Turning Point

Chapter 16

It began at 06:40, on the last day of February in 1942. The vague misgivings, thrumming vibrations in the air, and dull and distant rumblings soon produced a vast column of what looked like white steam, rising up and up, a massive veil over the Sunda Strait. In the little gun duel that was then under way, every man on either side with a view to the south and west took notice, some standing spellbound as they watch the rapid ascension of the steamy white cloud. High up, perhaps over 11,000 meters, it caught the wind, its top sheared away and smeared across the dull grey sky.

On the shore where the Japanese had landed on Java, the small, once bustling port of Anjer had long since ceased to be the little paradise of Palm and Banyan trees, with the sweet trade winds laced with spices. First came the headlong rush of soldiers and refugees coming over from Oosthaven on Sumatra, swelling over the quays and docks, hastening inland on the roads to Serang and Batavia to the east. Ships came and went, pulling up anchor and then putting out to sea, for the enemy was said to be very near.

At night, the dark silhouette of a Dutch gunboat lurked off shore, then fled north around the stony Cape Merak. Soon the silver grey night saw those glassy seas broken with the coming of over fifty transports, their holds laden with troops and equipment, the Japanese 2nd Infantry Division had finally arrived. Destroyers churned in the waters to the west of the landing site, soon to be challenged, first by the probing of the ill-fated Jupiter, and then by the larger task force led by Captain Agar on Dorsetshire. But he had been too late to prevent those landings, and now the old village Kampong huts were burning from the fires of war, and the dull tramp of Japanese infantry had swept over the sandy shore as they pushed inland, driving off a company of hapless Dutch defenders, and then the hasty defense mounted by the Beds & Herts.

When that vast column of steam vented up into the sky, the last gleaming light of the moon illuminated the silken white veil, and the moon itself fell like a massive blue pearl into the troubled waters of the Sunda Strait, as if fleeing from what was now to come. It set behind the island group that had sent this first warning up, and any man who gazed west was awed by the sight of the tall conical island, backlit by a violet haze that deepened to scarlet indigo at the level of the sea. The soldiers gawked for a time, then were urged on by the harsh throated orders of their officers. They had an invasion to see to, and no thought of what was now about to take place had entered any of their minds.

That morning, in the dark interval between moonset and the coming of the sun, the last of the landing parties cast off their lines, and anchors were pulled up on the transports. The first squadron was already heading north, hastening away from the rising sound of naval gunfire resounding from the west. Three of their guardian destroyers were already engaged, and out in the strait, a line of three more were hastening west like the winds they were named for, Harukaze, the Spring Wind, Hatakaze, the Flag Wind, Asakaze, the Morning Wind that was now about to become the breath of hell.

The pop of their gunfire was briefly heard, even as that vent of steamy sky reached upwards. Then the muffled report of the gunfire was suddenly smothered by the low growl of that isolated stony island in the sea, and this time something much more than steam erupted. The tip of the mountain’s sharp cone belched with fire, and a huge billow of pinkish-grey smoke and ash piled up above those flames, surging into the sky with a loud roar. It cast a vast shadow over the glassy blue sea, which deepened as the column rose, a roiling mass of heat that carried the sulfuric taint of some long lost den of horror beneath the earth.

The ships at sea were caught up in a sudden wild disturbance of the water, not a wave emanating from the site of that eruption, but something affecting the entire area around the islets of Krakatoa, as if the earth beneath was heaving and bucking up, shaking the water above. The smaller destroyers lurched about in those wild seas, and on the bigger ship Dorsetshire, Captain Agar was forced to reach for a guide rail near the binnacle as his heavy cruiser rolled suddenly to one side. His gaze was now transfixed on the scene behind him, amazed by the spectacle of that darkening bloom of heavy ash rising above the volcano.

The day that had been slowly lightening, now darkened under that shadow, the impenetrable pall of Hades spewing forth until the gloom shrouded the entire scene. The smoky ash that blighted the sky gathered with unceasing volume, and tremendous speed, driven on by a series of thunderous reports, as if massive bombs were being set off. They were heard all over Western Java, and dazed villagers came stumbling out of their huts and houses, staring in awe at the fisting shadow of doom that now rose into the violet grey sky. That fading color soon deepened to shadow, and darkness blackened the sky in every direction.

Out on the weather deck of Dorsetshire, Captain Agar gawked as a fine haze descended all about the ship. He reached out his ungloved hand, surprised to find a sheen of ash whitening the handrail. In a matter of minutes it had covered the cruiser from halyards to decks, a mantle of pallid grey-white ash that made it seem he was now Captain of some ghostly phantom ship.

The Japanese destroyers had careened about in that wild sea, and then turned rapidly northeast, as if they could sense the unnatural movement of the water beneath them was an omen far more dangerous than anything the British could be doing. The fume in their wakes seemed to underscore the chaos of the movement, but this was only the beginning, the first herald of the storm that was coming. It was only the first great eruption, which would persist until well after sunrise. Krakatoa was only just awakening from its long sleep, and for the next twenty hours, the gates of hell would be open, the host would issue forth, until it would end in a world shattering event that no man then alive could have possibly imagined.

At the bungalow HQ of Java Command near Bangdung, General Montgomery had been up early to follow the reports of the battle that was now underway. So far the movement of the Australians to contain the landings at Patrol east of Batavia had been smartly carried out, and he had come to believe that lodgment was not the main event. In the heart of Western Java, he was 250 kilometers southeast of Krakatoa, but when that first eruption burst forth, he soon heard the loud rumble, thinking it was the sound of a Japanese airstrike nearby. Then a messenger ran in with a cable from Batavia, and news of what was happening.

The boom of the eruptions could be heard clearly, growing louder with each report, as loud as heavy naval guns. Calls from Batavia, a hundred kilometers east of the eruption, claimed that a heavy ashfall was now blanketing the city, and frightened people were rushing about, throwing their meager belongings onto carts and rickshaws, and starting east on the road. The Japanese landings south of Merak were only 50 kilometers from Krakatoa, and there the rain of ash and pumice was far heavier, until the troops were themselves covered in ash, moving like pale ghouls through the thickening darkness. Even an hour after sunrise, the gloom was impenetrable, and all combat operations had to be immediately suspended.

Montgomery had one of his Brigadiers on the line in Batavia, learning that the city was not yet under attack. Then the line went dead, and a moment later there came a much louder explosion, the sound finally arriving from the distant mountain in the sea. It gave him a chilling, ominous feeling, and he wondered what must be happening there.

Windows were rattling in the city with each booming explosion, and battalion commanders further west, their men choking in the ashfall, were making frantic calls for permission to pull out to the east. Those orders were given, until the telephone system also went completely dead. The day that had promised nothing more than the thunder of war, had now descended into the wrath and chaos of nature, which was so all consuming of the sky that Krakatoa began to generate its own weather. Lightning streaked through the broiling mass of rolling black clouds, illuminating the bristling crown of the maddened Sea God.

As for flight Lt. Charles Lamb, safely out in the Indian Ocean, it was immediately apparent that he and his mates would not go out that day. All the planes on the two British carriers, still 150 kilometers from the eruption, were ordered removed from the flight deck and stowed below. Air operations were now completely impossible, and one seaplane that had tried to go up to see what was happening came plummeting down in no time, its engine completely clogged with ash.

Out in the Sunda Strait, Captain Agar had come about and was now withdrawing southwest. He would have to come within 25 kilometers of the volcano to leave the strait, and it would be a very perilous journey. Ships flashed lanterns at one another, until they could simply not be seen. Then the order was given to use the naval search lights, and long white fingers probed the ashen seas ahead and behind as the column proceeded at a cautious speed of 15 knots.

The ashfall was so heavy that it swept into any open hatch or stairwell, until the chalky white was tracked deep into the inner compartments of the ship. No one on deck could stay there for long, and the Captain was forced to rig out tarps on the open bridge to stave off the cinders that now began to fall in pea sized fragments, still warm to the touch. These would increase to chestnuts, and eventually fist sized clumps of pumice that fell continually.

At one point he had to give a steering order when the watchman called out an obstacle ahead. It was narrowly averted, and Captain Agar saw that it was a broad raft of pumice, which now covered the sea itself, giving the ocean a ghostly, milky-white appearance. To the men unfortunate enough to be on the high mast mounting their watches, it seemed that the task force was covered in hoarfrost, frozen ships on a frigid white sea.

That ash fall was going to spread for hundreds of kilometers on the wind. Soon much of Western Java was under the fallout, and later there would be reports of ash accumulating to a depth of half an inch on Cocos Island, 1,155 kilometers southwest of Krakatoa. Ships at sea in the Indian Ocean would report the blanket of fine dust and ash while steaming over 2800 kilometers away, and some reported ashfall as far off as the Horn of Africa, over 6,000 kilometers distant. The rafts of pumice that gathered in pinkish-yellow patches on the open sea would persist for over a year, drifting all the way to the African coast.

In the old history, the events already described had happened in May, and the mountain continued to steam and vent off and on, until late August when the final paroxysm came. Here, the pressure building beneath was nearly 60 years greater, which was not much in geologic time, but something unusual had happened beneath the earth. A subterranean eruption had forced a vast quantity of magma up, but it did not break the surface, forming a massive dike or plug in the deep wells that were driving the eruptive process. It literally ‘kept a lid’ on the mountain for those six decades, but all the while more and more magma flowed up, and the pressure building beneath Krakatoa was much greater than in the 1883 eruption that had happened in Fedorov’s history. This time, the entire process was going to be collapsed into a much shorter, and more violent event.

The explosion was so massive that it created a sound that would circle the earth seven times with its incredible pressure wave. To every man in Captain Agar’s squadron, it was simply ear shattering, so deafening that the crews were literally stunned as if they had been struck by a hammer, the pain intense, their eardrums shattered. Many, were knocked unconscious, others cowered below decks with their hands over their bleeding ears in shameless fear. They had been through rough seas, wind and storm, but never anything like this.

It was a sound so loud that it would be heard 85 minutes later in Perth, over 1700 kilometers to the south, as a strong explosive bang. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Tambora’s blast of 1815 was terrible, but did not produce this same explosive sound. As if to proclaim itself as the new pretender to the throne in the long arc of volcanic islands, the Sea Demon beneath Krakatoa was bellowing with a roar that moved the air around the island with an awful wrenching pressure.

The column of the eruption poured out and up, towering into the sullen sky like a living thing, a monstrous demon of earth, smoke and fire. Its smoky shoulders rolled upwards with incredible force, and then massive hunks of earth were seen in the sky, soon plummeting down into the turbulent sea.

This tremendous outpouring of gas and ejecta would go on for many hours, the sky growing ever darker, until it was near pitch black by mid-day. By then, the 54th Brigade defending near Merak had retreated east to Batavia, and the 53rd Brigade stationed there was ordered to move east on the road to Kilidjati Airfield. There was nothing that could be done about the 31 Hurricane fighters still on the airfields near Batavia. They simply had to be abandoned, for they could not fly. Some of the crews made a vain attempt to move ten or twelve on flatbed rail cars, but the ash was falling so heavily now that even the rail lines were hazardous. In the end, most of the planes simply had to be destroyed.

On the other side of the equation, The Japanese had a much worst time of things. There was already ash to a depth of many inches all along the coastal regions where they had landed. Half of the transports had fled north, but the remainder hovered furtively off shore, where three brave destroyers still stood guard. When it was clear that the situation was going from bad to worse, General Maruyama ordered any further landing of supplies, equipment, or vehicles halted, and began pulling his troops back towards the coast. He was going to attempt to re-embark as much of his force as possible.

The troops moved like zombies, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, shirtless, ashen souls stumbling through the utter darkness in long lines, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him. Many fell from respiratory distress, collapsing in listless heaps on the roads and trails, and then the lightning flashed, thunder joining the constant rumble and roar of the volcano, and a heavy sulfuric rain began to fall. This created pools of ash mud and flows of tiny ‘lahars,’ a Javanese word that had been used to describe ash and debris flows from volcanoes ever thereafter.

Yet the cold lahars were not the flows to be truly feared. It was the sudden collapse of that massive volcanic plume that would pose the most danger, a pyroclastic flow that could originate from any of the big explosive eruptions now underway. It could form a fast moving current of hot rock, ash, and gas that would cascade down over the sea and spread out like a mantle of utter destruction, moving at the incredible speed of up to 700 KPH. To be caught anywhere near such an event meant almost certain death, and General Maruyama, having lived under the shadow of Mt. Fuji most of his younger life, knew enough about volcanoes to be mortally afraid.

A few battalions made it to the rafts and boats, desperately paddling back out to meet the waiting ships, which stood like frozen icebergs on a blanched white sea. At a little after 22:00, when the beginning of the end rattled the atmosphere so heavily that the movement of the air knocked the men from their feet, all the ships lurched about, their anchor chains barely holding them. Then came the noise that would be heard all the way on the other side of the Indian Ocean, a sound so powerful and intense that it shattered every window in Batavia, over 150 kilometers to the east.

Fifty kilometers from Krakatoa, at Anjer, it struck the men with a sudden piercing thunderclap, knocking them deaf, dazed and senseless, to the ground. As far away as 100 kilometers, the sound would be as high as 172 decibels, ear splitting, nerve wrenching pain, well beyond the threshold of endurance for any human being. It was as if each man had ice picks driven into their ears, and then all was deathly quiet—they would never hear another sound again.

There they wallowed in agony, blinded by the heavy ash, their eardrums burst and bleeding, their voices clotted and mute. The 2nd Division was deaf, dumb and blind, and yet that was the least of the afflictions that was now about to befall those men. The great upheaval from beneath the earth had finally begun. Up until that moment, the eruption had been emerging from cracks and fumaroles in the heavy cap of cooled magma that had sealed off the main chamber. Now it all gave way, and terror was not half a word for what would happen next.

Chapter 17

The painful irony in General Maruyama’s retrograde movement to the coast was that each struggling step his troops took in the hope of saving themselves brought them closer to death. Thus far there had been a regular series of powerful explosions that produced surging pyroclastic flows out to 10 or 20 kilometers from the volcano, much of that activity becoming undersea flows. The paroxysm that was now underway at Krakatoa was so intense that it would collapse huge segments of the main island into the sea. The resulting tsunami would surge out in all directions, but was particularly amplified as the displaced seawater entered the Sunda Straits, a bottleneck formed by the mass of Java and Sumatra.

Aboard Dorsetshire, Captain Agar managed to gather himself, his head throbbing with pain. He was completely deaf, but his long years of experience at sea kept him moving, helping the helmsman up and gesturing to the heading he wanted. It was no good shouting orders, for no one would hear them. In fact, no man aboard those ships would ever hear again either, but the Captain managed with hand signals, slowly getting his men up and back to their posts to re-establish control of the ship.

Then the waves came, the first produced by the massive pyroclastic flows near the island. They were enough to raise the line of ships heavily as they fled, and as the dazed and deafened crews struggled to life again, the vessels were rocked heavily with its passing. They had been following one another closely due to the limited visibility and smothering darkness, with searchlights probing to see the nearest ship ahead. When the helmsman of destroyer Electra fell senseless to the deck, the ship veered off, her aft section now batted about by the first wave, while Express behind her was carried on like an arrow about to hit a wall. The encounter she soon had was devastating when the two destroyers collided, with Electra skewered amidships by the bow of the other ship.

Dorsetshire’s greater displacement and wider beam rode out the first few waves easily enough, though the entire column was now scattered, with ships loosing contact with one another in the murky darkness and scattering in all directions. There was a gracious interval between those first two waves and the great wave that would follow them.

Captain Agar could see the direction the waves were propagating, and steered in such a way as to best ride them out, but they were merely outriders in the storm. A huge segment of the island was collapsing into the sea, and it would generate a tsunami that would be well over 40 meters high. When the great wave finally came, the might of the sea lifted Dorsetshire up like a bath toy, her bow tipping down and then riding wildly up as it finally passed. The ship careened down with a heavy roll, ash and sea creating a wild white haze all around her, but Dorsetshire righted itself and eventually ran true again. Exeter had also escaped and was well off to starboard, but the light cruisers Dauntless and Dragon fared a little worse, eventually managing to ride the wave out, but seeing many men washed overboard. As for Electra and Express, the wave smashed the two together in a much more violent collision, and both would be completely swamped. Their crews would descend in terrified silence into the sea, lost to a man.

Off the coast of Anjer, the first two waves rolled through the anchorage site of the 2nd Division, again sending all the transports into a dizzying dance on the sea. These waves were big enough to swamp small boats laden with troops, and overturn rafts carrying artillery and equipment. Men clung to rope nets on the sides of Sakura Maru, desperately trying to keep themselves from being flung into the sea. The great wave would soon follow, smashing everything in its path with that wall of unstoppable seawater.

General Hitoshi Imamura, the overall commander of the Japanese 16th Army, would suffer a very peculiar fate. He was aboard the transport Ryujo Maru, a little over 100 kilometers from the fiery mountain, and well on the other side of Cape Merak above Banten Bay. When it finally came, the tsunami was still powerful enough there to create a 30 meter wave, nearly 100 feet. The ship rocked so heavily that he was thrown from the deck of Ryujo Maru along with his Vice Chief of Staff, and no one saw the two men go overboard into the ash covered water. He had been maneuvering to help coordinate the withdrawal, but now the operation would be completely unhinged.

The entire landing site descended into utter chaos. Minesweeper No. 2 was literally lifted up and flung at the transport Fushimi Maru, landing right astride the forward deck, and then the two ships rolled into the sea and the transport’s back was broken by the tremendous weight. Anchor chains snapped like tinsel, whipping through the water to sweep away smaller boats. Every deck of the 30 transports remaining there was heavily swamped, with 14 ships capsized and three others driven madly onto the nearest shore. The wave was so powerful that it would carry the Dainichi Maru twelve kilometers inland, where it would later be found on a jungle knoll, beached like Noah’s ark.

The men of 2nd Division had struggled for hours to reach the coast, only to find a 40 meter wall of water surging in from the Sunda Straits, and carrying everything before it, boats, rafts, ships and men alike. Many of the troops had just recovered from the terrible sound, clustered in small groups on the shore, dazed and disoriented, only to find this new terror, a wave they could not even hear coming, sweeping them to their doom.

Transports Brazil, Fushimi, Somedomo, Taketoyo, Tatsuno, Tofuku, Columbia, Maebashi, Genoa, Hoeisan, Atsuta, Dainichi, Tokiwa, Motoyama, Pacific, Kizzan, and Reiyo Maru would all be a total loss in the waters off Anjer and Merak, and with them thousands of troops from the 2nd Division would perish. Only 12 of the 30 ships would manage to stay afloat, but everyone aboard was so dazed and thunderstruck by the disaster that they were virtually lost as an effective combat force. In one fell blow, the mighty Krakatoa had done what Montgomery had spent hours with his maps trying to plan and devise. The entire Western Task Force of the Japanese invasion of Java was completely shattered.

The great wave surged inland at Lada Bay south of Anjer, and would roll 10 kilometers inland, sweeping all before it. People, homes, possessions, animals were all caught up in the massive movement of water, with a death toll that would be counted in the tens of thousands. The water careened up the flow channels of streams and small rivers that found their way to the sea just south of Anjer, and into a broad, low valley, some six miles wide. It would inundate the entire area, creating a small lake there for weeks before the water eventually drained back to the sea. Farther north near Merak, the wave was powerful enough to sweep completely over the nine miles of lowland just south of the knobby wrinkled rise of the mountains that formed the Merak Peninsula. It would surge over the lower ground, all the way to Banten Bay on the other side of the peninsula, where more Japanese troops that had landed there would also be swamped and drowned.

Only the transports anchored well out in the bay had a chance to survive, for the peninsula shielded them from the direct assault of the tsunami. So a few battalions and auxiliary troops that still remained in those ships would live to tell the terrible story of what had happened to their division, but they would be called the Mimi nai dansei ever thereafter, the men without ears.

The great wave pushed completely through the Sunda Straits, around the small islands of Sebuku and Sebesi north of Krakatoa, and into the long bay running up to the port of Oosthaven on Sumatra. There it would crash ashore, sweeping away boats, launches, docks, warehouses, and the entire town itself, rendering the port completely useless. It was so powerful that it migrated all the way to Batavia, and was still 28 meters high when it reached that major port.

As for the British, they fared a little better, being much further inland east of Batavia when the thunder and water came. The one forward deployed battalion, 5th Beds & Herts, was completely wiped out near the village of Serang when it was caught by the wave as it slogged east through the grey ash and rain. But most of the remainder of the division had already been given the order to pull out of Batavia hours earlier, and they were on the long road east when the thunderous roar was heard. The men dropped their rifles, covered their ears in misery, but the sound was not so debilitating there, the head of the column already 180 kilometers east of Krakatoa, and approaching Cirebon.

There it eventually blundered into a company of Japanese infantry from the Shoji Detachment that had landed at Patrol on the north coast with the intention of seizing Kilidjati Airfield. This regimental sized force had already been engaged by the 1st Sherwood Forrester Battalion, and the 18th Divisional Recon Battalion, with fighting about 50 kilometers west of Cirebon. The commander, Toshihari Shoji, had received word of the disaster at Merak and Anjer, and now realized that his was the only Japanese force west of the main landings at Kragan, completely isolated.

He radioed for instructions, but was unable to get through. Seeing that his transports were still off loading supplies, he took matters into his own hands and decided to preserve his regiment, withdrawing back towards the coast. This detachment would end up being the only effective fighting force that was delivered by the Western Task Force, and he would later be commended for his initiative in saving those troops.

The British were starting to deploy to engage that blocking company when it slowly dissolved and withdrew, leaving the road to Cirebon open. So they pressed on, keeping a wary eye north, but found no further enemy presence. The ash fall was slowly thinning out as they reached that port, but the darkness persisted, and it would take all the next day just to sort units out and reassemble the battalions in some semblance of order.

Well south of that column, Montgomery had a real dilemma on his hands. All of Western Java was a zone of heavy ashfall, and anything that lived was fleeing east, creating massive jams of refugees on the roads and a humanitarian nightmare. The desperate natives pleaded for help and, where they could, the British rendered assistance. The war was over in that portion of the island, and while light ashfall was experienced over most of Java, the real debilitating pumice and ash ended near Montgomery’s HQ at Bangdung.

Now he had to decide what to do with his Java Command Staff and a few battalions of the 54th Brigade he was holding in reserve. From all accounts, the chaos to the west was going to focus the remainder of his battle on the Japanese landing further east near Surabaya. Brigadiers Bennett and Clifton had already deployed there, and now he had most of his 18th division slogging east towards Cirebon. Word was that they found the rail lines operational there and could make good use of any rolling stock they could get their hands on. Krakatoa had pronounced its awful judgment on the strategies and plans of Generals on every side. Montgomery’s plan to try and hold Batavia was now swept away with that thunderous eruption, and he set his mind on deciding how to proceed.

“There’s nothing more we can do out west,” he told Bennett on the telephone. “We’ll have to come east and reinforce your defense of Surabaya. I’ll move the division through Cirebon to Semarang as soon as possible, and take what’s left of my reserve and headquarters to Surjakarta. It may be days before we can get sorted out, but we’ll muddle through.”

“What about Tjilatjap?” Bennett had asked. It was the only port open on the southern coast now.

“Blackforce is still there, with some local Dutch units and a few Aussie ships in the harbor. I can reinforce that position if need be, but I can’t see any immediate threat to the place at the moment. The Japanese must be as shaken up as we are. The Devil only knows what happened to those troops they landed out west. What is your situation?”

“Not entirely satisfactory,” said Bennett, with a characteristic understatement. “We’re holding Semarang, but the Japs have taken Rembang further east, and I’ve just the one battalion blocking the coast road in the north. My lines stretch southeast from there. Clifton holds the oil fields at Tejapu, but his right flank is open, and there appears to be heavy enemy movement in that sector.”

“They’re trying to flank Surabaya,” said Montgomery, “and I doubt if we’ll be able to get anything over that way for days.”

“My 2/20 Battalion is on the road northwest of Surabaya,” said Bennett. “It’s the only thing holding that axis at the moment, along with a company of those old Dutch armored cars.”

Montgomery took a deep breath. “Frankly, unless the Dutch can hold on, it doesn’t look like we can keep them out of Surabaya. Your 2/20th is likely to become caught up in all that.”

“Right,” said Bennett, “but I don’t much fancy the thought of those lads in a Japanese prison camp.”

“If need be, have them fall back through Surabaya to Malang. We’re still holding all of east Java, but if the Japs do swing south of Surabaya, that could change. It may be that the best we can do is stand the line from Semarang to Surjakarta, and hold on to Tjilatjap as our principal supply port until I can organize a counterattack.”

“Counterattack?” Bennett seemed surprised. All he had been doing since December was fighting one stubborn holding action after another. “That’s going to be a problem. I’m all for putting up the good fight, but that port can be easily interdicted by the Japanese Navy. To keep it open, Mountbatten and Somerville will have to maintain a constant presence south of Java, and with Perth being their only good base of support well to the south. For my money, we should get the troops off this god forsaken island while we can, and hold the line in Australia.”

“But if we move deliberately we can use that time to concentrate our entire force on Surabaya,” said Montgomery. “7th Australian Division is at sea, and coming to support us. Run this last Japanese division off, and we’ve won this thing.”

“But our boys won’t be able to come in at Batavia now,” Bennett warned.

“Yes, getting through the Sunda Strait is impossible. Tjilatjap will have to do. Then we can put them on the train to Surjakarta. By the time they get here, we should be ready for a decent push east to relieve the Dutch, assuming they can hold out that long.”

Monty’s dander was up, but his plan was overly optimistic. The Dutch would not hold, and that became the real problem. On the 1st of March, the Japanese landed at Karagajar east of Surabaya with three battalions of the Shoji Detachment supported by a recon battalion and two more engineer battalions and artillery from Makassar. Soon the city was flanked on every side, and Montgomery received the bad news the morning of March 3rd.

There was only one battalion of Australian troops supporting the Dutch garrison inside the vise around the port, and looking at his map Monty began to see a situation forming up that, as Bennett would have put it, was less than satisfactory. In spite of the catastrophic nature of the disaster, he had been pulling things together, and planning his next moves. The opportunity he saw in getting to Surabaya first had now slipped away. Fighting on the outer perimeter was tough going, and he could see that his troops would not get through.

If he had the Australian 7th Division in hand, that might do the job, but the disaster at Krakatoa meant Batavia was no longer there to receive them, and in the mind of Prime Minister Curtin, Tjilatjap would not do. He reluctantly gave the order to turn the convoy back to Colombo, the only other port it could possibly reach, and it would creep slowly back to the west, out of the battle, barely making port before the fuel ran out.

Now, with insufficient forces to really go on the offensive, Montgomery would be forced to heed Bennett’s advice and fall back on his only port at Tjilatjap. Obsessed with the capture of Surabaya, the Japanese did not attempt to pursue his withdrawal. The Dutch, and the brave stand put up by 2/20 Australian Battalion, would hold on just long enough for the bulk of the 18th Division to get down to the south coast, where they began boarding any transport shipping available.

The Japanese navy could have made a decisive intervention here, but all the ships were north of Java, and many had been sent to the stricken region out west in the hope of rescuing stranded troops of the 2nd Division. The destroyers and cruisers were plying through the dull grey seas, braving the ashfall, and pulling out a few hapless survivors adrift in the flotsam. One man in particular, would soon be found, and by a very important ship.

On the 5th of March, a flotilla of cargo ships arrived from Perth, and were joined at sea by Mountbatten with Illustrious and Indomitable backtracking from their flight to Colombo to serve as a covering force. They looked like gaunt shapes carved from bone, with ashfall completely blanketing every exposed area of the ships. They began pulling the rest of the 18th Division off, and the battle for Java would be lost. In spite of the presence of those troops, and the Rock of the East in Montgomery, nature had pushed the history along with the sheer power of that mighty eruption. The Rock was pushed along with it, and soon Montgomery would find himself in Perth, contemplating nothing more than a long sea journey back to Alexandria where he hoped to get back in the swing of things for Operation Supercharge.

Java’s fate had been decided, and Japan would occupy all the key barrier islands as they had in Fedorov’s history, but something else had happened in the Sunda Strait when the mountain finally vented its wrath in that last massive detonation. It was going to change more than the weather across the globe in the months ahead, and its effect would ripple out like the shock waves and tsunami had from Java, reaching all the way to the North Pacific, where Vladimir Karpov was quietly plotting the demise of his enemies.

Chapter 18

Captain Takechi Harada stood on the bridge, still unable to believe the devastation he was seeing. All around him, the sea was frosty white, convulsing in the last throes of a great disturbance. The air itself was thick with ashfall, and the deep basso of some great thrombosis within the earth growled with an ominous persistence, a steady rumble that spoke of calamity. What in the name of all the Gods and Demons had happened here?

His ship, the destroyer Takami, was one of Japan’s newest fighting ships, state of the art for her day, but now it seemed a deaf and blind thing in the heavy oppressive airs. All of the equipment was down, though engines were still hot and running smoothly in spite of the seas being clotted with ash. They had determined that there must have been a sudden, catastrophic eruption close by, for this island archipelago was infamous for its violent geology. A quick look at his charts named the likely suspect—Krakatoa.

At the moment, all he could think of was getting his ship to safety, and trying to find a way to navigate north away from the Sunda Straits to do so. They had been steaming about 110 kilometers northeast of the suspected eruption site, after passing through the straits and rounding the northwestern tip of Java at Cape Merak. They had been in a storm, skies darkening, winds up, with heavy lightning, and the ship was struck. The bridge blackened and systems failed just as they were cruising in the lee of a small island named Pulau Tunda according to their last charted position. Then the sound came, first a strange distended hum that descended into deeper tones, finally resolving to the awful roar and rumble they had been hearing for the last ten minutes.

The darkness intensified all around them, which they soon found was caused by a massive broiling eruption cloud to their southwest. It has to be a volcano, thought Harada, yet it was completely unexpected, as there had been no warnings or alerts issued. He wondered now at the fate of the other ships he had been maneuvering with before they broke off on separate courses.

Drawing a direct line from their presumed position to the volcano, the Captain saw that it passed right through that island, and then the northwestern tip of Java, reasoning that those land masses must have shielded his destroyer from the worst effects of the eruption, particularly the heavy wave sets that he could now see rippling over the sea. Like everything else that had been happening in recent days, it had come out of nowhere, changing the sea and sky in just minutes, and now persisted with its ear thrumming roar.

“Any word from engineering,” he said to his first officer, Lt. Commander Kenji Fukada.

“They’re still working, sir,” said Fukada, tall and gaunt looking in his grey overcoat, and battle helmet. “We got hit pretty hard.”

The ship was still rolling in the last residual swells, and with ash descending, darkness pervading, it had been impossible to see through the forward view panes. The wipers only smeared the ashen slurry to a dull opaque wash. He posted a watch on every weather deck, and seconds later the watch called out: “man overboard!”

They saw something bobbing on the white sea, only 50 yards off the starboard bow, which was the outer limit of visibility in the deep ash and gloom. It was the first sign of anything else afloat and alive, yet as he stared at it in his field glasses it seemed no more than flotsam.

When the watch finally made the sighting, the Captain came to all stop, grateful that the auxiliary engine and steering controls were still functioning. They had only been on the weather deck off the bridge for a few moments, but the sheen of ash was already coating their foul weather coats and rain ponchos, dusting their shoulders and then running in pale grey streaks with the rain.

The Captain craned his neck, to see the man pointing at the very same location where he had spotted the wreckage. He looked again, adjusting his field glasses, and now he saw not one man, but two, desperately clinging to the broken remnant of an old raft. One of the two was slumped on the raft, the other with an arm over him to keep the man in place.

“Looks like somebody else made it through this alive,” said Fukada. “Shall I have KK get a boat over there?”

“At once.”

The First Officer had referred to Katsu Kimura, the Sergeant in charge of the ship’s small contingent of Naval Marines, always called KK by the officers. The word was sent down and some minutes later they watched as a small launch went over to the scene, the broad shoulders and stocky hulk of Sergeant Kimura prominent as he stood at the wheel, three helmeted Marines behind him in full gear. The word came back—two survivors, one unconscious, but both alive, and they were both in uniform.

That set the Captain to wonder what may have happened to the rest of his squadron. They had separated an hour earlier, each bound for different ports in the rising tension of those last hours. He remembered feeling that impending sense of doom. His operation had proceeded smoothly enough, but then, with a suddenness that stunned every man aboard, chaos reigned over the scene. Perhaps he could learn more from these men.

Out on the turbulent water, the one conscious survivor was elated when help arrived. They had seen the ship appear, moving slowly through the heavy ashfall and rain. It seemed a sallow grey specter, deathly still, and frosted over with the ash that clung to its mast and odd looking riggings. He did not recognize the ship, but realized it must be one of the screening force units—most likely a cruiser from its size. He thanked the Gods that they had been found, and the long ordeal, clinging to that broken raft in the choking sea, would finally be over.

Being well over 120 kilometers from the massive detonation of Krakatoa, they had been spared the wrenching pain and deafness, though their ears were still ringing from the loudness of the event, even at that distance.

“Thank god you have found us,” he gasped when the small boat reached them, still bobbing in the high swells. He could see friendly troops there, four men, one using a grapple to secure the tattered raft, two others throwing life preservers. “This is General Hitochi Imamura!” he said with the last of his strength. “Take him first…”

General Imamura… Captain Harada was quite surprised when his chief medical officer came to the bridge, a bemused look on his face, and related that information.

“A General? An Army General? Out here? Did he say what ship he was on?”

“Ryujo Maru—a cargo ship from the sound of it. God only knows what it was doing out here in this mess.” The doctor folded his arms, Lieutenant Isamu Hisakawa, coming over from the Atago when this new ship was commissioned. The Captain found him a competent, no nonsense man.

“He’s resting quietly now, but he was quite talkative for a while. He wants to know if we have any information from 16th Army General Staff—says they were operating out of Balikpapan.”

“16th Army?” The Captain scratched his head. “Japanese Army?”

“That’s what he says. They both have on military service jackets and uniforms, and the one man is well decorated. If he isn’t a General he’s something else, and fairly high and mighty. What do you make of it, sir?”

“All I know, from the last orders I received, was that we were to get back to port. Then all hell broke loose. What was this man doing out here? I wasn’t aware the army had anybody that high up in this region.”

“He says they were way down above Banten Bay when their ship was taken by a tsunami from that eruption. They both went into the drink and managed to grab onto that broken raft.”

“But we’re 70 kilometers north of Banten Bay.”

“Looks like they had a pretty rough ride sir. They must have been pushed all the way up here by that tsunami.”

Captain Harada sighed. He was a careful man, and the fewer unanswered questions in front of him, the better. “Very well… I’ll go down and have a look at them. I need to see Chief Engineer Oshiro. We’ve got to get the ship back on her feet. We barely have engine and steerage control. Everything else is down, and we can’t raise anyone else either. Gods are angry today, Doctor. Whatever happened out there, it’s created a real nightmare. Give me ten minutes and I’ll see you in the sick bay.”

“You are Captain of this ship?” The man squinted at Captain Harada, his eyes still red and swollen from the ash and seawater, face haggard, though he was a portly man, with a substantial belly. The Captain bowed politely.

“You are safely aboard the Takami,” he said. “I am Captain Takechi Harada. What has happened to your ship?”

“That I cannot tell you,” said the man. “I was swept overboard… wait—what did you say your name was?”

“Harada, Itto Kaisa, Captain of the First Rank.”

“Itto Kaisa? Don’t you mean Kaigun-daisa? And how very strange, another Harada. My Deputy Chief of Staff is from that family. Perhaps you are a distant relative? In any case, I am Rikugun- Chūjō, Lieutenant General Imamura, Commander of the 16th Army now conducting these operations. You have done us a very great service, along with that sailor in the other room who helped keep me from drowning on that raft. I owe the navy a great debt. Thanks to you and your ship, I was fortunate to survive, but it is imperative that we reach a friendly port as soon as possible. I must ascertain what is happening on Java.”

Doctor Hisakawa said he was talkative, thought the Captain. Yet the more he looked at this man the stranger he felt. There was something about him, stirring some old memories to life. He stared at the man’s uniform, seeing the prominent gold stripe, well soiled now, and the two silver stars on his shoulders. But he knew something of the Army ranks as well—a Lieutenant General should have three stars, and they were supposed to be gold on green.

“Where are you from?” the man asked.

“Sendai,” said the Captain.

“How strange, Miyagi Prefecture, I grew up there as well. I still miss the trees on Jozenji Dori. I always loved to walk there. In the winter they would shimmer with a thousand lights for the Pageant of Starlight.” The man forced a wan smile. “Yet I have traveled far and wide since then. This war will likely take me even farther before it is over, but I should not complain. I could have been a meal for the sharks out there, assuming any will survive in that hell. It was terrible… the sound… the sea…that terrible darkness.”

The Captain nodded. “From what we can determine, Krakatoa must have erupted, and very suddenly, right there in the middle of the Sunda Straits. There was nothing in any report or communication to indicate a hazard there, or any state of elevated alert for that volcano.”

“Nature will do what it wishes, we must simply try and stay out of its way.” The man frowned. “That’s what my Deputy Chief of Staff would always tell me. I’m afraid the 2nd Division on Java was on the wrong side of that advice. The casualties must have been very heavy from that tsunami. Well, I put it there, and so I suppose I must bear the responsibility.”

“2nd Division? From Camp Asahikawa? They had units out here? We were not informed.”

That confusion aside, the Captain was deeply struck by what the other man had just said, not for any sense of its eloquence or wisdom, but it was something he had been told long ago—by his grandfather. ‘To live a long and happy life, a man must be wise, lucky, but also careful enough to stay out of nature’s way.’ He tilted his head to one side, looking at the man very closely. A powerful sense of recognition swept over him, and now he realized it was the uniform the man was wearing. It reminded him of his grandfather’s old army uniform—yes—even the rank insignia was much like that on this man’s shoulders.

“Be thankful you are in the navy, and with nothing more to worry about than the doings on this single ship. In the Army, things have been very much different since this business in China started. I was Deputy Chief of Staff in the Kwantung army once—sorting out all the messes that other Generals would create. Things were not so bad in the Kwantung. No volcanoes there. Now I have a mess of my own making to sort out, so you must get me to a friendly port right away. I must make my report on what has happened directly to the Imperial General Headquarters. It looked like we had things running very smoothly, but who could have expected this?”

Captain Harada, blinked, quite surprised.

“Imperial Headquarters?”

“Yes, a stuffy place full of sour old men, if you want my opinion, but they will need to know what has happened, and Combined Fleet as well, if they don’t already know it. We must have lost many ships in that tsunami, and I’m afraid we won’t have much left of 2nd Division now. We will have to pull reserves from Nishimura’s troops at Singapore. A brigade of the 5th Division is already forming up—excellent troops. I had that division a year or so ago, and they fight like tigers.”

“Well… General… We were headed for Singapore when that volcano blew. I don’t think we caught the worst of it. I suppose we were lucky after all, and managed to stay out of nature’s way. Yet my ship still took damage—nothing all that serious from what the engineers tell me. It is simply a matter of time before we can get everything up and running again. In the meantime, I’ll be making way with some caution here. It isn’t only nature we have to worry about. The Americans and Russians have just had a good fight in the North Pacific, and something tells me things will be going from bad to worse here soon. Odd thing… this is the second mountain to blow its top this week. Something in the Kuriles erupted three days ago, and all of Hokkaido is under this same goddamn ashfall.”

At this the General seemed quite surprised. “I had not heard that,” he said.

“Yes… Well sir, we’ll get the decks swabbed and be on our way soon enough. In the meantime, try to get some rest.”

“Just a moment Captain… Did you say the Americans were fighting with the Russians?”

“That is what we heard, and both sides lost ships, if the rumors are correct.”

I see…. And where did you say you were heading?”

“Singapore.”

“Impossible! Shouldn’t you rejoin the Western Screening Force? We will need to get to Balikpapan, or perhaps Makassar. Singapore is out of the question. That is Nishimura’s command now. Yamashita was brilliant, but sadly, he failed to finish the job.”

The Captain had started to edge towards the hatch, but he stopped again, turning his head. “I suppose I could get you up to Balikpapan, but why in the world is the army sending units there with all this trouble on Taiwan?”

That was going to end up being a very long story, and one we have heard before in this saga. It was going to be two men talking at cross purposes at first, each one failing to understand what the other was really saying. Yet if Captain Harada was listening closely to what this man was telling him now, he might have heard things that would have alarmed him a good deal more than those nostalgic memories of his grandfather. It seemed more was shaken than the earth, sea, and sky when Krakatoa vented its wrath. Pavel Kamenski might have had something to say about the unsettling nature of such massive explosions, and if Anton Fedorov had been in that room, he would have certainly picked up on the things the older man was saying about Yamashita at Singapore, and the 2nd Division on Java.

At that moment, however, the urgent business of the ship would pull Captain Harada away, though the encounter left him with a very strange feeling. For his part, the Major General might be forgiven for not knowing there was no Japanese destroyer by the name of Takami. That was the name of a mountain, and most destroyer class ships in the IJN were given poetic sounding names associated with wind, sky, sea, clouds, waves, frost or mist. Mountain names were typically reserved for bigger capital ships like heavy cruisers, and sometimes carriers. Kaga and Akagi bore such names, as they were special ship conversions born from older battlecruisers.

Yet there was Takami, real as the grey rain still falling on her decks, and she was a very special ship indeed, though not one a man like Hitochi Imamura would ever be familiar with—not one even Admiral Yamamoto could name. Her full designation was JS Takami, and there was a third letter after her hull type, DDG-180….