Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [44]
Twice between eight and nine p.m., lookouts called out sightings of enemy destroyers to the east. But they were phantoms, alive only in the imaginations of the watch personnel skittish from four hours of combat. What other threats lurked in the night could only be guessed. Mysterious yellow lights appeared in the water, seeming to rise from the deep in the wake of Doorman’s ships as they steamed. Some observers thought the lights marking their path were the by-product of their disturbance of a shallow sea. “As fast as we popped one group of lights astern, another popped up about a hundred yards to port,” Walter Winslow wrote.
In fact, the lights were not surfacing from below. They were floating down from the sky, parachute-harnessed calcium flares dropped by Japanese spotter plane pilots every time Doorman changed course. The flares traced their track so relentlessly that Jim Gee thought the Japanese had tied them together on strands to be caught by the Houston’s prow and dragged along behind her “like a long string of Christmas lights.” What little chance Doorman had to break through and attack the transports vanished. Takeo Takagi knew his every move.
Karel Doorman was about twenty minutes into his westward coastal run when a great blast swallowed the last ship in his line. The flash of the explosion settled into a moonlit flood of steam, and against that hellish backdrop sailors on the Dutch light cruiser Java looking astern could make out a lamp signaling, “jupiter torpedoed.”
At least it seemed like a torpedo. The explosion tore the British destroyer’s hull on the starboard side, abreast of the number-two boiler room’s forward bulkhead. Though more Long Lances lay in store for this Allied fleet, this was not one of them. It was a mine, part of a Dutch field planted off the coast that very day in anticipation of the coming invasion. Admiral Takagi had declined to pursue Doorman south out of this very fear. Her back broken, the Jupiter floundered and settled and took her time sinking, joining the Kortenaer and the Electra in death. Just seventy-eight of her crew reached the beach, and another handful were later retrieved from the sea by the Japanese.
Perhaps thinking he might seize a last opportunity to reach the convoy, Doorman steered north again, knowing that with every thumping turn of his ships’ steam-driven screws, Japanese aircraft watched him from overhead. At about 9:50 p.m., Captain Waller spied one, glinting by the moon’s light. Shortly thereafter the Allies’ new northerly course was etched in blazing calcium, another string of floating flares tracing their track.
Nerves rattled as the ships passed back through waters that had been their battlefield in the afternoon. The swells here and there were dotted with men adrift—survivors of the Kortenaer. The orders to ignore them stood. The area was still too hot for a rescue attempt. Clinging to or standing in their life rafts, the Dutch sailors blew whistles and hollered, looking for help. As the Houston passed within sight of the survivors, her deck force threw a raft overboard and illuminated the area with a flare. The HMS Encounter stopped—on whose authority it remains unclear—and took aboard 113 in all.
There was yet an enemy to hunt, and the quarry reappeared around 10:30 p.m. The Nachi and the Haguro, last seen some four hours earlier, now materialized to port, bearing down from the north on an opposite parallel course before looping around and tracing a parallel northerly course at a range of thirteen thousand to sixteen thousand yards. Concerned with dwindling ammunition stocks—the two cruisers had fired more than twelve hundred rounds that afternoon, and 348 more after dark—their commanders fired at a deliberate pace. It was futile to engage at that range by night. Star shells couldn’t reach that far. The phosphorous-filled projectiles needed to burst beyond their target in order to silhouette it