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Six Minutes, Two Ships. At 14 minutes before midnight, her batteries spoke. Her target was a Nip destroyer. Just 98 seconds later it was ablaze. As the enemy ship exploded and sank, the Helena swung her guns on a cruiser.
Four and a half minutes later the blazing cruiser sank. The Helena turned on another cruiser slugging it out with a U.S. cruiser near by. The enemy went down.
A Jap destroyer slipped in close, let go a torpedo. The Helena dodged, wheeled, finished off the attacker, which was already under fire from another U.S. ship. The enemy fleet turned and fled.
The Helena's score in her first battle: four targets, four ships sunk, with two assists by other U.S. craft. On the Helena: no hits, no casualties.
She cruised with a task force looking for Japs, escorted convoys, dodged a second torpedo attack—this time from a submarine. She put in one busy day silencing shore batteries which had bracketed U.S. transports unloading at Guadalcanal. The Japs sent over bombers. The Helena got four of the nine shot down by the U.S. ships.
First Sight, First Shot. The decisive Battle of Guadalcanal began in earnest that night. The Helena was the first to sight the enemy ships. A Jap cruiser slashed the darkness with her searchlight, caught the Helena, opened fire. The Helena was already on the target. She fired from the hip: a full salvo. The Jap burned like a torch, lighting the way for the U.S. destroyers. As the Jap cruiser began to sink, the Helena's secondary battery pounded down a destroyer.
The Japs began a withdrawal. One of their cruisers was slamming shells at the San Francisco, which had tangled with a Jap battleship and taken the salvo which killed Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan and her skipper, Medal-of-Honorman Cassin Young. The Helena sank the cruiser and a destroyer, shot up three other Jap ships. The U.S. beachhead in the Solomons was finally secure.
The Helena steamed on to her destiny. She pounded enemy airfields, troop areas, shore batteries. Down in her log went names now legendary: Munda, Vila, Kolombangara, Enogai Inlet, Bairoko Harbor. Finally came the Battle of Kula Gulf, a turning point which cost the Jap something between nine and eleven cruisers and destroyers. It cost the U.S. one ship: the Helena.
Last Train, Last Battle. The Japs, landing troops to reinforce Munda, were caught flatfooted. At 1:55 a.m., July 7, the battle was joined with the "Tokyo Express."
TIME Correspondent Duncan Norton-Taylor, on the bridge of another U.S. ship, was an eyewitness. He cabled: "Five of their ships died in our first onslaught. Others spoke back . . . but soon it was plain they were depending more heavily on another weapon. The frantic enemy was firing torpedo spreads."
Torpedoes got the Helena. Her main battery had been trained on one of the big Jap ships. She opened up with a blinding burst of flame, sank it. Her secondary battery smashed one Jap destroyer then another. Other U.S. ships were firing salvos, but the Helena chose to use "continuous fire." Her gunflames flared from stem to stern. In the brief moment left of her life she loosed perhaps a thousand rounds from main batteries alone and her thunder could be heard for miles.