The best Japanese admiral of WW2 wasn't Yamamoto. It was a destroyer commander the Americans nicknamed "Tenacious Tanaka." Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. No carriers. No battleships. Just a squadron of destroyers, a stack of the best torpedoes in the world, and a nearly impossible job. August 1942. US Marines have landed on Guadalcanal and grabbed the airfield. Japan needs to land troops and supplies on the island to take it back. But American planes from that airfield own the skies during the day. Any Japanese transport caught in daylight gets sunk. So Tanaka moves at night. His destroyers race down "the Slot," the channel through the Solomon Islands, arrive off Guadalcanal after dark, unload, and are gone before dawn. Over and over. Night after night. The Marines started calling it the "Tokyo Express." It ran so regularly you could almost set a watch by it. Destroyers aren't cargo ships, though. So Tanaka's men got creative. They packed supplies into steel drums, roped the drums together, and pushed them overboard near shore so troops could swim out and haul them in. Destroyers built to fight were now delivering groceries under fire. Then came the night of November 30, 1942. Tanaka is heading for Guadalcanal with eight destroyers. Six of them are loaded down with supply drums, decks cluttered, not ready for a fight. He's told to expect trouble. Trouble is waiting. An American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers under Rear Admiral Carleton Wright. The Americans have radar. The Japanese don't. Wright detects Tanaka first. On paper, this should be a massacre. But the Americans hesitate before firing torpedoes. When they do open fire, they pour almost everything into one Japanese destroyer, Takanami, and quickly sink it. The muzzle flashes give the American cruisers away. Tanaka doesn't panic. His crews have trained for exactly this. Within minutes, his destroyers fire spreads of Type 93 torpedoes, the weapon the Americans would later call the "Long Lance." Huge, fast, running on pure oxygen so they left almost no wake, and with a range far beyond anything the US Navy thought was possible. The torpedoes come out of the dark. USS Minneapolis is hit and loses her bow. USS New Orleans takes a hit that sets off a magazine and blows off her entire bow, nearly 150 feet of ship. USS Pensacola is hit and burns. USS Northampton takes two torpedoes and sinks. In about half an hour, a force of half-loaded destroyers had crippled or sunk four heavy cruisers. Around 400 Americans were killed. Japan lost one destroyer. The Battle of Tassafaronga is still considered one of the worst US Navy defeats of the war. Even the official American naval historian later praised Tanaka for it. And here's the twist. Tanaka understood something his bosses refused to accept. Guadalcanal was lost. Feeding an island by throwing drums off destroyers wasn't a strategy. It was a slow bleed of ships and men Japan couldn't replace. He said so. In December 1942, after his flagship was sunk and he was wounded, he was removed from command. He never commanded at sea again. He spent the rest of the war in shore assignments, sidelined. Two months later, Japan evacuated Guadalcanal. Tanaka survived the war and lived until 1969. The man the Americans respected most was the one his own navy didn't want to listen to.

Battleship Mississippi in the Mississippi River en route to New Orleans, Louisiana, 16 October 1945

Light cruiser USS Atlanta coming alongside heavy cruiser USS San Francisco for refueling, 16 October 1942. Note Atlanta's main forward batteries of three turrets of twin 5-inch/38 guns.

Oct 17, 1941. Seven weeks before Pearl Harbor, a German U-boat kills American sailors in the North Atlantic. The United States wasn't at war yet. Officially it was neutral. But by the fall of 1941, US Navy destroyers were escorting convoys halfway across the Atlantic to help keep Britain alive. In September, after a U-boat fired on the destroyer USS Greer, President Roosevelt ordered American warships to shoot German submarines on sight. In October a convoy of 52 merchant ships, SC 48, was attacked by a German wolf pack south of Iceland. Its handful of Canadian and British escorts were overwhelmed, and ships were burning and sinking. Four American destroyers raced out from Iceland to help. One of them was USS Kearny, launched only the year before. Through the night of Oct 16, Kearny charged around the convoy dropping depth charges on the U-boats. Just after midnight, she slowed to avoid colliding with a British corvette. Torpedo. U-568 hit Kearny square on her starboard side. The explosion tore a huge hole in her hull and wrecked her forward fire room. Eleven American sailors were killed. Twenty-two more were wounded. They were the first US servicemen killed by Germany in World War II. Her crew kept her afloat, got one engine running, and nursed her into Iceland at 10 knots. Ten days later, Roosevelt went on the radio. America had been attacked, he said, and history had recorded who fired the first shot. He still didn't ask for war. Two weeks after that, another U-boat sank the destroyer USS Reuben James. 115 more Americans died. Pearl Harbor was still five weeks away.