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By Root 1543 0

in 1933 and hustled his skinny frame to the San Diego Naval Training Center mostly in order to eat. And because the Depression destroyed families as well as livelihoods, more than a few Houston sailors had enlisted to escape broken homes. Howard R. Charles, a Houston Marine private, put himself in the path of a world war by escaping the wildfires of another: an escalating violent struggle with his stepfather back home in Hutchinson, Kansas. Melfred L. “Gus” Forsman, a seaman first class, didn’t need a push. He left Iowa in April 1939 to become a Houston sailor, dreaming of seeing faraway lands. But as he soon learned, anyone aspiring to a life of adventurous globetrotting found he had been sold a bill of goods. Fuel was expensive, and ships were kept in port as often as possible. Most enlisted men found their ambitions checked by a system of class that generally reserved the prestige of an officer’s commission for the white, the Episcopal, and the wealthy. The accoutrements of the good life found in officers’ country—silver service worthy of Hyde Park, a Steinway baby grand in the wardroom, all gifts of the citizens of Houston—were as much the ornaments of expectation as of accomplishment.

Several members of the Houston’s Marine detachment were veterans of the illustrious Fourth Marine Regiment, the unit that helped defend Shanghai’s International Settlement from the brushfires of combat between Japanese and Chinese forces. According to a veteran of Asia Station, Rear Adm. Kemp Tolley, the Fourth Marines were “the seaward anchor of the Yangtze Patrol during the period which might be called the Patrol’s heyday: 1927 to its flaming end on Corregidor.” One of its battalion commanders, the colorful Maj. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, had served in the Augusta’s Marine detachment under Captain Nimitz. The Houston’s Sgt. Charley L. Pryor Jr. had gotten his first stripe from Puller himself during his tour on the Augusta. In 1940, liberty in Tsingtao was an adventure unto itself. “Marines were never slow in tangling with men of the various other foreign detachments,” Tolley would write. “A very satisfactory state of belligerency could be established by a leading question or a facetious remark concerning a Seaforth Highlander’s kilt.”

Brawling frolics with soldiers of friendly nations were one thing. The Japanese were another. Charley Pryor had seen them training for war, witnessed their exercises, saw squads and company-sized units drilling in the hills and on the beaches in and around Shanghai. He wrote his parents in Littlefield, Texas, of brawls between Marines and militant Japanese nationals. “Everyone hates the Japs and though we are all told to take anything they say or do to us, it just won’t be done. I will try to kill the Japanese who so much as lays a hand on me. I am just like everyone else so I know the rest will do the same thing.”

As Hitler’s armies tore through Europe and Russia, the International Settlement became electric with energy, swelling with Jewish refugees from Austria. They brought some of Vienna with them, erecting bistros and wienerschnitzel stands alongside the tea and silk shops. String combos played on the streets. But by December 1940, as many people were fleeing the Settlement as arriving there. Distress was in the air. A Time correspondent wrote:

The first sting of winter hung over a dying city. Its tide of fleeing foreigners has reached flood last month with the evacuation of U.S. citizens; its foreign colony has shrunk to a scattering of bitter enders…. The roulette tables at Joe Farren’s, the Park Hotel’s Sky Terrace, Sir Ellis Victor Sassoon’s Tower Night Club has none of their old sparkle. Industrial Shanghai is sinking fast.

The Marines’ experience in China was excellent preparation for what the Houston’s officers had in store for them. For thirteen months leading to the outbreak of war, Cdr. Arthur L. Maher, the gunnery officer, had run a training program rooted in the idea that competition through intersquad rivalry was the key to high performance. The 1,168-man wartime complement was