Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [10]
“No detail, however small, was overlooked by naval architects, engineers and scientists in making this cruiser the supreme combination of all that is superb and efficient in fighting ships,” William Bernrieder would tell Houston’s KPRC radio audience. The crew slept not on hammocks but on actual berths with springs and mattresses. There were mailboxes throughout the ship, a large recreation hall with modern writing desks and reading lamps, footlockers instead of musty old seabags for personal storage, and hot and cold running water—not just for officers but for the crew as well.
Commissioned in the summer of 1930 and reclassified from light cruiser to heavy cruiser a year later, the Houston acquired her lifelong identification with the fabled U.S. Asiatic Fleet from the beginning. The ship was the Asiatic Fleet’s flagship until 1933. By the time she returned in that capacity in November 1940 under Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf, relieving the Augusta, tensions with Japan were escalating dangerously.
The Asiatic Fleet was, in effect, the frontier detachment of the turn-of-the-century Navy. In the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, its ships toured Asia’s imperial wilderness, showing the U.S. flag. Though it was always led by a single heavy cruiser or battleship that served as its flagship, the fleet’s signature vessel was the gunboat, 450-tonners that ranged inland—as far as thirteen hundred miles up the Yangtze River—to safeguard U.S. interests in China. One officer who commanded a Yangtze gunboat called them “seagoing fire departments.” By virtue of its exotic station, basing its ships wherever the seasons or the tremors of faltering European empires required—Shanghai, Tsingtao, Manila—the fleet enjoyed a cachet among sailors that always outweighed its meager physical assets. Free from stateside hierarchies and rigmarole, Asiatic Fleet sailors acquired a signal swagger and style. Admiral Hart held a high opinion of them. “Like their officers, the men were regulars and were of longer average service and experience than the rest of the Navy…. No man ever commanded a better lot.” In 1905, a midshipman named Chester Nimitz had served his first sea duty with the fleet, on board the twelve-thousand-ton battleship Ohio. Thirty years later he was back, commanding the fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Augusta.
Few American military men have served their nation as isolated and far removed from support as the men on “Asia Station.” On the world maps that schoolchildren studied—Mercator projections that invariably centered on the North American continent and whose edges cleaved the world vertically at 110 degrees east longitude—they patrolled the extreme edges of the planet. It was not possible to be farther from home. In such an exotic setting, even the most worldly American boy would have been an innocent, but the Houston’s crew were provincials by most any measure. Decades before, as the Navy was pushing to build a modern battle fleet—an ambition that got a boost with the victory over Spain in 1898—the commandant of the Newport Naval Training Station declared, “We want the brawn of Montana, the fire of the South and the daring of the Pacific slope.” As a Navy Department official wrote in 1919, “The boy from the farm is considered by the naval recruiting service to be the most desirable material.” At a time when judges were still sentencing criminals to rehabilitation by service in the fleet, the Navy would take whatever able-bodied, hardy-souled young men it could find. The arrangement was useful for all concerned. In the Depression and immediately afterward, new recruits joined not to redeem the free world but to save their hardscrabble selves. In a ship such as the Houston, the children of the “hungry thirties” entered a self-contained meritocracy in which they might find a way to thrive.
Smart discipline could mold the hardest cases into sailors. Pfc. John H. Wisecup