Cruiser (52 page)

It was not Collins who had made the decision but his masters at the Naval Board back in Melbourne and, above
them, the War Cabinet. In one aspect, the matter is academic. Orders were to be obeyed without debate, and
Perth
was therefore on her way. But, in a larger view, the question and answer are crucial. Once again, Australian fighting men were being committed to a battle that made no military sense at all. It was Gallipoli, it was Greece and Crete, it was Malaya and Singapore, the old story all over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Political expediency trumped military strategy, as it so often does. The War Cabinet had agreed to the request of the Chiefs in Washington that
Perth
should go. Australia could not be seen to back away from the fight, however futile that fight might be.

There was another alarm early on the 23rd, when the Board signalled
Perth
that a group of unidentified ships, possibly destroyers and a submarine, had been sighted off Christmas Island, roughly 500 kilometres south of Java. There was a chance they were Japanese. Waller altered course to close the area, but it was another false alarm. They were American.

That evening, they fetched Java Head off to starboard, the craggy lump of rock that guards the southern entrance to the Sunda Strait, which separates Java from Sumatra. The watch on deck could sniff the aroma from the land, the seductive odours of a tropical evening. These were waters rich in maritime history, familiar to sailors the world over. Dangerous waters, too, with a strong sou'westerly current that swirls unpredictably around the islands, large and small, that dot the waterway. Centuries ago, before European discovery of Australia, the galleons of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, had sailed the strait to bring home the spices and cloth, the gold and silver of the islands, and eventually to plant the flag of the Royal House of Orange on its shores. Occasionally, pirates plied their bloody trade there. In 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa had erupted with such force that its explosions were heard 3500 kilometres away in Perth, Western Australia, and clouds of its ash were detected in Europe.

The evening seemed peaceful enough. The ship's routine went on with its reassuring familiarity. The tramp of feet at the change of watch, the monotonous ping from the Asdic office, the regular helm and engine orders, the smell of cooking from the galleys, the hum of the fans: all was as normal as could be. But, as night fell, the Captain and the Navigator, John Harper, had one concern. A signal to Collins asking for a report on navigational aids in the strait had not been answered, which was puzzling. A second signal, sent later, produced the same non-result. They could only push on, trusting to their charts, hoping that no Allied ship or aircraft unaware of their presence in the area would have a go at them.

Nothing did, neither friend nor enemy. HMAS
Perth
arrived off Tanjung Priok at 6.30 am on 24 February. A Dutch inspection vessel met them and they took on a pilot to show them the swept channel through the protective minefields.

As they nosed through the clutter of ships in the roads, a discouraging sight opened up before them. Priok was burning. Thick black smoke rose from bombed buildings and oil storage tanks, and the air was heavy with reeking cinders. Godowns, or warehouses, were gutted shells, some still giving off tongues of flame, and the skeleton of a wrecked dockside crane struck an odd angle on the skyline. Flotsam and the occasional startling remains of a corpse slopped on the greasy harbour waters. The port had an aura of desolation and defeat, as if it was waiting passively for some final act of punishment to bring things to an end.

But at least they had company. The little sloop HMAS
Yarra
, well-blooded veteran of the Mediterranean and Singapore, had come in before them. The British heavy cruiser HMS
Exeter
was at a buoy nearby, with her three turrets of 8-inch guns. She was a bigger ship with a bigger main armament than
Perth
, and the aerials on her foremast indicated that she had radar, which might prove useful, they thought, if the two were to work together. Best of all,
Exeter
had a pedigree. She was one of the three Royal Navy cruisers that had harried the
Graf Spee
to destruction at the River Plate in 1939 – a scorecard that was pleasantly reassuring. And beyond her lay three British destroyers –
Electra
,
Jupiter
and
Encounter
– salt-stained and streaked with the rust of hard work. A handful of older and smaller British cruisers and destroyers lay further away in the harbour.

Perth
secured alongside a tanker, the
War Sirdar
, to refuel, and Waller and Harper picked their way through the battered dockyard and found a car to take them to Commodore Collins's headquarters a few kilometres away in Batavia. When they arrived, he couldn't be found, and nobody seemed to know where he was. Perhaps he was inland in Bandung, where ABDA was winding up and Wavell was preparing to leave the next day, they were told. Incredulous, the two officers returned to the ship, wondering what on earth to do next.

They didn't have long to wait. Early that afternoon, the Japanese arrived. Three aircraft with the blood-red sun on their tails dived in from the north, jinking their way through a curtain of fire.
Perth
's B-turret and 4-inch guns opened up, deterring one pilot coming at them from dead ahead, but a handful of bombs capsized a boat on one of her booms and lightly damaged two nearby merchant ships. The raid was over in minutes – little more than a pinprick for the ship's Mediterranean veterans, as they didn't hesitate to point out – but for at least half the crew it was their baptism of fire.

For Gavin Campbell, it was an early birthday present. He turned 21 the next day. A tall and lanky paymaster sub-lieutenant from Portland in western Victoria, educated at Scotch College in Melbourne, Campbell had entered the RAN as a Naval College cadet midshipman early in 1939. With service in the cruisers
Canberra
and
Hobart
already under his belt, he had been sent to
Perth
just before she left Fremantle – a pier-head jump, as they called it in the navy. Captain Waller had needed a new secretary and Gavin was the nearest man available. Pack your bag and get moving. After the raid, he had a few birthday beers in the wardroom to celebrate. The Captain joined in with a bunch of the other officers and so did the Captain of
Yarra
, Lieutenant-Commander Robert Rankin, who had dropped by. Gavin, on a sub-lieutenant's pay, began to worry about the size of his mess bill.

The next morning, another welcome face turned up.
Hobart
– battered but unbeaten from bruising days and nights in the
turbulent straits south of Singapore – limped in to fuel from the
War Sirdar
. On cue, there was another raid, this time by a much larger pack of bombers and fighters. On
Perth
's 4-inch gun deck, Fred Skeels, one of the young Western Australians, found the spectacle enthralling, even exhilarating:

Chaplain Mathieson and Polo Owen were in a boat with their luggage, transferring to their new ship,
Hobart
, as the bombs started dropping. They returned to
Perth
in a hurry.

‘Christ, Polo, what in hell are you doing still on board?' Waller asked when the raid ended.

Owen explained.

‘We're sailing at once for Surabaya,' Waller said. ‘
Hobart
's
coming with us. I'll transfer you and the draft to her by sea boat on passage.'

It was a fateful decision, as
Hobart
did not go with them. The two men were now a permanent part of
Perth
's crew, come what may.

Once again, the ship came through the raid unscathed, except for the Pusser's Duck, and that was more or less an own goal.
Yarra
was berthed right alongside, and the blast of her guns only metres from the Walrus smashed the aircraft's radio and a spar and some ribs on one wing. The RAAF fitters poked around but there was no way to fix the damage outside a fully equipped repair base. To the dismay of Jock McDonough and Waller himself, the Duck was out of action. But, as Waller had told Polo Owen, at last some orders had arrived from Collins: next stop, Surabaya. They sailed that afternoon in company with
Exeter
and the three Royal Navy destroyers – a powerful sight as five grey shapes, White Ensigns flying, disappeared down the bay and stood out past the Thousand Islands into the greasy slop of the Java Sea.

With Wavell gone and ABDA in confusion, the Dutch set about reorganising the defence of Java. In Europe, their homeland lay beneath Nazi tyranny, with Queen Wilhelmina and her government in exile in London. Much of their East Indies empire had already fallen to the Japanese. Java was about all that was left. They went at saving this island redoubt with the energy of desperate men.

Command of the naval forces descended upon Vice-Admiral Conrad Emil Lambert Helfrich, who, at the age of 56, plump and balding, nicely satisfied the Anglo-Saxon caricature of the gin-drinking, cheese-eating, pipe-smoking Hollander. This was misleading. Helfrich seethed with aggression. ‘Sacrifice is necessary for the defence of Java,' he signalled to his men. ‘You must continue attacks until the enemy is destroyed.'
²
But the doughty Admiral had two fundamental defects: he had never fired a shot in anger, nor had he commanded a fleet at sea. And the Royal Netherlands Navy had not fought anything like a major engagement since its defeat by the British at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797.

At his headquarters near Bandung, Helfrich assumed that the Japanese attack on Java would come from two directions, in a pincer movement. There were two prizes for the taking: Batavia and Tanjung Priok at the north-western end and the naval base at Surabaya in the east. The enemy would obviously descend on both. But the Admiral had no real idea of the formidable size of the forces sailing towards him.

Heading south in the waters off the western coast of Borneo was a massive Japanese invasion convoy, the Western Attack Group, of 56 transports packed with soldiers. This had left Cam Ranh Bay in Indochina on 18 February, escorted by a powerful fleet of cruisers and destroyers, backed up by a light fleet carrier. Its objective was west Java. Another convoy of 41 transports, again with a powerful naval escort, the Eastern Attack Group, had sailed from the Philippines on 19 February and was moving in from the north-east, between Borneo's east coast and the Celebes. Its target would be Surabaya.

This two-pronged approach put Helfrich on the horns of an appalling dilemma: should he divide his meagre naval forces to meet the two assault groups, or concentrate, either east or west, to counter just one threat? The most urgent menace seemed to be in the east, where, on 19 February, yet another Japanese force began to invade the island of Bali. Helfrich hurriedly scraped together what ships he could. A collection of Dutch cruisers, Dutch and American destroyers, and nine fast motor torpedo boats was deployed to intercept the enemy in the Badung Strait, opposite what are now the tourist-resort beaches of Sanur. Caught unloading their troops ashore, the Japanese should have been sitting ducks, but a fatal combination of poor tactics, timidity and sheer bad luck produced yet another Allied humiliation.

One Dutch destroyer ran aground. Another was torpedoed,
sinking like a stone, and a cruiser was so badly damaged by gunfire that it had to be packed off to Australia for repairs. The elderly American destroyer
Stewart
, also badly damaged, with her engine room flooded, staggered back to dry dock in Surabaya. At dusk, the motor torpedo boats sped through the strait, saw the Japanese in the distance but, inexplicably, failed to engage. The Battle of Badung Strait had been one more fiasco of men's lives and ships squandered. The Japanese lost a handful of sailors killed but their occupation of Bali barely skipped a beat.

When
Perth
,
Exeter
and the three destroyers arrived at Surabaya just after noon on 26 February and wound through the defensive minefields, again the air was thick with smoke and loud with the drone of air-raid sirens. Tanjung Priok had been bad enough; Surabaya was far worse. The harbour was scattered with wreckage. A freighter of the Rotterdam Lloyd line,
Kota Radja
, bombed and aground on a rock, had been burning for several days. A hospital ship, also bombed, was undergoing patchwork repairs, and
Stewart
had been so badly shored up in her dry dock that she had toppled over against the dock wall, a useless cripple.

Surabaya, the city and its port, had once been a pearl of the Netherlands Empire, renowned for its elegant colonial architecture and racy nightlife. The Hotel Oranje – a palatial confection of high white gables, long colonnades and vivid green tropical gardens – had rivalled Raffles in Singapore. Overlooking the harbour, the Modderlust, a combined yacht club and naval officers' mess, had sweeping terraces where white-clad waiters would glide from table to table bearing chilled glasses of Heineken beer and silver trays of Javanese sweetmeats. No more. The Oranje, scorched and pockmarked by near misses, and the Modderlust, its leadlight windows like blackened eye sockets, were dismal evidence of the ferocious battering Surabaya had endured. Buildings at the dockyard and the Morokrambangan airbase lay in ruins. There would be no rest here for
Perth
's crew, or anyone.

They had barely dropped anchor when Hec Waller and
Exeter
's Captain, Oliver Gordon, were ordered to maintain steam and be ready to sail again at 6 pm. The two had not met, but, as naval officers do, they knew each other by reputation. Summoned to an urgent conference at the naval headquarters, they shared a car driven with mad abandon by a Dutch marine officer who scattered pedestrians and
betjaks
, the local tricycle taxis, in their wake.
³
Their appointment was with a man who, like Percival in Singapore, would become synonymous with Allied ruin in the Far East.

Rear-Admiral Karel Willem Frederik Marie Doorman, aged 52, born in the Netherlands university city of Utrecht, was the Commander of the Combined Striking Force – an optimistic misnomer that meant, in reality, some of the scattered remnants of the ABDA navies in the Java theatre. Some lingering tropical illness had given him the reputation of being difficult to live with, but Captain Gordon, at their meeting, was struck by ‘his great charm of manner'.
⁴
Since Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya, Doorman had spent most of his time at sea, lurching from one forlorn battle to the next. Despite his personal courage and devotion to duty, he had lost every fight. Perhaps no man could have done better in the chaos of ABDA, but Doorman had been a naval aviator. Like Helfrich, he had little experience of leading a fleet, or even a squadron, at sea. His most recent failure had been at Badung Strait.