..."We had hardly cleared Iliolo entrance when we heard gunfire astern of us and saw a ship aflame," Cdr. Arthur Mahar recalled. Hidden in the dark backdrop of Panay's mountain ranges, the Houston avoided notice of the Japanese pilots. She joined a pair of Asiatic Fleet destroyers, the Stewart and the John D. Edwards, in escorting two fleet oilers and the old seaplane tender Langley out of the war zone.

Anyone overconfident about America's prospects against Japan might have asked why the invincible U.S. fleet was on the run. En route to Surabaya, Captain Rooks called his officers and department heads to the executive officer's cabin and informed them that war had started. On December 10 more than fifty twin-engine Japanese bombers struck Cavite unopposed, burning out most of its key installations, destroying the harbor facilities, and sinking a transport ship. When Tokyo Rose came on the radio that night, she purred an optimistic report that President Roosevelt's favorite heavy cruiser had been sunk. The men of the Houston were at once flattered and unnerved by the attention. Embracing their status as a priority target not only of the Japanese military but of its propagandists too, they would coin a defiant nickname for the ship: the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast.

For the Allies, the seeming ritual nature of the engagement ended less than an hour after it began. A medium-caliber projectile struck the Java, while an eight-incher arced down and slammed into the Houston. The latter passed through the main deck aft of the anchor windlass, penetrated the second deck, and tore through the starboard side above the waterline without exploding. Another hit ruptured an oil tank on the Houston's port side aft, but it too failed to explode. Either the warheads were duds or the ship's treaty-mandated limitations on weight, which dictated lighter armor protection than would become typical for a heavy cruiser, paid the dividend of failing to detonate a projectile engineered to sink ships with heavier hides.

Fujita had plenty to lose in his dealings with the Japanese. His father's countrymen, his captors, had no idea of his true heritage. Fujita didn't quite know why. He assumed they took him for a Filipino or a Mexican. Though his name was as Japanese as could be, no one paid him much attention. But his buddies did. "Hell, they are going to kill you," they would tell him. "Change your name. For God's sake, don't tell them you're half Japanese." Fujita was scared. He had no doubt they were right. Yet he could not quite pull the trigger on adopting a racial disguise. "If I change my name to Joe Martinez or something, well, when they kill me anyhow they might have me listed as Joe Martinex, and then my folks will never know what happened to me. So I figured hell, I was born with this name, and I might as well die with it."

On November 28 he found himself jammed with 2,200 other men aboard the Kamakura Maru, at 17,500-ton Japanese passenger ship. Each man had a single canteen to last him the ten-day voyage. The ship left Singapore and stopped at Formosa, where some POWs debarked. Continuing north, the ship reached Japan on December 7, 1942, and docked at Nagasaki, the home Fujita's father had left in 1914. The northern winds were cold on his face.

While some were chosen to stay in the mountain camps and maintain the railway against erosion and bombing and the varied sabotages of a defiant jungle, most were shipped to camps in western Thailand. Boarding boxcars to ride the narrow-gauge railway themselves, the evacuees thought of their efforts at sabotage, of the soft pilings they had bolted in place and the weak sports in the embankments they had cultivated, and worried those might be instruments of their own demise. "It was more or less like a Toonerville trolley," said Gus Forsman. "The boxcars swayed an awful lot, and you wondered - especially when you went across a bridge or something like that - whether it would hold, or whether you were going to go crashing in."

It was a largely uncelebrated technical achievement - the Allied nations' first smart bomb - that made it possible finally to destroy the great bridge over the Rive Kwae Noi. The newfangled bomb known as the VB-1 AZON was delivered to the Seventh Bomb Group's 493rd Squadron in late 1944. It was a thousand-pounder equipped with a gyro, solenoids, and moveable fins to hold it steady in free fall, and a radio receiver and servometer to steer it left or right. The acronym "AZON" stood for "azimuth only," indicating the limited (though revolutionary) extent of steering control the bombardier had over the weapon in flight. There was no way to adjust its range in free fall, no way to flatten or steepen its trajectory. But it could be guided left and right by visual means, as a powerful flare burned in its tail fin. Against a long, narrow target such as a bridge, control over one dimension of the trajectory was usually enough to greatly improve the chance of a hit.