Ship of Ghosts: The Story of USS Houston
From SHIP OF GHOSTS: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors by James D. Hornfischer.
Copyright © 2006 by James D. Hornfischer. Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Dell, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC.
On Aug. 18, 2014, the U.S. Navy divers confirmed that a shipwreck located in a hundred feet of water in Banten Bay, Java, is the USS Houston (CA-30).
Long renowned as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite warship, the Houston entered the annals of our most compelling naval mysteries when she was lost off Java after midnight on March 1, 1942. The final radio dispatch from Captain Albert H. Rooks—“Enemy forces engaged”—gave no hint of the odds her crew faced. Until the Pacific War had run its course, the world would have few details of the Battle of Sunda Strait, and fewer still of the fate of the Houston’s survivors, who in captivity would be forced to work on the most notorious slave labor project in World War II, the Burma-Thailand Death Railroad, immortalized in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
This excerpt from James D. Hornfischer’s Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR’s Legendary Lost Cruiser, and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors tells the story of how a great ship went down fighting.
Reaching the signal bridge, Walter Winslow found that Captain Rooks had decamped from the bridge and gone one deck below to the armored conning tower, a protected command station with narrow slits affording a limited view right out over Turret Two. It was a much safer place from which to command a warship in battle, and Rooks needed every advantage he could get. Efficient communication was nearly impossible owing to the racket of the ship’s own gunfire. Every available phone circuit was abuzz with urgent reports and orders and acknowledgments. “I wanted desperately to know what we were up against, but to ask would have been absurd,” Winslow recalled. “From the captain to the men talking on the overburdened battle-phones, everyone in conn was grimly absorbed in fighting the ship.”
Rooks was doubtlessly having a hard time following the Perth up ahead. The only sign of the Australian ship was the yellow-orange strobes of her guns biting into the smoky night. Unlike the Houston, she still carried torpedoes, 21-inchers. The U.S. Navy had decided in 1933 that it was risky to field the volatile weapons on its heavy cruisers. So the Houston’s torpedo mounts were taken off and the open hull spaces plated over. Hec Waller managed to fire four of the Perth’s eight torpedoes at the outlines of targets looming to starboard.
Waller stood on the bridge with nine other officers and chiefs. As the forward batteries sustained their measured cadence, flashing hell at the enemy and jarring to pieces furniture and other loosely anchored fixtures, Waller maintained an outward calm, his voice steady as he issued helm orders. He periodically vented pressure, as when a spotlight stabbed him—“For God’s sake shoot that bloody light out!” But by and large he kept so quiet that silence became contagious. Lloyd Burgess “felt his heart hammering and all sound was within himself, so that he could almost hear the blood pumping through his body.” Waller’s composure defied the increasing tempo of the apocalypse swirling outside his pilothouse. He kept calm even when the worst happened and the first Japanese torpedo bore down and struck the Perth, marking the beginning of its end.
She was barreling along at twenty-eight knots when the fish struck near the forward engine room. The crash and the roar shook her and departed, leaving behind a strange silence in her guts. “Some vital pulse had stopped,” Ray Parkin remembered. The intercom crackled with the report, “Forward engine room out. Speed reduced,” to which Captain Waller’s response was, “Very good.”
Gunfire battered the Perth, knocking away the seaplane catapult back aft. Word followed that B turret forward and X and Y turrets aft were out of projectiles, and that the loaders were ramming practice rounds boosted by an extra bag of powder for better hitting effect. Then A turret checked in, reporting just five projectiles left. Waller acknowledged each piece of bad news by saying, “Very good.”
The Perth started slowing with the first torpedo hit, her gyro smashed and the fire-control system gone with it, guns switched over to local control. The crews on her two forward four-inch mounts were all killed by blasts. The men on the other secondary guns, also out of ammunition, were left to fire star shells and practice rounds at the enemy. When a sailor wondered aloud in the dark, “What do we use after these?” an older man suggested they raid the potato locker for ordnance.
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At about ten minutes after midnight, the Perth could be seen from the Houston’s bridge and forward deck spaces, apparently dead in the water and sinking. “When Captain Rooks realized she was finished and escape was impossible,” Walter Winslow wrote, “he turned the Houston back toward the transports, determined to sell his ship dearly. From that moment on, every ship in the area was an enemy, and we began a savage fight to the death.”
The Houston was alone, facing attacks not only from the Mikuma and Mogami looming some twelve thousand yards to the north but also from two full destroyer squadrons and assorted armed auxiliaries. In their concentrated assault, direct hits from Japanese gunfire were following fast and furious, smashing the Houston up forward, producing a killing storm of shrapnel and flames. In the warren of passageways and compartments below, the noise came as a nearly continuous roaring, droning hum.
“We couldn’t see,” Jim Gee said. “We knew that we’d been hit a few times. We knew we had a good list on the ship. We knew that we were getting real close to the bottom of that ammunition deck, and all we had to send up were star shells. And, of course, we could hear a loud-speaker; every now and then, the captain would come on the loud-speaker and say something.” So long as that voice was there, strong and fatherly, all would be well. The intangible qualities of leadership emerged from small, prosaic things such as being there and speaking for yourself when the moment required it. Any number of minutiae connected to personality and judgment coalesced into something larger and could pay good dividends in terms of performance when the time came. The Houston’s time was now.
Spotlights reached for Captain Rooks’s cruiser and missed, summoning the shapes of Japanese transports nearer to shore. The Houston’s forward Mark 19 antiaircraft director got their range and fed an accurate setup to the main and secondary batteries, which banged away to port in roaring acknowledgment of the gift. Whenever a wayward searchlight beam settled on a transport or a support vessel, they would work her over furiously.
Then, amid the chaotic melee out to sea, a series of sharp detona- tions could be heard closer to the beach. Within sixty minutes of their first encounter with the Allied cruisers, the Japanese ships cut- ting the shell-torn seas outside Sunda Strait had put eighty-seven torpedoes into the water. More than a few hit appropriately hostile targets. But most of them churned harmlessly on toward the Japanese transports and auxiliaries clustered near shore. No fewer than four Japanese transports took torpedoes in their bellies, most all of them fired by Japanese destroyers. By widespread eyewitness accounts, at least four transports and a minesweeper were sunk or heavily damaged in the fratricidal undersea crossfire.
Among these was the Shinshu Maru, the headquarters vessel of Lt. Gen. Hitoshi Imamura himself. As that shattered transport rolled over, tons of heavy equipment, including badly needed radio equip- ment belonging to the Sixteenth Army, slid from its decks into the sea. Joining hundreds of his troops in the water, Imamura rode driftwood for several hours before a boat finally retrieved him. When he was at last delivered to shore, the drenched general parked himself on a pile of bamboo and was finally forced to confront the humor in the debacle as an aide congratulated him on a successful landing on Java.
Imamura thought that torpedoes from the Houston had hit his ship. Given her proximity, it was natural to make this assumption, though it was of course patently impossible, as the Houston no longer carried torpedo tubes. Still, the general’s own chief of staff allowed the notion to stand. Later, receiving a Japanese commodore sent to apologize to him for the navy’s error, he discouraged the apology, preferring the honor of taking a blow from enemy samurai to the embarrassment of fratricide. “Let the Houston have the credit,” he said.
Over on the Houston, just as the flow of steam was stanched from the destroyed after engine room, permitting the after director crew to return to their stations, the ship lost use of her brain. A torpedo struck the ship to starboard below the communications deck, plunging Central Station and the plotting room into darkness. They could hear the thunder of the Houston’s own gunfire, the rumble and snort of the enemy shells striking. At least once came a horrible, high-pitched metallic grinding sound that might have been the sound of a dud torpedo nosing along the side and bottom of the ship’s hull. The crew from Plot, on the starboard side of the ship, withdrew into Central Station, away from the vulnerable sides of the hull.
By the red glow of emergency battle lanterns, they weighed their options. With his rangekeeper out of action, Lt. Cdr. Sidney Smith decided there was little point in staying put. He got on the phone to the bridge and asked permission to abandon Central Station. He and his plotting department team were ordered topside to assist as needed.
Escaping from Central Station was among the most harrowing gauntlets to run. With the watertight doors sealed for battle, the only way out was straight up through the hollow trunk of the foremast, which reached down through all the Houston’s decks like a taproot into Sidney Smith’s netherworld. Studded inside with steel rungs, it provided a direct route to the main deck and superstructure. Traversing that vertical chute for the first time, in pitch blackness and in the midst of combat, was an ordeal that radioman second class David Flynn would not soon forget. “You didn’t know where the hell you were,” he said. “I had never used this escape route in my life before.” He began climbing, estimating his progress by triangu- lating to the frightening cacophony of battle outside.
Clarence “Skip” Schilperoort, an electrician’s mate assigned to the main battery battle telephone switchboard in Plot, was the second man up the trunk. He found the hatch to the officers’ stateroom, exited and walked aft toward the quarterdeck, came to another hatch, and unscrewed the peephole that enabled a cautionary glance through. All he could see were flames. On the intercom he had heard the hue and cry as spotters called out sightings for the fire controlmen and gun crews. Now, moving forward through a passageway and looking for the hatch to the main deck between Turrets One and Two, Schilperoort reached open air and saw enemy destroyers driving in close and peeling away. “I thought I was looking at a moving picture,” he said. Deciding that standing there and gawking was a sure way to get himself killed, he retreated behind Turret One, leeward of the gunfire.
David Flynn kept climbing up the foremast’s trunk. He must have missed the hatch, because he emerged three levels above the main deck, behind the conning tower in the flag plotting station. A hatch to the outside was open, and he exited just in time to see the flash of an explosion that blew shrapnel into his left leg. Shortly thereafter he got the word that Captain Rooks had been hit too.
