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By Root 1594 0

named Fred G. Hodge, the brother of the Houston’s communications officer, Lt. Ernest D. Hodge, invested years in tracing not only the fate of his brother, but the rest of the crew as well. His work was rooted in his supposition that, statistically speaking, there had to be many survivors. He had seen a Melbourne newspaper report of Rohan Rivett’s July 1, 1942, broadcast over the Batavia radio station referring to three-hundred-odd survivors of the Perth at Serang, Java. In that dispatch the Houston was not named, but there had to be some American survivors there too, Hodge thought. The Navy’s communiqués had already detailed the parallel fates of the two ships. It complicated things that the Navy, still deeming the Houston’s crew roster a military secret, would not release it until after the war. Still, working with a network of sleuths—including the family of chief radioman Harmon P. Alderman in Dayton, Ohio, who, using their own shortwave radio sets, received propaganda broadcasts from Java that disclosed the names of at least forty-seven of the ship’s survivors—Hodge made great progress.

Starting with just six names, Hodge would network aggressively among the community of USS Houston family members. As news about prisoners reached Washington via the International Red Cross in Switzerland, he collated it all, pursuing every conceivable link between shipmates as he found them, triangulating offhand mentions of this sailor’s “buddy” or that one’s “pal,” contacting families with sons in the same division or with similar ratings to determine whether they knew who that buddy might be. Through the good offices of his congressman, Sen. Guy Cordon (R-Ore.), he tried to get the Navy to release the ship’s roster. He was tireless, and even though he failed to determine whether his own brother had survived, the work gave him something to do with his days besides worry.

The experience filled Fred Hodge with disgust at the dilatory and opaque state of the Navy’s bureaucracy. Agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI, concerned that he might be running some kind of perverse con game on bereaved families, investigated his activities. Hodge used the results of the investigation, which cleared him of any suspicion, to encourage recalcitrant families to cooperate with him. He saved his anger for the Navy Department’s stubborn refusal to provide a crew list. When the Navy wrote Senator Cordon that a final list of officers and crew killed in action had not been compiled, Hodge wrote to his constituency of Houston kin, “Such a statement is either a deliberate evasion or further proof that the Navy Department has returned to its Pearl Harbor status wherein one department wasn’t supposed to know what went on in another department.” Nevertheless, Fred Hodge, as champion of the Houston families’ interests a generation before the Freedom of Information Act went to its first legislative committee, did immeasurable good. As a journalist would write after the war, “It is impossible to estimate the value of Mr. Hodge’s work to home morale. There are thousands of questions in the minds of relatives who have heard nothing beyond the ‘missing in action’ announcement by the navy.” Such was a brother’s love that it could embrace the entire family of the ship and endure long past the time that he learned that Lieutenant Hodge, once spotted alive and well and in command of a life raft drifting in Sunda Strait, had never been seen again.

Edith Rooks remembered her husband’s portentous farewell in Honolulu. “One thing that has always discouraged me in counting too much on Harold’s being a prisoner,” she wrote Admiral Hart, “is that before he left me he urged me to accept the fact that the Houston would be one of the first ships to fight the Japs and that if I heard it was sunk to remember that literally he would be the last man to leave the ship.”

It galled her that she couldn’t find anyone with first-hand knowledge of the Houston and the fate of its captain. On December 7, 1942, she had received a letter from the War Department’s Office of