JAPANESE LAND ON JAVA, BATTLE DEFENDERS, AFTER ALLIED FLEET DEFEATS FIRST ATTEMPT (3/1/42)

Shortly after 2300 hours yesterday, the heavy cruiser USS Houston (CA-30), with her No. 3 turret disabled and low on ammunition, and the light cruiser HMAS Perth were heading for the Sunda Strait when they rounded a headland in Banten Bay, Java, where the Japanese Western Invasion Force is landing troops. The two cruisers then engage the Japanese in the Battle of Sunda Strait. The cruisers are almost torpedoed as they approach the bay, but evade the nine torpedoes launched by destroyer HIJMS Fubuki. The two cruisers then sink one transport and force three others to beach. A destroyer squadron blocks Sunda Strait, their means of retreat, and large light cruisers HIJMS Mogami and Mikuma stand dangerously near. (Mogami and Mikuma were armed with 10x 8 inch guns during WWII, so they were “heavy” cruisers, although they were built with 15x 6 inch guns, so they were “large light” cruisers as US Brooklyn class.)

HMAS Perth sinks at 0025 hours from gunfire and torpedo hits; USS Houston faces the same fate at about 0045 hours. Of HMAS Perth’s complement of 680 men, 352 were killed and about 320 were captured by the Japanese and 105 of these died as POWs. 218 survive the war. The fate of these two ships was not known by the world for almost nine months, and the full story of her courageous fight was not fully told until after the war was over and her survivors were liberated from prison camps. An hour or two later the Dutch destroyer HNMS Evertsen, which was to have accompanied the HMAS Perth and USS Houston but had been delayed, ran into two enemy destroyers and, after a brief encounter, beached herself in a sinking condition on Sabuko Island off the coast of Sumatra. (Jack McKillop & Massimiliano Stola)

One of Houston’s shells damages Mikuma along with a Japanese destroyer. CO Captain Rooks receives the MOH for this action.

Above, you mention Perth's casualties, so here are Houston's: Of 1,064 officers and men, 696 are killed, with 368 surviving to be picked up by the Japanese. Of these survivors, 96 will die before the war ends. The survivors of these two warships, along with the surviving members of a Texas National Guard battalion captured on Java, were sent to Burma as slave labor to construct a railroad, where many of the prisoners died of malnutrition and disease.

One of my grandfather's cousins, Seaman Lewis Dodds, was killed when Houston went down in the Sunda Strait.

Here's a YouTube video commemorating the Battle of Sunda Strait.

If you want to read a good book about the Houston and her crew, try James Hornfischer's Ship of Ghosts, it is an excellent history of the ship, her crew, and their ordeal at the hands of their Japanese captors.

iowamark: "I don't know where to start on your John Birch Society article."

Oops, sorry, my bad.

But facts are still facts, and the 1944 Navy and Army boards did accept evidence from Kimmel & Short, and did put more blame on Washington higher-ups, especially Admiral Stark and General Marshall.

And it was to expose those higher-ups that Congress directed Secretary of War Henry Stimson to appoint his own investigation.

Stimson appointed Henry Clausen, whose c1992 book Pearl Harbor, Final Judgment names many higher-ups as contributing to the disaster on December 7, 1941, including, ultimately, President Roosevelt.

Clausen's book is based on his personal experience as an official investigator, and does not use alleged code-breaking data reported by later authors like Stinnett, Victor and Toland.

This alleged data -- I say "alleged" because many scholars have challenged much of it, on numerous grounds -- data on US code-breaking successes allows those authors to argue that Naval Intelligence and Washington higher-ups knew more about the coming attack than they revealed to Clausen or other investigators.

Ultimately, some like George Victor argue that President Roosevelt not only knew the attack was coming, but had deliberately provoked it as a way to bring a fully united America into the war.

But most scholars, or own CougarGA7 included, reject the alleged data, along with arguments based on it, and attack the authors as "conspiracy nuts."

My own view is that even though the conspiracy case is not proved, neither have "anti-conspiracy" scholars proved all of the alleged code-breaking data false.
So there is likely more truth in it than most scholars yet want to admit.

Just to clue you in iowamark, I reject the data because it is bad scholarship.

The authors like George Victor and Robert Stennitt feed on the sensationalism of prospect of being to pin the attack on Pearl Harbor on any one man. Blaming F.D.R. for the attack is sensationalism that sells books, but if you look at their use of source material you see the flaws in their logic. There is a litany of examples in my posting history that soundly show these flaws in both of these works.

It feels good for these people to be able to blame some individual for the attack. Especially when it allows them to demonize some political figure that runs counter to their own political leanings. I am not a fan of F.D.R. I still see the bad effects in our social policies that were born by him and I see many liberal pundits attempt to revive other dead polices of his showing their clear lack of historical understanding. But it is disingenuous to use that as an excuse to blame him completely for something that was a systemic failure across all levels of command.

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