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Tag: 1st Marine Division

Sailor W.R. Martin points out details of the Japanese trophy flags painted on the cruiser's pilothouse as a scoreboard of enemy ships claimed sunk in the Battle of Cape Esperance, 11-12 October 1942. The six Japanese ships (two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and three destroyers) represented in this scoreboard greatly overstates the actual enemy losses, which were one heavy cruiser (Furutaka) and one destroyer (Fubuki) sunk and one heavy cruiser (Aoba) badly damaged. This overclaiming was typical of contemporary night surface actions. Photographed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, soon after Boise arrived there for battle damage repairs in November 1942. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. (NHHC 80-G-36296)

Oct. 5, 2022

Variation on a Theme: Groping Blindly in the Dark at Savo Island and Cape Esperance

Low-hanging clouds drifted listlessly across a moonless sky on a tropical midsummer night. The occasional thunderclap stirred the silence and temporarily illuminated the otherwise calm seas that enveloped the Solomon Islands. In the months following the initial July 1942 occupation of Guadalcanal by Japanese forces, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN)