Ship of Ghosts (23 page)

He had it in his mind to look for a friend, Howard Corsberg, who he knew couldn’t swim. As he was crossing the quarterdeck aft, a torpedo hit on the starboard side, sending a wave of seawater over the deck and washing Charles against the seaplane catapult tower.
Hanging on to it, the hard taste of oil filling in his mouth, he thought,
Is this the way it is? Is this the way you go?

The wave drained away and Charles saw an enemy ship nearby, its gun crew stitching tracers into the
Houston
. He felt anger rising in his belly. Then he settled into a place beyond raw emotions, a place of detachment, the self at arm’s length, as if he were floating through the ordeal. He would wonder later if it was a form of trauma, and would feel the urge to study it. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the port side, where things seemed a little less dangerous. As the seaplane hangar behind him exploded and flames licked at the back of his shirt, he found another buddy in the Marine detachment, Sgt. Joe Lusk, standing there.

Lusk was leaning his tall frame against a line, smoking a cigarette. He tossed the butt overboard and asked, “You ready?” The younger Marine said he was, though the voice he heard coming out of his mouth sounded like a stranger’s. “You gotta get off here, Charlie,” Lusk said, then flung himself over the port rail, landing in the black water with a large splash. Charles followed him.

“I could feel the heat of the roaring inferno on my back as I tightened the straps of my lifejacket searching the sky for the Southern Cross,” Charles said. “I reached out and grabbed a lifeline. No matter what happened, I would swim toward those six bright stars hanging over the tiny black strip of land that had to be Java.”

Lieutenant Hamlin got off the ship by sliding down the port side of the bow as the ship rolled over to starboard. “I nearly fell through a hole back into the anchor windlass room, which would have discouraged me tremendously,” he wrote. Taking note of “a great many unauthorized holes” up forward, Hamlin reached the waterline and found he could stand on the hull. He walked aft, over the bulge amidships. “I hit the water on the other side of that bulge and gave the best imitation of a torpedo that I could, trying to get away from suction.”

“There were dead fish floating all around,” one sailor noted. “It was a very badly shark-infested area, but there was no danger from sharks that night. They were dead, too.”

They drifted on the swells, watching Japanese destroyers have their way with their ship. “I thought of her as she was when I joined her—just back from a Presidential cruise,” Lieutenant Hamlin recalled. “She shone from end to end with new paint and shining brass and polished steel. Well, there wasn’t much spit and polish to her now.”

Hamlin put a few hundred feet of water between him and his ship, then turned back to take a look at her. “She was full of holes all through the side, these close-range destroyer shells had gone right through one side and out the other, a good many of them…. Her guns were askew, one turret pointing one way, and another the other, and five-inch guns pointing in all directions.”

L
isting hard to starboard, settling by the bow, the
Houston
was bathed from stem to stern in hostile white light, wooden decks splintering under gales of machine-gun fire. She seemed on the verge of capsizing, yardarms nearly touching the sea, when, according to John Wisecup, “she righted herself like a dog shaking water off its back,” perhaps momentarily counterflooded by an unnoted and gratuitous torpedo hit. When that happened, the colors, brought to life by the beams of hot carbon arcs, just seemed to snap to and wave over the watery battlefield. “Perhaps I only imagined it,” Walter Winslow wrote, “but it seemed as though a sudden breeze picked up the Stars and Stripes still firmly two-blocked on the mainmast, and waved them in one last defiant gesture.”

As the
Houston
sank, going down by the broken bow, red tracers were seen, right to the end, still whipping down from the foremast’s machine gun platform. Gunnery Sergeant Standish, Wisecup wrote, “living up to Marine Corps legend, was a warrior to the end.

“Many years have gone by,” wrote Wisecup, “but I can still vividly recall the scene. The stars and stripes still fast on the mainmast streaming aft in the breeze. The ‘Gunny’s’ fifty-caliber machine gun still sending out a line of tracers toward the Japs as the tired old
Huey Maru
slowly sank beneath the waters of the straits.

“Not a word was uttered by anyone on the raft as they gazed at the spot where our ship had gone down.”

Once upon a day, William Bernrieder, the booster who had led the USS
Houston
campaign, called her “the Nation’s safest insurance against foreign aggression—the expression of might upholding the right…. May we always regard her as the emissary of peace, but if fight she must—may the Cruiser
Houston
—the pride of our Navy—never strike her colors to an enemy.” That was the one thing her survivors would remember, as clearly as a first child’s birthday, long after they were left alone in the nighttime sea. She never struck her colors.

T
he
Houston
’s survivors were never far from shore. Their ship came to rest a few miles west of Panjang Island, and about the same distance east of St. Nicholas Point. The
Perth
settled several miles north of the
Houston
.

Despite the proximity to the coast, the obstacles to reaching land were formidable. Although 368
Houston
survivors would finally be rounded up ashore—less than a third of the ship’s wartime complement—by all accounts many more than that survived the ship’s immediate trauma and loss. The final tally would take years to sort out. According to the ship’s action report, 150 men who made it into the water alive were never seen again. Lt. Harold Hamlin would write, “I saw hundreds of unwounded men go over the side there, whom I haven’t seen since.” So many men never reached the beach. With most of the lifeboats shattered by gunfire and torpedo blasts, and with any number of life rafts dropped prematurely on the first call to abandon ship, out of reach as the dying ship drifted to a halt, survivors clung to the handiest wreckage. The powerful surge draining out of the Java Sea through Sunda Strait took hold of them and whatever flotsam they were holding to—rafts, furniture, mattresses, spent shell cases—and pulled it toward a fathomless oblivion in the Indian Ocean.

From the moment the USS
Houston
and the HMAS
Perth
sank, hundreds of separate dramas set out on diverging paths. The currents feeding Sunda Strait saw to that. They spread the survivors far and wide. They dangled them within a hard swim of land all around St. Nicholas Point and near islands in the strait’s northern channel, and pulled them away on a natural whim. Survivors contended with predators under the sea and on land. They were set upon by native hillmen eager to settle scores with the white man and embrace the arriving Japanese. They were hauled aboard Imperial Army transports. They were shot in the water where they swam, never given a chance.

Sailors have earned places in legend for exploits less than what these men did up to the time of their sinking. Surely few naval personnel have ever performed more resolutely while running such a demanding gauntlet through enemy-controlled seaways. But when March 1, 1942, dawned, the eighty-fourth day of the Pacific war, their ordeal was in fact only beginning. No one could quite have guessed at the dimensions it would finally acquire.