Ship of Ghosts (16 page)

The harbor authorities rebuffed the
Houston
’s and
Perth
’s requests for fuel, informing Lt. Robert Fulton, in charge of fueling, that it was on reserve for Dutch warships.

When the Americans and Australians informed them of the disaster off Surabaya and the loss of most of the Dutch Navy, the harbor masters yielded a bit. Some cajoling and arm-twisting got three hundred tons of oil pumped into the
Perth,
bringing her bunkers to half capacity. The
Houston
got somewhat less. One of the dud projectiles that struck her during the Java Sea action had penetrated her oil tanks, making it impossible to fill them above a certain level without leaking an oil trail. But some thought her 350,000 gallons on hand was adequate to reach Australia.

It was clear the
Houston
would not make the trip in her accustomed high style. Like the
Perth,
she was about as battered and salt-worn as her crew. “Concussion from the main batteries had played havoc with the ship’s interior,” Walter Winslow wrote. “Every unlocked dresser and desk drawer had been torn out and the contents spewed all over. In lockers, clothes were wrenched from hangers and dumped in muddled heaps. Pictures, radios, books and anything else not bolted down had been jolted from normal places and dashed to the deck.” The well-appointed admiral’s cabin, which marked the
Houston
as a flagship, standing ready for use by any flag officers or adventurous U.S. presidents who might happen to come aboard, was a mess of ruined luxuries: overturned furniture, shattered glass and china, and drifts of soundproof insulation torn and jarred from the bulkheads. Scarcely a piece of glass was intact. Portholes, lightbulbs, mirrors, searchlight lenses, crystal tumblers, picture frames—all had been shattered by the impact of battle. The concussion of Turret
Two, which often fired while rotated to an extreme after bearing, had popped rivets and metal fittings and battered the weather shields girding the bridge, as well as damaged the signal searchlights on the navigation bridge. The guns themselves needed replacement.

The
Perth
was equally bad off. After the battle, an exhausted Hector Waller went to his cabin to rest for a spell. The forty-one-year-old captain sorely needed it. “He had been off-color for days,” remembered a
Perth
sailor. Jaundice had cast his skin in a pale yellow. Arriving in his cabin, he had to sweep his bunk clean of glass shards before lying down to rest.

On both ships, the buzz now centered on two things: what might have been in the disastrous battle they had just survived, and what might yet come to pass in the urgent days ahead. As to the first question, the American sailors speculated how it might have gone differently had the
Boise
or
Marblehead
or
Phoenix
been with them. For the men of the
Perth,
the absent savior was their old Mediterranean squadronmate, the heavy cruiser HMAS
Australia,
whose gunnery, they said, was as good as it got. The Aussies felt that if a proven fighter such as “ol’ Hec” had been in command rather than Admiral Doorman, the Combined Striking Force would have been handled more aggressively and decisively.

Captain Waller’s reputation had swelled with his successes in the Mediterranean. Commanding the destroyer HMAS
Stuart,
he had won two Distinguished Service Orders, one for his gallant turn during the Battle of Matapan, where the
Stuart
contributed more than a destroyer’s share to the Royal Navy’s greatest victory since Trafalgar and helped end Italy’s challenge to the naval balance of power. Waller had a reputation as a fighter and a hands-on commander. He liked to read and send his own signals. He proved his marksmanship by blasting floating mines with his own rifle. Visiting the governor’s palace in Malta, he had had both the temerity to tell the island’s First Lady that her famous rose garden was poorly pruned and the skill to wield the clippers himself and improve it. “Leaning against his bridge rail or walking the quarterdeck or even in civilian clothes he seemed to broadcast strength—the inner controlled strength of a man who knew where he was going, and knew why,” Ronald McKie wrote. Heavy-shouldered and balding, with rounded facial features, he was stern and serious-minded but given to seasonable playfulness. His odd mix of traits enabled his dour aspect to become its own brand of charm. Though his full given name, Hector Macdonald
Laws Waller, might have suggested he had been bred to dine with fine silver, he lacked pretense utterly. A naval career had in fact been his sole professional purpose since the age of nine.

The consensus among the Monday-morning quartermasters was that the three light cruisers should have operated independently of the heavies and charged with the destroyers straight at the Japanese, while the
Houston
and the
Exeter
blasted away from afar. The Americans could only guess at the destruction they would have wrought had their after eight-inch battery been working. Its untapped potential was plain to see—and haul. For the better part of that afternoon in Tanjung Priok, the crew continued loading projectiles from the after magazine on bedsheets and carrying them six hundred feet to the depleted forward magazines and handling rooms. The treacherous hike was considerably easier to do while the ship was moored rather than pitching and rolling at sea in the midst of battle.

Beyond the second-guessing, most of the sailors were elated to have survived at all. Having paid their way, they felt they had earned some respite now in safer harbors. “Everyone was lighthearted, and thinking that we had done our share, and done our best,” Lloyd Willey said. “We thought it would be great to see the United States again.” Others looked forward to more immediate good times in Australia.

While the crew was trying to get refueled, the
Houston
floatplane pilot who had stayed behind with his aircraft in Surabaya, Lt. Tom Payne, radioed word that he would fly to Tanjung Priok that afternoon to rejoin the ship. When he arrived, approaching the harbor from the sea, the raw-nerved crew of a Dutch shore battery opened fire on his Seagull at long range. As explosions of flak burst all around him, Payne touched down beyond the breakwater, cursing vigorously. As he began to taxi in, a Dutch torpedo boat motored out to inspect him. The
Houston
’s crew watched with some trepidation, unable to inform the boat that it was their shipmate. To their relief, it circled Payne’s aircraft and escorted him back into the harbor. “Tom was hoisted on board,” Walter Winslow wrote, “perplexed, to say the least, by his less than cordial welcome.”

N
aval service is a highly technologized trade. In it, life is simplified to the degree possible around the practical application of repetition-driven training. In the age of practical mechanics, efficiency was the route to advancement—and, in war, to survival. Training was designed in part to reduce war’s emotional calamities to the mastery of innumerable arcana, mechanics, and procedures. And yet somewhere along the way this rational world seemed to turn back on itself and touch a spiritual plane. As sailors’ worlds contracted around their narrow specialties, it was easy for them to feel as much like initiates in a mysterious brotherhood as cogs in a machine. Vestiges of the mystical remained. And despite their determined optimism, dark superstitions lurked everywhere.

While she was preparing to leave Fremantle for the East Indies, the
Perth
had been recalled three times before finally receiving orders to depart at 11:30 on February 13. Confronted with the unlucky date, Captain Waller intentionally delayed standing out till after midnight on the fourteenth. One did not idly tempt the fates. Unease was already rife on that ship. The
Perth
sailors realized at one point that two chaplains were on the roster, and contemplated the apocalyptic implications. “One was bad enough,” Ronald McKie wrote, “but two—that was lethal.” Another omen: While the
Perth
was firing on Japanese planes, a portrait of Marina, Duchess of Kent—it was she who had rechristened the ship as the
Perth
in 1939 after she was acquired from the Royal Navy as the HMS
Amphion
—fell from the wardroom bulkhead and crashed to the floor. Clearly dark ghosts were at work.

But perhaps the most striking portent involved the feline mascots of the
Houston
and the
Perth
. “I don’t know if Captain Rooks had anything to do with this or not, but it seemed very strange,” remembered Seldon Reese, a seaman first class on the
Houston
. As Rooks walked down the gangplank for a meeting of commanders, the ship’s cat “took off down that pier into Java like some big hound dog. You never saw a cat move so fast in your life.” Apparently the animal had had enough of life on the ship, be it a favorite of the president or not. Crewmen who witnessed the incident were nearly as spooked as their feline ex-shipmate. It gave substance to a fear expressed by Lieutenant Winslow—“that, like a cat, the
Houston
had expended eight of its nine lives and that this one last request of fate would be too much.”

The
Perth
’s black cat, Red Lead, had been given to a sailor at a New Year’s Eve party in Sydney in 1941. The feline had lived life as seagoing contraband until one day his owner devised to sneak topside and release the cat when Captain Waller was on duty on the bridge. The affection-starved animal snaked around Waller’s legs. To the delight of the sailor, the captain adopted the cat, removing the risk of its expulsion by officers junior in rank but superior in adherence to the book. In port now, Red Lead tried three times to desert the ship. The master-at-arms finally had to put him in “irons,” sticking his paws in a kerosene can with holes cut in it. The animal seemed to know something.

A
t dusk on February 28 the two ships got under way from Batavia. The Dutch destroyer
Evertsen,
also in port, ought to have joined them, but her commander had no orders and her boilers had no steam, and either deficiency was enough to keep her in port no matter how much the cruiser captains may have wanted her as an escort. Without a harbor pilot to guide them, trusting their own charts and the coming full moon—it would be bright enough to allow the antiaircraft rangefinders to take navigational fixes on shore—Rooks and Waller led their ships through the minefield channel without
incident, and increased their speed to twenty-two knots. Their bid to reach Australia was all that remained.

Walter Winslow wandered out on the quarterdeck by the port-side catapult tower. Looking astern, he watched Java’s darkening junglescape shrink in the flow of the ship’s trailing white wake. “Many times before I had found solace in its beauty, but this night it seemed only a mass of coconut and banana palms that had lost all meaning. I was too tired and too preoccupied with pondering the question that raced through the mind of every man aboard. ‘Would we get through Sunda Strait?’”

On the
Perth,
officers in whites assembled on their own quarterdeck to salute the striking of the ensign at sunset. Captain Waller held Red Lead, scratching him absently as the bugle pealed. An officer on the
Houston
had asked, as his ship was passing north through Sunda Strait on February 24, whether anyone had heard what he had: the sound of a gate clanging shut. The
Perth
’s engineering officer, Lt. Frank Gillan, felt a similar breath on his neck as he saluted the falling flag. According to Ronald McKie, “He felt that this moment at sundown was a dividing line between the past and the future and that somewhere a decision had been made affecting his life and the lives of them all.”

Another night fell, quieter than the last. The two ships sailed west toward what they hoped would be a more promising tomorrow.

T
he sea was calm. The moon would soon rise, bright and full. Those who managed to sleep did so fitfully. Those who could not sweltered in the nighttime heat. On the bridge, Captain Rooks and the rest of the officers of the watch clung to the reassuring Dutch reconnaissance report that the strait to the west was clear. Though the Japanese fleet seemed to be everywhere, at the moment the two ships seemed to be catching a break. The Japanese controlled all of the waterways leading out of the Java Sea except one. Sunda Strait, the narrow outlet into the Indian Ocean, lay open.

They had nothing to guide them but their eyesight. The
Houston,
with no radar, relied on the limited capabilities of the
Perth
’s air-search set, but it was generally confounded by the mess of islands cluttering these waters. So all eyes watched the dark. Off duty and hungry for sleep, Walter Winslow went to his cabin, navigating by the dim blue glow of battle lights set close to the deck at his feet. He switched on a flashlight briefly to find his cabin door, stepped in, and moved to his desk. Sitting on top of it was a carved wooden figurine, a Balinese head that he had bought on his first visit to Surabaya and had seen fit to name Gus. Standing in the dark, Winslow said, “We’ll get through this O.K., won’t we, Gus?” He felt sure his little friend on the totem had responded with a nod.