Ship of Ghosts (14 page)

The
Electra,
first into the breech, met ferocious gunfire from the Japanese. In quick succession, three shells struck her. The first, below the bridge, severed internal communications and the gun director’s signals to the mounts. Another hit the forward switchboard, shutting down power in the forward part of the ship. The third destroyed the after boiler room, and with that the
Electra
shuddered to a stop. When a fusillade of projectiles tore away the ship’s forward gun mount, the searchlight platform, and then one of the rear guns, the captain, Commander May, ordered the ship abandoned. The two other British destroyers in Doorman’s force, the
Encounter
and the
Jupiter,
arrived in time to see the
Electra
burning and dead in the water. The
Encounter
fired her torpedoes through an opening in the smoke. Attacking separately, the
Jupiter
was unable to get a torpedo solution on the enemy, and so she stood close by the
Exeter,
driving off with her gunfire two Japanese destroyers probing the smoke for the wounded cruiser.

The
Perth
was doing her own probing, firing her six-inch main battery at mastheads visible above the smoke. Once Doorman’s cruisers dialed in the range, the Japanese ships withdrew, and the
Exeter,
now making fifteen knots, was finally spared. Five miles to his east, through dusk’s failing light, Captain Gordon spied a shaded signal lamp on the
Witte de With
instructing him to follow the Dutch
destroyer back to Surabaya immediately. The two ships would peel away and head south. Leaving the battle scene, they reached port without further drama.

A
ll throughout the engagement, the American destroyers had little clue what was expected of them. The commander of the
John D. Edwards,
Lt. Cdr. Henry E. Eccles, would remark acidly, “The crystal ball was our only method of anticipating the intention of Commander, Combined Striking Force.” When orders finally did come, they did little to dispel the need for wizardry. As his cruisers retired south, Doorman signaled the destroyers to turn north and make a torpedo attack. Then he canceled the order. Shortly he issued a new one: “
Cover my retirement
.” At that point, low on fuel, the destroyers had little else to contribute to the battle. Their swimming torpedoes didn’t contribute much either. From long range, as could be expected, they all missed.

The fog of war was billowing out thicker than any smoke screen. One question loomed large: At 6:30 Admiral Doorman radioed Helfrich at Bandung, “
Enemy retreating west. Where is convoy?
” In the
De Ruyter,
Doorman curled sharply back toward the northwest, leading the
Perth, Houston, Java,
and four U.S. destroyers, perhaps in search of an opening through which to locate and attack the Japanese troopships. Clearing some smoke around 7:30, they again ran into the ubiquitous
Nachi
and
Haguro
.

As Captain Hara related it, the two heavy cruisers were unprepared for the encounter, having stopped to retrieve floatplanes they had launched at the battle’s outset. As the Allies approached, the
Nachi
’s boatswains were busy with the amidships crane. When they finished hooking up and bringing the last plane on board, the
Nachi
’s engines roared to life. The Japanese ships laid smoke to cover their withdrawal and within a few minutes were at eighteen knots. Though Admiral Takagi refrained from using his searchlights because he knew he was vulnerable, his ships opened fire with their main batteries at thirteen thousand yards. The cruisers traded salvos for about ten minutes until the
Perth
’s Captain Waller, spotting flashes along the length of the silhouetted enemy ships and suspecting a torpedo launch, turned sharply away. Evidently wishing to spare his cruiser’s faltering ammunition stocks, and perhaps despairing of his chances of blazing a path to the invasion convoy through
the gunfire of its most powerful escorts, Doorman broke off the engagement. He swung his squadron away to the south.

The
Nachi
and
Haguro,
both of which would go on to post gaudy combat records through the Pacific war, had escaped a most dangerous trap. In Doorman’s failure to see the plight of the momentarily exposed Japanese cruisers, he forfeited his best chance yet of reaching the transports concealed behind them over the northern horizon. The record reflects no sign that the Allies ever appreciated the tactical opportunity that had just washed over their bows and drained out the gunwales. Like so many opportunities, it had arrived unannounced and vanished without ceremony. They would get only one more like it.

N
ight fell. The wind went away with the sun, and the torn seas were permitted to slumber, smooth and glassy and glinting with the light of a rising full moon. The Japanese ships were gone. What wounds they might be tending were, and might ever remain, unknown. The wounds suffered by the Combined Striking Force were many and manifest. And for all their sacrifices, the danger to the Dutch East Indies loomed as great as ever. Thousands of Japanese troops were out there still, no doubt growing restless as soldiers out of their element will. They would bide their time at sea.

As Admiral Doorman led his ships southward toward Java’s northern coast, he received from the Dutch commander of the Surabaya naval district a three-hour-old report from a U.S. bomber that forty-five enemy transports, three cruisers, and twelve destroyers were just twenty miles from Bawean Island. Given the unfortunate vintage of the sighting report and the swift setting of the sun, his chances of intercepting them seemed about as good as the prospects for his home island in general.

The persistence of daylight had been his last hope to find and destroy an enemy who was all too lethally well trained to fight after dark. Ahead a lighthouse stood near Toeban, warning Doorman of his proximity to land. Nearly as dangerous as the newly planted
minefields off that coastal town were the shoal waters that threatened the keels of his deepest-draft ships.

During the lull on the
Houston
, hastily prepared sandwiches and coffee were distributed. Crews in the engineering compartments, gun mounts, and magazines, worn from the nonstop action, paused to eat and rest. Their hardware had withstood similar strain. Turret One had fired 261 salvos since installation, 97 just that afternoon. Turret Two had fired 264, 100 that afternoon. The life of an eight-inch gun was about 300 salvos. From the long barrels of the rifles, the liners were creeping out as much as an inch or more from the muzzle. The gun casings were so hot they could not be touched for hours. The ventilation systems in the shell decks, handling rooms, and magazines were utterly inadequate. Fighting 140-degree heat, men who didn’t lose consciousness altogether during the battle stood in three inches of melted gun grease, sweat, and urine. The violent sheering of the ship sloshed that fetid brew everywhere, into the breech trays and onto the powder cases. The mixture of human and industrial stenches crept into every compartment without a watertight seal.

Doorman changed course to the west, paralleling the north coast of Java. Shortly after nine
p.m
., the four U.S. destroyers that had so doggedly brought up the Striking Force’s rear had become too low on fuel to continue. The destroyers weren’t the only Allied ships low on critical consumables. The
Houston
had passed word to the
Perth
’s Captain Waller via voice circuit that her two forward mounts were nearly out of eight-inch ammunition. The shortage was the unavoidable result of an unprecedented four-hour gunnery marathon. At one point Otto Schwarz of the
Houston,
stationed on the shell deck below Turret One, had been assured by a chief that naval battles were always over in a hurry. He told Schwarz there had never been a naval battle that lasted longer than twenty or twenty-five minutes. The limited stock of ready ammunition in the turret would be all the gunners would need. Some eight hours later, the men in Schwarz’s compartment were still hauling greasy shells out of the storage racks. When they were gone, the crew began the backbreaking job of hand-carrying 260-pound projectiles, swaddled in slings made from cloth sheets, from the aft magazine up through the labyrinthine passageways leading forward, across the deck, and down into the two forward handling rooms.

Twice between eight and nine
p.m
., lookouts called out sightings
of enemy destroyers to the east. But they were phantoms, alive only in the imaginations of the watch personnel skittish from four hours of combat. What other threats lurked in the night could only be guessed. Mysterious yellow lights appeared in the water, seeming to rise from the deep in the wake of Doorman’s ships as they steamed. Some observers thought the lights marking their path were the by-product of their disturbance of a shallow sea. “As fast as we popped one group of lights astern, another popped up about a hundred yards to port,” Walter Winslow wrote.

In fact, the lights were not surfacing from below. They were floating down from the sky, parachute-harnessed calcium flares dropped by Japanese spotter plane pilots every time Doorman changed course. The flares traced their track so relentlessly that Jim Gee thought the Japanese had tied them together on strands to be caught by the
Houston
’s prow and dragged along behind her “like a long string of Christmas lights.” What little chance Doorman had to break through and attack the transports vanished. Takeo Takagi knew his every move.

K
arel Doorman was about twenty minutes into his westward coastal run when a great blast swallowed the last ship in his line. The flash of the explosion settled into a moonlit flood of steam, and against that hellish backdrop sailors on the Dutch light cruiser
Java
looking astern could make out a lamp signaling, “
jupiter
torpedoed
.”

At least it seemed like a torpedo. The explosion tore the British destroyer’s hull on the starboard side, abreast of the number-two boiler room’s forward bulkhead. Though more Long Lances lay in store for this Allied fleet, this was not one of them. It was a mine, part of a Dutch field planted off the coast that very day in anticipation of the coming invasion. Admiral Takagi had declined to pursue Doorman south out of this very fear. Her back broken, the
Jupiter
floundered and settled and took her time sinking, joining the
Kortenaer
and the
Electra
in death. Just seventy-eight of her crew reached the beach, and another handful were later retrieved from the sea by the Japanese.

Perhaps thinking he might seize a last opportunity to reach the convoy, Doorman steered north again, knowing that with every thumping turn of his ships’ steam-driven screws, Japanese aircraft
watched him from overhead. At about 9:50
p.m
., Captain Waller spied one, glinting by the moon’s light. Shortly thereafter the Allies’ new northerly course was etched in blazing calcium, another string of floating flares tracing their track.

Nerves rattled as the ships passed back through waters that had been their battlefield in the afternoon. The swells here and there were dotted with men adrift—survivors of the
Kortenaer
. The orders to ignore them stood. The area was still too hot for a rescue attempt. Clinging to or standing in their life rafts, the Dutch sailors blew whistles and hollered, looking for help. As the
Houston
passed within sight of the survivors, her deck force threw a raft overboard and illuminated the area with a flare. The HMS
Encounter
stopped—on whose authority it remains unclear—and took aboard 113 in all.

There was yet an enemy to hunt, and the quarry reappeared around 10:30
p.m.
The
Nachi
and the
Haguro,
last seen some four hours earlier, now materialized to port, bearing down from the north on an opposite parallel course before looping around and tracing a parallel northerly course at a range of thirteen thousand to sixteen thousand yards. Concerned with dwindling ammunition stocks—the two cruisers had fired more than twelve hundred rounds that afternoon, and 348 more after dark—their commanders fired at a deliberate pace. It was futile to engage at that range by night. Star shells couldn’t reach that far. The phosphorous-filled projectiles needed to burst beyond their target in order to silhouette it properly. The
Houston
fired several illumination rounds, but they fell short, as did those fired by the Japanese. But the night afforded its own illumination. Lieutenant Hamlin wrote, “We stopped shooting star shells and settled down to just shooting at each other by the starlight.”