To understand why the Japanese fought this battle at all, you have to understand the geography. The central Solomon Islands campaign had gone badly for them through the summer of 1943. They had lost Munda. They had lost three destroyers at the Battle of Vella Gulf in August. In mid-August, American and New Zealand troops had landed on Vella Lavella itself, bypassing the heavily garrisoned island of Kolombangara entirely and squeezing the Japanese on Vella Lavella into a tiny pocket on the northwestern shore around Marquana Bay. By early October, about 600 Japanese soldiers were trapped there, surrounded by troops from the New Zealand 14th Brigade. The only way out was by sea, and the only window was one night. Captain Shigoroku Nakayama pulled together whatever could float from the harbors at Buin: some twenty subchasers, barges, and other small vessels. To buy them time, Captain Matsuji Ijuin would bring six full destroyers and three older destroyer-transports down from Rabaul and pick a fight with whoever the Americans sent.

American Admiral Theodore Stark Wilkinson, commanding the amphibious forces in the area, saw the Japanese movement on his plot and immediately dispatched two groups of three destroyers each to intercept. The first group, under Captain Frank R. Walker, approached from Vella Gulf in the ships USS Selfridge, Chevalier, and O'Bannon. A second group of three destroyers under Captain Larson was still racing from the south, fifteen minutes behind. At 22:30 on 6 October, Japanese lookouts spotted Walker's three ships approaching. Walker could have waited. He chose not to. With the reasoning of a commander who believed the destroyer transports might slip away in any hesitation, he attacked immediately. Both sides launched torpedoes just before 23:00. Then the American torpedoes and guns found the lead Japanese destroyer, Yugumo. She was struck repeatedly, lost steering while charging in, fired her own torpedoes, and was finished with a torpedo hit at 23:10. But one of the torpedoes she had launched before dying had already reached Chevalier.

The Japanese torpedo hit Chevalier in the forward magazine. The explosion nearly blew her apart. O'Bannon, following close behind in the American line, collided with the crippled Chevalier and for some time the two ships were locked together in the dark - a tangle of twisted steel, both crews fighting to separate. Selfridge attacked on alone, firing at the Japanese destroyers Shigure and Samidare. At 23:06 she took her own torpedo hit and went dead in the water. Three American destroyers were now disabled or damaged. The Japanese still outnumbered the Americans six destroyers to none that were still fighting. What followed was a strange echo of confusion. Ijuin's patrol aircraft, circling above, mistook the approaching reinforcements under Larson for American cruisers. Thinking he was about to face a much larger force, Ijuin ordered his destroyers to turn for home and signaled the destroyer-transports to withdraw. It was the wrong call, but it was the call that ended the action.

While gunsmoke was still hanging over the battle site, the real Japanese mission was going forward in silence. Nakayama's collection of small vessels crept into Marquana Bay at around 01:10. American attention was focused on the damaged destroyers. Larson's arriving division picked up a brief radar contact on Yugumo as she sank, then began rescue operations. Wounded men were cross-loaded from Chevalier, which had become unsalvageable. Around 03:00, the destroyer La Vallette fired a torpedo into Chevalier's magazine and then shattered her bow with depth charges. Selfridge and O'Bannon, though both badly damaged, stayed afloat and were eventually towed out for repairs. Two hours after they entered the bay, Nakayama's barges and auxiliaries withdrew. They had taken 589 trapped soldiers off an island the New Zealanders had all but surrounded. The operation worked.

A ship for a ship - the scoreboard said Japan had won. But the numbers behind the numbers told a different story. Over the three-month campaign that ended that night, the Allies had lost six ships; the Japanese had lost seventeen. American industry would replace Chevalier many times over before the war ended. Japanese shipyards could not replace Yugumo at any rate that mattered. The capture of the central Solomons was complete. What the historian Ian Toll has written into the record of the Pacific War is that the naval action off Vella Lavella was the last Japanese surface-fleet victory of the entire conflict. Every night battle after this one would go to the Allies, because the arithmetic of steel and industry had finally caught up. Today Vella Lavella is a quiet island of about 9,000 people, known for the wreckage of downed aircraft in its jungles, for the scuttled American Liberty ship USS John Penn visible at low tide near Logha, and for the memory of a coastwatcher network that pulled more than a hundred USS Helena survivors to safety three months earlier. The waters off Marquana Bay hold the wreck of Yugumo somewhere in the dark, and the quiet fact that no Japanese flag would fly over a naval victory again.