Ship of Ghosts (28 page)

Bearding and filthy, their injuries untreated, the sailors were “packed together,” Rivett wrote, “like penguins or seals on one of those rocky beaches which the publishers of natural history books love to photograph.” Under strict orders to neither speak nor move, the men pressed bones to concrete for hours on end. Only a few had serious wounds. The swift ocean currents, by killing the weak, had largely prescreened survivors for a minimum level of health. Any number of the severely injured who got off the ship never made it ashore. William Stewart, burned while escaping the shell deck beneath
the inferno of Turret Two, didn’t appear to have very good prospects. Lieutenant Burroughs, the
Houston
’s junior medical officer, figured Stewart wouldn’t last two days. The ragged burns on his back and chest prevented him from lying down, so he had to sit. A
Houston
pharmacist’s mate wrapped the sailor’s charred body in a large swatch of canvas theater curtain, keeping it moist with water cajoled from the Japanese guards and changing and remoistening the dressing with religious regularity each morning after peeling away the dead skin. An Australian doctor saved his left arm by deft application of cod liver oil.

Those with high fevers were sent outside to lie on the bamboo platform that covered the latrine. At night they reclined and slept as sardines in a can, arranged tightly with chests against spines across the full length of the theater. One man’s attempt to roll over required a whole row of his fellows to do the same. Food was available only in starvation rations: bare spoonfuls of nearly raw rice. Native cooks mixed it in a concrete bin with a shovel. The result stuck fast to a plate turned upside down. Sufficient water rations went only to those willing to risk execution by slipping outside near the pit latrine during a rain and drinking what fell through the downspouts from the gutters.

The
Houston
’s officers were taken aside in turns for interrogation by the Japanese secret military police, or Kempeitai, in a private residence in Serang that bustled with the comings and goings of Imperial Army jeeps and motorcycles. The small but resounding professional kindnesses the
Perth
’s men experienced in Tjilatjap were not to be found here. Rank brought no privileges. The interrogators worked them over severely. The Americans could hear the tortured screams of a kid from the Royal Australian Air Force. “We thought we were dead pigeons more than once,” Lieutenant Barrett wrote.

The Japanese had declared the
Houston
sunk so many times that the flesh-and-blood presence of her survivors fresh from battle might well have struck them as a mass apparition. “They just didn’t want to believe we were off the
Houston,
” said Charley Pryor. Lieutenant Hamlin, captured and taken to a Japanese merchant ship, was questioned extensively about American attitudes toward the war and whether or not he thought America could win. The information the Americans received or inferred from the interrogators might have given them confidence that victory could be had. Lt. Tommy Payne was told that seven Japanese warships had been sunk on the night of
February 28, including heavy and light cruisers, destroyers, and a seaplane tender. Like Otto Schwarz, he was pressed to reveal how many battleships had been in the Allied force that night. Ens. Herbert Levitt was told that three Japanese cruisers were sunk, along with nine destroyers, a seaplane tender, two transports, and a hospital ship. The extravagant falsity of these claims was matched by odd reports at Serang, supposedly originating with senior Dutch officials, that the American Pacific Fleet was off Java, bombarding Japanese forces near its principal cities, that Allied troops had landed on Timor, Bali, and Java itself, and that, farther afield, four million American, British, and Canadian soldiers had invaded the Bordeaux region of France. Flirtations with fantasy kept morale up, but the news would get worse before it would get better. On the evening of March 24, the stragglers in the contingent of
Houston
survivors, including ship’s doctor William Epstein, arrived at Serang and were locked up in the town jail. Two days later, word reached them that the first of their captured shipmates had passed away. On March 26, Lieutenant Weiler, who had tried so gallantly to rally the men of his raft despite his own severe wounds, died at the small Dutch hospital in Pandeglang. A Japanese army officer pocketed his Naval Academy ring as a souvenir.

A
t first, they put great hopes in the idea that friendlies were just around the next coconut palm. “For the first four or five days at Serang,” Lanson Harris said, “we were very up. We thought any minute now the Marines were going to come crashing through the door and rescue us. I didn’t know where the Marines were going to come from. All I knew is that Marines were pretty good at this kind of stuff.” Others were less sure, although the confidence certainly was contagious.

Months before, the Marines had turned in a performance in defense of Wake Island that was as inspirational to home morale as the
Houston
’s exploits might have been had full details reached the mainland. But those Marines were Japanese prisoners now. Their brothers in the Corps were still several months away from settling on Guadalcanal as their first major objective. It took only a few weeks for the mood to darken. “We began to mellow out and to think,
Boy, we’re a thousand miles from home and nobody’s going to come get us out,
” Harris said.

Their world contracted around the here and now. Food was the top priority in that world, and the Japanese did little to satisfy it. “We were hungry to the point of it being actual torture,” said Charley Pryor, held at the Serang jail. They learned that the feeling of extreme hunger was both mental and physical, a transition phase from relative abundance to a crisis of want. They would grow accustomed to far worse. The sign of trouble would be when their hunger pangs disappeared altogether.

“After about two weeks, things began to get very uptight,” Lanson Harris said. “We began to hear a lot of stupid arguments. There were a lot of fights. I remember a fellow named Blackie Strickland who was arguing with another fellow over how many pancakes he could eat.
I can eat twenty-six pancakes. You’re a damn liar! You can’t eat twenty-six pancakes.
Next thing you know they’re down on the deck punching holes in each other.”

Six weeks in Serang were a short education in the utility of discipline, leadership, and unit integrity. The Japanese, apparently seeing the risks inherent in those same things, undertook to erode them. The first week of April, they ordered most of the
Houston
’s officers to board trucks. Eight of them—Al Maher, William Galbraith, Joseph Dalton, Bob Fulton, Frank Gallagher, Harlan Kirkpatrick, Tommy Payne, and Walter Winslow—were taken from the camp to the docks of Tanjung Priok and put on a prison ship destined for Japan. Three line officers stayed behind, Lt. Russell R. Ross, buckled with dysentery, Lieutenant Hamlin, and Ensign Smith, as well as the two ship’s doctors, Cdr. William Epstein and Lt. Clement Burroughs. The departing officers would arrive at Shimonoseki, Japan, on May 4, beginning a journey entirely distinct from the one that would engulf the men left behind on Java.

The scattering of the
Houston
’s men to the far corners of Asia achieved something that the Japanese never quite could with guns and torpedoes. Tokyo Rose wouldn’t be crowing about it, but the dispersal of the survivors ensured that one of the fleet’s best-drilled fighting crews, the officers and bluejackets who had given life to a presidential flagship, ceased finally to exist. They would forge their identities afresh in the crucible of captivity.

O
n February 28, 1942, the Navy Department had issued to the press Communiqué No. 48, making vague reference to a “major action” fought by an Allied fleet against a much larger Japanese force trying to land troops on Java. “From fragmentary reports received in the Navy Department,” it read, “American naval forces participating in this action consisted of one heavy cruiser and five destroyers.” Two weeks later, on March 14, the Navy put out Communiqué No. 54, recounting in more detail the great battle the
Houston
had fought on February 27. The report stated she had survived this encounter and, having refueled, continued west on February 28 in the company of an Australian cruiser. That night the Allied ships met the enemy again, entering battle at about 11:30
p.m
. “Nothing, however, has been heard from the HMAS
Perth
or the USS
Houston
since that time,” the communiqué read. “The next of kin of the USS
Houston
are being informed accordingly.”

Communiqué No. 54 became the basis for an Associated Press report that led the front page of the March 15, 1942,
Los Angeles Examiner
. Jane Harris, who lived in Los Angeles, saw it. The eighty-point sans-serif headline declared, “12 Allied Warships Lost in Java Battle—U.S. Cruiser
Houston,
Destroyer
Pope
Among Japanese Victims—13th Vessel Beached; 8 Nipponese Craft Sunk in Fight.”
But since the piece didn’t mention her husband, as far as Jane Harris cared, it might as well not have run.

The ambiguity grew worse five days later. On March 20, the Navy delivered a telegram to 16011⁄2 North Broadway Street in Santa Ana, regretting to inform Lanson Harris’s parents of their son’s MIA status. “Santa Ana Flyer Listed as Missing,” announced the hometown paper. Newspapers around the country reported the various local reverberations of the Navy’s communiqués and casualty lists. “Kin of Missing Sad but Proud, Some Hopeful,” reported the
New York Herald Tribune.
In April, a wire report detailed the exploits of
Houston
crewmen who fought an inferno ignited by an aerial bomb that hit the cruiser’s after gun turret. That was the last certain knowledge to be had of their worldly acts. “Heroes of Cruiser Fire Now Missing,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported on April 15.

A United Press dispatch published in some U.S. papers on April 24 opened the possibility of hope. It reported a Japanese propaganda announcement that gloatingly claimed that the
Houston
’s gunnery officer, Cdr. Arthur Maher, was in captivity in “the southern regions.” According to the Domei News Agency, which broadcast the dispatch, Maher had told his interrogators that only a few of the
Houston
’s complement had been rescued after “the Battle of Java.”

The potential enormousness of the ship’s loss was itemized on May 14, when the Navy published “Casualty List No. 3,” naming the 2,495 officers and enlisted men missing in action from the Pearl Harbor attack through the middle of April, as well as 2,995 more killed in action during that period. The entire crew of the
Houston
appeared on the MIA list. What fate had befallen any one of them was unknown.

People received news in approximate proportion to their mental and emotional wherewithal to collate scattered and fragmentary dispatches. They had to read the right newspaper at the right time, or have friends or family in other cities to keep track of out-of-town sources. For some people, the uncertain grief of a missing loved one eroded the concentration needed to scan and absorb relevant information from the stream of world developments, just as it intensified the need to do so. With four theaters of war in full furious swing—a struggle that Franklin D. Roosevelt had described in a fireside chat as “a new kind of war…different from all other wars of the past. Not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography”—it was easy to miss the smallest report that could unlock a mystery.

T
he telegram from the Postal Telegraph Co. reached 705 McGilvra Boulevard in Seattle on March 4, about ten days before she would learn that anything had happened to her husband’s ship. The local receiving station had date-stamped it 12:44
p.m
. Though it was printed with any number of alphanumeric codes, the space reserved for the point of origin simply said, “Sans Origine.” But its message seemed to establish an essential fact that Edith Rooks would cling to in the difficult months ahead. It was simply this: “Everybody well. Love, Harold Rooks.”