The war was going badly for the North Koreans, and it was about to get worse.

It was September 14, 1950, more than 11 weeks after North Korea’s June 25 invasion of South Korea. The North’s military planners had expected that it would take just four weeks to crush the Republic of Korea (ROK) army and reunify the peninsula under the communist government of Kim Il-Sung. But now it was mid-September and South Korean forces and their American allies still held a toehold around the port of Pusan. A last-gasp North Korean offensive had failed to break the ROK/U.S. lines.

North Korea was not prepared to fight a long campaign, especially against an enemy that had complete control of the air and sea.

At first, the invasion had gone exactly as planned. North Korea’s army was better equipped, better trained, and more experienced than South Korea’s forces, and the communists had quickly smashed through the southern defenses and driven the disorganized and demoralized survivors 150 miles south toward the tip of the peninsula where they would surely be trapped and annihilated.

But North Korea’s timetable had been upended catastrophically when the United States intervened with air, sea, and ground forces.  Neither the North Koreans, nor the Soviets and the Chinese, who had both reluctantly agreed to support the invasion, believed that the United States would respond to the North Korean attack with military forces of its own.

A Shocking Decision

But within 72 hours of the invasion, President Truman, erroneously believing that the Soviet Union had ordered the invasion and fearing that it might be the opening move in a world-wide communist offensive, had ordered U.S. air and naval forces to intervene. Three days later he ordered American ground forces into action, shocking the North Koreans and their patrons. On July 3, 1950 American carrier-based planes launched their first strikes against North Korean targets and within weeks were attacking North Korean troops pushing south. U.S. ground forces – although shamefully ineffective at first – arrived in increasing numbers and showed increasing competence. Supplies and reinforcements flowed through Pusan and the U.S. and ROK forces gained strength, finally halting the North Korean advance near Pusan. The objective of the North Korean invasion plan was to smash the ROK forces and occupy the entire country before the United States could rearm or resupply their ally.  But they hadn’t expected the U. S. to join the fighting.

One Last Push

On September 1, weeks after the war was supposed to be over, North Korea had launched its last big push against the U.S. and ROK lines surrounding Pusan. For their Naktong offensive, the North Koreans threw everything they had left at the U.S. and ROK defenders. It wasn’t enough.

Two months of steadily increasing U.S. air attacks against North Korean supply lines and stiffening resistance by American and South Korean ground forces had bled the North Korean army dry. To launch their attack, they had stripped defending troops from most of the key places they had captured, including the port of Inchon, and thrown thousands of untrained conscripts into battle.

Though weakened by horrific casualties and shortages of food, ammunition, and fuel, the North Korean attackers pushed forward grimly. Initially they made encouraging gains, and in a few places they actually broke through. But American and South Korean forces patched the breaches and threw the North Koreans back. With U.S. and ROK forces growing stronger, and the North Koreans reeling, it looked like the next phase of the war would be a United Nations offensive that would break the siege of Pusan and force the North Koreans back up the peninsula’s harsh terrain, one bloody mile after another.

The North Koreans were exhausted, outnumbered and running out of everything, including time. They were facing complete destruction, and neither the Soviets nor the Chinese were willing to provide military forces.

Worse, they knew that the Americans and their United Nations allies were preparing for an amphibious landing and they had no way to prevent it.

The UN landing – codenamed Operation Chromite – would take place on September 15 at the port city of Inchon, halfway up the Korean peninsula on the Yellow Sea. Planned by the American General Douglas MacArthur in his role as United Nations commander, the invasion would succeed brilliantly and lead directly to the rout of the North Korean army.

Because the landing was so successful and was accomplished at such low cost to UN forces, many observers have assumed that the North Koreans were surprised. That was hardly the case.  In fact, the landing at Inchon was one of the worst-kept secrets of the Korean War.

Operation Common Knowledge

It didn’t take any actual espionage to realize what MacArthur was planning. First of all, an amphibious landing behind the North Korean lines was a glaringly obvious maneuver, especially since UN forces had complete air and naval supremacy.  MacArthur himself had conducted dozens of similar landings during World War II to bypass Japanese strongpoints on New Guinea and in the Philippines. His belief in the value of an amphibious capability was so strong that he made certain the Far East forces he commanded from Japan were trained to conduct amphibious operations.

Before the war was one week old, MacArthur had ordered his staff to begin planning an amphibious assault behind the North Korean advance at Inchon to relieve pressure on the retreating ROK/U.S. units. That landing, codenamed Operation Bluehearts, was to have taken place before the end of July.

But the North Korean advance was so rapid, the performance of the retreating ROK troops so lacking, and the combat readiness of the U.S. forces that had been hastily dispatched to Korea from occupation duty in Japan so abysmal, that by the end of July the North Koreans were threatening to push the ROK/U.S. forces right off the peninsula. MacArthur had to turn his immediate attention to holding Pusan and its priceless port, without which the war could not be won.

So Bluehearts was canceled, but would soon be resurrected as Operation Chromite, once the ROK/U.S. position at Pusan was stabilized. By the beginning of August, MacArthur began planning Chromite in earnest.

MacArthur needed troops, transport ships, landing craft, and supplies for a major landing, and there was no way to get them without the help of hundreds of military and civilian planners, logisticians, and schedulers from staffs in Tokyo, Pearl Harbor, Washington DC, and allied capitals. Hundreds of civilians in Japan and other locations were being contracted to provide supplies or services in support of the operation. The recall of Marine reservists, the stockpiling of supplies, and preparations to use Japanese-crewed landing ships for the assault ensured that even the most obtuse observer could divine what was about to happen. Operational security was so compromised that American officers in Tokyo began referring to the planned landing as “Operation Common Knowledge.”

Mao’s Warning Ignored

Alarmed by the massive build-up of troops and ships, two weeks before the Inchon landing China’s Mao Zedong warned Kim to prepare for a landing at Inchon and urged him to strengthen defenses there.  But Kim told a Chinese emissary that the North Koreans did not believe that the UN forces had the strength to mount an amphibious landing.

Whatever strength MacArthur could muster, it was clear, though unstated, that North Korea lacked the strength to defend Inchon and simultaneously break the ROK/American lines at Pusan. Documents captured at Pyongyang later in the war showed that the North Koreans knew about the landing at Inchon before the end of August, but could do little to stop it. They had already stripped their defenses there and almost everywhere else to reinforce their offensive at Pusan, and those troops weren’t coming back. Although the North Koreans had plans to mine the harbor at Inchon, they never got to it. But even unmined and nearly undefended, Inchon was going to be no easy task for the Americans.

The Worst Possible Place

While MacArthur’s decision to conduct an amphibious landing might have been more conventional wisdom than genius, his fierce conviction that Inchon was the one place where the landing must occur was, in fact, a masterstroke.  MacArthur could not have found a physically less suitable landing area for an amphibious attack if he had searched for ten years. Everyone who knew what Inchon was like was aghast. But MacArthur believed that landing at Inchon would place his forces in the best position to cut the North Korean supply lines and crush the North Korean army besieging Pusan. His eloquent and powerful defense of the plan persuaded the skeptics – which included his nominal bosses on the Joint Chiefs of Staff – and eventually the landing was approved.

Not that the skeptics were wrong. Inchon really was a terrible place for an amphibious landing. For one thing, there were no actual beaches. The landings would have to be made against stone sea walls which rose as high as eight feet above the decks of the landing craft, forcing assault troops to use ladders to get ashore.  The only possible landing zones were in the heart of the city, which meant that once ashore, MacArthur’s troops would immediately be faced with the possibility of building-to-building combat, a type of warfare that heavily favored the defenders and seemed certain to trap the Marines in a bloody urban battle of attrition.

Landing ships could only approach the sea walls at maximum high tide, which only occurred twice each month.  At all other times the approaches to the shore were blocked by miles of impassable mud flats.  Tides at Inchon ranged from an average of 23 feet to a maximum of 33 feet and the current in the channel reached eight knots.  The two landing “beaches” were located on either side of the main port, more than four miles apart, forcing the Americans to split their forces at the outset.

The city itself was located miles from the open sea and could be reached only after navigating a narrow 10-mile long channel, which could be mined and defended by shore batteries. Near the city the channel was protected by a rugged little island called Wolmi-Do that would have to be captured prior to the main landing, thus ensuring that the North Korean defenders were alerted.

As one naval officer involved in the planning famously recalled, “We drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap—and Inchon had ’em all.”

Building the Force

But these obstacles were only part of MacArthur’s problems. First, he had to come up with a landing force and ships to bring them ashore. In the five years since the end of World War II, the United States had junked the most successful and best-equipped amphibious force in history. By the time North Korea invaded the south, the U. S. Marine Corps had shrunk from 474,000 marines in 1945 to just over 75,000 in 1950.  The Navy’s demobilization of its amphibious fleet was even more drastic, plummeting from 3,000 ships in 1945 to 148 in 1948.

MacArthur needed more than 40,000 men for his planned assault and most of the readily available combat troops had already been sent to bolster the forces fighting at Pusan. To find two more divisions of troops, the Joint Chiefs would have to dip into America’s strategic reserve, reducing the nation’s ability to fend off another attack elsewhere.

But the chiefs and the president agreed, and by recalling thousands of Marine reservists, rebuilding the Army’s half-strength Seventh Division by stripping units from other commands, increasing America’s military personnel limits, and augmenting the Seventh Division with 8,000 untrained South Korean conscripts, the Joint Chiefs found the troops MacArthur needed.

The Navy didn’t have enough active landing ships in the Pacific to bring the two divisions ashore, so MacArthur assigned fifteen LSTs and two cargo ships that had been turned over to the Army in 1945 to support the occupation forces. These ships had been decommissioned from the Navy and were operated by Japanese crews, much of the specialized equipment needed for a landing had been removed and they were in deplorable condition, but they would have to do. The Navy quickly recommissioned the ships, made some hasty repairs, assigned new commanding officers – although most were frighteningly inexperienced – and added a few signalmen and quartermasters to the Japanese crews to assist with communications and beaching operations.  Smaller landing craft were brought out of storage and reactivated and experienced sailors were flown out from the United States to operate them.

In the end, MacArthur’s Inchon assault force included the First Marine Division, the Seventh Infantry Division, several units of ROK troops, and Corps-level support units, including artillery; supported by a multi-national naval force of 261 ships including amphibious ships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, fire support ships, and minesweepers.

There would, of course, be no time for a rehearsal, and many of the troops were scarcely trained, but though hastily planned, the landing was superbly executed. Less than 90 days from North Korea’s surprise invasion, MacArthur, the U. S. and ROK militaries, and a handful of allies had turned back the North Korean attackers at Pusan and delivered a powerful counterstroke at Inchon.

Another Chinese Warning

As MacArthur had predicted, the landing faced little opposition and U. S. casualties were light.  Despite receiving explicit warnings from the Chinese that a landing at Inchon was possible, the North Koreans had gambled that they could crush the UN forces at Pusan before the Americans could land at Inchon and failed to establish an adequate defense.  Within ten days of the landings the Marines recaptured Seoul.

At Pusan, the strengthening UN forces launched an offensive on 16 September and within days were driving the North Koreans northward.  Trapped between the two UN forces, the already-weakened North Korean army collapsed with astonishing speed.   Fewer than 40,000 stragglers made their way, without equipment, back to North Korea.

The suddenness of the North Korean collapse made the reunification of North and South Korea under the South Korean government look temptingly easy, and despite receiving their own explicit warnings from the Chinese, the Joint Chiefs and President Truman gave MacArthur permission to invade the North.

But the Chinese weren’t bluffing. They would not accept a reunified Korea that was allied with the United States. As MacArthur’s forces charged north, Chinese troops flowed south. By late October, some ROK patrols had reached within a few miles of the Yalu River, the boundary between North Korea and China. On November 25 the Chinese attacked with overwhelming force, driving the U.S. and ROK forces south, over the South Korean border and beyond. Seoul, or what was left of it after being captured and liberated during the summer, was captured again.

Finally, the UN forces stiffened, and slowly pushed the North Koreans back. Once the UN forces had forced the Chinese back into North Korea, the exhausted armies of both sides settled in for a bloody two-year stalemate that was finally ended by an armistice in 1953.

“We shall land at Inchon and I shall crush them.”

– GEN Douglas MacArthur, 23 August 1950

October 11, 2019

Three Japanese bombs saved the USS Marblehead from total destruction in February 1942.

Nearly sunk by Japanese land-based bombers at the battle of Makassar Strait on 4 February 1942, the American light cruiser Marblehead was kept afloat by heroic damage control, inspiring leadership, rigorous training, and the unrelenting courage of her crew. Though grievously damaged – a nine-foot hole in her hull, thirty-four compartments flooded, steering inoperable, electical power reduced, speed nearly halved – during the next 89 days Marblehead sailed more than 20,000 miles to the U.S. east coast for repairs that allowed her to return to the fight before the end of 1942.

Had Japanese pilots missed their target and had Marblehead remained in the combat theater, she almost certainly would have shared the fate of the American cruiser Houston, the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java, the British cruiser Exeter, and the Australian cruiser Perth, all of which were sunk in the doomed allied attempt to defend the the Netherlands East Indies from Japanese invaders during the first three months of 1942.

But Marblehead survived, and her crew of more than 450 men avoided death or years of brutal captivity as prisoners of war.

USS Marblehead was an Omaha-class light cruiser, designed during the First World War and commissioned in 1923. Intended to serve as a long-range scout for the main force of battleships and heavy cruisers, Marblehead and her sisters were optimized for speed and endurance. They originally carried twelve 6-inch guns, mounted in a pair of two-gun turrets and eight casement mounts, an arrangement more appropriate to the Spanish-American War than to World War II.

By the late 1930’s the Omaha cruisers were thoroughly obsolete, though Marblehead herself could still approach her designed speed of 34 knots.

Marblehead had been assigned to the U. S. Asiatic Fleet in 1938, as China’s peasant armies struggled to stem the Japanese invasion of their country. For the next three years Marblehead and the rest of the Asiatic Fleet could only watch nervously as diplomatic relations between America and Japan deteriorated and the Imperial Japanese Navy strengthened its fleet with modern ships and aircraft, gained combat experience, and perfected the world’s most potent aircraft carrier strike force.

Throughout this period the Asiatic Fleet remained woefully weak, with just a pair of cruisers – Marblehead and Houston – twelve aging destroyers, fifteen submarines, and a motley collection of obsolete river craft, escort vessels, minesweepers, tenders, and patrol planes.

But even as war with Japan drew ever-more certain, the U. S. Navy could not spare additional vessels to shore up the Asiatic Fleet. U. S. war plans called for the Asiatic Fleet to fight a rear-guard delaying action, supporting American ground forces in the Philippines as long as possible, then retreating south to support the defense of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. If those efforts failed, the Asiatic Fleet would retreat further to Australia.

But when war came, the power and speed of the Japanese advance shocked American and allied planners. Eight U. S. battleships were sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and British naval power in Asia was broken with the loss of HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales to Japanese air attacks on 8 December. U. S. airpower in the Philippines was virtually destroyed the same day, and the American naval base at Cavite in Manila Bay was wrecked by Japanese air attacks on 10 December. Before the war was four days old, any hope for an effective naval defense of the Philippines was lost.

Within weeks the Asiatic Fleet became part of the hastily organized American, British, Dutch, and Australia (ABDA) command. Unsurprisingly, ABDA’s aging ships and untrained crews would prove to be no match for the disciplined, superbly trained, and well-equipped Japanese.

If ABDA had been created a year or two sooner, if its units had ever worked together and established communications and operational protocols, if the nations involved had agreed on a common strategy, and if the various senior leaders had put aside personal animosities, perhaps ABDA could have put up a stouter defense.

As it was though, the brief, inglorious history of ABDA was a sad tale of neglect, hubris, and hopeless courage in the face of overwhelming Japanese power, leaving the crews of individual ships – including Marblehead – to pay the price.

The end would come quickly for ABDA, but not without a fight. On 24 January 1942, four U. S. destroyers attacked a Japanese landing force at Balikpapan, sinking four transports and a patrol boat.

Marblehead had originally been assigned to participate in the attack, but engine problems forced her out of the line-up. She was replaced by USS Boise, a recent addition to the ABDA fleet. But on the day before the attack, Boise struck an uncharted coral head in the Sapi Strait, damaging her hull and forcing her to withdraw to Ceylon for repairs. She, too, survived the coming disaster. Marblehead was quickly assigned in her stead, but was not able to reach Balikpapan in time to join the attack.

A second attack against Japanese transport shipping planned for 31 January was cancelled when a U. S. scout plane discovered that the Japanese force at Balikpapan had been reinforced by additional cruisers and destroyers. So, the allies assembled a larger force of four cruisers – including Marblehead – and seven destroyers and headed for Makassar Strait.

They never got there.

Japanese aircraft spotted the allied ships near Cape Maduro in the Java Sea and at 9:50 am on 4 February 1942, 36 Japanese bombers attacked the ABDA ships. No allied ships were sunk, but USS Houston suffered a hit that killed 48 sailors and disabled her aft eight-inch gun turret and Marblehead was nearly destroyed.

For more than thirty minutes Marblehead dodged Japanese bombs, twisting and turning at full speed, and throwing up as much anti-aircraft fire as her furious gunners could manage. But at 10:26 am, eight single-engine Japanese bombers passed directly overhead, dropping eight bombs that straddled the ship. One bomb struck Marblehead’s stern, another struck amidships, and a third exploded close aboard forward. Large fires erupted amidships and at the stern and the ship quickly listed eight degrees to starboard. Unseen from the bridge, the near miss off the port bow had ruptured the cruiser’s hull and tons of seawater were rushing into the ship.

Below decks the cruiser was a flaming wreck. The bombs had destroyed the wardroom, which was being used as an emergency medical station, the sick bay below, and the emergency steering room, jamming the ship’s rudders at hard left. Engines racing, Marblehead could only circle to port as gunners peered skyward to spot any further attacks. The main deck was ripped open at the stern; power, water, and communications lines were cut; most berthing areas were smashed; and the after turret was inoperable.

Damage control parties rushed to extinguish fires, shore up damaged compartments, and take stock of the ship’s condition. Twelve crewmen were dead and more than 70 were wounded, some mortally. By noon – less than two hours after the bomb strikes – the fires were out and the rudder had been nearly centered at nine degrees left, although it was still immobile.

But the engines were working and if she held together and stayed afloat Marblehead could still make better than twenty knots. She could be steered on a general course by adjusting the speed of the engines, although she was continually swinging 40 to 50 degrees off course. Twenty-six compartments were flooded completely and eight others were partially flooded. Although the list had been corrected, Marblehead was down by the head by ten feet, and was continuing to flood. She was, in fact, sinking. Already the bow was barely above the sea.

With no reserve buoyancy, all that was keeping her afloat was the creaking efforts of the overworked pumps and desperate bailing by the crew. Any further battle damage would almost certainly sink the ship, and Marblehead was unlikely to survive even moderately heavy seas. In addition, many of the wounded needed treatment that the damaged ship could not provide – they would die if they could not get to a hospital soon. The nearest port with a hospital and rudimentary repair facilities was Tjilitjap, more than 400 miles away. Getting there would require taking the unsteerable, sinking ship through narrow Lombok Strait, with its rushing four-knot current and uncharted shoals. Marblehead would be escorted by two destroyers, but she would remain within range of Japanese bombers the entire way and would be crossing waters that were likely to harbor Japanese submarines.

Her first moments in the strait were hardly promising. As soon as Marblehead entered the rushing current she was pushed fifty degrees off course. Rather than try to recover, Marblehead’s commanding officer, Captain Arthur Robinson, let the ship complete a full circle before trying again. Marblehead made it into the strait on the second try, and somehow stayed off the rocks, even as rain squalls reduced visibility to zero.

They cleared the strait just after midnight and headed west for Tjilatjap. During the long night the crew struggled to keep their ravaged ship afloat. They gained an edge when they manhandled a 3.5-ton pump from the engine room to the main deck where it could match the water rushing in through the breached hull.

That afternoon another flight of Japanese bombers sighted Marblehead and her escorts. But the Japanese planes focused their attacks on the destroyer Paul Jones, possibly mistaking her for the cruiser, and no planes made runs at Marblehead. Undamaged and fully maneuverable, Paul Jones escaped unscathed. Finally, at dawn on February 6, nearly two days after the battle, Marblehead reached Tjilatjap.

But Marblehead’s troubles were far from over. Although there was a Dutch hospital that could care for the most seriously wounded, and a cemetery for the dead, the only drydock in the small port was a floating dock that was too short to accommodate the 550-foot-long cruiser. Unless they could get the ship’s damaged bow out of the water, they had no hope of patching the hole in her bottom.

So they did.

The drydock crew flooded the dock, sinking it below the keel of Marblehead. They then hauled the cruiser’s bow across the threshold, secured the ship as best they could, and pumped out the dock’s tanks, raising the dock and lifting the forward half of Marblehead. The cruiser slanted alarmingly, but the stern remained afloat and the damaged bow was clear of the water. This was no one’s idea of a proper docking and Marblehead was as likely to slide sternward off the dock or capsize the whole rig as it was to remain upright.

But there were no other options and somehow Marblehead stayed put. The docking took three tries, but the third was successful and workers were able to patch the nine-foot hole the near-miss had opened in the ship’s hull. With the massive main engines located near the stern, it was too risky even for Marblehead’s dauntless engineers to try to raise the stern, so repairs to the steering gear would have to wait.

The rudder was still inoperable and not all the leaks could be fixed, but Marblehead’s crew could continue to steer by engines and the ship’s pumps might conceivably keep the vessel afloat during the long voyage to the nearest allied shipyard. Most guns were operable, a temporary patch had been placed over the damaged deck at the stern, additional liferafts had been installed, tons of debris were removed from the ship’s interior, and a device was constructed that would measure the flexing of the damaged hull to give the crew some warning if the ship were about to break apart. It was time to go.

On 13 February 1942, after six days in Tjilatjap under constant threat of Japanese air attack, Marblehead got underway for Ceylon, nearly 4,000 miles distant. Left behind were more than 30 badly wounded sailors who remained at the Dutch hospital and fourteen Marblehead crewmen who had been buried in the European Cemetery at Tjilatjap.

The cruiser hadn’t gone a mile when fresh disaster nearly struck. Unable to steer a straight course, Marblehead was being towed through the minefield protecting Tjilatjap when the towline parted, leaving the damaged cruiser adrift in the narrow channel, surrounded by mines. As the tug backed toward the cruiser to remake the tow, she struck Marblehead’s stem hard, bending the cruiser’s bow and opening a hole near the waterline in the only forward compartment that was still watertight. Miraculously, the Dutch pilot was able to steer Marblehead out of the minefield using the engines.

One more leak wasn’t going to make much difference, so the barely seaworthy and only marginally steerable Marblehead headed for Ceylon, escorted by the submarine tender USS Otus. The tender provided little combat capability, but she wasn’t there to fight; her task was to pick up any survivors if Marblehead went down during the transit, an eventuality which seemed entirely possible, if not exactly likely.

During the voyage, Marblehead’s crew continued to make repairs. Electricians restored electrical power to more parts of the ship while engineers restored fresh water to much of the vessel. They even constructed a make-shift ice machine. These repairs helped, but the ship still needed extensive repairs and drydocking.

But upon arriving at Ceylon on 21 February, Marblehead’s crew was dismayed to learn – though they could hardly have been surprised – that the dockyard was booked for the next month and major repairs would have to wait. So they continued to work on their ship themselves, and by 2 March they managed to repair the steering motors by using parts salvaged from other equipment that had been damaged in the battle. The rudder wouldn’t have full range of motion, and it would have to be operated from the steering engine room, but it was vastly better than steering by engines.

Within an hour of the successful test of the steering gear Marblehead was underway. On 15 March they reached South Africa, where they refueled before entering the Royal Navy dockyard at Simonstown on 24 March.

On 15 April, the freshly patched, fully steerable, and agreeably habitable Marblehead left Simonstown for the final leg of her voyage home. Around the Cape of Good Hope, to Recife, Brazil, and finally, on 4 May 1942, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York Harbor, where permanent repairs and modernizing updates were completed. On 14 October 1942 Marblehead rejoined the U. S. fleet. She served until the end of the war, oulasting virtually the entire Imperial Japanese Navy.

Marblehead’s journey from the Java Sea to New York took 89 days and covered more than 20,000 miles, much of it with inoperable steering, uncontrolled leaks, limited electrical power, and almost no habitable bething areas. Her arrival at New York was heralded by the Navy and the press.

But acclaim for the remarkable dedication and resourcefulness of Marblehead’s crew couldn’t overshadow the grim news from the Pacific theater. While Marblehead was limping halfway around the world, Singapore, Java, and Bataan fell to the Japanese. Corregidor surrendered on 6 May, two days after Marblehead reached New York. More than one hundred thousand American, Filipino, British, Indian, Dutch, and Australian military personnel were thrown into barbaric captivity. Before the end of the war, tens of thousands had died from malnutrition, disease, overwork or had been executed.

The ABDA Afloat command was dis-established in early March, having lost five cruisers, twelve destroyers, and more than 4,500 men, including more than 1,800 Americans. USS Houston was gone – sunk with HMAS Perth at Sunda Strait on 1 March 1942 – and the remnants of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet fled to Australia. Dutch naval power in the Pacific was broken beyond repair and the Royal Navy retreated to the Indian Ocean. British warships wouldn’t return to the Pacific until 1944.

The crew of Marblehead and the other ships of the ABDA naval component fought on long after it was obvious that their force was too weak to stop the Japanese advance. Written off by their own nations, they demonstrated extraordinary courage and an unimaginable devotion to duty that continues to resonate today.

A version of this post was originally published on the Military History Now website.

https://militaryhistorynow.com/?s=uss+marblehead