 2025, a research expedition mapping the floor of Iron Bottom Sound found her severed bow, sitting upright
54:25in 2,200 feet of water, where it fell on the 30th of November, 1942.
54:32It is the last real piece of that ship anywhere in the world.
54:36And it is the grave of most of the men who died in her that night.
54:41And Raizo Tanaka, the finest destroyer commander Japan had, the man who beat the United States Navy at Tassafuranga with
54:49ships full of food drums, sat down years after the war and wrote out the accounting himself.
54:56Two battleships, three cruisers, twelve destroyers, sixteen transports, well over a hundred aircraft, thousands of officers and men.
55:08And his own conclusion, in his own words, that Japan's fate was sealed with the closing of the struggle for
55:15Guadalcanal.
55:17He was not describing a defeat.
55:19He was describing his victories.
55:22That is the answer to the question in the title.
55:24And in the end, it's very simple.
55:27When the Americans lost a battle, they got something back.
55:30The ship, the report, the man who survived it.
55:34And every one of those things went into the next fight.
55:37When the Japanese won one, they got the sea.
55:41Nothing came back from it.
55:43And there was nothing in a perfect night to learn from.
55:46Beat the Americans in 1942, and you taught them how to beat you.
55:52Thank you for staying with me to the end of this one.
55:55If it was worth your time, a like really does help.
55:58It's how these stories reach the people who want them instead of disappearing.
56:02Subscribe and turn on the bell if you'd like more.
56:05And I'd like to hear from you.
56:07Tell me in the comments where you're watching from.
56:09And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War?
56:14In the Pacific?
56:15In Europe?
56:17At sea?
56:17In a factory?
56:19Tell me his name and what he did.
56:22I read those comments.
56:23And there aren't many places left where those names get said out loud.
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