Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [69]
The order to abandon ship took Robert Fulton by surprise when it came in over a phone circuit. “We were really roaring along,” the assistant engineering officer recalled. His forward engine room was turning the outboard screws at some 330 revolutions per minute. With all four screws going at that speed, the ship would normally make thirty-two knots. But the inboard screws were dead, just dragging through the sea. The best the Houston could do now was about twenty-one knots. Except for the dead phone circuits and the peculiar wagging of the after engine room’s telegraph pointer, Fulton had had no indication anything was really wrong with the Houston. The abandon ship order seemed precipitous.
Thinking some kind of mistake had been made, he called the bridge and requested verification of the abandon ship order. Several minutes passed during which Fulton and his crew had no idea what they should be doing. Finally, after several minutes of chafing silence, a second order to abandon ship was received. Fulton passed the order to the rest of the dozen-odd men with him in the forward engine room and commenced the shutdown of the cruiser’s last working propulsion plant.
The fireroom crews shut down the burners under the boilers, leaving valves open to bleed off the high-pressure steam in the system. Though this was a standard procedure that removed the risk of injuries from the release of high-pressure steam in the propulsion system, it could not stop the ship with its ten thousand tons’ worth of inertia. As a consequence, the Houston continued to make headway as the first life rafts were lowered over the side. They were lost as the ship sailed on before crews could climb down into them.
With Captain Rooks’s passing, the ship’s senior surviving officer and exec, Commander Roberts, took charge. At 12:29 a.m., having noticed the loss of several rafts as the ship made way, he countermanded the abandon ship order. The cancellation went out over an intercom system that was too shattered to carry the message everywhere. Some heard it, turned away from the rail, and took shelter in less exposed areas of the ship. But many others never did, and they continued helping themselves and their shipmates overboard.
Quite a few sailors who returned to their battle stations were only too glad to get back into the fight. The prospect of leaving the ship was rife with uncertainty. During a lull in shooting, Gus Forsman was having a cigarette on the boat deck with gunner’s mate second class Elmer L. McFadden when he heard Commander Roberts on the intercom ordering all hands back to their battle stations. Forsman thought: Well, that’s more like it.
No matter how bad off a ship may be, there must always be a plan going forward, an objective to reach for, an opening to gain, a reprieve to win. How else should a sailor invest his hopes? The ship itself looms so large in his life that her end can be quite inconceivable.* But the near certainty of the ship’s end dawned on even the most unshakably optimistic of the ship’s crew. As he was returning gladly to his gun mount, even the gung-ho Forsman found himself thinking, I wonder how the water is.
Though they could tell “we were really getting the devil knocked out of us,” Jim Gee and the other sailors and Marines belowdecks in the five-inch magazine had frozen in disbelief when the first abandon ship order was passed around. The hatch above them was dogged down from above. Unlike the hatches in the main battery’s magazines, there were no dogs on the underside. They had no way out. For a time, they did not move from their stations. Yet their confidence