Ship of Ghosts by James D. Hornfischer Page A

across the Java Sea from Makassar Town, went ashore on Bali.
    With his ships dispersed near and far, from Sumatra to Tjilatjap and from Surabaya to Darwin, Doorman could not mount a concentrated naval assault on the forces creeping toward him. Field Marshal Wavell was losing heart altogether: “I am afraid that the defense of the ABDA area has broken down,” he observed on the twenty-first. Two days later he received orders from London to abandon Java altogether. On February 25 he secretly boarded a plane and departed with his staff for Ceylon, leaving Java’s defense to the Dutch. There was no longer an ABDA naval force for Admiral Helfrich to lead. With Wavell’s departure, the multinational command ceased formally to exist and Helfrich became his nation’s own last hope.
    As for the Americans, consigned to defeat by the U.S. Navy and poised to make a last stand under a foreign flag, their final lot was now cast. At dusk on February 21, the
Houston
arrived again at Tjilatjap. The crew was angered to find that the Dutch crews who manned the fueling station were nowhere to be found. Refueling would be a matter of self-service. A working party from the ship’sengineering department went ashore and took whatever the lines would give them—just three hundred tons—before the glow of dawn forced Captain Rooks to leave port for the comparative safety of sea.
    As the
Houston
threaded the protective minefield outside the harbor and turned west toward Sunda Strait, accompanied by the destroyers
Paul Jones
and
Alden,
Walter Winslow asked the navigator, Cdr. John A. Hollowell Jr., where they might be headed. “In a fatherly way, he draped his arm around my shoulder and, as though talking to himself, said, ‘Son, we’re going to hell, we’re going to hell.’” As the ship navigated the strait, rudder and engines straining against the strong currents, Ens. Charles D. Smith looked back at that perilous stretch of water and remarked, apropos of nothing, “Say, didn’t I just hear a gate clang shut behind us?” This struck Paul Papish as a premonition. The storekeeper would never shake the memory.

    M aking a successful transit north through Sunda Strait, the
Houston
rejoined Rear Adm. Karel Doorman’s striking force in Surabaya on the afternoon of February 24. The harbor of the capital city in east Java was marked by a towering column of smoke, the product of repeated Japanese air raids whose latest victim was a freighter, her hull laid open and sprawled on her side with a full cargo of rubber aflame. By day the smoke was a handy navigation aid for inbound Japanese aircraft. By night, its flames would be a beacon for any warships or submarines stalking the port. Captain Rooks anchored the
Houston
in midstream, a few hundred yards from the docks, where several warehouses were on fire. The crew watched sailors and soldiers ashore scrambling around with hoses.
    That night, with their ship still tied up, the crew topped off the
Houston
’s capacious fuel oil bunkers, then watched in fascination as a Dutch minelayer opened fire on the grounded merchantman with her deck gun, trying to quench her blazing cargo of rubber by shattering the hull and letting in the sea. Instead of sinking, the vessel just burned more fiercely. A Dutch torpedo boat motored in and launched a torpedo at her, to no better effect. For sailors on the
Houston,
these attempts to scuttle the floundering inferno made quite a spectacle. “With all the confusion going on around us,” Walter Winslow wrote, “we slept very little that night.”
    Even with the return of the
Houston,
Admiral Doorman’s ability to blunt the Japanese drive against Java was limited at best. Before leaving the theater, Field Marshal Wavell had written Winston Churchill, describing the intractable problem of defending a six-hundred-mile-long island with a handful of cruisers and destroyers. “If this [naval force] is divided between the two threatened ends of the island it is too