Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [9]
Roosevelt gave up a day of fishing to wheel around topside, relaying orders from King Neptune and taunting pollywogs with tales of the ocean deity’s vengeance. The details of what happened next are privileged, as proceedings of the ceremony tend to be. The following noon, as lunch was being served to as many new shellbacks as could rouse themselves from their bunks, the ship entered the volcano-flanked anchorage at Tagus Cove in the Galápagos Islands and the boats were hoisted out for another presidential fishing charter. Roosevelt seemed to think an important rite of passage had been completed. That evening, returning to the ship with catches in hand, he was overheard telling his mates, “Today you became men.”
That the president loved the ship was not altogether surprising, for warships have a way of seizing the hearts of those who come to know them. The Houston was like that. Her captains tended to be bighearted and popular disciplinarians whose personalities helped animate her sleek, powerful lines. That she was neither stout enough to stand and slug with her foreign peers nor modern enough to track them with radar and destroy them from afar was immaterial to the mythology that grew up around her. After Roosevelt’s 1938 tour, the Houston was designated as the flagship of the United States Fleet. She had that distinction fleetingly, from September to December. But she would ever after be known as FDR’s cruiser, and that legacy would stay with the Houston through the ordeal ahead, when the ship and the president who loved her were oceans apart and fighting their own wars.
As the damaged cruiser raced for port on the night of February 4, 1942, the Pacific war in full vicious swing, memories of antebellum pomp and circumstance lay in shrouds. The story of its crew’s struggle would unfold far beyond the reach of the president, far from the Pacific Fleet, battered and smoldering in Pearl Harbor. They were forgotten, if not by their loved ones then certainly by a public outraged by losses much closer to home, and discarded by war planners who had no choice but to leave them to fight a holding action of indefinite length while their nation retrenched for a struggle whose theater of first priority was on the other side of the world. There were, for now, no more planes to send them, no more ships to reinforce them. Franklin D. Roosevelt was busy with a war plan that would leave his favorite warship fending for herself against increasingly doubtful odds.
CHAPTER 3
The Houston had been christened in line with the ambitions of its namesake city’s elite. In January 1927, wishing to paint Houston’s name on the gray hull of a newly forged symbol of America’s might, the city’s leaders rallied behind former mayor Oscar Holcombe in petitioning the Navy Department to name a cruiser for the second-largest city in the American South. In short order, a blitz of entreaties from Houston’s citizenry was hitting the desk of Navy Secretary Curtis D. Wilbur—nearly two hundred resolutions from civic organizations, five hundred Western Union telegrams from individuals, and five thousand “classically composed appeals” from “home-loving boys and girls who comprise our scholastic population,” wrote William A. Bernrieder, executive secretary of the Cruiser Houston Committee. Within nine months of the campaign’s start, the Navy announced that its newest cruiser would be named the Houston. She would be a flag cruiser fitted to accommodate an admiral’s staff and designated to replace the USS Pittsburgh (CA-4) as flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet.
Electric-welded, lightweight, and fast, the USS Houston (originally designated CL-30) was drawn up to pack 130,000 shaft horsepower, more than the entire U.S. fleet did in 1898. The shipbuilders at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock in Newport News, Virginia, birth state of Sam Houston, launched her on September 7, 1929, at a cost of $17 million. On that grand day, the citizens of Houston showed up in Virginia in numbers that powerfully impressed Newport News president