Word: cruisers
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...Australian airmen strove to smash, scatter and delay the assembling Japanese convoys and air fleets before they could gather their full strength for assault. A Navy communiqué from Washington reported a great victory by U.S. and Australian naval airmen (who probably flew PBY patrol bombers). Two heavy cruisers were sunk, and the attacking airmen thought, with varying degrees of certainty, that they had also sunk a light cruiser, three destroyers, five troop-jammed transports, a gunboat and a minesweeper. They damaged a fourth cruiser, a fourth destroyer, six transports, an aircraft tender and a gunboat.* In a later attack...
...seven consecutive days before General Douglas MacArthur left Corregidor, the War Department's Philippine communiqués had a pleasant, unchanging sameness. U.S. scouting units continued to harass enemy communications. A Japanese cruiser fired several shells into the port of Cebu, but the slight damage inflicted hardly made the effort worthwhile. Another Jap division was landed at Mindanao, south of Luzon. Somehow-the means were not disclosed-a 3,000-ton enemy tanker was sunk. Otherwise, all was quiet in the Philippines...
...terms of the total Allied naval strength available in the combat area, it was a worse disaster than Pearl Harbor. Bleakest fact of all: the known Japanese losses in no way compensated for the Allied losses. The Navy carefully qualified its report that one Japanese cruiser and one destroyer were probably sunk, two other cruisers and three destroyers may have been put out of action. At best, the score was 13 to 7, the wrong way, in the battle of Java...
...Java action itself the U.S. navy lost only the heavy cruiser Houston, which had carried President Roosevelt some 25,000 miles through the Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific, and the old (World War I) destroyer Pope. The British lost the heavy cruiser Exeter, which by skillful maneuver drove the Admiral Graf Spee to her ignoble end in 1939, and four destroyers (Encounter, Stronghold, Electra, Jupiter). The Dutch lost two light cruisers (Java and De Ruyter), two destroyers (Kortenaer and Evertsen). Australia's Navy lost its light cruiser Perth, the armed sloop Yarra. Probable loss of life: about...
...definite air of conviction that the U.S. can yet win its Pacific war. No submarine losses were reported in the U.S.-British summary of the battle of Java. Of five U.S. destroyers referred to in the communiqué, only one was reported lost. The Houston was the only cruiser of at least 52 which the Navy admitted losing in any theater. Comforting to Navy men was one point which seemed academic to laymen: of all the warship losses in the battle of Java, not one was attributed to air attack...