Action off Java, March 1, 1942 (Sinking of the USS Edsall)

During the Second World War, four US destroyers were listed as missing, and presumed lost, but their fate was unknown. The old four-stack destroyer Edsall was one of these ships that had simply disappeared, and her fate was not known until after the war. Interviews with Japanese veterans led to the discovery of her fate in 1952, and details did not come to light until 1980. While it had always been assumed that Japanese forces had sunk her, no one had suspected that the little ship had died so valiantly, fighting against insurmountable odds.

To accurately understand the fate of the Edsall, we must first document her previous war experience, and then the chain of events that led to her demise.

On January 20, 1942, Edsall participated in the first sinking of a large Japanese submarine. While making a depth charge attack, one of her depth charges exploded prematurely, causing heavy damage to the stern of the destroyer. Leaking badly, she put into Tjilatjap for repairs, which were performed in a rush. The hull was repaired to stop the leaks, but there was no time to repair the ship's machinery, which cut her speed down to 30 knots from her previous high speed of 35 knots.

In February 1942, Japanese forces were advancing almost unchecked down the Indonesian archipelago. Allied forces were withdrawing, but it was hoped that the Japanese advance could at least be slowed on Java. To this end, the USS Langley, formerly the US Navy's first aircraft carrier and now an aircraft transport, was to carry 32 P-40 fighters from Australia to Java. Edsall, in the right place at the right time, and another destroyer USS Whipple, were to provide escort.

The Japanese sighted the ships on February 27, and destroyed Langley with aircraft bombs. Edsall and Whipple picked up 485 survivors, and finished off the old carrier with torpedoes and gunfire. The destroyers rendezvoused with the oiler Pecos at Christmas Island, and transferred the survivors to the larger ship. The 32 pilots were transferred to Edsall, which was instructed to return them North to Tjilatjap, where it was hoped aircraft could be found for them.

Edsall sailed northeast towards Java, and was never seen or heard from again. What we know of her from this point forward us based entirely on Japanese accounts, which did not surface until 1980. Even the most basic fact of her sinking was not known until 1952.

On March 1, Japanese troops began landing on the North coast of Java, and a general order went out by radio for all US to escape the area, rendezvous south of the island, and withdraw to Australia. Edsall did not respond, but evidently heard the order, as she was sailing south when she was sighted.

Three days earlier, Admiral Nagumo's Carrier Strike Force had sortied from Staring bay and entered the Indian Ocean to cut off the escape of Allied forces. Nagumo's command included the carriers Soryu and Akagi, the battlecruisers Hiei and Karishima, and the heavy cruisers Tone and Chikuma.

On the afternoon of March 1, the Tone spotted a lone ship 15 miles to the northeast of her position. Chikuma sighted it twelve minutes later, and after identifying the distinctive shape of an American four-piper, opened fire at 1730 hours with her 8-inch guns at a range of 21,000 yards. At that range, the shots were wildly inaccurate, but they alerted the Edsall's skipper, Lieutenant Joshua Nix, who immediately made smoke and started evasive maneuvers. But due to the incomplete repairs to the stern, Edsall had no chance to outrun the Japanese task force; all Nix could do was prolong the inevitable.

At 1747, Karishima and Hiei opened up from 27,000 yards with their 14-inch guns. All Japanese ships turned to attack the US destroyer, which Tone's officers misidentified as an Omaha Class light cruiser. At 1756, Nix turned his ship directly towards the attacking enemy, closing with the cruiser Chikuma to fire his ship's four diminutive 4-inch guns, and perhaps make the Japanese turn away fearing torpedoes. Shots from both sides fell short, and Edsall turned away a few minutes later. At 1800 hours, Chikuma was forced to cease fire, as Edsall made smoke and ducked into a rainsquall.

Naguma was not to be dissuaded, and all four Japanese ships stayed in pursuit, opening fire again when the little destroyer became visible. But Nix was a skilled ship handler, and his evasive maneuvers were impressive. At such great ranges, the Japanese shells took over a minute to reach his ship, so each time he saw the flash of gunfire he would alter course. His turns ranged from a few to 360-degrees, and he never stayed on the same course for a full minute. He also varied the speed of his ship radically, signaling everything from "turns for 30 knots" to "full astern emergency." His radical maneuvers, combined with the notoriously bad Japanese gunnery in the early months of the war, turned what should have been a quick and easy kill into a nightmare for the Japanese. Karishima and Hiei fired 297 14-inch rounds and 132 6-inch rounds between them, scoring only one hit. The cruisers faired even worse, firing 844 8-inch and 62 5-inch shells without hitting the American destroyer.

Naguma was furious. His ships had chased a single, greatly inferior enemy vessel for over an hour, expended nearly 1400 rounds of ammo, and yet had failed to sink it. With evening approaching, he decided to let his airmen have a try. Soryu launched 9 dive-bombers armed with 1100-pound bombs, and Akagi launched 8 dive-bombers armed with 550-pound bombs. They attacked Edsall between 1827 and 1850, and did far better than their surface-born comrades. Despite her twisting and making smoke, Edsall was struck by a number of bombs, which left her what the Japanese called "kasai," which translated means "a great flaming conflagration."

Either due to lack of control or out of defiance, Edsall turned her bows at the approaching Japanese surface ships before coming dead in the water. The Japanese battlecruisers and heavy cruisers closed in, and Chikuma pounded the little ship at point-blank range with her main and secondary guns, blowing first the bridge and then the stern off the vessel. At 1900 Edsall finally sank by the stern, at 13-45S 106-45E, some 430 miles south of Java.

Chikuma stopped to pick up 5 survivors (possibly 8). When interrogated, they revealed the name of the ship (recorded in Chikuma's log as the destroyer "Edosooru") and explained how their skipper had managed to avoid Japanese fire for so long. The Edsall survivors were left at a prisoner of war camp at Celebes, and there official Japanese records of them cease.

This engagement, and the valuable lessens learned from it, caused the Japanese to make a number of changes to the curriculum at their gunnery schools. To counter enemy ships avoiding shells fired from long range, and to avoid the horrible waste of ammunition, the maximum allowable range to target for a cruiser engaging and destroyer was reduced to 12,000 yards. Tactics were developed to use pincer attacks to corral an enemy vessel, more effort was put into ship identification, and more time was spent on long-range battle practice.

Based on verbal accounts by Japanese veterans after the war, the US Army Graves Registration Service visited the island of Celebes, and locals directed them to a forgotten POW camp at Kendari. There they found five unmarked graves, and identified the beheaded bodies of Edsall crewmen Sidney Amory, Horace Andrus, J.R. Cameron, Larry Vandiver, and Donald Watters.