J. E. MacDonnell - 028, page 12
Later, when fully out, we learned that the objective of the strike was to be Sabang, the big Jap base on the northern tip of Sumatra. There were oil-tanks there, there were aerodromes, and there were ships. How many ships, and if they were warships, we did not know.
All we knew now, all we wanted to know after those unrelieved months of monotonous training, was that at last those prefacing words, "for exercise only," were to be deleted from our firing orders.
As usual, the destroyers got out first. But the big fellows were already beginning to shift their bulk as we slipped past them. We nosed through the boom and in a few minutes had taken up our screening arrowhead formation. A couple of boats had been sent ahead, sniffing around for anything subsurface that might be tempted to take a look or a shot at what was lumbering through the boom.
It was something to look at! The flagship came first, her spreading beam just clearing the boom-gate, her huge armoured snout forcing a toppling mound of white before it, signal halliards a mass of brightly-coloured flags.
We'd all, every one of us, tested through communications and guns as soon as we'd got out. Now the flagship was doing the same. But where our peashooters whipped round under the pulse of the training pumps, those great armour-plated turrets back there moved slowly, the guns sticking from the steel looking in their camouflage paint like rigid pythons; turrets training slowly from left to right, ponderous, powerful, the twin guns lifting till they stuck up at their maximum elevation, huge menacing fingers more than two feet across at their muzzles, and much thicker than that where they disappeared into the gunhouses.
Each of those guns weighed more than ninety-seven tons, without the breech mechanisms. The barrels were a bit over fifty feet long; they would reach across the average suburban block of land.
They came out, one behind the other, three leviathans. Three floating islands of machinery and guns and armour and men.
The flagship was typical. She displaced thirty thousand six hundred tons. At the waterline she was covered with specially-tempered steel thirteen inches thick, an armadillo overlay protecting her great guts. On the gunhouses, which houses the gun-breeches and the loading mechanism and the men manning them, she carried eleven inches of armour-plate.
She carried also three thousand four hundred tons of fuel oil. This capacity gave her a radius of action of four thousand four hundred miles. She was driven by four propellers, and her Admiralty-type boilers transmitted eighty thousand horsepower to those giant clover-leaves of phosphor bronze. Thirty-thousand tons of steel driven through the resistant water at thirty miles an hour.
To fight her, to man her multitude of smaller guns and control-towers, her grant boilers and four engines, there were in her just under twelve hundred officers and men.
There were three of these monsters, and now behind them came the aircraft-carriers, harshly ugly in their flat-topped practicality, flight-decks massed with fighter and torpedo-bomber aircraft.
We watched, having seen all this before, but now worked upon by the alchemy of final purpose. Silent we watched, our feelings in our silence. The fuse-setter on the left gun became our spokesman. His voice was low, subdued, wondering.
"Jeez," he said.
Another ten minutes and Trincomalee harbour was strangely empty. Another half-hour and the whole island was a dark blur well astern. The Fleet made a splendid picture, steaming through a sea as mute as a dream, in close, compact battle formation, destroyers thrown out ahead in their screening V, then inside the cruisers, fast, held down to twenty knots, themselves screening the solid metal core of battleships and carriers. Far ahead, weaving back and across a blue sky, a Catalina cleared the way.
The second day out we dropped our guard-rails down. This simple operation gave a peculiar look of speed, and efficiency, and readiness to the ship: that nervy look of "cleared for action."
Then the captain passed on through the speakers a message from the commander-in-chief:
"Our objective is the harbour of Sabang, an island base just off the northern tip of Sumatra. The Jap has large concentrations of shipping there, oiling wharves, and aerodromes. Our bombers and fighters will take off at 0500 tomorrow morning, and we hope to catch `em with their kimonos up. so far we are undetected."
That night, tuning for the B.B.C. news, we picked up Japanese music.
When the news came through, we heard an announcement to the effect that Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander-in-Chief South-East Asia, had established his headquarters in Ceylon, "for the purpose of directing powerful blows against the enemy."
While the announcer's, cultivated tones flowed smoothly on, Mountbatten's Fleet, darkened, purposeful, in all its organised perfectness, slid steadily on towards the harbour of Sabang.
It was a lovely night, the eighteenth.
There was little cloud in the sky, and above the masthead the stars hung countless in a thin cloud of luminous dust. Our blackout of course was perfect, and not a slit of light showed in the shadow of the quiet night that lay upon the ship.
We closed-up for our normal watches at guns and tubes, and there was no need now for petty-officers and leading-hands to walk round their mountings ensuring that no man slept.
Talk was sporadic, quiet. It might be a bloodless operation for this great Fleet, it might all devolve on the aircraft. It might also be a desperate action, if those ships the admiral had spoken of decided to come out and have a go.
The older hands knew this. The younger ones sensed it, and they knew what they would be in for-hadn't we instructors done our level best over the past months to put them in the picture?
The night wore on. No sound from the dim mass of ships behind us, no sound but the sigh of the wind in the hilliards and rigging, and the soft hiss of the water sliding wetly down her sides, and the distant throb of the screws beating round at reduced speed.
Everyone on board had been getting ready for the coming dawn.
They wore an odd assortment of clothes, from greys and long khaki trousers to clean overalls, but all covering arms and legs from the green hot flashes from guns, shells, and bombs. We steamed on.
Watches drew to their close, gun-crews and lookouts and signalmen were relieved. Then, at 4.30 in the morning, the ship closed quickly and quietly up at action stations.
We stood there round our guns, waiting for the dawn. From my gun I could see the long black barrels of the oerlikons and pom-pom pointing at the sky, a shadow moving restlessly behind the armoured shields as the layers shifted position.
Now and again the twin barrels of A-gun below us swept round with a grind of machinery as the trainer eased the strain on the hydraulic pump. B-mounting did the same.
Then it was light, and the shapes of the consort ships gradually formed from the dimness of the sea; the rakish beauty of the destroyers and the harsh ugliness of the battleships and carriers.
We were not detailed as crash destroyer for the carriers this time, but the Fleet was in such compact formation that we could see plainly enough.
When exercising, the carriers had always reminded me of fussy old hens with their brood of chickens. But now as they turned into the wind, their attendant destroyers racing close by off the quarter, they seemed dark and menacing, not fussy, but steelily menacing.
Every fifteen seconds a roaring black shape spat from their decks, to circle round once, then, high in the lightening sky, forming up and winging away on their mission like a swarm of angry hornets.
With protecting fighters orbiting overhead the Battle Fleet hauled off to seaward, for manoeuvring room should the Jap be stung into engaging by sea.
Time moved on. Watchful, waiting time. We had breakfast at the guns, and we knew that by now the bombers would be over the target. The morning passed, the sun climbed higher up the cobalt vault and we felt its fierce heat, sweating under the anti-flash helmets and long gloves.
Then large formations of aircraft were sighted approaching from the east, which was the land.
They were ours. With long-drilled ease the great ships gathered in their satiated broods, then the Fleet formed-up in battle formation, our bow swung round, and we were heading out on the run home. We hadn't fired a shot. I had thought that the admiral, once the evolution had been completed and the instruments of it back, would retire at full speed towards his base.
Nothing of the sort. At a steady sixteen knots, when we could have raised twenty-four, the Fleet steamed leisurely away from burning Sabang. One gathered the impression that Somerville knew the strength of his own forces, and was giving the enemy every opportunity to share his knowledge.
I wasn't sure if I were relieved or disappointed. A man's experience and commonsense told him he was a fool not to be thankful that everything had gone so well-and at such long-range. But we'd been training for such a hell of a long time... A man never knows when he's well off!
Soon, however, the first messengers of a hurt and disturbed enemy began to appear.
Two torpedo-bombers were reported by our patrolling fighters fifty miles astern, coming towards. The order was passed to close-up in the first degree of readiness, which meant actually closed-up at positions at the guns. Then:
"On anti-flash gear."
This looked like it. Torpedo-bombers would certainly go for the battleships. To get at them they'd have to fly over us. And our 4.7inch quickfirers might have been specially designed for low-flying, approaching torpedo-bombers. But two of them...
As we waited there, seeing nothing astern of the reported enemy, I remember there was apparent in the attitude of the gun-crew a quiet, steady confidence.
You didn't need to be a Freud to understand why. The battleships and lean cruisers on either side, with their A.A. guns skyraking at all angles, engendered a distinct feeling of comfort. Apart, of course, from our own armament. And now, slipping in close astern, another British destroyer paired with us.
We could see nothing, but the captain had electronic ears as well as eyes. As the reports came into the bridge he correlated them and passed on the information through the sound reproduction equipment.
"Those two torpedo-bombers reported astern were intercepted by our fighters. They were `Kate' class, single-engined-oh, by the way, they were shot into the sea-with their main distinguishing feature, the long glassed cockpit, somewhat modified."
In the midst of life, in the midst of death, the ruddy training goes on!
"It has apparently been-what's that, Number One? Yes, I see it now. Hello, ship's company. That black smoke on the horizon astern is another torpedo-bomber. "
Looking aft I saw a pillor of dense black smoke stretching languidly in to the clear sky. Jap number three.
My Number Three, the rammer number, started:
"What's up with them bastards? Don't they think we wanna play too?" And, as a trio of fighters streaked with obvious and malignant intent towards a black dot on the horizon, pointing to an innocent seagull flapping over the foc's'le:
"It's a wonder they let that bloody bird come in!"
We had forgotten the Fleet fighters. We had never been in action before with such a pleasant superiority in airborne assistants. But now we began to think that the fly-boys were earning the dough, and that the Fleet would be unlucky if anything got to within fifty miles of it on this bright blue day. We steamed on, guns unblooded, and reaction set in. Then the first reports of the party ashore began to come in, and we felt a little better.
Here is what a newspaper correspondent aboard the American carrier thought of their share:
"The whole action was under the personal direction of Admiral Sir James Somerville, but the air-attack, suggested by Captain John
H. Cassidy, followed out a pattern which proved successful at Rabaul, Buka, Conis, Nauru, the Gilberts and Marshall Islands.
"At 0530 Commander Caldwell started to launch our striking force. We were sailing over a calm sea, but the engineer pushed the ship up to thirty knots, and in quick time our planes were in the air. A sister carrier, Royal Navy, launched a full quota of Barracudas and F4Us.
"The first run on the airfields was made when the Jap admiral was awakened from his slumbers. Admiral Somerville has expressed the hope that we might catch the Japs with their kimonos up. We did. Fifteen planes, consisting of Zekes, Kates, and large transport types, were destroyed on the field before the Japs could get a plane in the air. Meanwhile another group of eight planes visited the L'honga airfield to work over the Betty's on the ground there. A total of twenty-four Jap planes was the day's record.
"The bomber and torpedo planes had a field day. One two-thousand-pound bomb hit on each of the two five-thousand-ton cargo ships in the harbour. There were two Jap destroyer-escort vessels, both of which were thoroughly strafed and left on fire. A direct hit with a thousand-pound bomb was made on the fuel tanks and smoke rose to a height of three thousand feet. Twelve five-hundred-pound bomb hits were scored in the dockyard and wharf area, left in a mass of flames. Jap barracks received due attention. Four five-hundredpound bomb hits and one two-thousand-pound bomb hits were registered there.
"Then the fighters followed up with strafing. The radio station was smashed with four more bomb hits, and three one-thousandpounders did their work in the dispersal area in the south-east corner of the Sabang airfield. Three more half-ton bombs crashed into the hangar workshops.
"Meanwhile, the Japs got the word that something was amiss, and their anti-aircraft guns swung into action. There was intense light A.A. fire, but only a few heavy guns.
"Most serious of the hits made by the Jap gunners was that which left the plane of Lieutenant Dale (Klondike) Klahn, of Laramie, Wyoming, in flames. Commander Clifton anxiously followed his former wingman until Klahn's plane nosed over the sea. His parachute opened just in time to break his fall, and he was soon paddling about in the water, just two miles north-east of the airfield, within range of the Jap guns.
"Then one of the most dramatic rescues attempted in this war was executed successfully by a British submarine. It received a distress signal and rushed twelve miles to the rescue, picking up Lieutenant Klahn amid a salvo of heavy guns, then doing a crash dive. Captain Cassidy sent the following despatch to the C.-in-C. of our forces about this rescue:
`We take hats off to submarine who proceeded twelve miles on surface to a point two miles north-east of airfield to rescue our pilot. Rescue was made while under fire from shore batteries which could not be kept silenced due to exhaustion of ammunition in our fighters.'
"Meanwhile a Jap destroyer spotted the submarine and started towards it, but was stopped dead in its tracks by our planes. Despite the heroism of the rescue, it was found that international complications might result from it. `Klondike' is the champion eater of Air Group Twelve (and that takes in a lot of territory), and it is not expected that either the quality or the quantity of British supplies will meet with his approval.
"Meanwhile, life on board was extremely interesting. One general quarters alarm came about 0745, but the bogies turned out to be friendly planes from the British carrier. Then, from some point, the Japs headed a numbers of planes at us.
"Lieutenant Charles S. Motz, aided by the expert directions of our fighter director, swooped down on one Jap torpedo plane fifty miles from the ship, and sent it crashing into the sea. Another soon followed, riddled by bullets from the plane of Lieutenant W. Fisher.
"All this was going on beyond the range of vision of the taxpayers on board, who hoped to get in on this show. They were not disappointed. Two fighters closed in on another Jap torpedo-plane and sent it into the sea about twenty miles from our ship. The explosion and smoke were visible from the flight-deck. The gunnery department is sending an official protest, because as usual it stood eagerly at triggers, which have not yet been turned on Jap planes.
"Just how much damage was done by the raid and the general effect on Jap strategy is not known. No doubt the Japs thought they were having bad dreams when they saw the U.S. insignia on the attacking planes. They now know that just as they have been hit from the north and south and east, they can expect to be hit from the west time and time again-until the Rising Sun emblem can no longer be seen anywhere in this area.
"It is expected, of course, that the Japs will attempt a face-saving raid on our base. Flyers who did not get a chance in yesterday's raid are hoping that such will be the case. And the strong fleet which accompanied us on this strike guarantees that Jap ships, except submarines, will not venture far into the Bay of Bengal again.
"The only disappointment in the whole action is that we did not get a chance to `enebdize' the Jap port. But it might be rude to have disturbed the Jap admiral in his afternoon siesta, too."
Things were completely quiet now, the only aircraft in the sky our escorting fighters orbiting round us in a fast, wide circle.
The Fleet steamed on across a sea like blue enamel, the clouds' reflections trembling in the unbroken ripples of our wake.
