Lee doesn’t argue with them.
He just keeps training his crews.
The hard part is not the technology.
The hard part is the trust.
Battleship captains have spent 30 years learning to glance up from a chart and verify with their own eyes.
Lee is asking them to fight a ship they cannot see at a range they cannot personally confirm on the authority of a green glow on a cathode ray tube.
He is asking them to override every instinct their careers have built.
Captain Glenn B.
Davis, the commanding officer of USS Washington, is 49 years old, a career officer, quiet like Lee.
The kind of man who reads manuals on his off watch.
Davis listens.
Davis drills the procedures.
Davis says little.
He decides in his own way to believe.
By November of 1942, when Halsey’s order arrives, go north into Ironbottom Sound, stop Kondo, Washington’s crew has done something no other American battleship crew has done.
They have learned to fight by electronics.
They have learned to fight in the dark.
What none of them know yet, as they turn the bow toward Guadalcanal under a moonless sky, is that everything they have practiced is about to be tested in 7 minutes against a ship that has been at sea since the year Theodore Roosevelt was president.
And that the only thing standing between Henderson Field and a Japanese battleship at point-blank range is a 54-year-old marksman who has decided to fight a sea battle with mathematics in a navy that still fights with its eyes.
At 2300 hours on the night of November 14th, Task Force 64 rounds the western point of Guadalcanal and turns north into Ironbottom Sound.
Six ships in single file.
Four destroyers lead.
Walk first, then Benham, then Preston, then Gwinn.
Behind them, 2,000 yd back, the bow of USS Washington cuts a slow black line in the water.
2,000 yd behind Washington, the larger silhouette of USS South Dakota.
The air is warm, 85°, thick enough to taste.
There is no moon.
Low cloud blots out the stars.
Far to the east, heat lightning flickers over some distant storm and dies again.
The water is calm with a slight chop.
The smell of jungle drifts off Guadalcanal.
Wet wood, copra, gun oil, the old smoke of a campaign that has been burning for 3 months, visibility is less than a mile.
It is perfect weather for radar.
It is the worst weather in the world for a lookout.
The sound itself is not deep water.
It is 8 miles wide between Guadalcanal and Savo Island.
It is full of wrecks, Japanese, Australian, American, left over from previous battles.
The sailors will later joke, the way sailors joke, that the bottom is so packed with sunken hulls you could walk from one shore to the other and never get your feet wet.
It is no place to maneuver a battleship.
Lee has no choice, so he takes Task Force 64 into the closet, into the dark, into the wrecks, and waits for the door to open.
At 2305, Washington’s SG surface search radar paints its first contacts beyond Savo Island.
Multiple groups moving south.
The radar room reports up to the plotting team.
The plotting team reports to Lee.
Lee says nothing.
He stands by the chart in the flag plot, headset on, listening to the ranges and bearings as they come down the wire.
12, 14.
The number of Japanese ships keeps climbing on the screen.
Three separate groups.
Kondo has split his force.
It is exactly what Lee expected.
He sends a message to all ships over the short-range radio circuit.
This is Lee.
We are going into a big fight.
Keep your heads.
Stay alert.
Trust your instruments.
That is all.
There is no speech.
There is no exhortation.
There is nothing about country or glory or revenge for the men dead two nights ago.
Just the four sentences he believes a fighting crew actually needs.
Aboard Walk, at the head of the destroyer column, Commander Thomas E.
Fraser stares at his own SG screen.
Fraser is the most experienced destroyer skipper in the task force.
His radar is one of the few in the formation that matches Washington’s.
He watches the Japanese destroyer screen come over the horizon at 12,000 yd.
Fraser asks for permission to launch torpedoes.
It is the obvious play, a destroyer’s reason to exist.
10 Mark 15 torpedoes in two quintuple mounts, ready to fire.
Launch now at long range and the Japanese will be steering and ducking and reacting to American fish in the water before they even know what hit them.
Lee says no.
The reason is cold and exact.
In the dark with multiple ships maneuvering at 30 knots in a confined sound, no man no man will be able to which torpedoes are American and which are Japanese.
If Fraser launches now, Lee’s own ships will be dodging two different sets of fish in two different directions with no way to read them apart.
Friendly fire by torpedo is a real possibility.
It has happened before.
Hold fire, guns only, maintain station.
Fraser acknowledges.
He passes the order to his gun crews.
He turns his bridge talker back to the radar plot.
He is going to fight a Japanese destroyer division at point-blank gun range without the weapon his ship was built around.
He has 18 minutes left to live.
At 23:17, Washington’s main battery opens fire for the first time in her career.
Not on Kirishima, not yet.
On the Japanese sweep group to the south, the light cruiser Sendai and her destroyers.
Nine 16-in shells lift out of the muzzle flashes and arc across the dark water at 400 yd a second.
Each shell weighs 2,700 lb.
Each carries 40 lb of high explosive in its base.
The Japanese on Sendai see the muzzle flash before they hear it.
A wall of water 900 ft high comes up around their ship.
They do what any sane skipper would do.
They turn and run.
Sendai disappears into the smoke of her own funnels.
The American radio intercept room aboard Washington picks up Japanese voices on open circuits, excited, numerous, talking over each other.
They had no idea American battleships were here.
They have just learned.
But Kondo, with the main body, Kirishima, and the heavy cruisers Atago and Takao, is still coming north.
He has not yet been engaged.
He still believes the night belongs to him.
And the American destroyers up front have already been seen.
Aboard the Japanese destroyer Iyanami, the commanding officer is Lieutenant Commander AG Sakuma.
He is a night fighting professional.
His lookouts have been dark adapted for hours.
He does not need radar.
He sees the American destroyers as a column of darker shapes against slightly less dark water.
He counts them.
He passes the count to his gunners.
Iyanami fires first.
She launches a spread of Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes, 24 ft long, 2 tons each.
1,000 lb of high explosive in the warhead.
They are powered by pure oxygen and kerosene.
No bubbles, no white wake, almost invisible.
They run at 48 knots.
They have a range three times longer than anything in the American arsenal.
The fish enter the water and accelerate.
A searchlight snaps on across Iyanami’s bridge wing.
The beam stabs across the chop and finds Walke.
Fraser is illuminated like a man pinned in a stage spot.
Every Japanese gun in line of sight opens up.
Walke is hit before her own guns finish their first salvo.
5-in shells punch through her forward superstructure.
The bridge takes splinters.
The forward gun mount goes silent.
Fires bloom along the deck.
Fraser orders hard left rudder and returns fire.
Walke’s 5-in battery scoring visible hits on Iyanami, blowing out her searchlight, knocking down a deckhouse.
But Iyanami is not alone.
Two more Japanese destroyers join the fire.
The light cruiser Nagara opens up at 8,000 yd.
A torpedo wake passes under Walke’s stern by feet.
Another runs wide.
Fraser fires every one of his 10 torpedoes simply to clear the tubes.
They will run somewhere, hit something, miss something, but at least they will not be aboard his ship when she dies.
At 23:26, a 5-in shell penetrates Walke’s forward magazine.
Several tons of ammunition detonate at once.
The forward half of the ship, from the bow back through the bridge, disintegrates in a single fireball.
The blast wave kills everyone forward of the second stack instantly.
Commander Fraser is gone before he knows the magazine has been hit.
Walke breaks in two.
The bow section sinks immediately.
The stern hangs in the water for perhaps 30 seconds, lit by her own fires, before she capsizes and slides under.
Approximately 75 men die with her.
Roughly 60 get clear and float in their life jackets, watching the rest of the battle from the water.
600 yd behind Walke, on the bridge of USS Preston, Commander Max C.
Storms sees his lead destroyer come apart in front of him.
He keeps coming.
There is nothing else to do.
Astern, the battleships are dependent on the destroyer screen.
Ahead, Japanese guns are still firing.
Preston’s 5-in battery opens up on Iyanami and Nagara.
Multiple Japanese ships answer at once.
The first salvo destroys Preston’s SG radar antenna.
The second penetrates the after engine room.
High-pressure steam lines burst.
Every man in that compartment is killed in less than a second.
Superheated steam at 600° fills the space.
They do not have time to scream.
Preston loses propulsion on one shaft, then her bridge takes a hit.
The executive officer is killed.
Communications to the rest of the ship are severed.
Storms is alive, on his feet, but he is fighting half a ship.
At 23:30, a long lance hits Preston amidships on the starboard side.
Her keel breaks.
The ship folds.
Storms orders abandon ship.
He stays on the bridge helping men over the side.
He never gets off.
Less than 30 seconds after his order, Preston rolls onto her starboard beam and sinks bow first.
117 men die.
About 90 survive.
Lieutenant Commander John B.
Taylor, the skipper of Benham, sees two destroyers gone in front of him in the space of a few minutes.
He throws his rudder hard right to clear the wreckage and the men in the water.
The course change probably saves his ship from another torpedo, but not from this one.
A Type 93 hits Benham at the waterline, 30 ft back from the stem.
The bow vanishes.
60 ft of ship, the entire forward section, anchor windlass, forward gun mounts, magazines, crew quarters, paint locker, simply ceases to be.
There is a [snorts] hole in the night where the front of the destroyer used to be, but the torpedo strikes forward of the main watertight bulkhead, and the bulkhead holds.
Water rushes in and stops at the wall of inch-thick steel.
Benham is now 60 ft shorter than she was a minute ago, but she is still floating, still steering, still running her engines.
>> [snorts] >> Taylor stabilizes the ship and limps her south at five knots.
That is all the speed her hydrodynamics will allow without driving her under.
Not one of Benham’s crew is killed by the torpedo hit.
It is the only piece of good news in the destroyer column.
She will stay afloat through the night and most of the next day until at 1938 hours on November 15th, she is finally scuttled by her sister ship USS Gwinn after every attempt to nurse her into Guadalcanal fails.
Her crew will be transferred off in time.
Every man will go home.
Gwinn is last in the column.
Lieutenant Commander John B.
Fellows watches the three ships ahead of him die or mime in roughly that order.
He fires what guns he has.
At 23:32, a Japanese shell hits Gwinn’s after engine room.
Several engineers die in the blast.
One engine goes down.
The other holds.
Gwin keeps moving.
Of the four destroyers Halsey could scrape together, two are on the bottom.
One is dying.
One is wounded.
The screen, the entire reason a battleship task force has destroyers, no longer exists.
Lee has lost more men in 15 minutes than the entire Battle of Midway cost the United States Navy in killed.
In the same exchange on the Japanese side, Lieutenant Commander AG Sukuma’s Ayamani is mortally hit.
American 5-in shells from Walke and Gwin and from the battleship’s secondary batteries have shredded her.
She drifts off on fire, her own crew trying to keep her afloat.
She will sink before dawn.
Sukuma will die with her.
It is on the surface a brutal trade.
It is exactly what Lee accepted when he put his destroyers up front.
It is also the moment when the battle changes.
Because something else is happening 2,000 yd behind Walke’s burning wreckage that Kondo does not yet understand.
USS South Dakota, the second American battleship, the one Lee assumed would fight at his side, is about to take herself out of the fight.
And no Japanese gun is going to do it.
South Dakota’s captain is Thomas L.
Gatch.
He is 51 years old.
He is aggressive.
He is the kind of officer who likes to be in front.
Earlier in the year he ran his ship aground in the Tonga Islands.
A few weeks later he managed to collide with the destroyer Mahan.
He still has the command.
He still wants to fight.
When the destroyer action erupts, Gatch maneuvers South Dakota independently.
He does not stay tucked behind Washington as the formation diagram drew it.
He swings to starboard looking for a firing solution, eager to get into the picture.
It puts him into the burning destroyer water.
It puts him silhouetted against the fires of Walke and Preston.
It is the wrong place to be on a moonless night.
But the disaster that ruined South Dakota does not come from outside.
It comes from a single decision made by one of her own engineers.
Earlier in the evening, in the calm before the action, an electrical repair team had been working on a circuit breaker in one of the main switchboards.
The breaker had a habit of tripping.
The chief engineer, under pressure to keep every system online for the coming fight, decided to tie the breaker down.
Lock it.
Force it to stay closed even if a fault tried to throw it open.
It is a violation of every electrical safety procedure in the United States Navy.
It is a violation for a reason.
At 23:33, just as South Dakota is patching minor splinter damage from Iron Army’s earlier shells, a fault occurs somewhere in the power grid.
The breaker that should have tripped does not.
It cannot.
It is wired shut.
The fault has nowhere to go, so it goes everywhere.
The next breaker upstream trips.
Then the one upstream of that.
Then the one upstream of that.
In seconds, the entire main electrical distribution of a 35,000-ton battleship cascades into darkness.
Radar out.
Fire control out.
Gun directors frozen.
Ammunition hoists stopped.
Radios dead.
Ventilation silent.
Even emergency lights in some compartments fail.
The most modern battleship in the United States Navy goes blind in the middle of an engagement she has not yet finished joining.
The damage control parties grope through black passageways with flashlights.
They try to identify what tripped, what to reset, what to bypass.
In daylight, with the ship at peace, it would be a difficult repair.
In the dark, in combat, with the deck plates still ringing from her own guns of moments ago, it is closer to impossible.
She drifts forward on momentum and manual steering.
She has no idea where the Japanese are.
She has no way to fire her main battery in centralized control.
She has no way to talk to Lee.
She is a battleship with no sensors and she is sailing straight into Kondo’s main body.
As midnight approaches on November 15th, partial power returns.
Some radars flicker on.
Some directors come back.
But by then, South Dakota has drifted on momentum to within 5,500 yd of the Japanese line.
That is the inside of a city block in battleship terms.
The Japanese heavy cruiser Atago snaps on a searchlight.
The beam finds South Dakota in less than a second.
She is perfectly framed, silhouetted from behind by the burning American destroyers.
Lit from in front by a searchlight she cannot shoot out because her gun directors are still rebooting.
35,000 tons of new battleship, barely a year out of commission, wearing the cleanest paint in the South Pacific, standing in the spotlight at 5,000 yd.
Every Japanese ship in line of sight opens fire.
Kirishima’s 14-in main battery fires at point-blank for a battleship.
5,500 yd, a flight time of 8 seconds.
Atago and Takao add their 8-in guns.
The light cruiser Nagara fires 6-in.
The destroyer Asagumo adds 5-in.
South Dakota is hit at least 27 times in 3 minutes.
Most of the hits are smaller caliber, 6-in, 5-in, 8-in.
None of them can punch through her armor or the face of her turrets.
Her armor does exactly what the men who designed it intended, but everything above the armor is meat to be carved.
The forward main battery director takes a direct hit from a 14-in shell.
The shell does not penetrate the armor director.
It does not have to.
The kinetic shock alone kills every man inside.
The radar antennas, the ones South Dakota has just gotten back are shattered by shell fragments.
Gun mounts in the secondary battery are knocked off their pedestals.
Number three turret takes an 8-in hit on the barbette and holds, but the men inside are slammed against the steel.
The superstructure becomes a colander.
39 men are killed.
59 more are wounded.
A boatswain’s mate, 20 years old, dies in his gun tub.
A signalman dies on a wing of the bridge.
A marine posted as a sentry near the after director dies at his station with his rifle still slung.
Their names are not in the battle dispatches.
Their names will be in telegrams that arrive at houses across the United States over the next 3 weeks.
A mother in Ohio, a father in California, a wife in Norfolk who is 6 months pregnant.
Captain Gatch survives.
A shell fragment opens his neck and he is bleeding heavily before a corpsman reaches him, but he is alive.
The ship is alive.
The engines are alive.
She is still steering.
She is also blind.
Gatch orders a hard turn to starboard and breaks contact.
South Dakota disappears back south into the dark.
Fires burning along her topsides, smoke trailing behind her like a flag.
She has been in combat with the Japanese main body for less than 5 minutes.
In the operations rooms of three different Japanese ships, in the chart house of Kondo’s flagship Atago, a quiet certainty settles in.
They have just defeated the American battleship.
They believe it because they have not seen another one.
They have not seen another one because Lee has done exactly what he set out to do.
Washington is 2,000 yd to the north in deeper shadow with her own gun blasts of minutes ago lost in the chaos.
The Japanese radar, what little of it exists, is not good enough to separate two large contacts in surface clutter.
The Japanese eyes, the famous Japanese night optics, are blinded by their own searchlights, by their own muzzle flashes, by the burning American destroyers, and by the burning South Dakota.
Kondo reads the picture in front of him.
One American battleship illuminated, hit, withdrawing.
A destroyer screen, destroyed.
He has lost a destroyer, I Amami, but he has gutted the American force.
The path to Henderson Field is opening.
He has not lost this battle.
He has won it.
He believes that.
He believes it for 19 more minutes.
Inside the plotting room of USS Washington, in a compartment below the armored deck, lit by red battle lamps, four men sit around the Mark VIII range keeper.
Gears turn.
Cams shift.
A pointer slides across a graduated wheel.
The range keeper is being fed range data every 2 seconds fresh from the Mark III fire control radar on the forward main battery director, 60 ft above their heads.
The target is the largest contact remaining in the Japanese line, bearing 330, range 8,400 yd, speed 18 kn.
The range keeper computes the lead.
The directors elevate the guns.
Nine 16-in rifles in three triple turrets are now pointing at a Japanese battleship none of the men in this compartment has ever seen with their eyes.
Captain Glenn Davis glances at Lee.
Lee is watching the SG radar repeater.
The bright point of light on the screen, Kirishima, moves slowly, steadily, fat with overconfidence across his display.
He has been tracking her for 20 minutes.
She does not know he exists.
Lee turns his head.
His voice on the talker is flat, almost mild.
This is Lee.
Give me the range and bearing of the largest target.
The talker reads them back.
Lee listens, nods once, looks at Davis.
Stand by, Glenn.
Here they come.
It is the stroke of midnight, the night of November 14th turning into November 15th, 1942.
Inside the next 7 minutes, the way navies fight at sea is about to change forever.
At the order, Washington’s 9 16-in rifles fire as one.
The blast lights the sea for half a mile in every direction.
It rolls back across the water as a shockwave that empties the air from a man’s lungs if he is on deck and forgets to open his mouth.
24,000 lb of steel and explosive leave the muzzles in a single second.
The ship herself heals to starboard from the recoil, 8 ft of new battleship rolling on her keel like a dory in a swell.
Nine armor-piercing shells climb into the night.
Each shell stands 5 and 1/2 ft tall, the height of a small man, and weighs as much as a Volkswagen.
Each one carries 40 lb of bursting charge sealed behind a hardened nose with a base fuse set to delay just long enough for the shell to punch through armor before it lets go.
The shells rise to 20,000 ft at the top of their arc.
They come down at a steep angle, the angle that is most dangerous to a battleship because the angle at the top of the arc finds the deck armor, and the deck armor is the thinnest plate on her.
Time of flight, 8,400 yd, 20 seconds.
On the bridge of Kirishima, Captain Sanji Iwabuchi is 49 years old.
He has spent his career preparing for this moment, a night gun action against another battleship.
He has watched the destroyer screen south of him take the American destroyers apart.
He has watched the searchlights find the American battleship.
He has watched her be hit and turn and run.
His lookouts are facing forward watching the approach to Henderson Field.
He does not know there is a second American battleship.
He learns when the deck explodes under his feet.
The first salvo lands on Kirishima’s forward superstructure and main deck.
Two shells strike the bridge tower.
Both detonate.
The rangefinder on top of the tower disintegrates.
Fire control wiring is severed.
Communications go dead in the same instant.
The plot room loses its links to the gun directors.
Men on the bridge are killed by concussion alone without a fragment touching them.
The kinetic shock of 2,700 lb projectiles arriving inside steel walls.
Iwabuchi is knocked off his feet.
He survives.
Most of the men around him do not.
Smoke fills the bridge.
Electrical lights flicker and die.
He gets to one knee, then to his feet.
He tries to call the gunnery officer.
The phone is dead.
He orders return fire by voice tube to the after turrets, the only ones he still has any chance of pointing.
The second salvo arrives.
Washington’s gun crews are already reloading.
The hoists in each barbette have pulled new shells up from the magazines below the waterline.
Six powder bags follow each shell.
The breech blocks slam shut.
The director updates the solution from the latest radar range.
30 seconds after the first nine guns fired, nine more 16-in shells are in the air.
This salvo lands amidships and forward.
One shell penetrates the armor deck near the forward magazines.
It is the most dangerous hit a battleship can take.
The shell drives through the deck and explodes in a compartment one level above the magazine itself.
Fires spread.
Iwabuchi orders the forward magazines flooded, the standard protective measure to prevent a chain detonation that would tear his ship apart.
The flooding saves the ship from blowing up.
The flooding also disables the entire forward main battery.
Without ammunition feed, the forward turrets are now scrap.
Another shell from the same salvo brings down the main mast and the backup fire control director with it.
The director falls onto the deck, crushing men below it.
Kirishima’s eyes are gone.
She tries to fight anyway.
The two after turrets, three and four, are still mechanically operational.
The local gun captains in those turrets can see the muzzle flashes of Washington’s guns to the southwest.
There is no radar.
There are no optics worth using.
There is only the bright stuttering glare of 9 16-in rifles firing every 30 seconds.
The Japanese gunners estimate range by the brightness of the muzzle blast.
They estimate Washington at 10,000 yd.
Washington is actually at 8,600.
Close enough in many wars to be the same number, not close enough tonight.
Kirishima’s after turrets fire a salvo of 14-in shells.
They scream out across the dark water at the muzzle flashes that killed her bridge.
They pass over Washington’s masts by perhaps 200 ft.
A sailor on Washington’s signal bridge will say later that he could feel the pressure wave on his face.
He will say it sounded like an express train going by overhead in the dark.
He will say it took everything he had not to duck.
200 ft at 8,000 yd is the difference between a Japanese gunner getting the range right and a Japanese gunner getting it wrong by a hair.
If Heihachiro men had guessed 8,000 instead of 10,000, the shells would have come down on Washington’s deck instead of through her rigging.
A salvo of 9 14-in shells on a battleship’s main deck at point-blank would have killed scores of men.
A guess made by men who could not see their target.
That is the entire margin.
Washington’s third salvo lands amidships.
Three penetrating hits.
One shell goes through the side armor and explodes in the forward engine room.
Boilers rupture.
Steam lines burst.
The engineering watch is killed by superheated steam before any man has time to climb a ladder.
Another shell punches into the after engine room with similar results.
Kirishima’s speed begins to fall.
20 knots, 18, 15.
The fourth salvo 30 seconds later finds the steering.
A shell penetrates the deck and explodes in the steering gear compartment near the rudder.
The hydraulic lines that turn a 36,000 ton ship are cut.
Kirishima’s rudder jams.
She begins to circle slowly to port unable to control her own course.
The fifth salvo opens her below the waterline on the starboard side.
Water pours in.
The list begins.
The sixth salvo finishes the after turrets, the only guns she had left.
Aboard Washington, the gun crews are sweating in the heat of the turrets.
The plotting room is calling out ranges every 2 seconds.
The directors are tracking.
The Mark 8 range keeper grinds its gears and updates the solution.
Captain Davis paces the bridge in tight steps.
Lee stands by the radar repeater watching the bright point of light that is Kirishima begin to slow and turn and slow again.
At 1 minute past midnight, she was moving at 18 knots.
At 7 minutes past midnight, she is dead in the water.
In the same 7 minutes, Washington has fired 75 rounds of 16-in and 107 rounds of 5-in.
Sonar surveys of the wreck decades later will suggest that between 9 and 20 of the 16-in shells hit and that perhaps another 17 to 40 of the 5-in found their mark.
The exact count will never be known.
Too many of the hits went into the water and into spaces that flooded before any human eye could record them.
What is known is that Kirishima cannot move, cannot fight, cannot steer, and cannot put out her fires.
At 7 minutes past midnight, Lee orders cease fire.
There is no point in spending more ammunition on a ship that is already finished.
And there are other things to worry about now.
The Japanese destroyers have been launching torpedoes the whole time Washington has been firing.
Dozens of long lances are in the water running on courses set by men who guessed at Washington’s position from her muzzle flashes.
The fish do not need to be aimed perfectly.
They only need to find a battleship somewhere in the box of water she might be in.
Lee orders the helm hard over.
Washington swings hard left then hard right zigzagging at 25 knots through a maze of running torpedoes she cannot see.
Lookouts on the wings of the bridge spot wakes and there should be no wakes at all because the long lance leaves almost none but the sheer number of fish in the water means a few catch the right angle of light.
One wake passes a hundred yards ahead, another a hundred yards astern, another by one sailor’s count runs the length of the ship within touching distance to starboard.
None of them hit.
By half past midnight Washington is clear of the torpedo water.
By 3:00 in the morning Lee gives the order to withdraw.
The mission is finished.
Henderson Field is safe.
Behind them on a darkened patch of water seven miles northwest of Savo Island, Captain Iwo Buchi is making his last decision aboard a battleship.
Japanese destroyers have come alongside.
The wounded are being transferred.
The fires cannot be controlled.
The list is climbing past 15 degrees.
The forward magazines are flooded but other compartments are flooding now on their own and there are no pumps left that can keep up.
At 3:25 in the morning Iwo Buchi orders the sea [ __ ] opened.
He gives the order to abandon ship.
His men have done their duty.
There is no honor left to extract from staying aboard.
Kirishima rolls to starboard and goes down by the bow.
212 men go with her.
She sinks in nearly 4,000 feet of water.
Half a century later, an oceanographer named Robert Ballard will find her on the bottom, up high down, her turrets broken from their seats and resting in the silt beside her hull.
The wounds Washington put in her still visible in the lights of a deep water camera.
USS Washington has not been hit once.
Not one man on her crew has been wounded.
Her paint is unmarred.
The only thing different about her in the morning light is that her 16-in barrels are blackened from breech to muzzle by the heat of 7 minutes of continuous fire.
The action report that Captain Glenn Davis writes in the days afterward contains one sentence that will be quoted in Naval War Colleges for the next 80 years.
Radar has forced the captain or officer in tactical command to base a greater part of his actions on what he is told rather than what he can see.
It is a sentence about the end of one age and the beginning of another.
A few days later, Lee himself writes to Halsey.
The letter is not what anyone expects from a man who has just won the only one-on-one battleship gunfight in the history of the United States Navy.
He does not take credit.
He gives all of it to the radar.
We realized then, and it should not be forgotten now, that our entire superiority was due almost entirely to our possession of radar.
We have no edge on the Japanese in experience, skill, training, or performance of personnel.
A flag officer telling his theater commander in writing that his men were not better men, that his training was not better training, that the only reason any of them were still alive was a piece of electronic equipment most admirals still did not trust.
It is one of the most honest paragraphs ever written by a victorious commander.
The Navy lets it sit in a file.
Lee never makes a speech about Guadalcanal.
He never appears on a newsreel.
He never writes a memoir.
He is awarded the Navy Cross for the action, promoted to vice Admiral the following year, and sent on to the Marianas, to the Philippines, to Iwo Jima, to Okinawa.
He commands every fast battleship in the Pacific Fleet for the rest of the war.
He works himself sick doing it.
Sanji Iwabuchi survives Kirishima.
The Japanese promote him to Rear Admiral.
They send him to the Philippines.
In February of 1945, in the burning ruins of Manila, he refuses to surrender his garrison.
The battle for the city kills more than 100,000 Filipino civilians.
Iwabuchi dies in the rubble.
The Manila Massacre is one of the worst atrocities of the Pacific War.
The hand that closes that chapter is a hand that survived Lee’s salvos.
History runs in straight lines like that sometimes.
On the 25th of August, 1945, 10 days after Japan signs the surrender, 10 days after the war he helped to win officially ends, Vice Admiral Willis Augustus Lee is being ferried in a motor launch across Casco Bay, off Portland, Maine.
He is on his way out to his flagship, the old training battleship USS Wyoming.
He is 57 years old.
He has not had a full week’s rest in 3 years.
His heart gives out before the launch reaches the ship.
He is dead in the boat.
He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery under a plain white marble headstone in a row of plain white marble headstones.
The inscription gives his name, his rank, his dates of birth and death.
It mentions his Olympic medals.
It does not mention Guadalcanal.
It does not mention Kirishima.
It does not mention radar.
USS Washington serves out the war.
She covers the carriers at the Philippine Sea.
She bombards Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
She’s at the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay.
She brings soldiers home from Europe after V-J Day.
The Navy puts her in reserve in 1947 and keeps her there for 13 years.
In 1961, she is sold for scrap.
They tow her to a yard in New York and they cut her apart.
Her 16-in barrels are burned through with torches.
Her armor plate is melted down.
By the end of the year, the ship that destroyed a Japanese battleship in 7 minutes no longer exists as a ship.
But the idea she fought by is still at sea on every flag bridge in every navy in the world.
The combat information center, the central nervous system of a modern warship, where radar and sonar and electronic warfare and weapons control all feed into one room with one tactical picture, was created in the months after Guadalcanal by navy planners who finally understood what Lee had built into Washington.
The CIC is now standard on every warship larger than a patrol boat.
It is the architecture of how a ship at sea fights.
It traces a direct line back through the plotting room of a single battleship on a single night in November of 1942.
A quiet man in wire-rimmed glasses who would not let anyone praise him change the way the sea is fought.
He is buried under a stone that does not say so.
He would have preferred it that way.
