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Most of the killing in modern war, since 1914, was done by the artillery after all. And later air. Even in Guadalcanal and Vietnam.

I read a very interesting account of the Battle of Guadalcanal - from the POV of the Navy.

Neptune’s Inferno:
The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
by James D. Hornfischer
It turns out that the Navy was providing all the support it could to the Marines on Guadalcanal, but they were hampered by shortage of resources and a very serious technological problem. The Japanese didn’t have radar, but they did have what they referred to as "Sanso gyorai” - the "oxygen torpedo.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo
In daylight, the US had air superiority over the vicinity of Guadalcanal, of course, and at night the Japanese were sometimes able to bombard Guadalcanal. Both navies faced fuel constraints which limited what ships could be sailed what distances, when. The USN had a battleship available for use at that time and place, but it was such a fuel hog that they never actually used it. The naval battle was basically between destroyers and cruisers - and Japanese "oxygen torpedoes” were a signal advantage in that context. Just as with Japanese ignorance of radar, American commanders had difficulty getting their heads wrapped around the idea that Japanese topedoes had half an order of magnitude better propulsion energy than their own torpedoes had.
Historically torpedoes were propelled by compressed air. But when you do that, of course, the temperature in the air cannister drops with the pressure - and that compounds the temperature drop, drastically reducing the output energy. The solution was to burn fuel in the air coming from the air tank to raise the pressure. But even that is far below what is practical. You could burn five times more fuel in pure oxygen than you could in compressed air. The result would be five times as much energy available, neglecting the space you would have to take away from oxidizer propellant to quintupple the amount of liquid fuel you would need. The upshot would be that the Japanese torpedo probably had nearly four times as much energy, allowing it to go twice as fast for about the same duration of run time. So basically the effective range of the oxygen torpedo might be about twice that of an American WWII torpedo.
The upshot was a balance of differing advantages of the combatants which prevented the losing combatant from knowing when to quit throwing good money after bad. And the US Navy suffered even more casualties in the Guadalcanal campaign than the US Marines did.
Quite the interesting story. At that time, BTW, USN radar was primitive in lacking IFF. And was only on cruisers.
And Japanese destroyers could go faster than PT boats, and sometimes chased them down and rammed them.