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Effectively, two parallel but separate naval campaigns were developing. The seas immediately around Guadalcanal would be the setting for a campaign of surface fights between light forces for control of the seas. Farther out to sea, generally to the north and east of the Solomons, a less geographically constrained campaign would be fought as the roaming aircraft carrier forces made themselves selectively available to duel, striking with their planes but never coming within sight of each other.

On the night of August 21, the marines on Guadalcanal were witness to a quick, fiery encounter between light naval forces in Savo Sound. On that night the destroyers Blue and Henley, having brought two cargo ships into Guadalcanal, caught an enemy destroyer, the Kawakaze, bent on intercepting the U.S. cargomen, which had been sighted that afternoon. Before the American duo knew anything was awry, the Kawakaze had put six torpedoes in the water. The radar set on the Blue had only just revealed the enemy’s presence about three miles away when the American ship was racked by a torpedo. The blast removed most of her stern, killing nine men and leaving her to be scuttled the next night.

But Admiral Yamamoto had much more than destroyer skirmishes to worry about. The assignment to send his carriers against a U.S. island airdrome when the American carriers were unaccounted for must have given him an unsettling flashback to June, when he had tackled a similar dual threat, Midway and three enemy carriers, and paid a heavy price. If Yamamoto’s carriers met the Americans again, it would be a rematch between the commanders Fletcher and Nagumo, who had traded blows eleven weeks earlier off Midway.

11

A Function at the Junction

GHORMLEY SUSPECTED YAMAMOTO WAS SENDING A POWERFUL welcoming party to greet the newly ensconced aviators at Henderson. An intelligence report from Nimitz’s headquarters ventured a “rough guess,” based on aircraft and submarine reconnaissance, that a heavy Japanese striking force of carriers and battleships could arrive in the area around August 24. This guess had the virtue of being right on the money. Ghormley warned Fletcher, “Indications point strongly to enemy attack in force on Cactus area 23–26 August. From available intelligence … presence of carriers possible but not confirmed.… Important fueling be conducted soonest possible and if practicable one carrier task force at a time retiring for that purpose.”

On the morning of the twenty-third, a search plane flying from Ndeni, in the Santa Cruz Islands, sighted Tanaka’s southbound transports. Pilots from Henderson Field and from Fletcher’s flagship, the Saratoga, winged out to intercept but failed to find them. With this, Fletcher thought that the momentum toward battle had dissipated. That evening, with no targets in sight and with the fleet intelligence summary misleadingly placing Nagumo’s carriers at Truk, he followed Ghormley’s recommendation and sent the Wasp and her escorts south to refuel. Hundreds of miles to the north, the powerful Japanese task forces were making tracks in his direction.

The next morning, McCain’s PBY Catalinas found what they were looking for: Japanese carriers. The light carrier Ryujo was 280 miles northwest of Fletcher’s position. Although he was deprived of the Wasp, Fletcher would have his rematch with Nagumo. More than two weeks after the disaster of August 9, the third major aircraft carrier battle of the war was in the offing.

The Americans and the Japanese were well practiced in the new business of carrier combat, from the tricky dance of reconnaissance to the difficult choreography of flight and hangar deck operations, with ordnance gangs and plane handlers muscling their planes into the cycle: load, spot, launch, strike. When planes were fortunate enough to find targets, attacks succeeded or failed on individual pilot skill, the effectiveness of defenses and fighter interception, shiphandling, and,