Ship of Ghosts (19 page)

The furious but uncoordinated nature of the
Houston
’s gunnery—directors abandoned and manned again, rangefinders disabled, turrets switched to manual control and from director to director—meant that though a large number of Japanese ships were engaged in the battle,
seldom was the
Houston
’s fire concentrated sufficiently to sink any given ship.

Her five-inch gunners did the best they could. Most of them had been together since the ship left the States in October 1940. Commander Maher had worked them hard and it bore fruit now. Even on local control, the captains of the five-inch mounts performed superbly. Their fire struck the destroyer
Harukaze
on the bridge and in the engine room, damaging her rudder, killing three, injuring fifteen, and forcing her to abort a torpedo launch. Their volleys also ravaged the destroyer
Shirayuki
. Though the
Houston
had just one working thirty-six-inch searchlight on each side, her gunners managed to range on the
Mikuma,
hitting her with a projectile that disabled her main electrical switchboard and silenced her batteries and searchlights for several minutes. But Capt. Shakao Sakiyama’s electricians wired around the trouble, enabling her to resume the bombardment with even greater effectiveness as she closed to within ten thousand yards.

Having gone through the Java Sea battle, Howard Brooks recognized the tenor of the enemy cruisers’ eight-inch main battery fire. The big guns sounded much closer now than they had the previous afternoon. The destroyers were far easier to see. “We could see the whole outline of these Japanese destroyers that were firing at us,” Brooks said. “We could see the guys on the guns, Japanese sailors, their forms, moving around the guns. They were pouring fire right into our ship.”

“Oh Lord, sometimes you felt like you could reach out and shake their hands,” said John Bartz. He took shelter behind the back of his gun’s seat as bullets pinged all around the makeshift metal shield. The Marine second lieutenant in charge of his mount, Edward M. Barrett, ordered him to keep shooting, and Bartz did so, keeping to his unorthodox shielded firing position, reaching around the seat back to elevate and depress the guns, and grabbing the foot-pedal trigger with his other hand to fire.

“The tin cans got so close to us…that when they got under two hundred yards, you couldn’t train on them…. You’d hit the top of their stacks,” said John Wisecup, on gun number seven, aftermost on the boat deck’s starboard side. With some satisfaction Wisecup could tell that the 1.1-inch pom-poms were getting to the enemy. “They’d rake that topside, and you could hear them yelling over
there. You could see their faces. You could hear the guys on the bridge hollering because they were that close when they hit them.”

High in the
Houston
’s foremast, standing on a twenty-by-twenty-foot corrugated steel platform where four .50-caliber machine guns were mounted, Howard Charles had a commanding view of the battle. There he had a measurable advantage over gunners stationed closer to the sea. It was easier to fire down on a target than to hit it firing straight out over the water. With orders to quench enemy searchlights wherever they might shine, he steered his tracers into the glare of the unshuttered enemy lenses. All things considered, he preferred this lofty view to the cloistered depths of the magazines or handling rooms. Ever since the ship departed Tanjung Priok, he had been stirring restlessly in his bid for a little sleep before his midwatch shift began at midnight. But a kapok life jacket made a lousy mattress and a steel helmet an even worse pillow. So he had lain there watching the stars slide through the heavens until more compelling lights and clouds seized his attention.

Charles lost track of how many belts he and his loader had ripped through the gun chamber of his .50. Each time a new one was in place, the loader would tap him on the shoulder and he would pull the cocking lever twice and seize down on the handle bar trigger, showering red tracers at any Japanese ship that dared to brandish her beams. It might have seemed like a county fair target gallery, except that the Japanese ships sliding into view out of the night returned fire all too vigorously. The day before, during the Battle of the Java Sea, the ship’s machine gunners had stood by uselessly as the main batteries traded salvos at a range of a dozen miles or more. Now even the smallest guns played a part in the main event.

T
he men of the
Houston
’s engineering department had all the work they could handle keeping their complex machinery from yielding to the violent shakedown the cruiser’s helmsman and gunners were giving it. Changes in speed, sudden course adjustments, the impact of hits delivered and received—all conspired against the orderly operation of a steam-driven power plant. Heavy and powerful though the 107,000-horsepower geared-turbine power plant was, its operation was a delicate business that required experience up and down the chain of command, and an intuitive understanding between men at different stations. A radical maneuver such as a crashback, designed
to pull a sharp emergency turn by putting the shafts on the inside of the turn suddenly into reverse, requires the entire black gang to work together flawlessly. The throttleman watching the engine order telegraph responds to the bridge’s order by spinning the large handwheels to cut the flow of steam through the “ahead” throttle and simultaneously cracks the “astern” throttle to slow down and stop the turbine wheels. As he opens wide the astern throttle, he risks much: Too much steam can strip the turbine blades; too little risks a slow response to a vital order—equally sinful in the snap-to-it world of a shipboard engineering department, and more so under fire.

Only an experienced fireroom watch can contend with the sudden reduction to zero of the system’s demand for their steam. Trained intensively to observe the spray of vaporized bunker oil from the burners and monitor the efficiency of the nozzles and their combustion cones, they cut in or shut off burners to keep steady pressure in the main and auxiliary steam lines. Water tenders watch the boiler water level—too high a level sends water into the turbines with the steam, wrecking the turbines; too low and the boilers can burn out. Machinist’s mates stay busy working thirty-odd pumps to meet the plant’s rapidly fluctuating water demands. Meanwhile, the system’s efficiency is subject to any number of external variables, from the temperature of the water outside the hull, which influences the effectiveness of the condenser that returns boiler water to the system, to the viscosity of the bunker oil sprayed through the burners.

“We were making full power,” Lt. Robert Fulton recalled. “The throttle was wide open. We were rolling along and the machinery in this one engine room was working just fine.” Around 12:15
a.m
., the ship took a grievous hit aft on the starboard side. Fulton felt a slight tremor, and no more. Others felt it more heavily, though no one could ever quite tell whether it was a torpedo hit or a salvo of heavy projectiles. Whatever it was shattered the after engine room.

A shower of giant sparks cascaded through the bulkhead separating the number-four fireroom from the after engine room. Paint chips flew off the bulkhead and tore into exposed flesh like little blades. With the destruction of the main feedwater pumps in the after engine room, the four boilers in firerooms three and four were suddenly starved for water. The glasses indicating the water level inside the boilers went dry. A water tender started the emergency feed pumps, but they delivered too little too late. Before fireman first
class George Detre’s horrified eyes, the brickwork of two of the boilers driving the ship’s inboard pair of screws were turned into molten slurry.

In the forward engine room, Lieutenant Fulton wondered what had happened in the after engine room. The only evidence he had of the compartment’s fate was a sudden loss of communication with his chief engineer, Lt. Cdr. Richard Gingras. It could not have been pretty, the great blast ripping open the hull, tossing the crew about like puppets, melting the steel floor gratings in a flash, opening the way for the sea to flow in and quench the roasting steel, summoning a hissing wash of seawater and steam.

Fulton’s glimpse of that hell was a narrow and quick one, and it came via an unlikely window: the engine order telegraph. “When the ship was underway my job was to see to it that the two shafts of the forward engine room operated exactly the same as those in the after engine room,” Fulton said. When the captain signaled an engine order, it was relayed via the bridge’s engine order telegraph to Commander Gingras in the after control engine room, which drove the ship’s two inboard shafts. Gingras matched the setting on his own telegraph, thus confirming to the bridge his compliance with the order and passing the order to Fulton in the forward engine room, who mimicked his superior’s actions.

Looking at the dial of the engine order telegraph, Fulton saw something curious happen. All of a sudden the indicator’s pointer, which usually moved so deliberately in response to specific orders, was waving back and forth quickly. “It made no sense at all,” Fulton said. “We couldn’t understand it.” He thought the telegraph had malfunctioned somehow. But synchros didn’t go haywire like that. Nor, to say the least, did the engine orders, so faithfully mimicked downstream from the bridge. Fulton tried both of the available JV phone circuits but got no answer on either one. It would dawn on him later that the wagging indicator pointer was in all likelihood the act of a human hand, an improvised emergency signal from someone attempting in his scalding final moments to communicate disaster to the captain on the bridge. “It is exactly the kind of quick thinking that was typical of Mr. Gingras,” Fulton wrote.

Up on deck, above the after engine room, gusts of steam from shattered high-pressure pipes kept repair parties from doing their job. On the boat deck, the venting steam forced men on the five-inch guns and after antiaircraft gun director to abandon their stations.
The after guns were manned mostly by the ship’s Marine detachment. There was not a moment of panic among them. Before abandoning their steam-swamped battle stations, they actually requested permission to do so—and promptly returned to the boat deck as soon as the heat subsided.

R
eaching 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.”