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wrote his parents in Littlefield, Texas, of brawls between Marines and militant Japanese nationals. “Everyone hates the Japs and though we are all told to take anything they say or do to us, it just won’t be done. I will try to kill the Japanese who so much as lays a hand on me. I am just like everyone else so I know the rest will do the same thing.”
    As Hitler’s armies tore through Europe and Russia, the International Settlement became electric with energy, swelling with Jewish refugees from Austria. They brought some of Vienna with them, erecting bistros and wienerschnitzel stands alongside the tea and silk shops. String combos played on the streets. But by December 1940, as many people were fleeing the Settlement as arriving there. Distress was in the air. A
Time
correspondent wrote:
    The first sting of winter hung over a dying city. Its tide of fleeing foreigners has reached flood last month with the evacuation of U.S. citizens; its foreign colony has shrunk to a scattering of bitter enders…. The roulette tables at Joe Farren’s, the Park Hotel’s Sky Terrace, Sir Ellis Victor Sassoon’s Tower Night Club has none of their old sparkle. Industrial Shanghai is sinking fast.
    The Marines’ experience in China was excellent preparation for what the
Houston
’s officers had in store for them. For thirteen months leading to the outbreak of war, Cdr. Arthur L. Maher, the gunnery officer, had run a training program rooted in the idea that competition through intersquad rivalry was the key to high performance. The 1,168-man wartime complement was full of senior petty officers who had a talent for promoting competition between divisions. Inthe deck force, it was up to men such as boatswain’s mate first class Shelton “Red” Clymer—“a real tough old bird,” said one sailor—to get green recruits ready for war. In the engineering department belowdecks, any number of experienced hands kept the screws turning. Lt. Cdr. Richard H. Gingras and his hard-driving machinists ran the ship’s two steam power plants. “The caliber of the senior petty officers was way above anything that I’d seen in these other ships,” said Lt. Robert B. Fulton, the ship’s assistant engineering officer. “Other ships were struggling to get basic things together. None of them could compare to the caliber of personnel on the
Houston
.”
    In dealing with the Japanese leading up to war, the U.S. Congress had been considerably less surly than the leathernecks of the Fourth Marines. Certainly, Japan had not always been America’s enemy. During World War I the two nations had enjoyed a de facto alliance, Japan fondly remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-Russian posture during the Russo-Japanese War and eager for the chance to relieve Germany of its colonial island holdings in the Central Pacific: the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. Worried about provoking Japan, the U.S. Congress voted in February 1939 against appropriating $5 million to upgrade the Navy’s forward base in Guam. Though in April 1940 Adm. Harold R. Stark, the chief of naval operations, had relocated the United States Fleet from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, overseas the Navy would make do with the bases it already possessed.
    The imperial Japanese notion of peace was as consistent in application as it was different from the rest of the world’s understanding of the term. Serene dominion over continental and oceanic Asia was the Tokyo militarists’ idea of peace, clearly articulated by Japan but widely misunderstood in the West. “Japan was the only important nation in the world in the twentieth century which combined modern industrial power and a first-class military establishment with religious and social ideas inherited from the primitive ages of mankind, which exalted the military profession and regarded war and conquest as the highest good,” wrote the historian Samuel Eliot Morison. The Japanese Imperial Army, which by 1931 had become the