Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [19]
*The U.S. Asiatic Fleet consisted of the Houston, the Marblehead, thirteen old destroyers (Destroyer Squadron Twenty-nine), twenty-six submarines, six gunboats, and assorted support vessels.
*The Boise (CL-47) was not originally part of the Asiatic Fleet. Assigned to the Pacific Fleet’s Cruiser Division Nine, she was pressed into Asiatic Fleet service after escorting a convoy to Manila that arrived on December 4, 1941, just in time to get trapped there by the outbreak of the war.
CHAPTER 5
In the two months leading up to the Houston’s catastrophic bomb hit in the Flores Sea on February 4, ABDA ships had seen action only sporadically. To the chagrin of her crew, the Houston’s primary task during that period was convoy escort. Per orders of the Navy Department, Rooks’s cruiser joined the seagoing wagon train of transports ferrying American and Australian troops from Australia to Java. As often as not, the easternmost leg was Darwin, but sometimes the Houston steamed east as far as Torres Strait to pick up convoys coming up from Sydney and around Cape York Peninsula.
For infuriating stretches of time, the Houston stood at anchor off Darwin, swinging to the tides. The crew chafed to grapple with the Japanese fleet. “It got to be so bad,” wrote Walter Winslow, a Houston floatplane pilot, “that when I was in the company of Australian naval officers, I began to feel almost ashamed to be a part of the vaunted United States Navy.” A heavy cruiser with presidential pedigree deserved better than shepherding the sows of the service force.
Failing that, her crew certainly deserved a liberty call more interesting than what Darwin had to offer. The outpost of fifteen hundred souls was the capital of the Northern Territory, but that title was out of proportion to the dimensions of the town’s grid, three blocks by two, its single-story buildings roofed in corrugated iron, horses and carts providing the only public transportation. The flinty terrain and the red clay streets that swirled up with dust when they weren’t boggy with rain evoked memories of the nineteenth-century frontier. Sailors from America’s rural precincts may have enjoyed the fleeting illusion that they had come home again. For most of the Houston’s crew, though, the town was a disappointment. Hopes of meeting Australian girls faded in light of the reality that mostly only men were there. The first major Allied combat unit in the area was the 147th Field Artillery, a federalized South Dakota National Guard unit that was trucked up from Brisbane on January 18 to help defend Australia’s northern frontier. Drinking warm beer with Australians and South Dakotans was a pleasing diversion as far as it went. But it grew sour when the town’s beer supply vanished. Such shortages had struck Darwin before—its buildings had the broken windows to prove it. No sooner had the town restocked from the last run on its beer supply than a bunch of thirsty Yanks descended upon them again. The town’s supplies of canned food disappeared too, snapped up by Houston men eager to have snacks handy in the gun tub.
When the mayor of Darwin complained to Captain Rooks about the market-crashing effects of his crew’s appetite, the fleet’s service force replenished the town with fresh fruits and vegetables, canned peaches, hams, fruit cocktail, and olives, all originally meant for the U.S. troops in now-abandoned Manila. One of the Houston’s senior floatplane pilots became a small-town celebrity by procuring some American beer from a supply vessel in the harbor and bringing it ashore. “That’s the closest I’ve ever been to becoming the president of Australia,” Lt. Tommy Payne said.
Offensive operations fell to other