Battle of the Java Sea, 1942: Doorman's last fight

EBSCO's account calls the Battle of the Java Sea a naval disaster for the Allies and the first full-scale fleet action since Jutland, a battle of more than seven hours fought almost entirely by surface ships. The Australian War Memorial puts it more simply: outgunned, Doorman's force never reached the invasion fleet. The battle ended major Allied naval resistance to the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies.²

The battle was part of the Pacific War. It came after the Battle of Makassar Strait earlier in February 1942, its survivors were hunted down in the Second Battle of the Java Sea on 1 March, and the Allied and Japanese fleets met again at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May.

Background: the last barrier

By late February 1942 the Allies had lost Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Borneo, and the Philippines were falling. What was left of their warships in the region had gathered around Java, the richest island of the Dutch East Indies and the main prize of Japan's southern offensive. Japan wanted the islands for their oil, tin and rubber; the oil fields of Palembang on Sumatra alone, the US Navy narrative notes, produced more than half the oil of the Indies, and they had fallen in mid-February. Two Japanese invasion forces were now closing on Java, one from the northeast through the Makassar Strait and one from the west near Banka.³ › Battle of Makassar Strait, 1942

Command of the Allied navies around Java passed to the Dutch Vice Admiral Conrad Helfrich, with Doorman leading the striking force at sea. The Dutch laid the last of their mines along the north coast of Java, one field off Surabaya as late as the day of the battle.⁴

Armies and commanders

The Combined Striking Force under Rear Admiral Karel Doorman had the Dutch light cruisers De Ruyter, his flagship, and Java, the American heavy cruiser Houston, the British heavy cruiser Exeter and the Australian light cruiser Perth. Its destroyers were the Dutch Kortenaer and Witte de With, the British Electra, Encounter and Jupiter, and four old American four-stackers, John D. Edwards, Alden, John D. Ford and Paul Jones.⁵

On the afternoon of 26 February Doorman met his captains, by EBSCO's account the only conference they held before the battle, and they agreed on a sweep along the coast in search of the convoy. It was a fleet only in name. The ships of four navies had had almost no chance to train together and had no common signal books or tactical doctrine. EBSCO adds that only Exeter had radar and that orders had to be translated from Dutch into English; the 1943 US Navy combat narrative adds that signals went by flashing light in plain English or by Dutch radio to Houston, which relayed them to the American destroyers, and that communications broke down completely during the battle.⁶

Facing them was the escort of the Japanese Eastern Invasion Force under Rear Admiral Takagi Takeo. The Australian War Memorial gives it four cruisers and 14 destroyers protecting 41 transports; EBSCO lists the heavy cruisers Nachi and Haguro, the light cruisers Jintsu and Naka and sixteen destroyers, two of which stayed with the transports. The Japanese had two decisive advantages: floatplanes overhead to spot the fall of their shells, and torpedoes that could be launched from beyond 20,000 yards. EBSCO describes the oxygen-powered Long Lance as far outranging the Allied torpedoes and leaving almost no wake.⁷

The battle in phases

Contact off Surabaya

On 26 and 27 February Doorman swept along the coast in search of the convoy without finding it, and on the afternoon of the 27th he turned back to Surabaya to refuel. As his ships were entering the channel through the minefield, fresh reports placed the convoy and its escort near the island of Bawean. Doorman turned his column around and signaled the other ships to follow him out to sea.⁸

The two forces sighted each other a little after four in the afternoon. The Japanese cruisers opened fire at about 4:16 at very long range, Nachi and Haguro from more than 28,000 yards, and the Allied cruisers replied within a minute or two. For half an hour the cruiser lines traded salvos on roughly parallel courses. Several Japanese shells that struck Allied ships failed to explode; Houston took an 8-inch hit in the engine room from a dud, and Captain Gordon of Exeter noted the same failure on other ships.⁹

Exeter is hit

The turning point came at about 5:08, when an 8-inch shell burst in one of Exeter's boiler rooms. EBSCO credits the hit to Nachi, the combinedfleet.com record of Haguro to her. Captain O. L. Gordon reported that the shell put six of Exeter's eight boilers out of action and cut her speed at first to 11 knots, and at best 15 or 16 afterward. Exeter swung out of line, and the cruisers behind her, thinking she was obeying an order, turned too, leaving De Ruyter steaming alone toward the enemy.¹⁰

In the confusion a torpedo hit the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer, which broke in two and sank almost at once; combinedfleet.com and EBSCO credit it to Haguro. Japanese destroyers came in through the smoke to finish off Exeter. The British destroyer Electra counterattacked to cover her, was disabled by gunfire and sank. Doorman sent Exeter back to Surabaya escorted by Witte de With. Fifty-eight of Electra's crew were pulled from the water the next morning by the American submarine S-38.¹¹

Into the night

Doorman reformed his column and tried, in the dark, to work around the Japanese warships to the transports. The four American destroyers fired their torpedoes at long range to cover him, without a hit, and every thrust north met the escort again. At about half past seven the Allied cruisers came on Nachi and Haguro as they were stopped to recover their floatplanes; the Japanese cruisers got away, but only just. Low on fuel and out of torpedoes, the American destroyers returned to Surabaya at about nine. At about 9:25 the British destroyer Jupiter blew up and sank; Pacific Wrecks and EBSCO identify the cause as a mine from a Dutch field laid that same day, while the 1943 US narrative still thought she had been torpedoed.¹²

Passing back over the place where Kortenaer had gone down, Doorman ordered Encounter to stop and pick up her survivors, and she rescued more than a hundred men. That left his four cruisers without a single destroyer, still steaming north toward the convoy.¹³

Turning point: the night torpedoes

Late that night Nachi and Haguro found the Allied cruisers again. At about 11:32 p.m. a torpedo from Nachi hit Java and one from Haguro hit De Ruyter, and both ships caught fire aft. The accounts disagree on how quickly they went down: combinedfleet.com has Java sinking within a quarter of an hour and De Ruyter burning for hours into 28 February, EBSCO has Java going down about ninety minutes after she was hit, and the 1943 US narrative has De Ruyter sinking within a few minutes. The Australian War Memorial records that she was lost with Doorman and 344 of her crew. Doorman's last order sent Houston and Perth away to Batavia.¹⁴

How many died at the Battle of the Java Sea?

No single agreed total covers every Allied ship lost. The Dutch navy alone lost about 915 men, the figure given in the Dutch parliament, while the Dutch Navy Museum counts 918. Both Dutch cruisers went down with almost all of their crews; De Ruyter took Doorman and 344 of her men by the Australian count, 345 by the Dutch.¹⁵

Why was the Battle of the Java Sea important?

The defeat cost the Allies the core of their naval force around Java and ended major Allied naval resistance in the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese landed on Java the next day, and within days the Dutch surrendered, opening the way to the Japanese occupation of the islands, today Indonesia.¹⁶

The battle delayed the Japanese landing on Java by a day; it did not stop it. Allied claims of Japanese cruisers burning and sinking were not borne out: the combinedfleet.com record shows Haguro, reported sunk by the Allied gunners, back in action on 1 March. In the next two days the survivors were hunted down. Houston and Perth ran into the Western Invasion Force in the Sunda Strait and were sunk in the first hours of 1 March, and the damaged Exeter, trying to escape with the destroyers Encounter and Pope, was caught and sunk with both escorts. Only the four American destroyers reached Australia.¹⁷ › Second Battle of the Java Sea, 1942

For many of the men taken from the water the ordeal was only beginning. Hundreds of survivors of the sunken ships, the Dutch cruisers, Houston and Perth among them, spent the rest of the war as prisoners of the Japanese, and many did not come home.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

Doorman was blamed at the time for poor decisions. EBSCO notes that later historians have judged him more kindly, as a commander who did his best with a fleet that had no common doctrine, signals or radar and who insisted on taking the fight to a stronger enemy; in the Netherlands he is a national hero.¹⁹

His signal has a life of its own. The 1943 US narrative gives it as “Am proceeding to intercept enemy unit. Follow me. Details later,” and the Dutch defense ministry's newspaper as an order for all ships to follow him. In Dutch memory the signal became Ik val aan, volg mij, I am attacking, follow me, and in 1945 a Dutch government recruiting poster put that line under Doorman's name.²⁰

The battle had one last, bitter chapter. In 2016 a diving expedition organized for the 75th anniversary found that the wrecks of De Ruyter and Java had vanished from the seabed and that most of Kortenaer was gone. The ships were the war graves of the men who died in them. A joint Dutch and Indonesian investigation confirmed that illegal salvage of some kind had taken place, and the two countries agreed to cooperate in protecting what remains.²¹