Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [255]
Inset photograph of railway survivors (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Inset photograph of medical personnel (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Page Thirteen
Inset photograph of Lanson Harris (International Red Cross; collection of Jane and Lanson Harris)
Page Fourteen
Leaflet (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Page Fifteen
Background photograph of Houston survivors in Galveston (Marguerite Campbell, Houston Post)
Inset photograph of Albert H. Rooks, Jr. and Edith Rooks (National Archives)
Inset photograph of USS Houston survivors in Houston (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Page Sixteen
Photograph of Houston marine reunion (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Photograph of John H. Wisecup (Courtesy of James McDaniel)
Photograph of Frank Fujita (Don Kehn)
Photograph of James W. (Red) Huffman (James D. Hornfischer)
Photograph of Gus Forsman (Don Kehn)
Photograph of John Bartz (James D. Hornfischer)
Photograph of Edith Rooks (Cruiser Houston Collection, University of Houston Libraries)
Photograph of Jane and Lanson Harris (James D. Hornfischer)
Photograph of Wisecup in Thailand (Courtesy of James McDaniel)
Photograph of Otto Schwarz (Don Kehn)
Watch for James D. Hornfischer’s
latest book on World War II in the Pacific
NEPTUNE’S INFERNO
The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
Coming Spring 2011
Read a special preview below.
PROLOGUE
______
Eighty-two Ships
ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 1942, EIGHTY-TWO U.S. NAVY SHIPS MANNED by forty thousand sailors, shepherding a force of sixteen thousand U.S. Marines, reached their destination in a remote southern ocean and spent the next hundred days immersed in a curriculum of cruel and timeless lessons. No fighting Navy had ever been so speedily and explosively educated. In the conflict that rolled through the end of that trembling year, they and the thousands more who followed them learned that technology was important, but that guts and guile mattered more. That swiftness was more deadly than strength, and that well-packaged surprise usually beat them both. That if it looked like the enemy was coming, the enemy probably was coming and you ought to tell somebody, maybe even everybody. That the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.
Sailors in the war zone learned the arcane lore of bad luck and its many manifestations, from the sight of rats leaving a ship in port (a sign that she will be sunk) to the act of whistling while at sea (inviting violent winds) to the follies of opening fire first on a Sunday or beginning a voyage on a Friday (the consequences of which were certain but nonspecific, and thus all the more frightful).
They learned to tell the red-orange blossoms of shells hitting targets from the faster flashes of muzzles firing the other way. That hard steel burns. That any ship can look shipshape, but if you really want to take her measure, check her turret alignments. That torpedoes, and sometimes radios, keep their own fickle counsel about when they will work. That a war to secure liberty could be waged passionately by men who had none themselves, and that in death all sailors have an unmistakable dignity.
Some of these were the lessons of any war, truisms relearned for the hundredth time by the latest generation to face its trials. Victory always tended to fly with the first effective salvo. Others were novel, the product of untested technologies and tactics, unique to the circumstances of America’s first offensive in the Pacific: that you could win a campaign on the backs of stevedores expert in the lethal craft of combat-loading cargo ships; that the little image of an enemy ship on a radar scope will flinch visibly when heavily struck; that rapid partial salvo fire from a director-controlled main battery reduces the salvo interval period but complicates