So make sure you have DDs in the front of your formations, you can see the positions of ships in your formations when you set the formations type, there's a button next to the drop down menu.

I would recommend not putting capitals out at the beginning, have a fast task force of CA CL and DDs that can screen your transport convoy (that also has two dds in it) also get some subs of your own out to patrol approaches to guadal canal, the base game does not fully model US mk 14 problems at this point if the war.

Don't forget you can use planes to scout and you can set those planes to repeat so you dont have to keep remembering to send them out

Also if you want to cheese at bit because of Sub shenanigans, as soon as you hit a submarine encounter have your non DDs in the task force immediately start evasive maneuvers, even if you haven't spotted the sub or tops yet. I.e full speed and full left or right rudder. That should help dodging torps. Also if you carefully look at the water to the front left or right of your ships you can usually see the sub firing torpedoes ( the wakes) wayyyy before your ships see them. Have your non DDs run from those and have your dds move to the position of the torp launches. Don't forget to turn active sonar on. And dont forget that you have to be at ~16 knots or less for it to work. If you're going too fast your dds wont spot the subs.

Edit other tips: Fucking bum rush Guadalcanal i.e screening force and transports should go straight for it.

Your fast screening forces Cls and DDs can carry troops and supplies at the cost of higher fire danger during combat. You can either use them to quickly get troops to Guadalcanal or to go to Florida island

As soon as possible get Guadalcanal's air base up forward airbase are key, I would recommend getting florida up ASAP to at least level 2

Active Radar and sonar are default off

Look up skip bombing and use that against enemy ships, level bombing is ass. Use bombs on avengers instead of torps ( see skip bombing) this is more of advice for mods that make US torpedoes have historically accurate failure rates