Kongo and Haruna Turned on Henderson Field

On 14 October 1942, Japanese battleships Kongo and Haruna bombarded Henderson Field on Guadalcanal during the night. The airstrip was the immediate target. The shelling destroyed 50 American aircraft on the ground, about half of the planes then present. It was a severe loss, but not a complete shutdown: American aircraft took off from Henderson Field despite the damage.

The bombardment took place amid a struggle to bring men and supplies onto the island. About 3,000 American troops had landed from a convoy associated with the Battle of Cape Esperance. The following night, 14–15 October, a Japanese convoy of six cargo ships used the gap in American air cover to land 4,500 men and large quantities of supplies at Tassafaronga. The battleships’ shelling and the troop movement were parts of the same effort to exploit a gap in American protection.

The field’s planes were back in action after the shelling. On 15 October they attacked the transports unloading at Tassafaronga and destroyed three of them. That did not undo the Japanese landing, but it showed the difference between striking the airstrip and keeping it out of the fight. The bombardment had put half the aircraft on the ground out of action; it had not stopped all aircraft from flying, nor had it given the transports an untroubled unloading.

The bombardment and its aftermath therefore carried two contrasting results. Kongo and Haruna inflicted substantial damage at Henderson Field. Japanese forces also got men and supplies ashore while American air cover was disrupted. But American aircraft still launched and attacked the transports. The chronology recorded no clean finish: the Japanese landing succeeded, while the effort to unload continued under attack. For Guadalcanal, the contest over the runway and the contest over the nearby supply route remained tightly linked. The ships had made the airfield pay heavily for the night. They had not made it irrelevant by morning.