Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [49]
Captain Waller’s reputation had swelled with his successes in the Mediterranean. Commanding the destroyer HMAS Stuart, he had won two Distinguished Service Orders, one for his gallant turn during the Battle of Matapan, where the Stuart contributed more than a destroyer’s share to the Royal Navy’s greatest victory since Trafalgar and helped end Italy’s challenge to the naval balance of power. Waller had a reputation as a fighter and a hands-on commander. He liked to read and send his own signals. He proved his marksmanship by blasting floating mines with his own rifle. Visiting the governor’s palace in Malta, he had had both the temerity to tell the island’s First Lady that her famous rose garden was poorly pruned and the skill to wield the clippers himself and improve it. “Leaning against his bridge rail or walking the quarterdeck or even in civilian clothes he seemed to broadcast strength—the inner controlled strength of a man who knew where he was going, and knew why,” Ronald McKie wrote. Heavy-shouldered and balding, with rounded facial features, he was stern and serious-minded but given to seasonable playfulness. His odd mix of traits enabled his dour aspect to become its own brand of charm. Though his full given name, Hector Macdonald Laws Waller, might have suggested he had been bred to dine with fine silver, he lacked pretense utterly. A naval career had in fact been his sole professional purpose since the age of nine.
The consensus among the Monday-morning quartermasters was that the three light cruisers should have operated independently of the heavies and charged with the destroyers straight at the Japanese, while the Houston and the Exeter blasted away from afar. The Americans could only guess at the destruction they would have wrought had their after eight-inch battery been working. Its untapped potential was plain to see—and haul. For the better part of that afternoon in Tanjung Priok, the crew continued loading projectiles from the after magazine on bedsheets and carrying them six hundred feet to the depleted forward magazines and handling rooms. The treacherous hike was considerably easier to do while the ship was moored rather than pitching and rolling at sea in the midst of battle.
Beyond the second-guessing, most of the sailors were elated to have survived at all. Having paid their way, they felt they had earned some respite now in safer harbors. “Everyone was lighthearted, and thinking that we had done our share, and done our best,” Lloyd Willey said. “We thought it would be great to see the United States again.” Others looked forward to more immediate good times in Australia.
While the crew was trying to get refueled, the Houston floatplane pilot who had stayed behind with his aircraft in Surabaya, Lt. Tom Payne, radioed word that he would fly to Tanjung Priok that afternoon to rejoin the ship. When he arrived, approaching the harbor from the sea, the raw-nerved crew of a Dutch shore battery opened fire on his Seagull at long range. As explosions of flak burst all around him, Payne touched down beyond the breakwater, cursing vigorously. As he began to taxi in, a Dutch torpedo boat motored out to inspect him. The Houston’s crew watched with some trepidation, unable to inform the boat that it was their shipmate. To their relief, it circled Payne’s aircraft and escorted him back into the harbor. “Tom was hoisted on board,” Walter Winslow wrote, “perplexed, to say the least, by his less than cordial welcome.”
CHAPTER 14
Naval service is a highly technologized trade. In it, life is simplified to the degree possible around the practical application of repetition-driven training. In the age of practical mechanics, efficiency was the route to advancement