Ship of Ghosts (21 page)

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 triangulating 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.

I
n the choking confines of Turret Two, the ripe air heavy with heat, Red Huffman was head down on the indicator dial, listening for the gun captain’s signal to fire. The enemy ships were so close now that the guns were elevated downward, below zero degrees. Having rammed and fired twenty-seven salvos, the turret crew was hoisting and loading the twenty-eighth when there came a sharp metallic shock and an intense spray of sparks. The gun house had taken a direct hit square on the faceplate by a shell from a Japanese cruiser lying off somewhere in the dark.

The projectile failed to explode, but because the turret’s powder flaps had been opened to enable the men in the powder circle to pass powder bags into the gun chamber, the sparks alone were deadly. They splashed into the gun house and flowed all around the bags, igniting them. A flash fire engulfed the entire gun mount and roared down into the powder circle and shell deck.

The only men inside who were fully shielded from the inferno were Ens. Charles D. Smith, his talker, and two rangefinder operators stationed in the flameproof turret officer’s booth. Smith pulled the lever that activated the turret’s sprinkler system and peered through the booth’s glass port to assess the damage. All he could see was “a red haze as if on a foggy night.” The smoke from the fires was
tinted scarlet by all the burning particles of powder flying around as if seeking an exit from the blazing enclosure.

“Everything lit up,” Huffman said. “Oh God, it was all flames.” Seated above and forward of the triple mount’s gun breeches, he was lashed by a long tongue of flame that came reaching up around the turret’s split-level deck. Because the pointer’s station was severely cramped for headroom, he wasn’t able to don his battle helmet. The fire burned away the hair on the back of his head and roasted his back.

“I’m telling you what I did when I had my senses about me,” Huffman said. “After that, you operated automatically. You knew what to do and you did it, and you didn’t know
when
you did it or
how
you did or
what
you did, but you did it. You were trained to do it. For years I trained on that damn thing. All of us did. Everybody knew exactly what to do. We were trained to fight to the death, and that was what we did. It’s a hell of a thing to say, but it’s true.”

Stunned by shock, badly burned, hands moving with sharp purpose but unguided by active thought, Huffman opened the gun house’s port-side hatch and climbed through it. “I was getting out of there. It was a raging inferno. I didn’t know what I was doing.” With the turret trained out to starboard, the hatch led not to the communications deck but out into a void of space with a ten-foot drop straight down to the main deck. “There was nothing under me but air,” Huffman said. “But I never had that all in my mind. I really wasn’t thinking at all. I was just getting away from all that fire.” He landed hard on the teak. Memory failed him for a time from that point on. According to Ensign Smith, only seven of the fifty-eight men in Turret Two’s assembly—the turret, the magazine, the powder circle, the gun deck, and so on—escaped alive. Aside from Smith, Huffman, gunner’s mate third class James L. Cash, seaman first class Ray Goodson, and some lucky souls inside the officer’s booth, everyone else succumbed to the inferno of powder bags.

When the fires inside the turret grew hot enough to begin cracking the thick glass of his viewing port, Smith and the others abandoned the officer’s booth and scrambled clear of the turret as it burned up from within. Looking back, they were astonished to see the booth hatch open again and seaman first class Henry S. Grodzky stumble out onto the communications deck. Burned worse than Red Huffman was, he collapsed. Smith ran to him and carried him to the lee of the radio shack, where a medical triage had been set up.

On Turret Two’s shell deck, seaman first class William J. Stewart felt a slight jarring impact and saw a bright spark fly through an opening in the top of the barbette. Knowing that the tightly sealed gun housing was not readily permeable to flames, Stewart saw the spark as a sign of a terrible conflagration above. “We knew the turret was on fire and that if we were to survive, why, we had better start getting out,” he said. When he and the six other men on the shell deck wrestled open the four-foot-high watertight hatch, they were met by a pressurized blast of flame. “It was just like coming out of a blow torch and was bouncing off the bulkhead about eight feet in front of us,” Stewart said. He might have made it unscathed, but his dungarees got snared on the hatch and fire washed all around him. Bare from the waist up, he suffered horrible black burns on his exposed torso, face, and ears. His hair, thoroughly drenched with sweat, “burned down to a charcoal mat and apparently protected the top of my head,” Stewart wrote. He worked his dungarees free and, numb but soon to be in need of morphine, escaped with the six others. He headed to the aid station, high on his own adrenaline.

Red Huffman and another sailor were struggling with a fire hose, trying to train it on Turret Two, but it pulled no water. Back near the number-one radio room, Ensign Smith and some others found another hose and played it into the burning enclosure. To Smith’s surprise, the lights were still on inside, but they did not long survive the torrent from the fire hose. The electrical circuit and the lights died with the flames. The firefighters had no inclination to explore the dark turret’s blowtorched innards any further. Terrible fumes from inside drove them back.

The flames churning out of Turret Two had briefly cast the
Houston
in sharp relief for enemy gunners. In the
Mikuma,
sailors boisterously celebrated the tall lance of flame that leaped from what appeared to them to be the
Houston
’s bridge. Although those fires were swiftly quenched, projectiles flew to the ship like flies to a porch lamp, striking in rapid succession and filling the air with shrapnel, dust, and debris.

The random nature of the carnage made it futile to anticipate or avoid. “It’s coming from all sides,” Paul Papish said. “You don’t know where to go on the ship for protection…. Up the ladder you go, and you figure, ‘Well, bull! This isn’t the place to be!’ So you head back down.” The sick bay, the brig, the life jacket locker, the
wardroom, and the foremast machine gun platform all took direct hits. A series of burning belowdecks compartments were ordered flooded. When a fire broke out in magazine number two, timely flooding by Commander Maher prevented a catastrophic explosion. Word followed that the small-arms magazine between magazines one and two was afire, and it was flooded too. Then Lieutenant Hamlin in Turret One was surprised to hear a report of fire in his own magazine.

He had had no suggestion of it from the men best situated to know, those stationed in the magazine itself. Presumably a high temperature reading sent up a red flag to magazine flood control, so Commander Maher had ordered magazine number one flooded as well. As a precaution, Hamlin ordered the sprinklers activated in the lower powder hoists. But the wrong switch was thrown and the upper hoist and powder circle got wet too. As a consequence, he lost several salvos that were ready in the upper hoist. One last salvo remained in Turret One’s breeches. It was duly fired, and from that point onward the
Houston
was without the services of its largest guns.

With a ten-degree starboard list, the
Houston
was fighting with her lightest weapons. Two motor torpedo boats sped in, attracting the attention of the .50-caliber gunners in the tops and the 1.1-inch gunners below them. One boat was seen to disintegrate in the storm. The other was sawed clean in half yet managed in the seconds available to it to fire a torpedo, which ran on the surface and struck the
Houston
on the starboard side forward of the catapult tower.

“The ship seemed to be thrown sideways, and the deck jumped so bad I was knocked to my knees,” remembered seaman second class Bill Weissinger. “That explosion must have shot a couple of tons of water into the air, because when I started to get up, it came pouring down, and Bam! Down I went again. Man, it was heavy.” The explosion jarred the catapult track loose from its mounting, and it collapsed across the quarterdeck.

With Japanese ships pressing so close that
Houston
sailors could hear the roar of their firerooms, the battle harked back to an earlier day when naval battles were fought within man-to-man reach, without industrial tools to enable long-distance killing cleansed of a personal aspect. “It was point-blank. It wasn’t any of this arcing over yonder,” said Frank King, “it was just right broadside.” Seaman first
class Gus Forsman, on a port-side five-inch gun, said, “It was invigorating to be in a battle like that to where you didn’t wait for orders to fire or anything. You just picked a target and fired at it.”

The light guns kept up a busy chatter, but the five-inch mounts were running short of ammunition. Resigning himself to the inevitable, seaman second class Earl C. Humphrey, the rammer on Forsman’s gun, backed up against a ready box full of star shells, cradling one of his mount’s last projectiles in his arms. He told Forsman, “I thought I was going to get it, and when I got it well, I wanted to go all the way.” But when the gun captains ran out of common five-inch ammunition and started raiding that ready box for ordnance, Humphrey’s express ticket to a painless death started to look a little less certain.

Star shells were deadly at close range. The captain’s talker, aviation machinist’s mate second class John Ranger, a hero of the February 4 fire in Turret Three, stood just outside the conning tower, still tethered to his phones even though Captain Rooks had left to escape the flames from Turret Two. Standing there, Ranger could hear the hollering of the Japanese sailors as their ships were struck with the sizzling phosphorous rounds. The shells made a lot of noise too. “You could hear them cooking,” he said.

Bright lights warred with darkness for possession of the night. “My God, those magnesium flares just light a place up,” said Paul Papish, stationed in the after battle dressing station. “It’s a ghostly effect. You just can’t actually imagine in your mind what it looks like…. But it’s indescribable. A Japanese destroyer had illuminated us, and I remember hearing somebody holler, ‘Put out that goddamned light!’ And they fired point blank, that star shell, into that searchlight, which couldn’t have been more than the length of [a] building away from us. You could hear screams coming from the Japanese ship.”

S
urrounded by enemy ships on all offshore bearings, the
Houston
was about five miles northwest of Panjang Island and about the same distance east-northeast from St. Nicholas Point, on an eastward course at twenty knots. It was a little after midnight. The ship was taking on water and listing hard, restricting both her speed and her maneuverability. Her main guns were silent, Turrets Two and Three shattered and burned out, Turret One starved for ammunition with flooded magazines and hoists. “Because of the overwhelming volume of fire and the sheer rapidity with which hits were being scored on the
Houston
, it was impossible to determine in many instances whether a shell, torpedo, or bomb hit had occurred,” Commander Maher wrote.

Lost in the numbing stop-time of battle, few of the
Houston
’s sailors could step back and evaluate the ship’s overall prospects. That was the job of the officers and the captain. Walter Winslow was standing next to Captain Rooks on the signal bridge. Having been forced to leave the conn by the intensity of Turret Two’s flames, Rooks summoned the ship’s Marine bugler, Jack Lee. “In a strong, resolute voice,” Winslow recalled, “[Rooks] spoke the fateful words: ‘Bugler, sound abandon ship.’” Pvt. Lloyd Willey marveled at the clarity of the horn player’s tone. “He never missed one beat on that
bugle. It would have been absolutely beautiful if it had been anywhere else but at that time.” Lee blew his clean tones into the ship’s PA system. The abandon ship order went out over the battle telephones and the general announcing system.