August second, nineteen forty-three. Blackett Strait, in the Solomon Islands. It is about two twenty-seven in the morning, and the night is moonless. A Japanese destroyer named Amagiri comes out of the dark at speed and cuts an American torpedo boat in two. The boat is P T one oh nine. Her captain, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant junior grade named John F Kennedy, survives. Two of his crew do not.

That night, fifteen P T boats had gone out to stop four Japanese destroyers carrying troops to the island of Kolombangara. Eight of the boats fired a total of thirty torpedoes. Not one hit.

Five nights later, three of those four destroyers came back down the same route, on the same schedule. This time six American destroyers were waiting in Vella Gulf, about thirteen miles north of where P T one oh nine went down. They fired twenty-four torpedoes in sixty-three seconds, and all four Japanese destroyers were hit. Three of them sank, and more than twelve hundred Japanese soldiers and sailors died. No American ship was touched.

Same waters. Same enemy. Same week. And the American destroyer torpedo, the Mark fifteen, had a record no better than the weapon that failed on the P T boats. For twenty months it had run deeper than it was set, and too often it struck its target without exploding. The fleet had a word for a torpedo that hit and did not go off. It was a dud.

So what changed in five nights? The answer is in the Navy's wartime Combat Narrative of the battle, in the memoir of the Japanese captain who escaped it, and in a battle plan written by an officer who was ordered away three days before he could use it.

Start with the record. In twenty months of war, Japanese destroyers had never been beaten in a night torpedo action.

The Japanese called their night supply runs nezumi yuso, rat transportation. The Americans called them the Tokyo Express. Fast destroyers loaded troops and supplies at bases up the Solomons chain, ran south down the channel the Americans called the Slot, unloaded after dark, and were gone before daylight brought American aircraft.

Part of the Japanese edge was a weapon. The Type ninety-three torpedo, the Long Lance, was twenty-four inches across, burned its fuel with oxygen-enriched air, carried a warhead of one thousand and eighty pounds, and could run twenty-four thousand yards at forty-eight knots while leaving almost no wake. Part of it was American doctrine. The U S Navy's War Instructions of nineteen thirty-four, still in force when the Solomons fighting began, told destroyers to attack at once with guns and save their torpedoes for capital ships. At night, gunfire meant muzzle flashes, and muzzle flashes showed Japanese torpedo officers where to aim.

Tassafaronga, off Guadalcanal, on November thirtieth, nineteen forty-two, showed what that cost. American radar found eight Japanese destroyers first. Commander William Cole, leading the American destroyers, asked permission to fire torpedoes. Rear Admiral Carleton Wright answered, "Range on bogies excessive at present." Four minutes passed before permission came, and by then the targets had moved from an ideal firing position to a poor one. Three American destroyers fired twenty Mark fifteen torpedoes on long overtaking runs near the limit of their range. Every one missed. Then the American cruisers opened fire, and the Japanese aimed at the flashes. More than forty Long Lances went into the water. Four American heavy cruisers were torpedoed, Northampton sank, and around four hundred American sailors were killed. The Japanese lost one destroyer.

Seven months later the pattern held. At Kula Gulf on July sixth, nineteen forty-three, Japanese torpedoes sank the light cruiser Helena. A week later, off Kolombangara, Japanese ships without radar of their own tracked the Allied force by its radar emissions and fired first. They lost the cruiser Jintsu, but they torpedoed all three Allied cruisers and sank the destroyer Gwin. By the end of July, Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, commanding the Third Amphibious Force, was short of undamaged cruisers. If the next Express was going to be stopped, destroyers would have to do it alone, with a torpedo the destroyermen now knew was faulty.

The first suspect is the ships, and they can be ruled out quickly.

The six destroyers of Task Group thirty-one point two were not new. Dunlap, Craven and Maury were commissioned in nineteen thirty-seven and nineteen thirty-eight, Lang, Sterett and Stack in nineteen thirty-nine. All six were pre-war designs, older than the Fletcher class then arriving in the Pacific. The first three formed Destroyer Division Twelve and still carried their full pre-war torpedo batteries, forty-four tubes between them. The other three, Destroyer Division Fifteen, had given up half their tubes for extra forty millimeter guns.

One of them had already been on the losing side. Maury was at Tassafaronga. She had no S G surface-search radar that night, never found a target, and held her torpedoes.

Whatever changed, it was not the ships.

The second suspect is the enemy.

The Japanese force was led by Captain Kaju Sugiura, commander of Destroyer Division Four and a former chief instructor at the Japanese navy's torpedo school, with his flag in Hagikaze. Hagikaze and Arashi had screened the carriers at Midway. Hagikaze's torpedoes scuttled the burning carrier Kaga, and both ships helped send Akagi down. It was Arashi, racing back to the fleet after hunting the submarine Nautilus, that led Wade McClusky's dive bombers to the Japanese carriers. Kawakaze had torpedoed the destroyer Blue off Guadalcanal, and two of her torpedoes sank Northampton at Tassafaronga. At the rear came Shigure, with Captain Tameichi Hara on her bridge, the officer who had written the Japanese navy's manual on torpedo attack.

These were veteran ships under two of the Japanese navy's leading torpedo experts.

On August fourth, Sugiura briefed his captains. Hara described the briefing in his memoir, Japanese Destroyer Captain. The last run had been a complete success, Sugiura told them, and the high command wanted it repeated. Then he said: "We shall go through Vella Gulf and Blackett Strait again, exactly as we did last time."

Hara objected. It was the same mission, by the same route, on the same schedule, for the third time running. Sugiura answered that communications with the garrison made any change impossible. By custom, one destroyer scouted ahead with no troops or cargo, a pure warship. He offered that place to Hara, who declined because of the state of Shigure's boilers. So Hagikaze took the scout position, and Sugiura loaded her with troops as well. When the force sailed, all four destroyers had soldiers aboard: about nine hundred and fifty men and fifty-five tons of supplies, for the more than ten thousand Japanese troops already on Kolombangara.

Before sailing, Hara told an acquaintance, "This operation, at best, is unreasonable."

The third suspect is the plan, and it comes with the first twist. The man who wrote it was not there.

Commander Arleigh Burke had studied the defeat at Tassafaronga, and he had lobbied his superiors for a more aggressive use of destroyers. His plan called for hitting the enemy "with one sudden surprise after another." Two destroyer divisions would steam in parallel columns. The first would slip in close in the dark, fire torpedoes and turn away. When the torpedoes hit and the enemy began shooting at the retiring division, the second would open fire from another direction. No gun would fire until the torpedoes struck, so no flash would give the destroyers away. Burke had a saying about hesitation: the difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds. At Tassafaronga, the American destroyers had waited four minutes.

On the night P T one oh nine was lost, Burke's destroyers had been sent to Kula Gulf, on the far side of Kolombangara. The Express came the other way. On August third, Burke was reassigned. Commander Frederick Moosbrugger, his Naval Academy classmate from nineteen twenty-three and a former instructor in the Academy's Department of Ordnance and Gunnery, took over the task group. Two days later he was ordered into Vella Gulf.

On the morning of August sixth, Moosbrugger met Commander Rodger Simpson, who led Destroyer Division Fifteen, and then all six captains aboard Dunlap. Simpson persuaded him to adopt Burke's plan almost word for word, and the captains had already trained to it. Wilkinson's own advice was to avoid torpedo actions and rely on long-range gunfire. He gave Moosbrugger six destroyers and the freedom to disregard it. The written orders ran to three pages, and they were blunt: all surface contacts encountered in Vella Gulf are enemy; primary target destroyers, secondary barges. Moosbrugger also listed his assumptions. One was that the enemy would be at a disadvantage, with his decks loaded with troops. Sugiura had already made sure of that. Another was one the nineteen thirty-four rulebook did not share: in a night surface engagement under favorable conditions, the destroyer's primary and most devastating weapon was the torpedo. Of the morning conference, Moosbrugger wrote in his report, "There was complete mutual understanding of all possible situations to be encountered."

Task Group thirty-one point two sailed from Purvis Bay, near Tulagi, at eleven thirty that morning. That was an hour early, because Maury's engineering plant limited her to twenty-seven knots. The ships ran west, south of the Russell Islands and Rendova. In the late afternoon an American patrol plane sighted the Japanese force, and by seventeen thirty Moosbrugger had the report. Sugiura's radiomen intercepted the aircraft's urgent coded message, and he assumed he had been seen. He did not change the plan.

Six P B Y Black Cats were assigned to scout for the destroyers. Bad weather and radar trouble meant Moosbrugger never made contact with any of them. He would go in on his own sensors.

At twenty-two hundred the task group reached Gizo Strait, a narrow, poorly charted passage into Vella Gulf from the south, and slowed to fifteen knots, a speed that left little wake for enemy aircraft to see. At twenty-two twenty-six the moon set. The sky was completely overcast, and visibility ran from three thousand to four thousand yards, depending on the rain squalls. The two divisions swept the approach to Blackett Strait, found nothing, and at twenty-two fifty turned north along the western coast of Kolombangara. They stayed close inshore, with the dark mass of the island's volcano behind them.

At twenty-three eighteen, Dunlap reported a radar contact to the east at forty-five hundred yards. No other ship could confirm it, and it was dropped as a phantom. Fifteen minutes later, at twenty-three thirty-three, Dunlap's radar picked up a second contact, almost due north at twenty-three thousand nine hundred yards, about twelve miles.

That radar was the first piece of the answer. The S G set was the U S Navy's first microwave surface-search radar, built around the cavity magnetron the British had brought to America in nineteen forty, and the first to give its operator a plan position indicator, a round screen that drew ships and coastline like a map. Older long-wave sets could not separate a ship from the island behind it. The S G could. None of the four Japanese destroyers carried radar. Five nights earlier, the few P T boats with radar had fired first and been ordered home, which left the rest, P T one oh nine among them, waiting in the dark without it. The official reports later said that the S G radar made the success of this operation possible.

Craven confirmed over the ships' voice radio: "I have three targets; looks mighty nice to me." Dunlap answered, "We have four." Dunlap's Combat Intelligence Center, plotting the radar picture, reported a column coming south at twenty-five to thirty knots.

At the tail of that column, Hara had doubled his lookouts. Shigure, older and with tired boilers, had fallen more than a thousand yards behind Kawakaze, and Hara refused to overboost the engines to close the gap. He kept his torpedo tubes trained to port, toward the side where visibility was worst.

At twenty-three forty the two forces were closing at about fifty knots. Moosbrugger turned Destroyer Division Twelve to course three three five, to pass down the Japanese column's port side on the opposite heading, while Simpson's division swung away to the west to get across its path.

Between twenty-three forty-one and twenty-three forty-two, Dunlap, Craven and Maury fired twenty-four torpedoes, eight each, in sixty-three seconds, at ranges of forty-three hundred to forty-eight hundred and twenty yards. None of the American ships had seen a Japanese ship. They fired on radar alone.

The torpedoes were the second piece. The magnetic feature of their Mark six exploders had been disconnected, so they would fire on contact only. They had a new, more powerful warhead. Flash hiders on the tubes masked the flash of the powder charge that launched each one. And they were set to run shallow, at five to nine feet, because the Mark fifteen, like the submarine force's Mark fourteen, ran deeper than its setting. Aboard Maury, the executive officer, Russell Crenshaw, made sure her torpedoes were set at five feet, the shallowest setting there was. Crenshaw later wrote that perhaps the most important single factor in the Solomons night battles was "the unbelievable ignorance of the American commanders about the performance of destroyer torpedoes, both theirs and ours."

The third piece was the plan itself. The American destroyers held their guns. At Tassafaronga the first American salvo had shown the Japanese where to aim. In Vella Gulf the six ships stayed dark.

At twenty-three forty-two the Japanese lookouts began to see something. Hagikaze reported a contact to the east. Arashi reported a P T boat. Kawakaze reported another P T boat that was not there. On Shigure, as Hara remembered it, a lookout cried out: "White waves! Black objects! Several ships heading toward us!" Shigure swung to starboard and fired eight torpedoes back. Hara later called the next two minutes "the most breathtaking ones of my life."

At twenty-three forty-five Destroyer Division Twelve turned away together, clear of any torpedoes coming back. Shigure's eight missed.

The American torpedoes had about four minutes to run. Dunlap's chief torpedoman's mate reported to the bridge that all of them appeared to run "hot, straight and true." On Lang, gunnery officer E H Winslow remembered that it seemed to take forever.

At twenty-three forty-six the first explosion lit Vella Gulf.

Arashi was hit at least twice. Hagikaze took one or two torpedoes in a fire room and came to a stop. Kawakaze took one in her forward magazine, under the bridge, and the front of the ship became a ball of fire. Of the twenty-four torpedoes, eight hit. One in three.

Simpson's division, now across the Japanese column's path, opened fire with every gun. Lang found her target with her fire-control radar, and Sterett and Stack joined without waiting for a signal. Kawakaze rolled over and sank at twenty-three fifty-two. At twenty-three fifty-five Moosbrugger brought his own division back around, and Dunlap, Craven and Maury opened fire too. Maury's radar overload relay tripped after her first salvo, and she ceased fire after five. The Japanese fired back raggedly, in all directions.

At about ten minutes past midnight, Arashi's magazine exploded. The Combat Narrative describes a blast that climbed six hundred to seven hundred feet into the air. Thirty miles away, P T boat crews in Kula Gulf saw the explosions and thought the volcano on Kolombangara was erupting.

Shigure had reloaded her tubes and turned back toward the fight. Hara saw the blast, heard an aircraft engine overhead, and concluded the force was under air attack. He wrote that he decided retreat was honorable, and he turned for Rabaul.

At twenty-one minutes past midnight, Simpson's three ships each fired two more torpedoes into the last burning wreck. To one American observer it looked like a bed of red-hot coals thrown a thousand feet in the air. By twenty-seven minutes past midnight, nothing showed on any American radar screen. The task group had fired thirty-four torpedoes and about eight hundred five-inch shells. Oil burned on the water for an hour and a half.

Simpson's division went back through the area to take prisoners. The water was full of men clinging to rafts and wreckage, and they would not be rescued. They chanted in unison. When the destroyers slowed to pull men aboard, someone in the water blew a whistle. The chanting stopped, and the men swam away from the ships.

There was a second twist. The torpedo was still flawed.

Shigure's rudder had a hole straight through it. An American torpedo had hit her and failed to explode. Others had passed close by or underneath her. The fix, a new contact pistol for the Mark six exploder, would not reach the fleet until later in the year.

So the weapon was not the whole answer. The way it was used was. The torpedoes were fired from under five thousand yards, not at the end of a long chase, and they crossed the Japanese course at close to a right angle. Every one was in the water before a single gun gave the destroyers away. And the ships that fired them turned away at once, so Shigure's answer found empty water.

The dud had one more consequence. It let Shigure go. Fourteen months later, at Surigao Strait, she would be the only ship of Admiral Shoji Nishimura's force to survive the battle.

The numbers close the case. Of four Japanese destroyers, three were sunk. Six hundred and eighty-five Japanese soldiers died, along with one hundred and seventy-eight sailors from Hagikaze, one hundred and seventy-eight from Arashi, and one hundred and sixty-nine from Kawakaze: twelve hundred and ten men. About three hundred survivors made it ashore. Captain Sugiura was one of them. He drifted for some thirty hours and then spent a week in the jungle before he was rescued. He later commanded the heavy cruiser Haguro and died with her in May nineteen forty-five.

No American ship was hit, and no American was hurt by enemy action. Five nights earlier, the Japanese had dodged thirty torpedoes from the P T boats. At Tassafaronga, twenty. In Vella Gulf, one torpedo in three found a target. It was the first time since Balikpapan, eighteen months before, that American destroyers had gone after Japanese ships on their own.

The strategic effect followed quickly. Within a week, the Japanese concluded that Kolombangara could not be held. Admiral William Halsey decided not to assault it at all. On August fifteenth, American troops landed past it, at Barakoma on Vella Lavella, and by early October the Japanese had evacuated Kolombangara. They never again used Vella Gulf and Blackett Strait to supply Vila. Nimitz's headquarters put the value plainly: had the Japanese elected to defend Kolombangara, "it would have cost us a diversion of effort, either in ground forces to take it by assault, or in air and surface forces to keep it neutralized."

The verdict came from both sides. Admiral Chester Nimitz called the battle "a little classic of naval warfare," and he listed the reasons: good intelligence of the enemy's movements, wise planning, surprise, "the withholding of torpedo fire until salvos would course at right angles to the enemy, turning away before he could counterattack, and prompt follow up with gunfire." Hara, who saw it from the receiving end, wrote that the Americans had ambushed his force brilliantly. Then he added, "Never before had I seen such marksmanship."

Burke wrote to Simpson two nights after the battle. Vella Gulf, he said, "was perfect in every respect. It is an attack that every destroyer sailor dreams about." In September, Halsey presented Moosbrugger with the Navy Cross. Two of his captains, Clifton Iverson of Dunlap and Frank Gould of Sterett, received it too. By then the methods used in Vella Gulf were beginning to reach destroyers across the fleet. Burke got his own chance off Cape Saint George on November twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-three. His five destroyers used the same two-division attack against five Japanese destroyers, sank three, and took no damage. He went on to serve three terms as Chief of Naval Operations, and the Navy's main class of destroyer today carries his name.

None of it needed a new ship. The six destroyers were pre-war hulls, and one of them had been at Tassafaronga without the radar to find a target. The torpedo was still flawed. What changed was that Burke wrote down how destroyers should fight at night, the crews trained to it until every captain knew what the others would do, and Moosbrugger was finally allowed to fight that way. Burke had put the idea in his own words: there is no panacea which will ensure success in battle, and the best that can be done is to train individual units, place them in the positions where they will most probably be effective, and then aggressively fight the action under competent bold leadership.

August second, nineteen forty-three. Blackett Strait, in the Solomon Islands. Thirty torpedoes, not one hit, and P T one oh nine cut in two in the dark.

Five nights later and thirteen miles to the north, six pre-war destroyers fired twenty-four torpedoes the Navy had learned not to trust. All four Japanese destroyers were hit. Three of them never left Vella Gulf. The fourth, struck only by a dud, got away.