Long renowned as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite warship, the heavy cruiser HSS Houston (CA-30) entered the annals of our most compelling naval mysteries when she was lost off Java after midnight on 1 March 1942. The final radio dispatch from Captain Albert H. Rooks—"Enemy forces engaged”—gave no hint of the odds her crew faced. Until the Pacific war had run its course, the world would have few details of the Battle of Sunda Strait, and fewer still of the fate of the ship's survivors, who in captivity would be forced to work on the most notorious engineering project in World War II, dubiously immortalized in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The night of 28 February marked the fiery beginning of the crew's three-and-a-half-year ordeal, perhaps the worst suffered by a ship’s company in U.S. naval history. Of) the western tip of Java, aiming to transit Sunda Strait rind head for Australia following the disastrous Battle of the Java Sea, the Houston, accompanied by HMAS Perth, encountered a long-sought target of opportunity: a Japanese amphibious operation in full bloom. Guns blazing under a rising full moon, the two Allied cruisers turned to the attack, and as the large Japanese covering force fell on them, a horrific close-range night action commenced that would not be chronicled in detail until after the war was over. Houston’s final action previewed the Imperial Japanese Navy's deadly effectiveness with torpedoes—and the resolute courage of American surface-ship officers and crew faced with impossible odds.
Howard Brooks, an electrician’s mate on the Houston, dared to hope they might make it through Sunda Strait. But when the star shells started bursting, illuminating the ship so terrifically as to render academic the setting of the sun, he despaired of it entirely. He could hear the drone of a single-engine plane. The damn thing was dropping flares all around them from up on high, tracking them just as the bobbing phosphorous pots had marked their night run after the Java Sea battle. The planes seemed to have lights for every occasion. The Japanese were professional sea warriors, no question about that. The Houston had all she could handle.
The first Japanese ship to respond to the surprising intrusion by the Houston and Perth into Bantam Bay was the destroyer Fubuki. Her commander was as startled by the encounter as his two counterparts were. Commander Yasuo Yamashita, spotting them about 11,000 yards east of Babi Island, was unsure of their identity but confident his ship had not yet been seen. He rounded in behind them, keeping a safe distance of about five miles. He shadowed them until he saw the leading Allied ship flash a challenge on her signal lamp. At that point he ordered his torpedomen to fire nine Type 90 torpedoes, while the destroyers Harukaze and Hatakaze, patrolling closer to the beach, laid a defensive smoke screen. As the two Allied cruisers accelerated, guns roaring, the Fubuki signaled the commander of other Japanese forces out there in the dark: “TWO MYS-
TERIOUS SHIPS ENTERING THE BAY
The Fubuki’s early warning brought a prompt reaction from Rear Admiral Kenzaburo Hara, commander of the screening force accompanying the Western Attack Group. Immediately he ordered the light cruiser Natori and the six destroyers of the 5th and 11th Destroyer Divisions into action, and requested the help of two heavier hitters, the Mikuma and Mogami of Cruiser Division 7, providing cover about 14 nautical miles to the north. The two heavy cruisers hustled south, accompanied by the destroyer Shikinami. The Japanese warships fired illumination rounds. They rose in swift arcs and dropped white contrails that glowed in the blaze of drifting chemical suns.
In the officer’s booth in Turret One, Lieutenant Harold Hamlin got one last chance to peek through his periscope before the careening rush of strobe-lit events absorbed him completely in the management of his rocking main battery. He saw the Perth turning north and felt his own ship turning in behind her. The long shadows of enemy ships lurked at almost every compass point, flashes of gunfire blinking out all around.
Marine Private Jim Gee ran below to his general quarters station in the 5-inch magazine. “You could see the ships just all over because we immediately turned on searchlights. And the Japanese turned on searchlights. . . . The place was like Fifth Avenue, you know. And 1 guess for the first time, I myself felt some apprehension but I went down in the magazine and things were moving so fast that you really didn’t have time to think about the situation.”
The Perth led the Houston in a tight circle, engaging targets as they revealed themselves with their searchlights, silhouettes, or flash of guns. While the Japanese searchlights reached them easily, those of the Allied ships lacked the reach to be effective in turn. “We were firing at any target that [we] saw, point blank—pick your target, fire at will,” said Gee, part of the eight-man team of Sailors and Marines in his magazine. The volume of fire coming back on them was heavy. Gee said, “We knew they were having hell upstairs.”
Throughout the Battle of Sunda Strait, the fire control- men, spotters, and gunners on the Houston and Perth had no burden of identification to put pause in their work. Because there were only the two of them, as long as the ships stayed in line ahead with guns on broadside bearings, one ship never feared hitting the other. Keeping a simple column was not an entirely simple task—amid the maelstrom the cruisers could not always clearly see each other. But targets were plentiful. They appeared at ranges as close as 1,500 yards.
The Allied sailors had no firm idea of how many ships they faced. Under the circumstances they were impossible to count. The Perth’s first report was one destroyer and five unknowns. In the space of several awakening minutes, that became one cruiser and five destroyers. As the number climbed, the sense emerged that still larger things loomed out there in the dark. Five cruisers and ten destroyers. Twenty destroyers. Closer to shore, something else could be made out: the shadows of merchantmen and transports. There were dozens of them. As the spotters on the Houston and Perth came closer, they realized something astonishing: The enemy fleet they were fighting was the covering force for a landing operation.
Ahead and to port, clustered all around St. Nicholas Point, transports and auxiliaries were at anchor or on the beach, loaded with full cargos of men, vehicles, weapons, and supplies, unloading as fast as the sergeants of Japan’s Sixteenth Army could manage. Now, ostensibly looking to escape, two Allied cruisers had stumbled into the opportunity that the sharpest minds of their naval command had for difficult weeks tried to create for them. They had surprised a Japanese invasion force at the moment of its greatest vulnerability. Samuel Eliot Morison called it “the largest landing yet attempted in the Southwest Pacific.”
The Japanese Western Attack Group’s covering force included the heavy cruisers Mogami and the Mikuma as well as three divisions of destroyers and the light cruiser Na- tori. The landing force itself consisted of 56 transports and auxiliaries carrying Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s Sixteenth Army and its supply train, anchored all around the head of St. Nicholas Point, clear around to Merak on Sunda Strait.
Given the close quarters of the bay, the Japanese had a hard time avoiding hitting their own ships. The two enemy cruisers were running a course straight through their midst, exposing the Japanese ships to either side— transports and patrol boats to the west, combatants to the east—to friendly fire with almost every salvo. While the Americans could see innumerable gun flashes on nearly every bearing, there were moments when very few shell splashes were landing near the Houston. Were the Japanese firing at their own?
As the Perth and Houston looped to port, changing course from the north back toward Bantam Bay, the main batteries and the starshell-firing after 5-inch guns engaged targets to starboard. The forward 5-inch guns trained to port. “The fight evolved into a melee with the Houston engaging targets on all sides at various ranges,” Commander Arthur L. Maher, the ship’s gunnery officer, wrote.
Japanese destroyers bore in out of the darkness in groups of three and four, angling for a torpedo attack. The ships of Destroyer Division 12, which had been idling on the other side of St. Nicholas Point, roared out of Sunda Strait and curved around into Bantam Bay. They were dashingly commanded, rushing in to just a few hundred yards and firing furiously at a ship more than four times their size. At 2340 the Shirayuki and the Hatsuyuki, following the Natori, loosed nine torpedoes each. The Asakaze unloaded six more, the light cruiser Natori four. The Houston’s commander, Captain Albert H. Rooks, swerved the ship as he had done during the aerial bombardments in the Flores Sea, seeking now to avoid not aerial bombs but the even more forbidding threat of torpedoes streaking unseen under the waves. None of these first 28 fish found the mark.
The enemy tin cans stabbed the Allied ships with their searchlights. The illumination benefited the gunners on the Mogami and Mikuma, lying off in the darkness. Having hustled south to engage the unexpected raiders, the two cruisers stood off some 12,000 yards away, protected from return fire by the blinding glare of the destroyers’ spots. The Houston's machine gunners locked in fresh belts and raced to quench the lights with lead. In the lethal game of hide- and-seek, the Japanese alternated their searchlight beams, shuttering one and opening another to avoid drawing fire.
At 2326 the Perth took a projectile through the forward funnel. Another hit the flag deck a few minutes later. About ten minutes before midnight, under sustained fire from the Mogami and Mikuma, she took a waterline hit on the starboard side, starting severe flooding in the seamen’s mess.
Commander Maher and the men in the Houston’s forward main battery directors were confronting their own challenges.
Owing to the extreme height of their placement in Northampton- class cruisers, the blending of the enemy with the coastline, and the obscuring effects of enemy searchlights and smoke, the crew in Director One had trouble training their big batteries on the speedy targets. But every officer on- the Houston’s bridge saw three Japanese destroyers cross their wake at about 3,000 yards. Minutes later, a pair of torpedoes was seen bubbling in from astern, one to each side of the ship. Some 45 minutes had passed since the Houston’s general quarters alarm started screaming.
Commander Maher had the conn now. He steered straight ahead, cutting a narrow path between the torpedoes chasing from astern and allowing them to pass, one ten feet to port and the other about ten yards to starboard. His guns were madly engaged in all directions. Whenever Japanese destroyers approached, every gun that could bear zeroed in on the close-range threat. Crews assigned to illuminate with star shells had all they could handle trying to silhouette targets for the main battery amid the heavy smoke and Captain Rooks’ frequent course changes.
The cataclysmic crash of the cruiser’s salvos were echoed by the flash and roar of Japanese guns, as if returning from the far wall of a canyon. The Houston took her first hit when a projectile struck the forecastle, starting fires in the paint locker that danced brightly for about a quarter of an hour. The night air was rancid with cordite. Though the winds were still, the wisps of gray-white muzzle smoke flying from the Houston’s guns fell quickly away, left behind like an airborne wake covering her trail of foam.
Warships are divided into two worlds. One—encompassing the bridge, conning tower, and signal platforms—is devoted to observation, judgment, and command. The other—down in the engine rooms and firerooms, in the gun mounts and turrets, handling rooms and magazines, aid and repair stations—functions by procedure, repetition, and rote. Vital though the work below decks is, little of it depends on what the men there see around them, for indeed they see very little. They experience the battle through the skin: the deep, vibrating hum of the power plant, the rumblings and crashing of the gun batteries.
Deep in the Houston, in the forward powder magazine, Seaman Second Class Otto Schwarz only knew what he could hear on the intercom and on the headsets. Layers of armor and steel decking insulated him from the sounds of battle. Near misses announced themselves with a staccato cascade of shrapnel against the steel hull. “It sounded like somebody throwing pebbles at the ship.”
Stationed on a hoist in one of the 5-inch magazines, Seaman Second Class Donald Brain saw the power to his compartment die and the hydraulics fail, making it necessary to work the hoist by hand. Brain grabbed some hand cranks out of the ready locker, set them up, and was so busy cranking 5-inch projectiles up to the gun deck that he had no time to fret when an enemy shell came plowing through the side of the ship just forward of his station, rumbling like a freight train. “That is just what it sounded like ... just a rumble and a bang and a crash, and on it went.” He would crank that hoist until the magazine was empty.
The furious but uncoordinated nature of the Houston’s gunnery—directors abandoned and manned again, rangefinders disabled, turrets switched to manual control and from director to director—meant that though a large number of Japanese ships were engaged in the battle, seldom was the Houston’s fire concentrated sufficiently to sink any given ship.
Her 5-inch gunners did the best they could. Most of them had been together since the ship left the States in October 1940. Commander Maher had worked them hard, and it bore fruit now. Even on local control, the captains of the 5-inch mounts performed superbly. Their fire struck the destroyer Harukaze on the bridge and in the engine room, damaging her rudder, killing three, injuring 15, and forcing her to abort a torpedo launch. Their volleys also ravaged the destroyer Shirayuki. Though the Houston had just one working 36-inch searchlight on each side, her gunners managed to range on the Mikuma, hitting her with a projectile that disabled her main electrical switchboard and silenced her batteries and searchlights for several minutes. But Captain Shakao Sakiyama’s electricians wired around the trouble, enabling her to resume the bombardment with even greater effectiveness as she closed to within 10,000 yards.
Having gone through the Java Sea battle, Howard Brooks recognized the tenor of the enemy cruisers’ 8-inch main battery fire. The big guns sounded much closer now than they had the previous afternoon. The destroyers were far easier to see. “We could see the whole outline of these Japanese destroyers that were firing at us,” Brooks said. “We could see the guys on the guns, Japanese sailors, their forms, moving around the guns. They were pouring fire right into our ship.”
“Oh Lord, sometimes you felt like you could reach out and shake their hands,” said Seaman First Class John Bartz. He took shelter behind the back of his gun’s seat as bullets pinged all around the makeshift metal shield. The Marine second lieutenant in charge of his mount, Edward M. Barrett, ordered him to keep shooting, and Bartz did so, keeping to his unorthodox shielded firing position, reaching around the seat back to elevate and depress the guns, and grabbing the foot-pedal trigger with his other hand to fire.
Houston crewmen drill on two of the ship’s 5'inch/25 guns during a 1930s exercise off the China coast. After running out of common 5-inch ammunition during the desperate Sunda fight, the gunners fired phosphorous star shells at nearby Japanese ships, with terrifying results.
“The tin cans got so close to us . . . that when they got under two hundred yards, you couldn’t train on them. . . . You’d hit the top of their stacks,” said Marine Private John Wisecup, on gun number seven, aftermost on the boat deck’s starboard side. With some satisfaction Wisecup could tell that the 1.1-inch pom-poms were getting to the enemy. “They’d rake that topside, and you could hear them yelling over there. You could see their faces. You could hear the guys on the bridge hollering because they were that close when they hit them.”
High in the Houston’s foremast, standing on a 20-by-20-foot corrugated steel platform where four .50- caliber machine guns were mounted, Private Howard Charles had a commanding view of the battle. There he had a measurable advantage over gunners stationed closer to the sea. It was easier to fire down on a target than to hit it firing straight out over the water. With orders to quench enemy searchlights wherever they might shine, he steered his tracers into the glare of the unshuttered enemy lenses. All things considered, he preferred this lofty view to the cloistered depths of the magazines or handling rooms.
Charles lost track of how many belts he and his loader had ripped through the gun chamber of his .50. Each time a new one was in place, the loader would tap him on the shoulder and he would pull the cocking lever twice and seize down on the handle bar trigger, showering red tracers at any Japanese ship that dared to brandish her beams. It might have seemed like a county fair target gallery, except that the Japanese ships sliding into view out of the night returned fire all too vigorously. The day before, during the Battle of the Java Sea, the ship’s machine gunners had stood by uselessly as the main batteries traded salvos at a range of a dozen miles or more. Now even the smallest guns played a part in the main event.