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All the Drowning Seas
By Alexander Fullerton McBooks Press, Inc.
Copyright © 1980 Alexander Fullerton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59013-094-0
CHAPTER 1
The Surabaya Strait was a blue wedge glittering between the greens of Madura Island and the Java mainland, and as the squadron closed in towards it Defiant's camouflage-painted steel ploughed water already churned by the two Dutch cruisers and the Australian and the other British one, Exeter. Astern of Defiant came the American, Houston, and then the mixed bag of destroyers — two Dutch, six American and three British — in a slightly ragged seaward tail.
Every damn thing, Nick Everard thought, was slightly ragged. Slightly hopeless. You had to pretend it wasn't, you had to seem to believe in this attempt to stem an avalanche that had rolled clear across the southwest Pacific in just ten weeks ...
Farting against thunder, Jim Jordan of the USS Sloan had called it.
The slaughter wasn't finished yet. Even this force now — this scratch collection of ships — well, they were steaming back into Surabaya now, but only for the destroyers to refuel. Then they'd be sailing again, to meet the invasion fleet that would be arriving within a day, possibly within hours.
De Ruyter, Rear-Admiral Doorman's flagship, had put her helm over to port a few moments ago, and her next-astern, Java, was following her round now. They were leaving the Jamuang rock to port, turning around it to follow the channel into that funnel-shaped approach. Nick became aware of Chevening, his navigating officer, waiting with an eye on him, wanting to know whether Nick would take over the conning of the ship now they were in pilotage waters.
The hell he would. There were still twenty miles to go, to Surabaya itself, and he'd be lunching anyway, as soon as his servant brought the tray up. He told Chevening, "Carry on, please." A very proper, formal-mannered man, was Chevening, like many of these big-ship people; and it was conceivable that some of them might see their new commanding officer, Captain Sir Nicholas Everard DSO DSC RN, as something of an interloper. A destroyer man who'd been out of the Navy altogether between the wars certainly wasn't a typical cruiser captain; for some of them it might be difficult to imagine an RN officer leaving the Service voluntarily, unless there was something pretty odd about him ... Chevening was a senior lieutenant, tall and prematurely balding: his light-coloured eyes reflected the sea's brightness as he waited at the binnacle for the moment when he'd turn Defiant in Exeter's wake. Like a bloody old heron, Nick thought, watching Perth, ahead of Exeter, begin her turn. The Aussie cruiser was an old friend — from the Mediterranean, which was where he'd brought this ship from a few weeks ago. In the Med, before his own destroyer flotilla had been so reduced in numbers that it had virtually ceased to exist, he'd shared actions with Perth time after time: in the Greek operations, Crete, on the desert coast, in Malta convoys, she'd been through the thick of it.
Exeter, veteran of the Battle of the Plate, was turning now. But they were all, men and ships, veterans now.
Nick heard Chevening steadying Defiant on her new course. He lit a cigarette, squinting aft over the flare of the lighter to see Houston, the American, pushing her stem around inside the out-curving wake. Houston's guns were eight-inch, as were Exeter's; Defiant and the other four cruisers were armed with six-inch. With ten destroyers, they were not by any means a negligible fighting force: would not have been, he thought, if it weren't that they'd never fought together or even exercised together, had no joint tactical plan and no common signal code. They could communicate just about well enough to be able to follow each other around. Whereas any Jap force they came up against would be highly trained and integrated. They'd have air reconnaissance too, and their ships wouldn't be old crocks, already worked half to death. What it came down to was that any Jap force of roughly equivalent strength would be able to swallow this lot whole.
He prowled across the bridge and trained his glasses on the Java coastline, on Panka Point and the hill behind it. That strip of coast was about eight miles away, and with the binoculars you could see how the inshore waters were thickly groved with fishermen's stakes. They made what amounted to underwater corrals, by driving in bamboo stakes and lacing them together with lighter branches ... The Japanese would take Java, all right, even if the Dutch did fight to the last man as they were promising. The Allied command had been dissolved two days ago, and General Wavell had flown back to India, leaving the island in the hands of its Dutch commanders. There was no doubt about what was going to happen now. The Japs had taken Bali to the east, Timor beyond it and Amboina north of that, and they'd raided Port Darwin in north Australia; they were in Sumatra to the west and Borneo and the Celebes to the north, they'd got Malaya and Sarawak and fighting had just about ended in the Philippines. They'd won footholds farther afield as well, at Rabaul in New Ireland and Lae in New Guinea; but the main thrust of the assault now was a pincer movement closing in on Java, which they had already isolated and which they'd want in order to close the ring on all the Indies.
It was a good thing, Nick thought, that Wavell had flown out. There was nothing he could have done here. The Japs had to be kept out of India and out of Australia: if they could be held inside that huge perimeter there'd be time to reorganize, rebuild. With the Americans in it now you could reckon that in the long term things would turn out all right. Here and now, things looked bloody awful.
There'd been an "order of the day" issued by the Dutch governor-general. Its text ran: "The time for destruction and withdrawal has now ended, the time for holding out and attacking has come ... The foreign troops which are here will remain and will be maintained through a regular stream of reinforcements ..."
It was a nice thought, but the truth was there'd been an order that no more troops were to be landed in Java. Nick flicked his cigarette-end away down-wind and moved back to the port side of the bridge. Chevening had just ordered an increase in speed; and Defiant was indeed too far astern of Exeter. She'd lost ground somehow during that turn, he supposed. He told Chevening, "Bit more than that, I'd say." The navigator ducked to the voicepipe again and ordered another ten revolutions per minute, to get her back where she belonged more quickly. The last thing you wanted was a Dutchman telling you to keep proper station.
Now that was Leading Seaman Williams's voice, its Welsh lilt easy to identify, as he acknowledged the order through the voicepipe. Williams was new to the ship: he'd been drafted to her from shore duty in Singapore, and he'd left a wife there. Not many days before the end, when Defiant was bringing the last Australian reinforcements up through the Sunda Strait, Williams had requested a private interview and begged to be allowed ashore when they arrived. Nick had allowed it, although he'd been aware he shouldn't have; there was no question of granting shore leave, and he'd have to have Defiant well clear before daylight. He'd told Williams, "I'm trusting you to be in the boat when it comes back. Whatever the situation is ashore, whatever you find out. All right?"
"Aye aye, sir. Very grateful, sir."
Grateful, for the privilege of seeing to his own wife's safety. The town and dock area were already in chaos, thronged with desperate people who had no way out. Williams's wife was Eurasian, and the Japanese weren't behaving any less brutally to people — women particularly — of mixed blood than they were to whites, in the places they'd already over-run. The killick had come back as he'd promised he would, but in a worse state than when he'd landed: he'd failed to contact her or get any news of her. Most telephones were out of order, and the dockyard office where she'd worked had been empty, apparently ransacked. Facing Nick, he'd been stammering, helpless, a man in a waking nightmare. Nick told him that it surely meant she'd got away somehow, over to Sumatra or south to Java. Williams couldn't accept it: there was no way she could have got out, and she was there somewhere, in that panic-stricken rabble. Nick had appreciated how he'd have felt himself if Kate had been ashore there: and all he'd been able to do was tell Forbes, the chaplain, and the doctor, Sibbold, to keep an eye on him. Soon afterwards, two weeks ago, Singapore had fallen to the Japanese.
In his mind he could still smell the burning oil tanks, which had been set alight a week before the surrender. Even with Singapore island under siege, the enemy triumphant in Johore, Allied ships including Defiant had still been bringing troop convoys up through the Sunda Strait. You couldn't use the Malacca Strait because the Japs had established a crushing air superiority early in the battle for Malaya, and those waters were impassable. Without air power, you lost control of the sea; without that, you couldn't prevent enemy landings. The vicious circle tightened. The last troops into Singapore were the Aussie 18th Division, brought in so late they might as conveniently have marched straight into the POW camps. Evacuation had become a rout, a panic rush in anything that floated, and with Jap warships hunting close inshore. By that time there'd been a smoke-pall over Sumatra too, as the Dutch blew up their oil wells and refineries; the glow of the fires around Palembang had been visible in the sky from hundreds of miles out at sea. Nick had seen it when he'd been taking Defiant to meet a convoy of refugees who were being brought south from Natuna Island, a place the Japanese hadn't bothered to stop at in their first wave of assaults. The civilians had been ferried there from Miri in Sarawak and Labuan in North Borneo, just ahead of the enemy landings in those places, and at Natuna they'd been packed into a Dutch steamer which sailed with an escort of one Dutch and two American destroyers. The Dutch destroyer and one of the Americans had been sunk by Val dive-bombers before Defiant could reach them, and on the morning of the rendezvous the steamer was hit and set on fire and had to be abandoned. Defiant and the surviving American, USS Sloan, picked up most of the refugees and then fought their way down to Tanjung Priok — the port of Batavia, Java's capital — under recurrent air strikes. It had felt very much like the Crete battle: the frequent bombing, lack of air support, awareness of defeat, retreat.
A few days ago in Nick's cabin in Defiant, when they'd been licking their wounds in Tanjung Priok prior to sailing to join Doorman's Combined Striking Force at Surabaya, the USS Sloan's captain had remarked, "Darned strange, when you look at how things are right now, how none of us doubts we'll end up winning. Wouldn't you say so?"
Bob Gant, Nick's second-in-command, had glanced at Jordan in surprise. He and the American were both commanders, Gant a year or two older than Jim Jordan.
"Just as well nobody doubts it, I'd say."
He'd pushed back his chair: "If you'd excuse me now, sir. Rather a lot to see to." Getting to his feet, Gant tried to look as if the effort didn't hurt him. He was a small man, with hair already grey although he was still under forty. He'd been in the carrier Glorious when she'd been sunk off Norway in June 1940, and he'd suffered some sort of damage to his spine. He wouldn't admit to it, but Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Sibbold had said he was probably in pain twenty-four hours a day; he wouldn't admit it because if he had they'd have moved him to a desk job ashore.
Which some people might have preferred, Nick had thought, watching him leave the day cabin, to being where Bob Gant was now. Jordan was right: you didn't have to be defeatist or a pessimist, but you didn't have to be blind or stupid either.
Jim Jordan, Commander USN, was a square-built man with ginger hair and a face that broadened at the jaw. His eyes moved back to Nick as the door shut behind Gant.
"D'you have any doubts of it yourself, Captain?"
"That we'll win, eventually?" Nick shook his head. "None at all."
Jordan said, "Present circumstances are not exactly auspicious."
"Oh, I don't know. I mean, so far as Java's concerned." Out loud, one tended to resist the truth. "If the Dutch can hang on ashore ..."
"If ..." Jordan shook his head. "What worries me, frankly ..."
He'd cut himself short. Nick waited: resuming, Jordan spoke more quietly. "Everything. As of this moment, I can't see we have a damn thing going for us. However ..."
He'd checked again. Nick smiled. "As you say — however. Let's drink to that."
"In this whisky," Jordan nodded at it appreciatively as his fist closed round the glass, "I'll drink to just about anything."
He'd come aboard to discuss details of their move to Surabaya, and stayed at Nick's invitation to sample a malt whisky, some Laphroaigh that Nick had acquired in Alexandria. He added, sipping the end of it, "I never tasted one as smooth as this."
"Let's have one for the gangway, then."
"No opposition ... You married, sir? Family?"
"I'm not married now."
He didn't want to have to think too much about it, either. There was a girl in London, Fiona Gascoyne, a young widow, to whom he felt he was more or less committed: to whom he'd wanted to be committed, before he'd got to know Kate Farquharson. Kate was Australian, an Army nurse, and he'd brought her out of Crete on board Tuareg, his destroyer. If it hadn't been for Fiona in the background he'd have proposed to Kate before she and her unit had been shipped home to Australia. In the circumstances, perhaps it was a good thing she had been sent home; but it was a complicated and unsatisfactory state of mind to be in.
He told Jordan, "But family — yes. I have a son who's sort of part adopted American." "How come?"
"My former wife remarried, to an American. He's an industrialist, millionaire I'm told, lives in Connecticut. She had custody of our son Paul, and when the war started he ducked out of college over there and came across to join the Royal Navy. As a sailor, lower deck, but he's commissioned now and a submariner." Nick pushed the cork back into the Laphroaigh bottle. "Last I heard, he was being sent to Malta, to the submarine flotilla we have there." It was the main reason he hadn't wanted to leave the Mediterranean. With Paul in the 10th Submarine Flotilla they might have had a chance to see each other occasionally.
He'd sent Chevening down to get lunch in the wardroom; he'd already had his own, up here on the bridge. It had been corned beef, as usual. Ormrod, one of the watchkeeping lieutenants, was at the binnacle, and Nick was on his high seat in the port for'ard corner of the bridge. Glancing round, he saw Bob Gant coming forward from the ladder. Gant was in Number Sixes — tight, high-collared whites; Nick wore loose-fitting white overalls which he'd had made in Alexandria.
"Suppose we'll only get a few hours in there, sir?"
"If as much." He offered the commander one of his black cheroots, and Gant's refusal seemed a shade defensive. Nick told him, "They aren't as bad as they look, Bob."
"I'll stick to my pipe, sir, thanks all the same."
The Combined Striking Force had been patrolling north of Java since yesterday afternoon, looking for an invasion force that had been reported up there somewhere. They'd found nothing: lacking air reconnaissance, it was a matter of luck whether you bumped into an enemy or missed him. And the destroyers, with endurance strictly limited by the capacity of their fuel tanks, needed to be kept topped-up against the moment when you might run into the invaders.
Not "might," though. Would, undoubtedly. Doorman's object would be to intercept at the earliest possible moment, and break up the convoy. To get at it, at the troopships, you'd have to sink or drive off the escorting warships first.
Gant observed quietly, stating what he knew Nick knew already but feeling he had to mention it all the same, "Ship's company could do with some rest, sir."
The old, old story. Exhausted men, worn-out ships. The Jap ships would be new and fast and their crews fresh, high-spirited with all the momentum of their sweeping victories. Nick asked, leaking cheroot-smoke as he glanced round to see what the officer of the watch was doing, "Is Sandilands happy?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All the Drowning Seas by Alexander Fullerton. Copyright © 1980 Alexander Fullerton. Excerpted by permission of McBooks Press, Inc..
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