Even worse was the sleep-robbing uproar of the night naval bombardments that pounded planes and installations at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, the only American base where friendly fighters and bombers could find a home. The American hold on the island was in danger from sheer physical fatigue. The American and Japanese fleets clashed in the waters around the Guadalcanal landing beaches in a series of bloody surface battles that devoured ships and men on both sides in a hideous contest of attrition. Whichever side could hang on fifteen seconds longer than the other—whichever side could stand to lose one more ship and one more sailor—was going to win. At the very moment of one of the big cruiser-destroyer clashes (October 11-12, 1942)—officially called the Battle of Cape Esperance—American naval reinforcements of a sort arrived in the area. Forty miles east of the battle, four fresh, unbloodied fighting ships were sailing into Tulagi Harbor at Florida Island, just across a narrow strait from Guadalcanal. It was half of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, four PT boats, the first American torpedo boats to arrive in combat waters since the last boat of Lieut. John Bulkeley’s disbanded Squadron Three had been burned in the Philippines seven months before. [Illustration: SOLOMON ISLANDS] The PT sailors came topside as they entered the harbor to watch the flash of cannonading in the sky to the west where American and Japanese sailors were blowing each other to bloody bits. For them, training time was over, the shooting time was now, and the PT navy was once again on the firing line. All day on October 13, the PT sailors scurried about, getting the little warships ready for a fight. Their preparations made only a ripple in the maelstrom of activity around the islands. Coast watchers—friendly observers who hid on islands behind the Japanese lines and reported by radio on ship and plane movements—reported a new menace to Guadalcanal. They had spotted a Japanese naval force coming down The Slot, but they said it was made up only of destroyers. When Lieut. Commander Alan R. Montgomery, the PT squadron commander at Tulagi, heard that only destroyers were coming, he begged off from the fight—on the extraordinary grounds that he preferred waiting for bigger game. Montgomery’s decision is not as cocky as it first sounds. The Japanese presumably did not know about the arrival of the PTs on the scene, and if ever a PT was going to shoot a torpedo into a big one—a cruiser or a battleship—it was going to be by surprise. No use tipping off the enemy until the big chance came. The big chance was really on the way. The coast watchers had underestimated the size of the Japanese force. It was actually built around a pair of battleships, escorted by cruisers and destroyers, all bent on pounding Henderson Field and its pesky planes out of existence.