Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [153]
Admiral Hart, in Washington, kept up a heroic correspondence that cultivated Edith’s hope even as it eased her toward acceptance of her husband’s loss. But as she learned of the Navy’s halting progress in investigating rumors concerning her husband, the uncertainty took a toll on her. Hart had shared a hopeful rumor, mentioned in a letter from Lt. Joseph Dalton, placing Captain Rooks in Formosa. He realized that he might have stoked her hopes too vigorously. On May 5 he wrote.
Probably I should not have passed to you that rumor which was contained in my last letter. I knew that it would very well amount to nothing whatever but decided that you, being the kind of person that I know you to be, should be given it for such as it might be worth. In fact I rather felt that you simply would not forgive me if I withheld it from you and you ever found out.
In this letter he went further, dispensing once and for all with the tortuous hopes that the both of them had held open for the Houston’s commanding officer.
Edith, though there is always at least a vestige of hope I suppose that we must accept the situation which is that there is not really much to cling to and that lives should be ordered on the basis that Rooks is not ever really coming back. Those words are very hard to write and if I were face to face with you I probably would not have voice enough to say them.
Yet Edith’s response to Hart’s attempt to close the door on hope just pushed her the other way on the seesaw of denial. In the same letter in which she mentioned settling her husband’s affairs, apparently convinced of the finality of his loss, she also wrote, “I must say more and more I feel the promise of Harold’s death seems based on flimsy proof.”
In May 1943, the Navy’s first prisoner list named 1,044 men held by the Japanese. The report at once kindled hope and sowed doubt. There were survivors. But only seven from the Houston were named. Family members joined all their countrymen in wondering about the survivors from the U.S. Asiatic Fleet’s flagship. But they would not get the whole story until a disastrous world war had been set right and won.
CHAPTER 46
The Pacific Ocean’s vastness was an irreducible impediment to planning, to communications, to every measure of effectiveness given to man and to machine. If the entire European combat theater was a triangle of land and sea formed by lines connecting Murmansk, Gibraltar, and Tobruk, six such triangles could fit like puzzle pieces inside that portion of the Pacific within which America and Japan fought. One story in particular brought home the gulf of distance that separated the men from their home and the inscrutable way that fate at least occasionally allowed some news through.
Grievously wounded when the Houston was sunk, Lt. (jg) Francis B. Weiler had died of his wounds on March 26, 1942, at a small Dutch hospital near Pandeglang after guiding his raft of survivors ashore. Less than one year later, a Marine courier showed up at the home of Dr. and Mrs. George Weiler, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, to give them their lost son’s U.S. Naval Academy class ring.
Entrusted by Lieutenant Weiler to a Dutch nurse just before he died, it found its way to a Dutch doctor, who surrendered it to a Japanese officer, presumably at the Pandeglang hospital. It should have remained an untraceable loss, like any of the million other workaday lootings perpetrated by victors on the vanquished. Except Lieutenant Weiler’s ring was different.
A world away, eight months later, U.S. Marines were in the fight of their lives on Guadalcanal. In the midst of a firefight, a Marine captain named Gordon