Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  The ashfall was so heavy that it swept into any open hatch or stairwell, until the chalky white was tracked deep into the inner compartments of the ship. No one on deck could stay there for long, and the Captain was forced to rig out tarps on the open bridge to stave off the cinders that now began to fall in pea sized fragments, still warm to the touch. These would increase to chestnuts, and eventually fist sized clumps of pumice that fell continually.

  At one point he had to give a steering order when the watchman called out an obstacle ahead. It was narrowly averted, and Captain Agar saw that it was a broad raft of pumice, which now covered the sea itself, giving the ocean a ghostly, milky-white appearance. To the men unfortunate enough to be on the high mast mounting their watches, it seemed that the task force was covered in hoarfrost, frozen ships on a frigid white sea.

  That ash fall was going to spread for hundreds of kilometers on the wind. Soon much of Western Java was under the fallout, and later there would be reports of ash accumulating to a depth of half an inch on Cocos Island, 1,155 kilometers southwest of Krakatoa. Ships at sea in the Indian Ocean would report the blanket of fine dust and ash while steaming over 2800 kilometers away, and some reported ashfall as far off as the Horn of Africa, over 6,000 kilometers distant. The rafts of pumice that gathered in pinkish-yellow patches on the open sea would persist for over a year, drifting all the way to the African coast.

  In the old history, the events already described had happened in May, and the mountain continued to steam and vent off and on, until late August when the final paroxysm came. Here, the pressure building beneath was nearly 60 years greater, which was not much in geologic time, but something unusual had happened beneath the earth. A subterranean eruption had forced a vast quantity of magma up, but it did not break the surface, forming a massive dike or plug in the deep wells that were driving the eruptive process. It literally ‘kept a lid’ on the mountain for those six decades, but all the while more and more magma flowed up, and the pressure building beneath Krakatoa was much greater than in the 1883 eruption that had happened in Fedorov’s history. This time, the entire process was going to be collapsed into a much shorter, and more violent event.

  The explosion was so massive that it created a sound that would circle the earth seven times with its incredible pressure wave. To every man in Captain Agar’s squadron, it was simply ear shattering, so deafening that the crews were literally stunned as if they had been struck by a hammer, the pain intense, their eardrums shattered. Many, were knocked unconscious, others cowered below decks with their hands over their bleeding ears in shameless fear. They had been through rough seas, wind and storm, but never anything like this.

  It was a sound so loud that it would be heard 85 minutes later in Perth, over 1700 kilometers to the south, as a strong explosive bang. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Tambora’s blast of 1815 was terrible, but did not produce this same explosive sound. As if to proclaim itself as the new pretender to the throne in the long arc of volcanic islands, the Sea Demon beneath Krakatoa was bellowing with a roar that moved the air around the island with an awful wrenching pressure.

  The column of the eruption poured out and up, towering into the sullen sky like a living thing, a monstrous demon of earth, smoke and fire. Its smoky shoulders rolled upwards with incredible force, and then massive hunks of earth were seen in the sky, soon plummeting down into the turbulent sea.

  This tremendous outpouring of gas and ejecta would go on for many hours, the sky growing ever darker, until it was near pitch black by mid-day. By then, the 54th Brigade defending near Merak had retreated east to Batavia, and the 53rd Brigade stationed there was ordered to move east on the road to Kilidjati Airfield. There was nothing that could be done about the 31 Hurricane fighters still on the airfields near Batavia. They simply had to be abandoned, for they could not fly. Some of the crews made a vain attempt to move ten or twelve on flatbed rail cars, but the ash was falling so heavily now that even the rail lines were hazardous. In the end, most of the planes simply had to be destroyed.

  On the other side of the equation, The Japanese had a much worst time of things. There was already ash to a depth of many inches all along the coastal regions where they had landed. Half of the transports had fled north, but the remainder hovered furtively off shore, where three brave destroyers still stood guard. When it was clear that the situation was going from bad to worse, General Maruyama ordered any further landing of supplies, equipment, or vehicles halted, and began pulling his troops back towards the coast. He was going to attempt to re-embark as much of his force as possible.

  The troops moved like zombies, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, shirtless, ashen souls stumbling through the utter darkness in long lines, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him. Many fell from respiratory distress, collapsing in listless heaps on the roads and trails, and then the lightning flashed, thunder joining the constant rumble and roar of the volcano, and a heavy sulfuric rain began to fall. This created pools of ash mud and flows of tiny ‘lahars,’ a Javanese word that had been used to describe ash and debris flows from volcanoes ever thereafter.

  Yet the cold lahars were not the flows to be truly feared. It was the sudden collapse of that massive volcanic plume that would pose the most danger, a pyroclastic flow that could originate from any of the big explosive eruptions now underway. It could form a fast moving current of hot rock, ash, and gas that would cascade down over the sea and spread out like a mantle of utter destruction, moving at the incredible speed of up to 700 KPH. To be caught anywhere near such an event meant almost certain death, and General Maruyama, having lived under the shadow of Mt. Fuji most of his younger life, knew enough about volcanoes to be mortally afraid.

  A few battalions made it to the rafts and boats, desperately paddling back out to meet the waiting ships, which stood like frozen icebergs on a blanched white sea. At a little after 22:00, when the beginning of the end rattled the atmosphere so heavily that the movement of the air knocked the men from their feet, all the ships lurched about, their anchor chains barely holding them. Then came the noise that would be heard all the way on the other side of the Indian Ocean, a sound so powerful and intense that it shattered every window in Batavia, over 150 kilometers to the east.

  Fifty kilometers from Krakatoa, at Anjer, it struck the men with a sudden piercing thunderclap, knocking them deaf, dazed and senseless, to the ground. As far away as 100 kilometers, the sound would be as high as 172 decibels, ear splitting, nerve wrenching pain, well beyond the threshold of endurance for any human being. It was as if each man had ice picks driven into their ears, and then all was deathly quiet—they would never hear another sound again.

  There they wallowed in agony, blinded by the heavy ash, their eardrums burst and bleeding, their voices clotted and mute. The 2nd Division was deaf, dumb and blind, and yet that was the least of the afflictions that was now about to befall those men. The great upheaval from beneath the earth had finally begun. Up until that moment, the eruption had been emerging from cracks and fumaroles in the heavy cap of cooled magma that had sealed off the main chamber. Now it all gave way, and terror was not half a word for what would happen next.

  Chapter 17

  The painful irony in General Maruyama’s retrograde movement to the coast was that each struggling step his troops took in the hope of saving themselves brought them closer to death. Thus far there had been a regular series of powerful explosions that produced surging pyroclastic flows out to 10 or 20 kilometers from the volcano, much of that activity becoming undersea flows. The paroxysm that was now underway at Krakatoa was so intense that it would collapse huge segments of the main island into the sea. The resulting tsunami would surge out in all directions, but was particularly amplified as the displaced seawater entered the Sunda Straits, a bottleneck formed by the mass of Java and Sumatra.

  Aboard Dorsetshire, Captain Agar managed to gather himself, his head throbbing with pain. He was completely deaf, but his long
years of experience at sea kept him moving, helping the helmsman up and gesturing to the heading he wanted. It was no good shouting orders, for no one would hear them. In fact, no man aboard those ships would ever hear again either, but the Captain managed with hand signals, slowly getting his men up and back to their posts to re-establish control of the ship.

  Then the waves came, the first produced by the massive pyroclastic flows near the island. They were enough to raise the line of ships heavily as they fled, and as the dazed and deafened crews struggled to life again, the vessels were rocked heavily with its passing. They had been following one another closely due to the limited visibility and smothering darkness, with searchlights probing to see the nearest ship ahead. When the helmsman of destroyer Electra fell senseless to the deck, the ship veered off, her aft section now batted about by the first wave, while Express behind her was carried on like an arrow about to hit a wall. The encounter she soon had was devastating when the two destroyers collided, with Electra skewered amidships by the bow of the other ship.

  Dorsetshire’s greater displacement and wider beam rode out the first few waves easily enough, though the entire column was now scattered, with ships loosing contact with one another in the murky darkness and scattering in all directions. There was a gracious interval between those first two waves and the great wave that would follow them.

  Captain Agar could see the direction the waves were propagating, and steered in such a way as to best ride them out, but they were merely outriders in the storm. A huge segment of the island was collapsing into the sea, and it would generate a tsunami that would be well over 40 meters high. When the great wave finally came, the might of the sea lifted Dorsetshire up like a bath toy, her bow tipping down and then riding wildly up as it finally passed. The ship careened down with a heavy roll, ash and sea creating a wild white haze all around her, but Dorsetshire righted itself and eventually ran true again. Exeter had also escaped and was well off to starboard, but the light cruisers Dauntless and Dragon fared a little worse, eventually managing to ride the wave out, but seeing many men washed overboard. As for Electra and Express, the wave smashed the two together in a much more violent collision, and both would be completely swamped. Their crews would descend in terrified silence into the sea, lost to a man.

  Off the coast of Anjer, the first two waves rolled through the anchorage site of the 2nd Division, again sending all the transports into a dizzying dance on the sea. These waves were big enough to swamp small boats laden with troops, and overturn rafts carrying artillery and equipment. Men clung to rope nets on the sides of Sakura Maru, desperately trying to keep themselves from being flung into the sea. The great wave would soon follow, smashing everything in its path with that wall of unstoppable seawater.

  General Hitoshi Imamura, the overall commander of the Japanese 16th Army, would suffer a very peculiar fate. He was aboard the transport Ryujo Maru, a little over 100 kilometers from the fiery mountain, and well on the other side of Cape Merak above Banten Bay. When it finally came, the tsunami was still powerful enough there to create a 30 meter wave, nearly 100 feet. The ship rocked so heavily that he was thrown from the deck of Ryujo Maru along with his Vice Chief of Staff, and no one saw the two men go overboard into the ash covered water. He had been maneuvering to help coordinate the withdrawal, but now the operation would be completely unhinged.

  The entire landing site descended into utter chaos. Minesweeper No. 2 was literally lifted up and flung at the transport Fushimi Maru, landing right astride the forward deck, and then the two ships rolled into the sea and the transport’s back was broken by the tremendous weight. Anchor chains snapped like tinsel, whipping through the water to sweep away smaller boats. Every deck of the 30 transports remaining there was heavily swamped, with 14 ships capsized and three others driven madly onto the nearest shore. The wave was so powerful that it would carry the Dainichi Maru twelve kilometers inland, where it would later be found on a jungle knoll, beached like Noah’s ark.

  The men of 2nd Division had struggled for hours to reach the coast, only to find a 40 meter wall of water surging in from the Sunda Straits, and carrying everything before it, boats, rafts, ships and men alike. Many of the troops had just recovered from the terrible sound, clustered in small groups on the shore, dazed and disoriented, only to find this new terror, a wave they could not even hear coming, sweeping them to their doom.

  Transports Brazil, Fushimi, Somedomo, Taketoyo, Tatsuno, Tofuku, Columbia, Maebashi, Genoa, Hoeisan, Atsuta, Dainichi, Tokiwa, Motoyama, Pacific, Kizzan, and Reiyo Maru would all be a total loss in the waters off Anjer and Merak, and with them thousands of troops from the 2nd Division would perish. Only 12 of the 30 ships would manage to stay afloat, but everyone aboard was so dazed and thunderstruck by the disaster that they were virtually lost as an effective combat force. In one fell blow, the mighty Krakatoa had done what Montgomery had spent hours with his maps trying to plan and devise. The entire Western Task Force of the Japanese invasion of Java was completely shattered.

  The great wave surged inland at Lada Bay south of Anjer, and would roll 10 kilometers inland, sweeping all before it. People, homes, possessions, animals were all caught up in the massive movement of water, with a death toll that would be counted in the tens of thousands. The water careened up the flow channels of streams and small rivers that found their way to the sea just south of Anjer, and into a broad, low valley, some six miles wide. It would inundate the entire area, creating a small lake there for weeks before the water eventually drained back to the sea. Farther north near Merak, the wave was powerful enough to sweep completely over the nine miles of lowland just south of the knobby wrinkled rise of the mountains that formed the Merak Peninsula. It would surge over the lower ground, all the way to Banten Bay on the other side of the peninsula, where more Japanese troops that had landed there would also be swamped and drowned.

  Only the transports anchored well out in the bay had a chance to survive, for the peninsula shielded them from the direct assault of the tsunami. So a few battalions and auxiliary troops that still remained in those ships would live to tell the terrible story of what had happened to their division, but they would be called the Mimi nai dansei ever thereafter, the men without ears.

  The great wave pushed completely through the Sunda Straits, around the small islands of Sebuku and Sebesi north of Krakatoa, and into the long bay running up to the port of Oosthaven on Sumatra. There it would crash ashore, sweeping away boats, launches, docks, warehouses, and the entire town itself, rendering the port completely useless. It was so powerful that it migrated all the way to Batavia, and was still 28 meters high when it reached that major port.

  As for the British, they fared a little better, being much further inland east of Batavia when the thunder and water came. The one forward deployed battalion, 5th Beds & Herts, was completely wiped out near the village of Serang when it was caught by the wave as it slogged east through the grey ash and rain. But most of the remainder of the division had already been given the order to pull out of Batavia hours earlier, and they were on the long road east when the thunderous roar was heard. The men dropped their rifles, covered their ears in misery, but the sound was not so debilitating there, the head of the column already 180 kilometers east of Krakatoa, and approaching Cirebon.

  There it eventually blundered into a company of Japanese infantry from the Shoji Detachment that had landed at Patrol on the north coast with the intention of seizing Kilidjati Airfield. This regimental sized force had already been engaged by the 1st Sherwood Forrester Battalion, and the 18th Divisional Recon Battalion, with fighting about 50 kilometers west of Cirebon. The commander, Toshihari Shoji, had received word of the disaster at Merak and Anjer, and now realized that his was the only Japanese force west of the main landings at Kragan, completely isolated.

  He radioed for instructions, but was unable to get through. Seeing that his transports were still off loading supplies, he took matters into his own hands and decided to preserve his r
egiment, withdrawing back towards the coast. This detachment would end up being the only effective fighting force that was delivered by the Western Task Force, and he would later be commended for his initiative in saving those troops.

  The British were starting to deploy to engage that blocking company when it slowly dissolved and withdrew, leaving the road to Cirebon open. So they pressed on, keeping a wary eye north, but found no further enemy presence. The ash fall was slowly thinning out as they reached that port, but the darkness persisted, and it would take all the next day just to sort units out and reassemble the battalions in some semblance of order.

  Well south of that column, Montgomery had a real dilemma on his hands. All of Western Java was a zone of heavy ashfall, and anything that lived was fleeing east, creating massive jams of refugees on the roads and a humanitarian nightmare. The desperate natives pleaded for help and, where they could, the British rendered assistance. The war was over in that portion of the island, and while light ashfall was experienced over most of Java, the real debilitating pumice and ash ended near Montgomery’s HQ at Bangdung.

  Now he had to decide what to do with his Java Command Staff and a few battalions of the 54th Brigade he was holding in reserve. From all accounts, the chaos to the west was going to focus the remainder of his battle on the Japanese landing further east near Surabaya. Brigadiers Bennett and Clifton had already deployed there, and now he had most of his 18th division slogging east towards Cirebon. Word was that they found the rail lines operational there and could make good use of any rolling stock they could get their hands on. Krakatoa had pronounced its awful judgment on the strategies and plans of Generals on every side. Montgomery’s plan to try and hold Batavia was now swept away with that thunderous eruption, and he set his mind on deciding how to proceed.