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By Root 1488 0

’s main battery hobbled and the Marblehead damaged, Admiral Doorman aborted the mission, ordering the wounded cruisers to Tjilatjap for repair. As evening fell, Captain Rooks steered his bruised ship toward safety, out of the Flores Sea through Alas Strait, then west into the easternmost littorals of the Indian Ocean. Steaming in the shadows of the holy peaks of Lombok and Bali, the Houston’s crew gathered their dead shipmates on the fantail. The Houston’s two medical officers, Cdr. William A. Epstein and Lt. Clement D. Burroughs, exhausted themselves patching up the wounded and easing the worst of them into death. “I’m convinced they were never the same again,” wrote Marine 2nd Lt. Miles Barrett. “For weeks their nerves were completely shattered.” An ensign named John B. Nelson had the chore of identifying the charred corpses as they lay in makeshift state. Nelson’s eyes filled with tears as he studied the remains, identifying some and guessing at others. Then they were covered with a canvas tarpaulin to await burial. A carpenter’s mate oversaw the crew detailed to assemble caskets from scrap lumber. Their hammers tapped and tapped, marking time through the night. “War came to us in a real way. It knocked all the cockiness out of us,” said Sgt. Charley L. Pryor Jr. of the ship’s Marine detachment. “We saw what war could be in its real fury, just in those brief few moments.”

A ceremonial watch was set in honor of the dead. Seaman first class John Bartz, a stout Minnesotan from the Second Division, held his rifle at attention on the midwatch, fidgeting in the starlit darkness. What unsettled him was not so much the corpses but their unexpected movements at sudden intervals: arms and legs twitching, rising and reaching in death’s stiffening grip.

“I’m telling you, it was spooky,” Bartz said. “It was really scary when you’re standing there, a young kid about eighteen years old. I was glad to see my relief at four.”

CHAPTER 2

The horrors of the bomb blast challenged the mettle of a crew that had developed its esprit from altogether different experiences. By 1942, only a few of them had been on board long enough to remember the ship’s heyday in the thirties, when a president was proud to call himself their shipmate. Most of those who had sailed on those unforgettable voyages had left the ship. Yet the high spirits lived in the older sailors’ memories. It was a sort of living dream, a skein of folk history that wove itself into the banter in the mess halls and set the Houston’s men apart from the other seadogs in the fleet. The five-year reign the ship enjoyed as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite ride would survive the worst onslaughts of the Japanese.

Four times in the 1930s FDR had joined the Houston on long interoceanic trips. Whether it was because she had been launched in September 1929, right before the stock-market crash that brought on the Depression, and thus stood as a sort of shining symbol of the nation in its heyday, or whether it was an accident of circumstance, no one quite knew. Most of them seemed willing to accept it as the natural by-product of their shipshape tradition of discipline. “The spit and polish of the U.S. Navy was ingrained in us,” one sailor wrote, “and up to the moment he arrived on board we worked every minute to have the ship in readiness. Not a speck of dust, or corrosion on bright work, paint work, and our white teakwood decks shone with a snowy whiteness that came from many hours of scrubbing and holystoning. The ship was in perfect order.” The wheelchair-bound commander in chief appreciated the custom-engineered conveniences the shipfitters and metalsmiths installed whenever he came aboard. Ladders were replaced with electric lifts, handrails bolted along bulkheads, and ramps laid here and there to enable him to explore her decks and compartments.

“Bring the boat around,” Roosevelt would tell the brass at the Navy Department whenever the urge or the opportunity beckoned. In 1934, he rode on board the Houston from Annapolis to Portland, Oregon, by way of the Panama Canal and Honolulu.