Ship of Ghosts (13 page)

But Admiral Takagi wanted a torpedo fight. It was the Japanese Navy’s way of war. Even if he could outshoot his enemy—his cruisers’ eight-inch guns numbered twenty to Doorman’s twelve—his navy’s tactical doctrine favored the undersea missiles as the weapon of decision. His destroyer squadrons were well practiced in the deadly craft. And already Rear Adm. Shoji Nishimura’s destroyers
were racing in to demonstrate it. The enemy ships were as yet beyond the range of
Houston
’s secondary battery of five-inch guns, but the six-inchers of Doorman’s light cruisers would soon take them up. Capt. Hector M. L. Waller of the
Perth
grew frustrated at his uselessness in a long-range duel. “What possible bloody good can we do here? We should be in there having a whack at them—not sitting here waiting to be sunk.”

At 4:30 the
Naka
and the seven destroyers with her had closed to within sixteen thousand yards of Doorman’s force. They swung out to port and the torpedoes began hitting the sea. The
Haguro
joined this volley too, sending eight Long Lances bubbling toward the
Exeter
. The Japanese ships fired forty-three in all. Admiral Doorman also favored closing the range. His destroyers had torpedoes, but more urgent was the need to bring into the fight his light cruisers’ six-inch guns, the one category of arms in which the Combined Striking Force had superiority.

While the
Exeter
threw salvos at a light cruiser, broad on the starboard beam, the
Houston
’s forward main batteries slammed away at a heavy cruiser. After the sixth salvo Lieutenant Skidmore announced, “Straddle.” Four salvos later, flames and enemy blood flowed. Supervising his crew as they rammed the breeches by hand, Lieutenant Hamlin in Turret One couldn’t see much from within his shuddering armored gun house. But through the turret periscope he did see “a dull red glow of the exploding shells” on an enemy cruiser. “I saw us hit this enemy cruiser one very good wallop indeed. I saw flames shoot up from her after high turret and smoke and flames come up in the waist in the neighborhood of the ack-ack battery.” Hamlin recalled:

Commander Maher, the gunnery officer, whose vantage point was considerably better than Hamlin’s, observed that the
Houston
’s target
was “put on fire early in the engagement” and mentioned “a fire in the vicinity of the forward turrets.” According to Maher, at 4:55
p.m
., a little over half an hour into the battle, “the target was aflame both forward and amidships. The target ceased firing and fell out of column under the cover of the smoke from the fires and from her own funnel.” Ray Parkin, the
Perth
quartermaster, wrote, “Clouds of black smoke poured out of her top up to three-hundred feet high, but she kept firing.” Captain Gordon of the
Exeter,
his gunnery officer, and members of his fire-control team saw hits around the “lower bridge structure.” An aerial photo taken by an American P-40 pilot around this time shows a fast-moving Japanese ship trailing an outsize column of black smoke. When men on the
Houston
heard that a Japanese ship had ceased fire, turned, and withdrawn, spontaneous cheers rose.

With the apparent momentary withdrawal of one of the enemy heavies, the
Houston
turned her guns on the second. But she would score no further hits on the Japanese cruisers. A frayed electrical lead in the forward main gun director, coupled with the whipping back and forth of the towering foremast housing, led to problems with the
Houston
’s gunnery deflection adjustments. “The range was perfect,” the turret officer in Turret Two, Ens. Charles Smith, recalled, “but as we continued to fire on this second ship, we could not tell just exactly where the salvo was going to land. Sometimes it would be five mills to the left, sometimes on and sometimes ten mills to the right.” To a ship that prided itself on gunnery, the failure was intolerable.

The Japanese machinery of war was far from perfect too. As more than forty torpedoes were racing toward the Allied cruisers, several were seen to explode prematurely, rending the sea just a few minutes out of their tubes. Captain Hara on the
Amatsukaze
lamented the defective mechanisms. And he marveled at the apparent professionalism of the Allied captains. They seemed to know just when to throw the helm, combing the wakes of the Japanese torpedoes and presenting the smallest possible profile to the deadly fish.

For the Allies, the seeming ritual nature of the engagement ended less than an hour after it began. A medium-caliber projectile struck the
Java,
while an eight-incher arced down and slammed into the
Houston.
The latter passed through main deck aft of the anchor windlass, penetrated the second deck, and tore through the starboard side above the waterline without exploding. Another hit ruptured
an oil tank on the
Houston
’s port side aft, but it too failed to explode. Either the warheads were duds or the ship’s treaty-mandated limitations on weight, which dictated lighter armor protection than would become typical for a heavy cruiser, paid the dividend of failing to detonate a projectile engineered to sink ships with heavier hides.

S
alvo after salvo exploded into the sea around us,” wrote Walter Winslow, the grounded aviator. “I was mesmerized by the savage flashes of enemy guns, and the sight of their deadly shells flying toward us like giant blackbirds.” Torpedoes approached more stealthily. Their initial release, seldom seen, had to be inferred from the movements of ships. Shortly after five
p.m
., the
Jintsu
and six of the eight destroyers with her in Destroyer Squadron Two snaked in toward Doorman’s force, approached nearly head-on until they were about seventeen thousand yards away, and then withdrew behind a smoke screen. The telltale sequence meant that a second wave of torpedoes was on the way, this time sixty-eight in all, forty-eight from the six destroyers and a total of twenty more from the
Jintsu
and the two heavy cruisers. Trailing the Allied column, the captains of the U.S. destroyers couldn’t see much, but one commander wrote, “Throughout this madness, everyone was painfully aware that torpedoes were knifing their way through the sea toward us, yet Admiral Doorman took no evasive action.”

Then, all at once, all of Doorman’s ships seemed to be swerving out of line. The
Exeter,
in line ahead of the
Houston,
had taken a hit. An eight-inch projectile punched through a gun shield on her starboard secondary battery, killing six, then penetrated downward and
exploded inside a boiler in the B fireroom, killing ten more men. Power to her main battery failed, quieting her guns. As burst steam pipes screamed, Captain Gordon’s ship slowed to eleven knots, hauling sharply out to port. “We were appalled,” Walter Winslow wrote, “to see a billowing white cloud of steam spewing from the
Exeter
amidships.”

The British cruiser’s portside sheer threw Doorman’s column into confusion. The concussive quakes of the
Houston
’s gunfire had shaken her Talk Between Ships radio into malfunction. The delicate arcs in the ship’s signal spotlights were shattered too, and smoke obscured the alphabet flags and Aldis lamps used for communications in their stead. Captain Rooks, unable to communicate, saw the
Exeter
turn and suspected he had missed a signal from Admiral Doorman. The flagship
De Ruyter
lay ahead somewhere, shrouded in the smoke. So Rooks turned too, coming abreast of and then passing the wounded
Exeter
. Maher ordered the
Houston
’s main batteries to check fire as the turrets rotated in unison, rumbling about to stay on target through the turn. The
De Ruyter
continued on course for a moment before Doorman, realizing what was happening behind him, threw a hard port rudder to avoid losing his squadron.

As the cruiser column frayed amid the mounting confusion, Captain Waller of the
Perth
noticed the sorry state of the
Exeter,
billowing steam from the depths of her engineering plant. Aiming to cover the British heavy with a smoke screen, he swung the
Perth
in a counterclockwise loop to the north, racing astern of the south-turning
Houston
eight hundred yards to the engaged side and firing floating smoke pots into the sea that churned out white clouds. The thirty-foot-high wall of smoke gave the
Exeter
a reprieve.

The sight of Waller’s ship in action stirred Lieutenant Hamlin’s pride: “I’ll never forget the
Perth
as she came by there. She was a magnificent sight. Absolutely at top speed, streaming smoke and with battle flags flying at both yardarms and a great big white ensign aft, all guns firing and she looked like a warship really should. One of the finest sights I have ever seen.” In the chaos brought about by the
Exeter
’s sudden trauma, however, no one seemed to realize the risk in turning south while enemy torpedoes were coming in from the west.

“The sea seemed alive with torpedoes running from all quarters,” recalled Walter Winslow. Some surfaced and porpoised as they ran out of fuel. Others erupted in blasts of spray and debris,
self-destructing at the end of their long-range runs. One of them, drifting along at the end of its run, actually hit the
Houston,
gently glancing off the cruiser’s hull. “It was not going at sufficient speed to detonate,” wrote Ensign Smith, “and it bounced off and fell away.” Not knowing the astonishing range of the Japanese Type 93, many officers thought they had come from submarines. The Dutch destroyer
Kortenaer,
trailing the cruisers on the disengaged side and now, with the southward turn, screening them to the west, found herself broadside to a spread of Long Lances. One struck her on the starboard side.

A tremendous explosion produced a tower of seawater that swallowed her nearly from forecastle to fantail. When the splash crashed back down upon itself, the ship was revealed again, lying broken in two, jackknifed and foundering, each ruined half of her gray-green camouflaged hull pointing helplessly to the sky like a partly submerged V. According to Ensign Smith on the
Houston,
“There was only fifteen or twenty feet separating her bow from her stern.”

“Passing close aboard,” wrote Winslow, “we saw a few men desperately scrambling to cling to her barnacled bottom while her twin propellers, in their last propulsive effort, turned slowly over in the air.” A few sailors flashed a thumbs-up sign at the passing American heavy before the remains of their ship disappeared beneath the swells. “No ship stopped to take on survivors,” Winslow wrote, “for any that did could easily have shared the same fate.” The
Kortenaer
was gone within a minute, her crew left alone to contend with the sea.

Admiral Doorman had ordered his ships to leave survivors alone. In torpedo-riven waters, the risks of stopping were too great. The captains of the leading British destroyers did what they could under the circumstances, scrambling to lay smoke around the
Exeter
and give Doorman time to reassemble his cruiser line. Though they built a solid smoke wall, it had no roof. Japanese spotting aircraft droned overhead, radioing back details of the chaos.

At around six
p.m
., as daylight was beginning to fade, the
De Ruyter
appeared through the smoke and haze, blinkering the signal “
Follow me
,” a repeat of Doorman’s earlier cryptic command. Captain Rooks, watching the sea for torpedoes and ordering his guns to engage any Japanese ships closing with the wounded
Exeter,
took the
Houston
in a clockwise circle and steadied the helm on an easterly course behind the flagship. Captain Waller, having finished laying
smoke around the
Exeter,
saw Doorman’s signal and fell back into line with his retiring peers. The
Java
followed.

The
Exeter
’s engineering crew, struggling to coax electrical power from their shattered machinery, seemed to be making progress. Before long, her main battery came back to life, throwing salvos through the smoke at targets somewhere to the north.

A
dmiral Helfrich was helpless to aid his fleet in its hour of need. At 5:25
p.m
., from Bandung, ABDA’s naval commander ordered Admiral Glassford, commander of U.S. naval forces in the theater, to send his submarines to intercept the Japanese convoy, as yet hovering out of sight to the northwest. For Admiral Doorman, there was no telling what the silent service was up to, but his destroyers had torpedoes and now the tin cans were finally able to respond in kind, if not in unison. Doorman signaled, “
British destroyers counterattack
.” Too widely dispersed to form up in column, they made individual sorties.