There Is the Fleet

Southward from the Celebes Sea, toward Java and the rich oil wells of Balikpapan, the Jap drove last week. All had gone his way up to then in the Dutch Indies; nowhere had he been defeated in his Pacific battleground. Before him now was the final conquest of the Indies, perhaps a final grip on the Pacific world.

Then, for the first time in fair combat, he met the U.S. Navy. Into narrow Macassar Strait, where the warships, transports and screening planes of the Jap's convoy coursed south, steamed destroyers from Admiral Thomas C. Hart's Asiatic Fleet, U.S. cruisers and at least one U.S. submarine followed. Overhead and probably in advance of Admiral Hart's warships, the U.S. Army's Flying Fortresses and Dutch airmen in U.S.-made bombers harried the Jap's protecting planes, destroyers, cruisers.

The Jap took the worst beating given any convoy in World War II. The destroyers first shelled and torpedoed three Jap transports. One blew up. Another sank. A third listed, apparently was sinking when the destroyers withdrew. They returned, with U.S. cruisers. Shell and torpedo fire sank five more transports. A U.S. submarine torpedoed, probably sank a Jap aircraft carrier. U.S. bombers sank two transports, shot down five of twelve Jap fighters. Dutch bombers hit two Jap cruisers, five transports, a destroyer, a Jap warship which looked like a battleship. A Dutch submarine sank a Jap destroyer.

Three days after the Jap nosed into Macassar Strait, at least eleven of his ships had gone down, 22 more had been damaged. The U.S. at this stage of the action had lost not a single ship, not a single plane.

Before the main naval and air attack developed, the Jap reached his first objective, Balikpapan (where he found the wells, refineries, pipelines in scorched ruins, and Dutch troops ready to battle him ashore). But his convoy losses constituted a real defeat. His cruisers were reported in Macassar Strait only after the battle had well begun; he would scarcely have risked such valuable escorts unless he was hard-pressed. In that sector at least, he was definitely short of fighters to screen his own ships, bombers to attack the U.S. warships.

U.S. and Dutch airmen worked well together and with the surface fleet. By concentrating first on Jap planes and naval vessels, the bombers freed Admiral Hart's warships to knock off the transports like so many ducks.

These assaults slowed the Jap. It was yet to be shown that they had stopped his drive at the Indies' center. Unless he is stopped soon, the United Nations will have the infinitely harder job of driving him from his Indies, and from his sea lanes.

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