Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [91]
He was visiting the Navy Department on that sad day in early March when he heard that the Houston had been sunk. “There was a bell in the naval office which tolled every time a ship was lost,” Bernrieder said. “I’m not a crying man; I’ve probably cried twelve times in my life. But when I saw that dispatch and heard the toll, I went down the hall into a bathroom and cried.” The emotional resonance of the name Houston was no longer exclusive to Texas. In short order following the news of the cruiser’s loss, Navy secretary Frank Knox announced that a sleek new Cleveland-class light cruiser under construction at Newport News and slated to be christened the Vicksburg would be renamed Houston. The new Houston (CL-81) was scheduled for a June 1943 launching. And the people of the city of Houston were preparing an even more resounding salute to the lost ship.
“There’s never been anything like it, before or since,” a city magazine would write four decades later of Memorial Day 1942 in Houston. More than ten thousand Houstonians jammed Main Street between McKinney and Lamar to ensure that the memory of their late namesake cruiser would never be lost. They had read with the rest of America the Navy dispatches and scant news reports sketching the events of her demise. They hungered for news that at least some of the crew might have survived. If it would fall to the Navy to build a new Houston, the city itself would take the job of finding the men to replace the human toll.
The old heavy cruiser embarked 1,168 men. The goal of the “Houston Volunteers” recruitment drive was to find a thousand more to replace them. The throng in downtown Houston that day had come to witness the swearing in of a group chosen from the more than three thousand who answered the call. Few of the eager volunteers were likely aware that according to Navy superstition, it was powerfully bad luck for a ship to have its name changed after the keel was laid. There was a war to be won and a campaign of boosterism to sustain. The volunteers included ranch hands and cowboys, college kids and middle-aged men. “I’m ready to fight,” one of them told a recruiter after the word went out just two weeks before Memorial Day. “I want to join the Houston Volunteers and get a chance to avenge the boys of the cruiser Houston.” The volunteers would indeed later become known as the “Houston Avengers.”
Though a Navy edict would block family members from serving on the same ship, there was no shortage of familial pledges. Brothers volunteered with brothers; fathers showed up with their sons. A fifty-three-year-old logger named William Harrison Watson tried to sign up but was turned away because of his age and poor eyesight. His four boys took the oath instead. The Junior Chamber of Commerce commissioned a sixty-foot model of the old Houston and displayed it outside the naval recruiting office. The keynote speaker that day was the last admiral to fly his flag from Houston’s truck, Admiral Glassford, extracted from the doomed Asiatic theater.
Like Glassford, William Bernrieder must have marveled at how times had changed. When the executive secretary of the Cruiser Houston Committee was a naval reservist in the twenties, he had walked down this very same thoroughfare in uniform and been jeered at by pacifists. Now it seemed people couldn’t jam themselves tightly enough into the downtown intersection to join this street festival of patriotism. After Glassford finished the swearing-in ceremony, Houston’s mayor, Neal Pickett, read a letter from President Roosevelt over the loudspeakers:
On this Memorial Day, all America joins with you who are gathered in proud tribute to a great ship and a gallant company of American officers and men. That fighting ship and those fighting Americans shall live forever in our hearts.
I knew that ship and loved her.