Ship of Ghosts (11 page)

The majestic sight of it transfixed the captain of the destroyer
Amatsukaze,
escorting the formation to port. But Cdr. Tameichi Hara’s awe contended with his better judgment. Befitting a responsible commander, he fretted about the uncertainties and risks of the audacious operation. As the rhetoric of conquest was reduced to actual soldiers and ships and planes moving by complex schedules, human imperfection and weakness were becoming all too evident. Hara worried that Allied submarines would be drawn by the transport captains’ carelessness—the black smoke churning from their stacks, their loose attitude toward radio discipline and nighttime blackout doctrine. The flare of a cigarette, seen through the wrong submarine’s periscope, could bring ruin to the entire group.

The two heavy cruisers assigned to guard them, the
Haguro
and the
Nachi,
the latter the flagship of Rear Adm. Takeo Takagi’s Eastern Covering Group, trailed the vulnerable convoy by some two hundred miles, exhibiting the supercilious leisure of a triumphant fleet. Those ships would be essential in a face-off with Allied cruisers. Each cruiser carried a main battery of ten eight-inch guns mounted in five double turrets, plus sixteen torpedo tubes loaded with the new Type 93 heavy torpedo, nicknamed the “Long Lance.” Oxygen-fueled and wakeless at a racing-boat speed of as much as forty-nine knots, they delivered a hull-busting thousand-pound warhead up to 43,600 yards—over four times the range of American torpedoes.

Conceit seemed to flow from the highest levels of the Japanese command. The Combined Fleet commander in chief, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, flying his flag in the battleship
Nagato,
moored near Kure in the Japanese home islands, was little bothered by the small force of Allied warships reported to be gathering against him. When he ordered Admiral Nagumo’s carrier force to strike Darwin on February 19, he urged the destruction of dockside storehouses and shore facilities and instructed Nagumo to let the few Allied warships in the area slip away if necessary. “We must secure oil and other resources of the Dutch East Indies,” Yamamoto announced. “That is of higher priority than pursuing any small American force.” The USS
Houston
had been declared sunk more than once; why trouble with her now? He ordered his invasion forces to sail against Java even before Nagumo and his carriers could join them in support. “The landing operation does not require the support of a major task force,” he declared. He deemed the Allied fleet “completely demoralized” and “no longer in shape to attempt any major action.”

Under the overall command of Rear Adm. Shoji Nishimura in the light cruiser
Naka,
the Eastern Attack Group had sailed from Jolo on February 19, embarking the Imperial Japanese Army’s 48th Division, veterans of the Philippines conquest. General MacArthur had duly reported them to ABDA. Stopping at Balikpapan, the convoy absorbed most of the 56th Regiment. As Nishimura’s group approached Java from the east, farther to the west Vice Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa’s Western Attack Force, originating from Camranh Bay in Indochina, was southbound with fifty-six transports. The two invasion forces reached slowly south toward their prize.

R
ear Adm. Karel Doorman, flying his flag in the light cruiser
De Ruyter,
left Surabaya harbor near sunset on February 26 sure that invasion was imminent, though less certain what course he should take to head it off. As his ships departed, the wrecked docks were dotted with old men, women, and children—relatives of Dutch sailors, perhaps—waving farewell. Spirits were high, but his squadron’s departure went less than smoothly. As the striking force was getting under way, the
De Ruyter
struck a tugboat hauling a water barge, sinking both of the smaller ships.

Doorman’s flotilla—
De Ruyter
in the lead, followed by the
Houston,
the
Exeter,
the light cruisers
Java
and
Perth,
and nine destroyers from three nations—cleared the narrows between the west coast of Madura Island and Java and reached open water. The time for hedging bets had passed. After months of indecision and scattershot planning, the Allies had a powerful surface force under one command. Doorman would take it to sea and risk everything in defense of his homeland’s exotic outpost.

As the
Houston
made way, the
Exeter
turned out and passed her. From her mainmast the British heavy cruiser was flying a bright white battle ensign, twelve feet on a side, illuminated by a ray of the setting sun. Paul Papish on the
Houston,
seeing the British ship, couldn’t help but think that as impressive a spectacle as it made, the ensign tended to defeat the elaborate camouflage painted on her hull. As the
Exeter
went by, sailors on the
Houston
could hear a tune playing over the British ship’s loudspeakers: “A-Hunting We Will Go…” The buglers on the Dutch destroyers blew what sounded like a hunting song too. “Even when we found that it was merely a bugle call to close water-tight doors it still had a fine challenging lilt to it,” remembered Lieutenant Hamlin.

Admiral Doorman took his column east along Madura Island until about 1:00
a.m
., turned north, then reversed course west for the rest of the night. He led his ships as far as Rembang, then doubled back east. The Japanese fleet continued to elude him. Probing the night by eye, his lookouts found nothing. Then dawn came, dependably bringing with it the drone of Japanese aircraft. The air-search radar on the
Perth
detected them above the cloud layer. At nine o’clock a plane broke through and dropped a stick of bombs that splashed harmlessly in the vicinity of the destroyer HMS
Jupiter
. The attack was a mere gesture. It was the fact that the Japanese had spotted them that carried the greatest threat. Appearing sporadically
over Doorman’s Combined Striking Force through the morning of February 27, the Japanese fliers shadowed it and kept Nishimura apprised. Duly alerted, the commanders of the heavy cruisers
Nachi
and
Haguro
doubtless knew they would have plenty of time to catch up with the transports and form up for battle.

By noon, with his destroyers’ oil bunkers getting light, Admiral Doorman chose to return to Surabaya. The consecutive nights’ failure to find and engage the enemy did not sit well with Admiral Helfrich. On hearing of Doorman’s return to port, he signaled his striking force commander, “
Notwithstanding air attack you are to proceed to search for and attack enemy
.” But the air attack was not the reason for Doorman’s withdrawal. He responded to Helfrich, “
Was proceeding eastward after search from Sapoedi to Rambang. Success of action tonight depends absolutely on getting good reconnaissance information in time, which last night failed me
.” To underscore the condition of his ships and men, Doorman signaled Helfrich at 12:40
p.m
., “
This day the personnel reached the limit of endurance. Tomorrow the limit will be exceeded
.”

About that there was little doubt. The only question was how well and for how long the Striking Force’s sailors could function beyond human limits. Some of the gunners on the
Houston
had been on alert for twenty-one consecutive hours—an unheard-of marathon of tension, concentration, and strain. On the other ships, things were no better. “Throughout
Perth
there was general frustration and weariness, accentuated by the enemy’s power to sit over them with aircraft and make fools of them on the surface,” a quartermaster on that ship observed.

At 2:27
p.m
. the Allied ships were entering the channel through the protective minefield that lay outside Surabaya’s harbor when at last it happened. From Admiral Doorman came word that a Dutch PBY had sighted southbound Japanese transports twenty miles west of Bawean Island. Doorman had wanted good reconnaissance. Now, it seemed, he had gotten it. “The word spread like wildfire throughout the
Houston,
” wrote Walter Winslow. “Suddenly, men were no longer tired. This time we were hunting no specter force.” The enemy, long sought and seldom encountered, was less than a hundred miles away. Doorman passed the order to turn around in midchannel and led his squadron back out to sea.

N
o perfect account can be written of the major naval battle that ensued north of Java on the afternoon and night of February 27, 1942. The documentary record of the Battle of the Java Sea suffers from the deaths of so many key participants and from the loss of so many sunken ships’ logbooks that any narrative is bound to disappoint those who expect naval actions to be carefully tracked and cataloged. But if the details don’t always collate, the truth of the battle is not difficult to tease out.

At 2:45
p.m
., as Karel Doorman led his squadron to sea, he sent this message to his captains: “
Am proceeding to intercept enemy units. Follow me. Details later
.” Absent more specific orders, they would be left to ponder those details for themselves. In the
Houston,
Captain Rooks called “a hurried but deadly serious” conference in his wardroom, where his gunnery officer, Cdr. Arthur Maher, outlined the obvious and daunting objective: to destroy the enemy invasion convoy, after first disposing of any combatant vessels that might be escorting it. While there was no telling how many Japanese warships might be lurking nearby to protect the valuable flotilla, reportedly it was an inviting target, consisting of thirty-five to forty troop transports.

If only Doorman’s aviators could get a look at it for themselves.
The
Houston
’s aviation contingent had been sidelined. Rooks had just one of his original four Seagull floatplanes left. Enlisted pilot Lanson Harris, Lt. Thomas B. Payne, Ens. John B. Stivers, and Lt. (jg) Walter G. Winslow had practically as little to do as Lt. Jack Lamade, who was still cooling his heels on the Australian west coast. With the onset of the air attacks on the Striking Force in Surabaya, Captain Rooks realized the futility and risk of maintaining his own aircraft. He ordered Lt. Payne, the ship’s senior pilot, to fly the last operable SOC off the ship and find a safe place to hide it while the fleet was at sea. As the crew raced to battle stations, Lanson Harris joined the other idlers from the aviation division seeking a good place to watch the coming battle. Walter Winslow climbed to the signal bridge, scanning the northwestern horizon for Japanese ships and looking on with no small amount of anticipation.

Three British destroyers, the
Jupiter,
the
Electra,
and the
Encounter,
were arrayed left to right in line abreast, forming a van scouting line perpendicular to and about five miles ahead of the cruiser column. Doorman’s
De Ruyter
led the main body of the Striking Force, followed at nine-hundred-yard intervals by the
Exeter,
the
Houston,
the
Perth,
and the
Java
. Though the formation looked impressive, its deployment suggested its shortcomings. The Striking Force’s destroyers had been run so hard during the previous few weeks that Doorman could not deploy them as he would have wished. Hamstrung by cranky engineering plants, the
John D. Edwards, Alden, Paul Jones,
and
John D. Ford
weren’t fast enough to pass to the head of the formation and take up position on Doorman’s port bow. They settled instead for following in column astern the cruisers. Doorman’s two Dutch tin cans, the
Kortenaer
and the
Witte de With,
steamed on his port beam in part because the
Kortenaer
had boiler trouble that limited her speed to twenty-four knots. Destroyers were called many things—dogs, wolves, cans, thoroughbreds—but never albatrosses.

The Striking Force’s other deficiencies were less apparent to the eye, if equally likely to hamper its lethality. Foremost among these were communications. Despite the development of radio and years spent by different navies creating signal flag systems, Doorman’s ships had a hard time talking to each other. Each nation had its own signals and communications in good order. A naval authority called the system used by the U.S. Navy “a tactical instrument of collective genius, as reliable and thoroughly tested as the laws of physics. It
was a treasure of efficiency, cohesiveness and clarity.” But within this multinational force, those virtues were notably overboard. The squadron’s communications were hastily jury-rigged in a futile attempt to accommodate differences in language and protocol.

On the
De Ruyter,
Doorman broadcast his orders to the Striking Force via a shortwave transmitter in his native Dutch. This was fine for the
Java,
the
Kortenaer,
and the
Witte de With
. But the English-speaking vessels confronted unneeded complexity. A U.S. Navy liaison officer stationed on the
De Ruyter,
Lt. Otto F. Kolb Jr., and a signalman first class, Marvin E. Sholar, translated the orders concurrently and relayed them via signal light or tactical radio to the
Houston,
which in turn passed the orders to the
Exeter,
the
Perth,
and the destroyers. As a consequence of the translation and rebroadcast, confusion could easily arise as to the sequence of orders. Commanders often could not reconcile them. Even a common language did not guarantee effective communications. If signal flags had to be used, the British and the Americans might as well have been speaking alien tongues, because the British used signal flags that no one else could read.