Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [41]
“The sea seemed alive with torpedoes running from all quarters,” recalled Walter Winslow. Some surfaced and porpoised as they ran out of fuel. Others erupted in blasts of spray and debris, self-destructing at the end of their long-range runs. One of them, drifting along at the end of its run, actually hit the Houston, gently glancing off the cruiser’s hull. “It was not going at sufficient speed to detonate,” wrote Ensign Smith, “and it bounced off and fell away.” Not knowing the astonishing range of the Japanese Type 93, many officers thought they had come from submarines. The Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, trailing the cruisers on the disengaged side and now, with the southward turn, screening them to the west, found herself broadside to a spread of Long Lances. One struck her on the starboard side.
A tremendous explosion produced a tower of seawater that swallowed her nearly from forecastle to fantail. When the splash crashed back down upon itself, the ship was revealed again, lying broken in two, jackknifed and foundering, each ruined half of her gray-green camouflaged hull pointing helplessly to the sky like a partly submerged V. According to Ensign Smith on the Houston, “There was only fifteen or twenty feet separating her bow from her stern.”
“Passing close aboard,” wrote Winslow, “we saw a few men desperately scrambling to cling to her barnacled bottom while her twin propellers, in their last propulsive effort, turned slowly over in the air.” A few sailors flashed a thumbs-up sign at the passing American heavy before the remains of their ship disappeared beneath the swells. “No ship stopped to take on survivors,” Winslow wrote, “for any that did could easily have shared the same fate.” The Kortenaer was gone within a minute, her crew left alone to contend with the sea.
Admiral Doorman had ordered his ships to leave survivors alone. In torpedo-riven waters, the risks of stopping were too great. The captains of the leading British destroyers did what they could under the circumstances, scrambling to lay smoke around the Exeter and give Doorman time to reassemble his cruiser line. Though they built a solid smoke wall, it had no roof. Japanese spotting aircraft droned overhead, radioing back details of the chaos.
At around six p.m., as daylight was beginning to fade, the De Ruyter appeared through the smoke and haze, blinkering the signal “Follow me,” a repeat of Doorman’s earlier cryptic command. Captain Rooks, watching the sea for torpedoes and ordering his guns to engage any Japanese ships closing with the wounded Exeter, took the Houston in a clockwise circle and steadied the helm on an easterly course behind the flagship. Captain Waller, having finished laying smoke around the Exeter, saw Doorman’s signal and fell back into line with his retiring peers. The Java followed.
The Exeter’s engineering crew, struggling to coax electrical power from their shattered machinery, seemed to be making progress. Before long, her main battery came back to life, throwing salvos through the smoke at targets somewhere to the north.
Admiral Helfrich was helpless to aid his fleet in its hour of need. At 5:25 p.m., from Bandung, ABDA’s naval commander ordered Admiral Glassford, commander of U.S. naval forces in the theater, to send his submarines to intercept the Japanese convoy, as yet hovering out of sight to the northwest. For Admiral Doorman, there was no telling what the silent service was up to, but his destroyers had torpedoes and now the tin cans were finally able to respond in kind, if not in unison. Doorman signaled, “British destroyers counterattack.” Too widely dispersed to form up in column, they made individual sorties.
The Electra, first