#hnlms java

Trailing the formation was the elderly Java, but she made the turn as well. It might have been better for her men had she not. At 2336 hours a colossal blast erupted on Java’s stern. From five miles away observers on Nachi, who had been anxiously waiting for their torpedoes to arrive, saw “a flash . . . followed by big red flames shooting up.” Other Japanese witnesses in Sentai 5 wrote of “a huge explosion that lit up the sky.” To the southwest about six kilometers away, men of Tanaka’s DesRon 2 also observed explosions in the distance. On the bridge of DesDiv 16’s flagship, Yukikaze, Capt. Shibuya Shiro and the ship’s skipper, Tobita Kenjiro, saw the fire burst with their own eyes. Much closer, a mere nine hundred yards away, men on Houston were stunned. “There was one hell of an explosion; the aft part of the ship seemed covered in flames, and explosion followed explosion in rapid succession, with each one sending a tower of flame and debris a hundred feet in the air while the old Java just rocked and bucked." A single Long Lance had struck the Dutch cruiser aft on the port side. The one-thousand-pound warhead’s detonation and subsequent explosions—the torpedo appears to have set off a magazine, possibly Java’s hold of depth charges—severed the ship’s stern. On the bridge an RNN officer heard the helmsman exclaim, “She’s out of control!” as he spun the ship’s wheel around with no results. As men came down off the bridge, it was soon apparent that the ship was mortally damaged. With her stern blown off to gun number 7, the cruiser was already beginning to settle with a pronounced list. Java was an old ship, well advanced in years, and her water-tight integrity was poor. Capt. P. B. M. van Staelen and his officers immediately saw that she would not last long. Orders to abandon ship were given, but for the crew this only led to a rush toward life-vest stations amid considerable panic. The ship had lost electrical power, and none of her boats could be lowered. A number of men were physically injured during the scramble for vests; others were thought to have been crushed by heavy life rafts being dropped without warning on top them in the water after they went overboard. To add to the danger Java’s ruptured oil tanks created a heavy sheen of bunker oil around the ship, some of which caught fire, hindering attempts to get away from the doomed ship. The swiftness of her destruction and the absence of a destroyer screen, along with the dense blanket of flaming fuel oil, combined to ensure a highly lethal result. Out of her crew of 528 men there would be fewer than 40 survivors, and several of these men would not last the war in Japanese captivity. Watching in the water as the cruiser upended and slid vertically into the Java Sea, her executive officer, Beckering-Vinkers, led the men in a brave, if forlorn, cheer: “Long live the Queen! Hip-hip hooray, hip-hip hooray, hip-hip hooray!”