If you look at photographs of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s, one ship stands out.
Not because she was the biggest, but because she was the most beautiful, the battleship Hi.
She was not just a weapon of war.
She was a floating palace.
In the years before the war, she had been demilitarized and converted into the Imperial transport ship for Emperor Hirohito himself.
Her interiors were not gray steel.
They were lined with polished teak wood.
Her stateooms were designed for royalty.
She was the diplomatic face of Japan, a symbol of elegance and power that toured the world to show the flag.
When the war started, she was refitted with guns and armor, but the aura remained.
To the Japanese sailors, Hy was special.
She was the emperor’s favorite.
She carried a mystical invincibility, but war does not respect royalty, and physics does not respect symbolism.
On the night of Friday the 13th, November the 1942, the emperor’s floating throne sailed into a narrow channel of water near Guadal Canal.
This place would soon be known as Iron Bottom Sound.
Hi was a 36,000 ton monster armed with 14-in guns.
She was built to fight other battleships at a range of 20,000 yd.
She was built to dominate the horizon.
But on this night, she wouldn’t be fighting at the horizon.
She would be fighting in a phone booth.
She was about to be ambushed by a scrappy, desperate force of American cruisers and destroyers at a range so close that the Japanese gunners couldn’t depress their barrels low enough to hit the targets.
The Japanese thought Hy was unbreakable.
They thought her armor was impenetrable to anything smaller than a battleship shell.
They were wrong.
Before the sun rose, the emperor’s ship would be turned into a burning slaughterhouse.
Her bridge would be crushed, not by a titan, but by a medium cruiser firing straight into her face.
This is the story of a barroom brawl in the dark.
A story of what happens when a piece of royalty gets mugged in an alleyway.
To understand why a battleship got beaten up in a fist fight, you have to look at the man in charge.
Vice Admiral Hiro Aki Abbe was a competent officer.
He was disciplined.
He was experienced.
But he had a fatal flaw that often plagues commanders who are burdened with too much responsibility, hesitation.
On the night of November 12th, Admiral Abbe’s mission was not to fight a naval battle.
His mission was bombardment.
The American Marines on Guadal Canal were holding on by a thread.
They controlled Henderson Field, an airirstrip that was the center of gravity for the entire campaign.
Abbe was ordered to take Hay and her sister ship Kirishima, sail down the slot, and rain high explosive hell onto that airfield.
He was supposed to smash the planes, crater the runway, and break the Marines.
because his target was an airfield soft dirt and parked airplane ordered his gunnery crews to load a specific type of ammunition, the type 3 shell, the Saniki shell.
This was a special incendiary round.
It wasn’t a solid block of steel designed to punch through ship armor.
It was essentially a massive shotgun shell packed with hundreds of incendiary tubes.
It was designed to explode in the air and shower the ground with fire.
Against an airfield, it is devastating against a battleship.
It is fireworks.
As our bay’s fleet approached Guadal Canal, the weather turned nasty.
Rain squalls masked the islands.
Visibility dropped to zero.
Then at 0125 hours, our Bay received a report from his scout destroyers.
Enemy ships sighted.
This was the nightmare scenario.
Harbay was caught with his pants down.
His main guns were loaded with fireworks, not armor-piercing shells.
A boulder commander might have ordered an immediate reload, but reloading 14-in guns on a battleship is not like reloading a pistol.
It takes time.
You have to hoist the heavy shells back down to the magazine, bring up the armor-piercing rounds, and ram them home.
It takes minutes.
precious minutes.
Abbe hesitated.
He thought maybe the report was wrong.
He thought maybe he could just push through.
He didn’t want to waste the specialized shells if he didn’t have to.
So, he kept the type three shells in the chambers.
He steamed forward into the dark, hoping the enemy wasn’t there.
But the enemy was there, and they weren’t waiting.
Leading the American force was Rear Admiral Daniel Callahan.
Callahan wasn’t hesitating.
He was charging his column of cruisers and destroyers straight at the Japanese formation.
Callahan’s plan was simple and suicidal.
Get the big ones.
He was driving his lighter ships directly into the teeth of the Japanese battleships, aiming to create a chaotic melee where Japanese superior optics and longrange tactics would be useless.
Admiral Arbe was still debating whether to change his ammo.
When the shapes of the American ships emerged from the rain, they were agonizingly close.
3,000 yards, 2,000 yards.
The time for decision was over.
The time for physics had begun.
On the American side of the water, Rear Admiral Daniel Callahan was standing on the bridge of the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco.
Callahan was a devout Catholic and a disciplinarian.
He wasn’t a gambler by nature, but on this night he was holding a hand of cards that would make a poker player sweat.
He was leading a scratch team, five cruisers and eight destroyers.
Some of these ships had never sailed together.
They were tired.
They were outnumbered in tonnage and firepower.
Against them stood two Japanese battleships, a light cruiser, and 11 destroyers.
In a textbook naval battle, the cruiser force should retreat.
You don’t take a knife to a gunfight.
But Callahan didn’t retreat.
He did something that violated every rule of naval prudence.
He ordered his ships to steer a collision course directly into the enemy formation.
It was madness, but it was calculated madness.
Callahan knew that if he stood off at a distance, the 14-in guns of the Hy would pick his ships apart before they could even scratch her paint.
His only chance, his only hope, was to get inside the Japanese Guard.
He wanted to get so close that the Japanese advantages in optics and range would disappear.
He wanted to turn the Pacific Ocean into a telephone booth.
The weather seemed to conspire to make this happen.
A tropical squall settled over Iron Bottom Sound.
The moon was blocked.
The sea was black.
The two fleets were rushing toward each other at a combined speed of 40 knots.
That is almost 50 mph.
On the radar screens of the American cruiser USS Helena, the operators watched the blips merge.
They shouted warnings over the radio, but the radio channels were clogged with static and confused voices.
Strange ships ahead.
Bearing 310, Callahan held his fire, he waited.
He was driving his fleet straight down the throat of the Japanese formation.
Suddenly, the lead American destroyers, the USS Cushing and the USS Lafy, almost collided with the enemy destroyers.
They were so close they had to turn sharply to avoid scraping paint.
The Japanese formation fractured.
The American formation fractured.
The orderly columns dissolved into a swirling chaotic mob of 30 ships mixed together in a confined space.
It wasn’t a fleet maneuver anymore.
It was a traffic accident.
On the bridge of the Hy, the Japanese lookout screamed.
They looked out and saw American destroyers passing inside their own formation.
They were so close they could see the white uniforms of the American sailors on the decks.
This was the moment of catalyst, the point of no return.
Admiral Arbay, paralyzed by surprise, ordered his search lights to turn on.
Massive beams of white light stabbed out from the HIA.
They swept across the water and locked onto the lead American cruiser, the USS Atlanta.
That beam of light was a death sentence for the Atlanta, but it was also a suicide note for the HA.
By turning on his lights, Abbe had revealed his position to every American gunner in the sound.
He had painted a giant bullseye on the emperor’s palace.
Callahan shouted into the radio, “Oddship ships fire to starboard.
Even ships fire to port.” It was a desperate, confusing order for a desperate, confusing battle.
The silence of the squall was shattered.
The barroom brawl had begun.
The clock struck 0148 hours.
The first shots were fired and immediately the tragedy of Admiral Arby’s hesitation played out in gruesome detail.
The battleship Hi leveled her massive 14-in turrets at the American light cruiser USS Atlanta.
The range was point blank less than 3,000 yd.
At this distance, a battleship shell doesn’t just hit, it obliterates.
The Japanese gunners pulled the triggers.
There was a thunderous roar.
Two 14-in shells screamed across the water and slammed into the Atlanta.
If those shells had been armor-piercing AP rounds, they would have punched through the Atlanta’s thin skin, smashed through her vitals, and likely detonated deep inside the hull, snapping the ship in half.
Atlanta would have vanished in seconds.
But they weren’t armor-piercing.
They were the type three incendiary shells.
When they hit the Atlanta, they didn’t penetrate.
They shattered on impact.
Imagine a giant shotgun blast.
The shells exploded instantly on the superructure, spraying thousands of burning steel tubes and shrapnel across the decks.
The result was horrific, but in a different way.
The blast shredded the bridge.
It killed Rear Admiral Norman Scott.
It turned the upper works of the ship into a twisted, burning wreck.
It decimated the crew, but it didn’t sink the ship.
The hull was intact.
The engines were running.
This is the ammo trap.
Abbe’s hesitation had saved the Atlanta from instant death, but it had condemned her crew to a hell of fire and shrapnel.
However, the trap worked both ways.
Because Arbe hadn’t sunk the American ships immediately, they were still floating and they were still fighting.
And now they were angry.
The Atlanta was burning, but her guns were still firing.
The destroyers around her was still firing.
And lurking just behind her was the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco.
The San Francisco was armed with 8-in guns.
These were heavy weapons, but they were nothing compared to a battleship’s main battery.
In a normal engagement at 10 mi, an 8-in shell would bounce off Hi’s heavy armor belt like a pebble.
But this wasn’t a normal engagement.
The San Francisco steered toward the source of the search lights.
The captain saw the massive pagod mast of the HA looming in the dark, illuminated by her own beams.
The range was closing to under 2,000 yd.
This is pistol range for a warship.
At this distance, the physics of armor penetration change.
The velocity of the shells is at its peak.
They don’t arc down.
They fly flat and hard.
The San Francisco unleashed a full broadside.
Nine 8-in shells hammered into the hy and they didn’t bounce.
They smashed into the upper works.
They tore through the secondary armor.
They ripped into the superructure.
For the Japanese sailors on the HIA, it must have been a shock.
They had been told their ship was invincible.
They had been told they were the hunters.
Now they were being pummeled by a ship a fraction of their size.
And it wasn’t just the San Francisco.
The little American destroyers Cushing, Laffy, Starret, Oannon swarmed the battleship like piranhas, attacking a whale.
The USS Laffy passed so close to the IIA, literally 20 ft away that the Japanese main guns couldn’t depress low enough to hit her.
The Laffy’s machine gunners were firing their small arms directly onto the bridge of the battleship, killing Japanese officers where they stood.
It was absurd.
It was grotesque.
A 36,000 ton palace was being torn apart by machine guns and 5-in shells.
But the killing blow was about to come from the San Francisco.
She was reloading.
She was adjusting her aim and she was looking right at the brain of the beast.
Naval historians often try to map out battles with neat lines and arrows.
Ship A moves here.
Ship B moves there.
But you cannot draw a map of what happened next.
You can only draw a mess.
By 0200 hours, the battle of Friday the 13th had devolved into total anarchy.
It was, in the words of one American officer, a barroom brawl after the lights had been shot out.
Ships were intermingled.
Friends and enemies were passing within yards of each other.
At one point, the American destroyer USS Oannon was so close to the HIA that they could have thrown a potato onto the battleship’s deck.
In this swirling chaos, the hy was the biggest target in the room.
And because Admiral Abbe had foolishly left his search lights on, she was a lit up target.
She was taking fire from everywhere.
5-in shells from destroyers were peppering her superructure, setting fires, cutting electrical lines, and slaughtering the anti-aircraft crews.
But the real executioner was the heavy cruiser USS San Francisco.
The San Francisco was taking a beating herself.
She was being hammered by the HIA’s secondary guns, but her main battery, those nine 8-in guns, remained locked on the HIA.
The American gunnery officer didn’t aim for the waterline.
He didn’t aim for the belt armor.
He aimed for the light.
He aimed for the pagod mast.
He aimed for the brain.
At a range of less than 2,000 yd, the San Francisco fired salvo after salvo.
The physics of this moment are terrifying.
An 8-in shell weighs about 260 lb.
It is traveling at supersonic speed.
When it hits steel at close range, the kinetic energy alone is enough to shake a ship to its keel.
These shells smashed into the Hi’s bridge structure.
The HIA was a battleship.
Yes, she had thick armor on her hull, but her bridge, the command center high up in the tower, was not built to withstand direct hits from heavy cruiser fire.
The shells punched through the steel walls of the bridge.
They exploded inside the command center.
The devastation was absolute.
Chief of Staff Suzuki was killed instantly.
The bridge was turned into a charal house of twisted metal and fire.
Vice Admiral Abbe was wounded, concussed, and covered in the blood of his staff.
In a split second, the HIA had been lobbomized.
Her command staff was dead or incapacitated.
Her communication lines were severed.
The unbreakable ship was suddenly blind, deaf, and dumb.
But the San Francisco wasn’t done.
As the two ships passed each other, trading punches like heavy weights in a phone booth, a shell, likely from the San Francisco, though some sources say it was a torpedo from a destroyer, slammed into the high stern.
It punched through the hole plating near the rudder.
Water flooded the steering compartment.
The massive hydraulic pumps that moved the rudder failed.
The rudder jammed hard to the starboard side.
This was the kidney punch that ended the fight.
A battleship that cannot steer is not a warship.
It is a drift log.
The haay began to turn in a slow, agonizing circle.
She was burning from bow to stern.
Her upper works were a mangled wreck of steel.
Her guns were firing wildly or falling silent, and the psychological shock was rippling through the Japanese fleet.
They were watching the emperor’s ship, the symbol of Imperial might, being dismantled by a pack of inferior American vessels.
They were watching a 36,000 ton giant being brought to its knees by ships a third of its size.
The brawl continued for a few more brutal minutes.
The San Francisco, battered and broken herself, drifted away into the dark.
The Atlanta was burning.
The Cushing and Lafy was sinking, but the damage was done.
Admiral Arbay, dazed and bleeding on the wrecked bridge, looked out at his ship.
The palace was gone.
The teak wood was burning.
The majestic Pagoda mast was riddled with holes.
He tried to issue orders, but the radios were dead.
He tried to steer the ship, but the wheels spun uselessly.
The barroom brawl ended as quickly as it had begun.
The American ships, battered and bleeding, withdrew to the east.
The Japanese ships, confused and leaderless, withdrew to the north.
But Hay couldn’t withdraw.
She was stuck in her death circle.
She was a crippled giant, spinning slowly in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise.
And with the sun, the vultures would come.
When the sun rose over Iron Bottom Sound, it revealed a shocking truth.
The hy, the invincible floating palace, was a smoking ruin.
Naval analysts have spent decades dissecting this battle.
How does a 36,000 ton battleship lose a gunfight to a heavy cruiser like the USS San Francisco and a handful of destroyers? It defies the logic of naval displacement.
It is like a heavyweight boxer getting knocked out by a flyweight.
The answer lies in the collision between engineering and reality.
First look at the engineering.
The Japanese thought Hy was unbreakable because they looked at the numbers on a piece of paper.
She had a thick armor belt.
She had massive turrets.
But Hy had a dirty secret.
She was born as a battle cruiser, not a pure battleship.
She traded armor for speed.
Although she had been upgraded, her superructure, the tower where Admiral Arbay stood, was relatively soft.
It was designed to repel splinters and light gunfire.
It was not designed to stop an 8-in armor-piercing shell traveling at 2,800 ft pers at point blank range.
And that is the key.
Range.
Japanese naval doctrine was built around the decisive battle at 20,000 yd.
At that distance, shells lose velocity.
They arc high in the air and plunge down on the deck.
But Admiral Callahan didn’t fight at 20,000 yd.
He fought at 2,000 yd.
At that range, the American shells didn’t arc.
They flew flat.
They hit with maximum kinetic energy.
The American destroyers were so close that their 5-in guns weapons meant for anti-aircraft or small boats, were punching through the HIA’s upper plating like a hole puncher through paper.
The American strategy stripped away the H highay’s armor advantage by brute force.
Second, look at the psychology.
The Japanese lost this fight because they were trapped in a doctrine trap.
Admiral Arbay and his crew were trained for a duel.
They were trained for precision optics, long range fire, and elegant maneuvers.
They were masters of the katana.
Admiral Callahan brought a broken beer bottle to the fight by charging straight into the Japanese formation.
Callahan created chaos.
Chaos is the great equalizer.
In a chaotic swirl, superior optics don’t matter because you can’t tell friend from foe.
Superior range doesn’t matter because the enemy is grabbing you by the throat.
The Americans thrived in this chaos.
Their doctrine was flexible.
Their captains like the skipper of the San Francisco or the Laffy acted independently.
They saw a target.
They shot it.
The Japanese froze.
Admiral Arbay hesitated with his ammo selection.
He hesitated with his search lights.
He couldn’t process the fact that the enemy was insane enough to charge a battleship headon.
The crippling of the HA proves a brutal lesson of war.
Systemic rigidity is fatal.
The Japanese ship was a masterpiece of engineering designed for a specific type of battle.
When the Americans refused to fight that battle when they turned the ocean into a barroom brawl, the masterpiece crumbled.
The hy wasn’t destroyed by a bigger gun.
She was destroyed because her enemy refused to follow the script.
Friday the 13th dawned clear and bright.
And for the crew of the Hiay, the daylight brought no relief.
It only brought the vultures.
The great battleship was still afloat.
Her hull was mostly intact.
Her engines still worked, but she was dead in the water.
The hit to her steering gear meant she was locked in a turn.
She was steaming in slow, useless circles north of Tsavo Island.
She was like a wounded elephant, unable to run, unable to hide.
And just a few miles away at Henderson Field on Guadal Canal, the very airfield Hy had come to destroy the American pilots were waking up.
They looked out at the water and saw the prize of the century, a crippled Japanese battleship, alone, without air cover.
It was a feeding frenzy.
Throughout the day, American planes, marine dive bombers, Navy torpedo planes, even Army B17s swarmed the HA.
They didn’t have to aim carefully.
The target was unmissable.
They dropped bomb after bomb.
They launched torpedo after torpedo.
The hy fought back with her few remaining anti-aircraft guns, but it was hopeless.
She was being picked apart piece by piece.
On the wrecked bridge, the wounded Admiral Arbe faced a terrible choice.
He wanted to beach the ship on the island to save her as a floating battery.
But his superiors in Tokyo hesitated.
They couldn’t believe the emperor’s ship was lost.
Finally, the order came.
Scuttle.
It is a humiliating word for a naval officer.
It means to sink your own ship.
The crew opened the sea valves.
The emperor’s portrait was carefully removed and transferred to a destroyer.
The survivors abandoned ship.
Sometime in the evening of November 13th, the high a rolled over and sank stern first into the deep water of Iron Bottom Sound.
She was the first Japanese battleship lost in the war.
The psychological shock in Tokyo was seismic.
They had told the public that their ships were invincible.
Now the emperor’s favorite was gone, lying in the mud next to the American cruisers she had fought.
The hy had come to Guadal Canal to break the Americans.
Instead, she became a monument to their stubbornness.
She was the victim of a navy that refused to be intimidated by size, by royalty, or by the odds.
There is a saying in military strategy, a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
The story of the HA is the ultimate proof of this rule.
Vice Admiral Arbe failed not because he lacked courage but because he sought perfection.
He waited to change his ammo because he wanted the perfect shell for the perfect target.
He hesitated to fire because he wanted to be sure.
Rear Admiral Callahan had no such inhibitions.
His plan was crude.
It was bloody.
It cost him his life.
Callahan was killed on the bridge of the San Francisco during the battle.
But it worked.
By charging in, by accepting the chaos, by turning the battle into a brawl, Callahan neutralized the Hy.
He traded his life and his cruisers to take the queen off the chessboard.
The wreck of the Hayi lies upside down in 3,000 ft of water today.
It is a tomb for hundreds of sailors.
But it is also a warning.
It warns us that in the modern age, symbols of power like battleships or perfect doctrines are fragile.
They can be broken by a scrappy opponent who is willing to get in close and dirty.
The Japanese thought the hy was unbreakable because she was built with thick steel.
They forgot that steel is only as strong as the decision-making of the man in command.
When Admiral Abbe hesitated, the steel became paper and the emperor’s throne became a coffin.
