Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [157]
In the midst of another severe bout of malaria, Jim Gee languished in 114 Kilo Camp. Splayed out on what he was convinced would be his deathbed, “out of his mind” with the tremors, he saw his sister, Johnnie Gee, appear, looking down on him from a tree outside the sick hut. In his hallucination she had joined the service and had come looking for him. Her mouth was moving and they talked for a time. He had yet to learn of women in the military—in mid-1940, when Gee, then nineteen, had left the States, he hadn’t heard of the women’s auxiliaries—but the oddity of it would not occur to him until later. When he shook off the fever and came back to his senses, Jim Gee was the most disappointed Marine on the Burma-Thailand Railway. But the vision renewed his hope, for the clarity and immediacy of the image of his sister searching for him told him that people were out there coming for him. “This dream gave to me the strength, again, to know that, gosh, they’re really looking for us,” Gee would say. “They’re getting pretty close, and they can’t be far away because this was too realistic.”
One possibility might have struck him as a fantasy as outlandish as Johnnie floating in the trees: Less than two years after their ship’s loss, a new USS Houston was with the American fleet leading the way across the Pacific to reckon with their captors. If the new Houston was not strictly speaking a sister to Captain Rooks’s old heavy cruiser, there was certainly something of a blood relation there. Surging westward in the same task force as the new light cruiser Houston was the heavy cruiser USS New Orleans. Like the old Houston, she had felt the sting of Japanese torpedoes. In the Battle of Tassafaronga near Guadalcanal on the night of November 30, 1942, the New Orleans had taken a Long Lance torpedo that blew away her bow, forecastle, and a turret—everything forward of its number-two turret. The ship’s exposed cross-section of compartments was sealed over, and she was taken to Sydney for temporary repairs. Then CA-32 returned to Puget Sound Navy Yard in April to receive a new bow—and a new young officer. Ens. Harold R. Rooks, fresh from Harvard’s ROTC program, joined the ship on June 14, 1943. A year earlier, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had summoned Ensign Rooks to Washington and presented him with his father’s Medal of Honor. Now Rooks joined the New Orleans gunnery department.
Her son’s assignment doubtless filled Edith Rooks with a mix of pride and fear. When Secretary Knox wrote her in November 1943 to invite her to come to the Seattle-Tacoma shipyard to smash a champagne bottle across the stem of a new destroyer named in her husband’s honor, the last ship in the famous Fletcher class, the opportunity to reflect on the full weight of the Rooks family naval tradition must have come bearing down on her. It compelled her, on the second anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, to sit down and write Secretary Knox a letter:
Thank you for asking me to sponsor the USS Rooks, DD-804. It is a privilege. I am very grateful for this memorial to Captain Rooks.
Our older son Harold graduated May 27th, 1943 from Harvard [and] was commissioned Ensign U.S.N.R. the same day and in 2 weeks joined the U.S.S. New Orleans. Like his father, he is the first of his classmates to fight at the front. I hear from his superior officers the highest praise of his capability and devotion to duty.
If there were a time limit on his duty in the Battle area I feel I could bear even this.
Though her last sentence only implied what many other mothers would have beseechingly