Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [52]
“Ever since the night of the 23rd,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin, “when I last looked at this body of water, I had been getting on fine with a thoroughly fatalistic attitude. Not pessimism, just a fatalistic attitude. Now I began to see rosy visions of the Houston steaming into an Australian port. Then the long trip home for a new turret, and a visit with my wife.”
On the Perth, yeoman of signals Eric Piper was “pacing the flag deck exhorting everyone to be alert.” It was no idle pep talk; many of the sailors were faltering from exhaustion. When Lt. Lloyd Burgess finished his four-to-eight-p.m. navigator’s watch that evening, he was so tired he couldn’t remember a single order he had given or the name of a single crewman he had spoken to.
The strait ahead demanded the strictest vigilance. On either side, land formed a backdrop that rendered ship silhouettes invisible after dark. Commanding the machine-gun platform high in the Houston’s foremast, Marine gunnery sergeant Walter Standish remarked to Sgt. Joseph M. Lusk and Pfc. Howard R. Charles, “They could hide a battleship out there, and we’d never see it until it attacked.” The shoreline’s shadows were a hazard of sorts, but after long stretches of combat duty on the open sea, Charles welcomed the sight of the Java mainland. “If we sink, at least there’s land nearby,” he thought, making a mental note of a constellation, the Southern Cross, that would mark the way to shore if the worst came to pass.
Around 11:15, Captain Waller spotted something, a dim silhouette low and dark on the water lying in the embrace of the shadows. He took it for a Dutch patrol craft and ordered his chief yeoman to flash a challenge on the Aldis signal lamp. After several prickling seconds the response came, a greenish light blinking a stream of nonsense. A stickler for good signal work—it was one of the few subjects where the captain’s sense of humor left him—Waller ordered the challenge repeated, and as his yeoman did so, the unidentified vessel turned, revealing the telltale silhouette of a Japanese destroyer even as it started making smoke.
Captain Rooks spotted the ship just a beat after Waller did. Keeping station on the Perth nine hundred yards astern, he too considered it a Dutch picket until it became clear it was moving much faster than a patrol boat would. He ordered general quarters as a precaution and relieved his officer of the deck, Lieutenant Hamlin, who scrambled down to take station in the officer’s booth of Turret One.
On the flag deck of the Perth, whose magazines were even lighter than the Houston’s, with just twenty rounds per six-inch gun, Bill Bee sensed activity on the bridge above him. Manning the starboard eighteen-inch carbon arc spotlight, he noticed the cruiser’s A and B turrets, the twin-mounted six-inch batteries just forward of him, swinging out to starboard. “I looked in the same direction as the guns were pointing and without the aid of night binoculars I could make out four objects which appeared to be destroyers coming towards us bearing about 020 degrees.” The Perth turned slightly to port. The Houston followed. The first hint most of the American cruiser’s crew got that anything was amiss was the sudden, startling flash and shock of the Perth’s main guns ripping into the night up ahead.
As the general quarters alarm began its dissonant electronic barking (its energizing effect never diminished: even a veteran like Lieutenant Winslow leapt from his bunk and “found myself in my shoes before I was fully awake”), Lieutenant Hamlin could see a red Very flare arc skyward from the vicinity of the unidentified ships. Captain