The USS Marblehead (CL-12), referred to by her crew as Marby, was an Omaha class light cruiser commissioned in Philadelphia in 1924. It was the third U.S. Navy vessel given this name.
Marby joined the U.S. Asiatic Fleet in 1938, spending summers in China and winters in the Philippines until 1940, when she left China for good as Japan became more hostile. Japan’s ships were superior to the Marby and other Asiatic Fleet vessels. Marby’s skipper, Captain A.G. Robinson, and his crew spent the rest of the year and most of 1941 at sea training for battle. Late November 1941, two weeks before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Asiatic Fleet Commander Admiral Thomas Hart ordered his fleet to disperse from the Philippines and into the neighboring Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).
The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese struck the Philippines and other colonial possessions across Southeast Asia. The Asiatic Fleet, along with British, Dutch, and Australian vessels, would spend the rest of 1941 and some of 1942 fighting to slow the Japanese advance. Most of those ships wouldn’t survive, and many crews wouldn’t live to see March 1, 1942.
Marby was an exception. Her defining moments came Feb. 4, 1942, in the Battle of Makassar Strait and in the trying months that followed. That morning, a fleet of Japanese bombers attacked Marby and other ships south of the Strait. At the time, 724 officers and enlisted men were aboard.
Marby dodged the bombs dropped in the first two runs, but on the third, one bomb hit her stern and jammed her rudder, causing her to steam in uncontrollable but predictable circles, which left her vulnerable. A second bomb struck her center, disabling her internal and external communications and her gyroscope and electrical circuits, causing fires onboard. A third bomb exploded off her bow, opening a hole in her side, flooding multiple compartments.
The damage and fires were so extensive that the Japanese assumed the ocean would finish Marby off. They left her and pursued the USS Houston (CA-30). What the Japanese couldn’t know was the incredible level of training, skill and discipline instilled in Marby’s officers and enlisted crew. They refused to give up their beloved ship. Most of the pumps were damaged or had no electricity, and bucket brigades bailed water for around 72 hours while others devised workarounds to restore power and communications and keep the ship afloat.
Captain Robinson and crew, with the help of surviving destroyers, relied on Marby’s engines and propellers to navigate through rainstorms and the treacherous Lombok Strait to reach temporary safety on the south coast of Java. There, in Tjilatjap port, they buried 15 shipmates and had their wounded treated at Dutch hospitals. Since Tjilatjap port offered only minor repairs, Marby, still in bad condition, left Java on Feb. 13, starting the next leg of a perilous 90 day, 20,589-mile trip across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
On Feb. 21, she reached Trincomalee, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), but the port was full of ships fleeing the Japanese. So, March 2, Marby departed for South Africa across the other half of the Indian Ocean. They stopped briefly at Durban and Port Elizabeth, burying two shipmates in the latter, before heading to the British Royal Navy Base at Simonstown on March 24. There, they had enough repairs to brave the Atlantic Ocean. This also enabled Captain Robinson to grant the crew badly overdue shore leave, their first in several months.
On April 15, they went to Recife, Brazil, which held another Allied naval base, but there was an unexpected challenge. Recife port authorities wouldn’t let them in. The Japanese reported that Marby had sunk, and her trip home was kept secret. Authorities feared the ship was a Nazi ruse to enter and destroy the port. Though Marby’s crew correctly answered every question authorities asked, giving answers only Americans would likely know, they weren’t allowed in. One of Marby’s radiomen, Raymond Kester, became aware that the USS Milwaukee was in Recife. He had served with Milwaukee’s Chief Radioman Newell Phelps, who was soon called into the conversation. Phelps verified that the man on the radio was his former shipmate. For two days, Marby prepared for her final leg home, departing on April 25.
On May 4, Marby arrived in New York City. Special phone lines were installed for the crew to call home. Multiple Japanese reports of Marby having been sunk, plus the fact that Marby’s voyage had been kept secret, had led loved ones to believe their sons were either dead or in POW camps. Soon, tears of joy flowed as phone calls came in across the nation, bringing word that most of their men were safe and would soon be home on leave.
The American press wasted no time in giving Marby the title “The Ship That Wouldn’t Sink.” President Franklin Roosevelt mentioned the crew’s heroics in one of his Fireside Chats, citing their feat as having an important impact on Allied morale. In 1944, the book “Where Away, A Modern Odyssey” retold the story, and a movie, “The Story of Dr. Wassell,” portrayed escapes from Java by survivors of the USS Marblehead and the USS Houston.
After a six-month overhaul in Brooklyn Navy Yard in October 1942, Marby reentered the fight, patrolling the mid-Atlantic in search of Nazi blockade runners and submarines. In 1944, she supported the successful invasion of Southern France. Marby was decommissioned in late 1945 and scrapped in 1946, but she has never been forgotten.
This story was written in collaboration with the Webmaster and the Biographer of www.USSMarblehead.com, whose fathers were aboard Marby for the entire voyage home. The website is dedicated to the memory of Marby’s crew and the families that supported them.
