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an interviewer, “Captain Rooks passed the word, ‘Don’t abandon ship! I’m going to beach it!’” Others, however, dispute the willingness of a top captain such as A. H. Rooks to risk turning his cruiser into a Japanese war prize. The longtime president of the USS Houston Survivors Association, Otto Schwarz, called the claim “a short-lived rumor” and “comic book propaganda.” Rear Adm. Robert B. Fulton observed that the Houston had no steering control once the after engine room was disabled, and regarded the idea that Captain Rooks was aiming to ground his ship as not only impracticable, but an insult to his reputation. “No capable and responsible commanding officer would ever beach his ship where it could pass into the hands of the enemy,” Fulton wrote to the author. “That would constitute a violation of the most basic rules in our Navy…. In the wardroom we had several discussions as to how we could best sink the ship if forced to that action to avoid capture…. The talk of beaching the ship is just nonsense. The originators of those stories, I think, were just trying to say something complimentary about their Captain, whom we all revered…. But those stories show a total lack of understanding of all that our Captain had to face.” In an August 28, 1945, letter to Edith Rooks, Ens. Herbert A. Levitt, the Houston’s signal officer, stated that the captain said to him, “We’ll beach her, man, and fight her from there” before he, “reluctant and with tremulous voice,” ordered Levitt to sound the abandon ship. In context, the remark, if it was actually made, seems more a fleeting and emotional exclamation than an order.

Part Three

THE EMPEROR’S GUESTS

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

—Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried

CHAPTER 21

The Houston’s survivors were never far from shore. Their ship came to rest a few miles west of Panjang Island, and about the same distance east of St. Nicholas Point. The Perth settled several miles north of the Houston.

Despite the proximity to the coast, the obstacles to reaching land were formidable. Although 368 Houston survivors would finally be rounded up ashore—less than a third of the ship’s wartime complement—by all accounts many more than that survived the ship’s immediate trauma and loss. The final tally would take years to sort out. According to the ship’s action report, 150 men who made it into the water alive were never seen again. Lt. Harold Hamlin would write, “I saw hundreds of unwounded men go over the side there, whom I haven’t seen since.” So many men never reached the beach. With most of the lifeboats shattered by gunfire and torpedo blasts, and with any number of life rafts dropped prematurely on the first call to abandon ship, out of reach as the dying ship drifted to a halt, survivors clung to the handiest wreckage. The powerful surge draining out of the Java Sea through Sunda Strait took hold of them and whatever flotsam they were holding to—rafts, furniture, mattresses, spent shell cases—and pulled it toward a fathomless oblivion in the Indian Ocean.

From the moment the USS Houston and the HMAS Perth sank, hundreds of separate dramas set out on diverging paths. The currents feeding Sunda Strait saw to that. They spread the survivors far and wide. They dangled them within a hard swim of land all around St. Nicholas Point and near islands in the strait’s northern channel, and pulled them away on a natural whim. Survivors contended with predators under the sea and on land. They were set upon by native hillmen eager to settle scores with the white man and embrace the arriving Japanese. They were hauled aboard Imperial Army transports. They were shot in the water where they swam, never given a chance.

Sailors have earned places in legend for exploits less than what these men did up to the time of their sinking. Surely few