Turning Point

Chapter 13

The Japanese plan for the invasion of Java would be dubbed “Operation J” in this telling of events. With Bali and Timor well in hand, the main thrust for the offensive was now about to begin. It would employ three full divisions, the first being the tough 48th Division under General Hitoshi Imamura coming from the Philippines. Among the best divisions in the army, the 48th had special training for amphibious landings, and had performed as expected on the Philippines, participating in the capture of Manila. It would be further strengthened by the “Sakaguchi Detachment,” a regimental sized gift from the 56th Division in Burma.

This division would land well west of Surabaya at Kragan, push southeast and attack that city by indirect means, as the Japanese had done at Koepang on Timor. The Sakaguchi Detachment had a special assignment, ordered to drive south through the city of Surjakarta and along the south coast of the island to the port of Tjilatjap. If taken it was thought this would prevent any successful Allied attempt to evacuate.

The 2nd, “Courageous” Division, was a reserve unit taken from the Sendai region of Japan. As such, the 2nd was not one of the veteran fighting units of recent months. It had seen action on the Siberian front and China years earlier, but after being recalled home, it languished to a point that Prince Mikasa once said it had become the worst equipped division in the army. All that had to change, and quickly, and the man to change it was Yamashita’s confederate planner and master strategist, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the man who had cherry picked the best fruit in the army to assemble Yamashita’s 25th Army for the Malayan Campaign.

The 2nd had once been a “Square division” with two brigades of two regiments each. After its recall to Japan, it was made triangular, leaving one regiment behind to form a nucleus for forces being raised to replace it at home. For this operation it would be made square again by receiving the support of the 230th Regiment of the 38th Division, under Colonel Toshihari Shoji. The “Shoji Detachment” would land east of Batavia on the coast to block the enemy retreat and take a valuable airfield, and the remainder of the division would land west of the city near Merak on the Sunda Strait, and Banten Bay. This main force would send two of its three regiments at Batavia, and loop one further south to take Bandung in the center of the island, the location of the Allied Java Command HQ.

It was a well conceived plan, and in Fedorov’s history, with only the Dutch and a scattering of Allied units present, it became overwhelming force. This time, however, the entire British 18th Division was on the island, along with a reinforced brigade of Australians, two battalions off the Orcades, the 2nd New Zealand Brigade, and the Gurkhas. Allied strength on Java was now more than doubled.

It was for this reason that the entire 5th Division had been pulled off of Singapore Island after Yamashita’s departure. Once perhaps the strongest division in the Army after Colonel Tsuji had buttressed it with the best units he could find, it had been badly worn down from the long campaign in Malaya, and the heavy casualties sustained at Tengah Airfield on Singapore. Now it could muster no more than a Brigade strength unit, with six battalions under Major General Takuro Matsui, formed into two regiments, the 11th and 21st. Most of the rest of the division was dead, and the living had been told the enemy they faced at Tengah Airfield had made a cowardly withdrawal to Java, and that now they would have the honor of hunting them down and finishing the battle that had been joined earlier. Now they would avenge their fallen dead.

Montgomery had wasted no time taking command from General Sitwell and assembling his senior officers. He had commandeered a car in Batavia and drove immediately to Bandung, entering the city past the long rows of squat houses, their roofs looking like truncated pyramids, the streets lined with small rickshaws left idle in the disconsolate rain. One lone man was walking a main street, seeming a lost soul in the gloom. Everyone else was hidden away, huddled in shelters, fearful that the war was at last coming to their island. The rain seemed an outlier of worse things to come, and now here was this scrawny, determined man emerging from the weathered 1938 De Soto Sedan, a red beret cap and British Army jacket his only protection from the weather.

Behind him came Brigadiers Bennett, Clifton, and Blackburn, commanders of the ANZAC troops, the last to arrive. They would find Brigadiers Backhouse, Massy-Beresford and Duke of the 18th Division waiting for them in the bungalow that had been chosen on the southwest edge of the town near a once thriving banana plantation. Monty was all business from the very first.

“Well met, gentlemen, the last of the transports have unloaded and the disposition of the troops is well underway. Now it comes down to our plan for the defense. As I see things, we have two options. We know what the enemy will want here, and we can stand in such a way to deny it to him. That will mean we deploy to defend the key ports at Batavia and Surabaya, and the nearby airfields. Without them the enemy will have difficulty keeping themselves supplied. Unfortunately, these ports are all on the north coast of the island, and it does not seem likely that we will command the Java Sea.”

“There’s one good port on the south coast,” said Blackhouse, “Tjilatjap. We’ll have to hold that to the last. It’s the only way we can get our own reinforcements and supplies in.”

“Right,” said Montgomery. “Your battalion is here in Bandung. Why don’t you take it south by rail today and position yourself to control that port. Most of the Dutch garrison here has moved to the eastern portion of the island. They’ll hold Surabaya.”

“Not for long,” said Bennett. “They’ve very little in the way of good equipment, and frankly, they’re completely untested. If the Japanese hit us there, we can count on losing that port in short order.”

“Then they’ll need support.”

“My 2/20 Battalion is at Malang,” said Bennett. “The rest of the brigade is still at Semarang , another port we have to keep an eye on, and Clifton’s New Zealand Brigade has reached Surjakarta. Do you want us to push on to Surabaya?”

“That’s the dilemma,” said Montgomery. “At Singapore we were able to concentrate our entire force and face down the Japanese along a very narrow front. Here we’re sitting on an island that’s 600 miles from one end to the other. If we try to hold everything, we could find ourselves outmaneuvered. The enemy will be able to choose their landing sites, and we can’t simply sit in a central position and wait for them to come with any hope we can move reinforcements where they’re needed in time. The rail lines here are useful, but they’ll likely be hit very hard by the Japanese air power when this game tees off. So I propose that we select one sector of the island or another, and concentrate there , defeat the enemy landings in at least one instance. The question is where will that be?”

“Surabaya is closer to Darwin,” said Bennett. That’s where supplies will originate.”

“We can also expect regular convoys from Colombo,” said Montgomery. “I understand your point, but we’d have to move the 18th Division east rather smartly, and we don’t have sufficient rolling stock, road transport, or perhaps even time. At present, things got rather muddled on the lift over from Singapore. The men are doing a bang up job getting sorted out, but I’ve had to rebuild the brigades as they arrived. Now we’re strung out all along the roads and rail line from here to Batavia, and I propose we stay right where we are.”

“Hold Batavia?”

“Precisely.” Montgomery folded his arms. “The airfields here can cover the Sunda Strait, and Batavia is the nearest hop to Singapore. We mustn’t forget Percival, and all those civilians in the city. If we can hold the Sunda Strait, the run in to Batavia under our air cover might allow us to receive supply convoys out of Colombo. If the Japanese take it, then Singapore is as good as lost. The Japanese have already taken Denpasar airfield on Bali, and they’re on Timor as well. So we can’t count on anything coming by air from Darwin, and frankly, I don’t think we can expect much support from there in any case. No. Our line of communications will have to be the sea lanes to Colombo, or down to Perth. That will be Somerville’s watch.”

“Then you’ll pretty much abandon all the barrier islands from Java to Timor.” Bennett shook his head. “They won’t like that back home.”

“It can’t be helped,” said Montgomery. “We don’t have the forces to even consider garrisoning those islands. I’ve a mind to see about using the Gurkhas to raid Bali. Word is the Japanese didn’t put much more than a battalion there. If we can take that back, then we at least have a line through the Badung Strait to Surabaya, for what it will be worth.”

There was silence for a while, then Brigadier Duke of the 53rd Brigade came out with the one obvious element in this plan that had gone unspoken. “You realize that if we concentrate here, then we’re basically leaving the Dutch to wither on the vine out east. You know damn well that if we do hold Batavia, the Japanese will go all out for Surabaya. They’ll have little other choice.”

“General Duke, the Dutch expected to have to hold this entire island without us. They might be grateful if we at least keep half of it safe. We won’t be abandoning them. If hard pressed, they can fall back on our positions here.”

The others nodded, and there seemed to be no other dissenting voice. So Montgomery doled out his orders, and the die was cast. Japanese troop transports were already loaded and “on the water,” but the determination of Dutch Admiral Doorman was about to force a brief delay in the invasion.

Regrouping back at Surabaya after the fracas at Badung Strait, Doorman had received intelligence that the Japanese were coming. Another man might have looked at his weary sailors, battered ships, all needing maintenance and repair, and given up the ghost, but not Doorman. Even if he had no business doing what he now set out to do, credit must be given for his sheer audacity. He was going to take out anything he had at hand, and give challenge.

So it was that Doorman steamed out into the Java Sea, his ships battered and bruised, many old four stack destroyers dating to the last war. His crews had little rest in the last 18 hours, but they stood to their posts, in spite of a general pall of misgiving that had fallen over the little fleet. They had just faced their enemy, outgunning them by a wide margin, with nine ships against four in the Badung Strait, and they suffered a convincing defeat. So nerves were raw as they set out, eyes swollen and tired, some men even falling asleep at their battle stations.

To make matters worse, it was a much weaker force in this last sortie than the one made by Doorman in Fedorov’s history books. The entire British squadron, cruiser Exeter, and destroyers Electra, Encounter and Jupiter, had steamed off with the Australian cruiser Perth to rendezvous and support the arrival of Mountbatten and the two British carriers. If that weren’t enough, the US cruiser Houston was no longer afloat. Captain Rooks had made his fateful decision to screen the Antietam and Shiloh in the battle of the New Hebrides, and his valuable piece was no longer on the board. So instead of fourteen ships, Doorman had only eight, mostly destroyers.

To bolster this force, he called on the four American destroyers that had returned to Tjilatjap. They would join the four that had returned to Surabaya, and he would also press the cruiser Sumatra into service, even though it had been laid up with engine problems for some time. So he would end up with a baker’s dozen that day, the fleet limping out of Surabaya at no more than 26 knots.

The first American destroyer squadron led the way, with Edwards, Jones, Alden and Ford. Then came the Dutch squadron, the cruisers Java, Sumatra, De Ruyter, and two destroyers Witte de With and Kortenaer. Lastly he had the second US destroyer squadron, with Parrott, Pillsbury, Stewart and Pope. It was the last hurrah of what was once called the US Asiatic Fleet, and the final act in the drama the Dutch Navy would play in this campaign.

The Japanese knew the enemy was out there. Doorman’s fleet had been spotted by search planes off the cruiser Natori, and the fleet was subjected to a probing air strike at 14:20 that afternoon. No hits were scored by the few Japanese planes that came in, and Doorman reformed and pressed on. He was going to meet a different mix of forces this time out, largely from the Western Screening Force led by Rear Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa. He had been well north in the Malacca Strait, but learning of the British evacuation underway from Singapore, he moved quickly south to interfere. Though he had arrived too late to stop Montgomery and his troops from reaching Java, he was now in a perfect position to cover the western segment of the Java landings.

Ozawa had a fairly powerful group, light carrier Ryujo, 7th Heavy Cruiser Squadron with Kumano, Mikuma, Mogami, and Suzuya; light cruisers Natori, Yura, and Sendai, along with 12 destroyers in three divisions of four each. One division, and all his mine sweepers, stayed with the invasion convoy carrying 2nd Infantry Division. The rest of his covering force was out to give battle.

Doorman could feel in his bones that he was going to be overmatched that day, but true to his roots in Naval Aviation, he put out a call for air support as soon as the lead formation of Japanese destroyers was sighted. The British still had 36 of the 48 Hurricanes that had been operating from Sumatra. Now they were based at fields near Batavia, and they ran to answer the call. They would join a group of 16 Blenheims, and a few Hudsons and a squadron of Buffalos in an effort to gain air superiority over the Java Sea. Against this force, Ryujo would put up 16 A5M fighters and 12 B5Ns, and there were several squadrons of land based fighters coming from Balikpapan, with 25 Zeroes, and another 11 A3M Claudes in the first wave of Japanese air strength. The drone of their engines tipping over in a dive was the opening overture of the Battle of the Java Sea.

Chapter 14

Destroyer Flotilla 3 under Rear Admiral Hashimoto was the first to sight the Allied fleet. He had been steaming as part of a wide screening line of destroyers, his flag on the cruiser Sendai, with destroyers Fubuki, Hatsuyuki, Shirayuki and Shirakomo. Sendai opened the action at 16,000 yards with her 5.5 inch guns targeting the lead US destroyers, Edwards and Jones. The Japanese DD Flotilla then put on speed and charged in at the tail of that column, their guns engaging Alden and Ford.

Further south, the 5th DD Flotilla under Rear Admiral Hara aboard light cruiser Natori swung up to the northwest to engage the Dutch. Destroyers Asakaze, Harukaze and Matsukaze were in a good position to make a torpedo attack, and they put down a spread of 12 Long Lance torpedoes, firing from 15,000 yards. Behind them came the heavy cruisers Kumano, Mogami and Mikuma, and their bigger 8 inch guns already had the range to begin firing.

These three cruisers, all in the same class, had been cleverly designed in 1934 with five triple 6.1-inch gun turrets to be classified as a light cruiser. Yet the ships were over 8,500 tons, and 646 feet long as opposed to a standard Nagara Class light cruiser of about 5,300 tons and 534 feet in length. The barbettes for those five turrets were also secretly enlarged so they could accommodate a bigger turret during refits if desired. It was a deceptive little shell game played by Japan early in the treaty years, when they felt snubbed to be allocated fewer ships than the so called “Major Powers” like the US and Britain.

So in 1937, these ships all had their facelift, receiving better 8-inch gun turrets to deftly move them into the heavy cruiser class. Later on, the lead ship, Mogami, would be converted to a hybrid seaplane carrier, with 11 planes aft on a long flight deck, and three turrets forward, much like the Tone class.

Those three ships combined for thirty 8-inch guns, and they were going to wreak havoc on the thin skinned old destroyers. The American Tin Cans charged into the teeth of that fire, making smoke as they came, but visibility was good, the seas steady, and the Japanese aim was dead accurate. In the swirling duel that followed, Edwards, Pope, Alden and Ford would all take damaging hits, with the first three sinking within the hour, and Ford dead in the water. The engineers managed to get the screws turning again, and Ford limped off, fated to run into light cruiser Jintsu and come under the guns of heavy cruiser Haguro as it passed very near the Japanese landing zone, en route to Surabaya.

The Japanese destroyers lunged in towards the center of Doorman’s battle line, and the Long Lance torpedoes were again in the water, this time from the south. Yet the Japanese had little luck with this deadly weapon that day. One hit would take Dutch Destroyer Kortenaer aft, and the resulting explosion put so much damage on the screws and rudder that she would wallow helplessly for the next 40 minutes, eventually sinking at 18:20.

The line of three heavy cruisers then engaged Doorman’s force, and the ensuing battle would close to 8,000 yards and see hits on every side. Sumatra was so badly damaged that one of her boilers exploded, and the resulting fires would gut that ship in an hour. The Flagship De Ruyter was pummeled by no less than five hits, and had only one main gun operational thirty minutes into the fight.

This Japanese gunnery was superb compared to the results another set of heavy cruisers had obtained in the old history. There they had fired over 1600 rounds, getting only five hits, with four of those failing to explode. Those ships had been of the older Myoko Class cruisers. In this action it was all Mogami class, and they had scored at least sixteen hits for roughly the same expenditure of ammunition, an average of one hit per hundred rounds fired.

This was combat at sea in WWII, and nothing like the almost certain calculus that Kirov enjoyed. It was all a haphazard affair, one part seamanship, one part sweat and skill, three parts sheer luck. Doorman himself was wounded, his bridge clotted with heavy smoke, and he realized that his brave charge had done all it could. He turned about, hoping to make Surabaya before his ship lost power, and the remaining four US destroyers wheeled about to lay a heavy smoke screen and cover the withdrawal.

The Japanese were more than happy to see them go, and not inclined to pursue. Kumano had one forward turret out of action, Mogami two turrets that had sustained heavy damage, and Mikuma had her aft turret jammed by a hit near the barbette that prevented it from rotating. It would send the entire squadron home after the invasion for the refits that would see Mogami move from a caterpillar to a butterfly. The loss of Chikuma in the north meant the fleet needed fast scout cruisers with search planes, and this class was always eyed with that in mind.

So the Japanese had done exactly what a covering force was supposed to do, and protected the invasion convoy, putting five enemy destroyers and the cruiser Sumatra under the Java Sea. They would not lose a single ship, and the invasion would now proceed as planned.

Doorman’s surviving ships made Surabaya, and the haggard Admiral came ashore, his arm in a bloodied sling, realizing that he could do no more with his tattered squadron. He was, in fact, a Zombie now, for in the old history, his intransigence and persistence in leading his outgunned ships after the enemy would end with his death. This time he would have a very long night ahead to think about the men and ships he left behind. The four remaining American destroyers would slip off to try and reach Darwin, leaving him nothing much to fight with.

Doorman’s fleet had bothered the Japanese invasion of Sumatra, failed to stop the landings on Bali, and was now convincingly crushed in the Java Sea. The strategic result of his actions was nothing more than a brave, futile defeat, and his many sorties resulted in the Japanese now having total control of the Java Sea. Yet the naval game was not entirely over. Mountbatten was too late to intervene here, but he would arrive the following day just as the landings were underway.

It would put him in a very good position to cause trouble, but at that moment he did not know that another Admiral was steaming west in the Arafura Sea, Chiuchi Nagumo, with the 5th Carrier Fleet. Zuikaku and Shokaku had finished their work at Rabaul and now they came west, with three battleships, and trouble would not be half a word for what Nagumo had in mind.

That night, the 2nd Division convoy would make its approach to Merak, and the Eastern Covering Force moved into position to screen off any further sortie from Surabaya. The 48th Division followed it, with the Sakaguchi Detachment, and in the pre-dawn hours the ships deployed their paravanes and glided slowly towards their assigned anchorage sites. This detachment would be the first troops to set foot on Java at Kragan, a small fishing village on the north central coast. It had been chosen precisely because it offered a stretch of long shallow beaches, and was not near a port where the enemy might be expected to defend. As such, the landing achieved complete surprise, and was unopposed.

The troops moved quickly inland, reaching the rail line coming from Semarang through Lasem. Soon the remainder of the division would expand this beachhead east to Tuban on the road to Surabaya. One key objective were the oil fields at Tejapu, about 40 kilometers south of Kragan. This was assigned to Colonel Sakaguchi, as it was on the road to the large inland city of Surjakarta, which opened the route to the south coast.

The Dutch were the first to hear of the landings, and quickly dispatched their 2nd Cavalry Battalion positioned northeast of Surabaya to investigate. As it approached Tuban, it ran into 1/1 Formosa Battalion of the 48th Infantry, advancing quickly along the road in column.

Number 2 Armored Car Company was composed of 12 Alvis Straussler AC3D Armored Cars purchased from the United Kingdom in 1938. It was a speedy 13 ton four wheeled vehicle, with a hull mounted Vickers .303 MG and a turret mounted 12.7mm heavy machine gun. This small company stopped at Balud along the rail line near a bridge over the Solo River and began to set up a road block. The Japanese actually intended to cross this river at Bodjanegoro, about 30 kilometers west, but the position occupied by the Dutch was also on their list of objectives that day.

The only substantial fighting force for the Allies was well to the west, Brigadier Bennett’s Australian Brigade, which was all that was left of the 8th Division forces that had been on Singapore. They were 100 kilometers from the Sakaguchi Detachment landings at Kragan, and Bennett now had to decide what to do.

There were two routes he could take east. One was through a broad valley that skirted south of a stubby peninsula formed by the mass of Mount Murjo. This road would take him to the small port of Rembang on the north coast, then east to the site of the enemy landings. The second route followed road and rail lines through another inland valley that would take him to those oil fields at Tejapu, and then on to Surabaya. There was high country between the two routes, with no good roads of any kind. Bennett’s problem was that he would need to cover both routes. He got on the telephone to Brigadier Clifton, who was posted south at Surjakarta with the New Zealand Brigade.

“If we take the road to Rembang,” said Bennett, the Japanese could swing through Tejapu and then come west. That would bottle my brigade up near Mount Murjo. I would have to split my brigade and send at least one battalion by the other route as a blocking force.”

Bennett’s problem was they he could not walk two roads and yet one traveler be. Splitting his brigade in the face of uncertain enemy strength was not wise.

“If you decide that,” said Clifton, “then keep your main strength on the inland road to Tejapu. We know the Japs will want those oil fields. But I’ll go you one better. I can take my brigade up to Ngawa, right south of those fields. Then we’d be in a good position to support you.”

After contacting Montgomery, that was the order of the day, but it was specified that the airfields near Surjakarta and Semarang had to be garrisoned.

“We’ve heard the Japanese used paratroops on Timor,” said Monty. “Furthermore, we haven’t established that this is their main landing yet. Semarang is a nice cherry of a port. It will have to be held.”

That order was going to split Bennett’s Brigade three ways, and he wasn’t happy about it. He sent his 2/19 Battalion up to Rembang on the coast, and then took his artillery and 2/26 Battalion by the inland route. 2/18th Battalion deployed along the coast near Semarang. He had one more battalion, but it had been sent well south on the road to Malang, the “support” Monty had decided to provide to the Dutch forces in Surabaya.

As for Clifton, he found rolling stock and put his 24th Battalion on the line east. The Brigade than pooled its transport and sent the 26th Battalion by road, leaving the 25th Battalion in Surjakarta. So these orders were going to set four battalions in motion, advancing on a front that measured some 80 kilometers north to south.

Even as these troops set out on their marches, the next alarm rang far to the west at Merak on the Sunda Strait. Japanese troops of the Fukushima Detachment of 2nd Division stormed ashore there, swarming the Dutch and British defenders that had been watching that vital crossing point to Sumatra. The Dutch had just escaped from Oosthaven, welcomed by the single British battalion there, 2/5 Beds & Herts.

Further north, on the other side of a knobby mountain peninsula rising some 1900 feet, more Japanese transports had appeared in Banten Bay. It was soon clear that this was to be the main attack against Batavia, and now Montgomery rocked on his heels. “They’ve split their forces in two,” he grinned, “east and west. That gives us an excellent chance to defeat them in detail.”

“Assuming this is all they have,” said Sitwell, acting as his Chief of Staff due to his better knowledge of the scene there on Java.

“True,” said Monty, but at the very least I think we can hem these landings in near Merak.”

Then word came of the landing further east on the coast near a small hamlet named Patrol, and Monty’s eyes lost some of their shine. “Any idea of the strength there? Any division identified?”

“It looks to be the leading edge of at least a regiment, but we have no further details. Collier’s Royal Engineers are at the airfield at Kalidjati.”

“That’s what they want,” said Montgomery, thinking. “They knew they needed Merak on the Sunda Strait to secure their communications over to Sumatra. But these landings at Banten Bay look substantial from all reports. I’m inclined to think this other landing to the east is merely a raid, aimed at securing that airfield. They wouldn’t land that far east to make a go at Batavia. That’s why they’re in Banten Bay.”

“Sir, we’ve got the Division Recon Battalion at Cerebon, and the 1st Sherwood Foresters on the road heading that way. Together with the Royal Engineers, we could put three battalions into that landing out east, and they’d be coming in from every side.”

“Perfect,” said Montgomery. “Make it so.”

Those Royal Engineers were fairly well equipped. They had 27 squads in all, with 13 Vickers MGs, plenty of 3-inch mortars and even four Bren carriers. They set out towards the landing site immediately, and soon ran right into a much smaller detachment of engineers that were making right for that airfield. They would meet at Pagadan Baru on the rail line over the Punegara River, and a sharp engagement ensued.

The Royals reached the bridge first, with rifle fire from the advancing enemy snapping off the metal girders. They had no idea of the actual enemy strength, and there was soon help at hand to the east when the recon battalion came up in lorries and began to attack a small detachment of Japanese armored cars from march. They drove them back, but the Japanese were only falling back on the first of their three battalions of infantry in this landing, and their defense soon strengthened.

Out in the Sunda Strait, Mountbatten had sent a pair of destroyers to screen and patrol, wanting to know if the Japanese were making any movement into the Indian Ocean. DD Jupiter heard the radio traffic near Merak, and steamed up to investigate, but Lieutenant Commander Norman Thew was running into trouble. He had just lowered his field glasses, after seeing the vast sweep of enemy troops ships and thought he would have a crack at them. Soon they began to receive enemy fire from small caliber guns, and he gave an order to maneuver, when there was a sudden violent explosion.

“Torpedo!” a man yelled from below, and it was clear the ship had taken a hard blow to the starboard side. In fact, Jupiter had struck a mine, making her appointment with fate exactly on schedule, in spite of the many changes in the order of these events. The mine had been laid to help screen the approaches to Merak the previous day, by the Dutch minelayer Gouden Leeuw.

So while spared the grave risk of the fighting in the Java Sea, Jupiter would nonetheless meet its ordained end here in the Sunda Strait off the rocky coast of Java. The tabular record of movement would report her end almost verbatim as it had in Fedorov’s history: “During maneuvers to avoid enemy fire, ship detonated mine in position 6.45S — 112.6E and was totally disabled. Remained afloat for four hours before sinking. 84 of ship’s company were killed or missing with 97 taken prisoner and 83 were either able to reach the shore or were rescued by the US Submarine USS-S38.”

Thus far, the enemy was ashore in at least three locations, but Allied resources had been close enough to reach them and move to contain the landings. But this was just the leading edge of the storm now blowing in from the Java Sea.

The real thunder was yet to roll.

Chapter 15

In the early morning hours of Feb 28th, the distress signal received from destroyer Jupiter, along with the report that the Japanese were continuing their landings at Merak, prompted Mountbatten to act. Operating well south of the Sunda Strait, the flight crews on Illustrious and Indomitable were already beginning to spot planes for a planned airstrike at dawn. Mountbatten therefore decided to detach a stronger surface action group to move into the strait prior to that attack and scout the enemy position.

Destroyers Scout and Tenedos were already north of a small island group that sat in the middle of that strait, and they were probing closer to the Sumatran coast to ascertain whether the Japanese were making any use of the recently captured port of Oosthaven. Destroyers Electra and Express now led in a small task force to the south of those same islands, with light cruisers Dauntless and Dragon, followed by heavy cruisers Exeter and Dorsetshire. They soon encountered a screen of three Japanese destroyers south of Merak, and began to engage them with fire from the cruisers.

Captain Agustus Willington Shelton Agar, VC, DSO, was also a man to stack up names and titles, and he stood aboard Dorsetshire, watching the darkness ahead as the first salvoes fired. There followed soon after a slight quavering, which prompted him to look over his shoulder, thinking one of the other ships had fired behind him. All seemed quiet, so he looked forward again.

“That’s Exeter up ahead, is it not?” he said to the Officer of the Watch.

“Aye sir, she hasn’t fired yet.”

Thinking it was no more than an echo, the Captain turned to watch as Exeter finally fired, her 8-inch guns lighting up her silhouette some 2000 yards ahead. The guns barked, followed by a long, low rumbling sound that the Captain thought was thunder.

“Mister Dawes, are we expecting rain?”

“No sir, clear ahead and with a good moon. She’s nearly full sir. Should be good sighting once we close the range.”

The hydrophone operator on Dorsetshire had heard the sound as well, but thought it was nothing more than the dull rumble of naval gunfire, or perhaps even one of the destroyers dropping a depth charge on a suspected enemy submarine. Captain Agar looked at his watch, marking the time 05:48, and gave the order to increase speed to two thirds. The small bright flash of enemy gunfire appeared ahead as the Japanese destroyers realized their peril and began to fire back. No heavy guns yet, thought Agar, all the better for us, but we don’t know what’s back of that destroyer screen.

It wasn’t anything behind that destroyer screen that he should have been concerned about, for there was something in his wake that was far more dangerous. He had felt something like this an hour ago as they entered the Sunda Strait, a fluttering in the air, as if the pressure was changing, though the barometer remained steady. There came a trembling in the atmosphere, a quavering vibration that rattled the ship, setting lose equipment to shaking. The engines would rumble like that at times, protesting a sudden change of speed, but Dorsetshire had been fairly reliable of late. She was due for a refit soon, and the Captain hoped he would not have engine trouble now as he entered battle.

There was a loud boom, followed by a low growl, like the sound of a long distended roll of thunder, but the skies were clear, the wind calm, save for the vaguest sense of unease on the breeze, as if something was happening, a subtle shift, not in the weather, but in the earth itself. Captain Agar looked over his shoulder again, the hair on the back of his neck prickling up, as though he was being stalked by some unseen foe, but there was nothing to be seen, at least at first.

Dorsetshire fired again, and he moved out close to the edge of the weather deck to have a look with his field glasses, but he was not looking forward. Even in the urgency of the battle, the discomfiture he felt, an almost queasy sense of unease that was akin to dread, had prompted him to look aft, and there he finally saw something low on the horizon, a dull red glow much akin to what the sun might look like in the first red moment of dawn. Moving quickly to the chart table on the bridge, his finger tapped out the spot where he thought he was seeing the spectacle. There came a low rumble again, like that of a tea kettle just before it boiled, and the sound of a distant hiss in the sky.

“Must be a bloody volcano,” he said aloud. “But this one has gone dormant, hasn’t it?”

The Captain was an educated man, and new something of the world he was sailing in. The sea mount on his charts was in fact a cluster of small islands, Penjang, Sertung, and then a series of three peaks, Pertuban, Danan, and the highest being Rakata. They rumbled about from time to time, but seldom bothered anyone beyond that. Now it was the boom of Dorsetshire’s third salvo that commanded his attention, and shaking his head, he turned to his battle without another backward thought.

Far to the southwest, the planes were lined up on the decks of the British carriers as the skies slowly began to lighten. Illustrious had suffered an odd collision with HMS Formidable in the old history, and repairs had kept her from this duty. But it never happened here. Somerville and Wells had taken Formidable on a private hunt, and so Illustrious was in fine fighting trim, her two newly installed radar sets alert to any sign of enemy planes. She had her flight deck enlarged by 50 feet, a new catapult installed, and ten more 20mm Oerlikon AA guns to beef up her defenses.

Just as Illustrious wasn’t supposed to be where she was, an officer on her flight deck that morning was also off his appointed rounds. His name was Charles Bentell Lamb, not to be confused with Lieutenant Peter “Sheepy” Lamb who’s fate we have already visited aboard the ill fated HMS Audacity. Charlie Lamb had come up through the Merchant Marine, then learned to fly with the RAF Coastal Command before being posted to Illustrious. He had a fondness for the old Swordfish torpedo bombers, spending many long hours in his Stringbag before it was finally replaced with the new Albacore. Before the war he had gained some notoriety as a boxer for the fleet, and now he was spoiling for another kind of fight, eager to get up and see what the Japanese were up to that morning.

Lamb was supposed to be in a jail cell in French North Africa, captured when he tried to fly in a special agent there, and his plane developed engine trouble and had to go to ground. He would have sat out most of 1942 there, waiting for his confederates to land in Operation Torch in November. But that had not happened either. It was just a small thing that had changed his fate, an errant tick mark on a flight officer roster that checked off someone else’s name instead of his. So there he was, also in good fighting trim, and ready to board his Albacore, one hand reaching up to one of the wings as he completed his pre flight inspection.

Then, strangely, he felt the wing vibrating under his hand, thinking the ship had finally turned to find the wind, but that was not the case. He looked aft, but the wake of the carrier was calm and smooth. Mountbatten had not yet turned, the elevators were still working, and the last of this flight was still being spotted on the flight deck.

But there it was, a trembling vibration that rippled now from his hand on that wing, down his arm and all the way to his boots. The metal deck was quavering, and he thought he felt an odd stirring in the air. He looked around, finding the near full moon clear and bright as it fell towards the horizon. He looked at his watch, seeing it was just a little after 06:00. They had been under its pale silver light for some time, and it would not set for another hour, at about 07:00. Then, in that last interval of darkness, the planes would take off to race north before sunrise at 09:30 that day.

Lamb was enough of an old salt that he knew something was wrong in that vibration. Was Illustrious teething from that last refit? Had the work crews missed something in her engines? He would not find a chart and realize that it was only the occasional rumbling of the volcano that lived in these waters, one of so many that rose in tall misty cones along the Malay Barrier.

The long archipelago that military strategists of the 1940s referred to as the “barrier islands” stretched over 2,500 miles from the northern tip of Sumatra to the eastern tip of Timor. It followed the subterranean line of a great subduction zone, where the Indo-Australian plate slowly folds beneath the Eurasian plate. The resulting pressures created over 130 active volcanoes in the island arc, and among them were some of the great terrors in the panoply of Volcanic Gods.

In northern Sumatra, the mighty supervolcano of Toba sits beneath a serene blue lake, the largest in southeast Asia, that now covers its massive caldera. At its center sits the misty island of Samusir, almost as big as Singapore Island, and white falls of water now cascade down to the lake where hot flows of lava once shaped the flanks of those sheer cliffs. When it last erupted, over 70,000 years ago, scientists say it may have been a V.E.I. 8 on a scale of 9, where no known eruptions of V.E.I. 9 have ever been found. Some believe it nearly wiped humanity from existence, reducing the population to perhaps fewer than 10,000 individuals.

The children of Toba dot the landscape of these verdant, steamy islands for thousands of miles. Rinjani, Child of the Sea, sits prominently astride Lombok east of Bali. Merapi the Mountain of Fire, dominates the rugged central mountains of Java. The legendary Tambora sits as the undisputed master of the Island of Sumbawa, and in 1815, just a few months before the battle of Waterloo, it produced the largest eruption known on earth in the last 25,000 years.

And then there was the demon of the sea, sitting right astride a dogleg bend in that subduction zone, where the thinner crust saw the fiery heart of the earth migrate upwards to produce another famous mountain of fire in the middle of the Sunda Strait, and one with a name that might now be a synonym for fear and dread—Krakatoa. These were the islands that had rumbled to bother Captain Agar that morning, and their stirring had quavered the wing of Charlie Lamb’s plane, even though HMS Illustrious was 110 kilometers to the southwest.

In Fedorov’s history, that volcano had last erupted in 1883, producing the loudest sound humans ever heard, resounding all the way across the Indian Ocean, and shaking seismographs the world over. Its explosive force was 30,000 times greater than the bomb dropped at Hiroshima, and its shock wave circled the earth seven times. The mountain itself was literally blown apart, but as terrible as its demise was, the volcano still refused to die. In 1927, it slowly began to rise again, a dull grey cinder cone emerging from the sea like some dreadful behemoth with a single glowing red eye. Called Anak Krakatoa, or the ‘Son of Krakatoa,’ it would grow at a rate of five inches per week, always restive, never really sleeping, like a man beset with fitful nightmares.

Of all the most explosive eruptions in human history, the top three were Tambora in 1815, Santorini off Greece in 1628, BC, and Krakatoa off Java in 1883—at least in the history Fedorov knew. In this timeline, more than human events had been found to change. Meteorological and geologic events had skipped a beat here or there as well. The 1920s earthquake in Japan that had damaged the hull that was being built for the battlecruiser Tosa had never happened, and now that ship was afloat as a converted aircraft carrier, standing in for the loss of Hiryu after Pearl Harbor.

No one had ever thought to look, not even Fedorov, for there was so little time in the heat of all these events, and so much data to reabsorb. He had focused on trying to analyze what had changed in the history they were now sailing through, and why, but a flip through a geologic reference to see what the earth itself had been doing had never occurred to him. Perhaps he simply assumed that these “acts of god,” the storms, earthquakes, eruptions of the earth were all riveted in the chronology, destined to take place at their appointed times, but, as we have already seen, they were not.

The weather was so fickle that it could simply not be so harnessed. The wind would go where it wished, heedless of time’s ledgers and the urgencies of human endeavor. The storm that delayed Halsey and hastened the arrival of Neosho had been early, speeding the gritty Admiral into that confrontation with the Kido Butai, and sending Neosho to her fiery fate. That simple weather event had a considerable effect on the outcome of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, though no one ever took the time to finger the wind as the real culprit that day.

The interval from the 1800s to modern days is but a wink in geologic time, so to have two major eruptions so close together like Tambora and Krakatoa was strong evidence that the barrier islands were rumbling to life, the earth there shaking, even as it has in modern times, producing some of the largest earthquakes ever recorded on the planet.

Eruptions on this scale could radically alter the flow of events in the history they affected. The dire and weighty matters of war and strategy produced volumes in the brief outbreak of violence that was WWII, but relatively little has been written on the life changing powers possessed by these fiery mountains, and the restless angry Gods that hunched beneath their glowing cinder cones.

Vladimir Karpov might be one man who came to respect their power, for he had his entire battlegroup blown over a century into the past when the Demon Volcano erupted in the midst of a wild mêlée at sea in 2021. If he thought about that event, he might lay the blame for the massive fractures now rippling through the halls of fate and time right at the base of that volcano. For if that eruption had not occurred, nothing of his strange displacement to 1908, and the long confrontation with Admiral Togo’s fleet, would have ever happened. The Altered States that were now rewriting the history of WWII would have never taken place. Was it fate that he found himself aboard Kirov at exactly that place and time, the will of the great god Vulcan, or mere happenstance?

Whatever force had moved the levers that day, it was moving again in the Sunda Strait, awakening from long troubled sleep, rumbling to life beneath the turbulent seas where uniformed men now steamed about in the rising swells on small metal ships, flinging even smaller hunks of metal at one another, and calling it history. The lines they would inscribe in that book would be nothing compared to the epic now about to be written by the Demon in the waters off Java that morning.

It was something that was never supposed to happen now. The violence inherent in that fractured spot in the crust of the earth was already supposed to have vented its wrath in 1883, but it had not done so. If Fedorov had taken the time to look, he might have discovered the grim possibility that was now rumbling to life. He might have learned that, for reasons he could never fathom, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 had never occurred in this time line, but better late than never, it was going to happen now, and it would change the entire course of these events.

Aboard Illustrious, Mountbatten was settling into the Captain’s chair on the bridge with his early morning tea. Charles Lamb was sitting in his plane and ready to go find the sunrise, but he would never see it that morning. Something else was rising, from the depths of the earth, slowly throwing open the gates of hell itself.

Krakatoa was about to explode….