The Battle of the Java Sea

On 27 February 1942, shortly before four in the afternoon, two squadrons met in the Java Sea north of Surabaya. One was commanded by the Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman: five cruisers and nine destroyers from four navies, Dutch, British, American and Australian, the last coherent Allied naval force in the Dutch East Indies. The other, covering a convoy of more than forty transports carrying troops due to land in eastern Java, was commanded by Rear Admiral Takeo Takagi. The battle lasted, with intervals, until midnight. The Japanese lost not a single ship. The Allies lost two light cruisers, the Dutch De Ruyter and Java, and three destroyers, the Dutch Kortenaer and the British Electra and Jupiter, while the heavy cruiser Exeter came out of the action badly damaged. Doorman was killed in his flagship. The convoy reached Java a day late. On the same day, south of the island, Japanese bombers sank the American Langley, the US Navy’s first aircraft carrier, which was carrying fighters to Java.

Some lists call the admiral “Karl” Doorman and state that the Allies lost two light cruisers and three destroyers. His name was Karel, and the tally is correct for the evening of 27 February, although it leaves out Exeter, which survived for only two more days. Langley, on the other hand, was lost not in the Java Sea but in the Indian Ocean, some 140 kilometres south of Java.

Java encircled

The campaign that the Japanese had opened on 11 January with landings on Tarakan and near Manado entered its final phase. In the last days of February Java, the most important island of the Dutch East Indies, was surrounded on every side. To the west, after the fall of Singapore and the landing at Palembang, the Japanese controlled Sumatra. To the east, after the landings on Bali and Timor, their aircraft could fly from Denpasar airfield, a few minutes’ flight from the eastern tip of Java. From the north the whole island was within bomber range: Japanese aircraft had been bombing it since 3 February, and the raid on Darwin on 19 February had knocked out the nearest Australian base through which reinforcements could come. And the surrender of Singapore on 15 February had deprived the Allies of the main port in which British ships could be repaired.

The joint American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command, set up at the Arcadia Conference, had practically ceased to exist. General Archibald Wavell, convinced that Java could not be held, handed over command to the Dutch on 25 February and flew to India. Remaining on Java were the Governor-General, the commander of the Dutch colonial army, Lieutenant General Hein ter Poorten, and the naval commander, Vice-Admiral Conrad Helfrich, who in mid-February had replaced the American Admiral Thomas Hart. Unlike their allies, the Dutch had nowhere to fall back to: they were defending a colony that since the fall of the Netherlands in 1940 had been the chief basis of their government-in-exile’s existence. Helfrich was determined to fight with the fleet to the end.

Air reconnaissance detected two large convoys. The western one, sailing from Indochina, carried the 2nd Division and was to land troops in western Java, in Bantam Bay and near Eretan Wetan. The eastern one, which had left Balikpapan on Borneo, comprised 41 transports (the figure given by most studies) carrying the 48th Division and Major General Shizuo Sakaguchi’s detachment, and was heading for the coast near Kragan, west of Surabaya. Helfrich threw everything he had at Surabaya against the eastern convoy.

Doorman’s force

Doorman, commander of the Dutch squadron in the East Indies since 1940 and since early February commander of the ABDA Combined Striking Force, had a month of setbacks behind him. On 4 February Japanese bombers had caught his ships in the Flores Sea, in what is known as the Battle of Makassar Strait, and badly damaged two American cruisers. On 15 February, after several hours of air attacks, he had had to turn back from a convoy heading for Sumatra. On the night of 19–20 February his scattered groups failed to stop the landing on Bali and lost the destroyer Piet Hein.

He put to sea on the evening of 26 February with forces that looked formidable on paper. He had two heavy cruisers: the British Exeter, a veteran of the Battle of the River Plate, and the American Houston, which since the air attack of 4 February had been unable to fire her after turret and so had only six of her nine 8-inch (203 mm) guns. He had three light cruisers: the flagship De Ruyter, the older Java and the Australian Perth. They were accompanied by nine destroyers: the Dutch Kortenaer and Witte de With, the British Electra, Encounter and Jupiter, and four old American Clemson-class destroyers.

The numbers were deceptive. The ships of the four navies had never exercised together and had no common signal codes or common fighting doctrine. Doorman’s orders were transmitted in Dutch and translated into English, and an American liaison officer was posted aboard De Ruyter to translate signals. Only Exeter had radar. The crews had not been ashore for weeks, many ships were overdue for maintenance, and the air force that was supposed to provide reconnaissance and cover was exhausted: the aircraft still flying were assigned to defend the bases, not to cooperate with the fleet. According to Dutch sources, before putting to sea Doorman admitted in conversation with Helfrich that he considered the chances of success very slim, and wondered whether it would not be better to take the ships away from Java so that they could fight on from other bases. Helfrich rejected the idea: the Allies were to defend Java with the fleet as well.

After a night of fruitless patrolling along the coast, Doorman was returning to Surabaya on the afternoon of 27 February to refuel and rest his men. The ships were already entering harbour when reports of the convoy arrived, together with Helfrich’s order to attack despite the air raids. Doorman turned back.

The day action

The Japanese convoy escort was stronger than the Allies believed. Takagi had two heavy cruisers, Nachi and Haguro, each armed with ten 8-inch guns, and two destroyer flotillas led by light cruisers: Rear Admiral Raizō Tanaka’s Jintsū and Rear Admiral Shōji Nishimura’s Naka, fourteen destroyers in all. Floatplanes from the Japanese cruisers had been shadowing Doorman’s force since it left Surabaya. The Japanese also had a weapon whose significance the Allies did not yet grasp: the oxygen-propelled Type 93 torpedo, which left no wake on the water and could travel twenty kilometres or more, several times further than Allied torpedoes.

At about 4 p.m. the British Electra fired the first shots. For the first hour both sides fired from very long range, to negligible effect. The Japanese destroyers launched dozens of torpedoes from such a distance that almost all of them vanished without trace or exploded prematurely. The Japanese command later accused Nishimura of wasting torpedoes, and Commander Tameichi Hara, captain of the destroyer Amatsukaze, left one of the most vivid accounts of the battle in his memoirs. The Allied cruisers, for their part, reported hits that had not happened.

The turning point came at about 5 p.m. A shell from Haguro pierced Exeter’s deck and exploded in a boiler room, knocking out six of her eight boilers. The British cruiser slowed sharply and fell out of line. The ships following her, not seeing any signal from De Ruyter, assumed they had missed an order to turn and turned in Exeter’s wake. The Allied line fell apart, and for a moment the flagship was steaming towards the enemy alone. A few minutes later one of the torpedoes fired by Haguro from more than twenty kilometres struck the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, which broke in two and sank within moments. It was probably the longest-range successful torpedo hit in the history of naval warfare.

To gather his scattered force, Doorman signalled “All ships follow me”. In the Netherlands this passed into legend as “I am attacking, follow me” (Ik val aan, volg mij), although according to historians it was an order to re-form the line, not a call to charge. The British destroyers laid a smokescreen to cover Exeter, which was making for Surabaya escorted by Witte de With. Electra, emerging from the smoke, clashed with the Japanese destroyers Asagumo and Minegumo. She badly damaged Asagumo, but was herself hit repeatedly, caught fire and sank. The next morning the American submarine S-38 picked 54 of her crew out of the water. The same destroyer had in May 1941 rescued the only three survivors of the Hood, and in December hundreds of sailors from the sunken Repulse.

As dusk fell, the American destroyers fired their torpedoes at the Japanese cruisers from long range, without result. Takagi concluded that the Allies were withdrawing to port and ordered the convoy to resume its passage south.

The night

Doorman did not give up. After dark he made a wide sweep to get round the Japanese escort and reach the transports from the west, along the coast of Java. But his strength was dwindling. At about 9 p.m. the four American destroyers, which had no torpedoes left and were running short of fuel, left for Surabaya. At about 9.25 p.m. the British Jupiter blew up on a mine. It was most probably a mine from a field recently laid by the Dutch minelayer Gouden Leeuw, of which, according to most accounts, Doorman had not been told. Several dozen sailors were killed. Shortly afterwards the force passed over the spot where Kortenaer had gone down, and Doorman ordered his last destroyer, Encounter, to pick up the survivors and take them to Surabaya. The British rescued 113 Dutch sailors. From then on Doorman had only four cruisers and not a single destroyer.

The Japanese knew his every move. Floatplanes dropped flares over the Allied force, and Nachi and Haguro, which had just been recovering their aircraft, set off at full speed to meet it. Shortly before 11.30 p.m. they sighted the Allied cruisers in the moonlight. After a brief, ineffective exchange of fire, the two Japanese ships fired a salvo of twelve torpedoes from a range of a dozen or so kilometres. The Allied lookouts saw them too late. A torpedo from Nachi hit the stern of Java, the last ship in the line. The explosion of her magazines tore away part of the hull and the cruiser sank within a quarter of an hour. More than five hundred men were killed; only a handful of her crew survived. A few minutes later a torpedo from Haguro struck De Ruyter. The flagship lost power and was engulfed in flames, which also reached her stocks of anti-aircraft ammunition. She sank slowly: according to some sources over an hour and a half, according to others nearly three hours, going to the bottom only in the early hours of 28 February. Depending on the count, between about 345 and 367 of her crew were killed, including Doorman and the ship’s captain, Captain Eugène Lacomblé. The circumstances of the admiral’s death remain unclear: some witnesses claimed that he stayed aboard, while others reportedly saw him on one of the life rafts, many of which were never found.

According to survivors’ accounts, Doorman’s last order was that Houston and Perth should not stop to rescue survivors but should withdraw to Batavia. Captain Hector Waller, commanding Perth, took command of the two surviving cruisers and brought them into the port of Tanjung Priok on the morning of 28 February. The Allied ships could no longer exert any influence on the Japanese, who had been expecting a further clash. Cries of “banzai” rang out from Nachi and Haguro.

The death of Langley

On the same day another ship was lost in the Indian Ocean whose mission was part of the same desperate attempt to hold Java. USS Langley was the American navy’s first aircraft carrier: she had been converted in 1920 from the collier Jupiter, and in the 1920s American aviators had learnt to take off and land on her wooden deck. At the end of the 1930s she was turned into a seaplane tender. In February 1942 she was to deliver 32 assembled Curtiss P-40 fighters to Java, together with their pilots. On 22 February she left Fremantle in a convoy bound for Ceylon, and the next day, on Helfrich’s orders, she detached and headed alone for Tjilatjap (PL) (Cilacap), the only large port on the south coast of Java. Errors in coordination between the Dutch and American commands meant that she had neither a proper escort nor fighter cover.

On the morning of 27 February two American destroyers, Whipple and Edsall, joined her. Shortly before noon, some 75 nautical miles (140 km) south of Tjilatjap, Japanese Mitsubishi G4M bombers, known to the Allies as “Betty”, appeared over the ships. They belonged to the Takao Kōkūtai, a naval air unit named after the Takao base on Formosa, but they had taken off from Denpasar airfield on newly captured Bali. Popular chronologies speak of nine bombers, as does the US Navy’s official dictionary of naval ships. Studies based on Japanese records speak of sixteen aircraft with a fighter escort. Langley managed to dodge the bombs in the first two attacks, but on the third the Japanese dropped their bombs in a pattern that closed off every escape route. Five hits started a fire on deck; the ship listed and lost propulsion. Sixteen of her crew were killed. In the afternoon her captain ordered her abandoned; the destroyers took several hundred survivors aboard and then sank the wreck with gunfire and torpedoes so that it would not fall into enemy hands.

For most of the survivors this was only the beginning. The men were transferred to the oiler Pecos, and the fighter pilots to Edsall. On 1 March both ships, trying to escape to Australia, were sunk by aircraft and warships of Vice-Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s force, which was then operating south of Java. According to the US Navy, more than three hundred of the men who had been aboard Langley, including the army pilots, were killed. The fighters that were to defend the skies over Java never got there.

The toll

The Battle of the Java Sea is sometimes described as the largest clash of surface squadrons since the Battle of Jutland in 1916. It was certainly the first great surface battle of the Pacific War. Its outcome was crushing for the Allies. In a single afternoon and evening they lost five ships and more than a thousand men. The frequently cited figure of about 2,300 dead includes, according to some authors, the casualties of the fighting on the following days as well. The Japanese lost no ships, and the damage to Asagumo and several other destroyers was slight. According to ships’ records a few Japanese sailors were killed, according to some sources several dozen. Doorman had managed to delay the landing by a day at most: the convoy never came within range of his guns.

The reasons for the defeat were identified quickly and are undisputed today. The Japanese had better reconnaissance thanks to their floatplanes, air superiority, better optics and torpedoes of much longer range, and above all a unified command and ships that had trained together for years. Doorman commanded a scratch collection of ships from four navies, communicating through interpreters, without air support and without knowing where the enemy was. His decision to go on searching for the convoy after dark regardless, without destroyers, is sometimes criticised as reckless. For the Dutch it was and remains an expression of the will to fight to the end, in keeping with Helfrich’s order. The admiral cannot have failed to know that he was risking his force, but he also knew that a force spared would not save Java anyway.

The defeat had swift consequences. On the night of 28 February–1 March Houston and Perth, trying to break out through the Sunda Strait into the Indian Ocean, ran into the western convoy and were lost together with the destroyer Evertsen, which was following them. On 1 March, in the Java Sea, Japanese cruisers caught Exeter, which was trying to slip away towards Ceylon, and sank her together with the destroyers Encounter and Pope. Of Doorman’s entire force, only the four American destroyers sent back to Surabaya on 27 February got through to Australia.

Place in the war

The Battle of the Java Sea ended the existence of the Allied fleet in the Dutch East Indies and settled the question of the defence of Java. On the night of 28 February–1 March the Japanese Sixteenth Army of Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura landed on the island at three points, and on 8 and 9 March ter Poorten capitulated. The Dutch navy in Asia ceased to exist: ships that could not be got away in time were scuttled at Surabaya, and the few surviving submarines and surface ships fought on alongside the British and Americans. Japan had won the oil of the East Indies for which it had gone to war.

The defeat taught the Allies several things, albeit belatedly. Ships without air cover and reconnaissance were defenceless in this theatre. The Japanese navy was superior to the Western fleets in night fighting and the use of torpedoes, as the Americans were to learn painfully in the night battles off Guadalcanal in the summer and autumn of 1942. A coalition without a common language, procedures and command lost to a better-organised opponent even when the numbers were even. In the Coral Sea and at Midway a few months later the Americans were already fighting with their own carriers, with air reconnaissance and with radio intelligence that allowed them to read Japanese intentions.

In the Netherlands the battle and the figure of Doorman became a symbol: the navy named successive ships after him, and the anniversaries of the battle are regularly commemorated in The Hague and at the Dutch war cemetery in Surabaya. The wrecks of De Ruyter, Java and Kortenaer, found by divers in 2002 and 2004 and recognised as war graves, almost completely disappeared within a dozen or so years, illegally broken up for scrap. The discovery of this in 2016 caused a wave of outrage in the Netherlands, Britain and Australia.