Ship of Ghosts (3 page)

With the
Houston
’s main battery hobbled and the
Marblehead
damaged, Admiral Doorman aborted the mission, ordering the wounded cruisers to Tjilatjap for repair. As evening fell, Captain Rooks steered his bruised ship toward safety, out of the Flores Sea through Alas Strait, then west into the easternmost littorals of the Indian Ocean. Steaming in the shadows of the holy peaks of Lombok and Bali, the
Houston
’s crew gathered their dead shipmates on the fantail. The
Houston
’s two medical officers, Cdr. William A. Epstein and Lt. Clement D. Burroughs, exhausted themselves patching up the wounded and easing the worst of them into death. “I’m convinced they were never the same again,” wrote Marine 2nd Lt. Miles Barrett. “For weeks their nerves were completely shattered.” An ensign named John B. Nelson had the chore of identifying the charred corpses as they lay in makeshift state. Nelson’s eyes filled with tears as he studied the remains, identifying some and guessing at others. Then they were covered with a canvas tarpaulin to await burial. A carpenter’s mate oversaw the crew detailed to assemble caskets from scrap lumber. Their hammers tapped and tapped, marking time through the night. “War came to us in a real way. It knocked all the cockiness out of us,” said Sgt. Charley L. Pryor Jr. of the ship’s Marine detachment. “We saw what war could be in its real fury, just in those brief few moments.”

A ceremonial watch was set in honor of the dead. Seaman first class John Bartz, a stout Minnesotan from the Second Division, held his rifle at attention on the midwatch, fidgeting in the starlit darkness.
What unsettled him was not so much the corpses but their unexpected movements at sudden intervals: arms and legs twitching, rising and reaching in death’s stiffening grip.

“I’m telling you, it was spooky,” Bartz said. “It was really scary when you’re standing there, a young kid about eighteen years old. I was glad to see my relief at four.”

T
he horrors of the bomb blast challenged the mettle of a crew that had developed its esprit from altogether different experiences. By 1942, only a few of them had been on board long enough to remember the ship’s heyday in the thirties, when a president was proud to call himself their shipmate. Most of those who had sailed on those unforgettable voyages had left the ship. Yet the high spirits lived in the older sailors’ memories. It was a sort of living dream, a skein of folk history that wove itself into the banter in the mess halls and set the
Houston
’s men apart from the other seadogs in the fleet. The five-year reign the ship enjoyed as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite ride would survive the worst onslaughts of the Japanese.

Four times in the 1930s FDR had joined the
Houston
on long interoceanic trips. Whether it was because she had been launched in September 1929, right before the stock-market crash that brought on the Depression, and thus stood as a sort of shining symbol of the nation in its heyday, or whether it was an accident of circumstance, no one quite knew. Most of them seemed willing to accept it as the natural by-product of their shipshape tradition of discipline. “The spit and polish of the U.S. Navy was ingrained in us,” one sailor wrote, “and up to the moment he arrived on board we worked every minute to have the ship in readiness. Not a speck of dust, or
corrosion on bright work, paint work, and our white teakwood decks shone with a snowy whiteness that came from many hours of scrubbing and holystoning. The ship was in perfect order.” The wheelchair-bound commander in chief appreciated the custom-engineered conveniences the shipfitters and metalsmiths installed whenever he came aboard. Ladders were replaced with electric lifts, handrails bolted along bulkheads, and ramps laid here and there to enable him to explore her decks and compartments.

“Bring the boat around,” Roosevelt would tell the brass at the Navy Department whenever the urge or the opportunity beckoned. In 1934, he rode on board the
Houston
from Annapolis to Portland, Oregon, by way of the Panama Canal and Honolulu. In October 1935, he went from San Diego to Charleston following much the same southern route.

On the morning of July 14, 1938, as the ship was approaching San Francisco, the rumor circulated that the president was readying himself to join them once again. As the
Houston
eased into the harbor, some sharp-eyed sailors on deck could see the dockworkers breaking out the telltale fittings that heralded the arrival of a special visitor. FDR drew a rousing crowd at the new San Francisco–

Oakland Bay Bridge. Shortly after the
Houston
tied up to a pier, another crowd began to form. At 2:30
p.m
., the ship’s loudspeaker announced, “All hands shift into the uniform of the day: officers, full dress blue; crew, dress blue. Affirm.” Less than an hour later the crew was manning the rail, the honor guard and band assembled on the quarterdeck, the quartermaster standing ready to break the presidential flag at the mainmast.

When the crowd began cheering, a sailor named Red Reynolds spotted the presidential limousine. He was surprised to see that FDR’s wheelchair was already on board the ship. It sat empty on the quarterdeck, at the end of a forty-foot-long ramp, a steep “brow,” reaching down to the dock. The limousine pulled up on the pier and stopped at the brow’s base.

“I was wondering,
What now
?” Reynolds wrote. “The President is paralyzed. His legs were shriveled. No larger than my arms. How will he come aboard? Then, to my amazement, I watched him lean from the back seat, reach out, grab the brow rails with both hands, and, hurtling through the air, draw himself to an upright position. Then hand over hand, he slowly progressed up the brow, his feet dangling inches above the deck of the brow. Stopping occasionally,
smiling and nodding to the crowd. Saying a few words to the crowd and leading off with his old familiar words, ‘My friends.’ As he reached the top of the brow, he reached out, grasping the arms of his wheel chair, swinging his body into the air. Raising his right hand to a smart sailors’ salute to ‘Old Glory,’ as she waved back from her station on the main deck aft. As he dropped the salute all honors were rendered and his first words were, ‘It’s good to be back home again, Captain.’ The feelings of the crew were perhaps best expressed by all shouting, ‘What a shipmate!’”

Further out in the harbor, the battleships and heavy cruisers of the United States Fleet awaited their commander in chief’s review. They were lined up in four rows, “so evenly spaced that a giant ruler might have been laid among them, touching each,” observed Reynolds. It was said to be the largest concentration of U.S. naval power assembled to date. At 3:45, the
Houston
backed away from Oakland Pier. Roosevelt parked himself on the communications deck to take in the spectacle.

Steaming beneath the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and turning west, the
Houston
stood out of San Francisco Harbor, making ten knots. As she came abreast of the fleet flagship, the
Pennsylvania,
the battleship let loose a full broadside in salute. The roar had scarcely faded when the
Houston
passed by the
Idaho
. She issued a salute with a blast from her own battery. The fleet review progressed in a stately, thunderous rhythm, the baton of the ceremonial cannonade passing from one battleship to the next as the
Houston
slid past, the band on her quarterdeck playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” crews on all ships lining the rails, officers resplendent in full parade dress, epaulets, braid, and buttons shining gold against deep blue in the afternoon sun. When the last battleship had discharged its honors, the heavy cruisers of the Scouting Force picked up the powder-charged tribute. When the majestic show ended, the
Houston
set course for San Diego.

On arrival there, the president left the ship on some matter of business, then returned to make yet another grand entrance, thrilling the crowds on Kettner Boulevard. This time Eleanor Roosevelt was on hand, sitting dockside on one of the bollards around which the mooring lines were slung. Bantering with sailors through open portholes on the cruiser’s second deck, she told the crew to take good care of Franklin. She said, “Don’t let him get too tired, don’t let him catch cold, don’t let him smoke too much.”
At 5:15
p.m
., the
Houston
backed from the pier in San Diego and got under way again. Surrounded by pleasure craft, she stood out of the harbor, passing Fort Rosecrans, and set course for the far side of the continent, Pensacola by way of Panama.

In the twenty-four days that ensued, the president would for the third time win his stripes as a friend of the
Houston
and a fisherman worthy of the tallest tales. When he fished, he shunned the sleek, custom-built forty-foot cabin boat, perched on deck with its black hull trimmed with gold plating and a gold presidential seal affixed on each side of the bow. He preferred the cruiser’s regular motor launch. And instead of venturing out accompanied by the chief boatswain’s mate, the motor machinists, and a select cadre of officers, FDR asked—insisted, in fact—that a twenty-year-old coxswain named Russell be his personal guide. He liked the kid. Hailing from coastal Maine, Russell had fishing in his blood. That was good enough for Roosevelt. As soon as the carpenter’s mates had removed the special chair from the presidential cabin boat and bolted it to the deck of the launch, the aviation crane hoisted out the small craft and Coxswain Russell and his crew of enlisted kids went fishing with the leader of the free world.

Yellowtails and sea bass, groupers, big jacks and small sharks—they hit ravenously and often. The president, flush with jokes and stories, had the boat party rolling with laughter. Returning to the ship one evening, he told Russell to take the boat out again and angle alone for a change. Spotting his coxswain pulling away in the launch without orders, Capt. George Nathan Barker ordered him sharply to come back alongside. Whereupon, Red Reynolds recalled, “the President turned and told the Captain to simmer down, that he had told Russell to fish some if he liked. That was one of a number of times the Captain had to tuck his tail and back-water. Barker was captain of the ship, but Roosevelt was the Supreme Commander.”

FDR had a knack for remembering names and faces from previous times on board. When the baker, Donahue, offered him a doughnut, the president said, “Get Kielty to give us some coffee.” He went up to another sailor he recognized, a gunner’s mate named Wicker, and said, “I thought you told me in ’34 you were getting out of the Navy. What did you do, ship over?” Wicker replied, “Well, sir, I was going out, but I figured you’d make another cruise on
Houston,
so I shipped over for another four years so I could be with you again.”
Roosevelt smacked him on the hip and said, “Don’t give me any of that blarney. You’re a career man.”

Barker ran a tight ship, but the buoyant presence of the president encouraged him to let up. One day the boatswain’s pipe shrilled and routine inspections were called. There followed a pause and then another rising whistle. “Belay that last word,” came the announcement. “Repeat, belay that last word. There will be no field day; there will be no inspection…. By the word of the President all of us are on a three-week vacation.”

Whatever virtue lay in the idea of recreation lasted roughly until the
Houston
had crossed the equator, on its ninth day out of San Diego, July 25. The enlisted men at that point discovered their commander in chief’s well-developed fondness for membership in exclusive clubs. It was on boisterous display during the traditional crossing-the-line ceremony, the gaudily theatrical hazing ritual inflicted upon sailors who have not sailed across the equator before by those who have. The pollywogs learned to their dismay that FDR had crossed the line eighteen times already. As “senior shellback,” the president reveled in the festivities. Though his entourage of aides and Secret Service agents declined to participate in the silliness, their demurral did not withstand the power of high-pressure saltwater hoses and some time to reflect while bound to stanchions, baking dry in the sun.

Roosevelt gave up a day of fishing to wheel around topside, relaying orders from King Neptune and taunting pollywogs with tales of the ocean deity’s vengeance. The details of what happened next are privileged, as proceedings of the ceremony tend to be. The following noon, as lunch was being served to as many new shellbacks as could rouse themselves from their bunks, the ship entered the volcano-flanked anchorage at Tagus Cove in the Galápagos Islands and the boats were hoisted out for another presidential fishing charter. Roosevelt seemed to think an important rite of passage had been completed. That evening, returning to the ship with catches in hand, he was overheard telling his mates, “Today you became men.”

That the president loved the ship was not altogether surprising, for warships have a way of seizing the hearts of those who come to know them. The
Houston
was like that. Her captains tended to be bighearted and popular disciplinarians whose personalities helped animate her sleek, powerful lines. That she was neither stout enough to stand and slug with her foreign peers nor modern enough to track
them with radar and destroy them from afar was immaterial to the mythology that grew up around her. After Roosevelt’s 1938 tour, the
Houston
was designated as the flagship of the United States Fleet. She had that distinction fleetingly, from September to December. But she would ever after be known as FDR’s cruiser, and that legacy would stay with the
Houston
through the ordeal ahead, when the ship and the president who loved her were oceans apart and fighting their own wars.

As the damaged cruiser raced for port on the night of February 4, 1942, the Pacific war in full vicious swing, memories of antebellum pomp and circumstance lay in shrouds. The story of its crew’s struggle would unfold far beyond the reach of the president, far from the Pacific Fleet, battered and smoldering in Pearl Harbor. They were forgotten, if not by their loved ones then certainly by a public outraged by losses much closer to home, and discarded by war planners who had no choice but to leave them to fight a holding action of indefinite length while their nation retrenched for a struggle whose theater of first priority was on the other side of the world. There were, for now, no more planes to send them, no more ships to reinforce them. Franklin D. Roosevelt was busy with a war plan that would leave his favorite warship fending for herself against increasingly doubtful odds.