Horrors link Perth, Houston
Although I’ve never been to Perth, Nana Booker, Australia’s honorary consul in Houston until her retirement last year, tells me that Australia’s west-coast metropolis is similar in several respects to its American sister city. A frontier settlement founded shortly before Houston came into being, Perth is a port city, as well as its nation’s energy capital, which means, as Booker points out, that Perthians have to deal with fickle oil and gas price fluctuations just as Houstonians do. A number of Houston-based energy companies, including Schlumberger and until recently Apache, have major operations in Perth. Former Houstonian astronaut John Glenn dubbed Perth the “city of lights” when he looked down and saw that residents had lit up the night sky as he orbited the earth on Feb. 20, 1962.
The most compelling connection dates back to another dark night 75 years ago this month, when two ships named for their respective cities blundered into a covey of Japanese warships during the early months of World War II. In the narrow confines of Sunda
Strait off the coast of Java, enemy searchlights lit up the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth and the USS Houston, a heavy cruiser that had been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite vessel. Surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the Allied ships engaged their attackers, but the battle lasted less than an hour. Four devastating torpedoes burrowed into the Perth; she sank within seconds. The Houston kept fighting, and when she ran out of ammunition, desperate sailors and Marines fired star shells, harmless flares used for illumination. Pierced by three torpedoes, the “Galloping Ghost of Java” went down shortly after midnight on March 1, 1942. About 650 U.S. sailors went down with her.
Survivors enslaved
Several hundred survived, including Lt. Harold Hamlin, who abandoned ship after an exploding shell knocked him off his feet. After swimming a hundred yards or so, he turned around for one last look. “I could not help thinking what the Houston looked like when I first joined her,” he told the History Network. “She was the president’s yacht and shined from end to end . ... As I watched her lay down and die, she rolled over on either side and the fires went out with a loud hiss.”
Hamlin was among 368 Houston survivors captured by the Japanese. Of that number, 76 died as prisoners of war, although as naval historian James Hornfischer notes, the survivors “would come to envy her dead.” They endured 42 months of humiliation, physical and mental torture, starvation and horrible tropical diseases. Forced to work as slaves in coal mines and
shipyards and to build a railway linking Burma and Thailand through impossible jungle terrain, they watched their comrades, Australian and American, die slowly day by day. (“The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a fictionalized version of their ordeal.)
Another night years after the war: H. Robert Charles, a Marine who had been aboard the Houston, had his teenaged son drive the two of them to the top of a hill near their Connecticut home. “I had just gotten my driver’s license,” Dana Charles recalled.
His father, who had been drinking, was in tears. He wanted to tell his son what happened to him that terrifying night in the Java Sea. He wanted to recall what he endured, what he saw, during three-and-a-half years in Japanese POW camps. He struggled to explain why it had been so hard to let it go.
“I felt rather helpless,” Dana Charles said by phone earlier this week from his home in Kirkland, Wash.
As they sat in the car in the darkness, the elder Charles recalled manning his battle station on the Houston’s foremast and firing his .50 caliber machine gun at the searchlights providing deadly illumination of the two cruisers. Capt. Albert Rooks gave the order to abandon ship shortly before he was killed by shrapnel from a Japanese shell; Charles ignored the order. A second order came, and the 22-year-old Marine kept firing until his gunnery sergeant told him, “It’s finished, Charlie.” An explosion blew him off the quarter deck and knocked him out; he came to in the water. The sergeant, still firing, went down with the ship.
Struggled with PTSD
Charles swam for nine hours, for a while helping a wounded sailor stay afloat until the man slipped from his grasp and died. Finally, a Japanese patrol boat spotted him, threw him a line and dragged him ashore. His ordeal was just beginning. Along with other Perth and Houston survivors, he was harnessed to a donkey cart and forced to walk barefoot on hot asphalt until his feet were a mass of blisters. The POW procession halted only long enough for Charles and his comrades to rip the blisters off their feet. In a confinement they called the Bicycle Camp, he suffered from pellagra and malaria, was often beaten and was barely fed. A prison guard jabbed the skeletal young man in the back with his rifle butt; his back bothered him the rest of his life.
When Charles got home to Kansas after the war, “he got tired of his mother bringing people over to look at him,” Dana Charles said. He left home, got a degree in journalism from Northwestern University and worked as a magazine writer in New York. For years he struggled to cope with what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder. A book he wrote in 1988, “Last Man Out,” “seemed to get it out of his system,” his son said. The elder Charles died in 2009 at 90.
In 1945, a shipmate, Otto Schwarz, was working as a slave laborer building a railroad in Vietnam when a villager on a bicycle whispered to him in English that the war was over. Back home in Union, N.J., Schwarz experienced some of the same readjustment difficulties as Charles. One way that Schwarz coped was to assure that the memory of his shipmates who gave their lives would never be forgotten and that he and other survivors would stay in touch. With his wife Trudy’s help, he organized the USS Houston Survivors Association in 1946 and for years produced “The Blue Bonnet,” a quarterly newsletter he sent to survivors and their families.
The retired postal worker died in 2006 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. “He loved his service,” Trudy Schwarz said. “He loved being in the Navy.” John Schwarz continues his father’s work with the organization now known as the USS Houston Survivors Association/Next Generations.
Offering them their due
Trudy Schwarz, 93, was in Houston last week for the opening of an exhibition at the Houston Public Library’s Ideson Building entitled “Guardians of Sunda Strait: The World War II Loss of HMAS Perth and USS Houston.” Spearheaded by Booker, a Houston art gallery owner, and organized by curators of the Australian National Maritime Museum, the exhibition honors the legacy of both ships.
Schwarz also attended the annual USS Houston memorial service last Saturday at Sam Houston Park. Of the 1,068 crew members aboard the Houston on that horrendous night 75 years ago, only three remain. None were able to attend the service. (Only three Perth survivors are alive, as well.) As historian Hornfischer has written, “the surviving men of the USS Houston have lived and aged gracefully, seldom if ever asking for attention or demanding their due.”
Now, almost all are gone. The exhibition is a way for both Americans and Australians to offer them their due, to say thank you.
joe.holley@chron.com twitter.com/holleynews