Ship of Ghosts (8 page)

O
n February 8, three days into his tenure as a lame duck, Admiral Hart flew from Lembang to Tjilatjap and surveyed the damage done to his ships. The
Marblehead,
arthritic even in the best of repair, was finished. A Dutch naval architect managed to hoist her bow onto the little floating dry dock so her breached hull could be patched. But nothing could be done for her damaged rudder. In a few days the
Marblehead
would be westbound to the Brooklyn Navy Yard by way of Ceylon, steering with her engines and staying afloat via submersible pump and bucket brigade.

What to do with the
Houston
was a more complicated question. Hart knew that his star skipper deserved a voice in the matter.

For his part, Captain Rooks wondered about his family. He had received no mail of any kind since November, had had no word about Edith or his two sons, Albert junior, just twelve, and Hal, breezing through Navy ROTC at Harvard and destined for a Pacific tour in a heavy cruiser of his own. He was eager to share news of the battle with them within the censor’s necessary limits.

From Tjilatjap he cabled Seattle to assure Edith he was okay before she saw any publicity about the hit the ship had taken in the Flores Sea. “Well, the big news is that we have been in action. We were in the so-called Battle of the Flores Sea,” he wrote her. “I cannot give you any details inasmuch as I do not know whether our Navy Department has made any announcement of it or not…. I was not hurt, and came out of it with a good reputation. The crew delegated the ship’s chief master at arms to congratulate me on the way the ship was handled…. Throughout I remained cool and composed, and suffered no nervous or other shocks as a result of the experience.”

In the middle of the combat theater Admiral Hart was able finally to take the full measure of the
Houston
’s fifty-year-old captain. “When it comes to judging the ability of men as cruiser captains, one usually cannot tell how they will turn out until they are tried,” Hart would later tell Edith. At Tjilatjap, Hart observed the demeanor of his onetime aide and wrote, “Rooks still had perfect poise. His nerves were absolutely unshaken, his attitude and outlook as to the future were perfect and, in fact, I could see nothing whatever upon which I could base the slightest criticism (and, as you know, I am exacting and critical). After I left the
Houston
I told myself, ‘Well, now I know that I have in Rooks just the kind of cruiser captain that the situation out here calls for.’”

Under normal circumstances, a damaged main battery was cause for a mandatory appointment with the yardbirds. But nothing about ABDAfloat’s circumstances was normal. The striking force could not afford to do without one of its two heavy cruisers. Conferring with Rooks on the day of the funeral, Hart could see that sending the
Houston
home for repairs was an unaffordable luxury, at least until the promised new light cruiser
Phoenix
arrived in early March to take her place. Even with its cauterized after turret, the
Houston
still packed a stiff punch in its forward eight-inch battery.

But Hart feared that ordering the damaged ship to remain in theater and contend with the coming storm would amount to a death sentence for one of the best-trained, highest-morale crews in the fleet. He reportedly told Rooks that he “didn’t want our folks to accuse him of manslaughter, and there was a battle coming that was already lost before it was fought.”

Hart’s worries about “manslaughter” were probably overstated in view of the crew’s eagerness to assume the risk. It was exactly what most of them wanted. Some of the men got together and wrote a letter to their captain pledging that wherever he and the ship went, that’s where they would go too. Though it was a truism to a degree—deserters don’t get far at sea—the sentiment was emotionally genuine. “I think they looked at him as just another god,” said Gus Forsman. “Admiration for the Captain bordered on worship,” some officers would later write. “Everybody believed that the Good Lord had His hand on his shoulder for the things that he brought us through,” said Paul Papish, a storekeeper third class. That knack for inspiring confidence seemed to come naturally to Rooks. But it would never get too deeply into his head. According to Frank E. (Ned) Gallagher, a second lieutenant with the Marine detachment, “He always knew who he was and never wanted to be anybody else.”

For Albert H. Rooks, whose ship had been bloodied without the opportunity to respond in kind, there was no other decision but to stay and fight. He would not see the
Houston
pulled out at the very moment she was needed most. Though he longed for home, was in fact counting the days, his own concerns came secondary to his role as commander of the most powerful U.S. warship in the Asiatic theater.

Although Tommy Hart would live to regret putting the ship’s fate in the hands of her proud skipper, there was no denying that the
ship still had some wallop left in her. “After telling me that he would take his ship out again in a few hours,” Hart wrote, “Rooks pointed to the wreck of his after turret and said, ‘A Jap cruiser will have one strike on us, but with the two remaining we will try to break up his game.’ Such was the spirit.”

V
alentine’s Day 1942 was one of emotional reckonings and commitments to faith. Rooks wrote Edith in longhand, his penmanship more hurried than it had been before. “I am going out into the troubled zone this evening,” he wrote, “and I don’t know where we will end up. Two nights ago a dispatch came indicating we were to return to the United States. You can imagine the thrill we got—I dreamed about it all the rest of the night. But the next morning a dispatch came correcting the other. Our name had got there by mistake.”

The present was as heavily shrouded by doubt as the future. The
Houston
’s captain took refuge in the notion that a man’s destiny was out of his hands. “I trust that everything is going well with you and the boys and your father,” he wrote. “Keep your spirits up. In these times one must cultivate a faith in his fate. May God protect and strengthen you.”

That night Tommy Hart joined sixteen soon-to-be-former Asiatic Fleet colleagues at the Savoy Hotel in Bandung, Java, for a farewell dinner. He was feeling more than a little fraught about it. Haunted first by the fear he was leaving behind good men to die under foreign command, he worried too that his reputation had been sullied by his abrupt and awkward dismissal, that the perception might arise in
Washington that he was guilty of some failing of character or competence. No doubt at the end of the twenty-five-day, eight-thousand-mile journey back to the nation’s capital, his political foes would await his return with some relish.

The Asiatic Fleet’s officers toasted their veteran leader’s retirement. Then Hart stood to speak but could not summon words. As a brash young officer, he had once declared his wish to end his naval career on the bridge of his flagship, blown to eternity by a large-caliber salvo. He settled for a less dramatic exit. Faltering with grief, he at last managed only to say: “Well, boys, we all have a busy day tomorrow, so we’d better break this up.” In the receiving line afterward, his fleet intelligence officer, Lt. Cdr. Redfield Mason, grabbed Hart’s hand with both of his and said, “Goodbye, sir, you are the finest man I’ve ever known.” Hart couldn’t recognize anyone through the brine that welled in his eyes. That night he wrote in his diary, “Oh it was hard.” Wartime farewells were always wrenching, but “leaving them out here in the face of a dangerous enemy and commanded by God knows whom or how” was more than the old admiral could stand.

The next day he was driven to Batavia in a battered sedan for transit west. He was last seen in Java standing alone on the pier in Tanjung Priok, Batavia, wearing civilian clothes, awaiting the arrival of a bomb-damaged British light cruiser to ferry him home.

I
f a fighting spirit prevailed, the men of the
Houston
would have to suffer through one more turn as a convoy escort before exercising it. The cruiser was ordered to Darwin once again on February 10.

She began the return journey on February 15 leading a convoy of troop ships to Timor, the easternmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. All hope of keeping supplies flowing between Australia and Java required that Timor stay in Allied hands. The outpost held the only airfield, at Kupang, that enabled Allied fighter planes to cover the sea-lanes to and from Darwin.

The four transports, escorted by the
Houston,
the destroyer USS
Peary,
and the Australian escort sloops
Warrego
and
Swan,
carried a few thousand Australian Pioneers, infantry specially trained in construction and engineering, as well as a battalion of the U.S. 148th Field Artillery Regiment, a federalized Idaho National Guard unit once earmarked to reinforce General MacArthur in the
Philippines before his lines collapsed. They found themselves in Australia by accident. Their convoy had been one week out of Pearl Harbor when the war started. Now, as Admiral Hart was donning his civilian clothes to depart Java, the troops set sail for Timor, the Australians filling the 11,300-ton U.S. Army transport
Meigs
and the 5,400-ton Matson Line freighter SS
Mauna Loa
and the Americans boarding the British cargo ship SS
Tulagi
and the transport SS
Port Mar
.

Around noon on the first day at sea, the
Houston
’s bugler sounded the call to air defense. As the men ran to battle stations, a Japanese H6K Mavis flying boat appeared overhead, circling out of gun range. The plump four-engine plane lumbered in and made a pair of bombing runs on the cruiser from ten thousand feet, but the
Houston
’s concentrated flak drove her away. The Mavis was chased by a lone P-40 Warhawk fighter scrambled from Darwin and guided toward the Mavis by the
Houston
’s gunners, who sent a volley of five-inch shells bursting in the aircraft’s direction. The two planes disappeared over the horizon, leaving the sailors to guess which one’s demise caused the subsequent flash of fire and the pillar of black smoke.

The fact that enemy air power could reach them just one day out of Darwin was more troubling to the crew than the attack’s negligible results. “We believed that by being south of the Malay barrier we had nothing to fear from the Japanese bombers and would have time to rest our jangled nerves,” Walter Winslow wrote. The Japanese knew full well they were coming. As Tokyo Rose announced that afternoon, “
I see the USS
Houston
is escorting four transports to Timor, and they’re going to be in for a big surprise
.”

Around eleven
a.m
., the promised surprise came: a formation of nine Mavises and thirty-six twin-engine Mitsubishi Type 97 bombers, flying from the newly secured airfield at Kendari on Celebes. As they formed up into the dreaded nine-plane Vs and began their runs, the
Houston
drew most of their attention.

Lt. Jack Lamade climbed into his aircraft on the port catapult and its gunpowder charge detonated, propelling him to sixty miles per hour in a fifty-foot run. As his biplane clawed skyward the lieutenant set course for Broome, a coastal town five hundred nautical miles to the southwest. Lieutenant Winslow was unable to get airborne at all. The concussion of the five-inch guns shredded the fabric of his wings and fuselage.

Most of the troops embarked in the transports had never witnessed the U.S. Navy in action. The
Houston
made an impressive spectacle as Captain Rooks circled his charges, trying to draw the attention of the planes. “She was a wonderful sight, a fighting cruiser racing away at the uttermost limits of her energy,” wrote a sailor on the
Warrego
. “Above the smoke of her guns poured a smoke screen, as her bow like a hissing knife slashed through the ‘drink’ at speed that churned a stern wave boiling almost up to her after rails. We stared dumbfounded.”

Since the Japanese planes always seemed to drop their bombs from the same altitude and release point relative to the
Houston
’s course and speed, the cruiser’s senior aviator, Lt. Tommy Payne, had devised a “maneuvering table” that helped Captain Rooks calculate when to order the helm turned to avoid bombs, as he had done with such success in earlier actions. Rooks lay on the deck on the bridge, watching the planes with his binoculars and shouting helm orders as the bombs fell.