Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [58]
Stationed on a hoist in one of the five-inch magazines, seaman second class Donald Brain saw the power to his compartment die and the hydraulics fail, making it necessary to work the hoist by hand. Brain grabbed some hand cranks out of the ready locker, set them up, and was so busy cranking five-inch projectiles up to the gun deck that he had no time to fret when an enemy shell came plowing through the side of the ship just forward of his station, rumbling like a freight train. “That is just what it sounded like…just a rumble and a bang and a crash, and on it went.” He would crank that hoist until the magazine was empty.
The furious but uncoordinated nature of the Houston’s gunnery—directors abandoned and manned again, rangefinders disabled, turrets switched to manual control and from director to director—meant that though a large number of Japanese ships were engaged in the battle, seldom was the Houston’s fire concentrated sufficiently to sink any given ship.
Her five-inch gunners did the best they could. Most of them had been together since the ship left the States in October 1940. Commander Maher had worked them hard and it bore fruit now. Even on local control, the captains of the five-inch mounts performed superbly. Their fire struck the destroyer Harukaze on the bridge and in the engine room, damaging her rudder, killing three, injuring fifteen, and forcing her to abort a torpedo launch. Their volleys also ravaged the destroyer Shirayuki. Though the Houston had just one working thirty-six-inch searchlight on each side, her gunners managed to range on the Mikuma, hitting her with a projectile that disabled her main electrical switchboard and silenced her batteries and searchlights for several minutes. But Capt. Shakao Sakiyama’s electricians wired around the trouble, enabling her to resume the bombardment with even greater effectiveness as she closed to within ten thousand yards.
Having gone through the Java Sea battle, Howard Brooks recognized the tenor of the enemy cruisers’ eight-inch main battery fire. The big guns sounded much closer now than they had the previous afternoon. The destroyers were far easier to see. “We could see the whole outline of these Japanese destroyers that were firing at us,” Brooks said. “We could see the guys on the guns, Japanese sailors, their forms, moving around the guns. They were pouring fire right into our ship.”
“Oh Lord, sometimes you felt like you could reach out and shake their hands,” said John Bartz. He took shelter behind the back of his gun’s seat as bullets pinged all around the makeshift metal shield. The Marine second lieutenant in charge of his mount, Edward M. Barrett, ordered him to keep shooting, and Bartz did so, keeping to his unorthodox shielded firing position, reaching around the seat back to elevate and depress the guns, and grabbing the foot-pedal trigger with his other hand to fire.
“The tin cans got so close to us…that when they got under two hundred yards, you couldn’t train on them…. You’d hit the top of their stacks,” said John Wisecup, on gun number seven, aftermost on the boat deck’s starboard side. With some satisfaction Wisecup could tell that the 1.1-inch pom-poms were getting to the enemy. “They’d rake that topside, and you could hear them yelling over there. You could see their faces. You could hear the guys on the bridge hollering because they were that close when they hit them.”
High in the Houston’s foremast, standing on a twenty-by-twenty-foot corrugated steel platform where four .50-caliber machine guns were mounted, Howard Charles had a commanding view of the battle. There he had a measurable advantage over gunners stationed closer to the sea. It was easier to fire down on a target than to hit it firing straight out over the water. With orders to quench enemy searchlights wherever they might shine, he steered his tracers into the glare of the unshuttered enemy lenses. All things considered, he preferred this lofty view to the cloistered depths of the magazines or handling