Drachinifel gets so much of this treatment WRONG.
a. This ignores the Daihatsu war.
b.
HIJMS Nisshin was misused repeatedly.
c. Scott was already there with the cruisers. He was posted to the east guard position when Savo Island happened. His patrol box was assigned the Sealark Channel. See MAP.
d. Offset shooting was not an original British practice or even invented by them. Sims invented it. They adopted it after they saw us use it. The only reason Scott used it, was he had neither time, materials, nor means to construct tow sleds as "target tails". The "target tails" method was safer and allowed live fire on track with measurable hits observed and scored instead of splashes and guesses as to probability of hits.
e. Norm picked the USS San Francisco because she had the best radios and best OPTICS as well as the largest plot and chart rooms of the fleet.
e. Drachinifel muffs
the rapid fire gun drill used by the USN.
The reason for not using rapid fire at long range was mechanical. The guns barrels had to be aligned at 20 degrees minimum for the semi-auto rammers to work. Once the range dropped to where the elevation required was less than 40 degrees, the shell hose was turned on and
the target was walked along the track to death.
f.
Radioed contact reports and plotting of them by a tracking party was a thing that plagued all navies in WWII. That Drachinifel implies this was an unique USN shortcoming is typical of the SLOPPY biased scholarship a Briton brings to the Pacific war. We invented the combat information center after the hard lessons of Iron Bottom Sound. The Japanese and the British were still commanding thedir ships from the bridge and doing things the wrong way into 1945.
g. US signals were numbered out of a message book. Simultaneous turn to 230 was mishandled by the radio room as turn to 230. NO-ONE knows why the wrong format was used. But admiral's intent was simultaneous
reverse your bearing 180 which should have been the message sent. It was not.
10. The destroyer fould up and USS Boise was acting within USN tradition. Trust the captains to sort their ships out. This was not Spartivento, where British ships milled around in confusion while the italians used them for a shoot-ex and then hared off because Somerville lost the plot and the British captains waited on him to make up his mind. Given another 10 minutes before the merge, Scott's line would be back in hand and all would be well. But (bad) timing is usual when the enemy shows up in the middle of your evolution and you have to go with what you have.
11. USS San Francisco's captain had not trained the tracking party. This was also a mistake on Scott's part in his training program. He should have tabletopped some of these exercises he ran to simulate battle confusion and independent variables which would result in melee conditioons. (Eager captains going off on their own, which is a USN command characteristic.). I have no idea why Scott would not have learned this tendency from the Naval War College or from the Naval Academy. It inevitably resulted in a gun-torpedo or in this day and age MISSILE brawl that favors the more aggressive side.
12. There is no way to sugarcoat the comms failures. As at Savo Island, contacts were not passed forward to be plotted and hesitance to shoot proved costly.
13. Much has been made of Scott's "Cease fire.", order, but as it happened, nobody *(See 11.) I mean nobody even bothered to notice it, when they had positive ID on the Japanese.
14. HIJMS Aoba was so close and bows on that she was topsided. Here is when those two errant US destroyers on Goto's port flank, should have torpedoed her, but for some reason did not. That was a HUGE mistake.
15. HIJMS Furutaka did get the works, including the obligatory torpedo from the USS Buchanan, whose captain seems to have figured out that was what she needed as the US cruisers rearranged her innards to suit USN interests.
16. The HIJMS Fubuki, whose captain must have been stupified, got the same treatment. So far, in spite of Scott's errors, missed comms and general American confusion, things for the USN were shaping into a reverse Savo Island. So what went wrong NOW?
17. HIJMS Kinugasa and HIJMS Hatsuyuki counterturned away to port as the Aoba, Fubuki and Furutaka got theirs to starboard.
18. USS Fahrenholt and USS Duncan steamed into the USS Boise's shell hose as she was tearing Furutaka some new manholes and portholes to let in sea water to put out the American caused fires near the torpedo flat on the Japanese ship. This did neither US destroyer any good.
19. Scott presciently turned about this late stage to avoid the torpedoes from Kinugasa. This was not so much an accident as to turn it into a parallel order fight.
20. Despite pre-battle instructions not to do so, the USS Boise lit herself up and the HIJMS Kinugasa hit her in the number 2 powder room with disastrous effects.
22. HIJMS Kinugasa then worked over USS Salt Lake City which was illuminated by USS Boise's fires. Lesson here, is never sail in company with a ship dumb enough to use her searchlights in a night battle. And when that ship is set afire, scurry away from her as fast as possible.
Post battle tactical results: next day;
a. USS Duncan was scuttled as too damaged to tow in.
b. HIJMS Furutaka sank as a result of damage.
c. Admiral Ujima, the idiot assigned the transport mission that Goto's bombardment force inadvertently covered, sent four destroyers to help Goto. Two of the four destroyers sent were sunk by the Cactus Air Force and we should tack this further debacle onto Scott's efforts to protect henderson Field.
Post battle strategic results.
Drachinifel tries to minimize Cape Esperance. He argues that the Japanese successfully damaged Henderson Field 3 days later and that the Japanese seaplane tenders, fast transports gave the Japanese parity in the supply battle. In this assessment he is wrong. He thinks he has a point about the Japanese raising the stakes and making Guadalcanal a prolonged campaign minimizing Esperance's effects. Yet that is what the Americans wanted. The IJN had to escalate with capital ship commitments because they now knew cruisers were not enough. It may seem odd that after the later USN disaster of Tassafaronga, that Esperance made First and Second Guadalcanal necessary, but it so happens that Esperance convinced the Japanese
they had to neutralize Henderson Field and it would take battleships (battle cruisers) to do it.
The loss of Hiei and Kirishima was the result and now the Americans would be able to fight a destroyer war in the Solomons (Ran out of cruisers for the moment after Tassafaronga.), as the Japanese were not about to risk more battleships after First and Second Guadalcanal.
