Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, in Washington, after studying the battle report, could say only: “Everybody _hopes_ we can hang on.” Admiral Chester Nimitz was even more grim. “It now appears that we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us. The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.” Perhaps the PTs had arrived too late to do any good. Certainly a navy that consisted of three torpedo boats afloat and one on a reef was not going to win the battle for Guadalcanal. The Japanese, beginning on November 2nd, spent a week running destroyer and cruiser deckloads of soldiers down The Slot—65 destroyer deckloads and two cruiser loads in all. On November 8th, PTs hit the destroyer _Mochizuki_ but did not sink it. This kind of reinforcement by dribbles was not fast enough to satisfy the Japanese brass, so they planned to stop sending a boy to do a man’s job. At Truk, they organized a mighty task force of two light carriers, four battleships, 11 cruisers and 36 destroyers to escort 11 fast transports to Guadalcanal on November 14th. Before risking the transports, jammed with soldiers to be landed at Tassafaronga, the Japanese planned to bombard Henderson Field for two straight nights to eliminate once and for all the dangerous Marine airplanes based there. The climactic sea struggle for Guadalcanal began on the night of November 12, 1942. American scouting planes and Allied coast watchers sent word that a frighteningly powerful bombardment force was on its way down The Slot, and the most optimistic defenders of Guadalcanal wondered if this was going to be the end. Two Japanese battleships, the _Hiei_ and the _Kirishima_, a cruiser, and fourteen destroyers were in the Japanese fleet. (The Japanese had learned to fear the PT boats of Tulagi; the fleet commander had posted two destroyers on one advanced flank and three destroyers on the other, as a torpedo-boat screen. In addition, he had assigned three other destroyers, not counted among the 14 under his direct command, to rove ahead on an anti-PT patrol.) In a swirling, half-hour action on Friday, November 13th—the opening of the three-day naval Battle of Guadalcanal—the United States Navy lost the cruiser _Atlanta_, the destroyers _Barton_, _Cushing_, _Laffey_, and _Monssen_, and suffered severe damage to the cruisers _Portland_, _San Francisco_, _Helena_, _Juneau_, and to three destroyers. Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan was killed. Limping home after the battle, the cruiser _Juneau_ was torpedoed by the submarine I-26 (whose skipper admits that he was aiming at another ship entirely). The _Juneau_ disappeared in a blast of smoke and flame. In one of the most tragic and inexplicable misadventures of the war, the survivors of the _Juneau_, floating within easy reach of the PTs at Tulagi, were abandoned, and no attempt was made to rescue them until all but a handful had died of exposure.