Ship of Ghosts (29 page)

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, ‘All well.’ If he meant himself and the ship, he said, ‘Everybody well.’” From the signature line itself, the telegram might well have come from her son Harold R. Rooks, then a junior at Harvard University. Ten days later, however, she heard from him too. He sent a Western Union dispatch from Cambridge, saying, “
Just heard that Houston was sunk. Have you heard anything? Will stay in if you want to phone Eliot 1546. Love, Harold
.”

Edith had indeed heard something. But as word of the sinking of the
Houston
began to make headlines, the March 4 message from her husband was her talisman against the dark reality pressing down around her. It was a miracle of miracles. He was alive. When the Navy Department’s “We regret to inform you” notice arrived on March 14, the day of her son’s inquiry, informing her that her husband was missing following action against the enemy, she could dismiss it as a mistake, a bureaucrat being overzealous with the boilerplate.

The
Houston
was lost but her husband was fine, and she was so very proud of her older son. Nineteen-year-old Harold was busy with a naval reserve officer curriculum that would propel him in his father’s path. Edith applauded his ambition. Her March 18 letter to Admiral Hart was, as Hart told her in reply, “characteristic of you in having no hesitation about your son carrying on in his father’s footsteps.” The Rooks family was fully vested in this war. And Hart was not giving up on the skipper of the
Houston
. He wrote Edith on March 25, “I, myself, am by no means without hope of seeing Rooks in the flesh
again. It is quite true that we may not hear from him for a long time, since he may be a prisoner of war. But the experiences of ships sinking in action in that warm water is that there are many survivors in most of the cases. You see, water is warm, not rough, and men can endure until they are picked up.”

A few weeks later, the Secretary of the Navy put a sharp dent in Edith’s hopes, elaborating on the Western Union telegram.

For a few months her only source of news, and the only theater for her despair, was private correspondence. In late April, Edith received a letter from a Navy captain named J. W. Woodruff saying that the mother of
Houston
aviator Lt. John B. Stivers “had word from a most responsible source” that Captain Rooks was a prisoner of war in Formosa. No vague blandishment from the Secretary of the Navy could wash away the hope that grew from these heartening nuggets.

In a May 21 encomium to her husband, Admiral Glassford described him as “a tower of strength in getting our scattered forces together, providing safe conduct for hundreds of merchant ships escaping to the southward out of the fighting area to the north, and in planning not only our operations…but for our operations against the enemy…. It would be difficult for me to tell you how I relied on your husband’s advice to me during those days. So much so that I had determined quite definitely after I relieved Admiral Hart
to get Captain Rooks out of his ship at the first opportunity and attach him to my staff as the Deputy Chief of Staff. He never knew of this…. I needed just such a man.”

Y
ears of activism by William A. Bernrieder and other Houston civic leaders to name CA-30 after their city reflected a level of pride that wartime only strengthened. If the launching of the
Houston
had been cause for front-page headlines and champagne celebrations, her loss was, for Bernrieder, akin to the loss of a loved one.

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:

At the close of the ceremony, the new boots marched down to the railway station, where five trains would take them to west coast training centers. Ultimately, only one of the Avengers would actually come out of the personnel pool assigned to the new
Houston
: a reservist named William A. Kirkland, who worked as a banker in town. The rest were given to the Navy’s general personnel pool, which Secretary Knox called “an unparalled gift of manpower.”

The fate of those they were replacing remained a vexing open question when an AP wire dispatch published on July 2 cited a Japanese announcement that a thousand survivors of the USS
Houston
and HMAS
Perth
were being held at Batavia. No doubt mindful that the Japanese had been announcing the sinking of the
Houston
just about every other week since the start of the war, the AP discounted the news, referring to the essential untrustworthiness of enemy pronouncements.

The avenging impulse carried on. Later that year the city would organize a fund-raising campaign to pay for the new ship. By the time it closed on December 21, 1942, Houston residents rich and poor would pledge $85 million to cover the construction costs of the new
Houston
, delivered by check from FDR’s secretary of commerce, Jesse H. Jones, to Secretary Knox. And there was enough money to fund not only a new
Houston
but an aircraft carrier as well. In January 1943, a light carrier already under construction at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, New Jersey, was christened the
San Jacinto
(CVL-30) after Texas’s signature victory in its war for independence. That ship would slingshot a sometime Houstonian and future American president into desperate air battles in the far western Pacific. George H. W. Bush’s aircraft carrier would join a fleet that the survivors languishing on Java could only have fantasized about.

S
erang would be a way station to larger prisons. Consolidating the unexpected mob of prisoners—what imperial officer worth his sake could ever have imagined so many men surrendering?—the Japanese determined that more spacious accommodations were needed. On April 13 Imperial Army trucks arrived and the prisoners were mustered and told to prepare to move out. A Japanese officer ordered the Americans to line up against the jail’s wall. “Officer? Any officer?” he demanded to know. An American stepped forward. “Yes, I’m a naval officer.” It was Lieutenant Hamlin.

The Japanese, in broken English, elicited some basic biographical information from Hamlin. He was none too pleased to learn his prisoner was from the
Houston
. The Japanese officer alluded to a hospital ship sunk in Bantam Bay—“No good. No good,” he said—then he turned to weightier questions of honor. He asked Hamlin, “Who is the better man, Tojo or Roosevelt?”

“Roosevelt,” answered the lieutenant.

The Japanese officer turned and hollered at his troops, who jumped away from the American as machine gunners swiveled their weapons and trained them on the prisoners.

There was a weighty silence, then the officer stepped forward
again. “Who is the better man, Tojo or Roosevelt?” Again Hamlin responded in favor of his commander in chief.

The machine gun barrels converged on Hamlin now. The Japanese officer repeated the question, “Who’s the better man? Tojo or Roosevelt?”

Though he might have had special reason to know, given FDR’s famous affection for his old ship, Hamlin simply said this time, “Roosevelt is my leader.” This seemed to satisfy the Japanese officer. He barked at his troops and they began breaking down their machine guns. When they were finished, they began herding the Americans into trucks for a journey to God knew where.