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By Root 2052 0

a considerable advantage in Admiral Fitch’s land-based PBY Catalina patrol bombers and B-17 Flying Fortresses operating out of Espiritu Santo and other area island groups. They had the ability to fly at night and their range, at up to eight hundred miles, was peerless. On the morning of October 25, a flurry of sighting reports reached American commanders. At nine thirty, a B-17 spied the Junyo northeast of Malaita. Mere minutes later, a PBY spotted the battleships and cruisers of Abe’s vanguard. This was followed by a third sighting ten minutes later, reporting three Japanese carriers. At the time of these sightings, the Japanese were about three hundred miles northwest of the Santa Cruz Islands. Kinkaid’s and Murray’s task forces were about an equal distance east of the islands.

Realizing he had been discovered, Admiral Nagumo, furious that his scouts hadn’t yet found the U.S. carriers, decided to reverse course to the north, taking his three valuable carriers out of range of potential attack. It was a wise and fortuitous move. A flight of B-17s was summoned from Espiritu at first contact, and the Enterprise, too, launched a strike. Nagumo knew all too well that the first carrier to be seen was usually the first to be sunk as well. The fact that the American strikes missed him was testimony to the value of caution. The pilots from the Enterprise, meanwhile, encountered the terror that beset even the most experienced pilots returning to their ship after dark. Attemping to land on the small flight deck at night, eight aircraft were lost, either forced to ditch or suffer damage on hard landings. Two pilots were killed.

Through the night, Fitch’s snoopers kept up a determined effort to relocate the Japanese carriers on the night patrol. On Guadalcanal that night, the Japanese Army renewed its assault on Henderson Field, using the same general approach for a similarly grim result. General Hyakutake’s infantry, blistered by machine-gun, mortar, and canister fire, was forced to retreat. Japanese deaths were as many as thirty-five hundred. American fatalities in what would be known as the Battle for Henderson Field numbered around ninety.

As Vandegrift’s men held again, the first report from the PBYs reached Kinkaid around midnight and passed to Halsey. Dispatched shortly after 3 a.m. on the twenty-sixth (by a courageous Catalina pilot who doubled down on his luck by trying to bomb the Zuikaku), the report did not reach Kinkaid for two hours. When it finally did, the vintage of the news persuaded him to hesitate. He would not launch his attack until fresher information came.

The Enterprise, as the duty carrier, sent up the dawn patrol to resume searches to the west and north of the task force. At 6:17 a.m., two Dauntlesses working the western search sector spotted battleships, Abe’s Vanguard Force, about eighty-five miles out. But it was the carriers that were prized most highly. Less than thirty minutes later, two other Enterprise aviators hit pay dirt, spying Nagumo’s carriers to the west-northwest of Kinkaid, about two hundred miles away.

Unfortunately for Kinkaid, his decision to await better information before striking took place just as one of Kondo’s scout planes finally located him. As a consequence of the American commander’s delay and his bad luck in being spotted, the Japanese launched their principal attack about twenty minutes ahead of the Americans. At seven thirty-two, the Hornet, operating about ten miles from the Enterprise task force, began launching her first deckload of aircraft.

Because Kondo was heading southeast, directly into the wind, whereas Kinkaid’s carriers were steaming with the wind and thus had to reverse course into the wind in order to launch or recover aircraft, the Japanese were quicker on the draw by about thirty minutes. By seven forty, sixty-four Japanese planes—a nearly even mix of Kate torpedo bombers, Val dive-bombers, and Zero fighters from the Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho—were airborne and outbound.

U.S. Navy Combat Task Forces in the South Pacific (as of October 26, 1942)