>Japanese honestly thought they were fighting more and bigger ships

It's always amazing how difficult identification was in WWII.

A lot of work seems to have gone into jiving action reports from Japanese and American records and the contrasts are pretty wild. Destroyer's reported as battle ships, detailed info on sinking another ship that the other side had no record of... sometimes ships with every advantage over their opponent in position to score some serious victory... simply losing sight of the targets and being taken out of action when go searching for their targets by going the wrong direction.

Nothing seemed certain.