The Whale Has Wings Vol 3 - Holding the Barrier (9 page)

The Atago meanwhile was trying to reload her torpedoes. While this was a standard operation for Japanese ships, doing it at night in the middle of a gunfight with a battleship was most definitely not, and as a result, the operation was going very slowly indeed. While she was doing so, plumes of water from a new source of heavy guns lifted up around her - the Richelieu, the next ship behind the Prince of Wales, had managed to get a clear arc of fire. Feeling somewhat put out at the way the Royal Navy had been hogging all the fun tonight, the French battleship was firing both accurately and with enthusiasm. A single battleship was more than enough to handle even a heavy cruiser; two was enough to pound the Takao into scrap before she could even come close to reloading her torpedoes.

This time the torpedo salvo from the doomed cruisers was more accurate. Although by now both Japanese ships were on fire and obviously in deep trouble, first one then a second huge plumes of water lofted up above the masts of the Prince of Wales as the huge ship shuddered under the massive explosions. The shock was enough to cut off power to the ship, and it was fortunate that the Richelieu had already engaged, otherwise the Takao at least might have gotten away or reloaded her tubes to do even more damage. As it was neither cruiser was able to do more than land a few shell hits on the French ship, only one of which did any really serious damage - the ships wine storage room was wrecked!

The Prince of Wales was seriously damaged by the two hits. The ships TDS was not designed to handle this weight of warhead, and the ship was suffering heavy flooding along one side and into her forward engine and boiler rooms. Even with counter-flooding of the TDS on the other side of the ship, she was listing at 8 degrees and having real problems getting back under control. It wasn't until 10 minutes after the hit that her engineers managed to reset the shock-damaged circuit breakers and restore some power, but by then the ship had already taken in thousands of tons of water. Fortunately, that was the last Japanese attack of the night, but even so Admiral Somerville spent an anxious half an hour before the ship signalled that she had the damage at least temporarily under control and was able to make way, even if only at 10 knots.

As dawn broke over the South China Sea, Force Z was heading slowly southwest at 12 knots. The Prince of Wale's engineers, pushed on by the knowledge that they were still well in range of the Japanese land-based planes, had managed to get her up that fast, but the ship was handling poorly with the amount of water inside her. The quarterdeck was only inches from the water, and indeed waves were breaking over it frequently. Nevertheless, the ship pushed on as fast as she could. The Melbourne had now rejoined the fleet, and in view of the serious damage to two of his capital ships, Somerville had decided against any further air strikes against the Japanese unless a ship was directly threatening them. Instead, he had eight fighters up as a CAP and four ASV-equipped TBR's sweeping the sea around his force. He had signalled Singapore with the results of the night's action, and a squadron of Goshawks was on its way to Sinkawang airfield in Borneo where they would be able to help cover his force by the following day, landing on his carriers if necessary.

It was just as well that the fleet had reformed its air defences, as the IJN planes would indeed be in action again today. Not as early as expected - the situation after the night action was somewhat confused at headquarters, and it was not until nearly 1000 that someone got around to sending off the first reconnaissance planes. From the reports of the cruisers they had a reasonable idea of where to find them, and even though their job wasn't helped by the increasing cloud covering the area they found the retreating ships by noon, radioing their sighting back to base. Of course, it would have been a much more powerful strike if more aircraft had been available, and especially if they had been armed with torpedoes. However no one seemed to have informed higher command as yet of their problems and asked for more planes to be deployed to them. In any case, this would have taken time, as all the suitable and available naval planes were heavily involved in the attack on the Philippines, and asking the army for help was going to be a very hard decision to make.

Somerville and his staff were busy analyzing the night's actions, and working out what to do next. It was clear from the action photographs and the surface action that the Japanese covering force had been shattered and was effectively unable to interfere in the area until reinforced. The new Sea Eagle had proven itself in combat, and the carriers themselves had taken less aircrew losses than had been originally feared. On the other hand, he had lost a cruiser and a destroyer  and had a carrier and a battleship severely damaged, which reduced his own options until he could regroup. In any case, his remit had never been to destroy the Japanese Navy in the area, but merely make it unable to support the invasion of the British possessions. Of course, destroying it was one way of accomplishing that. It also was looking increasingly as if the IJN had a fast, very powerful torpedo that no-one had known about. While the initial strike on the Ceres could have been a submarine, the later hits on the Prince of Wales and the timings made this unlikely, as any submarine would have had to be right between the ships even though they were moving at high speed. Judging from the power of the explosions, it would be a big beast, which probably explained the range as well - it looked like it could go at least 10,000 yards. This would be a problem in future surface actions if the Japanese could mass their ships to ensure a decent number of hits.

The staff deliberations were interrupted by the news that the fleet had been spotted by a Japanese scout plane - fighters were trying to shoot down the shadower, but the cloud cover meant that for once the Japanese plane got away - base had not ordered it to keep close contact no matter what, so the pilot managed to evade the fighters who seemed to have a surprisingly good idea of where he was. Somerville estimated he had no real choice but to fight off today's attacks, unless he wanted to abandon the Melbourne and the Prince of Wales. He had no wish to do this unless the situation got far worse, and by tomorrow he would have additional land-based cover, and two more days should see him in Singapore. He decided to fight it out. The question now was how much had the Japanese managed to reinforce their land-based strike force since yesterday?

The problem the IJN faced was a lack of fighter cover. Only six Zeros were available to cover the 27 G4M Betty bombers, but they took heart from the reports of the damage done already to the British force. A carrier sunk, and another carrier severely damaged yesterday, as well as a battleship damaged. And it seemed that their cruisers had had successes overnight, while the reports were fragmentary, it seemed that before they had died bravely they had sunk another battleship as well as some more cruisers and destroyers.  While it was possible the British had two carriers left (judging by the night attack), they knew that their own planes had shot down large numbers of their fighters in exchange yesterday - they couldn't have many left now. Their targets were the remaining carriers – removing them would leave the British fleet naked to the power of the Japanese air force.

Force Z had been waiting for an attack ever since the spotter had been detected, and they finally saw it approaching at 1430. The fleet still had 30 operational fighters, and 24 of them either were already in the air or would be sent up to meet the raid. This was a gamble by the controllers - it left them more vulnerable if there was a second attack soon after, but with two slowed and badly damaged ships that would have difficulty evading and indeed surviving more torpedoes they wanted to have the best chance of driving the raid off rather than just surviving it. The fleet had also adopted a different pattern - the damaged Melbourne and Prince of Wales were between the two fleet carriers, this group surrounded by the other three battleships and the remaining AA cruiser.

The confidence of the Japanese airmen was rather discommoded some 25 miles from the fleet when two groups of fighters drove in on them, and they realized that a third was already engaging their top cover of Zeros. The twelve Sea Eagles had used their speed and power to climb above and then dive onto the Zeros at a speed approaching 500mph. While the experienced Zero pilots in fact spotted them as the dove in, they were simply unable to cope with the sheer speed with which the Eagles arrived, and the heavy cannon armament of the British fighters sent four of them spiralling down to the sea before any of them could get a shot off. The FAA had learned from the last few days, and instead of staying to fight the Zeros they just pulled hard out of their dives to come around for another straight-on attack.

While the Zeros were being engaged, the Goshawks had gone for the Bettys in two groups of six. To the delight of the fighter pilots the Betty proved as delicate and as combustible as the Nell. Without any interference from the remaining Zeros, who were busy fighting for their lives against the Sea Eagles, the Bettys were doomed. Still 20 miles from the fleet they had hoped to bomb, the Goshawks kept driving in towards them, determined that they would not reach the ships they were protecting. They didn't, although no one could fault the skill and bravery of the Japanese pilots in trying. In the end, some 20 of the Bettys were lost before the remainder, some damaged, dropped their bomb-loads to turn and escape. None of the six Zeros survived. The victory was not without cost to the defending fighters; despite the advantage of their initial surprise, one of the Sea Eagles was lost to a Zero, and three of the Goshawks were shot down or damaged so badly the pilots had to bail out due to the Betty's defensive fire. Two of the pilots were picked up by one of the escorting destroyers.

It was the last air attack of the day; just as well, as the carriers were now down to only19 operational fighters between them (although a few more would be fixed by morning). It was also the end of the IJN air attacks for the time being. This wasn't realized at the time, and the 15 Goshawks that had flown to Borneo the previous day were flown onto the two fleet carriers the next morning to improve the Fleet's defence. Force Z carried on its slow withdrawal, covering the damaged ships and praying that the weather would stay favourable - a bad storm could easily have finished the Prince of Wales. As it was, the battleship barely made it into Singapore on the 17th, her stern so low she had to crawl into the dock at high tide. The Melbourne was not in quite such a critical state, her buoyancy reserve not having been so badly damaged. While Singapore was a fully equipped dockyard, it was also in range of Japanese air attacks, and it was decided that Melbourne would be patched up quickly and then sent to Ceylon for proper repairs. The Prince of Wales would need more work, due to the considerable amount of water she had taken in, but as soon as enough had been done to make her seaworthy she would go to Durban for what was expected to be another 4-6 months of work to make her operational again. The Richelieu, although hit by three 8" shells, had no major damage, and was expected to be fully repaired in a few weeks.

While Force Z had been making its withdrawal, covering its damaged ships, the Covering Force had been doing the same. The main damage to the Haran was to her bow, and this was so bad that she couldn't move forward - the resistance of her damaged bow, and the pressure of the water on her repairs, was simply too great. So after a discussion, the cruisers Miami and Suzy took her under tow. Backwards.

Which view was of considerable interest and in fact a certain amount of amusement to the Captain of HMS Triumph as he looked at them through his periscope that morning. He'd already been lurking in the general area, hoping that the Japanese force would come in range, but last night's sighting report from the FAA planes had been all he needed for an estimate of how to intercept the force. He was quite surprised to see so few ships; he assumed that the rest of the force was elsewhere, leaving him this nice fat damaged battleship all for his very own.

The Triumph was one of the earlier T-class boats, having four external bow tubes as well as the more usual six internal ones. While the external tubes were a nuisance and impacted her performance, they gave her a very heavy initial salvo indeed. The sight of the Japanese battleships was simply too tempting not to go for all ten torpedoes at once. The Triumph had no problems lining up her shot - being towed backwards by two cruisers wasn't exactly the fastest form of propulsion - and the captain allowed the boats turn to ripple fire the torpedoes across the battleship. Normally he would then have dived to start his evasion on the assumption that the enemy would be looking for him as soon as they saw the torpedo tracks, but he had only seen one destroyer, which was a good distance away, and he just HAD to watch what was going to happen.

Being towed as she was, the Haruna could do nothing to escape, and the shout from a lookout of "torpedoes!" was greeted with despair on the bridge. In quick succession three huge plumes of water burst over the ship as the torpedoes detonated against her side. With the damage already done, that was more than enough to overcome the old ship. Reconstruction could do only so much, and as with all old rebuilt ships, she suffered from weak underwater protection by modern standards. The cruisers had no option but to slip their tows before the increasing weight of the Haruna broke the cables, and could do little more than circle back to her, watching as she slowly, even gracefully, heeled over on her final trip to the bottom.