Ship of Ghosts (20 page)

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.

The
Perth
’s deck lurched again as a second torpedo struck. This one seemed to lift the ship from a point right under the bridge. The rising deck threw Captain Waller and his nine officers and chiefs upward, and they fell down again, knocked to their knees.

“Christ, that’s torn it,” Waller said. “Abandon ship.”

The gunnery officer, Peter Hancox, asked, “
Prepare
to abandon ship, sir?”

“No,” the captain said. “Abandon ship.” Waller’s instincts about ships were not prone to be wrong.

The usual procedure was to secure the engines so that the ship would drift to a stop, thus allowing crewmen to leave the ship in the vicinity of lifeboats as they were lowered from the halyards. Waller instead ordered the chief quartermaster to leave the engines at half speed ahead. “I don’t want the Old Girl to take anyone with her,” he said. The suction of a sinking ship could draw survivors under. Perhaps Waller considered it a matter of choosing one’s poison. The crews of the
Perth
’s A and B turrets left their gun houses and rushed out on deck to release the life rafts, but their timing was unfortunate. They reached the open air just in time to be cut down by heavy shellfire.

John Harper, the navigator, ran through passageways spreading the captain’s order to abandon ship. Reaching the sick bay, he found carnage. The scattered mess of bloodied sailors in their white uniforms reminded him of strings of red and white ceremonial flags, stricken and piled in a red and white heap. Survivors sat there “stupefied with shock” and required sharp reminders to get moving. Collapsed bulkheads and piles of debris nearly blocked their exit through interior passageways, and outside, they found the whole port side amidships buried by the haphazardly cantilevered ruins of the catapult and crane. The glare of Japanese searchlights helped Harper pick his way to the rail and illuminated a clear expanse of water into which to leap.

He swam to a small balsa raft and hung on as he watched the
Perth
draw away from him, still making headway. The quarterdeck was crowded with sailors hesitant to go overboard for fear of landing in the cutting swirl of the ship’s outboard propellers. Then, Ray Parkin wrote, “across the sea and under the sky came a great roar.”

Leading seaman H. Keith Gosden, escaping Y turret’s lobby, was thrown skyward by one of the torpedo blasts. “Light, almost gay, in that mad moment,” he felt the urge to sing and dance in the air. When he hit the deck again a wave of water produced by the explosion washed him overboard, and as he fell into the sea he envisioned the telegram his mother would receive announcing his loss, and the tears that would fall from her eyes upon learning the news.

John Harper “was suddenly appalled at the amount of shellfire falling amongst the survivors.” It was worse still on the ship. She had taken on a hard list to port. “Pieces could be seen flying off as salvoes exploded with wicked flashes all over her,” he wrote. The
Perth
’s navigator lay in the water and watched as his ship died. In his heart, sadness warred with pride.

When a ship turns onto its side, the world goes ninety degrees off kilter. Without the sky to orient them, sailors trying to escape from belowdecks find the familiar interior of the ship has become a house of mirrors. Decks become bulkheads and bulkheads decks, ladders become rails running surrealistically sideways, and athwartship passageways become deep wells yawning at one’s feet.

Lt. Frank Gillan, one of the
Perth
’s engineers, was struggling to get free of the turtling ship. Stationed with three other men in the fireroom, or stokehold as the Aussies called it, they were losing their bearings as their steel-enclosed world made a disorienting ninety-degree rotation. Leaving the fireroom, they realized their best route to the main deck was a hatch some distance down the passageway they were standing in. The hatch opened to the level above them, the enclosed torpedo space below the four-inch-gun deck. It was a path they had trodden many times when the world was on its feet. Now, with the ship nearly on her side, a significant obstacle lay in their path: the athwartship passage opened below them like a five-foot-wide trapdoor into an abyss. One of the stokers that Lieutenant Gillan had helped escape from the fireroom tried to jump across, but his boots slipped on takeoff and he fell short, vanishing into the depths of the upended passageway that swallowed his scream.

The other two men with Gillan successfully leaped the pit and kept running. Wearing a Royal Australian Navy ball cap with a coal
miner’s lamp strapped to it, Gillan followed, but the seconds that separated them were meaningful. Ahead, he could see ocean water cascading through the hatch leading upward to his freedom. He froze for a moment, feeling the natural impulse to prefer a delayed but sure drowning to a more immediate but only slightly less certain one. Then he gathered his courage, took a deep breath, and plunged upward into the water, fighting his way up through the hatch. He succeeded, but even in his success he had to confront a sickening question. If the ship finally capsized, where would “up” finally take him? In moving toward the main deck, he might in fact be seeking her bottom as the ship turned turtle and came down on top of him.

She hadn’t gone fully over yet. Gillan could still feel that the ship was making forward headway while sinking by the bow. He realized this meant the water must be entering the ship from the forward compartments and flowing toward the rear. And he knew the inflow would carry with it assorted flotsam—entangling lines and nets, as well as heavier objects—that could prove dangerous if he fought against the natural progression of things.

In a moment of clarity, Gillan realized that his only hope was to surrender to the sea. If he relaxed and let it take him, it might just carry him free of the ship as it sought its own escape from the labyrinth. He tucked his knees up under his chin and began rolling aft as the water embraced him. Like a small boulder at the bottom of a rushing stream, he tumbled backward through a wreckage-filled passageway, gulping enough air to survive and thinking all along,
Thank God my Mae [West] isn’t fully inflated. I’d be up against the roof if it was and would never get out.

Lungs burning, Gillan felt himself bump up against the ship’s rail. He was finally free of the enclosed torpedo space. The cord to his miner’s lamp snagged momentarily on the rail, but then he was floating again, being washed up and down, unsure of which direction the surface was. He felt currents whirlpooling around him. The sensation evoked an amusement park ride before the flashing of red, green, and purple lights marked the possibility that his brain was starving for oxygen as he drowned.

Then the sea seemed to yield. There were no more currents, no more detritus of a battered ship grasping at him. All was still. He basked for a moment in a dying repose before it occurred to him,
If I don’t struggle now I’ll drown.
He clawed at the water around him,
sensing the surface above and reaching furiously for it. At last there came an explosion of water and tarry black bunker oil as Lieutenant Gillan broke the surface and sucked air again.

Any frail hope for the
Perth
was lost when a fourth torpedo struck the ship forward on the port side, throwing high another foaming column of seawater. This broke her. As survivors scrambled overboard and swam clear, they looked back and saw her not so much sink as drive herself under water. “Her four propellers came clear of the sea,” Ray Parkin wrote. “Three of the shafts were now broken, but the fourth was still turning. She went down for all the world as if she were steaming over the horizon from them. ‘She did not sink,’ they said, ‘she
steamed
out.’”

Frank Gillan caught the very last sight of the ship. Surfacing, he grabbed a biscuit tin floating nearby and fastened his arms around it, then turned and looked back in the direction of the ship. About a hundred feet away from him, a large curved blade—one of the
Perth
’s propeller screws—flicked the air one last time and disappeared beneath the ocean’s surface, carrying Captain Waller, dead on the bridge, and hundreds of others to their final resting place at twenty fathoms.

“I’m the last man out of that ship alive,” Gillan announced to the stars overhead. “God, I thank you.”

A
t 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 detonations could be heard closer to the beach. Within sixty minutes of their first encounter with the Allied cruisers, the Japanese ships cutting 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 equipment 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.