At dawn on Friday, November 13, 1942, burning, wrecked ships littered the waters of Guadalcanal. At a cost of five ships and thousands of lives, the U.S. Navy had blunted Japan’s drive to break the Guadalcanal stalemate.

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Despite the strategic defeat and loss of the battleship Hiei, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of Japan’s Combined Fleet, was determined to try again to break the deadlock and win the war.

Three months of bitter air-ground-sea action in the Solomon Islands had resulted in a stalemate. Both the Americans and the Japanese were short of ships. Their troops on Guadalcanal, the island prize of the campaign, were exhausted. Yamamoto was now taking the offensive, and his battleships and destroyers were a powerful force.

The first move had been made the night of November 12. Two battleships, under Rear Adm. Hiroaki Abe, headed for Guadalcanal with orders to shell the American air base, Henderson Field, and destroy it. Instead they slammed into U.S. Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan’s mixed force of cruisers and destroyers.

The midnight collision saw destroyers and battleships trade salvos at point-blank range. After a wild two hours of gunfire and torpedo attacks, Callaghan was dead, and a timid and cautious Abe fled, even though he had crushed the American force.

Yamamoto acted swiftly, firing Abe and sending south a convoy of 8,000 Japanese troops under Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa. And the survivors of Abe’s group, headed by the battleship Kirishima, regrouped under Vice Adm. Nobutake Kondo, Abe’s replacement.

Kondo, however, was little better than Abe. He was described as an ‘English sort of officer,’ very gentlemanly, and good with his staff, but better suited for training command than battle.

Nonetheless, Kondo was on hand and senior, so he took over, adding the two tough cruisers of his Cruiser Division Four, flagship Atago and Takao. One light cruiser, Nagara, and six destroyers would escort this group, called the Emergency Bombardment Force. The mission was simple: sweep Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal on the night of the 14th, shell the airfield, cover the convoy arrival, then high-tail it home before dawn of the 15th.

The Americans knew the enemy moves, thanks to their cryptographers. But Vice Adm. William F. Halsey, the aggressive commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater, had virtually no ships to hurl at Kondo. All his cruisers and destroyers had been used up in the Friday 13th battle. The carrier Enterprise was still only partially repaired after being damaged at the Battle of Santa Cruz, but her 78 planes could screen Guadalcanal by day. The problem would be a night surface action.

All that was left for Halsey’s use were two fast, new, battleships, USS South Dakota and USS Washington. Naval War College doctrine forbade the use of battleships in a tightly confined space such as Ironbottom Sound, just north of Guadalcanal, but Halsey knew that wars were won at sea, not in a textbook. He ordered the dreadnoughts committed.

Commanding the two battlewagons was Rear Adm. Willis A. ‘Ching Chong’ Lee, a chain-smoking, approachable, bespectacled gunnery expert who relieved tension on the bridge by reading lurid novels or swapping sailor stories with the enlisted men standing watch duty.

Lee was mostly business, though. With Washington Captain Glenn Davis and gunnery officer Lt. Cdr. Edwin Hooper, he sat up many nights discussing gunnery problems, taking a mathematical approach. Lee also used more practical tools. He tested every gunnery-book rule with exercises and ordered gunnery drills under odd conditions–turret firing with relief crews, anything that might simulate the freakishness of battle.

Washington and South Dakota technically were outstanding ships: 35,000-ton displacements, able to race at 28 knots, armed with 16-inch guns. But South Dakota, despite her fiery Captain Thomas L. Gatch, had a reputation in the fleet as a jinx ship because of her habit of getting into collisions and suffering mechanical breakdowns at inopportune times. One breakdown had resulted in South Dakota’s nearly colliding with the carrier Enterprise.

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