PREPARATIONS FOR A BATTLE
The Allies fighting the Japanese in Asia had one important advantage they had long broken their adversarys naval code. Time and again this fore warned them of surprise attacks. No sooner had Admiral Sir James Somerville arrived than he was told of the Japanese intention to send a raiding force into the Indian Ocean. Nagumo Chuichi, with a force consisting of five carriers, four battleships, three cruisers and 11 destroyers, was to attack the bases at Colombo and Trincomalee, while Ozawa Jizaburo, with cruisers and one light carrier, went for Calcutta and the shipping routes which crossed the Bay of Bengal. Somerville was under orders to avoid a fleet action. He sailed from Colombo with the battleship Warspite, the carriers Formidable and Indomitable and four cruisers, and steamed southwest, meeting up with Hermes and the cruiser Emerald, and the four R-class battleships with their destroyer screen.
A SENSE OF FALSE SECURITY
On 2 April Somerville decided to take the squadron to his reserve base at
Addu Atoll in the Maldive Islands to refuel, detaching three ships the heavy
cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire to Colombo for repairs, and Hermes to
Trincomalee to pick up stores. The next day, the Japanese entered the Indian
Ocean, and the following afternoon an RAF Catalina flying boat spotted
Nagumos ships about 360 miles southeast of Ceylon.
THE BATTLE JOINED
At 0800 on Sunday, 5 April, in a re-run of the attack on Pearl Harbour, 91 bombers supported by 36 fighters attacked Colombo. Cornwall and Dorsetshire had been warned off, and the port was almost empty, but the carrier based aircraft damaged shore installations and sank a destroyer and an armed merchant cruiser. The RAF sent up 42 fighters to intercept them, mostly obsolete Hurricanes, brought there by Indomitable earlier in the month , and were largely overwhelmed, losing 19 for the loss of seven Japanese aircraft. The returning Japanese aircraft flew over the two British heavy cruisers, probably by chance, and a second wave of attack aircraft promptly sortied and sank them in minutes with the loss of 424 men.
Over the next three days there followed a cat-and-mouse game. Somerville had left Addu as soon as re-fuelling was completed on 5 April, and Nagumos scouts tried
to find him. Admiral Nagumo, thus occupied, delayed his attack on Trincomalee until the morning of 9 April, with very similar effect to the strike on Colombo. Once again, the real sting came in the tail, for the returning attack aircraft overflew Hermes, which had hurriedly sortied in the company of the destroyer Vampire and a corvette when the first warning of impending attack had been received, without fighter aircraft embarked, and was now outside the protective umbrella of land-based air craft. A strike force was launched from the Japanese carriers, and attacked Hermes and her tiny screening force, sinking them in very short order.
At first sight, the Japanese raid looks to have been an undiluted success, but it did not achieve its objective of destroying the British fleet. Instead, two heavy cruisers and an antiquated aircraft carrier were all it managed to account for. Had Nagumo played his hand more wisely the effects would have been far more significant.
