| Second World War at Sea: Java Sea
Breaking the Malay Barrier
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2024
 While the northern islands of the Netherlands East Indies held vast natural resources, chiefly oil, the population centers of the Dutch colony lay on the southern rim of the archipelago. Java held an estimated 48 million people, or roughly the same as the United Kingdom on slightly more than half of the land area. Intense rice cultivation not only supported Java’s people, but also fed those of the adjoining islands.
Neighboring Sumatra had far fewer residents, but boasted both productive oil fields and a developing petrochemical industry centered around Palembang on the island’s south-east coast. The islands directly offshore from Palembang hosted tin mines, a metal necessary in electronics manufacture and other industrial uses. And much of the island produced rubber, in small holdings rather than the vast plantations of nearby Malaya.
All of those resources would be vital to Japan’s war effort, not only the natural resources but the human ones – between four and ten million Javanese would be deported by the Japanese as forced labor. But before these resources could be exploited by the Japanese, they would have to be captured.
During January 1942, the Japanese seized ports and airfields on the large islands of Borneo and Celebes to the north of Java, on the opposite side of the Java Sea. In response the Allied command (ABDA, for American-British-Dutch-Australian) formed a naval strike group of its modern cruisers, supported by older American and Dutch destroyers.
Troops of the 2nd Kure SNLF approach a down Australian Hudson on Ambon.
Even as the Japanese invasion convoys sailed for Balikpapan and Kendari, senior Army and Navy commanders and staff officers met in Manila to discuss their next moves. The Navy had agreed to a rapid pace during the previous such conference, held at Cam Ranh Bay at the end of December, but now the naval officers demurred. The captured airfields had turned out to be in much worse condition than anticipated, both due to Dutch demolitions and the fact that they hadn’t been very good in the first place. Allied aircraft – primarily Dutch – had inflicted greater losses than accounted for in planning, and minesweeping had been more difficult. Finally, the crews of the escorts had become badly fatigued over the past weeks of constant operations; they needed rest and their ships needed maintenance.
The Army was having none of it. Every delay gave the Allies more time to reinforce Java, the great prize of the campaign. Whatever the state of Japanese forces, the Allies were surely much worse off. And while this was easy for the Army participants to claim, as the Navy had provided not only the ships but also most of the aircraft and a fair number of the ground troops, Combined Fleet commander Isoroku Yamamoto took their side and directed that the operations commence as scheduled.
Yamamoto’s orders laid out a comprehensive plan to first isolate and then capture Java, while a bombing campaign wore down the island’s air defenses. Showing some understanding for the harried staff of Second Fleet overseeing the operations, Yamamoto detached the two heavy carriers of the 2nd Carrier Division to directly support the invading forces while the remaining four carriers of the First Air Fleet raided Darwin in northern Australia, the Allies’ supply hub.
American sailors and Indonesian workers inspect Marblehead’s bomb damage.
Ambon, between Celebes and New Guinea, boasted an airfield where Australian planes had deployed in early January along with a battalion of Australian troops to bolster the Dutch colonial garrison. Japanese air raids eventually drove off most of the Allied aircraft, and on 24 January planes from the Japanese carriers Hiryu and Soryu worked over the island’s defenses. The Japanese came ashore on the 30th, and while the Dutch offered very little resistance, the Australians fought with a determined fury despite Japanese air raids, naval bombardment, and suicide demolition attacks. But the Japanese ground forward despite heavy rain and by the 3rd the garrison had surrendered. That didn’t stop the Japanese from massacring 309 prisoners.
As agreed at the Manila Conference, the Japanese began an air campaign against Java in early February, savaging the Allied warships in a series of attacks on 4 February. The prime target remained Allied airbases and their aircraft. Suppressing Allied air power in turn allowed the swift occupation of Makassar in southern Celebes and the first landings on Sumatra. The remaining Allied surface ships set out to intercept the Sumatra landings, despite a strong Japanese escort, but never reached their target as carrier planes from Ryujo drove them off despite inflicting only minor damage.
Not all went according to plan. The Navy’s crack Mihoro and Genzan Air Groups moved across the South China Sea from Saigon to Kuching in Sarawak on 30 January, but sorely missed their ground personnel, equipment and supplies, which took longer to arrive. The Kanoya Air Group’s G4M bombers, known to Allied as “Betty” and Japanese pilots as “Hamaki” (“Cigar,” a reference to its tendency to burst into flame) initially could not be made operational in their new bases at all.
As the Japanese ground echelons got their acts together and air attacks on and around Java increased, Japanese troops landed on Singapore Island on 8 February. Fighting would last for a week before the garrison capitulated on the 15th, but even before the first landings the bombers had begun shifting their targets to Sumatra and Java. Once Singapore fell, the Japanese gained access to air bases and a naval base that made Sumatra indefensible, plus repair facilities and logistical infrastructure.
Japanese troops landed on Bangka Island just east of Sumatra on the 15th. On the 16th they raped and murdered 22 Australian nurses, and massacred the sixty wounded British and Australian soldiers and sailors the nurses had been tending. The Japanese began landing on Sumatra on 14 February, with six battalions from the 38th Infantry Division, while paratroopers attacked the oil center of Palembang. To support the paratroopers, an infantry battalion steamed up the Musi River to Palembang in an assortment of ships’ boats and confiscated fishing smacks. The Dutch had prepared for this, mining the river and blocking it with wire entanglements, but the Japanese steadily made their way upriver.
Honor of the Samurai. Australian soldiers force Japanese prisoners to exhume the Australian and Dutch prisoners massacred on Ambon in 1942. |
More parachute landings, and additional troops coming over the beaches, followed on the next day. Japanese bombers turned back an Allied surface action group trying to attack the beaches, and on the 19th the Japanese successfully brought the Imperial Guard Division to Sumatra from Singapore. The remaining Dutch defenders withdrew to northern Sumatra, in hopes of holding out there, but finally surrendered on 28 March.
To further isolate Java, the Japanese landed on Bali, the next island to the east of Java, on the evening of 18 February. Two transports carried a battalion from the 48th “Formosa” Infantry Division, escorted by four destroyers. They would land in the Badung Strait on the eastern side of Bali between Bali and Lombok, unload through the day and overnight and depart by dawn the next day, but the ABDA naval commander, now the Dutch Lt. Admiral Conrad Helfrich, ordered an immediate attack by all available surface warships.
The urgency meant that the Allied ships, led by Dutch Schoup-bij-Nacht Karel Doorman, came in two waves. The first, with two Dutch cruisers plus one Dutch and two American destroyers, skirmished with the Japanese, losing the Dutch destroyer to a torpedo, but inflicting little damage. The second wave, with one Dutch cruiser and four American destroyers, swept into the landing zone with the destroyers well ahead of the cruiser, loosing fifteen torpedoes. Doorman’s plan called for the cruiser Tromp to finish off with gunfire the ships crippled by the American torpedoes; the problem was that all the torpedoes either missed their targets or hung fire in their tubes.
The Japanese counter-attacked, and Tromp suffered eleven shell hits while covering the American destroyers’ retreat, though her commander J.B. de Meester expertly combed the wakes of a spread of Japanese torpedoes, evading them all – no mean achievement considering the dark night. Tromp and two of the American destroyers in turn shot up the Japanese destroyer Michishio, but did not press the attack to finish her as one of their own destroyers took serious engine room damage. A third wave, with seven motor torpedo boats, sighted no targets – the boats’ low profile hid them from enemy view, but also very effectively hid their enemies from the boat’s lookouts.
The Battle of Badung Strait saw one of the best opportunities the Allies would have to inflict a setback on the Japanese turn into a miserable failure. Helfrich may have intended the attack as a raid only, which would explain the failure of all three waves to press their attacks, but raids were not going to stop the relentless Japanese advance.
The Allies continued to reinforce Java with troops and especially fighter planes, funneled through the port of Darwin in northern Australia. To put the supply line out of operation, the Japanese deployed their First Air Fleet to attack Darwin. On 19 February, four carriers launched 188 planes that attacked shipping in the harbor and nearby airbases; another 54 land-based planes followed up two hours later. They sank 11 ships, damaged two dozen more, destroyed 30 aircraft and killed nearly 300 people for minimal losses. Most importantly, the raid assured that Darwin would not be forwarding reinforcements and supplies to Java for the foreseeable future.
That cleared the way for landings on Timor on the 19th and 20th, where another Australian battalion supplemented the Dutch garrison. Timor faced the Australian port of Darwin across the Timor Sea and the Australian government considered its retention crucial. The Japanese also dropped about 300 naval paratroopers on the island, who were overrun by an Australian bayonet charge and killed almost to the last man. The Japanese had secured the island’s ports and airfields by the end of the month, but the Australians continued their resistance until February 1943.
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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good.
He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.
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