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to documentation produced after the war, the commanding general of the Sixteenth Imperial Japanese Army instructed his troops that prisoners of war were fair game for killing. Troops were advised to kill “cautiously and circumspectly, with no policemen or civilians to witness the scene, and care must be taken to do it in a remote place and leave no evidence.” Orders traced to a Kempeitai unit and dated April 3–21, 1944, stated, “When prisoners are taken, those who are not worth utilizing shall be disposed of immediately…. Surrenderors found to be malicious after the interrogations performed on them…will be immediately killed in secret and will be disposed of so as not to excite public feeling.” A secret Imperial Japanese Navy document dated March 20, 1943, read, “Do not stop with the sinking of enemy ships and cargoes; at the same time that you carry out the complete destruction of the crews of the enemy’s ships, if possible, seize part of the crew and endeavor to secure information.”

Unbeknownst to the POWs, on August 1, 1944, a declaration had been issued by the Japanese War Ministry granting local camp commanders discretion to execute all Allied prisoners of war. Throughout their tenure on the Death Railway, the men had acclimated themselves to the risk of death as an element of daily living. Any number of offenses could get a man executed in the struggle to stay alive. Now the act of survival itself could be an offense that carried a death sentence.

The written document referencing a liquidation of the POW population was not a direct order but a clarification of some earlier policy guideline issued at the request of a prison camp commander in Formosa. According to author Linda Goetz Holmes, the war minister who wrote it did not actually have the authority to issue orders. Nonetheless, the chilling implications of the memo evoked the worst horrors of the worldwide Axis rampage. It stated, “Although the basic aim is to act under superior orders, individual disposition may be made in the following circumstances.” It allowed a commander to make a “final disposition”—that is, “to annihilate them all, and not to leave any traces”—if there was an uprising, or if he feared prisoners might escape and become a hostile fighting force. This falls short of proving an actual order to kill Allied prisoners, but in the context of what the POWs were hearing from their own camp guards, it supports the idea that the possibility of a mass slaughter was more than idle chatter.

CHAPTER 55

The spirit of the Houston—the faith of the city’s people, the fruit of their finances, and the volunteer gusto of their adult sons—was making rapid progress toward saving the vessel’s lost crewmen. The U.S. Fifth Fleet, including the new Houston and the New Orleans, embarking Lt. (jg) Hal Rooks, liberated the Mariana Islands in mid-June, taking down most of Japan’s carrier airpower in the so-called Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Three months later the two cruisers supported the landings in the Palaus as the Marines seized Peleliu. In October they joined Adm. William F. Halsey Jr. in the Third Fleet’s audacious carrier raids on Formosa. In the counterattacks by Japanese land-based planes that followed, the new Houston joined both her lost namesake and the New Orleans in their terrible acquaintance with Japanese torpedoes.

Like the heavy cruiser USS Canberra (CA-70) the day before, the Houston was struck by an aerial torpedo and left dead in the water, in grave danger of sinking. Taken in tow by other warships, a risky proposition so close to enemy air bases, the two cruisers were towed to rear areas at a gingerly four-knot pace, on the verge of sinking the whole way. With their ships playing the unwelcome role of magnets to further attacks, Third Fleet wags called the damaged cruisers “BaitDiv,” a play on the Navy shorthand “BatDiv” for a battleship division. The joking ended on October 16, when Japanese planes hit the Houston again. With the ship staggered by a second aerial torpedo, only her crew’s determined damage-control work kept her from joining