Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [61]
Waller stood on the bridge with nine other officers and chiefs. As the forward batteries sustained their measured cadence, flashing hell at the enemy and jarring to pieces furniture and other loosely anchored fixtures, Waller maintained an outward calm, his voice steady as he issued helm orders. He periodically vented pressure, as when a spotlight stabbed him—“For God’s sake shoot that bloody light out!” But by and large he kept so quiet that silence became contagious. Lloyd Burgess “felt his heart hammering and all sound was within himself, so that he could almost hear the blood pumping through his body.” Waller’s composure defied the increasing tempo of the apocalypse swirling outside his pilothouse. He kept calm even when the worst happened and the first Japanese torpedo bore down and struck the Perth, marking the beginning of its end.
She was barreling along at twenty-eight knots when the fish struck near the forward engine room. The crash and the roar shook her and departed, leaving behind a strange silence in her guts. “Some vital pulse had stopped,” Ray Parkin remembered. The intercom crackled with the report, “Forward engine room out. Speed reduced,” to which Captain Waller’s response was, “Very good.”
Gunfire battered the Perth, knocking away the seaplane catapult back aft. Word followed that B turret forward and X and Y turrets aft were out of projectiles, and that the loaders were ramming practice rounds boosted by an extra bag of powder for better hitting effect. Then A turret checked in, reporting just five projectiles left. Waller acknowledged each piece of bad news by saying, “Very good.”
The Perth started slowing with the first torpedo hit, her gyro smashed and the fire-control system gone with it, guns switched over to local control. The crews on her two forward four-inch mounts were all killed by blasts. The men on the other secondary guns, also out of ammunition, were left to fire star shells and practice rounds at the enemy. When a sailor wondered aloud in the dark, “What do we use after these?” an older man suggested they raid the potato locker for ordnance.
The Perth’s deck lurched again as a second torpedo struck. This one seemed to lift the ship from a point right under the bridge. The rising deck threw Captain Waller and his nine officers and chiefs upward, and they fell down again, knocked to their knees.
“Christ, that’s torn it,” Waller said. “Abandon ship.”
The gunnery officer, Peter Hancox, asked, “Prepare to abandon ship, sir?”
“No,” the captain said. “Abandon ship.” Waller’s instincts about ships were not prone to be wrong.
The usual procedure was to secure the engines so that the ship would drift to a stop, thus allowing crewmen to leave the ship in the vicinity of lifeboats as they were lowered from the halyards. Waller instead ordered the chief quartermaster to leave the engines at half speed ahead. “I don’t want the Old Girl to take anyone with her,” he said. The suction of a sinking ship could draw survivors under. Perhaps Waller considered it a matter of choosing one’s poison. The crews of the Perth’s A and B turrets left their gun houses and rushed out on deck to release the life rafts, but their timing was unfortunate. They reached the open air just in time to be cut down by heavy shellfire.
John Harper, the navigator, ran through passageways spreading the captain’s order to abandon ship. Reaching the sick bay, he found carnage. The scattered mess of bloodied sailors in their white uniforms reminded him of strings of red and white ceremonial flags, stricken and piled in a red and white heap. Survivors sat there “stupefied with shock” and required sharp reminders to get moving. Collapsed bulkheads and piles of debris nearly blocked their