Ship of Ghosts (17 page)

Eleven o’clock came and went. Soon the lighthouse on Babi Island was visible about a mile and a half off the starboard bow. Ahead and to port, Java’s coastline dropped away where Bantam Bay opened up, then returned in the form of St. Nicholas Point, marking the northern opening of Sunda Strait. About seventy miles separate St. Nicholas Point, located at the strait’s fifteen-mile-wide northeastern bottleneck, and the Java Head lighthouse that marks its southwestern opening into the Indian Ocean. In the center of the strait lies a rocky cluster of islands whose very name evokes cataclysm. The explosive self-destruction of the island of Krakatoa in 1883 reverberated from Bangkok to western Australia, shook the hulls of ships eighty-five miles east in Tanjung Priok, sent aloft the ashen remains of six square miles of rock, and killed some 36,000 people. It had reformed the contours of this rocky passage between the Sumatran and Javanese headlands. Because the entire Dutch East Indies lie along the fault line between the Eurasian and Australian tectonic plates, Java and the seas surrounding it are ever alive with volcanic activity.

Sunda Strait’s powerful currents run always to the south, counterparts to the northerly flows that prevail in the straits east of Java, in a sense making the entire island a vortex in a whirlpool more than six hundred miles across. Krakatoa’s remnants are eddies in Sunda’s flow, creating currents and rips strong enough to sink ships, the wreckage of which swiftly washes into the wide Indian Ocean. The deep paroxysms of geology that opened the celebrated passage had catered to the needs of traders and adventurers ever after. Merchants and travelers alike would use Sunda Strait for east-west transit. For those getting rich selling pepper and nutmeg, or exploring Oriental and Polynesian frontiers, it was the gateway to opportunity and discovery. And it had known war as well. For Kublai Khan, transiting the strait in the year 1293 with a thousand ships and twenty thousand men, it was an avenue to pacifying an upstart Javanese king who had snubbed the Mongol leader by sending his ambassador home less his nose. For Captain Rooks, who had brought his ship north through this strait seeking a fight with the enemy, it offered a route to survival.

“Ever since the night of the 23rd,” wrote Lieutenant Hamlin, “when I last looked at this body of water, I had been getting on fine with a thoroughly fatalistic attitude. Not pessimism, just a fatalistic attitude. Now I began to see rosy visions of the
Houston
steaming
into an Australian port. Then the long trip home for a new turret, and a visit with my wife.”

On the
Perth,
yeoman of signals Eric Piper was “pacing the flag deck exhorting everyone to be alert.” It was no idle pep talk; many of the sailors were faltering from exhaustion. When Lt. Lloyd Burgess finished his four-to-eight-
p.m
. navigator’s watch that evening, he was so tired he couldn’t remember a single order he had given or the name of a single crewman he had spoken to.

The strait ahead demanded the strictest vigilance. On either side, land formed a backdrop that rendered ship silhouettes invisible after dark. Commanding the machine-gun platform high in the
Houston
’s foremast, Marine gunnery sergeant Walter Standish remarked to Sgt. Joseph M. Lusk and Pfc. Howard R. Charles, “They could hide a battleship out there, and we’d never see it until it attacked.” The shoreline’s shadows were a hazard of sorts, but after long stretches of combat duty on the open sea, Charles welcomed the sight of the Java mainland. “If we sink, at least there’s land nearby,” he thought, making a mental note of a constellation, the Southern Cross, that would mark the way to shore if the worst came to pass.

Around 11:15, Captain Waller spotted something, a dim silhouette low and dark on the water lying in the embrace of the shadows. He took it for a Dutch patrol craft and ordered his chief yeoman to flash a challenge on the Aldis signal lamp. After several prickling seconds the response came, a greenish light blinking a stream of nonsense. A stickler for good signal work—it was one of the few subjects where the captain’s sense of humor left him—Waller ordered the challenge repeated, and as his yeoman did so, the unidentified vessel turned, revealing the telltale silhouette of a Japanese destroyer even as it started making smoke.

Captain Rooks spotted the ship just a beat after Waller did. Keeping station on the
Perth
nine hundred yards astern, he too considered it a Dutch picket until it became clear it was moving much faster than a patrol boat would. He ordered general quarters as a precaution and relieved his officer of the deck, Lieutenant Hamlin, who scrambled down to take station in the officer’s booth of Turret One.

On the flag deck of the
Perth,
whose magazines were even lighter than the
Houston
’s, with just twenty rounds per six-inch gun, Bill Bee sensed activity on the bridge above him. Manning the starboard eighteen-inch carbon arc spotlight, he noticed the cruiser’s A and B turrets, the twin-mounted six-inch batteries just forward of him,
swinging out to starboard. “I looked in the same direction as the guns were pointing and without the aid of night binoculars I could make out four objects which appeared to be destroyers coming towards us bearing about 020 degrees.” The
Perth
turned slightly to port. The
Houston
followed. The first hint most of the American cruiser’s crew got that anything was amiss was the sudden, startling flash and shock of the
Perth
’s main guns ripping into the night up ahead.

As the general quarters alarm began its dissonant electronic barking (its energizing effect never diminished: even a veteran like Lieutenant Winslow leapt from his bunk and “found myself in my shoes before I was fully awake”), Lieutenant Hamlin could see a red Very flare arc skyward from the vicinity of the unidentified ships. Captain Rooks, spying the dim shapes dead ahead and to starboard, ordered the after five-inch guns to illuminate them. They barked, lofting star shells to seven thousand yards, but the rounds burst short, producing a bright white glare and no silhouettes for the
Houston
’s gunners to range on. Another salvo extended the range, but still the phosphorous rounds failed to reach beyond and silhouette the target. When the
Houston
’s own main battery let loose, the range was just five thousand yards.

From his cinematic vantage point on the
Perth
’s flag bridge, Bill Bee was optimistic about the gunfire’s results. “Our first salvos appeared to strike home on the leading DD’s and I was expecting another burst from the forward turrets when flashes of gunfire from a number of directions diverted my attention.
Houston
too had now joined in the fray.” The blast of the
Houston
’s first salvos nearly knocked Ens. Charles D. Smith clean overboard as he raced from his stateroom to his battle station in the officer’s booth of Turret Two. In short order Smith’s guns joined the fight. Exactly how many ships they faced, and of what type, was as yet unclear. The
Houston
had just fifty rounds left per eight-inch gun after the marathon engagement in the Java Sea. “We were desperately short of those eight-inch bricks,” wrote Lieutenant Winslow, “and I knew the boys weren’t wasting them on mirages.”

Run for the strait or attack into the bay? For Captains Rooks and Waller, there was no real choice at all. With a full moon rising, the night offered only a thin cloak to movement. The long silhouettes slipping through the narrow waters around Sunda Strait could not fail to find them. Of course, cruiser commanders only ever go to sea
with one purpose in mind: the destruction by gun salvo of every enemy ship they can bring within reach.

When the
Houston
was preparing to depart Tanjung Priok, seaman first class William J. Stewart had overheard an officer in the communications department tell Captain Rooks that the ship’s stash of confidential publications was gathered and ready in case it became necessary to dispose of them by throwing them overboard. Stewart knew enough about security procedures to appreciate the implication that danger lay ahead. “I figured we were in for trouble that night.”

Around 11:30
p.m
., the
Houston
’s communications department transmitted the message that would be the last clue to the ship’s fate the world would have for more than three years. For the ship whose death had already been announced gleefully and repeatedly by Japanese propagandists, that had avoided one trap after another, that was now steaming at flank speed toward the engagement the best minds of the Allied navies had sought, entering battle again was no cause to wax dramatic.

The last that anyone would ever hear from the USS
Houston,
the HMAS
Perth,
their remarkable commanders, or so many of their superb crews was a final radio transmission that Captain Rooks sent before the approaching cataclysm swallowed him forever. To Admiral Glassford, to the commander of the Sixteenth Naval District, to Radio Corregidor, and to the chief of naval operations, he reported: “
Enemy forces engaged
.”

H
oward Brooks dared to hope they might make it through Sunda Strait. But when the star shells started bursting, illuminating the ship so terrifically as to render academic the setting of the sun, he despaired of it entirely. He could hear the drone of a single-engine plane. The damn thing was dropping flares all around them from up on high, tracking them just as the bobbing phosphorous pots had marked their night run after the Java Sea battle. The planes seemed to have lights for every occasion. The Japanese were professional sea warriors, no question about that. The
Houston
had all she could handle.

The first Japanese ship to respond to the surprising intrusion by the
Houston
and
Perth
into Bantam Bay was the destroyer
Fubuki
. Her commander was as startled by the encounter as his two counterparts were. Cdr. Yasuo Yamashita, spotting them about eleven thousand yards east of Babi Island, was unsure of their identity but confident his ship had not yet been seen. He rounded in behind them, keeping a safe distance of about five miles. He shadowed them until he saw the leading Allied ship flash a challenge on her signal lamp. At that point he ordered his torpedomen to fire nine Type 90 torpedoes while the destroyers
Harukaze
and
Hatakaze,
patrolling closer to the beach, laid a defensive smoke screen. As the two Allied
cruisers accelerated, guns roaring, the
Fubuki
signaled the commander of other Japanese forces out there in the dark: “
Two mysterious ships entering the bay
.”

The
Houston
and the
Perth,
had they been alerted to the presence of an enemy fleet, might have sought a way around it, even despite their weeks-long effort to grapple with it. Sufficiently forewarned, the Japanese invasion force might well have chosen to let the two cruisers slip by. There was great risk in exposing the important operation they were undertaking that night in a gun battle with two cruisers, even if their destruction would have eliminated Allied naval strength in the area.

The
Fubuki
’s early warning brought a prompt reaction from Rear Adm. Kenzaburo Hara, commander of the screening force accompanying the Western Attack Group. Immediately he ordered the light cruiser
Natori
and the six destroyers of the 5th and 11th Destroyer Divisions into action, and requested the help of two heavier hitters, the
Mikuma
and
Mogami
of Cruiser Division Seven, providing cover about fourteen nautical miles to the north. The two heavy cruisers hustled south, accompanied by the destroyer
Shikinami.
The Japanese warships fired illumination rounds. They rose in swift arcs and dropped white contrails that glowed in the blaze of drifting chemical suns.

In the officer’s booth in Turret One, Lieutenant Hamlin got one last chance to peek through his periscope before the careening rush of strobe-lit events absorbed him completely in the management of his rocking main battery. He saw the
Perth
turning north and felt his own ship turning in behind her. The long shadows of enemy ships lurked at almost every compass point, flashes of gunfire blinking out all around. In the
Perth
’s plotting room, through the voice tube, Schoolmaster N. E. Lyons heard someone on the bridge say, “There are four to starboard.” Then, “There are five on our port side.” Then, “By God, they’re all round us.”

Marine private Jim Gee ran below to his general quarters station in the five-inch magazine. “You could see the ships just all over because we immediately turned on searchlights. And the Japanese turned on searchlights…. The place was like Fifth Avenue, you know. And I guess for the first time, I myself felt some apprehension but I went down in the magazine and things were moving so fast that you really didn’t have time to think about the situation.”

The
Perth
led the
Houston
in a tight circle, engaging targets as
they revealed themselves with their searchlights, silhouettes, or flash of guns. While the Japanese searchlights reached them easily, those of the Allied ships lacked the reach to be effective in turn. “We were firing at any target that [we] saw, point blank—pick your target, fire at will,” said Gee, part of the eight-man team of sailors and Marines in his magazine. The volume of fire coming back on them was heavy. Gee said, “We knew they were having hell upstairs.”

Set up as a medical triage at general quarters, the
Houston
’s wardroom was full of corpsmen and stretcher-bearers waiting for something to do. Walter Winslow asked them what they knew about the enemy they were fighting. No one seemed to have much information. He started climbing a steel ladder toward the bridge, holding tight to the rail as the main battery’s concussion jarred his grip. He ran across the communications deck, passing one of the ship’s four quad-mounted 1.1-inch machine guns along the way. “Momentarily,” Winslow recalled, “I caught a glimpse of tracers hustling out into the night. They were beautiful.” By the time he reached the bridge, it seemed every mount on the
Houston
was firing.