Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [40]
For the Allies, the seeming ritual nature of the engagement ended less than an hour after it began. A medium-caliber projectile struck the Java, while an eight-incher arced down and slammed into the Houston. The latter passed through main deck aft of the anchor windlass, penetrated the second deck, and tore through the starboard side above the waterline without exploding. Another hit ruptured an oil tank on the Houston’s port side aft, but it too failed to explode. Either the warheads were duds or the ship’s treaty-mandated limitations on weight, which dictated lighter armor protection than would become typical for a heavy cruiser, paid the dividend of failing to detonate a projectile engineered to sink ships with heavier hides.
CHAPTER 11
Salvo after salvo exploded into the sea around us,” wrote Walter Winslow, the grounded aviator. “I was mesmerized by the savage flashes of enemy guns, and the sight of their deadly shells flying toward us like giant blackbirds.” Torpedoes approached more stealthily. Their initial release, seldom seen, had to be inferred from the movements of ships. Shortly after five p.m., the Jintsu and six of the eight destroyers with her in Destroyer Squadron Two snaked in toward Doorman’s force, approached nearly head-on until they were about seventeen thousand yards away, and then withdrew behind a smoke screen. The telltale sequence meant that a second wave of torpedoes was on the way, this time sixty-eight in all, forty-eight from the six destroyers and a total of twenty more from the Jintsu and the two heavy cruisers. Trailing the Allied column, the captains of the U.S. destroyers couldn’t see much, but one commander wrote, “Throughout this madness, everyone was painfully aware that torpedoes were knifing their way through the sea toward us, yet Admiral Doorman took no evasive action.”
Then, all at once, all of Doorman’s ships seemed to be swerving out of line. The Exeter, in line ahead of the Houston, had taken a hit. An eight-inch projectile punched through a gun shield on her starboard secondary battery, killing six, then penetrated downward and exploded inside a boiler in the B fireroom, killing ten more men. Power to her main battery failed, quieting her guns. As burst steam pipes screamed, Captain Gordon’s ship slowed to eleven knots, hauling sharply out to port. “We were appalled,” Walter Winslow wrote, “to see a billowing white cloud of steam spewing from the Exeter amidships.”
The British cruiser’s portside sheer threw Doorman’s column into confusion. The concussive quakes of the Houston’s gunfire had shaken her Talk Between Ships radio into malfunction. The delicate arcs in the ship’s signal spotlights were shattered too, and smoke obscured the alphabet flags and Aldis lamps used for communications in their stead. Captain Rooks, unable to communicate, saw the Exeter turn and suspected he had missed a signal from Admiral Doorman. The flagship De Ruyter lay ahead somewhere, shrouded in the smoke. So Rooks turned too, coming abreast of and then passing the wounded Exeter. Maher ordered the Houston’s main batteries to check fire as the turrets rotated in unison, rumbling about to stay on target through the turn. The De Ruyter continued on course for a moment before Doorman, realizing what was happening behind him, threw a hard port rudder to avoid losing his squadron.
As the cruiser column frayed amid the mounting confusion, Captain Waller of the Perth noticed the sorry state of the Exeter, billowing steam from the depths of her engineering plant. Aiming to cover the British heavy with a smoke screen, he swung the Perth in a counterclockwise loop to the north, racing astern of the south-turning Houston eight hundred yards to the engaged side and firing floating smoke pots into the sea that churned out white clouds. The thirty-foot-high wall of smoke gave the Exeter a reprieve.
The sight of Waller’s ship in action stirred Lieutenant Hamlin’s pride: “I’ll never forget the Perth as she came by there. She was a magnificent sight. Absolutely