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In six months of fighting around Guadalcanal, the Japanese Navy won nearly every night battle. They sank more ships, killed more sailors, and inflicted the worst surface defeat in American naval history — all in the first week.
When it was over, both sides had lost exactly twenty-four warships. It looked like a draw. It wasn't. Those same six months destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy as an offensive force. It never came back.
The officer who commanded Japan's last tactical victory in the campaign — a clean, decisive win — wrote after the war that Japan's fate was sealed there.
How does a navy keep winning battles and lose everything? And what were the Americans doing with their defeats that Japan couldn't do with a victory?
The answer isn't factories. It isn't steel. It isn't what most people think — and it only becomes clear when you watch what both sides did in the hours after a battle ended.
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