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The bloody slugging match for the island of Guadalcanal and the surrounding seas reached its peak fury seventy-three years ago this week.  Between November 13^th and 15^th, 1942, a pair of violent clashes in the waters north and east of the island marked a watershed in the eleven-month long Pacific War.  Those clashes would come to be known as the First and Second Naval Battles of Guadalcanal.

The stage was set for this far-flung, savage, running fight a week earlier, when US intelligence gleaned that the Japanese 17^th Army was going to make one last, large attempt break the Marine perimeter to overrun Henderson Field.  General Hyukatake, commanding 17^thArmy, had been arrogantly dismissive of the US Marines’ combat prowess, and entirely slipshod in his intelligence planning.  The Japanese had tried three times to break the Marines’ lines, once in late-August (at the Ilu River), in mid-September (Edson’s Ridge), and again in late-October, which was the first serious thrust, directly at Lunga Point and the airfield.  Each time, the Marines (and in October, joined by the Army’s 164^th Infantry) held firm and slaughtered the Japanese in large numbers.  Hyukatake had waited far too long.  Had his efforts been strong during the almost two weeks in mid-August during which the Marines had neither Naval nor air protection, the predicament of the 1^st Marine Division might have been extremely grim.  Now, after grievous losses, Hyukatake was to be reinforced for one last major push.

In light of the latest intelligence, Admiral Richmond K. Turner had taken Task Force 67, loaded with troops and supplies, toward the island.  The transports of TF 67 unloaded under intermittent air attack from Bougainville, but managed without serious losses.    The Japanese had pushed a bombardment force of two battleships, a cruiser, and eleven destroyers into the waters north of Guadalcanal with the mission of destroying the airfield and preventing the Cactus Air Force from interdicting the eleven transports packed with Japanese soldiers, supplies, food, and ammunition.  The US Navy had two task groups protecting the transports, under Admirals Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott.  Those forces combined, along with remaining escorts from Turner’s transport group, to form a powerful group of two heavy and three light cruisers, and eight destroyers (under Callaghan, aboard San Francisco).

The two forces sighted each other almost simultaneously, at approximately 0125 on 13 November.  Admiral Callaghan, regrettably, had not employed any ship with the improved SG radar in his van, which meant that the Japanese, even in the poor visibility of the night, negated his technical advantage with their superior night combat skills.  The confused melee began at extremely close ranges, and was filled with confusing orders, hesitation, and ferocity.  The IJN battleship Hiei was badly mauled by dozens of 5-inch hits on her bridge and superstructure, pummeled by US destroyers that were so close that Hiei’s 14-inch guns could not depress to engage them.   She suffered at least three 8-inch hits, likely from San Francisco, her steering gear was shot away, and she was a shambles topside.  Hiei and sister Kirishima managed to exacted revenge on Atlanta and San Francisco, landing large caliber (14-inch) hits on both.  The riddled Atlanta drifted across San Francisco’s line of fire, and was almost certainly struck by the latter’s main battery, adding to the carnage on board.    When the action finished less than an hour later, four US destroyers had been sunk, Altanta was a wreck, Juneau and Portland had taken torpedoes, and San Francisco had been savaged, leaving her with only one 8-inch mount in action.   Both American admirals, Norman Scott aboard Atlanta, and Daniel Callaghan on San Francisco, had been killed.  Admiral Abe, the Japanese commander flying his flag on Hiei, had been wounded.

The Japanese attempted to take Hiei in tow, but US air attacks from Guadalcanal and Espiritu Santo further damaged the battleship, and she sank in the late evening of 13 November off Savo Island.   Similarly, efforts throughout the day to save Atlanta were unsuccessful, and just after 2000 on 13 November, the cruiser was scuttled on the orders of her captain.   Juneau, down fifteen feet by the bows and listing from her torpedo wounds, was proceeding to Espiritu Santo at 13 knots when she was struck by a torpedo from the Japanese submarine I-26.  Her magazine exploded, breaking her in two.  Witnesses say Juneau disappeared in twenty seconds.   Fearing the submarine threat and believing very few could have survived the explosion, the senior surviving American Officer (Captain Hoover, aboard Helena) made the agonizing decision to leave the survivors for later rescue.  About one hundred men had survived the sinking, but after eight days in the water, only ten were rescued.  The rest perished from exhaustion, wounds, or sharks, including the five Sullivan brothers.

Aside from the eventual loss of Hiei, the Japanese lost two destroyers sunk, and four damaged.  Japanese killed had numbered around 700, about half the total of Americans killed in the action.  With little in front of him, Abe might have sailed in to bombard Henderson Field at his leisure, but instead he withdrew.  With his withdrawal, Abe had turned a potentially serious tactical reverse into a strategic victory for the US Navy and Marine Corps.  Yamamoto, who had planned the operation, was forced to postpone the landings.  Furious, Yamamoto fired Abe, and ordered a new bombardment force under Vice Admiral Kondo to neutralize the airfield the next day, 14 November.   So ended the First Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, the first act of the tense drama, setting the stage for the second.

One of the great things about SAAB is they work closely with the Swedish army to produce marketing displays, essentially dog and pony shows, that feature some great explosions.

The inertially guided Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (or NLAW) is in service with Sweden, the UK, Finland, and Luxembourg.

Join me as I take the Tier III US Destroyer, the USS Wickes for a spin on the Islands map.

A little luck, and a little skill, and we unleash the Kraken.

USS Ward (DD-139) was built in 2-1/2 months, laid down on May 15, 1918, and commissioning on July 24, 1918.

She would miss service in World War I, but on December 7, 1941, while patrolling the mouth of Pearl Harbor, she engaged a Japanese mini-sub with gunfire, and sank her.

Later in the war, off Okinawa, converted to a High Speed Transport, she would be damaged beyond feasible repair by a Kamikaze attack.

Her crew abandoned ship, and she was sunk by the accompanying destroyer O’Brien.

The Captain of O’Brien that day was William Outerbridge.

And where was Outerbridge on December 7, 1941?

He had then been the Captain of USS Ward.

PSAM is a fantastic museum, and we try to fly at least one plane each Saturday during the winter tourist season. Today, I just happened to see this flying over my house.

And yes, that Packard Merlin purr was sexy as hell.

Anti-ship missiles have been, since 1967, a deadly threat to surface warships.  Vast sums of money have been spent on guided missile systems, and electronic countermeasures to defeat them. Indeed, the entire impetus behind the Aegis radar/combat management system of US cruisers and destroyers was defense against anti-ship missiles.

But one of the most effective defenses against anti-ship missiles is also one of the cheapest.

Chaff.

Most anti-ship missiles use an active radar seeker for terminal guidance. Radar, of course, works by reflecting radio frequency energy off a target, back to the seeker.

Chaff disrupts this by placing thousands of tiny slivers of metal in the air, and thus generating enormous radar returns to obscure the real target. Think of it as a smoke screen for radar. While the first iteration of chaff in World War II was strips of metallic foil, today it is usually slivers of fiberglass or mylar with a metallic coating. And the length of each sliver is tuned to the likely wavelength of a radar seeker for an anti-ship missile.

To get the chaff into the air, a surface warship uses a special type of mortar. In the US Navy, that’s the Mk 36 Super Rapid Blooming Offboard Chaff launcher, or SRBOC.

In a typical scenario involving a US destroyer, an incoming anti-ship missile would likely be detected by either the ship’s SPY-1D radar, or by the ship’s SLQ-32 Electronic Countermeasures set picking up the missile’s seeker or radar altimeter.

The destroyer might try engaging the missile with its own SM-2 Standard Missiles, or the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles. It might also use active jamming from the SLQ-32. It will also likely use the Nulka active decoy countermeasure. And the ship will almost certainly use SRBOC.

A review of all known anti-ship missile engagements show that simply using chaff has been remarkably effective in defeating anti-ship missiles.

The recent Iranian backed Houti rebels firing on USS Mason last month reiterate the value of this most basic self defense capability.

I need an explainer on the electoral college. How is it that the person who got the most votes in this election is the one who lost?

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) November 10, 2016

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Callimachi has done some very good reporting on the fight against ISIS, so I won’t crucify her here.

But the fact that a byline reporter from the New York Times, a former AP bureau chief, needs an explanation of the Electoral College is, frankly, astonishing.

Both the Constitution of the United States and the whole collection of The Federalist Papers are available online, for free. That anyone can graduate from an “elite” university (Dartmouth) without reading, and understanding the Constitution is a severe indictment on our institutions of education. Heck, she graduated from an American high school. She should have learned it there.

And one of the most beautiful things about the Constitution is that it is quite easy to understand. It was written with a clarity that certainly isn’t found in current government writing. Probably the most confusing piece in the Constitution is the bit about capitation taxes, and even that can be puzzled out with a few minutes reading.

The shame is that we’ve taught an entire generation to have strong passions about the flaws of the Constitution, without having any grounding on why the Constitution was written the way it was.

And so we find ourselves today faced with the problem that Instapundit describes, where our “elites” aren’t elite, but merely elitists.