Those little tin cans were the bravest of the brave for the US Navy in WWII. There is no way to minimize the brass spheres it took for them to take on a far superior force in what was best described as a suicide mission.
The FACT that their attack was so fierce that it led the Japanese commander to assume he was being attacked by much larger force saved countless lives in what would have been one of our darkest days of WWII.
thank you! Reading the below, one can almost imagine the intensity of the battle:
“The hard-hit Johnston was also back in action. They faced not only a Japanese cruiser division, but also most of the Japanese destroyers. U.S. and Japanese ships zig-zagged, and exchanged intensive gunfire and torpedoes in the melee-like conditions. Johnston was still able to lay such a heavy fire on the Japanese cruisers Haguro and Tone that these reported her as a “heavy cruiser.”