Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [68]
Bright lights warred with darkness for possession of the night. “My God, those magnesium flares just light a place up,” said Paul Papish, stationed in the after battle dressing station. “It’s a ghostly effect. You just can’t actually imagine in your mind what it looks like…. But it’s indescribable. A Japanese destroyer had illuminated us, and I remember hearing somebody holler, ‘Put out that goddamned light!’ And they fired point blank, that star shell, into that searchlight, which couldn’t have been more than the length of [a] building away from us. You could hear screams coming from the Japanese ship.”
CHAPTER 20
Surrounded by enemy ships on all offshore bearings, the Houston was about five miles northwest of Panjang Island and about the same distance east-northeast from St. Nicholas Point, on an eastward course at twenty knots. It was a little after midnight. The ship was taking on water and listing hard, restricting both her speed and her maneuverability. Her main guns were silent, Turrets Two and Three shattered and burned out, Turret One starved for ammunition with flooded magazines and hoists. “Because of the overwhelming volume of fire and the sheer rapidity with which hits were being scored on the Houston, it was impossible to determine in many instances whether a shell, torpedo, or bomb hit had occurred,” Commander Maher wrote.
Lost in the numbing stop-time of battle, few of the Houston’s sailors could step back and evaluate the ship’s overall prospects. That was the job of the officers and the captain. Walter Winslow was standing next to Captain Rooks on the signal bridge. Having been forced to leave the conn by the intensity of Turret Two’s flames, Rooks summoned the ship’s Marine bugler, Jack Lee. “In a strong, resolute voice,” Winslow recalled, “[Rooks] spoke the fateful words: ‘Bugler, sound abandon ship.’” Pvt. Lloyd Willey marveled at the clarity of the horn player’s tone. “He never missed one beat on that bugle. It would have been absolutely beautiful if it had been anywhere else but at that time.” Lee blew his clean tones into the ship’s PA system. The abandon ship order went out over the battle telephones and the general announcing system.
Their commanding officer had foreseen this. His prescient “Estimate of the Situation” had described the swift, multipronged nature of the coming Japanese offensive. He had predicted Luzon’s vulnerability to air attack, had warned of Singapore’s exposure, and knew Japan would exploit it with its hard-hitting aviation corps. The devastating Darwin raid was no surprise to him either. He appreciated the skill of the Japanese officer corps and the dedication of their enlisted force. The Allies’ chances had never looked very good to Albert Harold Rooks. “If widely dispersed over the Far East, from Manila to Surabaya to Singapore,” he had written, “[the Allied ships] will be capable of only the most limited employment, and many of them will come to an untimely end.”
The captain was descending the ladder from the signal bridge when a salvo hit the number-one 1.1-inch mount on the ship’s starboard side, killing or wounding everyone in its vicinity. The blast threw a torrent of shrapnel into an athwartship passageway aft of the number-one radio room just as Rooks was coming off the ladder. It caught him in the head and upper torso. Ens. Charles D. Smith, the Turret Two officer, saw him stagger and collapse about ten feet from where Smith was standing. Rooks lay there, soaked with blood on the left side of his head and shoulders. Smith ran to him, but “he was too far gone to talk to us,” the young officer wrote.
Smith opened his first aid kit and stuck his commanding officer with two syrettes of morphine. “He died within a minute,” Smith would write. Then he laid a blanket over him and sought out the executive officer, Cdr. David W. Roberts, and the navigator, Cdr. John A. Hollowell Jr., and reported their captain’s death.
One of Captain Rooks’s mess attendants, a heavyset Chinaman named Ah Fong