Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [72]
Lieutenant Hamlin got off the ship by sliding down the port side of the bow as the ship rolled over to starboard. “I nearly fell through a hole back into the anchor windlass room, which would have discouraged me tremendously,” he wrote. Taking note of “a great many unauthorized holes” up forward, Hamlin reached the waterline and found he could stand on the hull. He walked aft, over the bulge amidships. “I hit the water on the other side of that bulge and gave the best imitation of a torpedo that I could, trying to get away from suction.”
“There were dead fish floating all around,” one sailor noted. “It was a very badly shark-infested area, but there was no danger from sharks that night. They were dead, too.”
They drifted on the swells, watching Japanese destroyers have their way with their ship. “I thought of her as she was when I joined her—just back from a Presidential cruise,” Lieutenant Hamlin recalled. “She shone from end to end with new paint and shining brass and polished steel. Well, there wasn’t much spit and polish to her now.”
Hamlin put a few hundred feet of water between him and his ship, then turned back to take a look at her. “She was full of holes all through the side, these close-range destroyer shells had gone right through one side and out the other, a good many of them…. Her guns were askew, one turret pointing one way, and another the other, and five-inch guns pointing in all directions.”
Listing hard to starboard, settling by the bow, the Houston was bathed from stem to stern in hostile white light, wooden decks splintering under gales of machine-gun fire. She seemed on the verge of capsizing, yardarms nearly touching the sea, when, according to John Wisecup, “she righted herself like a dog shaking water off its back,” perhaps momentarily counterflooded by an unnoted and gratuitous torpedo hit. When that happened, the colors, brought to life by the beams of hot carbon arcs, just seemed to snap to and wave over the watery battlefield. “Perhaps I only imagined it,” Walter Winslow wrote, “but it seemed as though a sudden breeze picked up the Stars and Stripes still firmly two-blocked on the mainmast, and waved them in one last defiant gesture.”
As the Houston sank, going down by the broken bow, red tracers were seen, right to the end, still whipping down from the foremast’s machine gun platform. Gunnery Sergeant Standish, Wisecup wrote, “living up to Marine Corps legend, was a warrior to the end.
“Many years have gone by,” wrote Wisecup, “but I can still vividly recall the scene. The stars and stripes still fast on the mainmast streaming aft in the breeze. The ‘Gunny’s’ fifty-caliber machine gun still sending out a line of tracers toward the Japs as the tired old Huey Maru slowly sank beneath the waters of the straits.
“Not a word was uttered by anyone on the raft as they gazed at the spot where our ship had gone down.”
Once upon a day, William Bernrieder, the booster who had led the USS Houston campaign, called her “the Nation’s safest insurance against foreign aggression—the expression of might upholding the right…. May we always regard her as the emissary of peace, but if fight she must—may the Cruiser Houston—the pride of our Navy—never strike her colors to an enemy.” That was the one thing her survivors would remember, as clearly as a first child’s birthday, long after they were left alone in the nighttime sea. She never struck her colors.
*Several Houston survivors have claimed that Captain Rooks wanted to steer the Houston toward Panjang Island in an effort to beach her, presumably to save his men and turn his ship into an unsinkable artillery emplacement. According to Quentin C. Madson, the captain’s last words were, “Head for the nearest land. We’ve got to give the men a chance.” William J. Weissinger Jr. recalled the PA announcement: “All hands stand-by for a ram. The Captain is going to try to beach. All hands stand-by! Belay abandon ship!” Seaman first class Seldon D. Reese told