Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [14]
In the years preceding war, American diplomats had driven a hard bargain with the Japanese, constraining them with naval arms treaties and holding out the threat of boycott and embargo to compel them to walk the line. Americans watched but did not seem to appreciate the fervor with which Japan was seizing control of the Asian mainland. Weary of war, some believed that messy foreign entanglements could be avoided, saving their suspicions for their own military or for Wall Street financiers and arms traders who they thought had profiteered during the Great War. In June 1940 the U.S. Army’s total enlistment stood at 268,000 men. It was inconvenient to contemplate that during the first six weeks of the Rape of Nanking, nearly half that number of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, as well as some American civilians, had been slaughtered by the Japanese Army.
The naivete of the isolationists concerning Imperial Japan’s ambitions was matched only by the ignorance of the average enlistee concerning its capabilities. Most American servicemen saw the Japanese as too many newspaper cartoonists sketched them: bucktoothed simpletons who would wilt when faced with U.S. Marines and tough sailors in their impregnable ships. But the perking belligerence of the Japanese dispelled any such misguided popular stereotypes among U.S. military planners. They saw the threat. As 1940 wound down, with the Japanese drawing up plans to seize the Dutch East Indies, American military dependents were sent home from the Philippines. Admiral Hart relocated the Asiatic Fleet from Shanghai to Manila in November 1941, allowing Rear Adm. William A. Glassford to stay on as long as he could in Shanghai as head of the Naval Purchasing Office and nominal boss of the Fourth Marines. The American position on the mainland was, according to Kemp Tolley, “about as hopeful as lighting a candle in a typhoon.”
In August 1941, Edith Rooks traveled from Seattle to Honolulu to say farewell to her husband as he prepared to take command of the USS Houston in Manila. Understanding the temperature of the times, Captain Rooks could not restrain himself from a moment of candor. He took stock of the developing crisis over China and told Edith that he would be unlikely to come home from this assignment alive. As his son would explain, “He said the power of the Japanese was far greater than what we could muster, and he did not expect to return.”
The 1914 Naval Academy graduate, having made captain in February, was a star performer and seemed bound for flag rank. His assignment to the Asiatic Fleet flagship was for two years—the minimum length of sea duty to make him eligible for promotion to rear admiral. On August 28, Rooks found the Houston at Cavite Navy Yard in Manila and two days later relieved Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf as her commander. The next day he wrote Edith and reiterated his mixed feelings. “It’s a shame to wish away time at our age, but two years is a long time, and I don’t look forward to it with pleasure.” In 1941 even a keen observer such as Rooks, long a student of geopolitics and now able to observe the Pacific theater firsthand, had trouble teasing out the flow of events. “My opinion of the Jap situation keeps changing. If I understand the press reports coming out of Tokyo, they are making some very grave decisions right now. I think they will finally decide against war with us, but I certainly might be wrong.”
In other writings, Rooks’s pessimism prevailed. His analytical mind told him that whatever her industrial advantages over the long term, America would not long stand up against a determined Japanese offensive in the western Pacific. He appreciated the Japanese Navy’s capabilities. Samuel Eliot Morison would write, “Few Allied