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By Root 1486 0

by the Exeter, the Houston, the Perth, and the Java. Though the formation looked impressive, its deployment suggested its shortcomings. The Striking Force’s destroyers had been run so hard during the previous few weeks that Doorman could not deploy them as he would have wished. Hamstrung by cranky engineering plants, the John D. Edwards, Alden, Paul Jones, and John D. Ford weren’t fast enough to pass to the head of the formation and take up position on Doorman’s port bow. They settled instead for following in column astern the cruisers. Doorman’s two Dutch tin cans, the Kortenaer and the Witte de With, steamed on his port beam in part because the Kortenaer had boiler trouble that limited her speed to twenty-four knots. Destroyers were called many things—dogs, wolves, cans, thoroughbreds—but never albatrosses.

The Striking Force’s other deficiencies were less apparent to the eye, if equally likely to hamper its lethality. Foremost among these were communications. Despite the development of radio and years spent by different navies creating signal flag systems, Doorman’s ships had a hard time talking to each other. Each nation had its own signals and communications in good order. A naval authority called the system used by the U.S. Navy “a tactical instrument of collective genius, as reliable and thoroughly tested as the laws of physics. It was a treasure of efficiency, cohesiveness and clarity.” But within this multinational force, those virtues were notably overboard. The squadron’s communications were hastily jury-rigged in a futile attempt to accommodate differences in language and protocol.

On the De Ruyter, Doorman broadcast his orders to the Striking Force via a shortwave transmitter in his native Dutch. This was fine for the Java, the Kortenaer, and the Witte de With. But the English-speaking vessels confronted unneeded complexity. A U.S. Navy liaison officer stationed on the De Ruyter, Lt. Otto F. Kolb Jr., and a signalman first class, Marvin E. Sholar, translated the orders concurrently and relayed them via signal light or tactical radio to the Houston, which in turn passed the orders to the Exeter, the Perth, and the destroyers. As a consequence of the translation and rebroadcast, confusion could easily arise as to the sequence of orders. Commanders often could not reconcile them. Even a common language did not guarantee effective communications. If signal flags had to be used, the British and the Americans might as well have been speaking alien tongues, because the British used signal flags that no one else could read.

“Everyone knows that you cannot assemble eleven football players who have never seen each other before, and go out and beat Notre Dame,” Lieutenant Hamlin wrote. “Even if they are good, they need to have some workouts to learn the signals and get to know each other. This team never got any workouts. Two hours after it assembled it was out on patrol.”

“Follow me,” Doorman had ordered. Traditionally, such a command enabled an admiral to lead his column without need of signals. Understated simplicity could work well enough if the squadron shared a foundational understanding of how the commander preferred to maneuver and fight. In this case, noting the murky situation faced by the newly gathered ships of the abortive ABDA organization, critics have said that more should have been required of its commander. The unasked follow-up to Doorman’s order might have been “And then what?”

The battle proper begins at 4:02 p.m., when lookouts on a British destroyer spot three Japanese floatplanes in the north. Visibility is clear, northeasterly winds at Force 1 or 2, the seas rolling with ten-foot swells. On the horizon a blur of gray smoke appears. It grows into a thicker streak of smoke, revealing the presence of distant ships. The minutes pass and soon, by 4:14, steel masts and the tops of foreign superstructures are rising on the northern horizon. Spotting the sprouting thicket of steel, a British destroyer in the van, the Electra, signals to Admiral Doorman: “One cruiser, large destroyers, number unknown,