At 1900 on December 11th, 1942, Lieutenant Junior Grade Lester Gamble armed PT37 at Tulagi, tracking 11 Japanese destroyers heading for Guadal Canal. Gamble was 25, two months in Ironbottom Sound. He had fired torpedoes at Japanese warships before, never once connected. 11 destroyers had departed Shortlands that afternoon.
Their flagship alone carried eight 100mm guns, four torpedo tubes, and 54 depth charges. Gamble’s PT37 carried four torpedoes, and two machine guns bolted to a plywood deck. For 4 months, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been running the Tokyo Express. Fast destroyer convoys raced down New Georgia Sound every few nights, delivering troops, ammunition, and rice to Japanese soldiers fighting for Guadal Canal.
The runs followed a brutal schedule. Japanese destroyers left Shortlands Harbor afternoon, sprinted 300 m down the passage Americans called the slot at speeds up to 33 knots, arrived after dark, packed supplies into sealed steel drums, pushed them overboard near the coast, and turned for home before dawn. Soldiers on shore swam out to haul the drums in.
American aircraft owned the daylight. Japanese destroyers owned the night. The United States Navy had thrown everything it had at the Tokyo Express. Cruisers, destroyers, submarines. The results were devastating. Since August, the Americans had lost two aircraft carriers, five cruisers, and a dozen destroyers in the waters around Guad Canal.
Thousands of American sailors lay on the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound. The ocean floor between Guadal Canal and Tsavo Island held so much sunken steel that it had earned its name. 12 days before Gamble loaded his torpedoes, the Navy had made its strongest attempt to break the express. On November 30th, Rear Admiral Carlton Wright led five heavy cruisers and four destroyers into an ambush at Tasa Faranga off Guadal Canal’s north coast.
The Americans had radar. They had surprise. They opened fire first. Rear Admiral Riso Tanaka commanded the Japanese force of eight destroyers. His crews reacted within minutes, launching Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes into the darkness. Heavy cruiser Northampton went down. Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Pensacola took catastrophic hits that tore their bowels apart.
395 American sailors died that night. Tanaka lost one destroyer. Five cruisers against eight destroyers and the Americans were demolished. It was the most humiliating surface defeat of the Pacific War. After Tasaparanga, no heavy warships remained to intercept the Express. The only vessels left were PT boats. 77 ft of mahogany plywood, 40 tons.
three Packard gasoline engines that could push them to 41 knots, but leaked fumes so badly that a single trace around could turn the entire boat into a fireball. Their main weapon was the Mark 8 torpedo, a weapon so unreliable that PT crews expected failure on every other launch. Since October, PT boats had been sorting from Tulagi nearly every night, firing dozens of torpedoes at Japanese destroyers.
Almost none had hit. On December 7th, just 4 days earlier, PT boats attacked the 12 destroyer Tokyo Express run off Cape Espirants. Not a single torpedo found its mark. Japanese destroyers shelled the retreating boats without mercy. The PT boats were not stopping the Tokyo Express. They were barely slowing it down.
And now Tanaka was coming again. Intelligence confirmed he was leading tonight’s convoy personally, flying his flag aboard Terasuki, a brand new Akizuki class destroyer completed just 3 months earlier at the Mitsubishi shipyard in Nagasaki. 440 ft long, 2,700 tons of steel. Terzuki had fought at the Battle of Santa Cruz in October.
She had fought in the naval battle of Guadal Canal in November where her guns helped sink the American destroyer Cushing. Her crew of 300 had never lost an engagement. She was the most powerful destroyer operating in the Solomons. Gamble’s PT37 displaced 40 tons. His hull was 3/4in mahogany plywood stretched over a wooden frame.
One direct hit from any of Terzuki’s eight guns would reduce his boat to floating splinters and burning gasoline. The weight ratio was 67 to1. No PT boat had ever sunk a warship of Terzuki size. 40 tons of plywood against a steel warship. What Gamble did next still sounds impossible. Hit like if you want to see how it played out.
It helps these stories reach more people. Please subscribe. Back to Gamble. At 2100, Gamble throttled PT37 out of Tulagi Harbor into the blackness of Iron Bottom Sound. PT40 under Stilly Taylor and PT48 under Bill Kryer carved wakes behind him. Further out, Frank Freeland’s PT44 and Charlie Tilden’s PT- 1110 fanned toward patrol stations around Savo Island.
Somewhere to the north, 11 Japanese destroyers were closing at 33 knots. Gamble had four torpedoes, a plywood hull, and roughly 90 minutes before Tanaka’s fleet reached Iron Bottom Sound. On the Japanese side, Tanaka had not wanted this mission. Supply runs to Guadal Canal had been failing one after another. On December 9th, the submarine I3 had been torpedoed and sunk, trying to deliver provisions underwater.
Japanese soldiers on Guadal Canal were starving. Thousands had died of malaria and malnutrition since August. They ate roots, bark, and leather stripped from their boots. Admiral Isuroku Yamamoto, commander of the combined fleet, sent Tanaka a direct order. Run the express again. Thousands of soldiers depended on this convoy. Without fresh supplies, the garrison faced mass starvation within weeks.
Tanaka organized his 11 destroyers into two groups. Six. Oashio, Kuroshio, Kagro, Tanikaz, Urakaz, and Aryak carried hundreds of sealed steel drums lashed to their decks packed with rice, ammunition, and medical supplies. Their decks were so crowded with cargo that their ability to fight was severely limited.
The remaining five, Teruzuki, Arashi, Naganami, Kawakaz, and Suzukaz sailed as combat escorts, fully armed. Teruzuki led the column. Arashi and Nagami fell in behind. Kawakaz and Suzukaz screened the flanks. The convoy covered 300 m in under 10 hours, reaching the waters north of Guadal Canal after nightfall. Tanaka knew the Americans would detect his approach.
Coast watchers, Allied intelligence operatives hidden in the jungle hills of the Solomon Islands, tracked Japanese ship movements by day and reported to Guadal Canal by radio. Japanese float planes launched from shortlands ahead of the formation, hunting for American patrol boats. Tanaka’s plan depended on speed and darkness.
Arrive after sunset, drop the drums offshore, turn north, and vanish before American aircraft scrambled at dawn. What Tanaka did not know was that American intelligence had already identified his convoy size and heading. The PT boat base at Tulagi had hours of warning. Gamble’s five boats pushed northwest through Iron Bottom Sound in total darkness.
The early Elco patrol boats carried no radar. Their crews relied entirely on eyesight to find enemy ships against the black horizon. On a clear night with moonlight, a destroyer silhouette might appear at roughly 1,000 yard. On an overcast night, detection range dropped to 500 yd or less. Tonight, broken clouds drifted across a partial moon.
Visibility shifted from minute to minute. One moment a crew could make out the dark mass of Tsavo Island. The next everything went black. PT boat attack doctrine against destroyers was simple in theory and nearly suicidal in practice. Approach on idle engines to minimize wake and noise, close to within 500 yd.
Fire torpedoes, then slam the throttles forward and run at full speed while enemy gunners try to track a small wooden target racing through the dark. The core problem was closing the distance. Japanese destroyers carried search lights that could illuminate targets at 2,000 yards. Their main batteries fired 15 rounds per minute per gun.
A PT boat caught in a search light beam at close range survived only if the gunners missed their first salvo. The torpedoes added another layer of risk. They ran a straight course, no homing capability, no course correction. After launch, the crew aimed the entire boat at the target, estimated the enemy’s speed and heading, calculated a deflection angle, and fired.
At 500 yd, a torpedo needed roughly 30 seconds to reach a destroyer moving at patrol speed. In those 30 seconds, the target could shift position by hundreds of feet. A small error in the deflection meant a clean miss. Each boat carried only four. Four torpedoes. Four chances. After that, the crew had nothing but machine guns against armored steel.
As the boats approached the western passages around Tsavo Island, Gamble positioned his force. Taylor’s PT40 and Kryer’s PT48 advanced to a forward patrol line between Cape Espiron and Tsavo Island, where the channel narrowed to barely 4 miles. Any ship heading for the Guadal Canal coast had to pass through that gap.
Their mission was to detect the enemy and radio the contact. Gamble held PT37 further south, ready to strike on the signal. Freeland’s PT44 and Tilden’s PT- 110 spread wide to cover the flanking approaches. Then all five boats killed their throttles and drifted, engines murmuring at idle, crews pressing binoculars to their eyes.
At 22:15, trouble arrived before the enemy did. Kryer’s PT48 began losing power. One engine coughed and died. Minutes later, a second engine failed. PT48 was crawling on one engine in the direct path of 11 oncoming destroyers, unable to make attack speed or outrun anything larger than a rowboat.
Taylor in PT40 saw Kryer’s boat falling dark and circled back to cover him. Then Taylor’s lookout spotted them. Dark shapes on the northern horizon. low silhouettes in column formation heading for the gap between Cape Espirans and Tsavo Island. Taylor keyed his radio. The Tokyo Express had arrived. PT48 was crippled and drifting directly in their path and Gamble in PT37 was still south of the channel, racing north to close the distance.
Taylor had seconds to decide. Kryer’s PT48 was drifting on one engine in the direct path of 11 oncoming destroyers. At their closing speed, the Japanese would be on top of PT48 within minutes. Taylor swung PT40 across the Japanese formation’s approach and opened his smoke generators. White chemical smoke poured from canisters on his stern, billowing across the channel between Cape Esperance and Savo Island.
The thick curtain masked PT48 and bought Kryer precious minutes to limp toward the Guadal Canal coast on his single remaining engine. The Japanese patrol column, Arashi, Nagonami, and Teruzuki in single file, was moving close to shore at low speed, scanning for a point to begin the supply drop. They did not detect the crippled boat behind Taylor’s smoke, but the white wall drifting across the channel told them American torpedo boats were operating nearby.
On the flanks, Kawakaz and Suzukaz went to full alert. Search lights snapped on and swept the dark water. Gun crews manned their stations and loaded. 3 mi south, Gamble heard Taylor’s contact report over the radio. 11 destroyers entering the channel, moving southeast, close to shore. This was the opening.
Gamble pushed all three throttles forward and PT37 surged north through the blackness, bow rising as three engines drove her toward the narrowing gap between Cape Esperants and Tsavo Island. He needed to reach the channel before the Japanese column cleared it, dropped their drums, and dispersed along the coast.
PT37 closed the distance in minutes. As Gamble approached the channel from the south, dark shapes materialized through gaps in the drifting smoke. Three warship silhouettes in single file moving close to the Guadal Canal coast. The lead ship’s profile was strikingly different from the others. Longer, taller, heavier superructure visible against the faint moonlit sky.
At 1,000 yards, Gamble could see the vessel dwarf the escorts behind it. Its outline matched the intelligence briefings. He was looking at Tanaka’s flagship. Gamble throttled back for the attack run, speed dropping, wake shrinking to barely a ripple. Every man aboard went silent. Sound carried across open water at night for hundreds of yards, and an engine note or a hull slapping waves could give them away.
The distance closed, 1,000 yd, 800, 600, 500. His torpedo crews crouched low at their stations, fingers on the release mechanisms, eyes fixed on the dark mass growing larger ahead. At 500 yd, details emerged, gun turrets four and aft, a tall bridge structure. Terizuki was making barely six knots, creeping along the coast with her search lights dark.
Her guns pointed northwest toward the smoke screen where Taylor had pulled the escorts attention. Gamble had a clean approach to her unguarded port side. He aimed for the stern, the engine rooms and fuel bunkers where a hit would do the most damage. At 6 knots, deflection was minimal. The target was nearly stationary. Compressed air hissed.
PT37 shuddered twice as two torpedoes dropped into the water and began their run. Gamble slammed the throttles open and hauled the wheel hard over, turning away at full power. Seconds later, Taylor in PT40, closing from a wider angle through the remains of his own smoke screen, fired at the same target. Multiple torpedoes were now cutting through the dark water toward Teduki. At 2259, two struck home.
The first torpedo hit the aft engine room beneath the main mast, punching through the hull and detonating inside the machinery spaces. Boilers ruptured. Steam lines burst. The second torpedo slammed into the fan tail, destroying the port propeller and smashing the rudder flat. The twin blast cracked open the aft fuel tanks.
Hundreds of gallons of burning oil poured from the shattered stern and spread across the surface, surrounding Terzuki’s entire aft section in a wall of flame that lit up the coastline for miles. The most powerful destroyer in the Solomons was dead in the water. Engines destroyed, steering wrecked, propulsion gone.
Flames climbed from her stern toward the bridge, their glow visible across Iron Bottom sound. On Terzuki’s bridge, Tanaka felt the deck plates heave beneath his feet, and then the searing bite of shrapnel tearing into his foot. Blood filled his boot. His flagship was burning from the stern forward, drifting without power, and she was never going to move again.
But Gamble had no time to assess his target. As PT37 raced south at full speed, search lights snapped onto the east. Kawakaz and Suzukaz had heard the explosions and were now sweeping the darkness with concentrated beams, hunting for the boats that had just crippled their admiral ship. Shells began falling around the fleeing PT boats, throwing columns of water into the air.
And somewhere in the dark between the Japanese escort destroyers and Tsavo Island, Frank Freeland’s PT44 was heading directly into their gun sites. Kawakaz and Suzukaz reacted within seconds. The two escort destroyers had been screening the flanks when the explosions lit up Terzuki stern. Their search lights snapped into wide sweeping arcs, hunting for the source of the attack.
Their gun crews opened fire at every shadow on the water, sending shells skipping across the channel between Tsavo Island and Cape Espirants. Gamble ran south at full throttle. PT37’s three engines driving her through the blackness. Wake streaming white behind the stern. Taylor in PT40 was somewhere a stern, also running hard.
Japanese search light beams swept the water in broad arcs, passing over the positions where the PT boats had been moments before. Shells splashed to port and starboard, throwing columns of spray into the night air, but the boats were already too fast and too low for the gunners to track. Gamble held his course south, putting distance between his crew and the Japanese guns.
Frank Freeland in PT44 had no such luck. His boat had been approaching from a flanking position near Tsavo Island when the torpedo struck Terzuki. The sudden glare of burning oil had illuminated the waters around him. Kawakazi and Suzukazi swinging their search lights east caught PT44 in a beam at close range.
Both destroyers opened fire simultaneously. At 2308, shells slammed into PT44’s hull. The gasolinefueled boat erupted. Two officers and seven enlisted men died in the dark waters southwest of Tsavo Island. PT44 was gone in seconds. Nine men killed. That was the cost of sending plywood against steel.
South of the engagement, Gamble eased back on his throttles as the search lights faded behind him. PT-37 had made it out. Taylor’s PT40 had also cleared the area. Kryer’s crippled PT-48 had limped to safety along the coast. Tilden’s PT 110, patrolling wide to the east, had avoided the engagement entirely. Four of five boats survived the night.
But Freeland and eight of his crew were at the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound. Gamble could still see the orange glow to the north. Teruzuki was burning brightly enough to light the underside of the low cloud layer. Whatever his torpedoes had done, the result was unmistakable. An enormous warship was on fire.
But Gamble had no confirmation that the ship was sinking, no way to verify how severe the damage was, and no way to know whether the Japanese could bring the flames under control. He had fired and he had hit. What happened next was beyond his reach. PT37 turned southeast toward Tulagi, her crew watching the distant glow fade behind the dark mass of Tsavo Island.
aboard Terasuki. The situation was deteriorating by the minute. The two torpedo impacts had wrecked the propulsion system entirely. The ship was without power, without steerage, drifting on the current off the Guadal Canal coast. Fires fed by ruptured fuel tanks had engulfed the stern and were advancing forward through the aft compartments deck by deck.
Commander Oitasuneo, Terzuki’s captain, ordered his damage control teams into the blaze. They fought hundreds of gallons of burning oil with portable extinguishers and bucket chains. The ship’s fire mains had failed with the engines. Her pumps were dead. Every minute, the flames gained another few feet toward midship.
On the bridge, Tanaka assessed the damage through the pain of his shrapnel wound. Teruzuki was finished as a warship. She could not move. She could not fight. Her magazines were at risk if the fires continued their advance. At 2333, Tanaka made the decision to abandon his flagship. A boat was lowered from the Nagoni, which had come alongside through the burning oil slick.
The admiral and his staff transferred across. Tanaka’s command flag now flew from a different bridge. Behind him, Teruzuki burned alone. The loss of the flagship threw the entire convoy into confusion. Tanaka had been the central command authority for the 11 destroyer formation. His emergency transfer disrupted communication among the scattered groups.
The six transport destroyers loaded with hundreds of drums of rice, ammunition, and medical supplies intended for the starving garrison attempted to complete their drops along the Guadal Canal coastline, but the coordinated timing that made the express work had collapsed. Some drums were pushed overboard in the right locations.
Others were dropped too far from shore for the soldiers to retrieve. Many never left the decks at all. The operation that Yamamoto had personally ordered was unraveling around a burning flagship, and Terzuki was still burning. The flames had now reached the midship section, climbing toward the aft ammunition lockers and the storage racks holding dozens of depth charges.
Each one was packed with hundreds of pounds of explosive. If the fire reached them, the detonation would tear the ship apart from the inside. Oita’s damage control crews fought on, but they were losing ground foot by foot against a fire that had been burning for nearly an hour with no way to stop it. Terzuki’s crew fought for 3 hours to save their ship. They lost.
The blaze had both fuel and momentum. Burning oil from the ruptured stern tanks had spread across the surrounding water, creating a barrier of flame that prevented other vessels from coming alongside. Inside the hull, the fire advanced forward through the aft compartments, feeding on paint, timber fittings, ammunition propellant, and oil that had pulled in every seam.
Smoke flooded the passageways and drove damage control teams back faster than they could push forward. Commander Odita organized relay teams passing buckets of seawater hand overhand through compartments ahead of the fire line without functioning pumps or pressurized mains. Manual labor was all they had.
Crewmen went below with soaked cloths over their faces, dragging empty hoses. Others cut fire brakes by ripping out deck plates and bulkhead fittings, trying to starve the flames of material. The effort was methodical, exhausting, and feudal. The fire had too much fuel and too much forward momentum to be stopped by buckets.
Nagonami and the remaining escorts circled at a distance, unable to penetrate the burning oil on the water’s surface. They lowered boats and sent them through gaps in the flames to take off the wounded. Tanaka, commanding from Nagonami’s bridge with his foot bandaged, faced a brutal calculation. The convoy still had a mission, and his escort destroyers were needed to protect the transports heading north.
He could not keep the formation circling a burning wreck until dawn when American aircraft from Henderson Field would catch them in open water. One by one, the escorts peeled away to cover the retreating transport ships as they abandoned whatever remained of their supply drops along the coast. By midnight, Teruzuki had been burning for over an hour.
She drifted south on the current, her hull glowing orange against the Black Sea. The fire had consumed the stern entirely and was pushing past the main mast toward the forward superructure. Heat warped the steel deck plates. Ammunition in the aft storage lockers began cooking off. Sporadic blasts and tracer rounds arcing into the sky at random intervals.
Every man still aboard could see the ship was dying. Orita ordered the Kingston valves opened. Seox built into the hull to flood the lower compartments and accelerate sinking. If Teduki could not be saved, she could at least be scuttled before the enemy salvaged her. But the valves were located in the engine room spaces, already flooded and burning.
Crewmen who attempted to reach them were driven back by heat and toxic fumes. The scuttling attempt failed. Orita gave the order to abandon ship. Some men climbed down ropes into boats that the escorts had sent through the flames. Others dropped directly into the warm water and began swimming toward the dark coastline of Guadal Canal, more than a mile distant.
The evacuation was remarkably orderly given the circumstances. Sailors helped wounded shipmates over the rail and into the water. Officers stayed on the burning decks until the last groups cleared. By 0200, the ship was empty of living men. Terzuki drifted alone through Ironbottom Sound, abandoned, burning from stern to bow, a floating torch visible in every direction.
The last Japanese destroyers had already turned north toward Shortlands. The supply drums that had been pushed overboard drifted toward the coast, where starving soldiers would search for them at first light. Many would never be recovered. At approximately 0440, the fire reached the aft magazines and the depth charge storage racks.
The detonation was enormous. A column of flame, smoke, and steel fragments erupted hundreds of feet above Iron Bottom Sound, briefly turning night into day across miles of open water. The blast ripped through Terzuki’s midsection, splitting the hull from the inside out. Secondary explosions followed in rapid chain as remaining warheads cooked off.
The ship broke in two. Her bow and stern sections folded inward as the center of the hull disintegrated beneath the waterline. Within minutes, the wreckage slipped beneath the surface and vanished into the deep water off Guadal Canal’s northern coast. The ship, whose name meant Shining Moon, settled onto the floor of Iron Bottom Sound, joining the dozens of warships already resting in that graveyard.
Nine of her crew were killed. 197 had been pulled from the water by the escorting destroyers before the final explosion. Another 156 swam to the Guadal Canal shore and joined the same starving garrison they had been sent to resupply. They had arrived not as rescuers, but as additional mouths that could not be fed.
20 miles to the southeast, Gamble-nosed PT37 into her birth at the Tulagi dock. As the first gray light of December 12th spread across the water, he knew his torpedoes had connected. He had watched the distant glow burn for nearly an hour as he withdrew south. But he did not yet know that the ship on the horizon had been the most powerful destroyer in the Solomons.
He did not know that Tanaka was wounded and he had no idea what his two torpedoes had just set in motion. Reports filtered into the Tulagi PT base throughout the morning of December 12th. Coast watchers in the Guadal Canal Hills had observed the massive fire off Cape Espirans for hours, reporting its position and intensity by radio.
At sea, signals intelligence operators intercepted Japanese fleet communications, distress signals, emergency reassignment orders, requests for rescue vessels. By midm morning, the intelligence staff at Tulagi pieced together a picture that went beyond anything the PT crews had imagined. The ship that burned and exploded off Cape Espirans had not been a standard Fabuki or Kagaroclass fleet destroyer.
It was an Akiuki class command vessel, the flagship of the officer responsible for the entire Tokyo Express resupply operation in the Solomons. For the PT boat crews, who had spent 2 months firing torpedoes into the dark and hitting nothing, the confirmation was almost impossible to process. Every failed attack, every night spent idling on black water, waiting for targets that outgun them in every dimension, every close call with search lights and destroyer shells, it had all built toward this single night. Two torpedoes
from a boat that most of the surface Navy considered expendable had struck the one target whose loss would [ __ ] the Japanese supply network more than anything a cruiser task force had managed in months. The men at Tulagi had been told their job was to harass and delay the express. On the night of December 11th, they had done far more than that.
The relief at the base was tempered by grief. PT44 had not returned. Freeland and eight of his crew were confirmed lost. The men at Tulagi understood the arithmetic of their work. Plywood boats and young lives traded for a chance against steel warships. On this night, the trade had produced a result no one expected.
But nine men who had motored out of the harbor the evening before would never come back. On the Guadal Canal coast, the supply run that Yamamoto had personally ordered proved to be a near total failure. At dawn, Japanese soldiers, weakened by months of malnutrition, waited into the surf, searching for the sealed drums that had been pushed overboard during the chaos.
The attack on the flagship had wrecked the coordination the drum drops required. Each drum had to be released at exact positions where the coastal current would carry it to designated collection points. Instead, the turmoil that followed the torpedo strike had scattered the drops across miles of shoreline.
Soldiers found a handful of drums and dragged them onto the sand. The vast majority drifted out to sea, sank in deep water, or washed up on stretches of coast held by American forces. The garrison received almost nothing. For the Japanese high command, the loss compounded a crisis that had been building since November. The Express had always been an imperfect solution.
Fleet destroyers diverted from combat duty to haul rice drums through hostile waters, delivering a fraction of what the garrison required. Even the best runs sustained the troops for only a few days. Now the flagship of the destroyer force responsible for those runs was gone. Its admiral wounded, its command structure fractured at the worst possible moment.
The arithmetic was turning decisively against Japan. Since August, the Express had cost the Imperial Japanese Navy dozens of destroyers damaged or sunk. Warships that could not be replaced at the rate they were being lost. Japan’s shipyards were already straining under combat losses across the Pacific. Every destroyer assigned to haul supply drums down the slot was a destroyer unavailable to escort carriers or screen the fleet in the battles that were certain to come.
The Express was consuming the force it depended on. After December 11th, the destroyer supply runs effectively ceased. A handful of submarine missions were attempted over the following weeks, but submarines carried far less cargo and proved equally vulnerable to American patrols. The submarine I1 was cornered and sunk off Kambo Bay on January 29th.
Another was damaged and forced to abort. The trickle of provisions reaching the garrison slowed to nearly nothing. Japanese soldiers on Guad Canal began dying at an accelerating rate. Malaria, dysentery, starvation, and untreated wounds reduced entire companies to a handful of men too weak to hold a rifle. The fighting force that had numbered in the tens of thousands was dissolving.
By late December, senior officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy began discussing what had been unthinkable 4 months earlier. Guad Canal could not be held. The garrison could not fight without supplies. The supplies could not get through without unsustainable losses. And the commander the Americans called Tenacious Tanaka, the man who had humiliated a cruiser task force at Tacaparanga and kept the supply line running through sheer tactical skill, was recuperating from his wounds with orders to report to Singapore. His sea
career was finished. The Express had lost its best operator at the moment it needed him most. The question facing Japanese high command was no longer whether Guad Canal could be won. It was whether the surviving soldiers could be pulled off the island before they all died. In the weeks that followed, the full significance of December 11th became impossible to ignore.
Terzuki was confirmed as the largest warship ever sunk by a PT boat in the entire Second World War. No patrol torpedo boat in any navy in any theater of operations would destroy a vessel of greater displacement for the rest of the conflict. The record set off Cape Espirants that night would stand not only through the war but through every decade that followed.
It has never been broken. On December 29th, Tanaka was officially relieved of command over Destroyer Squadron 2 and transferred to Singapore. His foot wounds required treatment, but the transfer was more than medical. Despite his unmatched record in night surface combat, no Japanese destroyer commander had inflicted more damage on American warships during the campaign.
Tanaka had made powerful enemies within the Imperial Japanese Navy. He had been openly critical of the high command’s decision to fight for Guadal Canal, arguing that the island could not be held and that the navy was wasting irreplaceable destroyers on a losing cause. His superiors did not welcome the criticism.
After recovering in Singapore, Tanaka was reassigned to shore duties in Burma, as far from a combat command as the Navy could send him. He would remain there until the end of the war. The most effective destroyer squadron commander in the Japanese fleet spent the final two and a half years of the conflict behind a desk, never commanding a warship at sea again.
With Tanaka gone and the Express broken, the Japanese garrison on Guadal Canal entered its final weeks. By mid January 1943, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo authorized what had seemed unthinkable the previous autumn, the complete withdrawal of all Japanese forces from the island.
The operation was designated K. It was kept secret even from the troops on Guad Canal who were told that reinforcements were on the way. The evacuation ran across three nights between February 1st and February 8th. Fast destroyers raced to the Guad Canal coast under cover of darkness, loaded soldiers onto their decks at collection points along the shore, and sprinted north before American aircraft could scramble at dawn.
Approximately 13,000 Japanese troops were pulled off the island over those three runs. The men who reached the destroyers were barely recognizable as soldiers. Months of starvation had reduced them to skeletal figures, many weighing less than 90 lb. Some could not climb the boarding nets and had to be hauled up by ship crews. Thousands more had already died on the island from starvation, malaria, dysentery, and wounds that went untreated because the medical supplies never arrived.
On February 9th, Major General Alexander Patch, commanding American ground forces on Guadal Canal, sent a cable to Admiral William Hollyy that closed the book on 6 months of the most brutal fighting in the Pacific. The message was brief. The Tokyo Express had reached its final stop on Guadal Canal. The campaign was over.
It had cost both sides dearly. Tens of thousands of lives, dozens of warships, and hundreds of aircraft lost in the air, on the ground, and beneath the waters of Iron Bottom Sound. For Japan, Guadal Canal was the first major ground defeat of the war, the moment the tide turned in the Pacific. The long retreat that followed would not end until August 1945.
For the United States, it was proof that Japanese expansion could be stopped, held, and reversed. For the PT boat force, the destruction of Terizuki validated a weapon system that the surface Navy had largely written off. The small wooden boats had been sent to the Solomons as an emergency measure. Expendable craft rushed in to fill the gap left by the cruiser losses of the autumn.
They had suffered chronic engine breakdowns, unreliable torpedoes, attacks by float planes, and devastating gunfire from warships that outclass them in every measurable way. But on one December night, two of those boats had delivered a strike that helped break the backbone of the Tokyo Express and accelerate the end of the entire campaign.
After Guadal Canal, the Navy expanded PT boat deployments across the Pacific to New Guinea, up the Solomon’s chain, and eventually to the Philippines. Gamble and the surviving PT crews continued operating out of Tulagi through January. PT37 went on patrol after patrol, running the same dark waters around Tsavo Island, where she had made history.
The boat that had killed the flagship kept hunting in the shadow of its own achievement. But Ironbottom Sound had not finished collecting its toll. On the night of February 1st, 1943, the same night the first Operation Key evacuation run began, PT37 sortied from Tulagi to intercept Japanese destroyers operating off the coast.
Waiting in the darkness was Kawakaz, the same destroyer that had screened Tanaka’s convoy on December 11th and whose shells had sunk PT44 that night. Now Kawakaz was hunting in Iron Bottom Sound again and PT37 was heading straight toward her. On the night of February 1st, 1943, PT37 sorted from Tulagi for the last time.
Japanese destroyers were running the first Operation Key evacuation mission and American patrol boats were sent to intercept. PT37 and PT 111 pushed into Iron Bottom Sound together. In the darkness off the Guadal Canal coast, Kawakaz found them. The destroyer’s guns opened fire at close range. Shells ripped through PT37’s hull, and the boat that had killed a flagship less than 2 months earlier was torn apart in the same waters where she had made history.
PT-11, caught alongside, was destroyed as well. Ironbottom sound swallowed them both. PT37 had been in commission since July of 1941. Built by the electric boat company at the Elco works in Bayon, New Jersey, she had deployed to the South Pacific as part of motor torpedo boat flotilla 1 in the autumn of 1942. In barely four months of combat off Guad Canal, her crew had patrolled Ironbottom Sound dozens of times, engaged Japanese destroyers in running nightfights, and endured air attacks, engine failures, and the constant awareness that one
shell could end everything. Her torpedo attack on December 11th had lasted less than 5 minutes from approach to impact. Those 5 minutes had reshaped the final chapter of the Guadal Canal campaign. Kawakazi did not survive the war either. On August 6th, 1943, during the battle of Vela Gulf in the Central Solomons, American destroyers ambushed a Japanese transport group.
Kawakaz took multiple torpedo hits and sank with heavy losses. The destroyer that had hunted PT boats through Iron Bottom Sound was herself killed by the same weapon. Torpedoes fired from the dark. Tanaka lived until July 9th, 1969, dying at the age of 77. He retired from military service in 1946 with the rank of vice admiral.
Though the promotion was largely ceremonial, he never commanded a warship after the night of December 11th. In the decades following the war, American naval historians came to regard him as one of the most formidable surface warfare commanders in the Pacific. Samuel Elliot Morrison, the official historian of United States Navy operations, wrote admiringly of Tanaka’s tactical skill and aggressiveness in night combat.
The officer whose own navy had sidelined him for speaking the truth about Guadal Canal received more recognition from his former enemies than he ever received from Japan. He spent his final years in quiet retirement, rarely speaking publicly about the war. For more than eight decades, Terizuzuki rested undiscovered on the ocean floor off Guadal Canal’s northern coast.
The exact position of the wreck was unknown. She lay somewhere in the deep water beneath Iron Bottom Sound alongside dozens of other warships, American and Japanese, unmarked, unvisited, and slowly dissolving in the darkness. In 2025, a joint deep sea expedition by the Ocean Exploration Trust, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of New Hampshire located Terzuki using advanced sonar mapping equipment.
Remote operated vehicles descended to the rec site and captured the first images of the ship in over 80 years. The hole lay broken on the sea floor, still split by the explosion that had destroyed her in the pre-dawn hours of December 12th, 1942. Gun turrets, bridge structure, and the shattered remains of her stern were identifiable on the bottom.
The wreck confirmed what the wartime records had always documented and what one PT boat crew had accomplished on a dark night off Cape Esperance with nothing but four torpedoes, three engines, and a plywood hull. You just heard how a plywood patrol boat took down one of the most powerful destroyers in the Pacific.
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