Ship of Ghosts (9 page)

“They dropped them so close to us that the shrapnel just pecked along our splinter shields all around us,” said Charley Pryor, who manned gun number eight, the portside five-inch mount closest to the fantail. Like even the oldest salts on the ship, Sergeant Pryor was stunned by Rooks’s audacity at the helm. The skipper turned the cruiser so sharply that seawater washed up over the quarterdeck. There were moments, Pryor recalled, when “in the foretops, all they could see under them was green sea, no ship.” For harrowing moments, the swirling flood reached to the knees of men standing on deck.

“I’d often wondered and worried…whether I’d be capable of doing my job or not,” said pharmacist’s mate Griff L. Douglas, an eighteen-year-old who had earned a decade’s worth of wisdom on February 4 while patching together maimed survivors. “I knew I’d been trained well, but it worried me all the time. I thought, ‘Well, I know I’m scared,’ and I’d think, ‘Well, maybe I can’t do my job.’ But after that, I never worried about it anymore.”

The ship spat skyward so much flak that she appeared to burn. Her gallery of eight five-inch guns put up a total of 930 rounds, two and a half rounds a minute for each gun for forty-five minutes straight. The projectiles taken from the
Boise
made a startling difference in the conduct of the enemy planes. “You could just see them rocking up there,” said Marine Pvt. Lloyd V. Willey. With the
concentrated smoky black bursts whistling shrapnel past their windscreens, the bombers retreated to a higher altitude. Seven fell victim to the
Houston
’s gunners. Already worn down from day after day of steady vigilance, the crews were relieved by men from other stations as the heat exhaustion got to them.

The soldiers on the transports had little else to do but gape as the cruiser shaped a weaving course around and through them. A yellow-orange curtain of fire seemed to envelop the
Houston,
while overhead another curtain—the black shroud of the heavy cruiser’s shell bursts—sheltered the transports from the planes. Bombs landed all around her—“All the sea boiled up and
Houston
was gone,” wrote E. L. Cullis. Another
Warrego
sailor said, “Good God! They’ve got her!” But then, Cullis wrote, “from walls of water surely two hundred feet high, from clouds of flame-shot smoke,
Houston
emerged, racing ahead. A miracle. We sighted her mast. Then her upper deck—it was a rippling sheet of flame. She was surging and bouncing and skidding like a toy ship spinning upon whirlpools.” By the time the bombers vanished, the only friendly casualty was a U.S. soldier on the
Mauna Loa,
hit by shrapnel from a near miss. He was taken aboard the
Houston,
but her pharmacist’s mates were helpless to save him.

As the convoy slugged north by night, the startling news came that Timor was already in enemy hands. The convoy promptly turned around and set course again for Darwin. The frustration aboard the
Houston
was palpable, leavened only briefly by the consoling wild cheers the troops in the four transports sent up—the Australians the loudest—as their sleek protector took station at the head of their column on the return journey. Ham sandwiches and cups of coffee in hand, faces and dungarees black with gun grease, the crewmen of the
Houston
came topside to bask in the celebratory roar. “It was a proud moment,” recalled Bill Weissinger, a gunner on the number-one five-inch mount on the starboard side. “The men were crying and may not even have realized it. The tears were streaming down their face and making clean channels down their cheeks.”

T
he astonishing progress of the Japanese in oceanic Asia was putting the entire issue of defending Java into doubt. They were advancing in a pincer movement. The Imperial Navy’s Western Attack Group, with seven cruisers, twenty-five destroyers, and fifty-six transports and cargo ships, was under way from Camranh Bay, Indochina, on course for Batavia and western Java. The Japanese Eastern Attack Group, with one cruiser, six destroyers, and forty-one transports, accompanied by three cruisers and seven destroyers of the Eastern Covering Group, threatened Surabaya and eastern Java. Fighting blind, without air cover or reconnaissance, the ABDA nations would be hard-pressed to muster enough strength to stop either arm.

On February 15, Singapore capitulated, less than a week after Field Marshal Wavell declared its unbreachable strength. That same day, with the
Houston
at sea between Timor and Darwin, Admiral Doorman led his striking force up the Karimata Strait to challenge the enemy’s advance toward the Sumatran oil center of Palembang. The Japanese found him first, hitting him with a naval air raid that damaged the Australian light cruiser
Hobart
and two U.S. destroyers. Doorman returned to Batavia with nothing to show for his dash. In the east, prospects were no brighter. The capture of Timor meant
that Surabaya, Java’s capital, would come under regular land-based air attack. Allied ships would operate in the Java Sea at their deep peril, exposed to attack from three directions.

The
Houston
returned to Darwin with her Timor convoy on the afternoon of February 18, refueled from a barge, and set sail again around 5:30
p.m
., under orders to rejoin Doorman. It was just as well for the
Houston
to be clear of Darwin’s waters. The next night, the crew heard Tokyo Rose announce that the Japanese First Carrier Fleet, under Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo, leader of the Pearl Harbor striking force, had launched a devastating surprise attack on the port.

A strike of 188 fighters and dive-bombers from the
Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu,
and
Soryu,
fresh from the Pearl Harbor raid, overwhelmed the ten American P-40 Warhawks sent to intercept them and, bolstered by fifty-four bombers flying from Kendari and Ambon, left the airdrome a shambles, its storage facilities ravaged, and thirteen ships sunk, including the
Meigs,
the
Mauna Loa,
and the destroyer
Peary
with most of her crew. Tokyo Rose added the
Houston
to the list, a fictional flourish so familiar by now that it no longer much amused anyone. That day too Japanese fighters swept over Surabaya and elements of the Japanese Sixteenth Army, ferried across the Java Sea from Makassar Town, went ashore on Bali.

With his ships dispersed near and far, from Sumatra to Tjilatjap and from Surabaya to Darwin, Doorman could not mount a concentrated naval assault on the forces creeping toward him. Field Marshal Wavell was losing heart altogether: “I am afraid that the defense of the ABDA area has broken down,” he observed on the twenty-first. Two days later he received orders from London to abandon Java altogether. On February 25 he secretly boarded a plane and departed with his staff for Ceylon, leaving Java’s defense to the Dutch. There was no longer an ABDA naval force for Admiral Helfrich to lead. With Wavell’s departure, the multinational command ceased formally to exist and Helfrich became his nation’s own last hope.

As for the Americans, consigned to defeat by the U.S. Navy and poised to make a last stand under a foreign flag, their final lot was now cast. At dusk on February 21, the
Houston
arrived again at Tjilatjap. The crew was angered to find that the Dutch crews who manned the fueling station were nowhere to be found. Refueling would be a matter of self-service. A working party from the ship’s
engineering department went ashore and took whatever the lines would give them—just three hundred tons—before the glow of dawn forced Captain Rooks to leave port for the comparative safety of sea.

As the
Houston
threaded the protective minefield outside the harbor and turned west toward Sunda Strait, accompanied by the destroyers
Paul Jones
and
Alden,
Walter Winslow asked the navigator, Cdr. John A. Hollowell Jr., where they might be headed. “In a fatherly way, he draped his arm around my shoulder and, as though talking to himself, said, ‘Son, we’re going to hell, we’re going to hell.’” As the ship navigated the strait, rudder and engines straining against the strong currents, Ens. Charles D. Smith looked back at that perilous stretch of water and remarked, apropos of nothing, “Say, didn’t I just hear a gate clang shut behind us?” This struck Paul Papish as a premonition. The storekeeper would never shake the memory.

M
aking a successful transit north through Sunda Strait, the
Houston
rejoined Rear Adm. Karel Doorman’s striking force in Surabaya on the afternoon of February 24. The harbor of the capital city in east Java was marked by a towering column of smoke, the product of repeated Japanese air raids whose latest victim was a freighter, her hull laid open and sprawled on her side with a full cargo of rubber aflame. By day the smoke was a handy navigation aid for inbound Japanese aircraft. By night, its flames would be a beacon for any warships or submarines stalking the port. Captain Rooks anchored the
Houston
in midstream, a few hundred yards from the docks, where several warehouses were on fire. The crew watched sailors and soldiers ashore scrambling around with hoses.

That night, with their ship still tied up, the crew topped off the
Houston
’s capacious fuel oil bunkers, then watched in fascination as a Dutch minelayer opened fire on the grounded merchantman with her deck gun, trying to quench her blazing cargo of rubber by shattering the hull and letting in the sea. Instead of sinking, the vessel just burned more fiercely. A Dutch torpedo boat motored in and launched a torpedo at her, to no better effect. For sailors on the
Houston,
these attempts to scuttle the floundering inferno made quite a spectacle. “With all the confusion going on around us,” Walter Winslow wrote, “we slept very little that night.”

Even with the return of the
Houston,
Admiral Doorman’s ability to blunt the Japanese drive against Java was limited at best. Before leaving the theater, Field Marshal Wavell had written Winston Churchill, describing the intractable problem of defending a six-hundred-mile-long island with a handful of cruisers and destroyers. “If this [naval force] is divided between the two threatened ends of the island it is too weak for either. If kept concentrated it is difficult, owing to distance involved, to reach a vital point in time. Wherever it is, it is liable to heavy air attack.” Without fighter cover, the number of ships the Allies had to oppose the Japanese was almost academic. The
Houston
’s sailors marked time by the regular appearances of Japanese bombers overhead, three and four times a day.

The members of the threadbare U.S. fighter squadron charged with providing land-based fighter cover in the Dutch East Indies were mostly veterans of the Philippines campaign, evacuated and taken to Brisbane, Australia, where they set up a makeshift training program for the green second lieutenants arriving from the States and cobbled together several squadrons from available parts and personnel. It wasn’t the way the Army Air Forces preferred to organize itself, but there were enough planes and people on hand to patch together five squadrons. Assigned to Java, the Seventeenth Pursuit Squadron (Provisional) came into being on January 10. Maj. Charles A. Sprague’s pilots had flown their P-40E Warhawks from Brisbane to Darwin and then on a thirteen-hundred-mile, six-leg flight up to Java.

Under the overall command of Col. Eugene L. Eubanks in Malang, Sprague’s pilots found a home at the Ngoro (or Blimbing) airdrome, located about forty miles southwest of Surabaya. Flying from the sodden rice fields of their hidden hive, they took to the skies daily in flights of eight, twelve, and sixteen P-40Es to intercept Japanese air strikes and escort the AAF’s own bombing strikes against Japanese targets in the area. The Dutch air warning service relayed ground observers’ aircraft sightings and all-clear signals to Surabaya via wire or native drumbeats. Sprague’s aviators typically got no more than twenty-five minutes of advance notice to get into the air. By the time they reached interception altitude of 21,000 feet or more, as often as not the bombs had already fallen. Gamecock-tough but ill-equipped, they could do little to prevent the daily pasting Surabaya was taking from Japanese bombers. Their own airdrome
was substantially safer, owing to their proficiency at hiding their planes under tangles of tapioca brush.

After the fall of Kendari on January 26, the attacks had been coming incessantly. All during February, the squadron’s pilots waged a determined campaign to intercept the inbound bombers, flying occasional reconnaissance and strike missions over Bali, Lombok, and the surrounding Java Sea as well. They suffered every handicap possible for a gang of aviators, from shortages of spare parts, fuel, and Prestone to muddy airstrips, perpetual bad weather, and a lack of early warning about enemy strikes. That the Japanese opposing them were fiercely well trained, with skills sharpened through years of war on the Asian mainland, was the final imbalance. Nearly every day this pickup squad took to the skies in their P-40s to tangle with the Japanese. Even when the Dutch coast watchers gave them sufficient warning, sometimes the old planes couldn’t get the job done. The oily life was being flown out of them. Their weary engines often had trouble reaching the bombers’ cruising altitude—around 27,000 feet—which was close enough to the P-40E’s service ceiling to make interception difficult even on the best of days.