Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [31]
As the British ships were arriving, Admiral Helfrich, in Bandung, sent an urgent message to Doorman reporting a force of thirty Japanese transports on the move 180 miles northeast of Surabaya. “Striking force is to proceed to sea in order to attack enemy after dark. After attack, striking force is to proceed towards Tanjung Priok. Acknowledge.” Helfrich’s instructions suggested both optimism and desperation. He was clearly hoping that the Combined Striking Force could repel the Japanese invasion force in the east and then, continuing to Tanjung Priok—Batavia—stage an encore against the western group.
Late in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Doorman summoned his commanders to his new headquarters in an electric company office in a residential neighborhood of Surabaya. Speaking fluent English, he said that British radio intercepts of Japanese naval communications indicated that Japanese convoys were steaming east and west of Borneo. He even knew which destroyer squadrons were escorting them. Doorman reviewed the plan for Java’s defense, discussed the formations the Combined Striking Force would use by day and by night, and described each vessel’s role in them. He reviewed the status of his ships, reminding his skippers of the grave wound the Houston had taken. The bomb blast on February 4 had cost him three of his fifteen eight-inch guns. Without her aft turret, the Houston was unfit to bring up the rear of a column.
With the fall of Borneo, Celebes, and Bali, the enemy’s land-based planes were even closer now. Carriers were nearby and possibly battleships too. A Kongo-class battleship had been reported near Singapore, and another in Makassar Strait. Doorman said the probable landing site for Japanese troops would be either the north shore of Madura Island or the oil fields at Rembang in the west. Accordingly, he warned them, a new minefield had been laid off Tuban, west of Surabaya. Then Doorman said something that perked the ears of every captain in the room—and provoked more than one cynical laugh: “There is a possibility in this action we may have some fighter protection.”
The prospect of air cover had been tantalizing. Great promises had been heard about shiploads of planes and pilots en route from the United States via Australia to bolster the defense of the Dutch East Indies. Doorman was expecting the imminent arrival at Tjilatjap of the seaplane tender USS Langley, bound from Fremantle with a load of thirty-two ready-to-fly P-40Es and thirty-three pilots, and the cargo ship Sea Witch, loaded with twenty-seven more Warhawks, disassembled and packed in crates. Helfrich had ordered them to head for Tjilatjap in a daylight run—a bold decision that carried considerable risk.
Those risks would materialize for the worst. The two ships parted company en route—the Sea Witch could not keep up—and the Langley crossed paths with land-based bombers of the Japanese Eleventh Air Fleet, patrolling south of Java to extinguish just such an effort. Nearing Tjilatjap on the morning of February 27, the old carrier was set upon by Japanese fliers, struck by five bombs, and left to be scuttled seventy-five miles south of Tjilatjap. The Sea Witch later made port undetected, unloaded her crates, and withdrew to Australia. But there would be no time to assemble, much less deploy, the Warhawks. They never got out of their crates. As the officers gathered in Admiral Doorman’s headquarters seemed already to know, the gallant fliers of the threadbare Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron had all the aircraft they were going to get.
At 8:55 p.m. that night, barely an hour before Admiral Doorman was to get under way, Admiral Helfrich amplified the spirit of urgency with one further exhortation to his Eskader Commandant: “You must continue attacks