The saga of the Thai-Burma Railway can be told from a number of perspectives. From the viewpoint of the Railway Engineers, it is a story of triumph, of completing an almost impossible task in record time. For the Allied POWs and Asian Workers, the story is much different. It is one of debasement and dehumanization as well as forbearance and survival.
I have, however, come to a darker conclusion with regard to the US POWs. The US War Dept. sacrificed them on the altar of Allied Unity! Permit me to lay out the evidence of this sacrifice.
USS HOUSTON
On Dec 8th 1941 the HOUSTON was forward deployed at Manila Bay. She immediately received orders to depart and sail south. Was she not needed in the defense of the P.I.? Could she not have assisted the men of Bataan and Corregidor? Why was she ordered to move?
She eventually made her way to the port city of Darwin AUS and was based out of there by early 1942. She spent the next few weeks on convoy escort duties. But in late FEB she was ordered to join ABDACOM the allied forces committed to the defense of the DEI especially Java. On 27 FEB under the command of Dutch Admiral Doorman – who spoke not a word of English – a small task force of 5 cruisers and their escort destroyers set out to interdict the pending invasion fleet sailing south from Borneo. (see Section 34.32 above]
Doorman’s flotilla was intercepted by a small screening fleet and the Allied ships spent the day sailing in circles trying to avoid the salvos of ‘Long Lance’ torpedoes fired by the IJN destroyers. They never even sighted the main invasion fleet. One by one the destroyers and cruisers were sunk by those highly effective weapons. By dusk, the destroyers were out of fuel and had to return to Surabaya. No sooner had Doorman ordered the HOUSTON and PERTH to sail to Batavia, than his flagship was hit and sunk with all hands. The Allied fleet scattered having inflicted little or no damage to the screening task force much less the main fleet!
What difference did the HOUSTON make? Indeed, she was the largest ship with the largest guns (8 inch vs 6 inch on all the other cruisers) but there is no record that any hits were made that day. The Allied ships were kept away by the effective distance of the IJN torpedoes at 20Km. Upon reaching Batavia, the two ships found that the port had been bombed and the fuel stores were burning. They managed to find some fuel on lighters but not enough to get them back to Darwin. They’d have to make another stop. To compound the problems there was no ammunition available. Not surprising for the HOUSTON since the Dutch Navy has no ships with 8 inch guns, but there was none even the PERTH’s 6 inch guns.
Their predicament was compounded further when the two captains went to ABDACOM HQ and were told that the Sunda Strait was free of any enemy activity as reported by a recon flight. The General Officers of ABDACOM were in the process of evacuating themselves from the southern port of Tjialjap to Australia. NOTE: they did NOT sail with the 2 cruisers!
Of course, before reaching the Sunda Strait the two cruisers sailed into the midst of the main IJA invasion fleet and were sunk in minutes! How did the WW1-veteran ABDACOM generals not know where the fleet had ‘disappeared’ to?
WHY was the largest ship in the western Pacific sacrificed to the Dutch?
TXNG 2/131
WHY, too, was the 2/131 also sacrificed to the defense of Java? The story of the TXNG artillery men runs in parallel. There were barely 600 of them in Eastern Java, while COL Searle’s 26th Artillery Brigade (well over 1000 men) were at or near Batavia. This force was evacuated along with the ABDACOM HQ. But LTC Tharp’s 600 men were ordered to support the Australian group known as Black Force. Even though the commander of the AAF bombers offered to ferry them out to Australian, Tharp’s was ordered west (to the place where the 26th already was)!
If these 600 men were not sacrificed, I don’t know what you could call it! The War Dept had to have known that the KNIL was completely incapable of defending Java and that the ABDACOM HQ had abandoned their station in fear and full knowledge of what was to come. Why evacuate your largest force (a full Brigade) and leave behind a mere Battalion?
In short, the crew of the USS HOUSTON and the Lost Battalion were being sent to their deaths, all in the name of Allied Unity! It must have come as a complete surprise when many (not quite most) of them were taken as POWs and were not KIA!
