The explosion was so massive that it created a sound that would circle the earth seven times with its incredible pressure wave. To every man in Captain Agar’s squadron, it was simply ear shattering, so deafening that the crews were literally stunned as if they had been struck by a hammer, the pain intense, their eardrums shattered. Many, were knocked unconscious, others cowered below decks with their hands over their bleeding ears in shameless fear. They had been through rough seas, wind and storm, but never anything like this.
It was a sound so loud that it would be heard 85 minutes later in Perth, over 1700 kilometers to the south, as a strong explosive bang. Nothing like it had ever been heard before. Tambora’s blast of 1815 was terrible, but did not produce this same explosive sound. As if to proclaim itself as the new pretender to the throne in the long arc of volcanic islands, the Sea Demon beneath Krakatoa was bellowing with a roar that moved the air around the island with an awful wrenching pressure.
The column of the eruption poured out and up, towering into the sullen sky like a living thing, a monstrous demon of earth, smoke and fire. Its smoky shoulders rolled upwards with incredible force, and then massive hunks of earth were seen in the sky, soon plummeting down into the turbulent sea.
This tremendous outpouring of gas and ejecta would go on for many hours, the sky growing ever darker, until it was near pitch black by mid-day. By then, the 54th Brigade defending near Merak had retreated east to Batavia, and the 53rd Brigade stationed there was ordered to move east on the road to Kilidjati Airfield. There was nothing that could be done about the 31 Hurricane fighters still on the airfields near Batavia. They simply had to be abandoned, for they could not fly. Some of the crews made a vain attempt to move ten or twelve on flatbed rail cars, but the ash was falling so heavily now that even the rail lines were hazardous. In the end, most of the planes simply had to be destroyed.
On the other side of the equation, The Japanese had a much worst time of things. There was already ash to a depth of many inches all along the coastal regions where they had landed. Half of the transports had fled north, but the remainder hovered furtively off shore, where three brave destroyers still stood guard. When it was clear that the situation was going from bad to worse, General Maruyama ordered any further landing of supplies, equipment, or vehicles halted, and began pulling his troops back towards the coast. He was going to attempt to re-embark as much of his force as possible.
The troops moved like zombies, their faces and eyes swathed in cloth, shirtless, ashen souls stumbling through the utter darkness in long lines, each man with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him. Many fell from respiratory distress, collapsing in listless heaps on the roads and trails, and then the lightning flashed, thunder joining the constant rumble and roar of the volcano, and a heavy sulfuric rain began to fall. This created pools of ash mud and flows of tiny ‘lahars,’ a Javanese word that had been used to describe ash and debris flows from volcanoes ever thereafter.
Yet the cold lahars were not the flows to be truly feared. It was the sudden collapse of that massive volcanic plume that would pose the most danger, a pyroclastic flow that could originate from any of the big explosive eruptions now underway. It could form a fast moving current of hot rock, ash, and gas that would cascade down over the sea and spread out like a mantle of utter destruction, moving at the incredible speed of up to 700 KPH. To be caught anywhere near such an event meant almost certain death, and General Maruyama, having lived under the shadow of Mt. Fuji most of his younger life, knew enough about volcanoes to be mortally afraid.
A few battalions made it to the rafts and boats, desperately paddling back out to meet the waiting ships, which stood like frozen icebergs on a blanched white sea. At a little after 22:00, when the beginning of the end rattled the atmosphere so heavily that the movement of the air knocked the men from their feet, all the ships lurched about, their anchor chains barely holding them. Then came the noise that would be heard all the way on the other side of the Indian Ocean, a sound so powerful and intense that it shattered every window in Batavia, over 150 kilometers to the east.
Fifty kilometers from Krakatoa, at Anjer, it struck the men with a sudden piercing thunderclap, knocking them deaf, dazed and senseless, to the ground. As far away as 100 kilometers, the sound would be as high as 172 decibels, ear splitting, nerve wrenching pain, well beyond the threshold of endurance for any human being. It was as if each man had ice picks driven into their ears, and then all was deathly quiet—they would never hear another sound again.
There they wallowed in agony, blinded by the heavy ash, their eardrums burst and bleeding, their voices clotted and mute. The 2nd Division was deaf, dumb and blind, and yet that was the least of the afflictions that was now about to befall those men. The great upheaval from beneath the earth had finally begun. Up until that moment, the eruption had been emerging from cracks and fumaroles in the heavy cap of cooled magma that had sealed off the main chamber. Now it all gave way, and terror was not half a word for what would happen next.
Chapter 17
The painful irony in General Maruyama’s retrograde movement to the coast was that each struggling step his troops took in the hope of saving themselves brought them closer to death. Thus far there had been a regular series of powerful explosions that produced surging pyroclastic flows out to 10 or 20 kilometers from the volcano, much of that activity becoming undersea flows. The paroxysm that was now underway at Krakatoa was so intense that it would collapse huge segments of the main island into the sea. The resulting tsunami would surge out in all directions, but was particularly amplified as the displaced seawater entered the Sunda Straits, a bottleneck formed by the mass of Java and Sumatra.
Aboard Dorsetshire, Captain Agar managed to gather himself, his head throbbing with pain. He was completely deaf, but his long years of experience at sea kept him moving, helping the helmsman up and gesturing to the heading he wanted. It was no good shouting orders, for no one would hear them. In fact, no man aboard those ships would ever hear again either, but the Captain managed with hand signals, slowly getting his men up and back to their posts to re-establish control of the ship.
Then the waves came, the first produced by the massive pyroclastic flows near the island. They were enough to raise the line of ships heavily as they fled, and as the dazed and deafened crews struggled to life again, the vessels were rocked heavily with its passing. They had been following one another closely due to the limited visibility and smothering darkness, with searchlights probing to see the nearest ship ahead. When the helmsman of destroyer Electra fell senseless to the deck, the ship veered off, her aft section now batted about by the first wave, while Express behind her was carried on like an arrow about to hit a wall. The encounter she soon had was devastating when the two destroyers collided, with Electra skewered amidships by the bow of the other ship.