Lieutenant Commander, U.S.N.R., who hailed from Little Rock, Arkansas, by way of ten years' service as a medical missionary and later as a United States Navy doctor in China. The orders he carried were to report to Admiral Thomas Hart at Cavite, P.I.
The President Polk sailed shortly before noon. Before her bow had passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, her radioman was listening, wide-eyed, to the reports of the raid on Pearl Harbor. The President Polk turned back to her pier, disembarked all civilian passengers, and turned herself over to the Army. When she sailed again, ten days later, she was an armed transport, carrying forty-eight of the first P-40s shipped to the Far East. Aboard her was Dr. Wassell. His orders still were to report to Admiral Hart. Just where Admiral Hart would be when the President Polk got west of the international date line remained a mystery which it was up to the doctor to solve.
The President Polk sailed under sealed orders. Having a speed of over twenty knots, she had no escort. If she encountered any Jap cruisers or submarines, she would have to run away from them or take it.
Ultimately the President Polk arrived at Brisbane where she unloaded the P-40s and took on troops and supplies to be delivered at Surabaya, Java.
In those first weeks of 1942 a lot was happening in the Malay Peninsula and the Dutch East Indies, and happening fast. Since December 10, 1941, when Jap planes sank the H.M.S. Repulse and Prince of Wales off the east coast of Malaya, the United Nations had been putting up a losing defensive against the tide of Japanese aggression. Having won supremacy of the air over the Philippines, as they did within a few days after the first attack on Manila, the Japs had begun their relentless movement southward, from one island steppingstone to the next, on the march to Singapore. In just nine weeks they seized an economic empire.
In the uncertain fortnight or so before the enemy launched his raid on Pearl Harbor, a number of American ships — cruisers and
