Ship of Ghosts (4 page)

T
he
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 Homer L. Ferguson, who attested, “Out of 319 launchings at the yards none was more colorful, nor bore more unmistakable signs of careful preparation.”

“No detail, however small, was overlooked by naval architects, engineers and scientists in making this cruiser the supreme combination of all that is superb and efficient in fighting ships,” William Bernrieder would tell Houston’s KPRC radio audience. The crew slept not on hammocks but on actual berths with springs and mattresses. There were mailboxes throughout the ship, a large recreation hall with modern writing desks and reading lamps, footlockers instead of musty old seabags for personal storage, and hot and cold running water—not just for officers but for the crew as well.

Commissioned in the summer of 1930 and reclassified from light cruiser to heavy cruiser a year later, the
Houston
acquired her lifelong identification with the fabled U.S. Asiatic Fleet from the beginning. The ship was the Asiatic Fleet’s flagship until 1933. By the time she returned in that capacity in November 1940 under Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf, relieving the
Augusta,
tensions with Japan were escalating dangerously.

The Asiatic Fleet was, in effect, the frontier detachment of the turn-of-the-century Navy. In the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, its ships toured Asia’s imperial wilderness, showing the U.S. flag. Though it was always led by a single heavy cruiser or battleship that served as its flagship, the fleet’s signature vessel was the gunboat, 450-tonners that ranged inland—as far as thirteen hundred miles up the Yangtze River—to safeguard U.S. interests in China. One officer who commanded a Yangtze gunboat called them “seagoing fire departments.” By virtue of its exotic station, basing its ships wherever the seasons or the tremors of faltering European empires required—Shanghai, Tsingtao, Manila—the fleet enjoyed a cachet among sailors that always outweighed its meager physical assets. Free from stateside hierarchies and rigmarole, Asiatic Fleet sailors acquired a signal swagger and style. Admiral Hart held a high opinion of them. “Like their officers, the men were regulars and were of longer average service and experience than the rest of the Navy…. No man ever commanded a better lot.” In 1905, a midshipman named Chester Nimitz had served his first sea
duty with the fleet, on board the twelve-thousand-ton battleship
Ohio
. Thirty years later he was back, commanding the fleet’s flagship, the cruiser
Augusta
.

Few American military men have served their nation as isolated and far removed from support as the men on “Asia Station.” On the world maps that schoolchildren studied—Mercator projections that invariably centered on the North American continent and whose edges cleaved the world vertically at 110 degrees east longitude—they patrolled the extreme edges of the planet. It was not possible to be farther from home. In such an exotic setting, even the most worldly American boy would have been an innocent, but the
Houston
’s crew were provincials by most any measure. Decades before, as the Navy was pushing to build a modern battle fleet—an ambition that got a boost with the victory over Spain in 1898—the commandant of the Newport Naval Training Station declared, “We want the brawn of Montana, the fire of the South and the daring of the Pacific slope.” As a Navy Department official wrote in 1919, “The boy from the farm is considered by the naval recruiting service to be the most desirable material.” At a time when judges were still sentencing criminals to rehabilitation by service in the fleet, the Navy would take whatever able-bodied, hardy-souled young men it could find. The arrangement was useful for all concerned. In the Depression and immediately afterward, new recruits joined not to redeem the free world but to save their hardscrabble selves. In a ship such as the
Houston,
the children of the “hungry thirties” entered a self-contained meritocracy in which they might find a way to thrive.

Smart discipline could mold the hardest cases into sailors. Pfc. John H. Wisecup from New Orleans, tall, lean, profane, and shockingly effective in a fight, no longer got into fisticuffs in the disciplined confines of the
Houston
’s Marine detachment. Such behavior had nearly brought a premature end to his Navy career. Driven by an aggressive machismo that seemed to have no greater expression than a drunken brawl, he had a checkered service record but enjoyed the saving good fortune to have had at least one commanding officer along the way who, when Wisecup crossed the line, saw enough virtue in him to spare him from a general court-martial.

Prominent among those virtues was his fastball. A dominating right-hander, Wisecup had taken his New Orleans Jesuit Blue Jays to an American Legion regional title and had played in the minor leagues before enlisting in the Corps and finding himself hotly recruited
to play for the Marines’ Mare Island squad. The commander there was a colonel named Thompson. A devout baseball fan, he took a liking to Wisecup—or at least to his right arm. He had seen what it could do to the Army and semipro teams that challenged the Marines for supremacy on the base. That fondness paid dividends for Wisecup when he got into a boozy fistfight with another Marine who happened to work as a guard at the base prison, famously known as “84” after its building number. Wisecup took the guy apart.

The next day Colonel Thompson hauled in the private, heard his story, and passed along some dire news: “You know, they want your blood at ‘84,’ John.” Wisecup said that he suspected as much. “If I give you a general court-martial,” the colonel said, “you’re going to do your time right over there. You know what’s going to happen?” Again Wisecup said he knew. The colonel offered him a way out. The USS
Chaumont
was in port. The 8,300-ton Hog Island Type B transport had won fame as the ship that had first landed Marines in Shanghai in 1927. It was a coveted billet for anyone looking to join the fabled Fourth Marines on Asia Station. The colonel told Wisecup the
Chaumont
was at the pier and that if he was smart he’d go along with a new assignment. “Go pack your gear and get aboard,” Thompson said. In pulling that string for his ace, the colonel gave him a free ticket not only out of the doghouse but to glory road.

Wisecup boarded the
Chaumont
—and blew the opportunity on his very first liberty. Overstaying his leave, he returned to the ship and was given an immediate deck court-martial. Tried and found guilty, he got ten days of bread and water and a stiff boot out of the China Marines. Halfway through his sentence, another ship moored alongside, and Wisecup was ordered to transfer to her and finish serving his sentence there. The other ship was the USS
Houston
.

Wisecup was not meant to be a China Marine. But he was clearly meant to stand out on the
Houston
. When the troublemaker hauled his seabag up the gangway, he saluted the officer of the deck and announced, “Sir, Private Wisecup, reporting for duty. Where’s the brig?” Wisecup did his time and managed to stay out of the lockup thereafter. He adapted to a world of regimentation and polished pride. Captain Rooks’s Marines were not allowed topside except in full dress, shoes polished and shirts triple-creased. Forced to vent his insuppressible rages privately, Wisecup maintained a serviceable
reputation, though in time his steel locker door was permanently bowed in.

The tradition of the seagoing Marine dated to the Revolutionary War, when Marines shot muskets from a man-of-war’s fighting tops. It spoke to the depth of the leadership tradition that grew from the
Houston
’s heady early days, and of the talents of 1st Lt. Frank E. Gallagher, Gunnery Sgt. Walter Standish, and 1st Sgt. Harley H. Dupler of the
Houston
’s detachment in particular, that a man such as John Wisecup was put in a position to make something of himself. It was true of all the crew to one degree or another, such was the contrast between life on board ship and the deprivation of the times. A sailor named James W. Huffman left his faltering family farm in the San Joaquin Valley, California, in 1933 and hustled his skinny frame to the San Diego Naval Training Center mostly in order to eat. And because the Depression destroyed families as well as livelihoods, more than a few
Houston
sailors had enlisted to escape broken homes. Howard R. Charles, a
Houston
Marine private, put himself in the path of a world war by escaping the wildfires of another: an escalating violent struggle with his stepfather back home in Hutchinson, Kansas. Melfred L. “Gus” Forsman, a seaman first class, didn’t need a push. He left Iowa in April 1939 to become a
Houston
sailor, dreaming of seeing faraway lands. But as he soon learned, anyone aspiring to a life of adventurous globetrotting found he had been sold a bill of goods. Fuel was expensive, and ships were kept in port as often as possible. Most enlisted men found their ambitions checked by a system of class that generally reserved the prestige of an officer’s commission for the white, the Episcopal, and the wealthy. The accoutrements of the good life found in officers’ country—silver service worthy of Hyde Park, a Steinway baby grand in the wardroom, all gifts of the citizens of Houston—were as much the ornaments of expectation as of accomplishment.

Several members of the
Houston
’s Marine detachment
were veterans of the illustrious Fourth Marine Regiment, the unit that helped defend Shanghai’s International Settlement from the brushfires of combat between Japanese and Chinese forces. According to a veteran of Asia Station, Rear Adm. Kemp Tolley, the Fourth Marines were “the seaward anchor of the Yangtze Patrol during the period which might be called the Patrol’s heyday: 1927 to its flaming end on Corregidor.” One of its battalion commanders, the colorful Maj. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, had served in the
Augusta
’s Marine detachment under Captain Nimitz. The
Houston
’s Sgt. Charley L. Pryor Jr. had gotten his first stripe from Puller himself during his tour on the
Augusta
. In 1940, liberty in Tsingtao was an adventure unto itself. “Marines were never slow in tangling with men of the various other foreign detachments,” Tolley would write. “A very satisfactory state of belligerency could be established by a leading question or a facetious remark concerning a Seaforth Highlander’s kilt.”

Brawling frolics with soldiers of friendly nations were one thing. The Japanese were another. Charley Pryor had seen them training for war, witnessed their exercises, saw squads and company-sized units drilling in the hills and on the beaches in and around Shanghai. He wrote his parents in Littlefield, Texas, of brawls between Marines and militant Japanese nationals. “Everyone hates the Japs and though we are all told to take anything they say or do to us, it just won’t be done. I will try to kill the Japanese who so much as lays a hand on me. I am just like everyone else so I know the rest will do the same thing.”

As Hitler’s armies tore through Europe and Russia, the International Settlement became electric with energy, swelling with Jewish refugees from Austria. They brought some of Vienna with them, erecting bistros and wienerschnitzel stands alongside the tea and silk shops. String combos played on the streets. But by December 1940, as many people were fleeing the Settlement as arriving there. Distress was in the air. A
Time
correspondent wrote:

The Marines’ experience in China was excellent preparation for what the
Houston
’s officers had in store for them. For thirteen months leading to the outbreak of war, Cdr. Arthur L. Maher, the gunnery officer, had run a training program rooted in the idea that competition through intersquad rivalry was the key to high performance. The 1,168-man wartime complement was full of senior petty officers who had a talent for promoting competition between divisions. In
the deck force, it was up to men such as boatswain’s mate first class Shelton “Red” Clymer—“a real tough old bird,” said one sailor—to get green recruits ready for war. In the engineering department belowdecks, any number of experienced hands kept the screws turning. Lt. Cdr. Richard H. Gingras and his hard-driving machinists ran the ship’s two steam power plants. “The caliber of the senior petty officers was way above anything that I’d seen in these other ships,” said Lt. Robert B. Fulton, the ship’s assistant engineering officer. “Other ships were struggling to get basic things together. None of them could compare to the caliber of personnel on the
Houston
.”