Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22) Read online

  Against this irresistible force, the British would throw the best they had available, Admiral James Somerville with three of their new fleet aircraft carriers, cruisers Exeter, Cornwall, Emerald and Enterprise, with destroyers Jupiter, Electra and Encounter. The battleship Royal Sovereign had been joined by Ramillies, but those two ships would remain on duty as convoy escorts.

  Soon the tide would break upon the distant shoreline of the barrier islands, and the last line of defense shielding Australia from possible attack. There, on the largest island rampart of Java, Bernard Montgomery, pleased to take the moniker of ‘Rock of the East’ upon himself, would hastily organize his defense. He had stopped Rommel at Tobruk, just barely, and then stopped Yamashita on Singapore. Now it was his to hold or lose this last bastion of Allied strength in the Pacific.

  The Japanese plan was straightforward and strategically sound. Even as Prime Minister Curtin had argued his homeland was the only suitable base of supply that could host, sustain and build up a credible war fighting machine against Japan, the Japanese also saw Australia as the one place the Allies could use to mount a counteroffensive. Port Darwin was the closest location where sufficient port and airfield capacity permitted this, and the daring bombing raid that struck there was the prelude to operations now underway.

  The decision had been made to sever the lines of communication between Port Darwin and Java, which would mean the Allies would then have to rely on the much more distant port of Perth for logistical support of the island. It was 1,750 miles from Perth to Java, but the route to Darwin was 400 miles shorter, and it was also much closer to resources in eastern Australia. The Japanese had two objectives in mind, both considered valuable for one reason only—their airfields.

  The first was Bali, hugging Java’s easternmost coast, and with a good airfield at Denpasar. The second was the large island of Timor, with good operational fields at both Dili and Kupang. Once taken, these islands would effectively cut off all forces in the archipelago between them, allowing the Japanese to occupy them at their leisure. These operations were principally intended to secure the left flank of the planned invasion of Java, and they would begin with a scrappy, if chaotic naval duel off Bali on the pitch black of a rainy tropical night.

  Chapter 11

  Badung Strait – 25 Feb, 1942

  The airfield at Kendari on the southeast coast of the Celebes was the largest and most modern base in the region, placing Japanese aircraft in good positions to operate over Java. It had but one liability, that being frequent and persistent fog and rain. To assure uninterrupted air support for “Operation J,” the Japanese therefore decided to invade and occupy Bali for its small but useful airfield at Denpasar. They would do so about a week later than these events transpired in the old history, but the outcome would be remarkably true to those events.

  For this mission, a single battalion of the 48th division, the 3rd Battalion of 1st Formosa Regiment, was designated the Kanemura Detachment. It was hoped that this small force could slip in quietly undetected, but it was soon spotted and word was flashed to the local naval commander on the scene.

  Rear Admiral Karel Doorman was determined to put his patchwork fleet to good use that day. Familiar with the Dutch East Indies from his youth when he served aboard survey vessels mapping the waters there, he eventually returned after the Great War and an abortive stint as a pilot. So it was off to the navy, where he was posted at Batavia, eventually working his way up to command the cruiser squadron composed of Sumatra and Java. Today he was aboard De Ruyter, a light cruiser of about 6,600 tons, with seven 5.9-inch guns and ten 40mm Bofors.

  The first sign of a Japanese invasion fleet had been spotted in the Java Sea, but after his abortive attempt to impede the Japanese invasion of Sumatra a few days earlier, his little fleet was now divided into two widely dispersed groups. He had taken the light cruisers Java and his flagship De Ruyter down through the Sunda Strait to the relative safety of the port at Tjilatjap. That was where he was now, along with destroyers Piet Hein, and two American DDs, the John D. Ford and Pope. The Admiral was hoping to have better luck when he got the news that an operation was now underway against Bali, and decided to launch a two pronged attack.

  He would lead his small task force out from Tjilatjap, along the southern coast of Java, and strike through the enemy landing site like an arrow. At the same time, the remainder of his forces at Surabaya on the north coast, would sortie with RNN light cruiser Tromp, and USN destroyers Stewart, Parrott, John D. Edwards and Pillsbury. If he was able to drive the Japanese off with his own group, they would then run right into this second force coming into the Badung Strait east of Bali from the north.

  Admiral James Somerville had not yet arrived on HMS Formidable, diverted by the hunt for a pair of German raiders near the Cape Verde Islands. This left the carriers Illustrious and Indomitable as the nucleus of the Eastern Fleet he was to command, now under the capable hands of another rising star in the fleet, Captain and Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten. Men of his ilk tended to stack up names like that, and medals along with admission to select orders and societies to go with their titles.

  The squadron had been well out in the Indian Ocean to conceal their presence from the Japanese, lingering in low rolling fog and clouds. As soon as they received word from Doorman that he had detected the Japanese fleet and was ready to sortie into the Java Sea, Mountbatten turned northeast running towards the Sunda Strait on the southern tip of Sumatra. Unfortunately, Doorman received word that the British fleet would not arrive in time to support him, and so he undertook to engage the enemy with this daring pincer attack.

  He would be opposed that day by four Japanese destroyers of the 8th DD Division, Asashio, Oshio, Arashio and Michishio, escorting the Kanemura Detachment aboard two troop transports, Sasago Maru and Sagami Maru. Doorman would be late to the party, and the Japanese landing would already be underway when his southern pincer approached through the low clouds threatening rain, a little before midnight on February 25th. Cruiser Java led the way, followed by Doorman in his flagship and the three destroyers. They caught the Japanese still lingering near the sandy coast of Sanur at 22:20.

  Doorman was squinting through his field glasses, frustrated by the darkness and looming presence of the island of Bali. Then he heard the cruiser Java open fire ahead, and the entire scene was soon illuminated when the Japanese fired off star shells to see what they were up against. A confused action resulted, with both sides opening up in a high speed dual that came to nothing. Strangely, Doorman decided to barrel right through the strait heading north where he expected to find his second task force.

  The Japanese, however, turned away to the south, where they found the three allied destroyers that had been about 5500 yards behind Doorman’s cruisers. Captain Jan Chompff on the Piet Hein saw them coming, got rattled, and executed a sharp turn to come around to the south, firing his deck guns and launching torpedoes as he did so. It was then that an unaccountable thing happened. A crewman on the bridge of that destroyer lost his footing in that turn and fell onto a button that controlled the ‘Make Smoke’ command. Thick smoke poured from the funnels, and completely obscured the scene, frustrating the gunners on the American destroyers behind Piet Hein. Putting on speed to try and break through the smoke, the US destroyers emerged just as the Japanese returned torpedo fire against the Dutch DD.

  They were firing the dread Long Lance, and its fabled accuracy, range, and power would not fail the Japanese that night. Piet Hein was struck a fatal blow, and peppered by accurate naval gunfire as she rolled to one side. The two remaining American DDs swapped gunfire with the Asashio in a brief five minute duel before Captain Jacob Cooper on the Ford began to also make smoke. They had already fired off their port side torpedoes, hoping to hit the transports, but failing to do so. So now Cooper came about in an attempt to get his starboard tubes into play, and this brought him right across the bow of the Destroyer Oshio, and into heavy gunfire.

  De
stroyer Pope fired off five torpedoes, all missing wildly in that action, and Ford swung around behind her, still making smoke. In spite of that, the sea around them was erupting with shell splashes that were close enough to wet the decks on both destroyers, and they decided trying to turn back north to follow the Dutch cruisers as ordered would be most unwise. The Americans broke off, running south in the confused action that saw the Japanese opening fire on each other at one point, with the Captains of two of their four destroyers claiming kills that never happened. It was all too typical of night actions, and the high speed in those restricted waters led to the haphazard results.

  With his train of supporting destroyers now out of the action, Doorman was alone with his two light cruisers, though help was not far off. This time the four American destroyers of the northern pincer led the way with orders to charge in and attack the Japanese anchorage. They made a brave torpedo run, confronted by a pair of bulldogs when Asashio and Oshio came around to challenge them. The Japanese gunfire was again very accurate, and the American torpedo strike a miserable failure. Of 21 torpedoes fired, fifteen would miss, four would fail to explode and two would be jammed in the launch tubes.

  The US flotilla had the enemy outgunned with their combined sixteen 4-inch guns to only twelve 5-inchers on the two Japanese DDs, but simply could not get hits. In the meantime, the Japanese saw the thin illuminating beams of searchlights from one of the American ships, slowly fingering the darkness. This gave them a perfect target, and they quickly put two hits on the USS Stewart, damaging her engines and forcing Captain Harold Smith to break off and turn back to the northeast.

  As the remaining US destroyers came about to follow, Parrott and Pillsbury nearly ran into one another, and that near miss also forced the Edwards to make a sharp turn to avoid a grand pileup. The whole mess lurched north, with the Japanese running parallel between those ships and the Dutch cruiser Tromp. Though they brought another six 5.9 inch guns into play, the Dutch could not get hits either, but the two Japanese destroyers had a field day.

  Captain Jan Balthazar de Meester on the Tromp decided to make the same mistake the American destroyer Stewart had made, switching on her bright searchlight to try and find the enemy in the heavy darkness. As the flashing light searched about, it clearly revealed the position of the cruiser to the enemy, and both Japanese destroyers opened fire.

  Asashio pummeled the bridge and conning tower of the Dutch cruiser, her guns firing rapidly, the shell casings careening off the forward deck. The experienced gunners would get no less than eleven hits in a brief, hot engagement that was going to put Tromp out of the action, and lay her up in Australia for months after for repairs. Thus far, these two intrepid Japanese destroyers had been attacked by three cruisers and seven Allied destroyers, and come off the better. Now the odds would shift even further in their favor when Arashio and Michishio came up to join the fray.

  As she turned to fall off to the north, Tromp got in one good hit on the bridge of Oshio, inflicting a number of casualties and temporarily shaking that destroyer badly enough to cause the torpedoes it had just fired to miss badly. Misery loves company, and the American destroyers Stewart and Edwards were inshore of the action near in the vicinity of the damaged Tromp, now attended by the US destroyer Pillsbury. The four allied ships suddenly found themselves under attack by the two newly arriving Japanese destroyers, which ran right between the two groups in a brazen attempt to decide the battle then and there.

  With the two sides passing in opposite directions, the Japanese destroyers were about to run a dangerous gauntlet of fire from two directions. It was a fast and furious gun duel, but this time the two undamaged US destroyers Pillsbury and Edwards, acquitted themselves by putting accurate and damaging fire on the lead Japanese destroyer, Michishio. Tromp joined the action and the Allies riddled the ship with hits that would kill 13 and leave another 83 of her 200 man crew wounded, and the ship itself foundering, and nearly dead in the water.

  Once the ships were clear of each other, the darkness folded her cloak over the scene, and the gunfire ended. Neither side wanted any more of the other, and the Arashio maneuvered to position herself to take her damaged sister ship Michishio in tow. That ship was so badly damaged that it would have to be towed all the way back to Japan. Oshio would be laid up for at least six weeks with extensive repairs required on her bridge, but the other two Japanese destroyers suffered only minor damage. They could claim a tactical victory in having faced down a vastly superior Allied fleet, while successfully shielding the final stages of the embarkation of the Kanemura detachment at Sanur.

  An hour or so after the guns had fallen silent and the smoke cleared, nature intervened with a hard driving rain. It was the kind of weather that would always halt any active operations by Allied forces, the darkness alone often serving to prompt them to settle quietly into defensive positions. For the Japanese, however, it was perfect fighting weather. They would use the cover of darkness and rain to steal up from the shoreline and through the groves of trees towards the airfield at Denpasar.

  There they would find the place defended by a company of irregulars in an outfit known as Korps Prajoda. It was a native contingent, 600 strong, recruited from the local population. While mostly armed with spears instead of rifles, and officered by only a few Dutch regulars, the company at the airfield was backed up by a few old armored cars. Far to the north, the main body of this force would defend, stupidly, at the coastal town of Singaradja. The Japanese had long ago written that site off as a potential landing point due to the steep rocky shoreline in the area. Furthermore, it was the airfield they really wanted, and that is where they attacked with the full battalion now safely ashore.

  Soon the natives of Korps Prajoda would be facing the veteran Japanese troops that had already fought and won in the grueling battle for the Philippines. It was no contest. The airfield fell that night, and little more than a week later, two companies of the Kanemura detachment would sweep the island and overcome the meager resistance of the remaining Korps Prajoda “troops” at Singaradja.

  So it was that with no more than a single pinky on the hand of the Japanese 48th Division, just one battalion, the valuable airfield on Bali was delivered into their hands. They had done this while Montgomery was still busily sorting out the haphazard arrival of his troops from Singapore. With that airfield secured, the Japanese would prepare to move air units there to support the next stage of the attack on Java.

  That same night that part of the plan would swing into motion. General Takeo Ito would take in the veteran 228th Regiment of the 38th Infantry Division, which had taken Hong Kong earlier, intending to seize the vital bases on Timor. Five ships would carry the regiment. Miike Maru, the largest ship at 12,000 tons, held the regimental HQ and support units. Africa Maru carried the 3rd Battalion, Zenyo Maru the 1st Battalion, Yamamura Maru the 2nd Battalion, with 1st Mt Artillery aboard Ryoyo Maru. With a force so small, the loss of any single ship could be disastrous, but the recent action at Badung Strait gave them confidence, and the little invasion fleet would be well covered.

  This same force had just defeated a small combined Australian Dutch force on Ambon Island to the north, and now it would face a similar defense for the attack on Timor. To put the scale of the operation in perspective, Timor was an island roughly twice the size of Crete in the Mediterranean, some 340 miles long and 90 miles wide at its greatest point, compared to the 150 mile length of Crete. Its land mass would exceed the total of all seven of the Canary Islands, which had been fought over so bitterly in recent weeks. Yet to conquer an island of this size, with nearly a million native residents, the Japanese were sending a single regiment, three battalions, and the Allies were defending with even less.

  If Prime Minister Curtin clearly perceived the importance of that island to operations then underway, the units and equipment Australia sent to defend it belied that assessment. In fact, the troops did not even have a reliable radio link from Dili to Darwin. Curtin’s problem was that al
l of his core veteran fighting units had already been sent overseas, and the British always seemed to find one place or another where they were desperately needed. The rest of the Australian Army was ill equipped, barely forming and largely untrained. There were also many other places under threat, New Guinea and Rabaul being uppermost on the list. So the only forces that could be found were small ad hoc battalions given the code names Sparrow, Lark, and Gull. These three little birds flew out to face the might of the Japanese Army, but they could be no more than a brief delaying force.

  Lt. General Sturde, Australia’s Chief of Defense, warned against this policy, seeing it as a “penny packet” dispersion of otherwise valuable battalions. What he wanted was a concentration of force in Australia, and was much behind Curtin’s insistence on recalling home the expeditionary divisions. His misgivings were soon proved correct when Lark Force went to Rabaul, where it arrived just in time to be overwhelmed and captured by the Japanese there in Operation R. Gull Force had already been met and defeated on Ambon by the same troops now coming to Timor. The last bird on the wire was a scrappy band of hearty defenders in Sparrow Force, which was also augmented with a company of Commandos that would prove particularly troublesome to the Japanese.

  Elsewhere, Australia’s real birds of prey, the tough, experienced divisions now en route from the Middle East, were still mostly on the sea. The Eagles and Hawks were coming, but the question remained as to whether they could get there soon enough to matter.

  Chapter 12

  Timor – Feb 26, 1942

  The landings at Timor were as audacious and brilliantly conceived as any of the other operations Japan had carried out. Utilizing a remarkable economy of force, the Japanese would send two battalions south of Kupang in a surprise landing, and then move north to attack the port. A third battalion would land near Dili in the northeast. These were the only two locations with airfield and port facilities worth having, and if controlled, the remainder of the island was largely irrelevant.