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Excellent. Any ambitious data tracking projects this time around? I considered logging the date of first appearance for each airframe, but I probably won't bother (since I'm about to embark on something similar for Rule the Waves...).
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Dec 7, 2015 22:18
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I'm going to try and track every ship that makes an appearance, hopefully including their last known position or when, where and how they were sunk. Nice, well done.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:35
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The hell with it—I'll take Hiei, may she wreak spectral havoc once again!fredleander posted:This looks fun. May I sign up for IJN Amatsukaze...? Friendly tip: Don't sign your posts here. It's a forums culture thing. (Also, Jobbo's got you covered re: Amatsukaze.) Jobbo, you've got Kirishima down as a CA, just fyi.
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Dec 8, 2015 00:12
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Peanut3141 posted:Very happy to see GH make another run at the Imperial version. Hopefully the little tyke doesn't torpedo his run. With any luck, the kid'll use American fish.
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Dec 9, 2015 06:27
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Drone posted:Wasn't Sinyang the site of a battle that spanned the better part of a whole year in the last LP? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a wiki or something? Over 445,000 reported casualties.
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Dec 17, 2015 00:50
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Winter Stormer posted:By the by, this tag is unclosed, and it still says Stratigic Report instead of Strategic Report. This is defiantly necessary for the full Grey Hunter Experience.
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Dec 20, 2015 20:13
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Neither of my grandfathers served: interned on the one side, Mennonite on the other. Both safe in the contiguous US for the duration. Best boatplane is obviously the Boeing 314. Rest in peace, President Coolaid. You were too beautiful for this world. I am considering reposting my ship write-ups from the previous edition of this thread/writing some new ones. Very much an "if I feel like it" thing, though, as they're a lot of 
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Jan 10, 2016 08:35
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Here are a few quotes on MacArthur from Ronald Spector's Eagle Against the Sun, indexed by page.110 posted:[A]lthough the bravery of his Filipino and American troops and Japanese mistakes could somewhat improve the tactical situation, they could do little to alter the effects of MacArthur's ill-conceived scheme on the United States forces' logistical system. Under MacArthur's plan for defending all of Luzon, supplies and equipment had been moved to forward areas near the beaches instead of to Bataan as they would have been under the told Orange plans. Now these same supplies had to be hurriedly transferred to Bataan. Through heroic efforts, MacArthur's staff managed to move some of the supplies from the Manila Bay area across to Bataan and Corregidor, but much had to be abandoned when the city was evacuated on December 31. The Orange planners considered the Philippines as a whole indefensible. American forces were to withdraw to a fortified position around Manila Bay (denying it to Japan) and hold until rescue operations could be mounted. MacArthur, believed to be intimately familiar with the Philippines due to long service there, was responsible for convincing high command to shift to a beach defense. 117 posted:As the distinguished Australian historian Gavin Long observes, "MacArthur's leadership in the Philippines had fallen short of what might have been expected from a soldier of such wide experience." Like Kimmel and Short, but with less excuse, he had allowed his air force to be crippled by surprise attacks on the first day of the war. His ill-conceived and grandiose plan to defend the entire archipelago had resulted in confusion and near disaster; it helped to produce the acute supply shortage which was sapping the strength of the Bataan forces. His grandiloquent pronouncements, together with his strange refusal to visit the front, hurt morale and shook the confidence of his men. 138 posted:The troops on Luzon would have been defeated in any case, but without MacArthur they might have been defeated without being racked by disease and tortured by slow starvation. I feel like this one really captures the essence of his personality: 189 posted:General MacArthur left Melbourne for his new headquarters aboard a special train on July 21 [1942]. Behind MacArthur's maroon-colored coach, built for the Prince of Wales's visit to Australia and still bearing the royal crest, were two flatcars. The first carried MacArthur's limousine, gleaming in the afternoon sun; the second bore General Sutherland's slightly less grand Cadillac. A steady hand and strong diplomacy in New Guinea: 190 posted:The Japanese advance [along the Kokoda trail] caused amazement and consternation at General MacArthur's headquarters. having been assured (quite erroneously) by his staff that the Australians outnumbered the Japanese on the Kokoda trail, MacArthur could only conclude that "the Australians won't fight." Superficial inspections of "the front" by Sutherland and his staff served to reinforce the commander in chief's misgivings. As the Japanese advance continued, MacArthur's headquarters became almost panic-stricken: this looked like Malaya all over again! General H. H. Arnold, visiting MacArthur on an inspection tour in early September, was surprised to see his "hands twitch and tremble—shell shocked". Arnold departed with the impression that "the Australian is not a bushman; he is not a field soldier. He is nothing but a city slum dweller." An officer on MacArthur's staff told Admiral Nimitz that New Guinea was "gone." Prime Minister John Curtis "won't let the Americans do anything in New Guinea because of the political effect it might have" and the Australians themselves "won't fight. This war has been a series of disasters and withdrawals for them and now they have the habit." This wouldn't be the last time he blamed Australian troops or, indeed, the Australian national character for setbacks in his theater. 217 posted:History has not been kind to MacArthur's "striking victory" in Papua. "The only result," concluded the army's official historian, "strategically speaking, was that after six months of bitter fighting and some 8,500 casualties, including 3,000 dead, the Southwest Pacific Area was exactly where it would have been the previous July had it been able to secure the beachhead before the Japanese ever got there." Others have pointed out that the Japanese entrenched at Buna and Sanananda could have been isolated and bypassed once the Allies had secured an airstrip at Dobodura.
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Jan 14, 2016 08:09
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Why does every War in the Pacific LP thread devolve into German tankchat? Reposting from the last thread in an attempt to instigate (much superior) boatchat instead: HMS Hermes: Purpose-Built Pioneer It is often claimed that the Admiralty of World War I was backwards and hidebound, too concerned with tradition to develop new technologies. However, its vigorous pursuit of the aircraft carrier casts serious doubt on this assertion. HMS Hermes was in many ways the culmination of that effort, although the end of the war would greatly slow her progress. No account of the Hermes would be complete without a brief overview of the early history of naval aviation. The first take-off from and landing aboard a ship took place, at the end of 1910 and beginning of 1911, just seven years after the Wrights’ first flight. They were performed by Eugene Ely as part of an experiment for the United States Navy, which, along with other leading navies, was interested in the scouting and observation power of the new device. Similar experiments soon followed around the world, notably British Lieutenant C. R. Samson’s first flight off a warship under way in 1912. As early as October of 1912—within a year of its own first flight from aboard ship and only two years from the first ever such flight—the British Admiralty reviewed a proposal for a “parent ship for naval aeroplanes.” This fascinating prototype from private shipyard Beardmore’s already showed some features that were to become hallmarks of the proper aircraft carrier. At an estimated 11,500 tons displacement, it had a flat through-deck for aircraft handling flanked by two proto-island structures containing hangars and funnels and connected by a bridge; later testing would rule out the double-island configuration, but the through-deck would eventually win out over a variety of rather unusual arrangements. Although the Beardmore’s proposal was ultimately rejected, interest remained sufficiently high to warrant the conversion of an old cruiser, HMS Hermes (not the ship that is the subject of this post), and then a merchant ship then under construction, renamed HMS Ark Royal (not the famous WWII carrier), to experimental seaplane carriers before World War I kicked off in August 1914. The latter vessel was, interestingly enough, fitted with a mizzen sail to hold her head into the wind, making her the only aircraft carrier to fly a sail. The names Hermes and Ark Royal were thus very early enshrined in the aviation arm of the Royal Navy. Almost immediately upon the outbreak of war, the Admiralty acquired a few cross-channel steamers and later the elderly liner Campania for conversion to seaplane carriers. By Christmas 1914 they had performed the first ever naval air strike against a land target. In 1917, satisfied with the promising performance of the seaplane carriers, the Admiralty decided to venture into operating land planes from aboard ship with the conversion of the curious “large light cruiser” HMS Furious and the more conventional cruiser HMS Cavendish, which became Vindictive, into aircraft carriers with both the forward “flying-off deck” of the seaplane carriers and a “landing-on deck” abaft the superstructure. Heavy turbulence from the superstructure as well as hot stack gases exiting the funnels rendered the split-deck design impractical, resulting in many crashes before the design was radically altered. This experience as well as wind tunnel tests caused the next ship, the converted liner HMS Argus, to be redesigned with a flush deck. She was the first “true” aircraft carrier in the modern pattern and, commissioning in September 1918, the only one to operate during the war. By the end of World War I, the Royal Navy possessed a clear lead in naval aviation technology and it was in this environment of innovation that a new HMS Hermes, the first carrier to be designed as such, was ordered on 14 July 1917. While her design displacement of 10,000 tons remained static throughout her construction, little else did as ongoing wartime experience informed her designers. She progressed very slowly as construction repeatedly halted for major redesign work, especially of her flight deck and superstructure. Her hull was complete enough in 1920 to be towed to Devonport for finishing, which, in the post-war lethargy, took until 1924. As with other British carriers (and in contrast to American ships), Hermes’s strength deck (in effect, the upper flange, opposite the keel, of the girder that is a ship) was the flight deck itself, a consequence of the closed hangar design.1 Because the hangar sides must then transmit the shear forces between the strength deck and keel, this configuration significantly limits the number, size, and location of openings in the hangar, as well as the size of the hangar itself. Fairly early on it was decided that carriers should be able to maintain at least a five to six knot speed advantage over the battle line. Reasons for this include the ability to avoid battle as well as to catch up after turning into the wind for aircraft operations. Hermes’s 26.2 knot speed was believed acceptable for this. Greater debate arose over her armament: At this time, and indeed through the interwar years, naval theorists believed that a carrier must be sufficiently armed to fight off an attack by destroyers or even cruisers herself rather than rely on escorts. Everyone’s favorite Admiral Beatty pressed for a heavy gun armament of as many as 11 6in. With the already considerable demands on deck space and ordnance stowage of the carrier role, the additional space required by so many large guns and their magazines would have severely impinged on her relatively small displacement. In the end, she completed with six 5.5in and three 4in antiaircraft guns, a decision apparently chiefly based on guns already available in storage. Hermes was built with an almost comically oversized island and giant control top for her guns, making her difficult to control during high winds. Combined with other features presumably resulting from her messy design process (she trimmed deep by the bow and had a constant list to port), she had low margins of stability, exacerbated by low-mounted intakes for the boilers, that made her less than stellar as a major combatant. At only 10,000 tons, she was never large enough to be proper fleet carrier; her cramped design and over-large armament limited her aircraft complement to just 21. Still, for a first attempt she proved her concept well and added considerably to the Royal Navy’s body of experience with aviation. By World War II, Hermes was clearly fading into obsolescence and had already been placed in reserve once in the 1930s. Her now comparatively slow speed, small air wing, and scant protection led the Royal Navy to transfer her to the quieter Indian Ocean station shortly after the fall of France. Her war service was comparatively uneventful, consisting largely of anti-commerce-raider patrols and supporting light action in Italian Somaliland, until April 1942 when the Imperial Japanese Navy came calling in the Indian Ocean. Hermes attempted to flee with the aging Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire but the ships were spotted and, lacking adequate air cover, quickly sunk by Japanese carrier aircraft. 1. There are two basic paradigms in aircraft carrier design: the open-hangar ship and the closed-hangar ship. In the former, the hangar and flight deck form a superstructure resting atop the main structural elements of the hull; in the latter, hangar and flight deck are themselves part of the hull structure. Each system has its advantages. Because the main structural beams of a closed-hangar ship are farther apart, its hull may be made lighter for the same strength and loading (imagine bending a short, fat rectangle compared with a long, thin one); it also need not worry about including expansion joints to allow the flight deck to flex relative to the hull. The closed hangar, being self-contained, also lessened the risk of fire spreading throughout the ship, but with less ventilation could be vulnerable to a build-up of gasoline fumes. The open hangar, without the need to carry shear forces between the structural members through the hangar sides, could extend the full beam of the ship, increasing storage and handling space—attempts to increase the hangar space of closed-hangar ships by adding a second hangar level introduced problems of their own, such as high wind resistance and increased roll accelerations, without fully solving the problem (one large space is easier to work in than two smaller ones). The open hangar enabled aircraft engines to be warmed up below decks and was thus more suited to a doctrine of large air wings and large strikes; this was further helped by the open hangar’s lighter structure being more amenable to large elevators. The closed hangar was much easier to protect (both types could benefit from an armored flight deck, although this could be made lighter for the same protective value in the closed-hangar ship, but the open hangar was inimical to side armor), but British WWII experience found that much of the protection rarely came into play and may not have been worth the reduction in aircraft (remember that fighters as well as armor protect the carrier from air attack). One might summarize the differences as the open-hangar design having the advantage in operating aircraft while the closed-hangar design has the advantage in being a ship. I had intended to wait until we actually got a glimpse of Hermes (Veloxyll's lucky ship), but oh well.
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Jan 18, 2016 07:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:IJN torpedoes were, from a technical perspective, really really good. They had longer range than their contemporaries, they didn't leave a bubble trail like steam-powered torpedoes, and they didn't suffer from the detonator teething problems that plagued American and German torpedoes. The Long Lance is basically the embodiment of "high risk, high reward" in torpedo form. H.C. Bywater's The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933, a sometimes-prescient novel written in 1925 about a fictitious naval war between the US and Japan, has the IJN making substantial use of both surface and submarine commerce raiders, although it never goes into specifics about torpedoes. I'd recommend reading it to many of the people who follow these LPs—as far as I can tell, the entire text is available free on Google Books and it fits in an interesting crossroads period where naval air plays an important but not yet dominant role. Acebuckeye13 posted:Edit: To save everyone else I'm dragging this over to the Military History thread, this discussion really doesn't have anything to do with the Pacific beyond the post I already made. Appreciated, and thanks for talking about Pacific tanks, too. Even though boats are unarguably cooler, Pacific tank combat is at least interesting and relevant 
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Jan 18, 2016 10:15
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Goetta posted:Congrats on Manila Grey One for the ol' folder.
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Jan 25, 2016 06:58
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pthighs posted:Please promise me "Grigsby" will be in the baby's name somewhere. He's gonna aim for the Americanized "Gray Hunter" and end up with "Gary Hunter" for the other half.
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Mar 24, 2016 08:23
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My goodness, what a day to miss. Congratulations remain in order!Lakedaimon posted:I thought for sure you would at least use one of the US name designations for IJA/IJN aircraft. What kid wouldnt want to be named Myrt? Well, George is (a damned good) one.
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Apr 7, 2016 10:09
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That cruiser engagement took place at 19,000 yards. Destroyer guns aren't going to accomplish much at that range. Naka mounts 7x5.5 inch guns as her main battery (of which only six can fire on the broadside). San Francisco mounts 9x8 inch and Helena 15x6 inch. That's four times the broadside in pure number of guns, never mind the benefits of heavier ones. The Japanese task force's only real hope is close-range torpedo action, which was never likely in what seems like good visibility daylight.
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May 12, 2016 23:21
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Comrade Koba posted:Looking forward to you getting the LP's mixed up. Where is (211, 186) on the actual map?
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May 23, 2016 22:54
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Grey Hunter posted:So what you are saying is defiantly no Blueray then? Blueray ought to be an American sub name.
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Jun 1, 2016 16:06
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Jobbo_Fett posted:How does the Kongo have barely any deck armor value over the Resolution when it has something like two inches more deck armor Size isn't everything. Arrangement and steel quality both affect a ship's actual resistance to damage. Without looking at any technical info, though, neither of those seems a particularly likely explanation to me. Both classes are about the same age and so I would expect them to have similar layouts (which would be sloped deck in Rule the Waves). The Kongos were heavily reconstructed, but completely revising the armor scheme isn't really in the cards. It could be that extra horizontal armor came in the form of layered plates or separate armored decks, which are less effective at resisting penetration than single plates of equivalent total thickness. I also know that Japanese naval armor steel was of high quality (roughly equivalent to British, American, or German armor steel) by the 1930s; it's possible but seems unlikely that steel quality would account for the difference.
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Jun 6, 2016 01:48
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PittTheElder posted:Was spaced armor ever a thing on ships? Maybe it doesn't work as well when the penetration is a whole >200lb bomb, rather than an explosively formed jet. There's a thing called a decapping belt, which is a special piece of thin (around 20-25mm, iirc) armor designed to degrade the effectiveness of an AP shell so that the main belt can better resist it. I guess it's functionally kind of similar to spaced armor. In the horizontal protection, though, the space between plates takes the form of entire deck levels. My understanding is that this is not great against a ballistic projectile, in that the first deck can slightly deflect the projectile onto a better trajectory to penetrate the second deck. This is in addition to the obvious problem of wanting to keep all the explodey bits out of your ship's guts.
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Jun 6, 2016 06:06
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Stewart is an American destroyer... for now.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:52
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Velius posted:Anyone recall specific highlights (and more importantly dates?) from the US LP? I've heard about some crazy losses and I don't want to flip through all thousand+ turns. The great anticlimax of Hornet. Maybe the name's just cursed?
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Jun 14, 2016 00:49
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I linked the loss of the three fleet carriers on the last page, but I think the CAP incident may have been separate.
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Jun 14, 2016 21:48
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Decoy Badger posted:I guess this is why you don't split the Kido Butai. The ships in the Kiddo Butai are unfit for service in the Kido Butai on account of their low speed. Due to engine limitations, putting them in the same force would unreasonably restrict the fleet carriers. A White Guy posted:You have the opportunity to sink every British carrier, and you're going to retreat because one of your really lovely CVEs took a torpedo? Pretty sure he means he's retreating the kiddos, not the main force.
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Jun 15, 2016 23:46
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Leperflesh posted:Anyway Grey, those LIberators are hitting your ships in light rain from 8k feet and your Nells are missing in heavy rain from 14k feet. My guess is, it's the difference between a really good level bomber below the cloud deck vs. a mediocre level bomber above the cloud deck. Totai Maru probably has a top speed of about 11 knots, whereas Chester & co. top out at three times that. That's not a trivial difference for evasion.
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Jun 17, 2016 07:15
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"You see, submarines have a preset torpedo limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own ships at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kifu, show them the medal I won." Interesting that both sides' scores are lower this time around. I suppose that reflects the lower intensity of the naval and air war.
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Jul 2, 2016 07:31
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Gnoman posted:Yes. Under the naval limitation treaty in place at the time, the United States Navy had 15,000 tons of unused carrier displacement after the construction of the three 19,800 tone Yorktown-class ships. The 14,700 tone Wasp was built with lower armor and speed (which allowed for lighter machinery) in order to carry the same number of aircraft as a Yorktown with 25% less displacement. Wasp was initially assigned duties of secondary danger - first to the Caribbean to keep watch on the remaining Vichy France ships, followed by a lengthy refit, followed by repairs from ramming a destroyer, followed by assignment to the potentially war-winning task of ferrying new aircraft to reinforce Malta's devastated air groups. After her second such mission (the first having failed when accurate intelligence allowed the Luftwaffe to annihilate the delivered Spitfires as soon as they landed), Coral Sea and Midway had drawn USN fleet strength in the Pacific to the critically low level of three fleet carriers, forcing Wasp to be reassigned. The Wasp's aircraft aided in the initial invasion of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, and missed most of the Battle Of The Eastern Solomons before being hit by three torpedoes (out of a spread of six - one missed everything, another hit and eventually sunk the destroyer O'Brien, and the last seriously damaged the battleship North Carolina - impressive shooting) from the submarine I-19. The complete lack of torpedo protection guaranteed that any one of those torpedoes would have been fatal. Two Yorktowns. Hornet succeeded Wasp and was intended to be built to the new design that would become Essex (exigencies of time and so forth). I like the implication here that I-19's torpedoes struck Wasp's aircraft rather than the carrier itself A White Guy posted:US Carriers in the Pacifc, historically of this date Why are you including Yorktown but not Lexington? Both had sunk by this time in 1942, so I would think they'd either both be in or both be out. Also, what kind of order is this? It's not hull number or commission date or loss date or alphabetical or anything else I can see.
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Aug 3, 2016 21:38
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PittTheElder posted:Not going to finish up in China? Or does it just take too drat long to move stuff in and out? Four carriers lost in battle at Chongqing.
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Aug 4, 2016 19:40
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steinrokkan posted:To answer the question "why did the Japanese do so well in the initial stages despite their primitive... everything", I'll outline a couple of bullet points, more on this can be read in the Handbook on Japanese Military Forces from 1944, available online. Thank you for this excellent post. One might also add the old aphorism about loving up less than the other guy.
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Aug 30, 2016 05:08
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A White Guy posted:What's going on in the South Pacific? You still hellbent on invading Fiji? He accidentally told the army to go to Fuji instead. The keys are, like, right next to each other, you know?
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Sep 4, 2016 20:27
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i81icu812 posted:Capable, Valuable, Extremely-durable? Cyclopean, Vast, Eldritch
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Sep 7, 2016 06:15
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THIS DATE IN HISTORY The US Navy has a bad day when Japanese submarine I-19's skipper fires the world's greatest torpedo salvo. For more we turn to Wikipedia: "Loss of USS [i posted:Wasp[/i]"] Wasp was scuttled at 2100. O'Brien successfully reached Noumea but was lost 19 October 1942 attempting the passage to Pearl Harbor. North Carolina was out of action at Pearl for a month.
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Sep 15, 2016 22:31
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The only historical warship losses on this date occurred in the European Theater, far to the north of Norway. The Royal Navy lost a minesweeper (Leda) and destroyer (Somali) to U-boat torpedoes west of Bear Island.
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Sep 20, 2016 22:48
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Well, that sure made page 100 interesting.
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Sep 23, 2016 08:01
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Today's historical warship loss: Destroyer HMAS Voyager went aground on Timor, was damaged by air attack, and had to be scuttled.
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Sep 26, 2016 08:24
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The only historical warship loss for 26 September 1942 was in European waters: Escort Destroyer HMS Veteran ate a torpedo in the North Atlantic and went down with all hands as well as perhaps 80 survivors of merchant ships. Is this interesting? September and October are kind of slow, loss wise. November will be hectic.
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Sep 26, 2016 17:42
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Dunno-Lars posted:Yes, I enjoy hearing about historical warship losses, please continue I will do so, then! Probably slip some days since I'm moving soon, but eh, I'm not Grey. Lord Koth posted:Note that Chokai didn't literally blow up. That's a situation mostly limited to British ships (and Taiho) Also ammunition ships 
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Sep 27, 2016 08:20
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Today's only historical warship loss takes us back to the Atlantic: The German merchant raider Stier bit off a little more than she could chew when she engaged a particularly plucky Allied merchant ship. I'll let Wikipedia explain further:Wikipedia posted:On 27 September 1942 Stier encountered the Liberty ship Stephen Hopkins en route from Cape Town to Paramaribo.
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Sep 28, 2016 06:19
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Today's historical warship loss is... nothing. No further losses in my source until 2 October.
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Sep 29, 2016 22:33
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Today's historical warship loss takes us, once again, back to the Atlantic, and it's a doozy. HMS Curacoa was a C-class light cruiser, completed shortly before the end of WWI. By 1942 she had been converted to an antiaircraft cruiser mounting eight 4" guns (it was a simpler time, when this was considered to be a real AA suite). She spent most of her war service escorting convoys in the Western Approaches. Just north of Ireland on 2 October 1942, she rendezvoused with the famous (and enormous—over 80,000 tons) RMS Queen Mary, which was carrying American troops to Britain. The latter ship was proceeding at high speed on a zig-zag path to avoid submarine attack. The two ships' courses intersected and, the captains not agreeing as to who had the right of way, Queen Mary plowed into Curacoa amidships at nearly 30 knots, neatly slicing her in two. The severed halves sank quickly, taking with them more than 300 officers and crew; the survivors remained in the water for several hours until destroyers arrived on scene to rescue them.
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Oct 2, 2016 17:44
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There may be combat happening every day, but the historical war won't see another warship sunk until the 11th. (This has been your historical warship loss report for basically the first third of October.)
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Oct 7, 2016 01:54
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Today’s historical warship losses are, at long last, on point. Shortly before midnight on 11 October 1942, a patrolling American force consisting of four cruisers (San Francisco, Boise, Salt Lake City, and Helena) and five destroyers (Farenholt, Duncan, Buchanan, McCalla, and Laffey) under Rear Admiral Normal Scott intercepted three Japanese cruisers (Aoba, Kinugasa, and Furutaka) and two destroyers (Fubuki and Hatsuyuki) under Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto as well as the seaplane tenders Nisshin and Chitose and their escorting destroyers in the Slot. Goto’s objective was to bombard Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, while the seaplane tenders formed the core of a Tokyo Express supply run to the beleaguered Japanese ground forces. In contrast to previous night battles around Guadalcanal, Scott made reasonable use of his radar (although, curiously, his flagship San Francisco was not outfitted with the latest SG radar) which, combined with earlier aerial reconnaissance alerting him to the presence of the Japanese force, enabled him to get the drop on Goto. Unfortunately for the Americans, their relative lack of night-fighting experience prevented a clean opening engagement, as there was some confusion as to which blips were which ships; still, the element of surprise told and the Japanese cruisers were raked by fire before they could respond. Furutaka was burning within minutes and, struck by a torpedo, began to sink shortly thereafter, joined by Fubuki. As Goto’s remaining ships retreated, Duncan, caught between the two forces, was hit by both sides and had to be abandoned after catching fire. At the end of the day, Cape Esperance was a welcome tactical victory for the USN after the humiliating defeat at Savo Island: a cruiser and destroyer sunk for only a destroyer and damage to Boise. But the Tokyo Express force escaped the night battle unscathed and successfully completed its mission.
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Oct 12, 2016 06:06
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