Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [23]
As the funeral procession motored off along Tjilatjap’s dusty streets to the beachside cemetery, an uneasy feeling became palpable among the newly war-wise sailors. Crossing-the-line initiations, tropical fishing expeditions, and the ceremonial frivolities of peacetime life seemed a world away. “Suddenly,” Lt. (jg) Walter Winslow wrote, “I had the weird impression that we were all standing on the brink of a yawning grave.”
The ship’s twenty wounded, along with about fifty more from the Marblehead, were put on a Dutch train for transport to Petronella Hospital in the town of Jogjakarta. Meanwhile, work parties, having used up the supply of lumber in the holds, gathered more of it ashore and returned to the ship to continue making coffins, forty-six for their own dead and thirteen more for the Marblehead’s. All available hands kept busy hewing the rough native mahogany until they could no longer stay awake. For the second time in as many days, exhausted crewmen collapsed to the lullaby of saw on wood and hammer on nail, which didn’t trail off until about two a.m. “A weird silence enveloped the ship, broken only by the slow tread of sentries making their rounds,” recalled Walter Winslow.
On February 8, three days into his tenure as a lame duck, Admiral Hart flew from Lembang to Tjilatjap and surveyed the damage done to his ships. The Marblehead, arthritic even in the best of repair, was finished. A Dutch naval architect managed to hoist her bow onto the little floating dry dock so her breached hull could be patched. But nothing could be done for her damaged rudder. In a few days the Marblehead would be westbound to the Brooklyn Navy Yard by way of Ceylon, steering with her engines and staying afloat via submersible pump and bucket brigade.
What to do with the Houston was a more complicated question. Hart knew that his star skipper deserved a voice in the matter.
For his part, Captain Rooks wondered about his family. He had received no mail of any kind since November, had had no word about Edith or his two sons, Albert junior, just twelve, and Hal, breezing through Navy ROTC at Harvard and destined for a Pacific tour in a heavy cruiser of his own. He was eager to share news of the battle with them within the censor’s necessary limits.
From Tjilatjap he cabled Seattle to assure Edith he was okay before she saw any publicity about the hit the ship had taken in the Flores Sea. “Well, the big news is that we have been in action. We were in the so-called Battle of the Flores Sea,” he wrote her. “I cannot give you any details inasmuch as I do not know whether our Navy Department has made any announcement of it or not…. I was not hurt, and came out of it with a good reputation. The crew delegated the ship’s chief master at arms to congratulate me on the way the ship was handled…. Throughout I remained cool and composed, and suffered no nervous or other shocks as a result of the experience.”
In the middle of the combat theater Admiral Hart was able finally to take the full measure of the Houston’s fifty-year-old captain. “When it comes to judging the ability of men as cruiser captains, one usually cannot tell how they will turn out until they are tried,” Hart would later tell Edith. At Tjilatjap, Hart observed the demeanor of his onetime aide and wrote, “Rooks still had perfect poise. His nerves were absolutely unshaken, his attitude and outlook as