Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [34]
About that there was little doubt. The only question was how well and for how long the Striking Force’s sailors could function beyond human limits. Some of the gunners on the Houston had been on alert for twenty-one consecutive hours—an unheard-of marathon of tension, concentration, and strain. On the other ships, things were no better. “Throughout Perth there was general frustration and weariness, accentuated by the enemy’s power to sit over them with aircraft and make fools of them on the surface,” a quartermaster on that ship observed.
At 2:27 p.m. the Allied ships were entering the channel through the protective minefield that lay outside Surabaya’s harbor when at last it happened. From Admiral Doorman came word that a Dutch PBY had sighted southbound Japanese transports twenty miles west of Bawean Island. Doorman had wanted good reconnaissance. Now, it seemed, he had gotten it. “The word spread like wildfire throughout the Houston,” wrote Walter Winslow. “Suddenly, men were no longer tired. This time we were hunting no specter force.” The enemy, long sought and seldom encountered, was less than a hundred miles away. Doorman passed the order to turn around in midchannel and led his squadron back out to sea.
CHAPTER 10
No perfect account can be written of the major naval battle that ensued north of Java on the afternoon and night of February 27, 1942. The documentary record of the Battle of the Java Sea suffers from the deaths of so many key participants and from the loss of so many sunken ships’ logbooks that any narrative is bound to disappoint those who expect naval actions to be carefully tracked and cataloged. But if the details don’t always collate, the truth of the battle is not difficult to tease out.
At 2:45 p.m., as Karel Doorman led his squadron to sea, he sent this message to his captains: “Am proceeding to intercept enemy units. Follow me. Details later.” Absent more specific orders, they would be left to ponder those details for themselves. In the Houston, Captain Rooks called “a hurried but deadly serious” conference in his wardroom, where his gunnery officer, Cdr. Arthur Maher, outlined the obvious and daunting objective: to destroy the enemy invasion convoy, after first disposing of any combatant vessels that might be escorting it. While there was no telling how many Japanese warships might be lurking nearby to protect the valuable flotilla, reportedly it was an inviting target, consisting of thirty-five to forty troop transports.
If only Doorman’s aviators could get a look at it for themselves. The Houston’s aviation contingent had been sidelined. Rooks had just one of his original four Seagull floatplanes left. Enlisted pilot Lanson Harris, Lt. Thomas B. Payne, Ens. John B. Stivers, and Lt. (jg) Walter G. Winslow had practically as little to do as Lt. Jack Lamade, who was still cooling his heels on the Australian west coast. With the onset of the air attacks on the Striking Force in Surabaya, Captain Rooks realized the futility and risk of maintaining his own aircraft. He ordered Lt. Payne, the ship’s senior pilot, to fly the last operable SOC off the ship and find a safe place to hide it while the fleet was at sea. As the crew raced to battle stations, Lanson Harris joined the other idlers from the aviation division seeking a good place to watch the coming battle. Walter Winslow climbed to the signal bridge, scanning the northwestern horizon for Japanese ships and looking on with no small amount of anticipation.
Three British destroyers, the Jupiter, the Electra, and the Encounter, were arrayed left to right in line abreast, forming a van scouting line perpendicular to and about five miles ahead of the cruiser column. Doorman’s De Ruyter led the main body of the Striking Force, followed at nine-hundred-yard intervals