31-Knot Burke and the Last Night of the Tokyo Express

On Thanksgiving Eve, 1943, off Cape St. George in the Solomon Islands campaign, Captain Arleigh "31-Knot" Burke's Destroyer Squadron 23 ambushed a Japanese resupply convoy in total darkness — sinking the destroyers Onami, Makinami, and Yugiri, killing 647 Japanese sailors and soldiers, without losing a single American life or ship. The U.S. Naval War College would later call it "an almost perfect surface action." This episode traces how eighteen months of costly night-battle failures in the Solomons finally produced a decisive American victory, why this battle ended the Tokyo Express for good, and why Burke's name still sails the seas today aboard the destroyers that bear it.