Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [47]
Captain Rooks was well aware of the rigorous emphasis his enemy had given to night fighting. In his analysis of the Japanese threat titled “Estimate of the Situation,” written just three weeks before Pearl Harbor and turned over to a colleague for safekeeping when the Houston was in Darwin in January, Rooks referred to the Japanese claim to being “the world’s most capable users of the torpedo” and described their aggressively realistic doctrine for their use in night actions. There was no denying their lethality. The Allies’ bloody discipleship at the feet of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s torpedo virtuosos began with the Battle of the Java Sea. That Rooks, his ship, and gallant crew had survived it was sheerest happenstance.
Once daylight came, revealing no enemy ships nearby, it seemed reasonable for the first time to hope that the Houston might escape the flash flood of Japanese power and regroup in Australia for the long war ahead. “I don’t think there was ever a minute that we didn’t feel that we were going to make it, that we were going to come out on top of this,” said Jim Gee of the Houston’s Marine detachment.
Arriving at Batavia in the early afternoon of February 28, the two ships were stalked briefly by a flight of Japanese torpedo bombers before Dutch Hurricane fighters scattered them in a rare and probably accidental moment of interservice cooperation. At three o’clock Admiral Glassford reached Captain Rooks via secure telephone. “He was so very cheery,” Glassford would write to Edith, “and the more so because [he] had gallantly engaged the enemy.” As the admiral gave Rooks his instructions, a harbor boat met them outside the breakwater and its pilot guided them through its protective minefield.
There wasn’t much to protect. As the Houston and Perth entered port, several merchant ships could be seen resting at odd angles on the harbor floor. What the Japanese planes had not yet smashed lay abandoned in place. Once bustling with industry, Batavia’s port district, Tanjung Priok, looked like a ghost town. As the cruisers moored to the pier to refuel, keeping up steam for an early-morning departure, it was clear that most of the harbor workers were gone. The Javanese and Malayan natives had learned to resent four centuries of European rule. But the Japanese were an as yet unknown quantity. The natives heard promising talk of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. They would find a safe place to await the arrival of the “liberators.”
Rooks and Waller went ashore and took the Australian officer’s staff car to the British Naval Liaison Office. There they received an encouraging report. According to Dutch air reconnaissance, Sunda Strait was wide open. The closest imperial warships were seventy miles to their northeast, heading east. The enemy had nothing within a ten-hour sail of the passage. Rooks and Waller were warned not to fire on any friendly patrol craft that would likely be watching Sunda Strait.
Escape seemed to be on everyone’s mind. Ashore, the Dutch were more interested in rendering the port useless to the Japanese than servicing the Allied ships that now needed them. With evacuation plans in motion, sappers were readying to blow up the dockside warehouses and other facilities. Workers at the soon-to-be-demolished canteen store were generous with their inventory, allowing the sailors to make off with whiskey, cigarettes, and other goods previously earmarked for the “Victualling Officer, Singapore.” Captains Rooks and Waller divvied up a dozen large life rafts that were stacked up on the dock. But more precious cargo eluded them.
The supply of fuel oil available to ABDA naval forces was desperately short. With the sea route from the massive refineries at Palembang, Sumatra, imperiled by Japanese forces, tankers could no longer make the run to Java. The island