“Cactus,” Carney Field, Guadalcanal

“Charlie” was shot down last night by a P-38 before he got past the Russells.

Patrolled 700 miles to within 15 miles of Kapingamarangi. Would’ve like to go in and take a look at the place but there was no cloud cover available and I didn’t quite feel quite up to taking on five float Zeros.

On the way home about 1315, 10 miles and NE of Tauu Is. at 2000 ft., we ran across a Mitsubishi 01 (Betty) at our altitude, on a converging course and headed for Kahili. He offered to fight, so we gladly obliged him. We both started to climb (we finally broke off at 5,000) and as he was to my left, I forced him away from Bougainville by turning toward him. The scrap lasted about 15 minutes and resemble the clumsy battles between two bull elephants — each lunging at the other then withdrawing momentarily to get set for the next run. We finally finished off with a head-on run at each other. He got a burst of 7.7mm into my wing while my top turret sprinkled him thoroughly. During this last run my nose turret quit, my waist guns jammed, and the top turret ran out of ammunition. The showing on our part was not too good as we should have shot him down, especially on that last run, but between mechanical failures and human failures all we managed to do was make him suddenly quite anxious to quit. He escaped in the clouds over Tauu.

About half hour later, south of Tauu we sighted another Betty at 1000 feet headed for Bougainville. We gave chase and he nosed over and ran. Got in one burst at long-range before he disappeared in a rain squall.

Came through Manning Strait and down the SW coast of Santa Isabel. Noticed a large oil slick extended down the Slot and following it we came upon the Australian cruiser Leander limping home just north of Savo Is. protected by four destroyers. Heard later that she, and two of our CLs St. Louis and Honolulu, all snagged torpedoes in a night naval battle just north of Kolombangara. We lost one DD while the Japs presumably lost one CL, and three DD.