Ship of Ghosts (24 page)

The destruction of the Allied fleet in the Dutch East Indies was proof of Capt. Albert H. Rooks’s foresight. His “Estimate of the Situation” foretold the entire fiasco. “There is an adage at war colleges that he who wills the end must will the means,” he had written. “For this task the means are lacking.”

Just as he had predicted, the other ships of the ABDA naval force, used in scattered piecemeal defense, came to sad ends. Once the
Houston
and the
Perth
were gone, there was little hope left for the stragglers. The Dutch destroyer
Evertsen
got under way a few hours after the two cruisers departed on their final voyages, clearing Tanjung Priok’s minefield by 9:15
p.m
. on February 28. Shortly thereafter her captain reported flashes of gunfire ahead. A surprised Admiral Helfrich relayed to Rooks and Waller a message from Admiral Glassford reporting the start of the battle: “
EVERTSEN
reports sea battle in progress off St. Nicholas Pt…. If any of addressees are engaged with enemy others render assistance as possible.”
This was not news to anyone in the
Houston
or the
Perth
. But since the
Evertsen
herself was soon thereafter attacked and sunk by two Japanese destroyers, Helfrich’s message created the misunderstanding in the Navy Department that the
Houston
had been lost while going to the
Evertsen
’s aid.

On the morning of March 1, Helfrich received notice from his chief of staff, British Rear Adm. A. F. E. Palliser, that all Royal Navy ships would withdraw from the theater. Helfrich argued for a time but eventually relented, perhaps recognizing the intractable conflict of national interests within his own headquarters. He then instructed Admiral Glassford to send the remaining U.S. ships to Australia. The old destroyers
Parrott
and
Whipple,
three gunboats, and two minesweepers were the only ones to reach Fremantle. The new
Brooklyn
-class light cruiser USS
Phoenix,
released from convoy duty and speeding to reinforce Java, was ordered back to Exmouth Gulf, Australia. It is said that when sailors from the old Asiatic Fleet encountered
Phoenix
crewmen later in the war, they ascribed that necessary decision to a lack of nerve. Sharp words occasionally followed, and a fisticuff or two.

The HMS
Exeter,
hastily repaired at Surabaya after the Java Sea debacle, tried to escape the waters of the conquered archipelago. On the morning of March 1, she was hunted down south of Borneo by four Japanese cruisers and sunk with the destroyers USS
Pope
and HMS
Encounter
. That same day, the USS
Edsall
was caught south of Java by the battleships
Hiei
and
Kirishima
. With their fourteen-inch salvos the battleships blew the old destroyer’s keel literally out of the water. The saddest story may belong to the
Edsall
’s sister ship, the USS
Stewart
. She had capsized in dry dock at Tjilatjap and was scuttled by her crew as the Allies abandoned the port. The Japanese repaired, refitted, and commissioned her as their own Patrol Boat No. 102, making that destroyer the only U.S. surface warship in World War II to be salvaged and made operational by her enemy. Through the rest of the war American pilots, recognizing her lines despite the modified uptakes and mast, would be mystified by the idea of an American ship operating so deep in enemy territory.

In his “Estimate of the Situation,” Captain Rooks leveled no criticism at his superiors, though it was plain enough that he would have done things differently had the campaign been his to direct. Politics had trumped operational strategy at every turn. As Rooks suggested, a failure of foresight and a shortage of matériel sealed their doom. Adm. Ernest King was said to have called the campaign to defend the southwestern Pacific “a magnificent display of very bad strategy.” Samuel Eliot Morison saw little strategic use in ABDA’s ultimate martyrdom. Still, in the loss of the
Houston
and the other
ships, and in the beyond-the-call gallantry of their officers and men, the U.S. Navy acquired an example by sacrifice that its future captains would ever remember.

“The United States Asiatic Fleet seldom tasted victory,” Morison wrote. “It drank the cup of defeat to the bitter dregs. Nevertheless, the fortitude of that Fleet in the face of almost certain disaster inspired the rest of the Navy in the forty months of war that followed, and its exploits will always be held in proud and affectionate remembrance.”

F
or Otto Schwarz, after abandoning ship there had been no longing looks back at Old Glory whipping from the mainmast truck, just a deltoid-burning crawl stroke away from the gunfire and the explosions. Stopping to rest, he donned the life vest he had been dragging with him, then noticed the moonlit mountaintops in the indeterminate distance. Alone, he set out for them, arms chopping the sea all through the night.

Over the water Schwarz could hear shouts, the
pop-pop
of machine guns, faint screams, and silence. Then, startlingly closer, he heard the rumbling gurgle and swish of diesel engines, and sensed a small craft nearing him. He went motionless just as a searchlight beam grabbed at him. The boat came closer. He heard Japanese voices and tensed, waiting for bullets to come. A Japanese sailor prodded Schwarz with something long and sharp, a boathook perhaps. There was more jabbering discussion, then the searchlight switched off, the engines roared to life, and the boat was gone.

Word passed swiftly over the waters that the Japanese were shooting survivors where they swam. Jim Gee heard the reports—from stunned word of mouth and from the gun barrels themselves. The Marine could hear urgent advice passing between his shipmates:
Swim that way
.
No, that way. Oil over here. Land’s that way
. He settled
for treading water. With no life vest or doughnut ring, he calmly kept his place afloat for about an hour as Japanese boats played yellow-white searchlights in all directions, looking for his like.

But in time Gee grew exhausted, deeply so. The consequence of rescue by the enemy was plain to the ear as gunshots ricocheted over the water. He thought of his shipmates killed in action.
Well, a lot of them have already gone. There’s no need for me to do otherwise.
What made him special? The existential vertigo became so unbearable that he despaired and finally just gave up. He quit the air and let himself slide under the water.

Gee stayed down long enough for a desperate reflex to kick in. “I took a deep drink of that sea water and I knew that wasn’t really where I wanted to be.” He kicked himself back to the surface and to his good leatherneck senses. A thought finally reached him that reoriented his thinking and told him that all was far from lost: “I had a round-trip ticket home…. I was going back home. From that point, I never wavered any one minute in believing that I wouldn’t make it.”

For some, the decision to survive was abrupt, coming in a flash. For others it was a function of staying on autopilot and letting the will regather its might. According to Charley Pryor, “You’re just completely beyond exhaustion but still you go. At a time like that you’ve got some reservoir of strength you never knew you had until you have to use it. Within ten minutes you feel, ‘Well, I can’t swim another stroke,’ but then eleven hours later you’re still going.”

Seaman second class Eugene Parham was on a lifeboat led by Lt. Cdr. Sidney Smith, the plotting room officer, when it drifted into a herd of Japanese troop transports anchored offshore. Soldiers and sailors lined the rails, jeering unintelligibly. When Commander Smith gave them permission to surrender if they so chose, Parham and some others climbed aboard a transport and submitted to their captors. Shortly afterward, a motorboat towing an empty
Houston
life raft puttered by and the next thing Parham and six other Americans on the transport knew, the Japanese were forcing them into the raft. A Japanese officer flashed his sword, the towline was severed, and they were cast loose again.

They drifted for the better part of the day, picking up a few more survivors before catching a current and losing sight of land. As the raft drifted along, Parham and two others decided their best chance at survival lay in jumping overboard and swimming toward the
mountaintops visible on the horizon. Four hours of hard swimming paid an unexpected dividend: A mile from the Java beach, an outrigger canoe found them. Two natives were at the oars, but the hands that hauled them aboard were American. Ens. John B. Nelson was in charge of the craft, having leased it from natives for rescue work for the price of his U.S. Naval Academy ring. It bought Parham’s life, but no one on the lifeboat he had originally abandoned—not Commander Smith nor anyone else—was ever seen again.

At least one other native caught the entrepreneurial spirit, but this one overplayed his hand. A Javanese at the helm of a fishing boat motored up to a group of struggling
Houston
survivors, meaning to do some brisk business. “This jerk was picking up guys if they could pay him something of value,” seaman second class William M. Ingram Jr. said. “He kept picking up exhausted guys, more and more of them, and taking their wedding bands, money, and watches. All I had was a jackknife on a lanyard tied to my belt, and a cheap ring I’d picked up in Honolulu,” Ingram said. “The native wanted both of them. I gave him what he wanted because, hell, I had to get on that boat, and there wasn’t any time to bargain.” Eventually, outraged by the price gouging, a bunch of the Americans rose and, said Ingram, “threw his ass overboard.”

In their new boat, Ingram and his shipmates headed for land, fighting stiff currents all the way. As they passed close by a small island, several sailors got anxious and jumped for it, only to get swept away by the fast-moving water. Sometimes staying with a raft saved you. Other times it was a sure route to oblivion; by inference, more than a few rafts had to have been swept into the Indian Ocean. Ingram’s remaining group made it to the beach, but their lucky judgment did them no good. “We weren’t ashore five minutes when along came a bunch of Jap soldiers, who took us prisoner,” he recalled.

E
xhausted from treading water, Jim Gee paddled in search of something buoyant to cling to, finally catching sight of a Seagull floatplane pontoon drifting loose. As he approached, he found a bunch of
Houston
survivors holding on to it, perhaps twenty of them, some badly burned. The ship’s chaplain, Cdr. George S. Rentz, was among them, doing what he had been put on the earth to do: minister to those in need.

Gee had little need of his chaplain’s services. The Marine private was not injured, merely tired. He clutched the side of the float, gathering strength and wind for another run toward shore. When he finally set out again, he discovered that no one, not even a strong-swimming Marine, could contend with the currents off Java. “I could feel myself being carried out to sea. There are certain things you can just tell. I could tell that I wasn’t going in a straight path.” He found just enough strength to return to the pontoon.

Gee got back in time to witness the making of a Navy legend. Chaplain Rentz, at fifty-nine, had been the oldest man on the ship, nine years senior to Captain Rooks and only about a year away from retirement when the
Houston
went down. The native of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, had been a pastor at churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey before joining the Navy during World War I. That war was nearly over when Rentz, as a junior-grade lieutenant, was named acting chaplain to the Eleventh Marine Regiment, deployed to France in October 1918, just a month before the armistice. After the war, Rentz fulfilled a series of sea-duty assignments in the peacetime Navy, making commander in 1924. He needed nearly two decades more to find his ultimate calling as shepherd to the survivors of a U.S. Navy cruiser in extremis.

The surplus pontoon, taking on water through a hole in its top, was slowly losing its buoyancy. Several times during the night Rentz tried to swim away to keep it from sinking. “You men are young, with your lives ahead of you,” he said. “I am old and have had my fun.” Each time, a different sailor from the group ignored Rentz’s entreaty and retrieved him.

At one point Lloyd Willey saw Rentz huddled with a sailor on the float. The kid, seaman first class Walter L. Beeson, was hanging on, head down, apparently wounded, though it was hard to see where or how badly. He didn’t have a life jacket. According to Beeson, Rentz, unhurt himself, “told me his heart was failing him; told me he couldn’t last much longer.” Gasping for breath, the chaplain said a brief prayer for the men in the group, removed his life jacket, and offered it to the young sailor. Perhaps ashamed to take it, Beeson accepted it but declined to put it on, at least not until Rentz had kicked away from the float and submitted to the sea. According to Jim Gee, “No one realized what had happened. It’s just one of those things that one minute he’s there, and the next minute you look around and you take a head count, and sure enough, he wasn’t
there.” Only when the finality of Rentz’s sacrifice had sunk in did Walter Beeson pull on the life jacket. The group stayed together and drifted the rest of that night, humbled by the spirit of their chaplain right to the end.