Ship of Ghosts (18 page)

Throughout the Battle of Sunda Strait, the fire controlmen, spotters, and gunners on the
Houston
and the
Perth
had no burden of identification to put pause in their work. Because there were only the two of them, as long as the ships stayed in line ahead with guns on broadside bearings, one ship never feared hitting the other. Keeping a simple column was not an entirely simple task—amid the maelstrom the cruisers could not always clearly see each other. But targets were plentiful. They appeared at ranges as close as fifteen hundred yards.

The Allied sailors had no firm idea of how many ships they faced. Under the circumstances they were impossible to count. The
Perth
’s first report was one destroyer and five unknowns. In the space of
several awakening minutes, that became one cruiser and five destroyers. As the number climbed, the sense emerged that still larger things loomed out there in the dark. Five cruisers and ten destroyers. Twenty destroyers. Closer to shore, something else could be made out: the shadows of merchantmen and transports. There were dozens of them. As the spotters on the
Houston
and
Perth
came closer, they realized something astonishing: The enemy fleet they were fighting was the covering force for a landing operation.

Ahead and to port, clustered all around St. Nicholas Point, transports and auxiliaries were at anchor or on the beach, unloading their cargos of men, vehicles, weapons, and supplies as fast as the sergeants of Japan’s Sixteenth Army could manage. Now, ostensibly looking to escape, two Allied cruisers had stumbled into the opportunity that the sharpest minds of their naval command had for difficult weeks tried to create for them. They had surprised a Japanese invasion force at the moment of its greatest vulnerability. Samuel Eliot Morison called it “the largest landing yet attempted in the Southwest Pacific.”

The Japanese Western Attack Group’s covering force included the heavy cruisers
Mogami
and the
Mikuma
as well as three divisions of destroyers and the light cruiser
Natori
. The landing force itself consisted of fifty-six transports and auxiliaries carrying Lt. Gen. Hitoshi Imamura’s Sixteenth Army and its supply train, anchored all around the head of St. Nicholas Point, clear around to Merak on Sunda Strait.

General Imamura’s sea route to western Java had finally opened when Admiral Helfrich sent the
Exeter
and her consorts east to join Admiral Doorman at Surabaya. Like the Allies, the Japanese too had thought their path would be free now of enemy ships. But in losing track of the
Houston
and the
Perth
after the Java Sea action, Japanese aerial reconnaissance had failed its fighting forces as surely as the Allied spotters had failed theirs.

The Allied ships should in fact have known that a Japanese force was headed their way. As would be revealed later, while they were docked in Tanjung Priok, the HMAS
Hobart
had spotted the Western Attack Group idling to the north near Banka Island. But the Australian light cruiser’s report never got past the authorities in Bandung. According to Walter Winslow, Captain Rooks was innocent too of another vital piece of intelligence. As he and Captain
Waller were meeting with the Dutch at Batavia, a piece of paper sat on the desk of Maj. Gen. Wijbrandus Schilling, commander of the Dutch East Indian First Army in western Java, who was headquartered in the same building as the British Naval Liaison Office. It was an aircraft sighting report registering the approach of the southbound convoy the
Hobart
had seen. The enemy force was too large to miss. It had been spotted 150 miles north of Sunda Strait, steaming south at fifteen knots. But according to Walter Winslow, General Schilling did not know the
Houston
and the
Perth
were in port. As a consequence, the ships learned nothing of this important piece of reconnaissance work until its subjects were under their guns. On the way to Java with his convoy, General Imamura had fretted that he might land unopposed. Part of him seemed to crave a showdown with the enemy’s samurai. He was getting his wish.

Given the close quarters of the bay, the Japanese had a hard time avoiding hitting their own ships. The two enemy cruisers were running a course straight through their midst, exposing the Japanese ships to either side—transports and patrol boats to the west, combatants to the east—to friendly fire with almost every salvo. While the Americans could see innumerable gun flashes on nearly every bearing, there were moments when very few shell splashes were landing near the
Houston
. Were the Japanese firing at their own?

As the
Perth
and
Houston
looped to port, changing course from the north back toward Bantam Bay, the main batteries and the starshell-firing after five-inch guns engaged targets to starboard. The forward five-inch guns trained to port. “The fight evolved into a melee with the
Houston
engaging targets on all sides at various ranges,” Commander Maher wrote.

Deep in the bowels of the ship, plotting room officer Lt. Cdr. Sidney L. Smith had a rather less complicated view of the battle. There the sound of the gunners’ labors arrived not as the cracking cacophony that rang eardrums topside but as a deep concussion whose reverberations were more readily felt in the sternum. He listened to the reports from the spotters, gunners, and rangefinders on his sound-powered phones and dialed that information into the Ford Instrument Company Range Keeper Mark 8. Its shafts, cams, rotors, and dials spun and turned and produced corrections that Commander Smith relayed to the gun mount crews.

Japanese destroyers bore in out of the darkness in groups of three
and four, angling for a torpedo attack. The ships of Destroyer Division Twelve, which had been idling on the other side of St. Nicholas Point, roared out of Sunda Strait and curved around into Bantam Bay. They were dashingly commanded, rushing in to just a few hundred yards and firing furiously at a ship more than four times their size. At 11:40 the
Shirayuki
and the
Hatsuyuki,
following the
Natori,
loosed nine torpedoes each. The
Asakaze
unloaded six more, the light cruiser
Natori
four. Captain Rooks swerved the ship as he had done during the aerial bombardments in the Flores Sea, seeking now to avoid not aerial bombs but the even more forbidding threat of torpedoes streaking unseen under the waves. None of these first twenty-eight fish found the mark.

The enemy tin cans stabbed the Allied ships with their searchlights. The illumination benefited the gunners on the
Mogami
and
Mikuma,
lying off in the darkness. Having hustled south to engage the unexpected raiders, the two cruisers stood off some twelve thousand yards away, protected from return fire by the blinding glare of the destroyers’ spots. The
Houston
’s machine gunners locked in fresh belts and raced to quench the lights with lead. In the lethal game of hide-and-seek, the Japanese alternated their searchlight beams, shuttering one and opening another to avoid drawing fire. According to Ray Parkin in the HMAS
Perth,
“The tactics were to expose the beam of one light for a few seconds to bathe
Perth
stark against the night; then that beam would be folded back within the iris shutters and another, elsewhere, would take its place. Heavy shell-fire criss-crossing them tore the sea to shreds and raised white monuments caught in the beams of light.”

At 11:26 the
Perth
took a projectile through the forward funnel. Another hit the flag deck a few minutes later. About ten minutes before midnight, under sustained fire from the
Mogami
and
Mikuma,
she took a waterline hit on the starboard side, starting severe flooding in the seamen’s mess.

Commander Maher and the men in the
Houston
’s forward main battery directors were confronting their own challenges. Owing to the extreme height of their placement in
Northampton
-class cruisers, the blending of the enemy with the coastline, and the obscuring effects of enemy searchlights and smoke, the crew in Director One had trouble training their big batteries on the speedy targets. But every officer on the
Houston
’s bridge saw three Japanese destroyers cross
their wake at about three thousand yards. Minutes later, a pair of torpedoes were seen bubbling in from astern, one to each side of the ship. Some forty-five minutes had passed since the
Houston
’s general quarters alarm started screaming.

Commander Maher had the conn now. He steered straight ahead, cutting a narrow path between the torpedoes chasing from astern and allowing them to pass, one ten feet to port and the other about ten yards to starboard. His guns were madly engaged in all directions. Whenever Japanese destroyers approached, every gun that could bear zeroed in on the close-range threat. Crews assigned to illuminate with star shells had all they could handle trying to silhouette targets for the main battery amid the heavy smoke and Captain Rooks’s frequent course changes.

The cataclysmic crash of the cruiser’s salvos were echoed by the flash and roar of Japanese guns, as if returning from the far wall of a canyon. The
Houston
took her first hit when a projectile struck the forecastle, starting fires in the paint locker that danced brightly for about a quarter of an hour. The night air was rancid with cordite. Though the winds were still, the wisps of gray-white muzzle smoke flying from the
Houston
’s guns fell quickly away, left behind like an airborne wake covering her trail of foam.

W
arships are divided into two worlds. One—encompassing the bridge, conning tower, and signal platforms—is devoted to observation, judgment, and command. The other—down in the engine rooms and firerooms, in the gun mounts and turrets, handling rooms and magazines, aid and repair stations—functions by procedure, repetition, and rote. Vital though the work belowdecks is, little of it depends on what the men there see around them, for indeed they see very little. They experience the battle through the skin: the deep, vibrating hum of the power plant, the rumblings and crashing of the gun batteries.

Deep in the
Houston,
in the forward powder magazine, seaman second class Otto Schwarz only knew what he could hear on the intercom and on the headsets. Layers of armor and steel decking insulated him from the sounds of battle. Near misses announced themselves with a staccato cascade of shrapnel against the steel hull. “It sounded like somebody throwing pebbles at the ship.”

Ray Parkin, as the
Perth
’s chief quartermaster, was better positioned to take in the spectacle of the pyrotechnics directed the two cruisers’ way.

Time rushed by in freeze-frame sequence, an adrenaline-enabled illusion that permits even the most confused crazy quilt of events to unfold in clear slow motion. It was collective survival in action. There was an overwhelming imperative to perform one’s duty perfectly, mechanically, in the stop-time of life-and-death concentration. They had to have faith that their unseen shipmates manning other stations were locked into the cycle with that same stone-cold focus. As a sailor from another war put it, “This kind of fighting demands the purest form of courage…. We must not let our imaginations run riot…. A man has to exercise perfect mastery over his emotions, carrying out his duties in a mechanical manner.”

Stationed on a hoist in one of the five-inch magazines, seaman second class Donald Brain saw the power to his compartment die and the hydraulics fail, making it necessary to work the hoist by hand. Brain grabbed some hand cranks out of the ready locker, set them up, and was so busy cranking five-inch projectiles up to the gun deck that he had no time to fret when an enemy shell came plowing through the side of the ship just forward of his station, rumbling like a freight train. “That is just what it sounded like…just a rumble and a bang and a crash, and on it went.” He would crank that hoist until the magazine was empty.