Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Completing the destroyer force were the three British ships, Electra, Jupiter and Encounter, which had arrived at Surabaya with Perth and Exeter, and, finally, two small Dutch ships, Kortenaer and Witte de With. Kortenaer had a leaky boiler, which restricted her speed to 25 knots.

  Leaving Surabaya, there was a bad omen when De Ruyter collided with a tug and a barge, sinking both, but there was also a cheerful note of British elan as Exeter swept down the channel with the strains of ‘A-hunting We Will Go’ blaring from her speakers. There might have been less good cheer if the men had been aware that Doorman had ordered that any damaged ship was to be left behind and that survivors of sunken ships were not to be rescued. In calm seas lit by a moon almost full, the force headed north in search of the enemy.

  They found nothing – no sign of a convoy at all. But at dawn the next morning, 27 February, the enemy found them. A lone Japanese reconnaissance plane shadowed them at a distance and eventually called up a handful of bombers. There were a couple of perfunctory attacks, beaten off by anti-aircraft fire, and no damage was done, but it added to the strain on crews weary from a sleepless night. They did not know that yet another Allied disaster was unfolding south of Java. The old carrier Langley, on the way from Australia, was bombed. Most of her crew abandoned ship, leaving her a blazing wreck, which eventually sank just 120 kilometres from the Java coast. Her much-needed aircraft went to the bottom with her. Doorman’s captains, sceptical about his promise of fighter cover, would find their doubts justified once again.

  Disappointed by the fruitless search, knowing that his destroyers were low on fuel and aware of the stress on his men, the Admiral decided to return to Surabaya and resume the search the next day. Away in Bandung, Helfrich, furious at what he thought was a lack of resolve, instructed Doorman to reverse course and continue hunting. Doorman chose to disobey the order, signalling to his boss instead that:

  This day personnel reached the limit of their endurance.

  Tomorrow the limit will be exceeded.6

  It was an accurate and compassionate observation. For months, these ships and men had found no time for rest, no moment to restore body or spirit, either at sea or in harbour. They were exhausted, mentally and physically. Perth’s ship’s company, relatively new on the scene, was in better shape, but not much. Anything for a night’s sleep. A couple of hours’ sleep. Surabaya, even with its stinking oil fires and its inevitable air raids, beckoned invitingly. The Striking Force prepared to enter harbour that afternoon.

  Just after two o’clock, Helfrich signalled again. Dutch aircraft had sighted three groups of Japanese ships slightly to the north of where Doorman had been the night before. The reports were emphatic. There could be no doubt. It was the invasion force. A flag hoist whipped up De Ruyter’s foremast. ‘Follow me,’ it said. Laboriously, the Striking Force turned about and headed out to sea again, lashed by a sudden tropical rain squall. Hec Waller, soaked to the skin on Perth’s bridge, called for a fresh shirt and shorts from his sea cabin. Stripping naked, he towelled himself off and dressed again – a costume change in the opening act. The prelude to the Battle of the Java Sea had begun.

  Less than a hundred kilometres to the north, on the bridge of the destroyer Amatsukaze (Heavenly Wind), Lieutenant-Commander Tameichi Hara7 was pacing back and forth, smoking nervously. The sudden reversal of course by the Combined Striking Force, reported by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, had him wondering if the Eastern Attack Group was blundering into a trap. At first, it had seemed the five Allied cruisers and their destroyers were fleeing to Surabaya. Now, they were heading out again. If they were to get among the lumbering transports full of soldiers, it would be wolves among the sheep.

  Hara, from a poor farming family, was a graduate of Eta Jima, the prestigious but bare-knuckle Imperial Japanese Naval Academy. A thrusting career officer now aged 42, he had written the IJN manual on torpedo tactics and was looking forward to putting his theories into practice in his first time in action. Amatsukaze had been attacked the day before by two Dutch bombers but the bombs had hit the sea some 300 metres away. It seemed there was nothing much to fear there. The battle, when it came, would be of ships and men on the sea surface. The Long Lance torpedoes, the best in the world, would deliver the killer blows.

  But Hara was right to be concerned. The Eastern Attack Group was split into three parts. At its centre was the troop convoy, escorted by the 4th Destroyer Squadron, made up of destroyers, minesweepers and the old light cruiser Naka. These ships were strung out over 30 kilometres, slogging along at just ten knots in a haphazard zigzag towards Java. Some way ahead of the convoy was a covering force of more destroyers, the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, including Amatsukaze, led by another elderly light cruiser, Jintsu. The third component of the Attack Group, the 5th Cruiser Squadron, consisted of two fast and powerful heavy cruisers, Nachi and Haguro, mounting ten 8-inch guns and 12 torpedo tubes, commanded by Rear-Admiral Takeo Takagi, who was in overall control of the Attack Group. Each of his two giants, of 13,000 tons and 36 knots, easily outclassed any of Doorman’s cruisers. But they were providing distant cover more than 200 kilometres astern of the troop convoy. Hara feared that the first two groups might be overwhelmed by the big guns of the Allied force before Nachi and Haguro could arrive on the scene. The battle would be over and the invasion of Java thwarted – a disastrous Japanese defeat.

  Electra was first to sight the enemy – a smear of smoke on the north-eastern horizon. It was just after 4 pm, in perfect sunshine, with high visibility and calm seas. She and the other two British destroyers were scouting some seven kilometres ahead of the Striking Force, all heading north-west. The five cruisers followed in line astern: Doorman in De Ruyter, then Exeter, Houston, Perth and Java. The two Dutch destroyers were behind the cruisers out on their port quarter, and the American four-pipers brought up the rear. At 4.12 pm, as the smoke began to turn into a thicket of masts and then funnels and full silhouettes, Electra sent a sighting report: ‘One cruiser, unknown number of large destroyers bearing 330° speed 18 knots, course 220°.’ This was Jintsu with its destroyer squadron. The Japanese, heading west, would cross ahead of the Combined Striking Force, shielding the troop convoy, which had withdrawn to safety. Hara desperately scanned the sea behind him, praying that Nachi and Haguro were not far away. His prayers were answered. The two heavy cruisers loomed over the north-eastern horizon in the nick of time. In the Striking Force, and in the Attack Group, men tensed, guts knotted.

  Doorman increased speed to 26 knots – the best the Dutch destroyers could manage. The Japanese were first to open fire. On Perth’s bridge, they saw the flashes from the enemy gun muzzles rippling down the line, bursts of light as bright as burnished copper. Then the shells were in the air, looking oddly like black crows, arriving with that sound somewhere between a high-pitched banshee scream and the rush of a speeding steam locomotive. Pillars of brown water erupted as they plunged into the sea, well short of the Allied ships. The range was still too great for hits by either side, much to the relief of Fred Skeels:

  At one stage directly in front of me, it seemed, at about two or three hundred yards from the ship’s side, nine geysers of water shot up in the air where the shells had landed. So the first broadside that we got from the Japanese ships was short of the Perth. They just must have been aimed directly at us, and if they had been another 300 yards closer in their range they would have blown us out of the water. I think I turned around to a couple of other blokes who were there and said, ‘Shit! The buggers are getting close with that lot.’ Again in our ignorance we would have laughed it off as an amusement rather than a threat to our lives but, for others, the battle was not so entertaining.8

  Doorman was now in danger of having his T crossed – a naval tactic known since the age of sail. The Combined Striking Force was the vertical line of the letter T. The Japanese were the crossbar, which meant they could bring all their guns to bear, fore and aft, their heaviest possible broadside, known as the ‘A’ arcs. But
the Allied ships on the vertical line could fire just their for’ard guns, and then from only those turrets not masked by ships ahead. Being on the crossbar confers a big advantage in firepower.

  So Doorman made a turn in line to the west – the correct response, which would bring his cruisers parallel to the Japanese and allow all his guns to open their arcs … if they were in range. And this was the first of the Dutch Admiral’s many errors. They were not in range. Doorman had turned too early. The 8-inch guns of the heavy cruisers Exeter and Houston could barely reach the enemy line, their shells plunging short in a futile waste of ammunition, and the 6-inch cruisers, De Ruyter, Java and Perth, had no chance. Their guns stood silent. Yet the enemy’s fire was now dangerously close. Japanese ballistics, finely honed, were superior. On Perth’s compass platform, Hec Waller fumed in impotent despair. After the battle, he would write in his Action Report that ‘I found a long period of being “Aunt Sally” very trying without being able to return the fire’.9

  Eventually, the two opponents drew closer, and Waller opened up with everything he had. It was 4.25 pm. Keen eyes were fixed on enemy ships that were no more than distant charcoal specks pricked every so often by the flashes of their guns. High in Perth’s Director, they set to their work. The Rate Officer, staring through his stereoscopic binoculars, estimated the enemy course and speed. Sweating in the heat, the Director Layer, the Director Trainer, Range to Elevation and Deflection Unit and Cross Level Operators made their calculations to be fed below to the Transmitting Station, where the Admiralty Fire Control Table would lay Perth’s guns on target. It was a combination of art and science. Each of the four turrets had to be trained slightly differently to ensure that all eight guns would converge on the same spot. The shells would be in flight for anything from 30 seconds to a little over a minute. Allowances had to be made for everything from the enemy’s speed and manoeuvring to wind direction and air temperature, and even for the rifling of the guns themselves, which spun the shells slightly to the right.

  Deep below the guns, in the turret lobbies and the handling rooms and magazines, men laboured to load the shells and cordite charges into the hoists that would carry them up to the turrets. This was the worst job in the ship, claustrophobic and frightening. You were imprisoned in a steel cell that was stinking hot and airless, struggling with a shell weighing some 50 kilograms, battling to keep your feet on a greasy deck while the ship lunged and shuddered to the helm and engine orders from the bridge. Endless, back-breaking work this, with every chance of a torpedo hitting you right there in the guts and putting an end to it all. At best, the way to the upper deck was an obstacle course of hatches, doors and ladders, one man at a time. In an emergency – such as a sudden shattering hit by a shell or torpedo, or even a flood from a nearby compartment – the chances of getting out were next to nothing.

  The gunnery trade referred to the shells as CPBC, or common pointed ballistic capped, which meant they would penetrate a fair amount of armour-plating before exploding. Each shell slid home in the guns, followed by a charge of 13 kilograms of cordite encased in a bag of silk. The breeches were swung closed and primed with a small tube containing a fine wire of iridium-platinum. As each gun got set, a red light glowed on the gun-ready lamp box in the Director. Six, seven, eight red lamps.

  ‘Ready to open fire, sir.’

  ‘Very good. Open fire.’

  Hancox, the Gunnery Officer, spoke into a microphone to the Director Trainer, who had one hand on a metal trigger and the other working an elevator wheel that could make split-second adjustments to the ship’s aim.

  ‘Shoot!’

  The fire-gongs in the Director made their tinny ting-ting sound to warn of the eruption to come. Squeezing the trigger sent a charge of electricity through the delicate wire in each gun breech, which, like the spark plug of a car engine, ignited the cordite charge. That created a gas that punched each shell up seven metres of gun barrel to emerge at a speed of 840 metres per second. The energy unleashed thrust seven tons of gun thundering back into the turret for about one metre before it was stopped by the recoil cylinder. Fired at a range of 18,000 metres, the shell would be in the air for 47 seconds. Then the whole process would begin again, with a fresh set of calculations, more heat, more acrid cordite fumes, more sweat and straining muscles. A well-drilled gun crew could fire about eight rounds per minute.

  The battle grew hot, ships racing westwards on parallel courses across a calm sea, great gouts of dirty water rising around them beneath a late-afternoon sky ever more smoky from the gunfire. Waller conned the cruiser like the destroyer captain he had been in the Med, darting and weaving behind Houston a few lengths ahead. Hard Over Hec was in his element, skill and intuition telling him where the next Japanese shells would land. Ray Parkin wrestled unceasingly with the ship’s wheel. Above them all, on Perth’s two masts and at the gaff, three enormous battle ensigns snapped in the slipstream, red, white and blue.

  The gunnery on both sides was surprisingly accurate, with ships constantly straddled, meaning shells landing just over or under their targets, or perhaps just fore and aft. De Ruyter took an early hit in her engine room, but the shell failed to explode. Exeter believed she had landed a shell on a Japanese cruiser, and Waller claimed a hit on a destroyer, which retired in a cloud of smoke. Houston’s shells, loaded with a dye to show the spotters where they landed, sent blood-red fountains rising around the enemy destroyers as they formed for their first torpedo attack. That was a Japanese failure, launched at too great a range even for the Long Lance. To the disgust of Tameichi Hara, the torpedoes exploded harmlessly at the end of their run. A second torpedo attack did no better. After an hour of fighting, the honours were about even.

  Then, at 5.14, came the moment that turned the battle. Exeter was struck by an 8-inch shell from the cruiser Nachi. It passed through the thin shield of one of the starboard 4-inch guns, killing four of the crew, and penetrated deep into B-boiler room, where it exploded, putting six of the ship’s eight boilers out of action and vaporising another ten men. Electric power failed, the guns fell silent and the cruiser lurched out of the line, a blast of super-heated steam billowing from a jagged hole in her side. Her speed fell back to 11 knots as she limped away to port.

  Chaos followed. Houston, next behind Exeter, turned sharply to port as well to avoid ramming the stricken British ship. Seeing Houston turn and unaware of the damage to Exeter, Hec Waller assumed that he had missed a signal from Doorman and he, too, turned away to port. So did Java to his rear. That left De Ruyter and the Admiral steaming west while the other four cruisers were heading south, with the destroyers widely scattered and wondering what on earth they were supposed to be doing. ‘The Allied line was thrown into considerable confusion,’ Commodore Collins would write later in his official report – a polite understatement.

  Exeter continued to stagger along, her engine room and damage control parties working feverishly to restore power, if only to her guns. In Perth, Waller could now see she was struggling. Calling for full speed, he hauled away to lay a smokescreen to conceal Exeter from the enemy. Lieutenant (junior grade) Hal Hamlin, an officer in Houston’s for’ard turret, watched in awe as the Australian cruiser stormed onwards:

  She charged past with her throttles wide open and a billowing cloud of white smoke streaming from her smoke generators. There was a beautiful snow-white bone in her teeth, and from the yardarms and the gaff, three battle flags streamed straight behind. She was firing rapid fire, and was one of the finest sights I have ever seen.10

  Fine but perilous. Perth had exposed herself to the Japanese heavy cruisers. She plunged through the columns of water thrown up by their 8-inch shells – fire so accurate in the smoke that Waller assumed it was radar-controlled. It wasn’t; the Japanese reconnaissance planes above were simply doing their job spotting the fall of shot. This passage of the battle developed into something like a back-alley brawl, with Perth fighting off Japanese destroyers as they darted in and out of the murk. In the f
ailing light, they glimpsed the Japanese cruisers and got away several quick salvoes, which, they thought, had scored some hits, but then the haze closed in again.

  Doorman in De Ruyter, discovering to his alarm that he was out on his own and heading away from his flock, circled back to rejoin it, narrowly avoiding a collision with the American destroyers. But, as he did so, another spread of Japanese torpedoes was streaking towards the Allied ships, and this time with a result. Kortenaer, the old Dutch destroyer with the leaking boiler, took one in the engine room and exploded in a fireball as she crossed ahead of Perth, where Fred Skeels watched her dying moments:

  She went down like a V for Victory, with her aft end and fo’c’sle just sticking up out of the water before she sank in about two minutes. Although it was only about 500 yards away we heard nothing and she disappeared into silent death … I could see men trying to escape, running up the bottom of the ship and then jumping over the side. The main impression this left on me was ‘Poor Buggers’, but at the same time I felt relieved it wasn’t us.11

  In the shocked silence that followed, there was nothing to do but keep going. It would have been suicidal for Perth to stop and lower a boat – and, anyway, Doorman had ordered that survivors from sunken ships must be left to fend for themselves. The destruction of the Japanese convoy was paramount. Perth’s veterans of the Mediterranean had seen ships and men die before and perhaps had become inured to it. These things were part of the job. But the new men who saw what happened realised, suddenly, that the war had taken on a terrible aspect. Once it had been an abstraction, something that happened to someone else. Now it was personal, and there was no hiding place. The small figures struggling in Kortenaer’s filthy oil slick were strangers and foreigners, to be sure, but also sailors like themselves.