Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [64]
Spotlights reached for Captain Rooks’s cruiser and missed, summoning the shapes of Japanese transports nearer to shore. The Houston’s forward Mark 19 antiaircraft director got their range and fed an accurate setup to the main and secondary batteries, which banged away to port in roaring acknowledgment of the gift. Whenever a wayward searchlight beam settled on a transport or a support vessel, they would work her over furiously.
Then, amid the chaotic melee out to sea, a series of sharp detonations could be heard closer to the beach. Within sixty minutes of their first encounter with the Allied cruisers, the Japanese ships cutting the shell-torn seas outside Sunda Strait had put eighty-seven torpedoes into the water. More than a few hit appropriately hostile targets. But most of them churned harmlessly on toward the Japanese transports and auxiliaries clustered near shore. No fewer than four Japanese transports took torpedoes in their bellies, most all of them fired by Japanese destroyers. By widespread eyewitness accounts, at least four transports and a minesweeper were sunk or heavily damaged in the fratricidal undersea crossfire.
Among these was the Shinshu Maru, the headquarters vessel of Lt. Gen. Hitoshi Imamura himself.* As that shattered transport rolled over, tons of heavy equipment, including badly needed radio equipment belonging to the Sixteenth Army, slid from its decks into the sea. Joining hundreds of his troops in the water, Imamura rode driftwood for several hours before a boat finally retrieved him. When he was at last delivered to shore, the drenched general parked himself on a pile of bamboo and was finally forced to confront the humor in the debacle as an aide congratulated him on a successful landing on Java.
Imamura thought that torpedoes from the Houston had hit his ship. Given her proximity, it was natural to make this assumption, though it was of course patently impossible, as the Houston no longer carried torpedo tubes. Still, the general’s own chief of staff allowed the notion to stand. Later, receiving a Japanese commodore sent to apologize to him for the navy’s error, he discouraged the apology, preferring the honor of taking a blow from enemy samurai to the embarrassment of fratricide. “Let the Houston have the credit,” he said.
Over on the Houston, just as the flow of steam was stanched from the destroyed after engine room, permitting the after director crew to return to their stations, the ship lost use of her brain. A torpedo struck the ship to starboard below the communications deck, plunging Central Station and the plotting room into darkness. They could hear the thunder of the Houston’s own gunfire, the rumble and snort of the enemy shells striking. At least once came a horrible, high-pitched metallic grinding sound that might have been the sound of a dud torpedo nosing along the side and bottom of the ship’s hull. The crew from Plot, on the starboard side of the ship, withdrew into Central Station, away from the vulnerable sides of the hull.
By the red glow of emergency battle lanterns, they weighed their options. With his rangekeeper out of action, Lt. Cdr. Sidney Smith decided there was little point in staying put. He got on the phone to the bridge and asked permission to abandon Central Station. He and his plotting department