Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [48]
When it was sprayed into the furnaces that heated a ship’s boilers, the Dutch oil, lighter and less viscous than standard American Bunker B, didn’t produce enough volume for a ship to generate full power. With the warm Java Sea waters already impairing the efficiency of her condensers, the best the Houston could do was twenty-seven or twenty-eight knots, well short of her rated thirty-two. At Tanjung Priok on February 28, only 760 long tons of furnace fuel were on hand, and the Dutch were inclined to be miserly with it. Admiral Helfrich had instructed the port authority at Tjilatjap to keep the available fuel for their own nation’s fleet. “No further fuel will be issued to U.S. naval vessels,” Glassford informed his commanders. “Unless otherwise instructed we will fuel our [ships] from [the oiler] PECOS.”
The harbor authorities rebuffed the Houston’s and Perth’s requests for fuel, informing Lt. Robert Fulton, in charge of fueling, that it was on reserve for Dutch warships.
When the Americans and Australians informed them of the disaster off Surabaya and the loss of most of the Dutch Navy, the harbor masters yielded a bit. Some cajoling and arm-twisting got three hundred tons of oil pumped into the Perth, bringing her bunkers to half capacity. The Houston got somewhat less. One of the dud projectiles that struck her during the Java Sea action had penetrated her oil tanks, making it impossible to fill them above a certain level without leaking an oil trail. But some thought her 350,000 gallons on hand was adequate to reach Australia.
It was clear the Houston would not make the trip in her accustomed high style. Like the Perth, she was about as battered and salt-worn as her crew. “Concussion from the main batteries had played havoc with the ship’s interior,” Walter Winslow wrote. “Every unlocked dresser and desk drawer had been torn out and the contents spewed all over. In lockers, clothes were wrenched from hangers and dumped in muddled heaps. Pictures, radios, books and anything else not bolted down had been jolted from normal places and dashed to the deck.” The well-appointed admiral’s cabin, which marked the Houston as a flagship, standing ready for use by any flag officers or adventurous U.S. presidents who might happen to come aboard, was a mess of ruined luxuries: overturned furniture, shattered glass and china, and drifts of soundproof insulation torn and jarred from the bulkheads. Scarcely a piece of glass was intact. Portholes, lightbulbs, mirrors, searchlight lenses, crystal tumblers, picture frames—all had been shattered by the impact of battle. The concussion of Turret Two, which often fired while rotated to an extreme after bearing, had popped rivets and metal fittings and battered the weather shields girding the bridge, as well as damaged the signal searchlights on the navigation bridge. The guns themselves needed replacement.
The Perth was equally bad off. After the battle, an exhausted Hector Waller went to his cabin to rest for a spell. The forty-one-year-old captain sorely needed it. “He had been off-color for days,” remembered a Perth sailor. Jaundice had cast his skin in a pale yellow. Arriving in his cabin, he had to sweep his bunk clean of glass shards before lying down to rest.
On both ships, the buzz now centered on two things: what might have been in the disastrous battle they had just survived, and what might yet come to pass in the urgent days ahead. As to the first question, the American sailors speculated how it might have gone differently had the Boise or Marblehead or Phoenix been with them. For the men