Sea Flight by Hugh Popham

Author:Hugh Popham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473849372
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing

XVIII

It was natural enough that we should be angry at seeing our first chance of action in six months go by default; it was natural that we should see it as an unintelligible decision by Admiral Somerville. It was his decision, of course; but it was not unintelligible, and it must have been a bitter one to make. While we were at Addu Atoll the first time, he learnt—as we did not—that the Japanese force consisted of five aircraft-carriers, and four fast battleships, besides cruisers and destroyers. Against this fleet we could pit only two aircraft-carriers and one fairly modern battleship, Warspite. They had, therefore, a superiority in sheer numbers that would almost certainly have made any battle a foregone conclusion. For the second time in six months, our Eastern Fleet might have suffered obliteration, leaving India, Ceylon and the whole Indian Ocean an open hunting-ground. In fact, at the same time as Admiral Nagumo—he of Pearl Harbour—was attacking Ceylon, a striking force of one light carrier and six cruisers was ranging the Bay of Bengal and sinking every ship in sight. But both operations were, as it turned out, flashes in the pan. Nagumo, when he retired eastwards, had failed to bring the Eastern Fleet to battle, and had suffered such rough-handling by the Hurricanes we had flown off to Colombo and China Bay, that the attack was never followed up.

It might have been otherwise; and would have been, if we had had our say. There would have been a Battle of the Indian Ocean set down in the histories of the Second World War next to the great American carrier battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. That was what the situation demanded, and what, I dare say, Admiral Somerville would have given his right hand to have been able to achieve. As it was, the Battle of the Indian Ocean was never fought. Instead there was a small and terrible butchering of one old carrier, two lightly-armoured County Class cruisers, a destroyer, and 100,000 tons of merchant shipping, while we lurked beyond the horizon and chewed our nails and followed the tracks of the dive-bombers on our radar screens. It was from the logic of our unpreparedness that this should happen; but it was none the less disheartening for that.

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