Ship of Ghosts (7 page)

Word was relayed to the other ships of Task Force Five, awaiting
orders in Kupang Bay in eastern Timor. With the
Houston
busy far to the east, escorting a convoy from Torres Strait back to Surabaya, Admiral Glassford had at his disposal the
Boise
and the
Marblehead
and the destroyers
John D. Ford, Pope, Parrott,
and
Paul Jones
. He was excited about the approach of a Japanese surface force in a place where his ships might finally be able to do something about it. What followed was the U.S. Navy’s first offensive operation of World War II and its first major surface action since the Spanish-American War. And the Asiatic Fleet’s largest ships would miss out on it.

On the morning of January 23, Glassford’s flotilla set out to strike at the Japanese landings at Balikpapan. The
Boise,
Glassford’s flagship, hit an uncharted pinnacle rock, tearing a long gash near her keel and forcing her to Tjilatjap for repairs. No sooner had Glassford transferred his flag to the
Marblehead
than trouble struck that ship too. Mechanical problems with a turbine limited her to a speed of fifteen knots. The
John D. Ford, Pope, Parrott,
and
Paul Jones
sortied alone to ambush the Japanese landing force off Balikpapan that night.

Approaching the big Dutch oil center near midnight, Commodore Paul Talbot, in the
John D. Ford
, discerned a dozen transports anchored in rows outside the harbor, neatly silhouetted against the fires consuming Balikpapan’s refining and storage facilities, set ablaze by the Dutch in retreat. The destroyers accelerated to twenty-seven knots.

The Japanese
marus
never saw them coming. On the first run, the
Parrott
sent three torpedoes bubbling toward a row of transports anchored about five miles outside the harbor entrance. The other American ships followed suit, and as Talbot reversed course back to the south, explosions began to rend the night. The 3,500-ton transport
Sumanoura Maru
threw a tower of flame five hundred feet high. Rear Adm. Shoji Nishimura, in the light cruiser
Naka,
took his ships away from the action in search of his presumed assailant, a U.S. submarine. But his impulsiveness left Talbot’s squadron alone with its quarry. Another transport, the
Tatsukami Maru,
erupted and sank, as did an old destroyer. The
Kuretake Maru
actually got up steam, not unlike the
Nevada
at Pearl Harbor. But the
Paul Jones
got her, putting a torpedo into the five-thousand-tonner’s starboard bow and leaving her sinking, stern high out of the water. A last torpedo,
from the
John D. Ford
, damaged still another transport. Their lethal work done, Talbot’s ships joined up and headed for Surabaya as Nishimura’s destroyers chased phantoms.

Given the totality of the surprise, their success in the Battle of Balikpapan was only middling: four of twelve transports sunk and one torpedo boat. The Japanese seized the valuable oil port anyway. But in the context of disastrous circumstances, the attack was a lift to the spirits.

Admiral Hart never got word from Washington about when, if ever, more combat ships would arrive to help him against the onrushing enemy. Nor was he told when the main Pacific Fleet would finally go on the attack and relieve the pressure he was facing from the Japanese. Though Vice Adm. William F. Halsey’s aircraft carriers struck the Marshall and Gilbert Islands on February 1, the Japanese were making bolder strides to seize control of the western Pacific.

Life would have been easier for Hart if the Japanese military were his only foe. Internecine squabbles hampered him—but more threatening still were the daggers being sharpened in private. Field Marshal Wavell was of mixed mind regarding Hart’s suitability for command. He complained to Winston Churchill via telegram that the fall of Manila had given the American “exaggerated ideas of Japanese efficiency.” Wavell described Hart as “a quiet attractive character and seems shrewd. But he is old and openly says so and gives me the impression of looking over his shoulder rather too much.” Hart was conscious that “almost no one had ever been retained in a sea-going command beyond the age of 64.” There was, he wrote, “a movement toward youth in all sea commands.” Tall, thin, and white-haired, the sixty-four-year-old habitually joked about being an “old man.” This might have been a gambit to build collegiality through self-effacement, but it only eroded the Allies’ confidence in him. Tommy Hart was, in his own words, “a worrier who never could sit back and coast until whatever was in hand was tied down and double-rivetted.” He would compose a diary of three thousand pages, the handwriting decaying into a shaky, arthritic scrawl by the end.

Hart was caught in a political crossfire from both east and west.
At home, as the U.S. Army and Navy maneuvered to assign blame for the Pearl Harbor debacle, General MacArthur was trying to saddle him with the loss of the Philippines. Hart had to contend, too, with the Dutch admiralty’s bitterness over their exclusion from ABDA leadership. Admiral Helfrich was not only commander in chief of the Royal Dutch East Indies Navy but minister of marine in the Dutch government. His civilian authority underscored the awkward fact that Hart superseded him in the military hierarchy. Helfrich’s counterpart, General ter Poorten of the Dutch Army, was a co-equal of Hart’s. For Helfrich to stand beneath his peer seemed hard for him to take. He ribbed Hart about the inefficacy of U.S. submarines in the theater. The American suspected Helfrich might have withheld information from him, and even lied about the readiness of Dutch warships for counterattacks against the Japanese.

Hart sympathized with the Dutch and took pains to suggest to Helfrich that he had accepted the ABDAfloat post only reluctantly and had not lobbied for it. “I did not like to be commanding Admiral Helfrich on his own home ground,” he later wrote. As a sop to Dutch national pride he delegated to Helfrich the task of dealing directly with Rear Adm. Doorman, the commander of the Dutch surface combatants in ABDA, whom Hart would later put in command of a reconstituted Combined Striking Force.

Restrained and decorous in public, Hart never criticized the Allies in the press. In private, though, he was candid, even blunt, incapable of endorsing sunny pretenses about the military situation as he saw it. He could be intimidating to underlings. An Asiatic Fleet destroyer captain remarked, “I was scared of the old devil. It was a well known fact that he could shrivel an individual to a cinder with but a single glance of those gimlet like eyes.” When it came to jousting with foreign contemporaries, however, he appears to have been something of a pushover. Hart’s candor would be his own worst enemy. As disarming as he must have hoped his references to his age might be, it only gave Helfrich leverage in his back-channel effort to undermine him. If Hart’s combat instincts and the readiness of his ships would determine his fortunes in theater, his political survival would hinge on battles fought in Washington, a continent away.

Word of the “strategic withdrawal” of British troops down the
Malay Peninsula arrived on January 31. The erosion of their position defied the royal imagination. Yet there the Japanese were, somehow vaulting the length of the jungle-sotted peninsula, on the verge of seizing “the Gibraltar of the East,” Singapore, Britannia’s most important naval base east of Ceylon. The quick collapse highlighted the futility of the British preference for convoying troops, and the grand waste of using all available Royal Navy and Dutch surface ships to escort convoy after convoy of troops bound for precipitous surrender.

Admiral Hart’s position within ABDA was nearly as tenuous as that of the British stronghold. On February 5 he received a telegram from Adm. Ernest J. King, the commander in chief of the United States Fleet, informing him that an “awkward situation” had arisen in Washington. Wavell, thinking that Hart’s pessimism was sapping the vigor of the naval campaign, urged Churchill to find a “younger more energetic man” for the job. Churchill in turn cultivated Franklin Roosevelt’s doubts, already seeded by General MacArthur. As a result, when King contacted Hart it was to suggest that Hart request detachment for health reasons and yield his command to Admiral Helfrich. Anguished that he might depart under a pall, Hart complied, and the Dutchman was promptly named his successor. Hart confided to his diary on February 5, “It’s all on the laps of the gods.” Two days later, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet was officially dissolved and renamed U.S. Naval Forces, Southwest Pacific, nominally under Admiral Glassford. The American flotilla took its place as a component of the Combined Striking Force, under the overall command of Helfrich, who in turn delegated its tactical control to Rear Admiral Doorman.

Doorman was aggressive, but even the boldest deployment of cruisers faced dim prospects under enemy-controlled skies. The Combined Striking Force’s February 3 sortie, abandoned after the
Houston
took that terrible bomb hit on Turret Three, revealed the difficulties that even the most powerful surface squadron would have in a theater dominated by enemy planes. As his damaged ship docked at Tjilatjap in the first week of February, Captain Rooks might well have seen the evolving Allied predicament as similar to Spain’s doomed attempt in 1898 to hold Cuba and Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War as an American invasion loomed. He had studied it at the War College. The commander of Spain’s
Caribbean Squadron, Adm. Pasqual Cervera, had seen the futility of defending “an island which was ours, but belongs to us no more, because even if we should not lose it by right in the war we have lost it in fact, and with it all our wealth and an enormous number of young men, victims of the climate and bullets, in the defense of what is now no more than a romantic ideal.”

R
omantic ideals dissolved quickly in the Pacific war’s early days. As the last Allied base in the Sunda chain beyond the reach of Japanese bombers, located in the center part of the island’s south coast, away from the pincers of Japanese airpower encroaching from east and west, Tjilatjap had drawn a multinational crowd of ships, naval and merchant alike, seeking to elude the onslaught. It was clear that nothing could be done for the grievous wound to the
Houston
’s after turret. Although support ships were on hand to service destroyers and submarines short on ordnance, stores, and parts, the
Houston
’s after turret was a permanent ruin, its internal circuitry burned out, breechblocks and firing locks frozen into place. The crew used a dockside crane to hoist the turret assembly back onto its roller bearings. Shipfitters patched the roof of the gun house with a big steel plate, draped a canvas shield over the turret’s side, and trained it aft, creating the appearance of combat readiness. Two fractured longitudinal support beams under the main deck were replaced with rails from the train yard near the docks. The
Houston
’s forward antiaircraft director was jury-rigged back into service, and stocks of antiquated five-inch projectiles were replaced with five hundred live rounds taken from the
Boise
. The most modern ship in the theater, the
Boise
had been forced to Ceylon after running
aground off Timor. Her last contribution was leaving her valuable ordnance behind.

The most important service was rendered to the
Houston
’s deceased. The crew stood at attention in their dress whites as the dead followed the wounded ashore. As they were loaded onto Dutch Army flatbed trucks, the ship’s band performed Chopin’s funeral dirge. The solemn procession marked the turning of a page. Among the men killed in the inferno in Turret Three was warrant officer Joseph A. Bienert, a boatswain, whose last act before the bomb struck was to order one of his electricians forward to check the circuitry on a malfunctioning five-inch projectile hoist. The order spared Howard Brooks his life. The electrician’s mate returned aft to find Bienert sitting there with his insides blown out. “Oh, don’t bother with me,” Bienert said. “Go help someone that you can help. Don’t bother with me.” Bienert was the only man among the
Houston
’s fifty-four officers and warrants who had been on board for President Roosevelt’s memorable cruise in 1938, when the band was playing a very different tune.

As the funeral procession motored off along Tjilatjap’s dusty streets to the beachside cemetery, an uneasy feeling became palpable among the newly war-wise sailors. Crossing-the-line initiations, tropical fishing expeditions, and the ceremonial frivolities of peacetime life seemed a world away. “Suddenly,” Lt. (jg) Walter Winslow wrote, “I had the weird impression that we were all standing on the brink of a yawning grave.”

The ship’s twenty wounded, along with about fifty more from the
Marblehead,
were put on a Dutch train for transport to Petronella Hospital in the town of Jogjakarta. Meanwhile, work parties, having used up the supply of lumber in the holds, gathered more of it ashore and returned to the ship to continue making coffins, forty-six for their own dead and thirteen more for the
Marblehead
’s. All available hands kept busy hewing the rough native mahogany until they could no longer stay awake. For the second time in as many days, exhausted crewmen collapsed to the lullaby of saw on wood and hammer on nail, which didn’t trail off until about two
a.m
. “A weird silence enveloped the ship, broken only by the slow tread of sentries making their rounds,” recalled Walter Winslow.