Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [25]
The Asiatic Fleet’s officers toasted their veteran leader’s retirement. Then Hart stood to speak but could not summon words. As a brash young officer, he had once declared his wish to end his naval career on the bridge of his flagship, blown to eternity by a large-caliber salvo. He settled for a less dramatic exit. Faltering with grief, he at last managed only to say: “Well, boys, we all have a busy day tomorrow, so we’d better break this up.” In the receiving line afterward, his fleet intelligence officer, Lt. Cdr. Redfield Mason, grabbed Hart’s hand with both of his and said, “Goodbye, sir, you are the finest man I’ve ever known.” Hart couldn’t recognize anyone through the brine that welled in his eyes. That night he wrote in his diary, “Oh it was hard.” Wartime farewells were always wrenching, but “leaving them out here in the face of a dangerous enemy and commanded by God knows whom or how” was more than the old admiral could stand.
The next day he was driven to Batavia in a battered sedan for transit west. He was last seen in Java standing alone on the pier in Tanjung Priok, Batavia, wearing civilian clothes, awaiting the arrival of a bomb-damaged British light cruiser to ferry him home.
If a fighting spirit prevailed, the men of the Houston would have to suffer through one more turn as a convoy escort before exercising it. The cruiser was ordered to Darwin once again on February 10.
She began the return journey on February 15 leading a convoy of troop ships to Timor, the easternmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. All hope of keeping supplies flowing between Australia and Java required that Timor stay in Allied hands. The outpost held the only airfield, at Kupang, that enabled Allied fighter planes to cover the sea-lanes to and from Darwin.
The four transports, escorted by the Houston, the destroyer USS Peary, and the Australian escort sloops Warrego and Swan, carried a few thousand Australian Pioneers, infantry specially trained in construction and engineering, as well as a battalion of the U.S. 148th Field Artillery Regiment, a federalized Idaho National Guard unit once earmarked to reinforce General MacArthur in the Philippines before his lines collapsed. They found themselves in Australia by accident. Their convoy had been one week out of Pearl Harbor when the war started. Now, as Admiral Hart was donning his civilian clothes to depart Java, the troops set sail for Timor, the Australians filling the 11,300-ton U.S. Army transport Meigs and the 5,400-ton Matson Line freighter SS Mauna Loa and the Americans boarding the British cargo ship SS Tulagi and the transport SS Port Mar.
Around noon on the first day at sea, the Houston’s bugler sounded the call to air defense. As the men ran to battle stations, a Japanese H6K Mavis flying boat appeared overhead, circling out of gun range. The plump four-engine plane lumbered in and made a pair of bombing runs on the cruiser from ten thousand feet, but the Houston’s concentrated flak drove her away. The Mavis was chased by a lone P-40 Warhawk fighter scrambled from Darwin and guided toward the Mavis by the Houston’s gunners, who sent a volley of five-inch shells bursting in the aircraft’s direction. The two planes disappeared over the horizon, leaving the sailors to guess which one’s demise caused the subsequent flash of fire and the pillar of black smoke.
The fact that enemy air power could reach them just one day out of Darwin was more troubling to the crew than the attack’s negligible results. “We believed that by being south of the Malay barrier