Ship of Ghosts (15 page)

A few projectiles landed close enough aboard to thrash the sides of the
Houston
’s hull underwater like chains flailing at a tin roof. Japanese guns scored on the
De Ruyter,
hitting the flagship on the quarterdeck. For good measure, the
Nachi
and the
Haguro
put a dozen more torpedoes into the water, sixty degrees to starboard, at targets eleven thousand yards away. The ships entered a rainsquall as their commanders counted down the torpedo runs.

Captain Waller was conning the
Perth
behind his squadron flagship. Seeing the
De Ruyter
turn and surmising that Doorman had spotted inbound torpedoes, he changed course on cue. The
Houston
and the
Java
followed the
Perth,
pregnant minutes passing before the
night was again lit by a blast. It was the
Java,
taking a torpedo aft. Charley Pryor, scanning the
Houston
’s port quarter with binoculars, saw her blow. He saw bodies flying through the air, silhouetted by flames, the water burning. Red and pink streamers flew everywhere from the column’s rear. The blast was powerful enough to be felt by crewmen topside on the
Perth
. Flames leaped above
Java
’s bridge. She sank so quickly—in about eight minutes—that her steel had no time to melt.

Another torpedo struck the
De Ruyter
so soon after the first one hit the
Java
that some witnesses took it as a simultaneous cataclysm or confused their sequence. The flagship “blew up with an appalling explosion and settled aft, heavily afire,” Captain Waller observed. “It happened with the suddenness and completeness that one sees in the functioning of a good cigarette-lighter—a snap and a burst of flame,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin. The inferno’s heat was so intense that sailors on the
Perth,
following several hundred yards behind the flagship, could feel it on their faces. “I thought it would fry us,” one Australian recalled. “It was so close you could smell burning paint and a horrible stink like burning bodies.”

Reprising what happened that afternoon with the
Exeter,
the sudden crippling of the
De Ruyter
derailed the column like a jackknifing freight train. “Captain Rooks frantically maneuvered his cruiser to avoid torpedoes,” Walter Winslow wrote, “and then ordered the
Houston
into a hard right turn, unaware that the
Perth,
whose captain was now the senior officer, was overtaking us to starboard in an effort to assume the lead.” Captain Waller had to stop his port engine and turn the helm all the way over to port, and the
Perth
“just scraped by the port side” of the burning flagship. The
Houston
sheered out to starboard, nearly colliding with the
Perth.
Rooks ordered emergency full astern while Ens. Herbert A. Levitt grabbed the wheel from the helmsman and brought the ship back to port, avoiding the Australian cruiser by a mere twenty-five yards.

As the
De Ruyter
’s crew gathered forward to escape the flames eating the back half of the ship, the fires reached the forty-millimeter antiaircraft ammunition stowage, and small explosions began popping amid the sailors. Glowing metal fragments shot into the night as the ordnance went off en masse. As the fires worsened, Admiral Doorman had no choice but to order abandon ship. One of his last earthly acts was to instruct the last two serviceable vessels under his command, the
Houston
and
Perth,
to head for Batavia rather than
stand by to recover his survivors. The standing order that disabled friendlies should be “left to the enemy’s mercy” came with no exemption for an admiral. Left behind, the
De Ruyter
fought the clutches of the sea for nearly an hour and a half before she finally sank. Ensign Smith in the
Houston
“counted nine separate and distinct explosions before we cleared the horizon.”

Karel Doorman was never seen again. Admiral Helfrich had ordered him to fight to the end, and that is precisely what he did. “The
Houston
and
Perth
raced on into the night,” wrote Walter Winslow. “Behind us blazed the funeral pyres of our comrades-in-arms, whom we deeply mourned.”

A
s the growl of naval gunfire washed ashore on Java, only the most naive of the battle’s proximate witnesses could fail to appreciate its sinister meaning. An American B-17 pilot stationed there recalled, “Walking to the telephone building I could hear a dull rumble in the hot midnight air coming from far over the water. The few people in the blacked-out streets assumed it was distant thunder. I knew it was the little Dutch Navy in its final agony out there in the dark.” The men of the U.S. Nineteenth Bomb Group at Malang were closely acquainted with the mounting disaster. The sound of the naval battle out to sea seemed to herald the end. A pilot recalled, “Java died that night in the gunfire which came rolling in over the water.”

But two ships yet lived. By night the
Houston
and the
Perth
raced westward, bound for refuge and replenishment. For a time, the Japanese pursued them. Admiral Takagi, whose cruisers had ranged miles to the northwest by the time their torpedoes hit the two Dutch cruisers, had wanted to finish them off. As crewmen on the decks of the
Nachi
and
Haguro
leaped and danced and shouted “
Banzai!
” as fires raged on the waters to their southeast, Takagi approached the
Java
and the
De Ruyter
in their death throes and instructed
his gunners not to waste precious ammunition on them. “They are done for,” he said coolly.

At midnight the
Nachi
and
Haguro
spotted silhouettes to the south-southeast. As Takagi’s destroyers sought in vain to locate and engage them, his cruisers opened fire on “four cruisers.” But whatever they were shooting at slipped away. Puzzled by the disappearance of the surviving Allied ships, Takagi called off his search around three
a.m
. Commander Hara would call the admiral’s inability to finish off the survivors “the last Japanese mistake of the battle,” though it would become clear soon enough that mistakes had been predominantly the domain of the Allies.

The
Houston
and the
Perth
formed a short column and chased rainsqualls to elude their pursuers. Standing orders were for all ships to sail to Batavia if the squadron got scattered. They were to make the three-hundred-mile run to refuel, then pass through Sunda Strait, head down to Tjilatjap to evacuate Allied soldiers and airmen gathering on Java’s south coast, then continue on to Australia. At 8:40
p.m
. on the night of February 27, the
Houston
sent a dispatch labeled “Urgent” to Admiral Glassford: “
HOUSTON
and
PERTH
retiring to Batavia Arrive about 1000 tomorrow X Request pilots and air protection if available
.” Whoever could manage it found a place to sack out on deck. The heat and smell in the lower decks were simply too much. Hatches were thrown open, letting the hot ferment of battle vent into the night.

Though the ship’s stocks of ammunition and fuel were low, the crew’s morale, as ever, was improbably high. It had been high when they were spending day after day at general quarters at Surabaya, helpless against the droning assault of Japanese bombers. It had been high when they finally entered battle against the Japanese Navy, and high still as their enemy routed them. Now, more understandably, morale was high because at last, against all odds, they were about to see sunrise on February 28. When one Allied ship after another was bursting into flames all around them, no one would have put much money on it.

The terror they had experienced was a frightening preview of the trials the U.S. Navy would face after dark against their well-practiced enemy. Before the war, plenty of reasons were found—compelling enough in peacetime—to neglect difficult and dangerous night exercises. Adm. James O. Richardson, commander in chief of the United
States Fleet, wrote, “In the era before radar, close-in night exercises brought great risk of collision, loss of life, and expensive ship repairs.” In other words, they were very much like actual night battles. He might have endorsed them by the same measure. As a result of this hesitancy, Navy commanders would not see nighttime torpedo attacks launched by hard-charging cruiser and destroyer captains until they confronted the real thing under the least forgiving of circumstances.

Captain Rooks was well aware of the rigorous emphasis his enemy had given to night fighting. In his analysis of the Japanese threat titled “Estimate of the Situation,” written just three weeks before Pearl Harbor and turned over to a colleague for safekeeping when the
Houston
was in Darwin in January, Rooks referred to the Japanese claim to being “the world’s most capable users of the torpedo” and described their aggressively realistic doctrine for their use in night actions. There was no denying their lethality. The Allies’ bloody discipleship at the feet of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s torpedo virtuosos began with the Battle of the Java Sea. That Rooks, his ship, and gallant crew had survived it was sheerest happenstance.

O
nce daylight came, revealing no enemy ships nearby, it seemed reasonable for the first time to hope that the
Houston
might escape the flash flood of Japanese power and regroup in Australia for the long war ahead. “I don’t think there was ever a minute that we didn’t feel that we were going to make it, that we were going to come out on top of this,” said Jim Gee of the
Houston
’s Marine detachment.

Arriving at Batavia in the early afternoon of February 28, the two ships were stalked briefly by a flight of Japanese torpedo bombers before Dutch Hurricane fighters scattered them in a rare and probably accidental moment of interservice cooperation. At three o’clock Admiral Glassford reached Captain Rooks via secure telephone. “He was so very cheery,” Glassford would write to Edith, “and the more so because [he] had gallantly engaged the enemy.” As the admiral gave Rooks his instructions, a harbor boat met them outside the breakwater and its pilot guided them through its protective minefield.

There wasn’t much to protect. As the
Houston
and
Perth
entered port, several merchant ships could be seen resting at odd angles on the harbor floor. What the Japanese planes had not yet smashed lay
abandoned in place. Once bustling with industry, Batavia’s port district, Tanjung Priok, looked like a ghost town. As the cruisers moored to the pier to refuel, keeping up steam for an early-morning departure, it was clear that most of the harbor workers were gone. The Javanese and Malayan natives had learned to resent four centuries of European rule. But the Japanese were an as yet unknown quantity. The natives heard promising talk of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. They would find a safe place to await the arrival of the “liberators.”

Rooks and Waller went ashore and took the Australian officer’s staff car to the British Naval Liaison Office. There they received an encouraging report. According to Dutch air reconnaissance, Sunda Strait was wide open. The closest imperial warships were seventy miles to their northeast, heading east. The enemy had nothing within a ten-hour sail of the passage. Rooks and Waller were warned not to fire on any friendly patrol craft that would likely be watching Sunda Strait.

Escape seemed to be on everyone’s mind. Ashore, the Dutch were more interested in rendering the port useless to the Japanese than servicing the Allied ships that now needed them. With evacuation plans in motion, sappers were readying to blow up the dockside warehouses and other facilities. Workers at the soon-to-be-demolished canteen store were generous with their inventory, allowing the sailors to make off with whiskey, cigarettes, and other goods previously earmarked for the “Victualling Officer, Singapore.” Captains Rooks and Waller divvied up a dozen large life rafts that were stacked up on the dock. But more precious cargo eluded them.

The supply of fuel oil available to ABDA naval forces was desperately short. With the sea route from the massive refineries at Palembang, Sumatra, imperiled by Japanese forces, tankers could no longer make the run to Java. The island was down to its native capacity, just 22,000 tons per month. Java’s storage facilities, though large, were located inland and now effectively inaccessible given the abandonment by many native workers. Admiral Helfrich accordingly notified his naval commanders, “
Oil position is serious. Every effort must be made to reduce expenditure provided operations against the enemy are not prejudiced…It is essential that oil be moved from Surabaya to Tjilatjap and Tanjung Priok as soon as possible.
”

When it was sprayed into the furnaces that heated a ship’s boilers,
the Dutch oil, lighter and less viscous than standard American Bunker B, didn’t produce enough volume for a ship to generate full power. With the warm Java Sea waters already impairing the efficiency of her condensers, the best the
Houston
could do was twenty-seven or twenty-eight knots, well short of her rated thirty-two. At Tanjung Priok on February 28, only 760 long tons of furnace fuel were on hand, and the Dutch were inclined to be miserly with it. Admiral Helfrich had instructed the port authority at Tjilatjap to keep the available fuel for their own nation’s fleet. “
No further fuel will be issued to U.S. naval vessels
,” Glassford informed his commanders. “
Unless otherwise instructed we will fuel our [ships] from [the oiler]
PECOS
.”