by Ian W. Toll
I am afraid that the defence of A.B.D.A. area has broken down and that defence of Java cannot now last long. . . . It always hinged on the air battle. . . . I see little further usefulness for this H.Q. . . . I hate the idea of leaving these stout-hearted Dutchmen, and will remain here and fight it out with them as long as possible if you consider this would help at all.
Picking up the cue, the U.S.-British combined chiefs dissolved the ABDA command. American, British, and Australian ground and air forces were evacuated south to Australia or west to Burma, where they would live to fight another day. Wavell was ordered to fly to India, where he would resume his old post as commander in chief of British forces in that country.
The decision to pull out of the beleaguered Indies was hardhearted but logical—in the Philippines and Malaya, the Allies had lost large numbers of men with little to show for it. But the Dutch, still vexed by the Anglo-American decision to freeze them out of the Allied high command, had no intention of joining in the general retreat. In Europe, their home country had long since been broken to the Nazi yoke, and the Netherlands government-in-exile clung tenaciously to its remaining overseas territories. The Dutch presence in those hot, fecund islands dated back more than three centuries. Many of the Dutch officers had spent the better part of their lives living in the East Indies. Whatever the feelings of the natives, the Dutch were inclined to fight for Java as they would fight to defend their own soil.
As Wavell and his staff departed for India, Dutch commanders took control of all remaining land, air, and naval forces. Admiral Hart having been recalled to the United States on his own recommendation, Vice Admiral Helfrich took command of the remaining units of the ABDA fleet, which included American, Australian, and British ships left behind to inflict as much punishment as they could on the approaching invasion convoys. Most remaining fleet units were organized into the “Combined Striking Force,” based at Surabaya, on the northern coast of eastern Java. That multinational flotilla of cruisers and destroyers, most of ancient vintage, sailed under the seagoing command of Rear Admiral Karel W. F. M. Doorman.
The officers and men of the Combined Striking Force had seen with their own eyes the extreme penalties they must pay for Japan’s dominance in the air. Several times, throughout the month of February, Allied fleet units had been hit by airstrikes. On February 4, Japanese bombers had hit an Allied task force north of Bali, inflicting heavy punishment on the American cruisers Houston and Marblehead. The Houston’s aft turret was knocked out of action and the Marblehead was sent limping toward Ceylon for an overhaul. On the 15th, near Palembang on eastern Sumatra, successive waves of Japanese G3M bombers had attacked the Striking Force, sending down a rain of bombs from high altitude. With aggressive helmsmanship and violent maneuvering, Doorman’s fleet had managed to avoid most of the bombs, but the Australian light cruiser Hobart and two American destroyers were damaged, and Doorman was forced to signal a retreat to Batavia through the Gaspar Strait. In mid-February, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier task force had prowled around the vicinity, offering the unnerving specter of a sudden, overpowering carrier air attack on the Allied fleet at any time or place. That carrier group, Kido Butai, was far more powerful than anything the Allies had in the Pacific, let alone in the embattled islands of the East Indies. On February 19, an armada of carrier bombers (joined by land bombers from Kendari and Ambon) had laid waste to the northern Australian seaport of Darwin, sending the residents fleeing into the great red interior. Later that day, a swarm of Zeros had appeared over Surabaya, and in a massive aerial dogfight sent forty Allied fighters down in flames.
The swift reduction of Allied airpower left Doorman feeling blind, while the Japanese naval forces enjoyed steadily improving air reconnaissance. The little Allied fleet was constantly on the move, wrenched here and there by conflicting and often mistaken contact reports. They rarely saw a friendly plane in the skies above their heads. By the end of February, the officers and crews were exhausted and on edge—one of the American skippers referred to his crew’s “considerable psychological tension.” They were plagued by poor communications, failing equipment, retrograde technology, and inadequate port facilities. Refueling was a recurring headache—storage tanks in Surabaya and Batavia were always on the verge of running dry, and the oil workers who might have helped had fled the scene. Often the ships were obliged to put to sea with half-empty fuel tanks or with a partial supply of ammunition and torpedoes. An insidious female voice, carried over the airwaves by Radio Tokyo, taunted the Americans in California-accented English. “Poor American boys,” she mock-lamented. “Your ships are swiftly being sunk. You haven’t a chance. Why die to defend foreign soil which never belonged to the Dutch or British in the first place?”
The Japanese drive into the East Indies did not let up for a moment, even at the height of the battle for Singapore. Admiral Yamamoto, directing the campaign from his flagship Nagato in her Hashirajima anchorage, was determined to give the Allies no rest and no space to breathe. He insisted on an early seizure of Java, the richest and most populous island in the region. In the last week of February, two invasion convoys converged on Java in a huge pincer movement, the largest amphibious invasion yet mounted in the Second World War. The Eastern Attack Convoy had sailed on the 19th from Jolo in the Sulu Sea: it included forty-one transports and cargo ships with a screening force of one cruiser and ten destroyers. The Western Attack Convoy was made up of fifty-six transports and cargo vessels accompanied by three cruisers, a light carrier, and no fewer than twenty-five destroyers. It had weighed anchor on February 18 from Cam Ranh Bay, Indochina. Those two long columns of ships would pass to the east and west of Borneo, respectively, and disgorge their troops on opposite ends of the 500-mile-long island. Three additional “supporting” groups of cruisers and destroyers were sent into the vicinity, to be summoned into action if needed. Yamamoto correctly inferred that the remaining Allied sea and air forces were too feeble to endanger this mammoth operation, so he ordered Nagumo’s carrier force away to the Indian Ocean, where it could intercept and finish off any Allied ships fleeing to the west.
The eastern convoy sailed in two columns a mile apart, each about twenty miles long. The freighters were sluggish and handled poorly by their civilian crews—destroyer skipper Tameichi Hara of the Amatsukaze was exasperated by their “obvious laxity,” their tendency to break radio silence or allow lights to show from their vessels at night. The convoy advanced at no better than 10 knots. The danger posed by both air and submarine attack seemed ominous. But what few Allied bombers did appear over the convoy did not score any hits, and the American submarines, staging out of Surabaya, made no impression at all. The Japanese freighter Arizona-maru was struck by a dud torpedo in early February. “It seemed to pass along the hull, scraping the keel,” one of her officers recalled, “and continued on the other side, emitting great clouds of bubbles before finally sinking to port.” It was a problem that would continue to plague the American submarine campaign throughout the first year of the war.
Aerial and submarine sighting reports tipped off the Allies to the approach of the eastern convoy, and on February 24, Vice Admiral Helfrich ordered several British cruisers and destroyers to sail from Tandjong Priok in western Java to Surabaya, where they would join up with Doorman’s ships. On the evening of the 26th, the Combined Striking Force sortied from Surabaya and steamed north through a typically majestic South Pacific sunset. Despite putting out extra lookouts, Doorman’s ships found no sign of the enemy. As dawn rose, Doorman decided to head back into port to top off fuel. While retiring he received terse messages from Helfrich, ordering him back out to sea. He replied: “This day the personnel reached the limit of endurance. Tomorrow the limit will be exceeded.” But at 2:27 p.m. on February 27, as the fleet entered the outer roads of Surabaya, a new contact report put the Japanese convoy just ninety miles north. Doorman’s flagship put about and signaled his British, American, and Australian companions in a plain English semaphore: “
Am proceeding to intercept enemy unit, follow me, details later.”
The Striking Force now included two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and nine destroyers. It departed Surabaya in a column led by Doorman’s flagship, the cruiser De Ruyter. The crews had operated at sea in perilous conditions for weeks on end, without much respite, and physical exhaustion was beginning to take a toll on their performance. But now they rallied. They sailed in three columns, with De Ruyter leading four other cruisers of three other nations—Exeter, Houston, Perth, and Java. It was a fine day, with good visibility, light breezes, and moderate swells. The British destroyers sailed ahead as a screening force, while the American and Dutch destroyers followed the cruisers on their rear and port quarter. The antique four-stack destroyers coughed up billows of black smoke as they churned along in the wakes of the larger ships. One of the Dutch destroyers had engine trouble that limited the speed of the entire force to 26 knots.
The multinational character of the force, and its makeshift efforts to coalesce under one command, were highlighted by the difficulty Doorman had in making himself understood to his English-speaking charges. One of the American destroyer skippers described the communication problems as “farcical.” The Striking Force had been issued no signal books and no common codes. Doorman’s flagship communicated by blinker light in plain English, but in the smoke and confusion of a naval melee that would prove impractical. In some cases, the admiral’s orders were transmitted on a Dutch-type high-frequency radio to the Houston, which then relayed them to the other ships by TBS (“talk-between-ships,” a short-range voice circuit used on the American vessels). In the forthcoming action, Doorman’s orders would sometimes arrive at the other ships in the wrong sequence, leaving their skippers flummoxed.
Japanese patrol planes tracked Doorman’s column and radioed contact reports to Vice Admiral Takeo Takagi, commander of the eastern convoy covering force. Well before he made direct visual contact, Takagi knew Doorman’s speed and course, and he had a good idea of the composition of Doorman’s force. He sent the troopships north, out of danger, and took his cruisers and destroyers south toward the enemy at high speed. At 4 p.m., lookouts on the Japanese cruiser Jintsu reported several ships hull-down to the southeast. A small forest of mastheads peeked over the horizon, indicating the presence of a large Allied fleet. Dutch, British, and American flags could be seen fluttering in the breeze. Lieutenant Commander Hara of the destroyer Amatsukaze, studying the scene through his binoculars and comparing it to what he saw in his ship-recognition diagrams, correctly identified the flagship De Ruyter before her hull had risen into his line of sight.
The two columns closed at an oblique angle. At a range of 28,000 yards, the Japanese heavy cruisers Haguro and Nachi opened fire with their 8-inch guns. Columns of brightly colored water rose on either side of the Allied line—the shells were injected with colored dye markers for shot-spotting—but the range was too great for accuracy, and none fell close. As the range closed, Japanese floatplanes circled overhead and radioed ranging information to Takagi’s cruisers, and the salvos began creeping steadily closer. To avoid being raked fore-and-aft, Doorman ordered a 20-degree port turn, a maneuver that would put him more nearly on a parallel course and bring the full broadsides of his cruisers to bear on the enemy. A few minutes after the course change, Houston and Exeter opened fire. Red-dyed spouts straddled the Japanese column, but no hits were scored.
A few minutes after five o’clock, the Exeter was struck amidships by an armor-piercing shell fired by the Haguro. It penetrated into the boiler room and exploded, destroying several of the British cruiser’s boilers. She immediately lost about half her power, and turned out of the line to limp back toward Surabaya at reduced speed. Houston, following in her wake, also turned to avoid a collision, and as a result the Allied column was now thrown into confusion. The TBS radio on the Houston was knocked out of action by a dud shell, cutting the radio relay link with Doorman’s flagship. “From then on,” wrote Commander H. E. Eccles, skipper of the destroyer USS John D. Edwards, “all communication was by flashing lights obscured by gun smoke, smoke screens, and hampered by rapid maneuver.” It seemed that no one was receiving or understanding Doorman’s orders.
At 5:15 p.m., a Japanese torpedo that had been fired at long range some minutes earlier struck the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, which went up in a great flash of light and a thunderclap. She broke in two, jackknifed, and sank. The American destroyers counterattacked with a spread of forty torpedoes, but all either missed their targets or struck an enemy hull and did not explode. Now Japanese Type 93 torpedoes were slicing through the sea all around the American ships, and several exploded automatically upon reaching the ends of their runs. Lookouts on the American ships, ignorant of the great range of the enemy’s torpedoes, wrongly assumed that the Striking Force must be under submarine attack. The situation was massively confused. “The crystal ball was our only method of anticipating the intention of Commander Combined Striking Force,” wrote Commander Eccles in his action report. “Then came the orders ‘Counter-attack,’ ‘Cancel Counter-attack,’ ‘Make smoke,’ ‘Cover my retirement.’” At about 5:25 p.m., the smoke screen ordered by Doorman allowed the cruisers to break off the engagement and escape to the southeast, toward the Javanese coast. The Dutchman hoped to get free of the Japanese cruisers and destroyers, which had thus far got the better of him. His prime objective was to surprise and sink the Japanese troopships, later that night or the following dawn.
For the next several hours, the Striking Force ran south, but then doubled back in the enveloping darkness and ran at high speed toward the northwest. Doorman hoped to evade Takagi’s warships and get directly at the transports, but without air reconnaissance he would need a stroke of luck to do so. The Japanese cruiser scout planes could be heard droning overhead—they dropped flares in hopes of illuminating the Allied fleet for the guns of their ships. The Japanese cruisers fired star shells and shined their searchlights across the horizon, but could not bring the enemy into effective range for a night action. Shortly before eight, Doorman again changed course and ran south until the moonlit coast of Java came into view. The American destroyers, running low on fuel and having fired all their torpedoes, were dispatched to return to Surabaya for replenishment. At 9:25 p.m. a British destroyer, the Jupiter, struck a Dutch mine, exploded, and sank in minutes. Doorman now hoped against the odds that he might circumvent the Japanese screening force and attack the troopships. The four remaining Allied cruisers turned north. They sailed alone, their destroyer brethren having been whittled away by low fuel, expended torpedoes, or the fortunes of war.
Japanese cruiser spotting planes continued to stalk them. At 9:50 p.m., a parachute flare floated down over the Allied ships. The crews felt exposed, with good reason—flares continued falling from the sky, indicating that they had been spotted. Admiral Takagi moved his ships in for the kill. A lookout on the cruiser Nachi, scanning the horizon with one of the Japanese navy’s excellent night vision glasses, reported a visual contact on Doorman’s ships at 11 p.m. Both lines opened fire and the night sky was flashed with heavy naval gunfire and star shells. Reiji Masuda, the merchant marine officer on the Arizona-maru, had never seen anything like it: he spoke of the “thunder of big guns, flashes of light, flares in the dark sky, columns of fire.” Two cruisers, Haguro and Nachi, swung northward and closed the range. At 11:53 p.m., when they had closed to 8,000 yards, the two cruisers launched a spread of twelve torpedoes. Thirteen minutes later, the De Ruyter exploded with a mighty thunderclap of sound and broke in two. The fires quickly reached her magazine and set off a secondary explosion that briefly lit up the entire seascape for miles around. The two separated sections of her hull slipped quickly beneath the waves, taking 367 men, including Admiral Doorman, to the bottom. Almost immediately thereafter the Java also exploded and went down quickly by the bow. A few of her crew managed to leap into the sea, but the British cruiser also went down with the loss of most of her hands. The sailor
s on the decks of the Japanese cruisers leaped and danced and shouted, “Banzai!”
Doorman’s final order to the surviving ships was to break off the engagement and withdraw to Tandjong Priok (the harbor of Batavia). Perth and Houston broke away in the darkness. The Java Sea was now a Japanese lake, and further Allied resistance could only end in total annihilation. All that remained was for the scattered remnants of the ABDA fleet to escape before they were hunted down and destroyed, in hopes of living to fight another day. Exits were few. To the north, the Japanese reigned supreme at sea and in the air. Bali Strait, east of Java, offered the quickest route south from Surabaya, but those waters were too shallow to accommodate the cruisers. The four American four-pipers that had retired to Surabaya managed to sneak through that strait on the last night of February. They exchanged long-range gunfire with a Japanese task force dispatched to intercept them, but managed to break away in the darkness. They reached Fremantle, on the western coast of Australia, a week later.
The wounded British cruiser Exeter, accompanied by the destroyers HMS Encounter and USS Pope, crept north out of Surabaya that night. They hoped against the odds to evade detection the next day, hug the south coast of Borneo, and then make a high-speed run for Sunda Strait, to the west of Java, the following night. At first the battle-damaged Exeter could make only 16 knots, though the engine crews eventually coaxed her to about 23 knots. March 1 dawned with alarmingly good visibility. The three ships were quickly spotted, both from the air and by patrolling Japanese ships. Admiral Takagi moved his ships in for an easy kill. Two separate Japanese task forces, including four heavy cruisers and several destroyers, closed from two directions. A heavy gun duel began at long range at 9:40 a.m., and several hits were soon taken by all three Allied vessels. At about 11 a.m., the Japanese torpedomen launched an effective spread, and one of their fish hit the crippled Exeter. She rolled over and went down at eleven-thirty. The Encounter succumbed to several hits and sank five minutes later. The Pope, last remaining Allied warship afloat in the Java Sea, was methodically bombed by planes from the light carrier Ryujo and sank shortly after noon. Her survivors were picked up by a Japanese destroyer; they would spend the next three and a half years in hell.
