Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [24]
Under normal circumstances, a damaged main battery was cause for a mandatory appointment with the yardbirds. But nothing about ABDAfloat’s circumstances was normal. The striking force could not afford to do without one of its two heavy cruisers. Conferring with Rooks on the day of the funeral, Hart could see that sending the Houston home for repairs was an unaffordable luxury, at least until the promised new light cruiser Phoenix arrived in early March to take her place. Even with its cauterized after turret, the Houston still packed a stiff punch in its forward eight-inch battery.
But Hart feared that ordering the damaged ship to remain in theater and contend with the coming storm would amount to a death sentence for one of the best-trained, highest-morale crews in the fleet. He reportedly told Rooks that he “didn’t want our folks to accuse him of manslaughter, and there was a battle coming that was already lost before it was fought.”
Hart’s worries about “manslaughter” were probably overstated in view of the crew’s eagerness to assume the risk. It was exactly what most of them wanted. Some of the men got together and wrote a letter to their captain pledging that wherever he and the ship went, that’s where they would go too. Though it was a truism to a degree—deserters don’t get far at sea—the sentiment was emotionally genuine. “I think they looked at him as just another god,” said Gus Forsman. “Admiration for the Captain bordered on worship,” some officers would later write. “Everybody believed that the Good Lord had His hand on his shoulder for the things that he brought us through,” said Paul Papish, a storekeeper third class. That knack for inspiring confidence seemed to come naturally to Rooks. But it would never get too deeply into his head. According to Frank E. (Ned) Gallagher, a second lieutenant with the Marine detachment, “He always knew who he was and never wanted to be anybody else.”
For Albert H. Rooks, whose ship had been bloodied without the opportunity to respond in kind, there was no other decision but to stay and fight. He would not see the Houston pulled out at the very moment she was needed most. Though he longed for home, was in fact counting the days, his own concerns came secondary to his role as commander of the most powerful U.S. warship in the Asiatic theater.
Although Tommy Hart would live to regret putting the ship’s fate in the hands of her proud skipper, there was no denying that the ship still had some wallop left in her. “After telling me that he would take his ship out again in a few hours,” Hart wrote, “Rooks pointed to the wreck of his after turret and said, ‘A Jap cruiser will have one strike on us, but with the two remaining we will try to break up his game.’ Such was the spirit.”
CHAPTER 7
Valentine’s Day 1942 was one of emotional reckonings and commitments to faith. Rooks wrote Edith in longhand, his penmanship more hurried than it had been before. “I am going out into the troubled zone this evening,” he wrote, “and I don’t know where we will end up. Two nights ago a dispatch came indicating we were to return to the United States. You can imagine the thrill we got—I dreamed about it all the rest of the night. But the next morning a dispatch came correcting the other. Our name had got there by mistake.”
The present was as heavily shrouded by doubt as the future. The Houston’s captain took refuge in the notion that a man’s destiny was out of his hands. “I trust that everything is going well with you and the boys and your father,” he wrote. “Keep your spirits up. In these times one must cultivate a faith in his fate. May God protect and strengthen you.”
That night Tommy Hart joined sixteen soon-to-be-former Asiatic Fleet colleagues at the Savoy Hotel in Bandung,