USS Washington

The Story of USS Washington

She was the American battleship that did what few of her kind ever managed to do — she met an enemy battleship in a stand-up night gunfight and sent it to the bottom. USS Washington was a fast, modern battleship of the North Carolina class, armed with nine 16-inch guns, and on one desperate night off Guadalcanal she may have done more than any other single ship to save the entire campaign. The crisis came in November 1942. The struggle for Guadalcanal hung in the balance, and a powerful Japanese force, including the battleship Kirishima, was steaming down "the Slot" by night to bombard the vital American airfield, Henderson Field, and smash the Marines clinging grimly to the island. If the bombardment succeeded, the American foothold might collapse. Washington and her newer sister South Dakota were sent racing to stop them, and the result was the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal — a wild, close-range night action fought in the darkness and confusion that the Japanese had so often turned to their advantage. The fight was chaos. In the darkness, South Dakota suffered a cascade of electrical failures, was caught and pinned in Japanese searchlights, and took a fearful battering as the enemy concentrated their fire on her. But Washington, unseen and unsuspected in the night, crept close and held her fire, tracking the enemy on radar. Then, at close range, she opened up on Kirishima with everything she had. It was devastating and decisive. Washington's huge 16-inch shells, aimed by radar in the pitch black, smashed into the Japanese battleship again and again in a matter of minutes — wrecking her steering, knocking out her guns, and leaving her a flaming, sinking ruin. Kirishima was so badly mauled that she had to be scuttled by her own crew hours later. Washington had won one of the only true battleship-versus-battleship duels of the entire Pacific War, and she had won it almost without being touched. The victory broke the back of the Japanese effort to retake Guadalcanal by night and helped turn the long campaign decisively in America's favour. Washington went on to serve through the rest of the war, screening the fast carriers and bombarding island fortresses across the Pacific, and she came home safely at the end, her great moment in the dark off Guadalcanal secure in history. To reconstruct USS Washington is to capture that rare achievement — the American battleship that fought and killed an enemy battleship in a night action, decisively and almost alone. She was the quiet champion of Guadalcanal, overshadowed in fame by flashier ships, yet on one crucial night she did something almost no other battleship of the war could claim: she met her opposite number in the dark and sank it.