Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [60]
In the forward engine room, Lieutenant Fulton wondered what had happened in the after engine room. The only evidence he had of the compartment’s fate was a sudden loss of communication with his chief engineer, Lt. Cdr. Richard Gingras. It could not have been pretty, the great blast ripping open the hull, tossing the crew about like puppets, melting the steel floor gratings in a flash, opening the way for the sea to flow in and quench the roasting steel, summoning a hissing wash of seawater and steam.
Fulton’s glimpse of that hell was a narrow and quick one, and it came via an unlikely window: the engine order telegraph. “When the ship was underway my job was to see to it that the two shafts of the forward engine room operated exactly the same as those in the after engine room,” Fulton said. When the captain signaled an engine order, it was relayed via the bridge’s engine order telegraph to Commander Gingras in the after control engine room, which drove the ship’s two inboard shafts. Gingras matched the setting on his own telegraph, thus confirming to the bridge his compliance with the order and passing the order to Fulton in the forward engine room, who mimicked his superior’s actions.
Looking at the dial of the engine order telegraph, Fulton saw something curious happen. All of a sudden the indicator’s pointer, which usually moved so deliberately in response to specific orders, was waving back and forth quickly. “It made no sense at all,” Fulton said. “We couldn’t understand it.” He thought the telegraph had malfunctioned somehow. But synchros didn’t go haywire like that. Nor, to say the least, did the engine orders, so faithfully mimicked downstream from the bridge. Fulton tried both of the available JV phone circuits but got no answer on either one. It would dawn on him later that the wagging indicator pointer was in all likelihood the act of a human hand, an improvised emergency signal from someone attempting in his scalding final moments to communicate disaster to the captain on the bridge. “It is exactly the kind of quick thinking that was typical of Mr. Gingras,” Fulton wrote.
Up on deck, above the after engine room, gusts of steam from shattered high-pressure pipes kept repair parties from doing their job. On the boat deck, the venting steam forced men on the five-inch guns and after antiaircraft gun director to abandon their stations. The after guns were manned mostly by the ship’s Marine detachment. There was not a moment of panic among them. Before abandoning their steam-swamped battle stations, they actually requested permission to do so—and promptly returned to the boat deck as soon as the heat subsided.
CHAPTER 17
Reaching the signal bridge, Walter Winslow found that Captain Rooks had decamped from the bridge and gone one deck below to the armored conning tower, a protected command station with narrow slits affording a limited view right out over Turret Two. It was a much safer place from which to command a warship in battle, and Rooks needed every advantage he could get. Efficient communication was nearly impossible owing to the racket of the ship’s own gunfire. Every available phone circuit was abuzz with urgent reports and orders and acknowledgments. “I wanted desperately to know what we were up against, but to ask would have been absurd,” Winslow recalled. “From the captain to the men talking on the overburdened battle-phones, everyone in conn was grimly absorbed in fighting the ship.”
Rooks was doubtlessly having a hard time following the Perth up ahead. The only sign of the Australian ship was the yellow-orange strobes of her guns biting into the smoky night. Unlike the Houston,