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The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced sailing in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. “If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post,” a maritime historian wrote.

BY DUSK ON AUGUST 5, with a heavy haze saddling the sea and some unlikely escorts, flying fish arcing and splashing amid rainbows in the bow spray, the ships of the Watchtower task force shaped a northward course. By skirting the radius of enemy air reconnaissance, Fletcher aimed to keep the fleet hidden from Japanese snoopers on the final run in.

Shortly after midnight on Friday, August 7, Fletcher’s expeditionary force approached Guadalcanal from the west. “God was with us during the approach,” the captain of the destroyer Monssen said, “because we had a complete overcast of clouds just about five hundred feet above us, complete dense white overcast of clouds, a perfectly calm night, not a ripple on the ocean.” To the hundreds of lookouts standing watch, the island revealed itself as a dark-against-dark silhouette, “vague, black and shapeless off our starboard bow,” Joe Custer wrote; “like a purple lump in a pool of oil,” according to George Kittredge, a turret officer in the Chicago. The moon was just rising, a waning crescent only five days to new, but its faint light was enough to make visible the plantation island’s interior mountains, and the round mound in the sound, Savo Island, ahead and just to port. The Chicago’s bow wave, curling back in a surge of salt spray every time it pressed into a swell, produced a great phosophorescent arrow that receded for miles off either quarter. Kittredge feared it would reveal them to the enemy. But the operation was going like clockwork. After everything—the sonar soundings of fish, the endless refueling, the tense waiting, the failed rehearsals, the massive ocean rendezvous six thousand miles from home—Fletcher’s task forces were just fifteen minutes behind the schedule that had been set weeks before.

Two powerful forces indigenous to the island competed to make the first impression on the newcomers: the scent of tropical flora and the stench of a rotted harvest. The abandoned Lever Brothers plantation’s fermenting fruits and the tropical vegetation everywhere else made a vivid blend, almost visual in its impact on the senses. En route to this place, the Navy had done well to avoid surprises. The diverse mélange of aromas was the first of many, small and large, that would find them at Guadalcanal.

Because submarine attack was among the worst surprises of all, fighting captains understood the importance of the blackout restriction: lights out, no smoking, exterior bulkhead doors and hatches tightly shut, no exceptions. The Astoria’s searchlights were turned in to keep their lenses from reflecting the moon. Turner’s transports were exhibiting less discipline. Lazing along off the Astoria’s port quarter, they were seen blinking signal lamps at one another. “What the hell do they think this is, Broadway?” someone asked. All nerves were atwitch. A Japanese naval patrol was widely expected to greet their arrival. As the amphibious force approached within three miles of Lunga Point, a strongpoint said by the coastwatchers to house antiaircraft gun emplacements, the commander of the landing force’s cruiser screen, Rear Admiral Victor A. C. Crutchley, Royal Navy, ordered his ships to draw a bead while the transports drew past. Shortly after 3 a.m., on all vessels, came the call to general quarters. Bugles blared through intercoms. Synthetic alarm bells summoned the heavy clambering of soles on steel decks and ladders. Then: “All hands man your battle stations! Set Condition One!”

As dawn broke, it was almost possible, from the high perspective of a cruiser’s foremast, to comprehend