Free Ship of Ghosts by James D. Hornfischer Page B

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.
    “They dropped them so close to us that the shrapnel just pecked along our splinter shields all around us,” said Charley Pryor, who manned gun number eight, the portside five-inch mount closest to the fantail. Like even the oldest salts on the ship, Sergeant Pryor was stunned by Rooks’s audacity at the helm. The skipper turned the cruiser so sharply that seawater washed up over the quarterdeck. There were moments, Pryor recalled, when “in the foretops, all they could see under them was green sea, no ship.” For harrowing moments, the swirling flood reached to the knees of men standing on deck.
    “I’d often wondered and worried…whether I’d be capable of doing my job or not,” said pharmacist’s mate Griff L. Douglas, an eighteen-year-old who had earned a decade’s worth of wisdom on February 4 while patching together maimed survivors. “I knew I’d been trained well, but it worried me all the time. I thought, ‘Well, I know I’m scared,’ and I’d think, ‘Well, maybe I can’t do my job.’ But after that, I never worried about it anymore.”
    The ship spat skyward so much flak that she appeared to burn. Her gallery of eight five-inch guns put up a total of 930 rounds, two and a half rounds a minute for each gun for forty-five minutes straight. The projectiles taken from the
Boise
made a startling difference in the conduct of the enemy planes. “You could just see them rocking up there,” said Marine Pvt. Lloyd V. Willey. With theconcentrated smoky black bursts whistling shrapnel past their windscreens, the bombers retreated to a higher altitude. Seven fell victim to the
Houston
’s gunners. Already worn down from day after day of steady vigilance, the crews were relieved by men from other stations as the heat exhaustion got to them.
    The soldiers on the transports had little else to do but gape as the cruiser shaped a weaving course around and through them. A yellow-orange curtain of fire seemed to envelop the
Houston,
while overhead another curtain—the black shroud of the heavy cruiser’s shell bursts—sheltered the transports from the planes. Bombs landed all around her—“All the sea boiled up and
Houston
was gone,” wrote E. L. Cullis. Another
Warrego
sailor said, “Good God! They’ve got her!” But then, Cullis wrote, “from