J. E. MacDonnell - 028, page 13
All that calm day we were unmolested. We remained closed-up at action throughout, feeling pretty certain that with darkness he would have a crack with torpedo-bombers. At our cruising speed we would not be much more than two hundred and fifty miles from land, easy range for his torpedo-carrying aircraft.
During the day, though closed-up, we had been relaxed, gun-crews handy about the mountings, while not actually manning them. The strain of manning a gun position, staring at director pointers or waiting with shells, can tire a man more than a couple of hours loading-drill. So we waited, relaxed.
At 6.30, just as dusk was drawing in over the sea, we closed-up again in the first degree of readiness. This was the favourite time, and, like dawn, it always meant general quarters.
No sooner had night fallen completely than contact was established, "raid coming in far astern."
We had no fighters up-the Fleet would handle this with its own traditional weapons. And with the amount of muck soon to be in the air it was just as well the Corsairs and Avengers and Barracudas were snugged down for the night.
B-gun was trained round right aft, as far as she'd go, cordite cylinders lying in the loading trays, breeches open, waiting, each fuse-setter with a long, yellow high-explosive shell on the table before him, ready.
The barrels of the port oerlikons just behind us moved restlessly down the dark sky.
Then came the radar report:
"Raid four miles astern!"
Simultaneous with this electric announcement came an eager and appreciative yell from one of my loading-numbers:
"Boys, they're into it!"
They certainly were! The volume of fire was enormous, but it was not that which makes that night stick forcibly in my memory. I had seen the normal amount of action during five years at war at sea, and in the south-west Pacific was to see a good deal more in a cruiser: but this was the first time I was really scared.
Dive-bombing attacks, torpedo-bomber raids, submarine depth-charging, a torpedo which just missed my corvette's bows, all the usual hazards of life at sea: and this was different. It was something in its massed volume of fire I had never seen before-and it was aimed directly at us now.
We had dropped back with nightfall, so that we were steaming abreast the battle-line. Three battleships, a narrow width of water, we destroyers-and, boring in over the destroyers, the Jap torpedo-bombers heading for the battleships.
To engage the aircraft, the battleships had to fire towards us.
From the great ships there burst suddenly into being the greatest firework display I had ever seen, coloured lights thrusting vehemently against the sky in a confused and fiery pattern.
Lines of tracer from multiple pom-pom and oerlikon stitched across the sea towards us, red-hot meteors streaking out. They crossed the sky in thousands, like sparks blown from scores of chimneys on fire.
Then came solid sheets of flame stabbing from the ships' sides and we knew their four-inch had opened. The shells burst viciously just above water, the splash of splinters plain to see in the flash of the following explosions. Burst above the water between us and the battleships...
The roar of the tremendous barrage was loud and continuous, above the rattling cacophony of short-range weapons the duller, louder crack of the four-inch.
I learned later I was not alone in my fright... We knew, of course, that the battleships would be in barrage-firing, which meant that their shells were set to explode at a predetermined distance from the guns; thus making the attacking planes fly through the wall of explosions. But it needed only a few fuse-setters in all that tumult to put the wrong setting on, and those shells would smash into us.
It was not nice to be on the delivery end... But the fuse-setters did not set the wrong range on their shells. And that was the real lesson of that short and fierce night action-the never-to-be-forgotten training and steadiness of those British gunners.
As abruptly as it started the firing ceased. For several seconds afterwards, the tracer already in the sky continued its curved flight, the shells winking out one by one as the phosphorous burnt out.
We were not in the slightest surprised when the captain broadcast that the Japs had turned away! Oddly enough, I felt a strange kinship with those torpedo-bomber pilots... And later, back in base talking to a battleship gunnery-control man, I learned that the Japs had broken away before all the guns had really got going!
But the Jap was game. After the first one, attack followed attack, first a run to starb'd, then to port. It was estimated that there were at least ten torpedo-bombers making the runs, but not one of them came anywhere near dropping range for his torpedoes.
Silence again. No sound in the quiet night but the familiar overtones of wind and hissing sea. No sound or lights from those hulking great shapes to port, nothing from the dark outlines of the cruisers or carriers.
No sound-but a smell. There was little wind, and the stench of burnt cordite was heavy and acrid in the air. It caught at your throat, bitingly. It was the invisible and palpable evidence of the violence of the past few minutes.
We'd beaten them off. We couldn't see a thing in the blackness, but by now they would be winging their thwarted way back to Sabang. We were still excited, still nervy With tension after what we'd seen. And we hadn't fired a shot.
Then, so abruptly that we acted wholly by instinct and training, we were into it.
We could not see, but radar could. The orders snapped out, the director swung, the mounting followed with a rasp of straining machinery. Right round to the starb'd beam, the barrels depressing until they were almost horizontal. We didn't need the information from the transmitting-station-only torpedo-bombers came in that low.
The phone-number yelled:
"Barrage low, low, low!"
The loading trays clanged over, the power-rammers streaked forward and withdrew, breeches slammed shut, then with a crashing roar we'd opened. Pompoms and oerlikons went into action in a snarling crackle of sound.
For more than a minute we poured out everything we had at the approaching bomber. That meant over two hundred big projectiles, and thousands of pompom and oerlikon shells.
The bomber sheered off. The guns fell reluctantly silent.
That was the last we saw of them. Still in precise formation, still completely untouched, the Fleet continued its course. There were no further enemy contacts.
But the Fleet's immunity was not the significant thing about that short and vicious night attack. Not to me. As captain of a mounting, I suppose I must have conducted hundreds of firings, from an old worn-out gun in a corvette to the eight-inch monster in a cruiser's turret. But nothing in the past gave me as much repressed exultation as that night shoot west of Sabang.
The quick-firing guns had been new to me; how must they have seemed to youngsters who'd never been in action? We'd drilled, yes, but firing at drill bears about the same relationship to firing under attack as ice-cream does to boiling oil. They'd manned their guns like veterans, they'd not missed a round. And they'd done this in a pitch-black night against an invisible target.
They were talking now, joking and laughing, letting the tension drain out; not so much the tension of fear but the tautness of wondering how they would go in their first action.
It was hard, and they probably hated my guts for it-but one must maintain the gun-captainly image, and one never knew if there were more Jap aircraft lining us up for another run. My voice cut into the undisciplined chatters, even though I was feeling more exultant than they:
"Pack up that row! Anyone'd think we'd crashed the whole bloody Jap air-force! Get those empties cleared away!"
The noise ceased. A careful mutter here and there. But they got rid of the empty cordite cylinders. Their average age was nineteen.
Two days later all ships steamed in turn slowly through the torpedo net boom and secured to the berths from which, five days previously, they'd slipped on Mount batten's first strike against the eastern enemy. The operation was completely successful. We had effected heavy damage to one of the enemy's best harbours, without loss to ourselves. We had vindicated the constant and gruelling training of months past. But, most important of all to us, the operation had made us, once again, a contented ship.
Followed a period of intensive-exercises!
God help those little yellow men if ever this Fleet catches up with `em! And then, almost a month after Sabang, there spread round the Fleet the universal buzz that something was up.
Those buzzes were becoming almost reliable... That afternoon the watch was piped to muster in the dog-watches, to get inboard tons of stores.
Meat, potatoes, boxes of butter, tinned fruit, case after case came in and was stowed tightly in the storerooms until they were chock-a-block. Then they were stacked in the passages outside.
The oil lighter came alongside and pumped ton after ton into us, till every available cubic inch of bunker space was filled. After storing was completed the awnings were furled, and those boats not essential hoisted and secured snugly for sea. There was indeed something up.
Next morning we knew definitely we were going to sea.
But nothing was released of what was to come with us. Was it the whole gubbins, or was this just some independent mission, some long-range convoy perhaps, for whose dull routine we had been selected?
No! The whole flotilla slipped first, the four ships of our trot leaving their buoys at precisely the same moment, easing out through the boom and forming up in close order line-ahead, fifty yards apart.
As we slid down-harbour, past the battleships and carriers, we found what we were looking and hoping for.
Outwardly they seemed the same. But to an experienced eye their altered appearance spoke much. None of the big ships had their boats down; their lower booms were lashed to the ships' sides; on the nearest battler the hands were completing the furling of the quarterdeck awning, an acreage of white canvas; the squat, spreading turrets were training round from side to side as the crews tested mechanism; and, most conclusive evidence, each ship's bridle of heavy cable to the buoy had been replaced with a slip wire.
We knew then. This was to be another strike, with everything out.
When well out, with the Battle Fleet formed up in battle formation astern, the captain read us a signal from the commander-in-chief. We gathered round the S.R.E. speaker in the mess to listen.
"The object of the present sortie by the Fleet is to distract and occupy the attention of the enemy whilst important operations are taking place in the Pacific. Should the situation remain favourable, it is intended to carry out an offensive operation against the enemy in his naval base of Sourabaya.
"During our last operation we achieved complete surprise, and I hope we will be equally successful this time.
"It is important that all officers and men should rest as much as possible when off duty in order that they shall be alert and vigilant when on watch."
Sourabaya. That looked interesting, for most of us had been there, and knew its crucial importance as a naval base. It was from there that cruiser Perth had sailed on her last glorious mission against a swarming enemy. It would be nice to send some Made-in-Britain messengers back there.
It also seemed a safe bet to hope that the Jap Fleet was there or thereabouts. Everybody knew, of course, that the material damage a hundred planes from carriers could do was a secondary consideration in these sweeps: particularly when Sabang could easily be covered by Fortresses from Burma, and Sourabaya from Darwin.
What we were after was a decisive engagement with the Japanese Fleet. And as we steamed on across that calm blue sea, ever closer to his naval base, it seemed he must be stung into action this time.
The procedure was almost the same as before-a devious approach right down and into the West Australian coast to refuel and to avoid his reconnaissance; constant, exacting alertness to spot his aircraft first and deal with them before giving the alarm, then the final quick rush through that last night.
At dawn the bombers and fighters took off.
Closed up at the guns we watched them, circling round the carriers, black specks pregnant with menace. We were in the line of flight, and shortly the bunches of bombers came steaming overhead towards the coast of Java, the massed thunder of their engines a roar that set your blood on fire.
As they passed over and away, the sun thrust an arc of lurid light above the horizon. Straight into the tropic sunrise they flew. Watching, my Number Four (Mickey Rooney-no relation) observed:
"Looks like clouds over the Rising Sun today."
The Fleet edged closer into the land, tensed and ready, like a heavyweight boxer, waiting for him to come out. It seemed impossible that those aircraft could fly right across Java undetected. As the commander-in-chief had mentioned, the Jap must still be sore from Sabang, and would do his utmost to hit back this time.
It did not occur to us he wouldn't, or couldn't. The Navy will never forget Prince of Wales and Repulse-shattered by the "puny" little yellow men.
So we waited. Soon they came back, the bombers and the fighters, and once again the great ships gathered them in.
We turned and withdrew. One plane alone was left behind. And we were as disappointed as all hell.
Only a man who has never been in action, or who is a bit wet, is eager to risk having his guts ripped out. But we'd trained hard, we'd been keyed up like piano wires for days, we'd hoped for a showdown with his Fleet so as to chop off as much of this bloody war as we could in one go. And we knew now that Nepal with her new crew was a competent fighting unit.
And there were those empty blue skies, the smiling blue sea, clear to the rim of the encircling horizon-and no Jap. Savage, contemptuous, but still thwarted, the Battle Fleet steamed back towards its base.
That afternoon the commander-in-chief passed round to all ships a detailed accounting of the damage done.
"Attack on Sourabaya appears to have been completely successful. Hits were scored on ten ships in harbour totalling some thirty five thousand tons, including a small tanker and possibly a destroyer.
"Two floating docks were badly damaged by five thousand pounds of bombs.
"The oil refinery at Wonokron was completely destroyed. Direct hits demolished the power house, storage tanks and stills were set on fire, smoke rising to five thousand feet.
"Direct hits caused considerable damage to naval installations. The important Braats naval engineering works were completely destroyed by seven tons of bombs.
"Two enemy aircraft were shot down; fifteen were destroyed on the ground and many others damaged. All our aircraft returned to the carriers except one.
"It is to be assumed that the Fleet has not, repetition not, been sighted by the enemy."
Later on, after nightfall, Liberators from Darwin stoked up the fires.
When Trincomalee, our base, was raided in 1941, when the carrier Hermes and the Australian destroyer Vampire were sunk by Jap carrier-based bombers, the approaching enemy force had been detected and reported when five hundred miles east of its objective.
We had steamed the same distance, across an area cluttered with enemy naval and air bases, to within a few miles of his territory, and the first he knew of it was the blast and roar of British bombs on one of his most important harbours.
One doesn't underestimate the enemy, of course, especially this one, but it surely seems the Jap had had his time. If only we'd had this Battle Fleet here in '41...
In due course, exercising en route, absolutely unmolested, the Fleet returned to base.
CHAPTER TEN
WE STILL EXERCISED, but we always did that anyway. But the tempo seemed to be quickening.
Almost exactly two months after our first acquaintance with Sabang, I was idly gazing at the boom-vessel dragging its gate open, and musing on past history.
Last year a Jap squadron of cruisers penetrated west from the Andaman Islands, right across the Bay of Bengal, and steaming savagely into the busy shipping route outside Madras harbour, sank eighteen ships in almost as many minutes. The enemy squadron withdrew scathless.
Later in the year Hermes and Vampire went down fighting under a hail of bombs and cannon-fire not far off Trincomalee. Again the enemy force suffered negligible loss.
Well, that was last year. Things have changed a bit since then. And as I watched the Allied Eastern Battle Fleet, stronger still now, steaming in line ahead out past the little boom vessel into the rising sun, I couldn't help but believe that things-especially on the Japheld island of Sabang-were due for another change.
This time a violent one. For Sabang was again our target, and now we knew for certain why the previous fortnight had been almost wholly taken up with bombardment practice.
Various parts of the coast of Ceylon had erupted skyward in a flung mass of sand, earth and coconut trees, and in a day or two the familiar sight looked like being repeated; with, we hoped, a mixture of concrete fortifications thrown in.
