Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [2]
Even readers who have explored the Navy’s war against Japan in some depth are unlikely to have read much about the Houston’s battles and the forty-two-month ordeal that her survivors endured. The men who gave life to the legend of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite warship fought their war in isolation, hidden, it seems, behind the pall of smoke standing over the armored carcasses of Pearl Harbor. Eight thousand miles from home, trapped on the wrong side of the tear that Imperial Japan rent in the fabric of the Pacific Ocean’s realm, they ran a gauntlet through the war’s first eighty-four days that would have been an epic unto itself in any other time. And yet the history books scarcely report it. Any number of good histories of the Pacific war pass over the story of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and her redoubtable flagship as if they had never existed. The classic serial documentary Victory at Sea does not mention it. Nor does the epic television series World at War. Accordingly, we know little of the exploits of the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast, of her crew’s gallantry against the guns and torpedo batteries of a superior Japanese fleet, and of the darker trial that awaited them after Java fell.
Newspapers carried sketchy reports of the Houston’s final action. But as the calamity of a two-ocean war engulfed America in 1942, no one could say what became of her survivors, how many there were, where they were taken, what trials they suffered, when if ever they might return home. The Houston’s survivors, barely a third of her complement, would come to envy her dead. Captured and made slaves on one of history’s most notorious engineering projects, they were lost for the duration of World War II, enfolded in a mystery that would not be solved until America’s fleets and armies had subdued one of the most potent military machines ever set loose on the world, and freed its prisoners and slaves. Even today we know little of the staggering trials of her survivors, a seagoing band of brothers whose resilience was tested on the project that encompassed the drama depicted in David Lean’s classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai. Few people understand that there were Americans there. And fewer still appreciate how their spirit of resistance, defiance, and sabotage enabled them to keep their dignity, and how their conspiracies to espionage eventually conjoined with those of the OSS in Thailand during the most fraught hours of the Asian war.
The Houston carried 1,168 men into the imperiled waters of the Dutch East Indies at the start of the war. Just 291 of them returned home. In the end, when the puzzle of their fate was at last solved, the euphoric rush of victory swept their tale into the dustbin of dim remembrance. The story of the Houston got lost in a blizzard of ticker tape.
The surviving men of the USS Houston have lived and aged gracefully, seldom if ever asking for attention or demanding their due. Now they are old, and they are leaving us. They numbered sixty-five when this project began in 2003. As I write in February 2006, that number is down to forty-two. Only the ship’s hardiest representatives are left. The time is fast coming when the eyewitnesses to World War II will be gone, and historians left with their documents and nothing more. So it is time now to remember the Houston and what may well be the most trying ordeal ever suffered by a single ship’s company in World War II. At the very least, we owe them some overdue thanks before it is time for them to go.
Part One
ON ASIA STATION
“I knew that ship and loved her. Her officers and men were my friends.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, letter to Houston mayor Neal Pickett, Memorial Day, 1942
CHAPTER 1
Off the island of Bali, in the silhouette of mountains made sacred by the favor of local gods, a warship plied the black