Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [89]
Communiqué No. 54 became the basis for an Associated Press report that led the front page of the March 15, 1942, Los Angeles Examiner. Jane Harris, who lived in Los Angeles, saw it. The eighty-point sans-serif headline declared, “12 Allied Warships Lost in Java Battle—U.S. Cruiser Houston, Destroyer Pope Among Japanese Victims—13th Vessel Beached; 8 Nipponese Craft Sunk in Fight.” But since the piece didn’t mention her husband, as far as Jane Harris cared, it might as well not have run.
The ambiguity grew worse five days later. On March 20, the Navy delivered a telegram to 16011⁄2 North Broadway Street in Santa Ana, regretting to inform Lanson Harris’s parents of their son’s MIA status. “Santa Ana Flyer Listed as Missing,” announced the hometown paper. Newspapers around the country reported the various local reverberations of the Navy’s communiqués and casualty lists. “Kin of Missing Sad but Proud, Some Hopeful,” reported the New York Herald Tribune. In April, a wire report detailed the exploits of Houston crewmen who fought an inferno ignited by an aerial bomb that hit the cruiser’s after gun turret. That was the last certain knowledge to be had of their worldly acts. “Heroes of Cruiser Fire Now Missing,” the Los Angeles Times reported on April 15.
A United Press dispatch published in some U.S. papers on April 24 opened the possibility of hope. It reported a Japanese propaganda announcement that gloatingly claimed that the Houston’s gunnery officer, Cdr. Arthur Maher, was in captivity in “the southern regions.” According to the Domei News Agency, which broadcast the dispatch, Maher had told his interrogators that only a few of the Houston’s complement had been rescued after “the Battle of Java.”
The potential enormousness of the ship’s loss was itemized on May 14, when the Navy published “Casualty List No. 3,” naming the 2,495 officers and enlisted men missing in action from the Pearl Harbor attack through the middle of April, as well as 2,995 more killed in action during that period. The entire crew of the Houston appeared on the MIA list. What fate had befallen any one of them was unknown.
People received news in approximate proportion to their mental and emotional wherewithal to collate scattered and fragmentary dispatches. They had to read the right newspaper at the right time, or have friends or family in other cities to keep track of out-of-town sources. For some people, the uncertain grief of a missing loved one eroded the concentration needed to scan and absorb relevant information from the stream of world developments, just as it intensified the need to do so. With four theaters of war in full furious swing—a struggle that Franklin D. Roosevelt had described in a fireside chat as “a new kind of war…different from all other wars of the past. Not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography”—it was easy to miss the smallest report that could unlock a mystery.
The telegram from the Postal Telegraph Co. reached 705 McGilvra Boulevard in Seattle on March 4, about ten days before she would learn that anything had happened to her husband’s ship. The local receiving station had date-stamped it 12:44 p.m. Though it was printed with any number of alphanumeric codes, the space reserved for the point of origin simply said, “Sans Origine.” But its message seemed to establish an essential fact that Edith Rooks would cling to in the difficult months ahead. It was simply this: “Everybody well. Love, Harold Rooks.”
If that was so as of the date it was stamped, it did not matter to the captain’s wife where the telegram had originated. She told a reporter, “That means he and the ship are okay. When he meant himself in cablegrams to me, he said,