Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [63]
She hadn’t gone fully over yet. Gillan could still feel that the ship was making forward headway while sinking by the bow. He realized this meant the water must be entering the ship from the forward compartments and flowing toward the rear. And he knew the inflow would carry with it assorted flotsam—entangling lines and nets, as well as heavier objects—that could prove dangerous if he fought against the natural progression of things.
In a moment of clarity, Gillan realized that his only hope was to surrender to the sea. If he relaxed and let it take him, it might just carry him free of the ship as it sought its own escape from the labyrinth. He tucked his knees up under his chin and began rolling aft as the water embraced him. Like a small boulder at the bottom of a rushing stream, he tumbled backward through a wreckage-filled passageway, gulping enough air to survive and thinking all along, Thank God my Mae [West] isn’t fully inflated. I’d be up against the roof if it was and would never get out.
Lungs burning, Gillan felt himself bump up against the ship’s rail. He was finally free of the enclosed torpedo space. The cord to his miner’s lamp snagged momentarily on the rail, but then he was floating again, being washed up and down, unsure of which direction the surface was. He felt currents whirlpooling around him. The sensation evoked an amusement park ride before the flashing of red, green, and purple lights marked the possibility that his brain was starving for oxygen as he drowned.
Then the sea seemed to yield. There were no more currents, no more detritus of a battered ship grasping at him. All was still. He basked for a moment in a dying repose before it occurred to him, If I don’t struggle now I’ll drown. He clawed at the water around him, sensing the surface above and reaching furiously for it. At last there came an explosion of water and tarry black bunker oil as Lieutenant Gillan broke the surface and sucked air again.
Any frail hope for the Perth was lost when a fourth torpedo struck the ship forward on the port side, throwing high another foaming column of seawater. This broke her. As survivors scrambled overboard and swam clear, they looked back and saw her not so much sink as drive herself under water. “Her four propellers came clear of the sea,” Ray Parkin wrote. “Three of the shafts were now broken, but the fourth was still turning. She went down for all the world as if she were steaming over the horizon from them. ‘She did not sink,’ they said, ‘she steamed out.’”
Frank Gillan caught the very last sight of the ship. Surfacing, he grabbed a biscuit tin floating nearby and fastened his arms around it, then turned and looked back in the direction of the ship. About a hundred feet away from him, a large curved blade—one of the Perth’s propeller screws—flicked the air one last time and disappeared beneath the ocean’s surface, carrying Captain Waller, dead on the bridge, and hundreds of others to their final resting place at twenty fathoms.
“I’m the last man out of that ship alive,” Gillan announced to the stars overhead. “God, I thank you.”
CHAPTER 18
At about ten minutes after midnight, the Perth could be seen from the Houston’s bridge and forward deck spaces, apparently dead in the water and sinking. “When Captain Rooks realized she was finished and escape was impossible,” Walter Winslow wrote, “he turned the Houston back toward the transports, determined to sell his ship dearly. From that moment on, every ship in the area was an enemy, and we began a savage fight to the death.”
The Houston was alone, facing attacks not only from the Mikuma and Mogami looming some twelve thousand yards to the north but also from two full destroyer squadrons and assorted armed auxiliaries. In their concentrated assault, direct hits from Japanese gunfire were following fast and furious, smashing the Houston up forward, producing a killing storm of shrapnel and flames. In the warren of passageways and compartments below, the noise came as a nearly continuous roaring, droning hum.
“We couldn’t