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full of senior petty officers who had a talent for promoting competition between divisions. In the deck force, it was up to men such as boatswain’s mate first class Shelton “Red” Clymer—“a real tough old bird,” said one sailor—to get green recruits ready for war. In the engineering department belowdecks, any number of experienced hands kept the screws turning. Lt. Cdr. Richard H. Gingras and his hard-driving machinists ran the ship’s two steam power plants. “The caliber of the senior petty officers was way above anything that I’d seen in these other ships,” said Lt. Robert B. Fulton, the ship’s assistant engineering officer. “Other ships were struggling to get basic things together. None of them could compare to the caliber of personnel on the Houston.”

In dealing with the Japanese leading up to war, the U.S. Congress had been considerably less surly than the leathernecks of the Fourth Marines. Certainly, Japan had not always been America’s enemy. During World War I the two nations had enjoyed a de facto alliance, Japan fondly remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-Russian posture during the Russo-Japanese War and eager for the chance to relieve Germany of its colonial island holdings in the Central Pacific: the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. Worried about provoking Japan, the U.S. Congress voted in February 1939 against appropriating $5 million to upgrade the Navy’s forward base in Guam. Though in April 1940 Adm. Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, had relocated the United States Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, overseas the Navy would make do with the bases it already possessed.

The imperial Japanese notion of peace was as consistent in application as it was different from the rest of the world’s understanding of the term. Serene dominion over continental and oceanic Asia was the Tokyo militarists’ idea of peace, clearly articulated by Japan but widely misunderstood in the West. “Japan was the only important nation in the world in the twentieth century which combined modern industrial power and a first-class military establishment with religious and social ideas inherited from the primitive ages of mankind, which exalted the military profession and regarded war and conquest as the highest good,” wrote the historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The Japanese Imperial Army, which by 1931 had become the dominant voice in Japanese government, adopted the ancient ambition of Japan’s mythical founder, Emperor Jimmu: the principle of hakku ichiu, “bringing the eight corners of the earth under one roof.”

With Formosa and Korea in hand, spoils of previous wars, Japan cast its ambitious eye on China and its iron- and coal-rich northern provinces. Imperial troops had been there in sizable force since the “Manchuria Incident” in 1931. In a malevolent gambit that seemed to preview the Reichstag fire in 1933 Weimar Germany, the Japanese garrison conspired to bomb the South Manchuria Railway, which it controlled, in order to justify more aggressive moves against its enemy. An escalating cycle of provocation and skirmish ensued. In July of 1937, a year in which Emperor Hirohito’s Japan allocated sixty-nine percent of its budget to the military, the intensifying fighting provoked Japan to launch a full offensive in northern China. Aiming to avoid embargoes mandated by the U.S. Neutrality Acts, Japan called its savage campaign against civilians and city-dwelling foreigners a benevolent occupation. But the strain of China operations soon compelled Japan to look farther afield for oil, timber, rubber, tin, and other materials to wage the war. Playing on the tensions between the Soviet Union and Germany to maximize its freedom of action in Asia, Tokyo turned its covetous eyes southward, to the Dutch East Indies.

Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Timor, and the 17,500 other islands in the scimitar-shaped archipelago held a world of natural wealth. Ten thousand species of birds, fish, flora and fauna were its surface manifestations: exotic deerlike pigs, dwarf buffalo, tree kangaroos, Komodo dragons, one-horned