Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [30]
As 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