Ship of Ghosts (22 page)

Their commanding officer had foreseen this. His prescient “Estimate of the Situation” had described the swift, multipronged nature of the coming Japanese offensive. He had predicted Luzon’s vulnerability to air attack, had warned of Singapore’s exposure, and knew Japan would exploit it with its hard-hitting aviation corps. The devastating Darwin raid was no surprise to him either. He appreciated the skill of the Japanese officer corps and the dedication of their enlisted force. The Allies’ chances had never looked very good to Albert Harold Rooks. “If widely dispersed over the Far East, from Manila to Surabaya to Singapore,” he had written, “[the Allied ships] will be capable of only the most limited employment, and many of them will come to an untimely end.”

The captain was descending the ladder from the signal bridge when a salvo hit the number-one 1.1-inch mount on the ship’s starboard side, killing or wounding everyone in its vicinity. The blast threw a torrent of shrapnel into an athwartship passageway aft of the number-one radio room just as Rooks was coming off the ladder. It caught him in the head and upper torso. Ens. Charles D. Smith, the Turret Two officer, saw him stagger and collapse about ten feet from where Smith was standing. Rooks lay there, soaked with blood on the left side of his head and shoulders. Smith ran to him, but “he was too far gone to talk to us,” the young officer wrote.

Smith opened his first aid kit and stuck his commanding officer with two syrettes of morphine. “He died within a minute,” Smith would write. Then he laid a blanket over him and sought out the executive officer, Cdr. David W. Roberts, and the navigator, Cdr. John A. Hollowell Jr., and reported their captain’s death.

One of Captain Rooks’s mess attendants, a heavyset Chinaman named Ah Fong but nicknamed “Buda” by the crew, came across the skipper in his last moments. According to Walter Winslow, “Rocking slowly back and forth, he held Captain Rooks as though he were a little boy asleep and, in a voice overburdened with sorrow, repeated over and over, ‘Captain dead,
Houston
dead, Buda die too.’” The Chinese were generally terrified of the water. Though several others would be successfully urged overboard at gunpoint, Buda wouldn’t budge.

T
he order to abandon ship took Robert Fulton by surprise when it came in over a phone circuit. “We were really roaring along,” the assistant engineering officer recalled. His forward engine room was turning the outboard screws at some 330 revolutions per minute. With all four screws going at that speed, the ship would normally make thirty-two knots. But the inboard screws were dead, just dragging through the sea. The best the
Houston
could do now was about twenty-one knots. Except for the dead phone circuits and the peculiar wagging of the after engine room’s telegraph pointer, Fulton had had no indication anything was really wrong with the
Houston
. The abandon ship order seemed precipitous.

Thinking some kind of mistake had been made, he called the bridge and requested verification of the abandon ship order. Several minutes passed during which Fulton and his crew had no idea what they should be doing. Finally, after several minutes of chafing silence, a second order to abandon ship was received. Fulton passed the order to the rest of the dozen-odd men with him in the forward engine room and commenced the shutdown of the cruiser’s last working propulsion plant.

The fireroom crews shut down the burners under the boilers, leaving valves open to bleed off the high-pressure steam in the system. Though this was a standard procedure that removed the risk of injuries from the release of high-pressure steam in the propulsion system, it could not stop the ship with its ten thousand tons’ worth of inertia. As a consequence, the
Houston
continued to make headway as the first life rafts were lowered over the side. They were lost as the ship sailed on before crews could climb down into them.

With Captain Rooks’s passing, the ship’s senior surviving officer and exec, Commander Roberts, took charge. At 12:29
a.m
., having noticed the loss of several rafts as the ship made way, he countermanded the abandon ship order. The cancellation went out over an intercom system that was too shattered to carry the message everywhere. Some heard it, turned away from the rail, and took shelter in less exposed areas of the ship. But many others never did, and they continued helping themselves and their shipmates overboard.

Quite a few sailors who returned to their battle stations were only too glad to get back into the fight. The prospect of leaving the ship
was rife with uncertainty. During a lull in shooting, Gus Forsman was having a cigarette on the boat deck with gunner’s mate second class Elmer L. McFadden when he heard Commander Roberts on the intercom ordering all hands back to their battle stations. Forsman thought:
Well, that’s more like it
.

No matter how bad off a ship may be, there must always be a plan going forward, an objective to reach for, an opening to gain, a reprieve to win. How else should a sailor invest his hopes? The ship itself looms so large in his life that her end can be quite inconceivable.
*
But the near certainty of the ship’s end dawned on even the most unshakably optimistic of the ship’s crew. As he was returning gladly to his gun mount, even the gung-ho Forsman found himself thinking,
I wonder how the water is
.

T
hough they could tell “we were really getting the devil knocked out of us,” Jim Gee and the other sailors and Marines belowdecks in the five-inch magazine had frozen in disbelief when the first abandon ship order was passed around. The hatch above them was dogged down from above. Unlike the hatches in the main battery’s magazines, there were no dogs on the underside. They had no way out. For a time, they did not move from their stations. Yet their confidence was still whole. “No one in the magazine ever said ‘I guess we won’t make it!’ or something of this nature,” Gee said. “I have never seen eight men face the absolute end so calmly,” said Pfc. Marvin E. Robinson. When the second abandon ship order came, at 12:33, minutes after the first one, with reports of flooding circulating on the battle phones, they decided it was time to go. Marine corporal Hugh Faulk appeared overhead, wrestling open the hatch and hollering down to Gee and his crew, “Y’all come on out, and hurry!” Faulk was awash to his ankles in water, its level almost overspilling the top of the hatch. According to Robinson, “I told the boys, ‘We’ve had it.’ There was no panic, nothing.” Someone said, “Well, we might as well go topside.”

Jim Gee climbed up the ladder out of the magazine, took a long drink of surprisingly cold, fresh water from a scuttlebutt that had no business working, and started wading forward through water that got deeper with every step. “We were going to go up and see if there was something that we could do to help someone because a lot of people were in trouble.”

“It looked like high noon on the boat deck,” Bill Weissinger said. He recalled watching a Japanese destroyer off the ship’s starboard beam. “I went through the steam that was pouring out of an engine room vent to the port side of the boat deck. With the bright beams of the searchlight filtering through the cloud of steam, which was drifting aft on a light breeze, the scene that met my eyes had an eerie quality about it. I had a fleeting impression that I was on a strange ship. What I was looking at was unrecognizable to me. Everything was in disarray.” Weissinger removed his shoes, laid them side by side on the deck, and jumped overboard.

Leaving the forward powder magazine and heading topside toward his abandon ship station, Otto Schwarz was knocked unconscious by a great blast. He awoke in a grayed-out landscape of smoke, unsure of where he was. Feeling his way around the bulkhead, unshirted and wearing khaki pants, he found a rifle rack and
realized he was in the Marine compartment. He finally reached the quarterdeck, then ran forward to the forecastle. “When I got there it was just like the Fourth of July,” he said. “The Japanese ships were out there in a semicircle. You could see their searchlights and muzzle flashes and all.” Tracers whipping all around him, he ran to the life jacket locker but found it was on fire. He went farther forward, where other sailors were milling, unsure what to do with an abandon ship order in effect but with the ship still making way at about ten knots, to Schwarz’s eye. He was running back aft when a series of explosions buffeted him, knocking him to the deck. Looking up, he could see the night air filled with debris, metal chunks, and flotsam, burning and falling toward him, a red-hot rain of steel. Out of nowhere a sailor wearing a life jacket jumped on top of Schwarz.

People pass through our lives fleetingly, touch us once, and go. The sailor, a seaman first class named Raleigh Barrett, touched Schwarz’s life meaningfully at that moment. “All of a sudden this guy jumped on top of me, and he had a life jacket on. So he absorbed the shrapnel that was falling down that would have hit me, and I had no clothing on at all, just a pair of marine khaki pants,” Schwarz said. “So he jumps on top of me, then rolls off. I never saw him after that. He didn’t survive.”

By one o’clock in the morning, few if any of the crew remained on deck. Even the men in the forward engine room had managed to get off the ship. But the machine-gunners in the tops lived in a separate world. On the foremast machine-gun platform, Howard Charles had been so intent in guiding the snaking curve of his .50-caliber tracers into the bright searchlight beams snapping on and off around him that he was surprised to find himself contemplating an unexpected silence and a vague, ringing memory of a bugle call below. As he knelt to pull another ammo belt from the metal locker at his feet, he took stock of his surroundings. He was alone on the foremast gun platform with Gunnery Sgt. Walter Standish, the two Marines outnumbered by the three other gun mounts standing abandoned around them.

Charles shielded his eyes as a new Japanese searchlight stabbed the ship. He snapped another belt into place and hammered at it for a bit, then felt a strong hand on his shoulder. “Better go, Charlie. It’s all over. Finished.”

“What about you?” he asked Standish. “You going with me?”

As Charles remembered it, the portly gunny grinned. “I’d never make it,” he said. “Go, now. Swim away before you’re pulled under.”

Charles could see an orange life raft hanging over the nearly awash starboard rail, half in the water. To port, men were leaping straight down into the sea and paddling hard away from the ship and its expected undertow. In the aviation hangars aft of the quarterdeck, fires were everywhere. Acrid smoke wafted upward from Turret Two. Flames were grabbing at the base of the foremast.

When Charles looked up, Commander Maher was there, having come down from the gunnery officer’s booth in the foretop. Maher urged Sergeant Standish down, nodding to the ladder. Charles joined the plea. “Come on, Sarge,” he said. “You and me, we’ll make it.” He saw land beneath the twinkling heavenly fixture of the Southern Cross, which he had taken note of earlier—in another life, it seemed. “It isn’t very far to that island.”

But Standish couldn’t swim. He shook his head and said calmly, “Goodbye, Charlie.”

The ship shuddered again, and with that Howard Charles grabbed the rungs of the ladder and started down the foremast. He wrote:

Choking on his own vomit, he continued, “feeling direction, sensing purpose, body moving as if propelled by someone else.” The hangar fires backlit a slaughterhouse on the quarterdeck. Japanese destroyers and patrol boats were close by on all sides. “Muzzle bursts were blinking under searchlights, and out of the darkness came the red streaks arcing in across the starboard side, ripping into bodies caught on the lifelines,” Charles would write.