Cruiser (56 page)

Hec Waller was now the senior surviving officer of the Striking Force, although only just. He had been promoted to the rank of captain on 30 June 1940, exactly one day before Albert Rooks of the
Houston
received his US Navy silver eagles and fourth gold stripe.

All too grimly aware that the battle had ended in disastrous defeat, he decided there was no point in continuing a suicidal fight against lethal odds. Signalling Rooks to follow him, he turned away from the carnage in a feint to the south-east and slipped from the Japanese grasp into the night. As his action narrative put it:

In fact, both Japanese and Allied records examined after the war showed that no submarines took part in the Java Sea Battle on either side, although to this day some Australian and American survivors will swear they saw a periscope or a conning tower break the surface for a moment. The Allied Captains, Waller included, aware of the range of their own torpedoes, had no idea of the superiority of the Japanese Long
Lance. Torpedoes could not have been fired at them from surface ships so far away, they thought. Submarines were the only logical explanation.

But the withdrawal to the south-east was the right decision, and it worked. For whatever reason, perhaps to shepherd the transports, Vice-Admiral Takagi continued north after his triumphant destruction of the two Dutch cruisers, much to the disgust of Tameichi Hara of
Amatsukaze
, who believed that total annihilation of the Allied force could have been achieved.

High above them all, Duke Campbell in his PBY watched as two dark shapes turned west again, small specks on a silver sea.
Perth
and
Houston
, bloodied and beaten, were alive to fight another day.

In the hot and reeking turrets of the ship's main armament, or in the fresher night air up on the 4-inch deck, men slept where they dropped. Others did the same in the magazines and shell handling lobbies, high in the Director Towers or deep in the Transmitting Station, in the Sick Bay and the wardroom, everywhere in the ship where they no longer had an immediate part to play. Adrenalin had kept them going, that and the desire not to let down their mates, but now, with the battle over, exhaustion claimed them and they surrendered to it. Notionally, they were still at action stations, but sleep had become a primeval urge, the only release from the physical and mental ordeal they had endured.

Some men could not sleep, as much as they longed to. Bleary-eyed and drawn, Waller and the knot of officers and ratings on the bridge, Dolly Gray and the watch in the engine room, the men in the Plot and the Wireless Office stayed on their feet as they drove the ship westwards through the early hours of Saturday 28 February. And the cooks, too, the cooks. They had been at their action stations handling or loading shells or waiting in damage control parties, but with a dogged resolve they returned to the ship's galley where, stumbling through the debris, they made chunky sandwiches from slabs of boiled bacon and bully beef. For most of the crew, it was the first food they had seen since the morning before; they wolfed it down with welcome mugs of water. In the ship's office,
Paymaster Sub-Lieutenant Gavin Campbell, the Captain's secretary, squeezed his tired young frame into a chair and poked away at a battered old typewriter, putting together the makings of the Action Narrative, the report for Commodore Collins ashore.

That document would eventually draw a caustic response from the fire-breathing Admiral Helfrich:

Some historians have explained away this bombast by suggesting it was composed in ignorance of the facts, but that does not stand up. Helfrich wrote it months after the battle. He would have known that
Houston
's after turret had been out of action for weeks, that both cruisers were not ‘undamaged' as he maintained and were indeed low on fuel and ammunition. However wishfully he might have believed the Japanese had sustained ‘severe' damage, the greenest midshipman would have understood that
Perth
and
Houston
on their own were no match for the enemy force. The Dutch Admiral, never blooded in battle himself, was suggesting that Waller and Rooks should have led their men to a symbolic but futile death to defend the last vestige of an indefensible empire already in ruins. His
final sneer about selling lives at greater cost to the enemy was beneath contempt, the more so because Helfrich, for all his bluster about fighting to the bitter end, did not find the idea of supreme sacrifice personally attractive. Deciding not to sell his own life to the Japanese at any cost, he abandoned his staff and his countrymen to their fate and hurried his corpulent form onto a small plane for Ceylon a good two days before the Governor General, Starkenborgh Stachouwer, surrendered what was left of the Netherlands East Indies.

Houston
was in worse shape than
Perth
. Unluckier than the Australian ship, she had been struck by two 8-inch shells early in the battle. Neither exploded or killed anyone, but one tore through her starboard side just above the waterline and the other wrecked a port-side fuel tank. Her main guns, in almost constant action since Pearl Harbor, were now so worn that the sleeve linings were protruding from their muzzles. Without a dockyard job very soon, they would be incapable of firing. Even as she followed
Perth
towards Priok, her Gunnery Officer still had teams of weary sailors humping 8-inch shells forward along the deck from her after magazine. Below decks, her ventilation systems had virtually given out, causing men in her engine room and shell handling spaces to collapse from exhaustion. As in
Perth
, everywhere was a shambles of broken glass and crockery, tumbled furniture and chunks of loose asbestos soundproofing hurled about by the concussion of her own guns. Roosevelt's presidential yacht was, in the words of one of her own officers, a wreck.

Her men were doing it tough, too. They had been fighting their way down from the Philippines since early December in one bitter battle after another, including the one in the Makassar Strait earlier in February, which had gutted her after turret. The ship had shifted from port to port so often that little mail had arrived from home. For all that, morale was still high.
The men of the
Houston
wanted to avenge Pearl Harbor.

All through the dark morning, the two cruisers sped towards Priok at 28 knots,
Perth
leading,
Houston
zigzagging in her wake, lookouts scanning the skies for hostile aircraft. The enemy did not find them, and, as the last sun of February rose astern, the tension eased a little. Men saw themselves now in the image of others: red-eyed, drawn and stubbled, clothing filthy with sweat and grease, some shaking with fatigue. But they were alive. With the brightening light, there was an alarm as they spotted some small Japanese seaplanes in the distance – reconnaissance aircraft again – and Waller requested fighter air cover. Miraculously, it arrived. The two cruisers were left unmolested to enter the channel through the Priok minefield shortly after noon.

The port was oddly quiet now and, if anything, more desolate than it had been only days ago. A bombed freighter lay on her side by the breakwater, and the skeletons of other sunken ships protruded here and there. Smoke from the burning oil tanks still smeared the sky. There was only one other warship to be seen – a small Dutch destroyer,
Evertsen
.
Hobart
and the handful of British cruisers and destroyers of the so-called Western Striking Force had been sent on a sweep to the north earlier that morning. As
Perth
and
Houston
secured alongside, the place seemed deserted; the local labour force had fled, leaving only a handful of Dutch soldiers and officials behind. Tag Wallace was disconcerted to see soldiers strapping explosive charges to some of the wharf pylons. The silence was ominous, the sense of imminent defeat more profound than ever.

Both captains asked to refuel but were told there were only 1000 tons of oil left in Priok. This was being reserved for Dutch ships. When Waller pointed out that there was hardly a Dutch ship left afloat in the Java Sea, he was allowed, reluctantly, to take on just 300 tons, which brought
Perth
to about half her capacity. There were no 8-inch shells available for
Houston
and no 6-inch shells for
Perth
, but Hancox somehow managed to lay his hands on some 4-inch ammunition.

Other things were plentiful. The godowns at the docks, some of them with doors gaping open after bombing, bulged with luxury goods: cartons of cigarettes, beer and expensive liquor, canned food and milk, crates of aircraft parts and even cars. Some of the stuff was addressed to the victualling officer, Singapore. The Australians decided he would no longer be needing it. Tag Wallace got hold of 30,000 Woodbine cigarettes, and other men smuggled cases of whisky on board. And the Commander, Pincher Martin, noticed a stack of rafts lying on the wharf. They turned out to be small contraptions of timber used on ships carrying Muslim pilgrims to the Middle East, and, you never knew, they might be useful. Martin had about two dozen of them stowed in the port waist, along with two small firefighting pumps.

Hec Waller went ashore with Captain Rooks to meet Commodore Collins, and this time he found him. Collins had spent the fortnight since the fall of Singapore in a frenzy. On the one hand, he had been coping with the tide of desperate refugees washing up in Priok on whatever vessels had made it past the patrolling Japanese, all of them clamouring for onward passage to Australia, or Ceylon, or anywhere. On the other hand, he was trying to deploy whatever British and Australian naval ships came within his orbit while dealing with the Byzantine bureaucracy of ABDACOM away in Bandung. It cannot have been easy.

His next problem was what do with
Perth
and
Houston
. The sensible thing would have been to recognise that Java was a lost cause and to send both ships to Australia, but Collins did not have the authority to do this. That lay with Helfrich. And Helfrich, stubborn and obtuse to the last, was not going to let them go. They would stay in Java waters to defend the NEI. Collins had no choice; he gave Hec Waller orders to take
Houston
under his command again, with the Dutch destroyer
Evertsen
, and to make for Tjilatjap (Cilacap), roughly a third of the way along the south coast of Java, the port the carrier
Langley
had been heading for when she was sunk. They would
have to lay a course west from Tanjung Priok then south through the Sunda Strait. It was not believed there was any Japanese force in the area to trouble them.

This decision was, almost certainly, ABDACOM's last great blunder of the war. Collins went on to a brilliant wartime and post-war career, but his memoirs rarely rise above the level of cheery wardroom anecdote, and the orders for
Perth
and
Houston
rate only a brief mention:

In fact, ABDACOM had been told that a Japanese naval force of light cruisers and destroyers, escorting a convoy of transports, had been spotted not far away to the north-west and heading for Java.

Geoff Dewey, from Chester Hill in Sydney, had enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in May 1940 at the age of 18. Taught to fly in the Empire Air Training Scheme, he was one of the many hundreds of Australians who found themselves defending their king and the Mother Country in the British Royal Air Force. The war had already taken him to Europe and the Middle East. In 1942, by now a battle-hardened 20-year-old, he was packed off to fight the Japanese, flying the long-nosed Bristol Blenheim MkIV light bomber as a sergeant pilot in the RAF's 84 Squadron. He still wore his RAAF uniform, for what it was worth. The aircrew of 84 Squadron barely knew each other; the unit had been patched together from whatever men and aircraft could be rounded up
from broken squadrons in the shambles after Singapore.

On that last morning of February, he and his observer and gunner took off from their makeshift base at the Kalijati airfield in West Java, on their way to a bombing raid on the Sumatran city of Palembang, some 600 kilometres away.

The Blenheim climbed steadily through scattered cloud, on a course west by nor'west across the Java Sea. Around lunchtime, at about 11,000 feet, through a hole in the cloud cover, Dewey spotted a convoy of ships stretching as far as he and his observer could see. He knew, from the sheer numbers, that they could only be Japanese. And, having flown anti-submarine patrols over the Atlantic early in the war, he recognised naval ships when he saw them. Two light cruisers and at least six destroyers were escorting transport ships in an arrowhead formation, as he described it, and they were on the reciprocal or opposite course to the Blenheim, steaming straight for the Javan coast. This was the vanguard of the Japanese Western Invasion Force.

Dewey could not know that, but he realised it was important enough to break radio silence. He reported the sighting back to Kalijati, got an acknowledgement that his message had been heard, and continued on to Sumatra for the bombing raid.

On the way back home, he sighted the same ships again and radioed their position again. And when he landed back at Kalijati late that afternoon, he made another report of what he had seen. Geoff Dewey had done his duty, properly and well. Captured a few weeks later, he became a slave labourer on the Burma–Siam Railway and in Japan, but he survived the war.