Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  The Houston and Perth, having put the previous night’s debacle well behind them, put into Tandjong Priok at midday on February 28. The two cruisers refueled in haste and sortied at 7 p.m. that night, with hopes of slipping through the Sunda Strait. At 10:15 p.m., near Bantam Bay, at the western extremity of Java, they stumbled on a group of anchored Japanese transports. They were elements of the Western Attack Convoy, sent to land on the western end of the island. A full moon lit the scene. It was a good opportunity to attack those transports while they were in the vulnerable position of landing troops and supplies on the beach. The Japanese had overwhelming naval forces in the vicinity—seven cruisers, ten destroyers, and a light aircraft carrier, the Ryujo, though most of those units were off some distance to the north. Houston and Perth opened fire on the transports, and at first only one of the Japanese destroyers could return fire. But the other Japanese surface ships rushed into the fray at flank speed and quickly overpowered the two Allied cruisers. Three Japanese cruisers and nine destroyers got into the action, and fired no fewer than eighty-seven torpedoes at them. The battle developed into a general melee, all the more confused because of smoke screens laid by the Japanese destroyers and the geometry of the action, which involved a dozen Japanese ships converging from several directions simultaneously.

  Several torpedoes overshot the two Allied ships and struck the defenseless transports in the background. Against such overwhelming force, the Houston and Perth were not going to last long. They were surrounded by enemy ships in every offshore direction, all pouring shells into them. Japanese planes circled overhead. The last moments were confused and utterly hopeless. Commander A. L. Maher of the Houston later wrote: “All communication systems which were still operative were hopelessly overloaded with reports of damage received, of approaching torpedoes, of new enemy attacks begun, or changes in targets engaged.” The American and Australian ships gave some punishment back to their tormentors, but took much the worse of the exchange.

  In the general melee, five Japanese ships were hit by friendly fire. Two, a minesweeper and a transport, were sunk. With such a great number of torpedoes launched at the two Allied cruisers in a relatively small area, it was perhaps inevitable that some would strike the anchored transports. As the ships were so close inshore, a large percentage of the crews aboard got ashore safely. General Hitoshi Imamura, commander in chief of the 16th Army, swam to shore and staggered onto the beach soaked head to foot in fuel oil.

  At midnight the Perth took a direct hit from an 8-inch shell. Shortly afterward she was struck by a torpedo under the waterline, and that was too much for her—she sank quickly. The Houston was also pummeled by heavy shellfire and three torpedoes. A few minutes after midnight, a shell penetrated the engine room and broke a steam main, scalding the engine-room crew to death. Steam ruptured through the deck and she listed heavily to starboard. At 12:25 a.m., Captain Rooks ordered abandon ship. Shortly after that, the Houston was struck directly in the bridge, killing her captain. She rolled onto her side, and at twelve-forty-five that morning she went under. Only about half of her crew survived. Of the crews of the two cruisers, 307 of the Perth and 368 from the Houston were picked up by Japanese ships, and would languish in prison camps as forced laborers for the remainder of the war.

  Those Allied ships remaining on the south coast of Java at Tjilatjap were sent away by Admiral Helfrich on March 1. Some escaped, while others were caught by Nagumo’s carrier planes and sunk. A destroyer, the Edsall, and an oiler, the Pecos, were sunk south of Java the next day.

  As a result of those battles, the ABDA fleet was largely annihilated, with losses of ten ships and about 2,173 sailors. Not a single Japanese warship had been sunk in the defense of the Malay barrier, which was now decisively broken. In the immediate aftermath of the battle there was some criticism of the Dutch commanders, though always tempered with admiration for their courage. The skipper of one of the American destroyers that escaped to Australia believed that Admiral Doorman lacked a firm grasp of tactics and communications, but added, “The Dutch fought with unfaltering courage and dogged determination” and “went to their deaths with grim foreknowledge.” Admiral King echoed those points, calling the naval campaign in the Java Sea “a magnificent display of very bad strategy,” but the judgment is probably a little unfair. The Allied forces in the theater were totally overmatched, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet was antiquated and decrepit. Mahanian orthodoxy actually accounted for those deficiencies: Mahan had decreed that the battle fleet must remain as a unit, and if that principle was to be observed unfailingly, the Asiatic Fleet could never be treated as more than an afterthought. The single most important factor in the Japanese victory was their mastery in the air; there was little the ships of the ABDA fleet could expect to do with such weak support from above.

  A few ships escaped to Australia, but the Japanese were only briefly delayed in carrying out their invasion of Java on February 28. From widely dispersed beachheads, the invasion forces pushed into the island. Helfrich was informed by subordinate admirals that they judged the attempt to save Java to be a lost cause and had received orders from their countries to withdraw. Helfrich at first demanded that the few remaining ships of the ABDA fleet should continue to resist, but in the face of opposition from his British subordinate officers, he bowed to the inevitable and agreed that the remaining British ships should be withdrawn. The remaining Allied planes took off, jammed with passengers, and completed the hasty evacuation of the island. The main western centers of Batavia and Bandoeng were in Japanese hands by March 5. The remaining Dutch and British troops on Java fought bravely, but all remaining resistance was stamped out within a week. Many of the Javanese natives seemed glad to be rid of their Dutch masters. By March 9, Japan had established complete mastery over the island, and the remaining Allied forces surrendered.

  THE HEAVY DEFEATS SUFFERED BY THE ALLIES that winter and spring of 1942 reverberated harshly in their halls of power. The Japanese offensive had made a mockery of their predictions, deranged their plans, sapped their morale, undercut their leaders’ reputations, and torn at the seams of their global coalition. Churchill had been among those British leaders who had vehemently maintained that Singapore was impregnable—that it was “vain” and a “bugbear” to suppose that the great “citadel” could ever fall to the Japanese. Now his rivals in Parliament and the British press threw those imprudent oaths back in his face. In his memoirs, Churchill wryly noted that the ABDA charter had been created in painstaking negotiations between half a dozen governments, eating up the scarce time and attention of hundreds of civil and military officials, requiring “scores of thousands of words” to be cabled around the world by the “surest codes,” and had been “staffed in strict proportion to the claims of the different powers, all in triplicate for the army, navy, and air.” No sooner was the Sisyphean work completed than the Japanese onslaught put the entire enterprise out of business. ABDACOM was stillborn.

  With the Malay barrier smashed to pieces, there was nothing left to check the Japanese juggernaut, whether it went east, west, or south. It might even advance in all those directions at once, as the Japanese had given abundant proof of their power and readiness to attack across widely separated fronts. On March 8, the date of the surrender of Allied forces on Java, Japan’s 15th Army marched into Rangoon, the capital city of Burma. The demoralized British troops, cut off from the seaport that had been their main source of supply, fell back to the north and west. The British now had to ask themselves whether the population of India would regard the approaching Japanese as invaders or liberators. The Japanese gained control of the Burma Road, the Allies’ major route of overland supply for the Nationalist Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek warned of a collapse of Chinese resistance, and threatened to open truce talks with the Japanese.

  Also on March 8, Japanese invasion forces went ashore on the coast of New Guinea, at Lae and Salamaua, and began clearing land for new airfields. That pointed to
ward a further advance along the axis of South Pacific islands lying to the east of the Dutch East Indies—the Admiralties, the Bismarcks, and the northern Solomons—and a direct threat to the line of sea communications between North America and Australia. Australian prime minister John Curtain, in a strident exchange with Churchill, had demanded the return of several Australian divisions from the Middle East, refusing the latter’s entreaties that they be diverted for the defense of Burma—he had even broached the term “inexcusable betrayal” in his comments on the defense of Singapore. The vast southern landmass, with its largely unpopulated 16,000-mile coastline, lay totally exposed—its only real defense was its physical remoteness and the red desert wastes of its interior.

  Kido Butai, Admiral Nagumo’s feared carrier striking force, continued to swallow up enormous swaths of ocean. In the first week of April it was afoot in the Indian Ocean. On the morning of April 5, when many servicemen and civilians were at religious services to celebrate Easter Sunday, Japanese carrier aircraft descended suddenly on the port of Colombo, on the west coast of Ceylon. They sank only one destroyer and a merchantman, but they inflicted heavy damage on the wharves and port installations, and shot down twenty-four British planes that scrambled to intercept them. Later the same day, more of Nagumo’s planes found and sank two British cruisers, Dorsetshire and Cornwall. On the morning of April 9, a wave of Japanese carrier planes appeared over Ceylon’s second important base, Trincomalee. As at Colombo, the attackers took a heavy toll on shore-support facilities. A counterattack by nine RAF Blenheim bombers fell on the retreating Akagi, but they scored no hits. Five Blenheims were shot down and the others damaged. Later that day, Nagumo’s planes found the British aircraft carrier Hermes at sea, and sent her to the bottom along with an escorting destroyer. Running low on fuel, Kido Butai exited the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca and turned north for home.

  Altogether, in carrier and submarine attacks, the Japanese had destroyed twenty-three merchant vessels and five Royal Navy warships including the Hermes. That was a heavy blow, and left Burma more isolated than ever, but worse from the British point of view was the prospect that the Japanese might return with troopships, and stage an invasion of Ceylon or even India. In the geopolitics of the Second World War, the Indian Ocean was the crux of the issue. It was a main artery of global Allied supply lines, critical to China, North Africa, and even Russia. It held the key to control of the Persian Gulf, recognized even then as home to the largest oil reserves in the world. In early April, the British asked the Americans to send naval reinforcements to the Indian Ocean, a request that Admiral King refused. By late April, American communications intelligence units had confirmed that the Japanese had no further operations brewing in the Indian Ocean, but the Allies continued to wring their hands over the vision of a German-Japanese linkup in the Persian Gulf, and an Axis chokehold on the greatest oil-producing region in the world.

  Nor was there much good cheer radiating from the other theaters of the war. In North Africa, Rommel’s Afrika Korps had seized the port of Benghazi, driving the British back toward Tobruk. General Rommel seemed poised to launch a punishing tank offensive against Egypt and the Suez Canal, a campaign that might sever a principal artery of the British Empire. In the Mediterranean, British efforts to resupply the besieged and starving island of Malta had been thwarted by enemy air and submarine attacks. On February 11 and 12, two German battle cruisers and one heavy cruiser broke out of the French port of Brest, eluded a British blockade, darted up the English Channel, ran the big shore batteries at Dover, and reached Germany intact. The “Channel Dash,” as the British press acerbically called it, was a thumb in the eye of the Royal Navy. In the United States, German U-boats were sinking merchantmen and oil tankers just off the east coast, often within sight of land, and the U.S. Navy was apparently powerless to stop them. In California, invasion fears were revived by an incident north of Santa Barbara on the night of February 23, when a Japanese submarine surfaced off the beach and shelled an oil refinery. The next night, Los Angeles succumbed to mass panic as the city’s antiaircraft batteries let loose at an imaginary Japanese air raid.

  Most tormenting of all in those ominous weeks was the prospect of a Russian collapse. Hitler was known to be preparing a huge spring offensive in the Caucasus. Could the Red Army withstand it? And would Japan attack in Siberia, forcing Joseph Stalin to fight on two fronts?

  In his correspondence with Roosevelt, Churchill did not conceal his private anguish. He was candid and open-hearted to a remarkable degree, even hinting that the pressure was getting to him. He confided on February 19, 1942: “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball.” On March 7: “The weight of the war is very heavy now and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.” Roosevelt’s inborn optimism was valuable in those dark days of the war. He acknowledged that the fall of Singapore would give “the well-known back-seat drivers a field day,” but urged the British leader to “be of good heart” and to “keep up your optimism and your grand driving force.” He encouraged Churchill to take time away from his duties to relax: “Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole, and pull the hole in after me. I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs. I wish you would try it, and I wish you would lay a few bricks or paint another picture.”

  But the president also emphasized that the Allies had better “constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” Yes, the defeats in the Pacific were disastrous and shocking, but there was nothing to be gained in agonizing over them. “Here is a thought from this amateur strategist,” he wrote Churchill on March 18. “There is no use giving a single further thought to Singapore or the Dutch Indies. They are gone.” The immediate concern was to set up a new theater command system to replace the disbanded ABDACOM. Australia must be defended at all costs, as the launching pad for an eventual Allied counteroffensive. The British could do little to protect Australia; on the other hand, the Americans could do little to check Japanese aggression in the Indian Ocean or against the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, asked the president, why not simply divide command responsibility between the eastern and western flanks of the Japanese Empire, with the Americans to be predominant in the Pacific, and the British in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia? He made the offer explicit in two long cables of March 7 and 9, 1942. General Brooke was at first suspicious, noting in his diary that the proposal was “good in places but calculated to drive Australia, NZ, and Canada into USA arms, and help to bust up empire!” But no viable alternative lay on the table, and the strain on British military resources ruled out any new force commitments to the Pacific or Australasia. So what reasonable objection could they offer? After a brief, irritable debate, Churchill and his cabinet acquiesced.

  Observing the rapid deterioration of Allied fortunes in the Pacific, Admiral King pushed to reinforce the theater even if it meant drawing forces away from pending operations in Europe. President Roosevelt backed him. The president put the point directly to Churchill on March 7: “The energy of the Japanese attack is still very powerful . . . the Pacific situation is now very grave and, if it is to be stabilized, requires an immediate, concerted, and vigorous effort by the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.” Shipping was the bottleneck. Troop transports previously intended to sail for Britain would have to be redeployed to the Pacific. That left no option other than to postpone implementation of the buildup of U.S. troops in Britain, the operation code-named bolero. It also meant, the president wrote, that the “American contribution to an air offensive against Germany in 1942 would be somewhat curtailed.” By agreeing to those revisions, Churchill acknowledged the limits of a Europe-first policy at a time when the Japanese were rampaging across Asia and the Pacific.

  The United States had assumed sole Allied command responsibility in the Pacific, including the big southern island groups of Oceania and Aust
ralasia. In Washington, it was naturally assumed that General MacArthur would be named supreme commander of the entire theater. He was already on the scene in Australia, and no one else in the American military command even approached his stature or popularity. But Admiral King was implacably opposed to giving MacArthur command of the Pacific Fleet, and if the deadlock could not be resolved, he would appeal his case to the president. King and Marshall apparently thrashed the issue out in private, meeting alone or with a handful of aides behind closed doors. No detailed account of those sessions entered the historical record, but there is reason to believe that hard words were exchanged.

  In the end, they emulated the wisdom of King Solomon, and divided the theater between the army and navy. MacArthur was named commander in chief of the “Southwest Pacific Area,” which included Australia, the Philippines, the former Dutch East Indies, the Bismarcks, and the Solomons. Admiral Nimitz retained his title of CINCPAC while adding that of commander in chief of the “Pacific Ocean Areas,” which included the entire North and central Pacific, and the South Pacific island groups east of the 160th meridian. (Nimitz’s new call sign, which he would lug around with him for the rest of the war, was “CINCPAC-CINCPOA.”) Within their prescribed theaters, MacArthur and Nimitz would command all Allied forces, on the ground, on the sea, and in the air. The settlement resolved the standoff in Washington, but led to army-navy friction whenever an operation straddled the two spheres, as did the Guadalcanal Campaign in the latter half of 1942. Naturally, the boundaries drawn in Washington would not be respected by the Japanese.