Ship of Ghosts (6 page)

Anyone overconfident about America’s prospects against Japan might have asked why the invincible U.S. fleet was on the run. En route to Surabaya, Captain Rooks called his officers and department
heads to the executive officer’s cabin and informed them that war had started. On December 10 more than fifty twin-engine Japanese bombers struck Cavite unopposed, burning out most of its key installations, destroying the harbor facilities, and sinking a transport ship. When Tokyo Rose came on the radio that night, she purred an optimistic report that President Roosevelt’s favorite heavy cruiser had been sunk. The men of the
Houston
were at once flattered and unnerved by the attention. Embracing their status as a priority target not only of the Japanese military but of its propagandists too, they would coin a defiant nickname for the ship: the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast.

Their cocky optimism took a blow when the toll of the Pearl Harbor raid and the destruction of General MacArthur’s air force on Luzon were reported in dispatches. A Navy Department communiqué that arrived on December 15, typed up and posted in the mess hall, detailed the losses: the
Arizona
sunk, the
Oklahoma
capsized. The damage to the Pacific Fleet left the United States with, in Samuel Eliot Morison’s words, “a two-ocean war to wage with a less than one-ocean Navy. It was the most appalling situation America had faced since the preservation of the Union had been assured.” The crew was stunned, if unsure what it all meant for them beyond an end to fifty-cent eight-course dinners and nickel shots of whiskey in Manila’s cabarets.

By Christmas, Wake Island had fallen. Manila, under daily air attack from Formosa, had been abandoned and declared an open city by MacArthur, whose soldiers, with the men of the Fourth Marines, would soon be bottled up on the Bataan peninsula. Singapore faced a siege. Where might the Allies finally hold the line? On New Year’s Day 1942, with Japanese amphibious forces closing in on Borneo and Celebes to the north, an American submarine entered Surabaya’s harbor in Java flying the flag of a four-star admiral. Admiral Hart disembarked weary, having made the thousand-mile journey from Cavite mostly submerged, breathing stale air. Ashore, he gathered his energies and took a train west to Batavia, headquarters of the Dutch Naval Command. It was clear to all the Allied commanders in the theater that their last stand in the southwest Pacific would be made in Java.

The British and the Americans had formalized their joint command relationship at the end of December, at the Arcadia Conference
in Washington, where President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill endorsed a Europe-first strategy and established the Combined Chiefs of Staff to centralize American and British strategic decision making. To defend the Dutch East Indies, and ultimately Australia, a four-nation joint command, ABDACOM, was organized on January 15, combining American, British, Dutch, and Australian forces under the overall command of British Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell. Ground forces on Java included principally Dutch and Australian garrisons, about 40,000 strong, under Dutch Lt. Gen. Hein ter Poorten. ABDA’s meager and ill-supported air forces were placed under Royal Air Force Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse. As senior naval commander in the area, Admiral Hart was named head of the naval component, formally colloquialized as “ABDAfloat.”

Low-level confusion, or at least a lack of focus and unity of purpose, surrounded most every aspect of the ABDA naval command. The confusing unit nomenclature reflected this. The
Houston
and the other combatants of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet were known as “Task Force Five” when they were on convoy duty, but were part of the “Combined Striking Force” during joint offensive operations. When Admiral Hart was named commander of ABDAfloat, he put Admiral Glassford in command of Task Force Five and installed his capable chief of staff, Rear Adm. William R. Purnell, an old hand at working with the British and Dutch, as acting Asiatic Fleet commander, based at Hart’s former Surabaya waterfront headquarters. Hart himself relocated to Field Marshal Wavell’s ABDA flag headquarters in the mountain resort town of Lembang, seventy-five miles southeast of Batavia and several hundred miles from Surabaya. The interlocking responsibilities and haphazard lines of international communication were a recipe for frustration.

Hart readily saw that conflicting national priorities would hamper everyone’s ability to fight. In the prewar conferences attended by Admiral Purnell, it became clear that the Royal Navy was worrying less about defending Java than about saving its imperial crown jewel, Singapore, at the tip of the Malay peninsula. Long before war began, the Americans and the British had debated the merits of holding Singapore. The Americans considered it hopeless once Japanese land-based airpower came to bear on it. But Wavell insisted that the British garrison there could endure a Japanese assault indefinitely. “Our whole fighting reputation is at stake, and the
honour of the British Empire,” he wrote after the island came under Japanese assault, in a February 10 letter that largely paraphrased a cable he had received from Prime Minister Churchill that same day. “The Americans have held out on the Bataan Peninsula against heavier odds; the Russians are turning back the picked strength of the Germans; the Chinese with almost complete lack of modern equipment have held the Japanese for four and a half years. It will be disgraceful if we yield our boasted fortress of Singapore to inferior forces.”

Hart preferred to orient the Allied effort toward the defense of Australia. Already the Americans were setting up a major base for its service force—supply ships, tenders, and other auxiliaries—at Darwin in northwestern Australia, the receiving point for convoys of troops, equipment, and supplies arriving from points north and east. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet surface battle group, Task Force Five, consisting of the
Houston,
the
Marblehead,
and the thirteen old destroyers of Destroyer Squadron Twenty-nine, joined by the modern light cruiser
Boise,
was well positioned at Surabaya to guard the lifeline to Australia.
*
The British made their home port at Batavia, four hundred miles to the west, a better position for running convoys to Singapore. The heavy cruiser HMS
Exeter,
which had won fame in 1939 hunting the
Graf Spee
in a legendary pursuit that ended with the German pocket battleship’s scuttling at Montevideo, was the largest Royal Navy ship in the theater.

Painfully aware of Germany’s occupation of their continental homeland, the Dutch were naturally displeased that an American, Hart, was to head the naval defense of their homeland in exile. His appointment to lead ABDAfloat put him in natural conflict with the head of Dutch naval forces in the area, Vice Adm. Conrad E. L. Helfrich, a jut-jawed bulldog of a commander who preferred attack to retreating defense. Born on Java, he knew the region’s straits, coves, and shallows. At the Surabaya conference he reportedly pounded the table and demanded a squadron of heavy cruisers to resist the Japanese onslaught. Though he discovered there were limits to the resources America and Britain could assign to his cause, he
still thought Allied surface forces could stymie the enemy convoys, even without air cover.

In a secret prewar analysis that he completed on November 18, 1941, labeled “Estimate of the Situation,” Rooks showed his almost prescient strategic acuity, detailing in 107 typed and hand-annotated legal pages the soon-to-be-exploited weaknesses of the scattered Allied forces in the Pacific. From Singapore’s vulnerability to blockade and land assault to Manila’s exposure to air raids, Rooks catalogued the full range of the Allies’ shortcomings.

The remedy, he argued, was boldness, commitment, and unity. As Captain Rooks sized things up, the best way to contain the enemy’s swelling tide was to base a combined Allied superfleet at Singapore. For a time in 1941, the British discussed reinforcing the Far Eastern Fleet with as many as seven additional battleships. Rooks argued that such a force, augmented by Allied cruisers and destroyers, might contest Japanese control of the South China Sea and block Japanese aggression against the Philippines, Borneo, and Indochina. “When this fleet becomes strong enough to prevent Japanese control of the South China Sea the war will be well on its way to being won,” Rooks wrote. But he ultimately recognized the futility in it. Such a dramatic effort would require an unlikely concentration of resources and will. He saw that without stronger air forces to cover them, with long lines of supply and replenishment, and led by commanders unacquainted with local waters, even a fleet of dreams would have had a hard time of it. Alas, the means had to carry the end. When Rooks took the
Houston
out of Darwin and headed for the combat zone in the Dutch East Indies, he left behind a copy of his “Estimate” with a colleague. He left behind his optimism too. Historians would be the arbiters of Albert H. Rooks’s ability to divine the shape of things to come.

It would fall to the scattered navies of four nations to save the Dutch East Indies. It would fall to Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite ship; to the
Exeter
and three smaller cruisers of a Dutch flotilla defending its own imperial shores; to an Australian light cruiser, the
Perth,
whose pugnacious skipper had made his name in the Mediterranean; to several squadrons of old destroyers still capable of running with bone in teeth but whose better days were behind them; to Capt. John Wilkes’s submarine force, operating on the run without spare parts or a good supply of torpedoes. It would fall to ships and submarines because there were not enough planes. The ineffectiveness
of the aerial campaign over Java would make the ships’ work all the tougher. At the dawn of the age of naval air power, ushered in by its leading and most audacious practitioners, the Japanese, Thomas C. Hart’s ABDA naval force would fight largely without wings. But it would most certainly fight.

I
n the two months leading up to the
Houston
’s catastrophic bomb hit in the Flores Sea on February 4, ABDA ships had seen action only sporadically. To the chagrin of her crew, the
Houston
’s primary task during that period was convoy escort. Per orders of the Navy Department, Rooks’s cruiser joined the seagoing wagon train of transports ferrying American and Australian troops from Australia to Java. As often as not, the easternmost leg was Darwin, but sometimes the
Houston
steamed east as far as Torres Strait to pick up convoys coming up from Sydney and around Cape York Peninsula.

For infuriating stretches of time, the
Houston
stood at anchor off Darwin, swinging to the tides. The crew chafed to grapple with the Japanese fleet. “It got to be so bad,” wrote Walter Winslow, a
Houston
floatplane pilot, “that when I was in the company of Australian naval officers, I began to feel almost ashamed to be a part of the vaunted United States Navy.” A heavy cruiser with presidential pedigree deserved better than shepherding the sows of the service force.

Failing that, her crew certainly deserved a liberty call more interesting than what Darwin had to offer. The outpost of fifteen hundred souls was the capital of the Northern Territory, but that title was out
of proportion to the dimensions of the town’s grid, three blocks by two, its single-story buildings roofed in corrugated iron, horses and carts providing the only public transportation. The flinty terrain and the red clay streets that swirled up with dust when they weren’t boggy with rain evoked memories of the nineteenth-century frontier. Sailors from America’s rural precincts may have enjoyed the fleeting illusion that they had come home again. For most of the
Houston
’s crew, though, the town was a disappointment. Hopes of meeting Australian girls faded in light of the reality that mostly only men were there. The first major Allied combat unit in the area was the 147th Field Artillery, a federalized South Dakota National Guard unit that was trucked up from Brisbane on January 18 to help defend Australia’s northern frontier. Drinking warm beer with Australians and South Dakotans was a pleasing diversion as far as it went. But it grew sour when the town’s beer supply vanished. Such shortages had struck Darwin before—its buildings had the broken windows to prove it. No sooner had the town restocked from the last run on its beer supply than a bunch of thirsty Yanks descended upon them again. The town’s supplies of canned food disappeared too, snapped up by
Houston
men eager to have snacks handy in the gun tub.

When the mayor of Darwin complained to Captain Rooks about the market-crashing effects of his crew’s appetite, the fleet’s service force replenished the town with fresh fruits and vegetables, canned peaches, hams, fruit cocktail, and olives, all originally meant for the U.S. troops in now-abandoned Manila. One of the
Houston
’s senior floatplane pilots became a small-town celebrity by procuring some American beer from a supply vessel in the harbor and bringing it ashore. “That’s the closest I’ve ever been to becoming the president of Australia,” Lt. Tommy Payne said.

Offensive operations fell to other ships of the ABDA fleet. On the night of January 22–23, a U.S. submarine patrolling Makassar Strait, the
Sturgeon,
intercepted a Japanese invasion force bound for the key oil center of Balikpapan, Borneo, closed with the convoy, and fired a spread of torpedoes. Seeing several bright explosions, Cdr. William L. Wright radioed his higher-ups, “Sturgeon
no longer virgin
.” When PBY-4 Catalina flying boats spotted more enemy shipping heading for Balikpapan, there was no doubt as to the enemy’s intentions.