Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [45]
A few projectiles landed close enough aboard to thrash the sides of the Houston’s hull underwater like chains flailing at a tin roof. Japanese guns scored on the De Ruyter, hitting the flagship on the quarterdeck. For good measure, the Nachi and the Haguro put a dozen more torpedoes into the water, sixty degrees to starboard, at targets eleven thousand yards away. The ships entered a rainsquall as their commanders counted down the torpedo runs.
Captain Waller was conning the Perth behind his squadron flagship. Seeing the De Ruyter turn and surmising that Doorman had spotted inbound torpedoes, he changed course on cue. The Houston and the Java followed the Perth, pregnant minutes passing before the night was again lit by a blast. It was the Java, taking a torpedo aft. Charley Pryor, scanning the Houston’s port quarter with binoculars, saw her blow. He saw bodies flying through the air, silhouetted by flames, the water burning. Red and pink streamers flew everywhere from the column’s rear. The blast was powerful enough to be felt by crewmen topside on the Perth. Flames leaped above Java’s bridge. She sank so quickly—in about eight minutes—that her steel had no time to melt.
Another torpedo struck the De Ruyter so soon after the first one hit the Java that some witnesses took it as a simultaneous cataclysm or confused their sequence. The flagship “blew up with an appalling explosion and settled aft, heavily afire,” Captain Waller observed. “It happened with the suddenness and completeness that one sees in the functioning of a good cigarette-lighter—a snap and a burst of flame,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin. The inferno’s heat was so intense that sailors on the Perth, following several hundred yards behind the flagship, could feel it on their faces. “I thought it would fry us,” one Australian recalled. “It was so close you could smell burning paint and a horrible stink like burning bodies.”
Reprising what happened that afternoon with the Exeter, the sudden crippling of the De Ruyter derailed the column like a jackknifing freight train. “Captain Rooks frantically maneuvered his cruiser to avoid torpedoes,” Walter Winslow wrote, “and then ordered the Houston into a hard right turn, unaware that the Perth, whose captain was now the senior officer, was overtaking us to starboard in an effort to assume the lead.” Captain Waller had to stop his port engine and turn the helm all the way over to port, and the Perth “just scraped by the port side” of the burning flagship. The Houston sheered out to starboard, nearly colliding with the Perth. Rooks ordered emergency full astern while Ens. Herbert A. Levitt grabbed the wheel from the helmsman and brought the ship back to port, avoiding the Australian cruiser by a mere twenty-five yards.
As the De Ruyter’s crew gathered forward to escape the flames eating the back half of the ship, the fires reached the forty-millimeter antiaircraft ammunition stowage, and small explosions began popping amid the sailors. Glowing metal fragments shot into the night as the ordnance went off en masse. As the fires worsened, Admiral Doorman had no choice but to order abandon ship. One of his last earthly acts was to instruct the last two serviceable vessels under his command, the Houston and Perth, to head for Batavia rather than stand by to recover his survivors. The standing order that disabled friendlies should be “left to the enemy’s mercy” came with no exemption for an admiral. Left behind, the De Ruyter fought the clutches of the sea for nearly an hour and a half before she finally sank. Ensign Smith in the Houston “counted nine separate and distinct explosions before we cleared the horizon.”
Karel Doorman was never seen again. Admiral Helfrich had ordered him to fight to the end, and that is precisely what he did. “The Houston