Cruiser (54 page)

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:

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 failing 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:

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.

In the roiling smoke that lay thick across the sea and shrouded the setting sun itself, the Combined Striking Force
was in disarray. Lieutenant-Commander Hara, in
Amatsukaze
, seeing the Allied cruisers head to the south, assumed he was watching some clever tactical manoeuvre, but in reality it was just a mess. Two factors that would multiply the scale of the ABDA disaster in the Java Sea now came into play.

First, Doorman's ships, hastily thrown together, had never exercised with each other. They were like a team of footballers who had never met, picked at random to play on the eve of a grand final in a game whose rules they barely knew.

The second factor, weighing even more heavily against them, was the communications barrier. Doorman spoke good English but gave his orders in Dutch. These were then translated by an American officer and a signalman assigned to
De Ruyter
, with the delays that entailed. Signals then had to be transmitted to the ships of four different navies, whose codes and methods varied widely and were largely incomprehensible to each other. The Dutch had one system; the United States Navy had another.
Perth
and the British ships operated yet a third system and could communicate perfectly easily together, but not so well with Doorman or the Americans. The International Code of Signals was also unusable, because the Japanese could read its flags just as well. In the end, they settled on an obscure Anglo-French Tactical Code – a system the British themselves rarely employed and which might have been Swahili to everybody else. For the men on the flag decks – and Hec Waller was himself a trained signalman and proud of it – it was an unending muddle.
¹²

Compounding these handicaps was Doorman's inexperience, which became only more apparent as the hours wore on. The Dutch Admiral was out of his depth. In a sane world, Waller, the most experienced officer present, should have commanded the Striking Force, but the politics of the ABDA agreement and the iron hierarchy of naval rank relegated him to a subordinate role.

The Japanese suffered no such problems. Speaking the one language, well trained in strategy and tactics, with morale high
from three months of stirring victories won in the Emperor's godly name, they held the whip hand. And they had another priceless advantage: aerial reconnaissance. Their two heavy cruisers each carried two seaplanes, and the light cruisers one. They were constantly aloft, poking through the smoke to track the Allied ships and to spot the Japanese fall of shot. In the ABDA force,
Perth
's Walrus had been damaged beyond repair at Tanjung Priok, and of
Houston
's two Seagull Scout Observation aircraft – SOC floatplanes, as they called them – one had been flown to Western Australia and the other had been put out of action by blast from the ship's big guns. The Dutch cruisers had none.
Exeter
had radar – she was the only ship on either side equipped with it – and that might have tilted the balance a little, but she was now limping back to Surabaya, escorted by the remaining Dutch destroyer
Witte de With
, which had been damaged by one of her own depth charges exploding close beneath her stern.

Gradually, some order returned to the Striking Force. Flying his ‘All ships follow me' signal yet again – to some of the English-speaking officers, it appeared to be the only thought he had – Doorman headed back to the north-east, still hoping to penetrate the Japanese screen and get at the convoy. At 5.25 pm, he ordered the three British destroyers to launch a torpedo attack. This was another mistake. Left without orders, they had scattered in the earlier melee and were now too widely separated to make a concerted rush at the enemy.

Electra
would be the next to die. Bow wave creaming, she raced out of the smoke into a patch of late sunlight to find herself confronting a light cruiser, probably
Jintsu
, and six destroyers. She got away the first shot from one of her 4.7-inch guns and had the satisfaction of seeing a rose of fire blossom from the upperworks of the leading enemy destroyer,
Asagumo
. After that, though, she had no chance. The Japanese battered her with shell after shell until, finally, one in the boiler room stopped her in her tracks. Even then, she kept shooting with what she had left. Her Torpedo Gunner fired a salvo to
starboard, but it was only a gallant gesture and there were no hits.