USS North Carolina at Guadalcanal: The Showboat at the Eastern Solomons and the Torpedo of 15 September

USS North Carolina (BB-55) in a color photograph from 1941, the year she was commissioned at the New York Navy Yard. A year later she was screening carriers off Guadalcanal. U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-K-13972 (National Archives); public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Guadalcanal, 1942–43

USS North Carolina at Guadalcanal: The Showboat at the Eastern Solomons and the Torpedo of 15 September

The first new American battleship in sixteen years came to the South Pacific in the summer of 1942, fought off a carrier air strike in eight minutes, and took a submarine torpedo that nearly changed the campaign. Today she is North Carolina’s World War II memorial.

Readers in the Lake Norman area know USS North Carolina as the gray battleship moored across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, a school field trip and a summer day out. She is also one of the few ships left afloat anywhere that fought in the Guadalcanal campaign. In August and September 1942 she was the first of the Navy’s new fast battleships to fight in the South Pacific. She screened Enterprise during the landings of 7 August (see Chapter 1), fought off Japanese dive bombers at the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on 24 August, and on 15 September was hit by one of the six torpedoes fired by the submarine I-19, the same spread that sank the carrier Wasp (see Chapter 3, Henderson Field and the Cactus Air Force).

She survived because her damage control worked. Within six minutes her crew had corrected the list, and she kept station with the task force at 25 knots. But the hit sent her back to Pearl Harbor for repairs and took her out of the campaign at one of its most dangerous moments. This page tells that story from the Navy’s records, chiefly the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, the Bureau of Ships’ War Damage Report No. 61 on the torpedo hit, and the Naval History and Heritage Command director’s H-Gram 010. It also covers the ship’s rescue by North Carolinians in 1960–61 and what a visitor from the Charlotte region will find at the memorial today.

The figures in the record do not always match. The Navy’s ship history has been revised over the years, and the number killed by the torpedo and the number of battle stars the ship earned are both given differently by different official sources. Those differences are shown below.

The Showboat

North Carolina‘s keel was laid at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn on 27 October 1937, Navy Day. The memorial’s ship history notes that she was the first battleship built in the United States in sixteen years and the first of the ten fast battleships that joined the fleet during World War II. Her sister was Washington. The building ways had to be lengthened and strengthened to take her hull. She was launched on 13 June 1940 and christened by Isabel Hoey, daughter of North Carolina’s governor, Clyde R. Hoey. She was commissioned on 9 April 1941 with Capt. Olaf M. Hustvedt in command. The memorial gives her cost as $70 million.

The nickname came early. DANFS explains that she was called the “Showboat” because she drew so much attention during her fitting out and trials. She was the first of the Navy’s modern battleships to be commissioned. She was armed with nine 16-inch guns in three triple turrets and twenty 5-inch, 38-caliber dual-purpose guns in twin mounts, plus lighter antiaircraft guns whose numbers grew through the war. She was built for speed as well, able to stay with fast carriers in a way the older battleships could not, and that is the job she did at Guadalcanal.

After Pearl Harbor she was ordered to the Pacific. DANFS has her entering the Pacific on 10 June 1942, and the memorial dates her arrival at Pearl Harbor to 11 July. Within a month she was screening Enterprise for the Guadalcanal landings.

The Eastern Solomons, 24 August 1942

Two weeks after the landings, the Japanese sent a carrier force south to cover a reinforcement convoy for Guadalcanal. The result, on 24 August, was the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the third carrier battle of the war. American aircraft sank the light carrier Ryūjō. In the afternoon, dive bombers and torpedo planes from Shōkaku and Zuikaku found Task Force 16. North Carolina was in Enterprise‘s screen. DANFS records that the carrier, the faster ship, pulled ahead of the battleship during the attack, so North Carolina fought partly on her own. Enterprise took three bomb hits.

For the battleship, it was eight minutes of the heaviest antiaircraft fire most of her crew would ever see. DANFS credits her with shooting down between 7 and 14 Japanese aircraft. She came through seven near misses undamaged, but one man was killed by a strafing plane. The wide range of claims is typical. In a short, crowded air battle, every gun on every ship fired at the same targets, and wartime claims routinely exceeded the aircraft actually lost. Japanese aircraft losses over Task Force 16 that afternoon were heavy, but no record allows them to be divided among the ships that fired.

Enterprise left the area for repairs, and Saratoga was torpedoed by a submarine on 31 August. By the end of the month the Navy was down to two carriers in the South Pacific, Wasp and Hornet, with North Carolina as the one battleship to protect them.

The torpedo of 15 September

On 15 September 1942 Wasp and Hornet were covering transports carrying the 7th Marines to Guadalcanal, the reinforcement that brought Puller’s battalion to the island. The two carrier groups were steaming several miles apart. North Carolina was with Hornet in Task Force 17. Lt. Cmdr. Takaichi Kinashi’s I-19 got inside the screen of Wasp‘s group and fired a spread of six torpedoes. H-Gram 010 calls it “arguably the most effective spread of torpedoes in history.” At least two, possibly three, hit Wasp, which burned and had to be scuttled with 173 of her crew lost, along with a newspaper correspondent and 45 aircraft.

The torpedoes that missed Wasp kept going. One passed under the destroyer Lansdowne, and H-Gram 010 traces it and two others running several miles into Hornet‘s screen. One hit the destroyer O’Brien in the bow. Her crew got her 2,800 miles toward Pearl Harbor before she broke apart and sank near Samoa on 19 October. Another passed under the destroyer Mustin and struck North Carolina. The War Damage Report gives the time as 1452. The torpedo hit the port side abreast Turret I, at about frame 46 (frames 45 and 46 by the divers’ count), roughly 20 feet below the waterline and just under the lower edge of the armor belt.

The report describes the damage closely. The hole was about 32 feet long and 18 feet high by the divers’ measurements (the report’s summary gives a length of 36 feet). About 970 tons of water flooded the damaged area at once. The ship took a list of 5.5 degrees to port, which her damage-control parties removed in six minutes by counterflooding about 480 tons into empty compartments on the other side. DANFS puts it this way: “a 5.5 degree list was righted in as many minutes.” Two 16-inch powder magazines, A-422M and A-516M, flooded. Others were sprinkled after a fire report that proved false. Some 150,000 gallons of fuel oil were lost. Turret I was apparently still able to fire.

What the report stresses is how little the hit slowed her. Speed went up from 19 to 25 knots, and she held station with the task force for five hours. Afterward she could keep up about 18 knots, with bursts to 24. The report concluded that the ship “generally absorbed the damage without serious effect or marked loss in fighting efficiency.” It also identified a design weakness that mattered for the whole class: the holding bulkhead, No. 5, did not stay watertight.

Men did die. The current DANFS entry says five were killed. An older version of the same entry, still reproduced on some sites, says six. The War Damage Report records one man washed overboard and five missing at 1930 that evening, and notes that remains were later recovered from the flooded compartments A-310-1L and A-316T. The likeliest reading is five dead in the flooded spaces and possibly one lost overboard. The names of North Carolina‘s dead are kept by the memorial’s curators.

Why the hit mattered

North Carolina went first to Tongatabu, arriving on 19 September, for temporary repairs that were finished on the 21st, and then on to Pearl Harbor. H-Gram 010 says she was out of action for two months. That absence came at the worst time. Wasp’s loss left the Navy with two fleet carriers in the Pacific, Hornet and the damaged Enterprise, against a Japanese fleet that still had two large carriers and several smaller ones. Through October, the month of the Japanese battleship bombardments of Henderson Field and the Santa Cruz battle (see Chapter 6), she was in the yard. In the November crisis it was her sister Washington and South Dakota, not North Carolina, that fought the night battleship action of 14–15 November (see Chapter 7).

It is a fair question how the campaign might have gone had I-19‘s spread missed. Without the torpedo, North Carolina might have been off Guadalcanal in mid-October when Kongō and Haruna shelled the airfield, or with Washington in November. Any answer is speculation. What the record supports is narrower. A single submarine attack removed a carrier, a battleship and a destroyer from the South Pacific in one afternoon, and the Navy fought the next two months short of the heavy ships it needed.

The rest of the war

After repairs at Pearl Harbor, North Carolina spent much of 1943 screening Enterprise and Saratoga and covering supply and troop movements in the Solomons. From late 1943 she steamed with the fast carrier task forces through nearly every major operation of the central Pacific drive. DANFS lists the Gilberts, Marshalls, Truk, the Marianas and the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Leyte, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and strikes on the Japanese home islands. She survived the war, carried midshipmen on training cruises, and was decommissioned at New York on 27 June 1947 and placed in reserve at Bayonne, New Jersey.

Her official battle-star count depends on the source. DANFS gives twelve for World War II service. The battleship memorial and NCpedia give fifteen, and the memorial calls her the most highly decorated American battleship of World War II. The difference may come from how operations in the same campaign were combined or separated when stars were awarded. This page reports both figures rather than choosing one.

Two cautions apply to the Guadalcanal part of that record. The first is about claims. The figure of 7 to 14 aircraft at the Eastern Solomons is a wartime assessment made by men under fire, counting planes that many ships were shooting at together. No postwar study divides the Japanese losses of that afternoon among the ships of Task Force 16, so the claim should be read as a measure of how hard the ship fought, not as a verified score. The second is about the torpedo. The War Damage Report was written by the Bureau of Ships after divers examined the hole. It is the most exact contemporary evidence available, and where later popular accounts give different numbers, the report should be preferred.

It is also worth keeping in view who fired that torpedo. I-19 was one of the large Japanese fleet submarines that the Imperial Navy deployed across the approaches to the Solomons in the autumn of 1942. That screen also put a torpedo into Saratoga on 31 August, and on 13 November I-26 sank the cruiser Juneau (see USS Juneau and the Five Sullivan Brothers). Japan’s submarine force is often remembered for missed opportunities, but around Guadalcanal in 1942 it struck hard, and Kinashi’s attack of 15 September was the most destructive single blow of those months.

Saving the Showboat

The Navy struck North Carolina from its list on 1 June 1960, and she faced the scrapyard. North Carolinians organized a “Save Our Ship” campaign to bring her home. The memorial’s history describes money raised county by county, with schoolchildren asked to give their dimes. NCpedia puts the total at $330,000, enough for the purchase, preparation of a berth and the tow from New Jersey. The photographer Hugh Morton was the campaign’s best-known champion. NCpedia records that he was singled out for praise at the dedication.

The ship was transferred to the people of North Carolina on 6 September 1961 (DANFS). NCpedia dates the handover to the state’s commission at Bayonne to 14 September. She was towed south and, according to the memorial, reached the mouth of the Cape Fear River near Southport on 1 October 1961 and was brought thirty miles upriver to her berth on 2 October. On the way upriver she struck the Fergus Ark, a floating restaurant, which NCpedia says was badly damaged and closed for good. The memorial was dedicated on 29 April 1962. Adm. Arleigh A. Burke gave the main address, and Governor Terry Sanford, Secretary of Commerce (and former governor) Luther H. Hodges and Adm. Claude V. Ricketts also spoke. The ship was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

She was dedicated as the state’s memorial to all North Carolinians who died in World War II. Its Roll of Honor counts 11,081 Tar Heels killed, and the database can be searched by county and by name. Mecklenburg County lost 619 people. For a family in Cornelius, Davidson, Huntersville or Mooresville, the ship is the place where those names are kept.