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Following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December of 1941, the US and Great Britain had agreed to the formation of the American, British, Dutch, and Australian Command (known as ABDACOM), whose mission was to prevent the Japanese from overrunning the strategic western-held islands in the Malay Barrier.  The impressive-sounding ABDACOM was in reality, anything but.  

By the time the ABDA Command was formed on 1 January 1942, under British General Sir Archibald Wavell, Allied air power in the Far East had been all but destroyed.  The Japanese had decimated US air forces in the Philippines (including the Navy PBY Catalinas around Cavite), while British and whatever Dutch air power had been shredded in aerial combat, bombed out of existence, or overrun by Japanese ground forces.  The naval components of the ABDA were little better.  The US Asiatic Fleet under Thomas C. Hart consisted of one Treaty "tin-clad" heavy cruiser, USS Houston (CA-30), the obsolete light cruiser Marblehead (CL-12), thirteen old Clemson-class flush-deck destroyers, a handful of elderly Yangtze and ocean-going gunboats, and some tenders.  The most viable part of the Asiatic Fleet were 23 modern submarines, along with six elderly World War I-vintage S-boats.   

The other contributors to the naval component of ABDA were the thinly-stretched Royal Navy, the remaining Dutch forces in Java and Dutch East Indies, and the Australians.  With the loss of Force Z, battle cruiser Repulse and battleship Prince of Wales, Royal Navy forces in the Far East by 1942 consisted merely of a few cruisers and destroyers, many in need of overhaul.  The Dutch had a few light cruisers, none a match for their Japanese foes, some destroyers, and submarines which operated out of Java.  The Australian Navy, similarly, contributed a few light units.  The grandly-named ABDA Strike Force, commanded by Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman, was really a hotch-potch of Allied ships of varying degrees of usefulness.  

While there were some successes by Dutch submarines under Admiral Helfrich in Java, US submarines were hampered by poor planning and positioning, the notorious problems with the Mk 14 torpedo, and the vulnerability of their bases at Cavite and Manila to Japanese air attack.  In surface actions, ABDA naval forces had been brushed aside in the Makassar Strait, had been roughly handled by Japanese land-based aircraft off Sumatra, and mauled by a smaller IJN force in a night battle in the Badung Strait.  On each occasion, the ABDA naval forces could not prevent Japanese landings.   The fall of Singapore on 15 February deprived ABDACOM of anything resembling a proper headquarters for commanding the widely dispersed fragments of the forces at their disposal.

By the time the Japanese were discovered preparing for the conquest of Java, the ABDA Strike Force had been reduced by losses against IJN forces in the aforementioned battles.  Marblehead had been all but wrecked by Japanese bombers at Makassar Strait, with Houston having Number Three 8-inch turret knocked out of action in the same fight.   Dutch light cruiser HNLMS Tromp had been damaged at Badung Strait, and several destroyers and smaller units had been sunk over the course of the previous two months.  Without a forward drydock and proper repair facilities, battle damage could not be made good.  Marblehead limped more than 15,000 miles via South Africa, back to Brooklyn Navy Yard, to be repaired.  Though she survived, she was lost to the ABDA Strike Force permanently.

On 27 February 1942, the remnants of the ABDA Strike Force, under Admiral Doorman, sailed into the Java Sea to block the Japanese invasion force.  The two sides appeared to be fairly evenly matched, but closer investigation shows otherwise.  The Japanese force consisted of two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and fourteen destroyers.  They were also saddled with the task of protecting eleven transport vessels carrying the Java invasion force.  Doorman's Strike Force was comprised of two heavy cruisers, HMS Exeter (of Graf Spee fame), the damaged Houston, and three light cruisers, Doorman's flag HNLMS DeRuyter, HNLMS Java, and HMAS Perth.  In addition, Doorman had nine destroyers, of varying ages and quality.  The Japanese heavy cruisers were, however, far more powerful than their Allied counterparts, much larger, faster, and better protected, and carrying ten 8-inch guns each, to Exeter's six, and Houston's six (three on the after 8-inch turret had not been repaired).  Japanese destroyers were also far more powerful and larger than their opponents, greatly superior in gun power and shipping the lethal 24" Type 93 Long Lance torpedo.

The two forces sighted each other at about 1600 on the afternoon of 27 February.  Ragged gunnery yielded few results until Exeter was struck in her boiler room by an 8-inch shell, causing her speed to drop.  She heeled out of line and retired toward Surabaya with an escort of a destroyer.   Dutch destroyer Kortenaer was struck by a Long Lance torpedo, exploded, and sank.  

As darkness closed, destroyer HMS Electra engaged in a running gun duel with two Japanese destroyers, was riddled with hits, and had to be abandoned.  The American destroyers expended all their torpedoes in an attack just after dark, but with no effect.  The destroyers then retired to Surabaya.  Worse was yet to come.  Another destroyer, HMS Jupiter, struck a mine and sank.   The Japanese would prove yet again their mastery of night actions, pounding DeRuyter and Java with gunfire, and sinking them with a salvo of torpedoes.  Admiral Doorman went down with his flagship, along with all but 111 survivors of her crew and those of Java, who became prisoners of the Japanese.  

The sacrifice of the ABDA Strike Force had caused almost no damage to the Japanese force (a single destroyer had significant damage and retired), and had delayed Japanese landings by less than a day.  

When Exeter, and the surviving cruisers of the Strike Force (Perth and Houston) reached Surabaya and Jakarta, respectively, they found no means to affect anything other than  temporary repairs.  To make matters worse, there was neither fuel nor ammunition in Jakarta for Perth and Houston, who departed after dark on 28 February to try and make a run to Australia.  In doing so, the two cruisers ran into a Japanese invasion fleet headed for West Java.  The Allied warships managed to damage three Japanese transports, before being sunk in the early morning darkness of 1 March 1942.  

Exeter put to sea at reduced speed from Surabaya for Ceylon, but flooding in her forward sections made her draft too deep for transiting the Bali Strait.  She, with two destroyers, USS Pope and HMS Encounter, also limped toward the Sunda Strait.  There, four Japanese cruisers and seven destroyers lay in wait, engaging and sinking the crippled Exeter and Encounter with gunfire at midday on 1 March.   USS Pope was hunted down and sunk a few hours later.   The ABDA Strike Force had ceased to exist.

Nowhere were the Japanese seriously interdicted by the ABDA naval or air forces.   ABDACOM existed for just sixty days.  The 1 March 1942 actions in Sunda Strait completed the annihilation of all meaningful Allied naval forces in the Far East.   

The bravery of the Allied sailors, their suffering and sacrifice, deserves to be remembered.  But like so much of history, the ABDA story should serve as a cautionary tale.   Stationing weak, inadequate forces far from defended bases, or in bases subject to powerful enemy attack, carries tremendous risk.  The enemy's calculus for that risk is very likely not to match your own.  War planning that does not provide effective and achievable concepts of operations under realistic conditions renders initiative automatically to a capable adversary when hostilities commence.  Reliance upon unproven and inadequately tested technologies to be decisive advantages in a war at sea is a fool's errand.   Assumed advantages in quality of training and equipment represents dangerous arrogance that always costs lives, and sometimes costs wars.  

The most indelible lesson from the ABDA debacle was one which should particularly resonate today.  The projection of power ashore from the sea, dismissed today by so many suffering from "end of history" myopia, proved absolutely decisive in the Japanese push south.  Then, as now, there were loud choruses declaring such operations to project power ashore were things of the past, obsolete in the more lethal mid-century wars, invoking the failure at Gallipoli and citing the capabilities of modern defensive weapons.  Yet the Japanese continued to land, conquering and building bases from which land-based air power and striking capability could be launched, and leapfrogged across an area larger than the Indian Ocean, rolling up British, Dutch, Australian, and American forces in fewer than 90 days from the outbreak of hostilities.  Such a lesson should be even more indelible today for us, in light of the fact that the US did precisely the same to the Japanese from mid-1942 on, from Guadalcanal and Efate and Ulithi and Guam and Tinian, all the way to Okinawa, to threaten the Home Islands by 1945.   

Even if we decide to be so foolish as to cast such lessons into the dustbin of history, our adversaries certainly are not.  They understand, as we should, that war in the Western Pacific will look very much like war in the Western Pacific.  And they are planning accordingly.  Satellite images of reclaimed land, helicopter bases, anti-ship cruise missiles, and target acquisition radars speak loudly to that fact.  I do hope we are listening.