Ship of Ghosts (5 page)

In dealing with the Japanese leading up to war, the U.S. Congress had been considerably less surly than the leathernecks of the Fourth Marines. Certainly, Japan had not always been America’s enemy. During World War I the two nations had enjoyed a de facto alliance, Japan fondly remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-Russian posture during the Russo-Japanese War and eager for the chance to relieve Germany of its colonial island holdings in the Central Pacific: the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. Worried about provoking Japan, the U.S. Congress voted in February 1939 against appropriating $5 million to upgrade the Navy’s forward base in Guam. Though in April 1940 Adm. Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, had relocated the United States Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, overseas the Navy would make do with the bases it already possessed.

The imperial Japanese notion of peace was as consistent in application as it was different from the rest of the world’s understanding of the term. Serene dominion over continental and oceanic Asia was the Tokyo militarists’ idea of peace, clearly articulated by Japan but widely misunderstood in the West. “Japan was the only important nation in the world in the twentieth century which combined modern industrial power and a first-class military establishment with religious and social ideas inherited from the primitive ages of mankind, which exalted the military profession and regarded war and conquest as the highest good,” wrote the historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The Japanese Imperial Army, which by 1931 had become the dominant voice in Japanese government, adopted the ancient ambition of Japan’s mythical founder, Emperor Jimmu: the principle of
hakku ichiu,
“bringing the eight corners of the earth under one roof.”

With Formosa and Korea in hand, spoils of previous wars, Japan cast its ambitious eye on China and its iron- and coal-rich northern provinces. Imperial troops had been there in sizable force since the “Manchuria Incident” in 1931. In a malevolent gambit that seemed to preview the Reichstag fire in 1933 Weimar Germany, the Japanese garrison conspired to bomb the South Manchuria Railway, which it controlled, in order to justify more aggressive moves against its enemy. An escalating cycle of provocation and skirmish ensued. In July of 1937, a year in which Emperor Hirohito’s Japan allocated sixty-nine percent of its budget to the military, the intensifying fighting provoked Japan to launch a full offensive in northern China. Aiming to avoid embargoes mandated by the U.S. Neutrality Acts, Japan called its savage campaign against civilians and city-dwelling foreigners a benevolent occupation. But the strain of China operations soon compelled Japan to look farther afield for oil, timber, rubber, tin, and other materials to wage the war. Playing on the tensions between the Soviet Union and Germany to maximize its freedom of action in Asia, Tokyo turned its covetous eyes southward, to the Dutch East Indies.

Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Bali, Timor, and the 17,500 other islands in the scimitar-shaped archipelago held a world of natural wealth. Ten thousand species of birds, fish, flora and fauna were its surface manifestations: exotic deerlike pigs, dwarf buffalo, tree kangaroos, Komodo dragons, one-horned rhinos, and freshwater dolphins. Land’s boundary line with the sea was smudged every year by the onset of monsoons, typhoons, and windblown wave crests during the rainy season. But it was the treasures below the ground—oil, tin, manganese, roots that gave life to rice plants, and trees bearing rubber—that interested Japan.

In the years preceding war, American diplomats had driven a hard bargain with the Japanese, constraining them with naval arms treaties and holding out the threat of boycott and embargo to compel them to walk the line. Americans watched but did not seem to appreciate the fervor with which Japan was seizing control of the Asian mainland. Weary of war, some believed that messy foreign entanglements could be avoided, saving their suspicions for their own military or for Wall Street financiers and arms traders who they thought had profiteered during the Great War. In June 1940 the U.S. Army’s total enlistment stood at 268,000 men. It was inconvenient to contemplate that during the first six weeks of the Rape of
Nanking, nearly half that number of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, as well as some American civilians, had been slaughtered by the Japanese Army.

The naivete of the isolationists concerning Imperial Japan’s ambitions was matched only by the ignorance of the average enlistee concerning its capabilities. Most American servicemen saw the Japanese as too many newspaper cartoonists sketched them: bucktoothed simpletons who would wilt when faced with U.S. Marines and tough sailors in their impregnable ships. But the perking belligerence of the Japanese dispelled any such misguided popular stereotypes among U.S. military planners. They saw the threat. As 1940 wound down, with the Japanese drawing up plans to seize the Dutch East Indies, American military dependents were sent home from the Philippines. Admiral Hart relocated the Asiatic Fleet from Shanghai to Manila in November 1941, allowing Rear Adm. William A. Glassford to stay on as long as he could in Shanghai as head of the Naval Purchasing Office and nominal boss of the Fourth Marines. The American position on the mainland was, according to Kemp Tolley, “about as hopeful as lighting a candle in a typhoon.”

I
n August 1941, Edith Rooks traveled from Seattle to Honolulu to say farewell to her husband as he prepared to take command of the USS
Houston
in Manila. Understanding the temperature of the times, Captain Rooks could not restrain himself from a moment of candor. He took stock of the developing crisis over China and told Edith that he would be unlikely to come home from this assignment alive. As his son would explain, “He said the power of the Japanese was far greater than what we could muster, and he did not expect to return.”

The 1914 Naval Academy graduate, having made captain in February, was a star performer and seemed bound for flag rank. His assignment to the Asiatic Fleet flagship was for two years—the minimum length of sea duty to make him eligible for promotion to rear admiral. On August 28, Rooks found the
Houston
at Cavite Navy Yard in Manila and two days later relieved Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf as her commander. The next day he wrote Edith and reiterated his mixed feelings. “It’s a shame to wish away time at our age, but two years is a long time, and I don’t look forward to it with pleasure.” In 1941 even a keen observer such as Rooks, long a student of geopolitics
and now able to observe the Pacific theater firsthand, had trouble teasing out the flow of events. “My opinion of the Jap situation keeps changing. If I understand the press reports coming out of Tokyo, they are making some very grave decisions right now. I think they will finally decide against war with us, but I certainly might be wrong.”

In other writings, Rooks’s pessimism prevailed. His analytical mind told him that whatever her industrial advantages over the long term, America would not long stand up against a determined Japanese offensive in the western Pacific. He appreciated the Japanese Navy’s capabilities. Samuel Eliot Morison would write, “Few Allied naval officers other than Captain Rooks of the USS
Houston
believed the Japanese capable of more than one offensive operation, but they exceeded even his expectation.”

If he did not wish away time entirely, Rooks marked its passing with the precision of a chronometer. “Well, September is almost gone,” he wrote Edith after a month in command of his ship, abandoning longhand and breaking in his new Underwood typewriter, acquired in Manila for forty-five dollars. “Day after tomorrow it will be one month since I took over the
Houston,
and two months since I left you in Honolulu. That makes two twenty-sixths of the time, or 1/13 gone. When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound so interminable, does it?”

In time he seemed to realize the cumulative effect on Edith of reiterating his pessimism. In his correspondence to her during the ensuing months leading up to war, one can sense him doing penance for his earlier candor. “The longer they keep from striking, the less chance that they will start anything. For one thing, America is growing stronger every day,” he wrote on October 5.

He told Edith he thought the Japanese would attack Siberia if they attacked at all. “They are really in what must be for them a very unsatisfactory position. An attack on Siberia will not solve their pressing need to obtain oil and other supplies. In a movement to the South, where such supplies are, they will inevitably be opposed by the combined power of the United States, the British Empire, and the Netherlands East Indies. If they make no move at all, our embargo will slowly but surely sap their economic and industrial strength and will probably ultimately defeat their effort in China.” Two weeks later he noted that “the Jap situation is sizzling this week end, with the fall of the cabinet, and with the torpedoing of our
destroyer
Kearny
on the east coast. I suppose it means real trouble…. Well, come what may, I am ready for it.”

For a short time still, the Philippine capital would be a sanctuary from the kind of chaos that was overtaking Shanghai. A few months into his tenure as captain, with the
Houston
moored at Cavite, Rooks returned to his stateroom after an evening on the town and wrote Edith, “It is an interesting fact to me that there seems to be no particular fear or nervous tension here at all. Everyone seems calm, cool, and cheerful. They have of course been facing such crises for months, not to say years, and are inured to them…. As for me, I face the future with the utmost confidence. My job is turning into one of the biggest in the Navy at this time, and I am fortunate to have it. The ship is in excellent condition as far as material and training is concerned. Whatever weaknesses she has are those of design. Service in these hot southern waters is of course very uncomfortable when the ships are sealed up for war operations, but we will have to take that.”

He seemed eager to revoke his farewell prophecy in Honolulu. “I have a feeling that fate is going to be kind to me,” Rooks wrote to Edith, “and that on some happier tomorrow we will be walking the streets of Seattle in company, as we now do in spirit.”

I
n November 1941, the tension that gripped the naval base at Cavite was palpable. A war warning was circulating. Aware of the Asiatic Fleet’s vulnerability in Manila, Admiral Hart scattered the vessels.
*
The
Houston
was stripped down for action. The admiral’s flag quarters were cleared of all unnecessary accoutrements. The nicer furniture was stored ashore in Manila, including the silver service and the baby grand piano. One afternoon, when the
Houston
’s softball team went out to meet a challenge from sailors at Canacao Naval Hospital, the familiar peacetime routine prevailed. Three hours later, the ballplayers returned to find the well-ordered chaos of a warship preparing to get under way.

A shore patrol went to round up stragglers still on liberty. Yard workers hustled to reinstall the ship’s four carbon arc searchlights, which had been detached and set aside for replacement by newer models. They doubled their efforts to install two additional four-barreled 1.1-inch antiaircraft mounts. Welders dropped over the sides to burn portholes shut. The ship’s degaussing cable, wrapped
around the ship’s hull to produce a magnetic field to defeat magnetic-triggered mines, was hurriedly tested and calibrated. The
Houston
was going to sea. FDR would fish with it now from afar, pursuing more formidable quarry.

At nine
a.m
. on December 1, the
Houston
set course for Iloilo, 238 miles south of Manila, while the light cruiser
Marblehead
and the destroyers headed for bases in Borneo. Navy war plans had long provided for such a withdrawal. The prewar consensus had been that the Asiatic Fleet would leave the area entirely, biding time in the Indian Ocean until the main Pacific Fleet had advanced far enough west to join in a counteroffensive. Hart was initially reluctant to abandon the Philippines without a fight. As late as October 1941 he suggested keeping his small fleet in Manila and fighting alongside General MacArthur. But Secretary Frank Knox’s Navy Department deemed it too risky. A compromise was reached under which the
Houston
would move further south but stay nominally in the region, leading the fleet from Surabaya, Java.

Stopping at Iloilo, Rooks rendezvoused with Admiral Glassford, recently evacuated from China. When Glassford’s Catalina flying boat splashed down in the bay just before dark on December 7, a motor launch from the
Houston
retrieved him and brought him to the ship. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Glassford reportedly said upon stepping aboard. The
Houston
was soon en route to Surabaya.

The
Houston
’s escape was a close one. The Japanese swung their blade east and south on December 8 (December 7 in the United States). The
Houston
radioman who received Admiral Hart’s Morse code transmission perfunctorily copied the block of characters, dated the sheet three
a.m
. local time, tossed it into the basket, then asked himself, “What did that thing say?” It said: “Japan started hostilities. Govern yourselves
accordingly
.” “We had hardly cleared Iloilo entrance when we heard gunfire astern of us and saw a ship aflame,” Cdr. Arthur Maher recalled. Hidden in the dark backdrop of Panay’s mountain ranges, the
Houston
avoided notice of the Japanese pilots. She joined a pair of Asiatic Fleet destroyers, the
Stewart
and the
John D. Edwards,
in escorting two fleet oilers and the old seaplane tender
Langley
out of the war zone.