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Wilbur—nearly two hundred resolutions from civic organizations, five hundred Western Union telegrams from individuals, and five thousand “classically composed appeals” from “home-loving boys and girls who comprise our scholastic population,” wrote William A. Bernrieder, executive secretary of the Cruiser Houston Committee. Within nine months of the campaign’s start, the Navy announced that its newest cruiser would be named the
Houston
. She would be a flag cruiser fitted to accommodate an admiral’s staff and designated to replace the USS
Pittsburgh
(CA-4) as flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet.
    Electric-welded, lightweight, and fast, the USS
Houston
(originally designated CL-30) was drawn up to pack 130,000 shaft horsepower, more than the entire U.S. fleet did in 1898. The shipbuilders at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock in Newport News,Virginia, birth state of Sam Houston, launched her on September 7, 1929, at a cost of $17 million. On that grand day, the citizens of Houston showed up in Virginia in numbers that powerfully impressed Newport News president Homer L. Ferguson, who attested, “Out of 319 launchings at the yards none was more colorful, nor bore more unmistakable signs of careful preparation.”
    “No detail, however small, was overlooked by naval architects, engineers and scientists in making this cruiser the supreme combination of all that is superb and efficient in fighting ships,” William Bernrieder would tell Houston’s KPRC radio audience. The crew slept not on hammocks but on actual berths with springs and mattresses. There were mailboxes throughout the ship, a large recreation hall with modern writing desks and reading lamps, footlockers instead of musty old seabags for personal storage, and hot and cold running water—not just for officers but for the crew as well.
    Commissioned in the summer of 1930 and reclassified from light cruiser to heavy cruiser a year later, the
Houston
acquired her lifelong identification with the fabled U.S. Asiatic Fleet from the beginning. The ship was the Asiatic Fleet’s flagship until 1933. By the time she returned in that capacity in November 1940 under Capt. Jesse B. Oldendorf, relieving the
Augusta,
tensions with Japan were escalating dangerously.
    The Asiatic Fleet was, in effect, the frontier detachment of the turn-of-the-century Navy. In the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, its ships toured Asia’s imperial wilderness, showing the U.S. flag. Though it was always led by a single heavy cruiser or battleship that served as its flagship, the fleet’s signature vessel was the gunboat, 450-tonners that ranged inland—as far as thirteen hundred miles up the Yangtze River—to safeguard U.S. interests in China. One officer who commanded a Yangtze gunboat called them “seagoing fire departments.” By virtue of its exotic station, basing its ships wherever the seasons or the tremors of faltering European empires required—Shanghai, Tsingtao, Manila—the fleet enjoyed a cachet among sailors that always outweighed its meager physical assets. Free from stateside hierarchies and rigmarole, Asiatic Fleet sailors acquired a signal swagger and style. Admiral Hart held a high opinion of them. “Like their officers, the men were regulars and were of longer average service and experience than the rest of the Navy…. No man ever commanded a better lot.” In 1905, a midshipman named Chester Nimitz had served his first seaduty with the fleet, on board the twelve-thousand-ton battleship
Ohio
. Thirty years later he was back, commanding the fleet’s flagship, the cruiser
Augusta
.
    Few American military men have served their nation as isolated and far removed from support as the men on “Asia Station.” On the world maps that schoolchildren studied—Mercator projections that invariably centered on the North American continent and whose edges cleaved the world vertically at 110 degrees east longitude—they patrolled the extreme