• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1517 0

till enemy is destroyed.” This much can be said for the outclassed Dutch admirals: In defense of their second homeland, they did not shy from a fight. For the first time their best ships were gathered in one force. If their enemy’s exact whereabouts still lay shrouded in some mystery, there was no doubt they planned to announce themselves soon. Karel Doorman’s force would enter that fight one-eyed if not blind, and with only the dimmest sense of the forces marshaled against it. But the showdown for Java was coming. Captain Rooks’s Houston and the rest of the Combined Striking Force would be ready.

* The Banshee was the Army version of the Navy’s SBD Dauntless dive-bomber.

Part Two

A BLOODSTAINED SEA

Life brings its own education, and the life of the sea permits no truancy. It says to a man, learn to be a seaman, or die. It takes no slurring answer, it gives no immunity…. The ocean cannot be cheated…. It may not be crossed except by those who know the stars.

— Lincoln Colcord

CHAPTER 9

The invasion convoy was twenty miles long, arrayed around two parallel columns of troop transports steaming a mile apart, 650 yards between ships, their extended line humped upward gently by the curve of the earth. Heavy with arms and vehicles and khaki-shirted soldiers enflamed with pride of empire, with backpacks, leather boots, and bundles of battle flags that leached red dye in the squalls and deck wash, the transports of the Japanese Eastern Attack Group pushed through the seas, zigzagging at ten knots.

The majestic sight of it transfixed the captain of the destroyer Amatsukaze, escorting the formation to port. But Cdr. Tameichi Hara’s awe contended with his better judgment. Befitting a responsible commander, he fretted about the uncertainties and risks of the audacious operation. As the rhetoric of conquest was reduced to actual soldiers and ships and planes moving by complex schedules, human imperfection and weakness were becoming all too evident. Hara worried that Allied submarines would be drawn by the transport captains’ carelessness—the black smoke churning from their stacks, their loose attitude toward radio discipline and nighttime blackout doctrine. The flare of a cigarette, seen through the wrong submarine’s periscope, could bring ruin to the entire group.

The two heavy cruisers assigned to guard them, the Haguro and the Nachi, the latter the flagship of Rear Adm. Takeo Takagi’s Eastern Covering Group, trailed the vulnerable convoy by some two hundred miles, exhibiting the supercilious leisure of a triumphant fleet. Those ships would be essential in a face-off with Allied cruisers. Each cruiser carried a main battery of ten eight-inch guns mounted in five double turrets, plus sixteen torpedo tubes loaded with the new Type 93 heavy torpedo, nicknamed the “Long Lance.” Oxygen-fueled and wakeless at a racing-boat speed of as much as forty-nine knots, they delivered a hull-busting thousand-pound warhead up to 43,600 yards—over four times the range of American torpedoes.

Conceit seemed to flow from the highest levels of the Japanese command. The Combined Fleet commander in chief, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, flying his flag in the battleship Nagato, moored near Kure in the Japanese home islands, was little bothered by the small force of Allied warships reported to be gathering against him. When he ordered Admiral Nagumo’s carrier force to strike Darwin on February 19, he urged the destruction of dockside storehouses and shore facilities and instructed Nagumo to let the few Allied warships in the area slip away if necessary. “We must secure oil and other resources of the Dutch East Indies,” Yamamoto announced. “That is of higher priority than pursuing any small American force.” The USS Houston had been declared sunk more than once; why trouble with her now? He ordered his invasion forces to sail against Java even before Nagumo and his carriers could join them in support. “The landing operation does not require the support of a major task force,” he declared. He deemed the Allied fleet “completely demoralized” and