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By Root 1550 0

Already the Americans were setting up a major base for its service force—supply ships, tenders, and other auxiliaries—at Darwin in northwestern Australia, the receiving point for convoys of troops, equipment, and supplies arriving from points north and east. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet surface battle group, Task Force Five, consisting of the Houston, the Marblehead, and the thirteen old destroyers of Destroyer Squadron Twenty-nine, joined by the modern light cruiser Boise, was well positioned at Surabaya to guard the lifeline to Australia.* The British made their home port at Batavia, four hundred miles to the west, a better position for running convoys to Singapore. The heavy cruiser HMS Exeter, which had won fame in 1939 hunting the Graf Spee in a legendary pursuit that ended with the German pocket battleship’s scuttling at Montevideo, was the largest Royal Navy ship in the theater.

Painfully aware of Germany’s occupation of their continental homeland, the Dutch were naturally displeased that an American, Hart, was to head the naval defense of their homeland in exile. His appointment to lead ABDAfloat put him in natural conflict with the head of Dutch naval forces in the area, Vice Adm. Conrad E. L. Helfrich, a jut-jawed bulldog of a commander who preferred attack to retreating defense. Born on Java, he knew the region’s straits, coves, and shallows. At the Surabaya conference he reportedly pounded the table and demanded a squadron of heavy cruisers to resist the Japanese onslaught. Though he discovered there were limits to the resources America and Britain could assign to his cause, he still thought Allied surface forces could stymie the enemy convoys, even without air cover.

In a secret prewar analysis that he completed on November 18, 1941, labeled “Estimate of the Situation,” Rooks showed his almost prescient strategic acuity, detailing in 107 typed and hand-annotated legal pages the soon-to-be-exploited weaknesses of the scattered Allied forces in the Pacific. From Singapore’s vulnerability to blockade and land assault to Manila’s exposure to air raids, Rooks catalogued the full range of the Allies’ shortcomings.

The remedy, he argued, was boldness, commitment, and unity. As Captain Rooks sized things up, the best way to contain the enemy’s swelling tide was to base a combined Allied superfleet at Singapore. For a time in 1941, the British discussed reinforcing the Far Eastern Fleet with as many as seven additional battleships. Rooks argued that such a force, augmented by Allied cruisers and destroyers, might contest Japanese control of the South China Sea and block Japanese aggression against the Philippines, Borneo, and Indochina. “When this fleet becomes strong enough to prevent Japanese control of the South China Sea the war will be well on its way to being won,” Rooks wrote. But he ultimately recognized the futility in it. Such a dramatic effort would require an unlikely concentration of resources and will. He saw that without stronger air forces to cover them, with long lines of supply and replenishment, and led by commanders unacquainted with local waters, even a fleet of dreams would have had a hard time of it. Alas, the means had to carry the end. When Rooks took the Houston out of Darwin and headed for the combat zone in the Dutch East Indies, he left behind a copy of his “Estimate” with a colleague. He left behind his optimism too. Historians would be the arbiters of Albert H. Rooks’s ability to divine the shape of things to come.

It would fall to the scattered navies of four nations to save the Dutch East Indies. It would fall to Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite ship; to the Exeter and three smaller cruisers of a Dutch flotilla defending its own imperial shores; to an Australian light cruiser, the Perth, whose pugnacious skipper had made his name in the Mediterranean; to several squadrons of old destroyers still capable of running with bone in teeth but whose better days were behind them; to Capt. John Wilkes’s submarine force, operating on the run without spare parts or a good supply of torpedoes. It would