Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  “There’s nothing more we can do out west,” he told Bennett on the telephone. “We’ll have to come east and reinforce your defense of Surabaya. I’ll move the division through Cirebon to Semarang as soon as possible, and take what’s left of my reserve and headquarters to Surjakarta. It may be days before we can get sorted out, but we’ll muddle through.”

  “What about Tjilatjap?” Bennett had asked. It was the only port open on the southern coast now.

  “Blackforce is still there, with some local Dutch units and a few Aussie ships in the harbor. I can reinforce that position if need be, but I can’t see any immediate threat to the place at the moment. The Japanese must be as shaken up as we are. The Devil only knows what happened to those troops they landed out west. What is your situation?”

  “Not entirely satisfactory,” said Bennett, with a characteristic understatement. “We’re holding Semarang, but the Japs have taken Rembang further east, and I’ve just the one battalion blocking the coast road in the north. My lines stretch southeast from there. Clifton holds the oil fields at Tejapu, but his right flank is open, and there appears to be heavy enemy movement in that sector.”

  “They’re trying to flank Surabaya,” said Montgomery, “and I doubt if we’ll be able to get anything over that way for days.”

  “My 2/20 Battalion is on the road northwest of Surabaya,” said Bennett. “It’s the only thing holding that axis at the moment, along with a company of those old Dutch armored cars.”

  Montgomery took a deep breath. “Frankly, unless the Dutch can hold on, it doesn’t look like we can keep them out of Surabaya. Your 2/20th is likely to become caught up in all that.”

  “Right,” said Bennett, “but I don’t much fancy the thought of those lads in a Japanese prison camp.”

  “If need be, have them fall back through Surabaya to Malang. We’re still holding all of east Java, but if the Japs do swing south of Surabaya, that could change. It may be that the best we can do is stand the line from Semarang to Surjakarta, and hold on to Tjilatjap as our principal supply port until I can organize a counterattack.”

  “Counterattack?” Bennett seemed surprised. All he had been doing since December was fighting one stubborn holding action after another. “That’s going to be a problem. I’m all for putting up the good fight, but that port can be easily interdicted by the Japanese Navy. To keep it open, Mountbatten and Somerville will have to maintain a constant presence south of Java, and with Perth being their only good base of support well to the south. For my money, we should get the troops off this god forsaken island while we can, and hold the line in Australia.”

  “But if we move deliberately we can use that time to concentrate our entire force on Surabaya,” said Montgomery. “7th Australian Division is at sea, and coming to support us. Run this last Japanese division off, and we’ve won this thing.”

  “But our boys won’t be able to come in at Batavia now,” Bennett warned.

  “Yes, getting through the Sunda Strait is impossible. Tjilatjap will have to do. Then we can put them on the train to Surjakarta. By the time they get here, we should be ready for a decent push east to relieve the Dutch, assuming they can hold out that long.”

  Monty’s dander was up, but his plan was overly optimistic. The Dutch would not hold, and that became the real problem. On the 1st of March, the Japanese landed at Karagajar east of Surabaya with three battalions of the Shoji Detachment supported by a recon battalion and two more engineer battalions and artillery from Makassar. Soon the city was flanked on every side, and Montgomery received the bad news the morning of March 3rd.

  There was only one battalion of Australian troops supporting the Dutch garrison inside the vise around the port, and looking at his map Monty began to see a situation forming up that, as Bennett would have put it, was less than satisfactory. In spite of the catastrophic nature of the disaster, he had been pulling things together, and planning his next moves. The opportunity he saw in getting to Surabaya first had now slipped away. Fighting on the outer perimeter was tough going, and he could see that his troops would not get through.

  If he had the Australian 7th Division in hand, that might do the job, but the disaster at Krakatoa meant Batavia was no longer there to receive them, and in the mind of Prime Minister Curtin, Tjilatjap would not do. He reluctantly gave the order to turn the convoy back to Colombo, the only other port it could possibly reach, and it would creep slowly back to the west, out of the battle, barely making port before the fuel ran out.

  Now, with insufficient forces to really go on the offensive, Montgomery would be forced to heed Bennett’s advice and fall back on his only port at Tjilatjap. Obsessed with the capture of Surabaya, the Japanese did not attempt to pursue his withdrawal. The Dutch, and the brave stand put up by 2/20 Australian Battalion, would hold on just long enough for the bulk of the 18th Division to get down to the south coast, where they began boarding any transport shipping available.

  The Japanese navy could have made a decisive intervention here, but all the ships were north of Java, and many had been sent to the stricken region out west in the hope of rescuing stranded troops of the 2nd Division. The destroyers and cruisers were plying through the dull grey seas, braving the ashfall, and pulling out a few hapless survivors adrift in the flotsam. One man in particular, would soon be found, and by a very important ship.

  On the 5th of March, a flotilla of cargo ships arrived from Perth, and were joined at sea by Mountbatten with Illustrious and Indomitable backtracking from their flight to Colombo to serve as a covering force. They looked like gaunt shapes carved from bone, with ashfall completely blanketing every exposed area of the ships. They began pulling the rest of the 18th Division off, and the battle for Java would be lost. In spite of the presence of those troops, and the Rock of the East in Montgomery, nature had pushed the history along with the sheer power of that mighty eruption. The Rock was pushed along with it, and soon Montgomery would find himself in Perth, contemplating nothing more than a long sea journey back to Alexandria where he hoped to get back in the swing of things for Operation Supercharge.

  Java’s fate had been decided, and Japan would occupy all the key barrier islands as they had in Fedorov’s history, but something else had happened in the Sunda Strait when the mountain finally vented its wrath in that last massive detonation. It was going to change more than the weather across the globe in the months ahead, and its effect would ripple out like the shock waves and tsunami had from Java, reaching all the way to the North Pacific, where Vladimir Karpov was quietly plotting the demise of his enemies.

  Chapter 18

  Captain Takechi Harada stood on the bridge, still unable to believe the devastation he was seeing. All around him, the sea was frosty white, convulsing in the last throes of a great disturbance. The air itself was thick with ashfall, and the deep basso of some great thrombosis within the earth growled with an ominous persistence, a steady rumble that spoke of calamity. What in the name of all the Gods and Demons had happened here?

  His ship, the destroyer Takami, was one of Japan’s newest fighting ships, state of the art for her day, but now it seemed a deaf and blind thing in the heavy oppressive airs. All of the equipment was down, though engines were still hot and running smoothly in spite of the seas being clotted with ash. They had determined that there must have been a sudden, catastrophic eruption close by, for this island archipelago was infamous for its violent geology. A quick look at his charts named the likely suspect—Krakatoa.

  At the moment, all he could think of was getting his ship to safety, and trying to find a way to navigate north away from the Sunda Straits to do so. They had been steaming about 110 kilometers northeast of the suspected eruption site, after passing through the straits and rounding the northwestern tip of Java at Cape Merak. They had been in a storm, skies darkening, winds up, with heavy lightning, and the ship was struck. The bridge blackened and systems failed just as they were cruising in the lee of a small island named Pulau Tunda according to
their last charted position. Then the sound came, first a strange distended hum that descended into deeper tones, finally resolving to the awful roar and rumble they had been hearing for the last ten minutes.

  The darkness intensified all around them, which they soon found was caused by a massive broiling eruption cloud to their southwest. It has to be a volcano, thought Harada, yet it was completely unexpected, as there had been no warnings or alerts issued. He wondered now at the fate of the other ships he had been maneuvering with before they broke off on separate courses.

  Drawing a direct line from their presumed position to the volcano, the Captain saw that it passed right through that island, and then the northwestern tip of Java, reasoning that those land masses must have shielded his destroyer from the worst effects of the eruption, particularly the heavy wave sets that he could now see rippling over the sea. Like everything else that had been happening in recent days, it had come out of nowhere, changing the sea and sky in just minutes, and now persisted with its ear thrumming roar.

  “Any word from engineering,” he said to his first officer, Lt. Commander Kenji Fukada.

  “They’re still working, sir,” said Fukada, tall and gaunt looking in his grey overcoat, and battle helmet. “We got hit pretty hard.”

  The ship was still rolling in the last residual swells, and with ash descending, darkness pervading, it had been impossible to see through the forward view panes. The wipers only smeared the ashen slurry to a dull opaque wash. He posted a watch on every weather deck, and seconds later the watch called out: “man overboard!”

  They saw something bobbing on the white sea, only 50 yards off the starboard bow, which was the outer limit of visibility in the deep ash and gloom. It was the first sign of anything else afloat and alive, yet as he stared at it in his field glasses it seemed no more than flotsam.

  When the watch finally made the sighting, the Captain came to all stop, grateful that the auxiliary engine and steering controls were still functioning. They had only been on the weather deck off the bridge for a few moments, but the sheen of ash was already coating their foul weather coats and rain ponchos, dusting their shoulders and then running in pale grey streaks with the rain.

  The Captain craned his neck, to see the man pointing at the very same location where he had spotted the wreckage. He looked again, adjusting his field glasses, and now he saw not one man, but two, desperately clinging to the broken remnant of an old raft. One of the two was slumped on the raft, the other with an arm over him to keep the man in place.

  “Looks like somebody else made it through this alive,” said Fukada. “Shall I have KK get a boat over there?”

  “At once.”

  The First Officer had referred to Katsu Kimura, the Sergeant in charge of the ship’s small contingent of Naval Marines, always called KK by the officers. The word was sent down and some minutes later they watched as a small launch went over to the scene, the broad shoulders and stocky hulk of Sergeant Kimura prominent as he stood at the wheel, three helmeted Marines behind him in full gear. The word came back—two survivors, one unconscious, but both alive, and they were both in uniform.

  That set the Captain to wonder what may have happened to the rest of his squadron. They had separated an hour earlier, each bound for different ports in the rising tension of those last hours. He remembered feeling that impending sense of doom. His operation had proceeded smoothly enough, but then, with a suddenness that stunned every man aboard, chaos reigned over the scene. Perhaps he could learn more from these men.

  * * *

  Out on the turbulent water, the one conscious survivor was elated when help arrived. They had seen the ship appear, moving slowly through the heavy ashfall and rain. It seemed a sallow grey specter, deathly still, and frosted over with the ash that clung to its mast and odd looking riggings. He did not recognize the ship, but realized it must be one of the screening force units—most likely a cruiser from its size. He thanked the Gods that they had been found, and the long ordeal, clinging to that broken raft in the choking sea, would finally be over.

  Being well over 120 kilometers from the massive detonation of Krakatoa, they had been spared the wrenching pain and deafness, though their ears were still ringing from the loudness of the event, even at that distance.

  “Thank god you have found us,” he gasped when the small boat reached them, still bobbing in the high swells. He could see friendly troops there, four men, one using a grapple to secure the tattered raft, two others throwing life preservers. “This is General Hitochi Imamura!” he said with the last of his strength. “Take him first…”

  * * *

  General Imamura… Captain Harada was quite surprised when his chief medical officer came to the bridge, a bemused look on his face, and related that information.

  “A General? An Army General? Out here? Did he say what ship he was on?”

  “Ryujo Maru—a cargo ship from the sound of it. God only knows what it was doing out here in this mess.” The doctor folded his arms, Lieutenant Isamu Hisakawa, coming over from the Atago when this new ship was commissioned. The Captain found him a competent, no nonsense man.

  “He’s resting quietly now, but he was quite talkative for a while. He wants to know if we have any information from 16th Army General Staff—says they were operating out of Balikpapan.”

  “16th Army?” The Captain scratched his head. “Japanese Army?”

  “That’s what he says. They both have on military service jackets and uniforms, and the one man is well decorated. If he isn’t a General he’s something else, and fairly high and mighty. What do you make of it, sir?”

  “All I know, from the last orders I received, was that we were to get back to port. Then all hell broke loose. What was this man doing out here? I wasn’t aware the army had anybody that high up in this region.”

  “He says they were way down above Banten Bay when their ship was taken by a tsunami from that eruption. They both went into the drink and managed to grab onto that broken raft.”

  “But we’re 70 kilometers north of Banten Bay.”

  “Looks like they had a pretty rough ride sir. They must have been pushed all the way up here by that tsunami.”

  Captain Harada sighed. He was a careful man, and the fewer unanswered questions in front of him, the better. “Very well… I’ll go down and have a look at them. I need to see Chief Engineer Oshiro. We’ve got to get the ship back on her feet. We barely have engine and steerage control. Everything else is down, and we can’t raise anyone else either. Gods are angry today, Doctor. Whatever happened out there, it’s created a real nightmare. Give me ten minutes and I’ll see you in the sick bay.”

  * * *

  “You are Captain of this ship?” The man squinted at Captain Harada, his eyes still red and swollen from the ash and seawater, face haggard, though he was a portly man, with a substantial belly. The Captain bowed politely.

  “You are safely aboard the Takami,” he said. “I am Captain Takechi Harada. What has happened to your ship?”

  “That I cannot tell you,” said the man. “I was swept overboard… wait—what did you say your name was?”

  “Harada, Itto Kaisa, Captain of the First Rank.”

  “Itto Kaisa? Don’t you mean Kaigun-daisa? And how very strange, another Harada. My Deputy Chief of Staff is from that family. Perhaps you are a distant relative? In any case, I am Rikugun- Chūjō, Lieutenant General Imamura, Commander of the 16th Army now conducting these operations. You have done us a very great service, along with that sailor in the other room who helped keep me from drowning on that raft. I owe the navy a great debt. Thanks to you and your ship, I was fortunate to survive, but it is imperative that we reach a friendly port as soon as possible. I must ascertain what is happening on Java.”

  Doctor Hisakawa said he was talkative, thought the Captain. Yet the more he looked at this man the stranger he felt. There was something about him, stirring some old memories to life. He stared at the man’s uniform, seeing the promi
nent gold stripe, well soiled now, and the two silver stars on his shoulders. But he knew something of the Army ranks as well—a Lieutenant General should have three stars, and they were supposed to be gold on green.

  “Where are you from?” the man asked.

  “Sendai,” said the Captain.

  “How strange, Miyagi Prefecture, I grew up there as well. I still miss the trees on Jozenji Dori. I always loved to walk there. In the winter they would shimmer with a thousand lights for the Pageant of Starlight.” The man forced a wan smile. “Yet I have traveled far and wide since then. This war will likely take me even farther before it is over, but I should not complain. I could have been a meal for the sharks out there, assuming any will survive in that hell. It was terrible… the sound… the sea…that terrible darkness.”

  The Captain nodded. “From what we can determine, Krakatoa must have erupted, and very suddenly, right there in the middle of the Sunda Straits. There was nothing in any report or communication to indicate a hazard there, or any state of elevated alert for that volcano.”

  “Nature will do what it wishes, we must simply try and stay out of its way.” The man frowned. “That’s what my Deputy Chief of Staff would always tell me. I’m afraid the 2nd Division on Java was on the wrong side of that advice. The casualties must have been very heavy from that tsunami. Well, I put it there, and so I suppose I must bear the responsibility.”

  “2nd Division? From Camp Asahikawa? They had units out here? We were not informed.”

  That confusion aside, the Captain was deeply struck by what the other man had just said, not for any sense of its eloquence or wisdom, but it was something he had been told long ago—by his grandfather. ‘To live a long and happy life, a man must be wise, lucky, but also careful enough to stay out of nature’s way.’ He tilted his head to one side, looking at the man very closely. A powerful sense of recognition swept over him, and now he realized it was the uniform the man was wearing. It reminded him of his grandfather’s old army uniform—yes—even the rank insignia was much like that on this man’s shoulders.