Battle of Makassar Strait, 1942: Doorman's cruisers under the bombers

The Battle of Makassar Strait was not fought in the Makassar Strait, and no enemy ship took part. It was an air attack on an Allied cruiser force on its way there, fought by the ships' antiaircraft guns against bombers that came and went for most of a morning.²

The action goes by several names. The U.S. Navy's 1943 combat narrative called it the action of Madoera Strait, after the waters where the force had gathered; Morison, writing after the war, spoke of the damage the cruisers received in the Flores Sea; the name Makassar Strait comes from where the ships were going, not where they fought.³

Who won the Battle of Makassar Strait and why?

Japan won. Land-based naval bombers flying from newly captured airfields such as Kendari crippled the cruiser Marblehead, wrecked an 8-inch turret of the Houston and forced Rear Admiral Doorman to abandon his raid on the Japanese convoy. The Allied ships had no radar and no fighter cover, so they could only dodge and fire back.⁴

Background: the race for the Indies

In January 1942 Japanese forces were working their way south through the oil-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. American, Dutch, British and Australian warships, combined under the ABDA command, tried to slow them. Japanese troops landed at Balikpapan in Borneo, and on the night of 24 January American destroyers struck the convoy there, sinking or leaving sinking three transports and an old patrol boat. The Japanese took Kendari in Celebes, with its airfield, the same day. The Allies hoped to repeat the success of Balikpapan.⁵ › Battle of Tarakan, 1945

The Japanese came on in two prongs. A central force moved down the Makassar Strait from Davao in the Philippines to the oil fields of Tarakan and Balikpapan in Borneo, with Bandjermasin as its next target. An eastern force worked through Celebes, from Menado to Kendari and on to Makassar town, and seized Ambon on the flank. Each new airfield brought Japanese bombers closer to Java.⁶

Then Allied air reconnaissance reported a new concentration of Japanese ships at Balikpapan, preparing to push south through the Makassar Strait, between Borneo and Celebes. The ABDA command ordered Doorman to take a combined force up the strait and strike it before it could reach its next objective.⁷

Armies and commanders: four cruisers against land-based bombers

Doorman, flying his flag in the Dutch light cruiser De Ruyter, commanded the striking force. With him were the Dutch light cruiser Tromp and three Dutch destroyers, the U.S. heavy cruiser Houston under Captain Albert H. Rooks, the old light cruiser Marblehead under Captain Arthur G. Robinson, and four American destroyers.⁸

Against them the Japanese sent land-based naval bombers, twin-engined Mitsubishi land attack planes in the U.S. Navy's account of the Houston, flying from the bases they had taken in the islands; Marblehead's gunners also reported a wave of single-engined aircraft.⁹

The commanders' decisions

At the beginning of February Admiral Thomas C. Hart, who commanded the ABDA naval forces, at last assembled a combined American and Dutch striking force strong enough to deserve the name. He put Doorman in command and wanted the Japanese shipping gathering off Balikpapan attacked before it moved on, as the American destroyers had done on 24 January.¹⁰

Doorman sailed knowing the risk. On 3 February Japanese bombers made their first raid on Surabaya, a sign that the new airfield at Kendari was already working, and on the way they spotted his ships. Morison judged the plan hazardous with the enemy in control of the air over the Java Sea, but in his words it was now or never.¹¹

The force that sailed in the first hours of 4 February consisted of De Ruyter, Tromp, Houston and Marblehead with four American destroyers and Dutch destroyers, three in the British official history and four in Morison's account. None of the ships carried radar, so any warning of an air attack would be short, and there were no fighters to protect them. Their only defense was speed, maneuver and their own antiaircraft guns.¹²

The battle in phases

Seen from the air. The Japanese knew where the Allied ships were. On 3 February, while the force lay at anchor off Madura Island, Japanese bombers on their way to raid Surabaya passed over and saw it; Doorman went ahead with his plans regardless. Before dawn on 4 February the Dutch and American ships left their anchorage and met at 5 a.m. for a hit-and-run raid into the strait.¹³

The first waves. At 9:49 a.m. the bombers were sighted closing in, 36 of them in the Navy's ship history and in Morison's four formations of nine, about 37 in groups of nine according to the 1943 narrative, and some sixty in the British official history. They came in at high level in V formations and dropped their bombs in salvos from about 14,000 feet. The ships scattered, and the bombers went for the cruisers. Marblehead dodged three attacks, and her gunners shot down a bomber that spiraled toward her.¹⁴

Marblehead hit. A fourth wave of seven planes then put two bombs into Marblehead and a third close aboard the port bow, which tore a hole in her bottom. Fires swept the ship, she listed to starboard and began to settle by the bow, and with her rudder jammed she steamed in circles at full speed while her gunners kept firing and damage control parties fought the fires. By 11 a.m. the fires were under control.¹⁵

Turning point: the hit on Turret III

The attacks on Houston went on for most of the forenoon. She evaded every bomb until the last attack, when a bomb struck the mainmast and burst on the main deck beside her after turret. Fragments set off the powder inside Turret III and started a serious fire, killing many of the men at the turret. The turret was wrecked for good; when Houston was sunk about four weeks later she still had only two working 8-inch turrets.¹⁶

The Dutch flagship De Ruyter was straddled twice by near misses, which knocked out her antiaircraft fire control. With two of his four cruisers damaged, Doorman called off the raid into the Makassar Strait and turned west.¹⁷

Counting the losses

The casualty figures for Marblehead differ by source. The Navy's Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships gives 15 dead or mortally wounded, with 34 seriously injured in its older published text and in Morison's history, and 84 seriously injured in the current online edition. The 1943 narrative speaks of 70 or 80 casualties, several of them fatal.¹⁸

Houston lost many of the men at and below her after turret, and De Ruyter was shaken by near misses, but no Allied ship was sunk. The Japanese airmen reported two cruisers sunk and two more damaged; in fact all four cruisers reached port. The American gunners claimed several bombers shot down, but none of the American or British accounts gives a Japanese loss figure.¹⁹

Aftermath

Steering by working her engines at different speeds, Marblehead made for Tjilatjap on the south coast of Java and arrived drawing 30 feet forward. There her worst leaks were patched, though her rudder could not be repaired, and on 13 February she set out on a voyage of more than 9,000 miles, by way of Ceylon and South Africa, to reach a shipyard in the United States.²⁰

The voyage took Marblehead first to Trincomalee in Ceylon, where she could not be repaired for weeks, and then to South Africa, by way of Durban and Port Elizabeth to Simonstown, where she spent three weeks in dry dock. She went on to serve in the Atlantic and was decommissioned on 1 November 1945.²¹

Doorman did not try again at once. He took his force away from the Java Sea to the south coast of Java, where the ships would be farther from the Japanese airfields; Morison describes the same retirement by way of Sunda Strait.²²

The convoy Doorman had set out to attack never made the voyage he feared. Japanese troops moved down the Borneo coast in small craft, marched overland and took Bandjermasin on 9 or 10 February, the dates given by Morison and the British official history. An invasion force sailed from Kendari for Makassar town on 6 February; Doorman, now at Tjilatjap, was ordered to strike it, but it landed on the night of 8 to 9 February before he could sail. An American submarine sank one of its escorting destroyers, and that was all the Allies could do.²³

By the second week of February Ambon and the key points in Celebes and southern Borneo were in Japanese hands, and their airfields put bombers within reach of the whole Java Sea. The British official history describes the net tightening round the eastern end of Java.²⁴

Houston also went to Tjilatjap for repairs, and was soon at sea again with one turret out of action. In the small hours of 15 February she left Darwin with the destroyer Peary and two Australian corvettes, escorting a convoy of four transports carrying troops to reinforce Timor. The next day Japanese bombers attacked in waves, and Houston led the antiaircraft defense of the convoy; no ship was sunk, but with Timor about to fall the convoy was recalled, and it was back in Darwin on 18 February. Houston sailed west that evening to rejoin Doorman, so she was gone when Japanese carrier aircraft struck Darwin on 19 February and sank Peary and two of the transports.²⁵

Legacy and memory

The Japanese invasion went on. Three weeks later Doorman led what was left of the ABDA fleet against the Java invasion convoy in the Battle of the Java Sea, with Houston firing from her two remaining turrets. Houston and the Australian cruiser Perth, the only cruisers left of the Allied battle line, were sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait in the first hours of 1 March, about four weeks after the Bali Sea attack.²⁶ › Battle of the Java Sea, 1942

Marblehead's long voyage home became a story of its own; the same narrative calls it one of the great stories of the sea, made almost half the way without a rudder.²⁷