At 1:33 in the morning on October 14, 1942, the Japanese battlecruisers Kongo and Haruna arrived off the coast of Guadalcanal, well beyond the range of most Allied shore batteries. The men at Henderson Field had almost no warning. In an instant, white and orange flashes erupted over the airfield as shells screamed in from the sea and rained down in sheets of fire and shrapnel. What followed would become the most punishing naval bombardment U.
S. forces suffered during the entire Pacific War. Over the next hour and twenty-three minutes, the two battleships hurled 973 fourteen-inch shells into the airfield perimeter. Two-thirds were high explosive impact rounds that tore up the runways.
The rest were a weapon the Japanese had developed for a different purpose entirely. The Sanshiki Dangan, known in the West as the beehive incendiary cluster munition, had originally been designed as an anti-aircraft shell for the main guns of Japanese battleships and heavy cruisers. In that role, it had been a complete failure, with no recorded aircraft downings. Each shell contained 480 separate tubes filled with rubber thermite.
A timed fuse ignited a bursting charge that scattered the tubes forward in a cone spreading to a diameter of 152 meters, and half a second later, the incendiary tubes ignited, blazing with flames five meters long. Against aircraft parked in the open, fuel dumps, tents, and maintenance areas, the weapon proved devastatingly effective. When the shelling finally ended around 3:00 a. m.
, Henderson Field lay shattered. Both runways were severely damaged, nearly all of the available aviation fuel had burned, and the majority of the surviving aircraft had been set ablaze where they stood. Six pilots of the Cactus Air Force were among the dead. Of the 90 aircraft on Guadalcanal, only 12 remained flyable by dawn, with more than half completely destroyed.
The Japanese battleship force, having exhausted its ammunition, withdrew at high speed and returned to Truk Atoll in the Caroline Islands. It was the closest Japan would ever come to wiping out American air power on Guadalcanal, and it was a moment that came to be remembered simply as the Night. The bombardment was not an isolated act of destruction. It was part of a carefully planned operation to support a major Japanese offensive aimed at driving U.
S. forces off the island entirely. For months, the Japanese had struggled with a fundamental problem. American control of the skies during daylight made it nearly impossible to move large amounts of men and supplies to Guadalcanal by conventional transport.
Instead, they had relied on fast destroyers, known as the Tokyo Express, to deliver troops and supplies at night and withdraw before dawn. But this method moved too little, too slowly. There was not enough time to build up the forces required for the scale of the Imperial Army’s planned offensive. As a result, the Japanese decided to take a considerable risk.
On October 13, a convoy of six cargo ships escorted by eight destroyers left the Shortland Islands for Guadalcanal. On board were two infantry regiments totaling 4,500 troops, some naval marines, two heavy artillery batteries, a tank company, and a large amount of supplies. To protect this convoy from attack by the American aircraft stationed on Guadalcanal, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto ordered a heavy bombardment mission to neutralize Henderson Field before the convoy arrived. Yamamoto assigned the battlecruisers Kongo and Haruna to the mission.
Each ship carried eight fourteen-inch guns and could exceed 30 knots. Their speed was critical. They could bombard the airfield at night and withdraw before daylight, when American carrier or land-based aircraft would be able to strike back. Together with nine destroyers and a light cruiser, the two battlecruisers sailed south from Truk, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s largest base in the South Pacific, and reached Guadalcanal unopposed on the night of October 14.
Knowing that the Japanese convoy was approaching and would soon land troops and supplies, the Cactus Air Force made every effort to strike it with what little remained of its strength. Within hours, one runway had been patched up sufficiently for operations to resume. On October 14, the Americans launched two attacks using fuel salvaged by siphoning it from damaged aircraft. But they were too few to cause significant damage.
Around midnight, the Japanese convoy arrived at Tassafaronga Point on Guadalcanal’s east coast and began unloading. By the next morning, the Cactus Air Force had been reinforced with 17 Dauntless dive bombers flown in from Espiritu Santo, while U. S. Army and Marine transport aircraft delivered critical aviation fuel and supplies to Guadalcanal.
Throughout the day, Henderson Field’s aircraft bombed and strafed the six transport ships, which were desperately trying to unload their remaining cargo before being destroyed. As night fell on October 15, three of the transports fled back up the Slot, the narrow body of water between the Solomon Islands, toward Rabaul, still carrying some of their supplies. The other three never left Guadalcanal. They remain there to this day, wrecked and rusting off the island’s coast, a permanent reminder of the night the Japanese battleships opened fire from the darkness and came closer than they ever would again to eliminating American air power in the battle for Guadalcanal.
The damage done to Henderson Field that night was severe, but it was not permanent. The Americans repaired the runways, rebuilt their fuel reserves, and resumed air operations within days. The Japanese convoy, despite the protection of one of the most powerful bombardments of the war, failed to deliver enough supplies to make a decisive difference. The Imperial Army’s planned offensive would go ahead later in October, but it would not achieve its goal.
The United States would hold the airfield, and Japanese battleships would never again fire on Henderson Field. The U. S.
Navy went to great lengths to ensure that outcome, and the Night of October 14, 1942, would stand as the turning point in the struggle for the island.
