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Here’s a good book I’m reading now.

Ship of Ghosts
The story of the USS Houston CA-30

A few excerpts:
This captivating saga chronicles the ordeal of the lost cruiser USS Houston and the fate of its 1,168 men — a grim tale that was then a mystery and largely untold in historical accounts of WWII naval warfare in the Pacific.
Hornfischer provides an intimate history of FDR’s favorite pre-war ship, its crew and the desperate sea battle in 1942 off the coast of Java that sunk the Houston, the U.S. fleet’s flagship in Asia.

The bulk of Ship of Ghosts follows what happened to the third of Houston’s crew that survived the sea battle only to face shark-infested waters, hostile nearby islanders, and — for those lucky or unlucky enough to get that far —years of hardship and struggle to stay alive as prisoners of war. This is the part of the story that David Lean told in his classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai — about horror-filled POW camps in the impassable jungles of Burma and Thailand, where merciless Japanese guards forced Houston survivors suffering from starvation and deadly tropical diseases to build bridges and railroads by hand.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2006-12-13-ship-ghosts-review_x.htm

http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780553803907

http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780739311431

Authors sight (nice Memorial on it)
http://www.jameshornfischer.com/

It’s deserving of a movie Or a Foxhole thread. The battles it was in is something else

Thanks quietolong. It is worthy of a Foxhole thread. I did a search on my hard drive to see if we’d done it and I did find notes but it looks like we never got to it. Now we have no excuse. :-)

I read a book called “The Lonely Ships” a long ime ago it covered the Far East Asian Fleet and the disasters it encountered at the beginning of the war. An interesting read.

Don't forget the rules.

USS Houston (CA-30) in 1939