What was the Second Battle of the Java Sea?
On 1 March 1942, two days after the main Allied defeat in the Java Sea, the damaged British heavy cruiser HMS Exeter tried to escape from Surabaya with the British destroyer Encounter and the American destroyer Pope. Japanese heavy cruisers and destroyers caught them north of Java. Exeter and Encounter were sunk around midday, and Pope was finished off by aircraft and cruiser fire in the early afternoon. Almost all of the survivors spent the rest of the war as prisoners.1
The battle of 27 February had destroyed the Allied striking force; this was its epilogue. With Java about to fall, the last Allied warships at Surabaya tried to slip away, and three of them never got out of the Java Sea.2
Background: the fall of the Malay Barrier
In early 1942 the Japanese advanced through the Dutch East Indies, whose oil they needed. The Allies pooled their ships in the Netherlands East Indies under a joint American, British, Dutch and Australian command, ABDA, with the Dutch Vice Admiral Conrad Helfrich in charge of the naval forces and Rear Admiral Karel Doorman leading the striking force at sea. EBSCO lists the problems that dogged it: a single short conference before battle, orders that had to be translated, and only one ship with radar.3
On 27 February Doorman tried to reach the Japanese invasion convoy bound for eastern Java and met a covering force under Rear Admiral Takagi Takeo. In the Battle of the Java Sea the Allies lost the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java and the destroyers Kortenaer, Electra and Jupiter, and Doorman went down with his flagship. The Office of Naval Intelligence's wartime narrative describes what was left as split between two ports, with most of its ammunition gone.4 › Battle of the Java Sea, 1942
Armies and commanders
Exeter was a famous ship. In December 1939 she had fought the German pocket battleship Graf Spee off the River Plate and been badly damaged. Repaired and refitted with radar, she came out to the Far East in 1941 under Captain Oliver L. Gordon.5
In the Battle of the Java Sea an 8-inch shell struck one of her boiler rooms and cut out six of her eight boilers. Accounts differ on who fired it: the combinedfleet.com record and Pacific Wrecks name the heavy cruiser Haguro, EBSCO the Nachi. She limped into Surabaya late on 27 February, escorted by the Dutch destroyer Witte de With, and after emergency repairs could make only 16 knots.6
Her escorts were the British destroyer Encounter and the old American four-stacker Pope under Lieutenant Commander Welford C. Blinn, the only American destroyer at Surabaya still carrying torpedoes. Against them the Japanese had two groups of heavy cruisers: Nachi and Haguro of Takagi's 5th Cruiser Division, and Ashigara and Myoko, each with destroyers, as well as floatplanes from the cruisers and the seaplane carrier Chitose and bombers from the carrier Ryujo.7
The battle in phases
The breakout. On 28 February the Allied command ordered the remaining ships to leave for the Indian Ocean. The four old American destroyers, out of torpedoes, were to go east around Bali, which was thought safer. Exeter drew too much water for the eastern channel, so she was to go north into the Java Sea toward Borneo and then turn west for the Sunda Strait. Pope was assigned to escort her with Encounter. They sailed after nightfall.8
The first contact. At 9:15 a.m. on 1 March Exeter sighted the heavy cruisers Haguro and Nachi with two destroyers, and the little convoy turned away. A Japanese plane appeared and kept them in sight, and soon more ships were seen ahead. At 9:35 the two Allied destroyers engaged a Japanese destroyer at 12,000 yards, and ten minutes later Exeter and the Japanese cruisers opened fire. Pope laid a smoke screen and the others followed; according to her history she hit the Japanese destroyer and drove it off, and fired two torpedoes without visible result.9
The trap closes. At 11:00 a second group appeared: the heavy cruisers Ashigara and Myoko with the destroyers Akebono and Inazuma. Exeter's engineers had kept working under way and had her up to 25 knots, but it was not enough. The clock times differ between the American record and the Japanese records published by combinedfleet.com, but both describe the same end: a hit in a boiler room knocked out Exeter's power and left her dead in the water, at 11:40 by Pope's history.10
Turning point: the end of Exeter
How Exeter went down is told in two ways. The Australian War Memorial records that she was sunk by a torpedo from the destroyer Inazuma, and Inazuma's own record, as combinedfleet.com presents it, has her firing two torpedoes into the stopped cruiser's starboard side. Pacific Wrecks adds that Exeter's captain had already ordered her scuttled and that the torpedoes struck after the crew had abandoned ship; a survey of the wreck in 2008 confirmed the two torpedo hits. Encounter, trying to cover her with smoke, was hit and sank too; the Haguro record says her captain ordered her scuttled when a near miss stopped her engines.11
Three ships left Surabaya on the evening of 28 February. None of them reached the open ocean.
Pope alone. Pope ran for a rain squall. She had fired all her torpedoes, her old boilers were failing after more than 140 salvos, and her speed was falling. At 12:15 a floatplane from the seaplane carrier Chitose found her as she came out of a second squall. Six aircraft from the cruisers dive-bombed her, and on the eleventh of twelve attacks a bomb exploded close alongside under the waterline near the stern, bending a propeller shaft and opening the hull. Carrier bombers from Ryujo joined in.12
At 12:40 Lieutenant Commander Blinn ordered the ship abandoned and scuttled. A yeoman was killed by the demolition charge meant to destroy the sonar. Ashigara and Myoko then came up and shelled the sinking destroyer, which went down stern first within seconds of the sixth salvo.13
Aftermath: captivity
The same night had gone just as badly in the west. The cruisers Houston and Perth, sailing from Tanjung Priok for the Sunda Strait, ran into the Japanese western invasion force and were sunk shortly after midnight on 1 March; the Haguro record counts 645 killed on Houston and more than 350 on Perth. Only the four old American destroyers that had left Surabaya by the eastern route got away. Slipping through the Bali Strait by moonlight, they exchanged fire with Japanese destroyers at the southern exit, shook them off and reached Fremantle on 4 March.14
The losses in the fighting were small next to what followed. The combinedfleet.com record counts 43 killed and 716 taken prisoner from Exeter, 8 killed and 121 prisoners from Encounter, and one man killed on Pope; Pacific Wrecks gives about 40 dead and some 600 prisoners for Exeter. The Japanese destroyers picked up the British survivors on 1 and 2 March.15
The 151 survivors of Pope drifted for three days in a whaleboat and three rafts until the Japanese destroyer Inazuma, one of the ships they had fought, picked them up on 3 March. They were landed at Makassar in Celebes; the officers were sent on to camps in Japan. They spent the rest of the war as prisoners, and 27 of them died in the camps. Pacific Wrecks follows Exeter's men through the same camp at Makassar, a nickel mine in Celebes and camps in Japan and Manchuria.16
The date is not quite settled in print. The U.S. Navy's history of Pope and the Australian War Memorial both put the action on 1 March, while the EBSCO account of the Java Sea campaign dates the attack on Exeter, Encounter and Pope to 28 February. With these three ships gone, and Houston and Perth sunk in the Sunda Strait in the early hours of the same day, only the four American destroyers that had slipped out through the Bali Strait were left of the Allied striking force, and the Dutch on Java surrendered a few days later.17 › 1 March in military history
Legacy and memory
For more than six decades the wrecks lay undisturbed. Divers working from the survey vessel MV Empress, who had found the Dutch cruisers in 2002, located Exeter on 21 February 2007, roughly 90 miles northwest of Bawean Island, and Encounter the same year. One of them, Kevin Denlay, recalled the moment a twin 4-inch gun mount rose out of the gloom and he knew they had found Exeter. In 2008 veterans of her crew sailed with the frigate HMS Kent to a memorial service over the wreck.18
That peace did not last. In November 2016 an expedition sponsored by the Dutch naval memorial society, the Karel Doorman Fund, found that the wrecks of Exeter and Encounter had been almost entirely removed by illegal scrap-metal salvagers, along with the Dutch cruisers lost on 27 February and the submarine Perch. The survey report went to the Dutch defence ministry, which opened an investigation; for the families of the men lost in 1942, the wrecks had been war graves.19
_sinking_after_the_Battle_of_the_Java_Sea_on_1_March_1942.jpg){kind=link}