Season 3 Episode 12: Memorial Day Tribute to the USS Houston Part 1 of 2 (A Time Travel Podcast)

<p><em>What’s that? A radio is being broadcast across the entire ship. Not a man is moving as everyone has their ears listening closely to the announcement from President Franklin D. Roosevelt from radio signal coming in from CBS and NBC Radio.</em></p> <p><strong>PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT DECLARING WAR</strong></p> <p><strong>ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1941 AFTER JAPANESE EMPIRE BOMBED PEARL HARBOR ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1941</strong></p> <p>I rushed back up to the place I had landed my time machine, and was quickly lifted away until I found myself nestled in the bed in my quarters on the USS Houston. It was near sunset on February 28, 1942</p> <p>The ship I was on, the U.S.S. Houston, Admiral Tommy Hart’s former Asiatic flagship, had vanished off the radar without a trace somewhere off the Northwest coast of Java. The mystery of this great warship remained complete until the war ended and small groups of survivors were discovered in Japanese prisoner of war camps, scattered from the island of Java through the Malay Peninsula, the jungles of Burma and Thailand, and northward to the Islands of Japan.</p> <p>Of the 1,008 officers and men who manned her, including myself, approximately 350 escaped from the sinking ship, only to be captured in the jungles of Java, or as they floundered helplessly in the sea. Of the original survivors, only 266 lived through the ordeal of filth and brutal treatment brutally handed out to them in the Japanese prisoner of war camps.</p> <p>To me the story of the U.S.S. Houston, especially during the last three weeks of her valiant battle against overwhelming odds, is one of the greatest epics of the United States Navy, yet historians of World War II seem to have neglected it almost completely. Not only that. In 1970, my mother was given a typewritten manuscript from my Uncle who was one of the 266 who lived through the ordeal of… as I put it… filth and brutal treatment. My story today is long overdue. In 2016, I wrote a novel called “The Galloping Ghost from the Java Coast,” which fi