Read an Excerpt
Chapter Nine ~ “Guardian Angels”
William Oscar Spears Jr.
Chattanooga, Tennessee
“Bill came to Navy via military school and Severn Prep. With him he brought his own motto of 'Never do today that which you can put off till the day after tomorrow.' A less talented man would have bilged long ago, but Bill rarely has trouble with mental specters. Navy’s white hope in high jumping, he finds plenty of time to show the boys how Culbertson plays bridge. Willie is no snake, but he has such a pleasant disposition that he never says “no” to a classmate’s entreaty to drag blind. Worlds of success to you, Bill, and here’s hoping we are shipmates again when we reach the Fleet.” – The Lucky Bag, 1938
The destroyer USS Pope attempted its escape from the Java Sea in company with the wounded British cruiser Exeter and the destroyer HMS Encounter. By then the Pope had earned a reputation as a fighting ship, having performed well at the Battle of Balikpapan and during a scrape in the Lombok Straits. She and her crew had come through both fights unscathed. Some even considered her “charmed.”1 The three ships departed Surabaya on the evening of February 28 with orders to try for Colombo, on Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), in the Indian Ocean. Their plan was to sail during the daylight toward Borneo’s southern coast, hoping to avoid any Japanese scout planes and, once the sun set, to make a run westward for the Sunda Strait.2
The plan fell apart early on March 1, a sunny day with a calm sea, light swell, and little wind. They were spotted by Japanese scout planes, which had bedeviled the Allied ships’ escape attempts from the beginning. Once Admiral Takeo Takagi of the Imperial Japanese Navy learned where they were, he immediately gave chase. At 0730, while the three-ship column sailed on its westerly leg, the Exeter made first contact with an enemy flotilla of two heavy cruisers and a large destroyer. Lookouts reported the pagoda masts of the Japanese warships bearing down on them from the south-southwest. On the Pope the men left their breakfasts and sprinted to their battle stations. The Exeter’s captain, O. L. Gordon, signaled for a turn southwestward, but his course change helped little. The Japanese turned to match his course and launched more planes from their catapults to keep an eye on the Allied ships from above. In the dazzling sun there was nowhere on the sea for the Allies to hide. They were “as exposed as a caravan in mid-desert.”3 Captain Gordon ordered a northwesterly course change, but escape in that direction was blocked by more onrushing Japanese ships, this time the flagship group of Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi, including two more heavy cruisers and another three destroyers. The Allied ships found themselves massively outgunned, out in the open, and quickly out of options.
The gunfire engagement started at 0935. Quickly the Pope, Exeter, and Encounter launched their portside torpedoes at Takagi’s initial group and their remaining torpedoes at the reinforcing enemy ships that were approaching on their starboard beams. Hits were scored, and to Bill Spears, USNA ’38, in charge of firing the torpedoes, it looked as though one of the Japanese cruisers was sunk. The Japanese fired back with their guns and Captain Gordon quickly made smoke and turned the three ships on a radical course change due east, intending to make a run along the Borneo coast. But IJN ships were everywhere, even then flying down through Makassar Strait, and steaming between Celebes and Bali, and blocking Karimata Strait to the west with the aircraft carrier Ryujo. Gordon’s group was trapped, and their eastward run bought them nothing but an hour. The Japanese were sailing faster and Takahashi’s cruisers eventually overhauled the Allies, closing the range to 14,000 yards. Despite more smoke and salvos fired off the Exeter’s stern, the Japanese gunners were aided by their spotter planes and their shells hit the Exeter from the start.
At 1100 puffy clouds and rain squalls popped up east of the three Allied ships, and Gordon ordered his engineers to “pour on the coal.”4 It was a race they could not win, however. The Exeter was the first to be reeled in. Japanese destroyers drove in on her starboard beam, and though Pope and Encounter fired their guns in support to try to ward them off, the duel was one-sided. Quickly a shell blew apart the Exeter’s boiler room in a cloud of smoke and she slowed to four knots, then went dead in the water. Gordon ordered the Pope and Encounter to keep going as his now wallowing ship was struck again and again by Japanese shells and “murderous fans” of torpedoes.5 Eighteen of them were fired at the Exeter, the last striking just after Gordon ordered his crew to abandon ship into the oil she was leaking. That last blow caused the British cruiser to capsize quickly and go down at about 1140. The Encounter lasted a few minutes longer: she quickly received her own fatal hit, a strike most likely to her ammunition magazine, and sank in a mass of smoke and flame not far from where the Exeter had slipped beneath the surface.
The Pope found herself alone on the water, now the last Allied ship afloat on the Java Sea. According to the historian Theodore Roscoe, “No ship in World War II or any war [before] was in a situation worse than that of this old ‘four-piper’ cornered in the sea below Borneo, with cannon to the right of her; cannon to the left of her; her crew ready to drop from exhaustion; her torpedoes expended; her nearest safe haven, Australia, a thousand miles to the east.”6 As Lieutenant Commander W. C. Blinn, her captain, wrote in beautifully understated fashion, “Her operations . . . had been such as to engender considerable psychological tension.”7
But Blinn refused any talk of surrender, and according to Roscoe, the crew had full confidence in him. They were ready to “sweat it out and slug it out—to hell with the odds!”8 For a moment it seemed as though the Pope might survive. She drove closer to the rain squalls, opaque on the approaching seascape, and Blinn ordered his engineers to squeeze every possible turn out of the engines as he blanketed the ocean astern with more smoke. Geysers from Japanese shells blossomed around them, but none hit, and the Pope flew into the safety of the squall’s clouds and darkness, where they caught a thirty-minute breather. The Japanese faded away behind them. With the break the men rushed more ammunition to the handling rooms and ready boxes and performed quick emergency repairs in the dark cloud bank’s rain. Soon the Pope emerged from the storm, spotted another in the distance, raced through the sun to it, and disappeared into the safety of rain clouds once again. Captain Blinn allowed himself to hope. Perhaps they could continue to elude the Japanese eastward along the Borneo coast and then, at night, race south through Lombok Strait.
But the second rain squall dissipated quickly, once again leaving the Pope beneath a merciless “noonday sky of tropic blue” and Japanese cruiser-carried spotter planes.9 The pilots radioed their sightings, and very soon six dive-bombers from the carrier Ryujo to the west answered.
They arrived on the scene to dive-bomb the Pope at 1230. The Americans initially held the planes off with a single 3-inch antiaircraft gun, but it eventually jammed, leaving the ship’s gunners with nothing for defense save their .50-caliber machine gun, which had little chance against the fast and diving Vals. Blinn had a seaman lie on his back with a pair of binoculars and call out when the planes dropped their bombs. The Japanese pilots made run after run, most of their bombs splashing harmlessly into the sea as Blinn turned aggressively. On the eleventh dive-bomb attack, a near miss damaged the Pope port side aft, punching a hole beneath the water- line, springing seams, and flooding compartments. The port engine had to be shut down before its vibrations shook the ship to pieces. Her time was expiring quickly.
More Japanese planes arrived, this time a swarm of high-level bombers who made their runs at three thousand feet and showered the limping Pope, which by now was visibly settling into the water by the stern, her afterdecks already awash. The ship’s damage control officer informed Blinn the flooding could not be slowed, so the captain passed the order to stand by to abandon ship. His officers raced to destroy code books and rigged critical instruments for destruction. The depth charges were dropped on their “safe” settings. Other men prepared to scuttle the vessel by opening watertight doors and ports. Word was then passed to abandon ship and the sea cocks were opened, magazines flooded, and ten pounds of TNT blown in the engine room. To add to the finality of her destruction, a final 8-inch round from one of the Japanese cruisers then hit with a blast, and the ship sank behind a pall of smoke and steam within fifteen seconds, stern first, listing to starboard.
By then, Bill Spears and the rest of the officers and men on board had quit the ship in good order, taking their assigned places in the motor whale- boat, a damaged wherry, and in her cork rafts. What happened next was inglorious, on both sides. As the survivors of the Pope’s sinking sat in the water, a Japanese seaplane skimmed the motor whaleboat, prompting one American seaman to shoot at the plane with a Browning automatic. Other Japanese pilots in the air then took advantage of the seaman’s rashness and raked the survivors with machine-gun fire for the next thirty minutes. Improbably, no one was killed during the strafing. Soon the whaleboat, the wherry, and the three life rafts linked up in the water, the wounded were moved to the whaleboat, and a muster was taken: only one man had been killed in the battle and the subsequent sinking. Blinn, Spears, and the other officers divided into six watches, and they scanned the sea for signs of an American submarine that might pick them up, as the captain had sent out messages about their plight during the attack.
For three days the survivors drifted. At one point, the men were able to get the whaleboat puttering toward Java, towing the other boat and rafts, but the fuel ran out at noon on the third day. They rigged a sail and the strongest of them paddled, but over time more and more of the crew grew too exhausted in the sun and the heat and they gave up their seats, able to do no more. No American submarine came, but a Japanese destroyer eventually approached over the dark horizon at 2230 on the third night, and all hands, including Bill Spears, were picked up. The men were sprayed with carbolic acid and searched, then taken prisoner.
The Japanese crew treated them professionally. They were given corned beef, chipped biscuits, and a sweet tea, and then, two days later, landed at Makassar City in the Celebes, where their treatment quickly deteriorated. After nine days in a squalid native jail, the officers and men of the Pope were transferred to an old Dutch camp with survivors from the Exeter and the Encounter. Blinn, with the other captains, was sent on to Japan. For Spears, his years-long suffering at the hands of the Japanese as a prisoner of war began.
There were other escapes to be attempted. On February 28, back in Surabaya, Lodwick Alford, USNA ’38, was now on board the Isabel serving as first lieutenant and gunnery officer (ironically, on a ship with no guns) with his Academy classmate Marion Buaas, still serving as the yacht’s executive officer, and they watched the doomed USS Pope and the British ships Exeter and Encounter sail out for their escape attempts. Other ships departed on various courses for safety throughout the day. The Isabel, how- ever, sat camouflaged with bushes and palm fronds and moored along the east bank of the Kali Donan River, which flows into Tjilatjap harbor. She was the last Allied ship in the port, ordered to stay behind and pick up any stragglers or last remaining staff people, and her small crew were growing increasingly anxious by the minute as the necessary orders to leave failed to arrive. At any moment Alford, Buaas, and the others on board expected overflights from Japanese spy planes. They listened glumly throughout the long hours of the day as more bad news poured into the radio shack. They learned of the disappearances of the Houston and the Perth, lost out there somewhere, and of the enemy landings taking place on both ends of Java. They heard that the Exeter, Encounter, and Pope had all been run down and sunk. Alford wrote in his journal: “Japs raising hell everywhere.”10 There was a rumor that an enemy convoy was also headed their way. All the while, they waited.
Finally the Isabel received her orders, and shortly after 2100 on March 1 she slipped her moorings and cleared the minefields. There was bright moonlight, and the men knew the yacht potentially presented a pretty tar- get for enemy submarines, perched as she was on the bright sea. Near 0030 lookouts on the yacht spotted a torpedo wake to port. With no time to take evasive action, the men held their breaths, scared out of their wits, until the fish passed under the bridge without exploding. The captain turned the yacht away from the torpedo’s track and asked for top speed. In his journal Alford noted: “Have a hell of a gauntlet to run.”11
Throughout March 2 the men on board “lived in mortal fear of bombers and warships with hardly anything to fight them with.”12 Alford had never been so scared in his life. At one point during the day, the captain called all hands to the main deck and gave the men a talk. He told them they could expect to be attacked at any time and that if they were going to be sunk, they were going to go down fighting, “throwing spus at them if nothing else was available.”13 If they were desperate and it was possible, the captain told Alford, Buaas, and the men, then they would ram whatever Japanese ships attacked them. They were told to put their life jackets on and keep them on, and to collect all their valuables and protect them as best they could.
“God bless you all, and good luck.”14
As Alford described it,
There followed the most awful, terror-filled hours of my whole life before or since. . . . The doom we felt. Isabel had no effective means of defense. . . . The tension that afternoon was close to unbearable. Anyone who shouted, talked loud, or attempted a bit of humor was immediately glared at and cursed out the side of mouths drawn with anxiety. A slammed door was like a cannon shot signaling the start of death throes of Isabel and our last minutes of life on this earth. I think I know now how a prisoner under death sentence feels as he sits in his cell waiting for guards to come and escort him to the electric chair. Darkness came as a reprieve.15
The Isabel made for the Indian Ocean. Perhaps because she was so small, the yacht was overlooked until 0900 on the morning of March 3, when a cruiser appeared in the distance on a course designed to intercept. Alford was officer of the deck at the time, and he climbed up into a high search platform on the foremast to get a better view. The ship looked Japanese, perhaps a cruiser of the Mogami class, and his heart stopped beating. Surely it was all over. But as Alford continued to look, he noticed something familiar on the cruiser—an airplane crane. That detail quickly reminded him of the American cruisers he had served on, and when the ship challenged them with a signal light, Alford responded with “Don’t shoot!” Across the water was the USS Phoenix, Alford’s old home and a ship he had no idea was within ten thousand miles of the area.
“What a break! Oh, my Guardian Angel!,” Alford remembered.16
The Isabel reached Fremantle on March 6. They had made it through the gauntlet of almost an entire Japanese fleet, with enough fuel left for one more hour of steaming. The mood of the crew improved even more when the Parrott steamed into the harbor later that day, carrying roughly one-third of Alford’s shipmates from the Stewart, but they all waited in vain for the Pillsbury, which had disappeared. Later it was learned that the Pillsbury had been sunk on March 2 by two heavy Japanese cruisers due south of Bali Strait. She had been run down and smothered by the cruisers’ concentrated 8-inch gunfire. Along with the thirty or so former members of the Stewart on board when she went down were two of Alford’s classmates: Edmundo Gandia from Puerto Rico and Howard P. Fischer, who had been Alford’s roommate during that long sail from San Francisco to Manila the previous autumn. Both men were killed. For Alford, “it was one of the most painful experiences of the war.”17
