Ship of Ghosts by James D. Hornfischer Read Free Book Online Page B

“ABDAfloat.”
    Low-level confusion, or at least a lack of focus and unity of purpose, surrounded most every aspect of the ABDA naval command. The confusing unit nomenclature reflected this. The
Houston
and the other combatants of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet were known as “Task Force Five” when they were on convoy duty, but were part of the “Combined Striking Force” during joint offensive operations. When Admiral Hart was named commander of ABDAfloat, he put Admiral Glassford in command of Task Force Five and installed his capable chief of staff, Rear Adm. William R. Purnell, an old hand at working with the British and Dutch, as acting Asiatic Fleet commander, based at Hart’s former Surabaya waterfront headquarters. Hart himself relocated to Field Marshal Wavell’s ABDA flag headquarters in the mountain resort town of Lembang, seventy-five miles southeast of Batavia and several hundred miles from Surabaya. The interlocking responsibilities and haphazard lines of international communication were a recipe for frustration.
    Hart readily saw that conflicting national priorities would hamper everyone’s ability to fight. In the prewar conferences attended by Admiral Purnell, it became clear that the Royal Navy was worrying less about defending Java than about saving its imperial crown jewel, Singapore, at the tip of the Malay peninsula. Long before war began, the Americans and the British had debated the merits of holding Singapore. The Americans considered it hopeless once Japanese land-based airpower came to bear on it. But Wavell insisted that the British garrison there could endure a Japanese assault indefinitely. “Our whole fighting reputation is at stake, and thehonour of the British Empire,” he wrote after the island came under Japanese assault, in a February 10 letter that largely paraphrased a cable he had received from Prime Minister Churchill that same day. “The Americans have held out on the Bataan Peninsula against heavier odds; the Russians are turning back the picked strength of the Germans; the Chinese with almost complete lack of modern equipment have held the Japanese for four and a half years. It will be disgraceful if we yield our boasted fortress of Singapore to inferior forces.”
    Hart preferred to orient the Allied effort toward the defense of Australia. Already the Americans were setting up a major base for its service force—supply ships, tenders, and other auxiliaries—at Darwin in northwestern Australia, the receiving point for convoys of troops, equipment, and supplies arriving from points north and east. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet surface battle group, Task Force Five, consisting of the
Houston,
the
Marblehead,
and the thirteen old destroyers of Destroyer Squadron Twenty-nine, joined by the modern light cruiser
Boise,
was well positioned at Surabaya to guard the lifeline to Australia. * The British made their home port at Batavia, four hundred miles to the west, a better position for running convoys to Singapore. The heavy cruiser HMS
Exeter,
which had won fame in 1939 hunting the
Graf Spee
in a legendary pursuit that ended with the German pocket battleship’s scuttling at Montevideo, was the largest Royal Navy ship in the theater.
    Painfully aware of Germany’s occupation of their continental homeland, the Dutch were naturally displeased that an American, Hart, was to head the naval defense of their homeland in exile. His appointment to lead ABDAfloat put him in natural conflict with the head of Dutch naval forces in the area, Vice Adm. Conrad E. L. Helfrich, a jut-jawed bulldog of a commander who preferred attack to retreating defense. Born on Java, he knew the region’s straits, coves, and shallows. At the Surabaya conference he reportedly pounded the table and demanded a squadron of heavy cruisers to resist the Japanese onslaught. Though he discovered there were limits to the resources America and Britain could assign to his cause, hestill thought Allied surface forces could stymie