Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [16]
At nine a.m. on December 1, the Houston set course for Iloilo, 238 miles south of Manila, while the light cruiser Marblehead and the destroyers headed for bases in Borneo. Navy war plans had long provided for such a withdrawal. The prewar consensus had been that the Asiatic Fleet would leave the area entirely, biding time in the Indian Ocean until the main Pacific Fleet had advanced far enough west to join in a counteroffensive. Hart was initially reluctant to abandon the Philippines without a fight. As late as October 1941 he suggested keeping his small fleet in Manila and fighting alongside General MacArthur. But Secretary Frank Knox’s Navy Department deemed it too risky. A compromise was reached under which the Houston would move further south but stay nominally in the region, leading the fleet from Surabaya, Java.
Stopping at Iloilo, Rooks rendezvoused with Admiral Glassford, recently evacuated from China. When Glassford’s Catalina flying boat splashed down in the bay just before dark on December 7, a motor launch from the Houston retrieved him and brought him to the ship. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Glassford reportedly said upon stepping aboard. The Houston was soon en route to Surabaya.
The Houston’s escape was a close one. The Japanese swung their blade east and south on December 8 (December 7 in the United States). The Houston radioman who received Admiral Hart’s Morse code transmission perfunctorily copied the block of characters, dated the sheet three a.m. local time, tossed it into the basket, then asked himself, “What did that thing say?” It said: “Japan started hostilities. Govern yourselves accordingly.” “We had hardly cleared Iloilo entrance when we heard gunfire astern of us and saw a ship aflame,” Cdr. Arthur Maher recalled. Hidden in the dark backdrop of Panay’s mountain ranges, the Houston avoided notice of the Japanese pilots. She joined a pair of Asiatic Fleet destroyers, the Stewart and the John D. Edwards, in escorting two fleet oilers and the old seaplane tender Langley out of the war zone.
Anyone overconfident about America’s prospects against Japan might have asked why the invincible U.S. fleet was on the run. En route to Surabaya, Captain Rooks called his officers and department heads to the executive officer’s cabin and informed them that war had started. On December 10 more than fifty twin-engine Japanese bombers struck Cavite unopposed, burning out most of its key installations, destroying the harbor facilities, and sinking a transport ship. When Tokyo Rose came on the radio that night, she purred an optimistic report that President Roosevelt’s favorite heavy cruiser had been sunk. The men of the Houston were at once flattered and unnerved by the attention. Embracing their status as a priority target not only of the Japanese military but of its propagandists too, they would coin a defiant nickname for the ship: the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast.
Their cocky optimism took a blow when the toll of the Pearl Harbor raid and the destruction of General MacArthur’s air force on Luzon were reported in dispatches. A Navy Department communiqué that arrived on December 15, typed up and posted in the mess hall, detailed the losses: the Arizona sunk, the Oklahoma capsized. The damage to the Pacific Fleet left the United States with, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s words, “a two-ocean war to wage with a less than one-ocean Navy. It was the most appalling situation America had faced since the preservation of the Union had been assured.” The crew was stunned, if unsure what it all meant for them beyond an end to fifty-cent eight-course dinners and nickel shots of whiskey in Manila’s cabarets.
By Christmas, Wake Island