Ship of Ghosts (10 page)

Refusing to wear insignia, not only out of egalitarian esprit but also from fear of Japanese snipers, Sprague got up every day and fought, driven by pure, haunted anger. The Japanese had captured his wife and children in the Philippines. His anguish over their fate was well-known to his men. Soon enough they would be anguishing over him.

On the morning of February 20, the squadron escorted a motley dive-bomber strike against Japanese shipping off Bali following that island’s fall. While a handful of Douglas A-24 Banshees zoomed down to attack the ships, Sprague turned his sixteen Warhawks against a swarm of Japanese Zeros closing to intercept.
*
In the ensuing melee, the American fliers claimed four Zeros. Four P-40s were lost. Returning to Blimbing, the pilots were saddened to find that Major Sprague was among the missing. Eventually word reached the squadron through the native rumor mill that their commander had been taken captive by the Japanese. With their commander missing, Sprague’s squadron, seldom noted or written about, acquitted
themselves proudly as the dark clouds of war scudded south, flying and fighting in conditions as bad as anything outside the Flying Tigers’ better-publicized aerial domain. Over time, though, they bled out through attrition.

A
s February drew to an end, the threat from the air seemed to herald worse tidings from the sea. The snooping eyes of submariners aboard the USS
Seal
reported a convoy of Japanese troop transports off Bawean Island, just a hundred miles north of Surabaya. On the morning of February 24 Admiral Helfrich ordered five ships of his Western Striking Force, led by the HMS
Exeter,
the HMAS
Perth,
and three British destroyers, to leave Batavia and join Doorman at Surabaya. He projected that Japanese troops would reach Java’s shores by the morning of the twenty-seventh. On February 25, belated word arrived from General MacArthur that a hundred Japanese ships had been seen gathering at Jolo. That same day a reconnaissance plane reported that some eighty enemy vessels were en route south in Makassar Strait. The aircraft was destroyed before further details could be sent. On the twenty-sixth, the crew of a Catalina patrol plane spotted fifty to sixty transports and destroyers farther west, in Karimata Strait between Borneo and Sumatra. Japan’s serpentine arms were reaching out to seize Java. The sightings put urgency to the growing certainty that the Allies needed a decisive victory, and soon.

On the morning of February 26, the
Houston
returned from a fruitless nighttime sweep of the waters between Surabaya and Bawean Island with the Dutch cruisers
De Ruyter
and
Java,
dropped anchor in the channel between Java and Madura Island, and endured yet another assault by Japanese aircraft. With the harbor defenses by and large abandoned, the
Houston
was the port’s principal antiaircraft installation and its most inviting target. “It was the first time we’d ever fired at anchorage,” remembered Charley Pryor, “and we fired right up to the maximum limits…about eighty-eight degrees. And so we fired that way, and then the opposite battery would pick them up when they crossed over.” With their five-inch guns elevated to fire nearly straight up, the crews had to reckon with their own ordnance coming right back down on them. The larger chunks weighed as much as three pounds, “jagged things a half-inch thick, maybe three or four inches wide at one place,” said Pryor. At one
point the Dutch authorities in Surabaya asked that the ship refrain from directing its antiaircraft fire over the city for fear of harm to its residents.

For the crew, awake all night at general quarters and unable to sleep by day as bombers attacked overhead, there were no breaks for meals. The best they could hope for was ham sandwiches and coffee served at their battle stations. “At the end of three or four days of this, we were really at the end of our physical and psychological endurance,” seaman first class Otto Schwarz recalled. But high spirits endured. At the sounding of the all-clear siren, the
Houston
’s band would gather on the quarterdeck and bounce out swing tunes, bucking up crewmen exhausted by the full-time alerts.

If the
Houston
’s luck in ducking the bombardment was cause for celebration, the arrival of reinforcements for the Combined Striking Force should have inspired a ticker-tape parade. At 2:30 on February 26, three British destroyers stood in, followed thirty minutes later by the HMS
Exeter
and light cruiser HMAS
Perth
. “I cannot ever remember a more heartening sight than those five grey ships steaming into the harbor,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin. The arrival of Capt. Oliver Gordon’s
Exeter
in particular lifted everyone’s spirits. Though she was armed lightly for a heavy cruiser, with just six twin-mounted eight-inch guns, and displaced less than nine thousand tons, typical given the requirements of the naval treaties, she was highly regarded for her part in hunting, with two other Royal Navy cruisers, the German pocket battleship
Graf Spee
halfway across the Atlantic in 1940. It was among the legendary chapters in the Royal Navy’s history. Such gallantry the Allies would need again now.

As the British ships were arriving, Admiral Helfrich, in Bandung, sent an urgent message to Doorman reporting a force of thirty Japanese transports on the move 180 miles northeast of Surabaya. “
Striking force is to proceed to sea in order to attack enemy after dark. After attack, striking force is to proceed towards Tanjung Priok. Acknowledge
.” Helfrich’s instructions suggested both optimism and desperation. He was clearly hoping that the Combined Striking Force could repel the Japanese invasion force in the east and then, continuing to Tanjung Priok—Batavia—stage an encore against the western group.

Late in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Doorman summoned his commanders to his new headquarters in an electric company office in a residential neighborhood of Surabaya. Speaking fluent
English, he said that British radio intercepts of Japanese naval communications indicated that Japanese convoys were steaming east and west of Borneo. He even knew which destroyer squadrons were escorting them. Doorman reviewed the plan for Java’s defense, discussed the formations the Combined Striking Force would use by day and by night, and described each vessel’s role in them. He reviewed the status of his ships, reminding his skippers of the grave wound the
Houston
had taken. The bomb blast on February 4 had cost him three of his fifteen eight-inch guns. Without her aft turret, the
Houston
was unfit to bring up the rear of a column.

With the fall of Borneo, Celebes, and Bali, the enemy’s land-based planes were even closer now. Carriers were nearby and possibly battleships too. A
Kongo
-class battleship had been reported near Singapore, and another in Makassar Strait. Doorman said the probable landing site for Japanese troops would be either the north shore of Madura Island or the oil fields at Rembang in the west. Accordingly, he warned them, a new minefield had been laid off Tuban, west of Surabaya. Then Doorman said something that perked the ears of every captain in the room—and provoked more than one cynical laugh: “There is a possibility in this action we may have some fighter protection.”

The prospect of air cover had been tantalizing. Great promises had been heard about shiploads of planes and pilots en route from the United States via Australia to bolster the defense of the Dutch East Indies. Doorman was expecting the imminent arrival at Tjilatjap of the seaplane tender USS
Langley,
bound from Fremantle with a load of thirty-two ready-to-fly P-40Es and thirty-three pilots, and the cargo ship
Sea Witch,
loaded with twenty-seven more Warhawks, disassembled and packed in crates. Helfrich had ordered them to head for Tjilatjap in a daylight run—a bold decision that carried considerable risk.

Those risks would materialize for the worst. The two ships parted company en route—the
Sea Witch
could not keep up—and the
Langley
crossed paths with land-based bombers of the Japanese Eleventh Air Fleet, patrolling south of Java to extinguish just such an effort. Nearing Tjilatjap on the morning of February 27, the old carrier was set upon by Japanese fliers, struck by five bombs, and left to be scuttled seventy-five miles south of Tjilatjap. The
Sea Witch
later made port undetected, unloaded her crates, and withdrew to Australia. But there would be no time to assemble, much less deploy,
the Warhawks. They never got out of their crates. As the officers gathered in Admiral Doorman’s headquarters seemed already to know, the gallant fliers of the threadbare Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron had all the aircraft they were going to get.

At 8:55
p.m
. that night, barely an hour before Admiral Doorman was to get under way, Admiral Helfrich amplified the spirit of urgency with one further exhortation to his
Eskader Commandant
: “
You must continue attacks till enemy is destroyed
.” This much can be said for the outclassed Dutch admirals: In defense of their second homeland, they did not shy from a fight. For the first time their best ships were gathered in one force. If their enemy’s exact whereabouts still lay shrouded in some mystery, there was no doubt they planned to announce themselves soon. Karel Doorman’s force would enter that fight one-eyed if not blind, and with only the dimmest sense of the forces marshaled against it. But the showdown for Java was coming. Captain Rooks’s
Houston
and the rest of the Combined Striking Force would be ready.

T
he invasion convoy was twenty miles long, arrayed around two parallel columns of troop transports steaming a mile apart, 650 yards between ships, their extended line humped upward gently by the curve of the earth. Heavy with arms and vehicles and khaki-shirted soldiers enflamed with pride of empire, with backpacks, leather boots, and bundles of battle flags that leached red dye in the squalls and deck wash, the transports of the Japanese Eastern Attack Group pushed through the seas, zigzagging at ten knots.