Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [67]
The random nature of the carnage made it futile to anticipate or avoid. “It’s coming from all sides,” Paul Papish said. “You don’t know where to go on the ship for protection…. Up the ladder you go, and you figure, ‘Well, bull! This isn’t the place to be!’ So you head back down.” The sick bay, the brig, the life jacket locker, the wardroom, and the foremast machine gun platform all took direct hits. A series of burning belowdecks compartments were ordered flooded. When a fire broke out in magazine number two, timely flooding by Commander Maher prevented a catastrophic explosion. Word followed that the small-arms magazine between magazines one and two was afire, and it was flooded too. Then Lieutenant Hamlin in Turret One was surprised to hear a report of fire in his own magazine.
He had had no suggestion of it from the men best situated to know, those stationed in the magazine itself. Presumably a high temperature reading sent up a red flag to magazine flood control, so Commander Maher had ordered magazine number one flooded as well. As a precaution, Hamlin ordered the sprinklers activated in the lower powder hoists. But the wrong switch was thrown and the upper hoist and powder circle got wet too. As a consequence, he lost several salvos that were ready in the upper hoist. One last salvo remained in Turret One’s breeches. It was duly fired, and from that point onward the Houston was without the services of its largest guns.
With a ten-degree starboard list, the Houston was fighting with her lightest weapons. Two motor torpedo boats sped in, attracting the attention of the .50-caliber gunners in the tops and the 1.1-inch gunners below them. One boat was seen to disintegrate in the storm. The other was sawed clean in half yet managed in the seconds available to it to fire a torpedo, which ran on the surface and struck the Houston on the starboard side forward of the catapult tower.
“The ship seemed to be thrown sideways, and the deck jumped so bad I was knocked to my knees,” remembered seaman second class Bill Weissinger. “That explosion must have shot a couple of tons of water into the air, because when I started to get up, it came pouring down, and Bam! Down I went again. Man, it was heavy.” The explosion jarred the catapult track loose from its mounting, and it collapsed across the quarterdeck.
With Japanese ships pressing so close that Houston sailors could hear the roar of their firerooms, the battle harked back to an earlier day when naval battles were fought within man-to-man reach, without industrial tools to enable long-distance killing cleansed of a personal aspect. “It was point-blank. It wasn’t any of this arcing over yonder,” said Frank King, “it was just right broadside.” Seaman first class Gus Forsman, on a port-side five-inch gun, said, “It was invigorating to be in a battle like that to where you didn’t wait for orders to fire or anything. You just picked a target and fired at it.”
The light guns kept up a busy chatter, but the five-inch mounts were running short of ammunition. Resigning himself to the inevitable, seaman second class Earl C. Humphrey, the rammer on Forsman’s gun, backed up against a ready box full of star shells, cradling one of his mount’s last projectiles in his arms. He told Forsman, “I thought I was going to get it, and when I got it well, I wanted to go all the way.” But when the gun captains ran out of common five-inch ammunition and started raiding that ready box for ordnance, Humphrey’s express ticket to a painless death started to look a little less certain.
Star shells were deadly at close range. The captain’s talker, aviation machinist’s mate second class John Ranger, a hero of the February 4 fire in Turret Three, stood just outside the conning tower, still tethered to his phones even though Captain Rooks had left to escape the flames from Turret Two. Standing there, Ranger could hear the hollering of the Japanese sailors as their ships were struck with the sizzling phosphorous rounds. The