Eastern Solomons damage and Pearl Harbor repair

At the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, Enterprise took three direct bomb hits and four near misses, with seventy-four killed and ninety-five wounded. The fighting forced back the Japanese troop movement toward Guadalcanal. Ryūjō also appears as a treaty-era light-carrier workaround whose displacement grew after the Japanese added another deck. Damage-control parties secured Enterprise well enough for her to return to Hawaii under her own power. Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard repaired the serious damage between 10 September and 16 October 1942 instead of sending the ship to the American west coast. The speed of that work supports the argument that further Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor's repair infrastructure would have made American recovery harder, though the attacking force would have faced greater losses. Enterprise returned to sea with Air Group 10 and VF-10, the Grim Reapers. Her survival depended on shipboard damage control, a theater repair base, and a combat-ready air organization.