Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [38]
Turret One developed mechanical difficulties from the fifth salvo, when a fuse box jarred loose from the turret’s bulkhead, disabling the electro-hydraulic ramming mechanism.
From that point on, according to Lieutenant Hamlin, the crew in the Houston’s forwardmost turret loaded and rammed the breech by hand, keeping pace with Turret Two on all but a few salvos. “This is a thing that you couldn’t do in peacetime,” Hamlin wrote, “no gun crew could do it, but they did.”
Some seventy men worked in each of the Houston’s two functioning main battery mounts. Below, loading the two hydraulic hoists that fed the handling room from the Houston’s magazines was exhausting work. Seaman second class William M. Ingram said they were at general quarters so often that he scarcely ever slept in the First Division’s crew compartment. He barely even knew where his bunk was. He kept a pillow and a blanket in the starboard-side powder box. Spartan accommodations and relentless working hours notwithstanding, the gun crews sent five, sometimes six projectiles a minute rushing out at Japanese cruisers that were doing the same thing right back to them.
Scoring a hit with a naval rifle at the extreme range of more than eighteen statute miles was a bit like rolling snake eyes twice in a row. Arcing down after seventy seconds of flight, the projectiles fell at angles nearly vertical to the sea, both minimizing the chance of a hit and rendering a crippling waterline blow virtually impossible. Further reducing the odds was the erratic path of the targets, each ship turning in irregular zigs and zags. This kind of fight had been long rehearsed in exercises wherein victory emerged through seamanship: forming columns quickly to take the initiative, keeping the column closed and free of gaps to concentrate firepower and simplify command, and orienting it to greatest advantage relative to the enemy and the elements, a challenge complicated by wind, heavy seas, and smoke.
For some fifteen minutes as the opening salvos flashed and roared over the Java Sea, the Japanese concentrated their gunfire on the Exeter, leaving the Houston undisturbed. Captain Rooks’s target was the rear Japanese heavy cruiser, the Haguro, trailing Takagi’s flagship Nachi by about half a mile. The Houston’s guns roared, landing 260-pound projectiles all around the enemy ship. Japanese spotter planes launched by catapult from the Nachi and other of Takagi’s ships ranged up and down the length of the Allied column on its disengaged side, safely out of reach of the Houston’s expert gunners. Takagi’s cruisers made good use of the floatplanes’ spotting reports: Their salvos straddled the De Ruyter, Houston, and Perth as well as the Exeter. From the third salvo on, the Nachi’s and Haguro’s “overs” were missing the Exeter by as little as three yards to the disengaged side, indicating the steepness of the projectiles’ fall. Captain Gordon reported a “near-miss underwater well aft” that flooded some compartments and “had the apparent effect of lifting the whole ship in a most remarkable manner.”
But Admiral Takagi wanted a torpedo fight. It was the Japanese Navy’s way of war. Even if he could outshoot his enemy—his cruisers’ eight-inch guns numbered twenty to Doorman’s twelve—his navy’s tactical doctrine favored the undersea missiles as the weapon of decision. His destroyer squadrons were well practiced in the deadly craft. And already Rear Adm. Shoji Nishimura’s destroyers were racing in to demonstrate it. The enemy ships were as yet beyond the range of Houston’s secondary battery of five-inch guns, but the six-inchers of Doorman’s light cruisers would soon take them up. Capt. Hector M. L. Waller of the