The USS Houston ( code and identification number CA-30 ) was a heavy cruiser of the United States Navy , belonging to the Northampton class and so named by the homonymous city in Texas . Set in May 1928 and launched in 1929 as a light cruiser ( CL-30 ), it was heavily reclassified in July 1931 following the signing of the London naval treaty .

USS HOUSTON 1934

The USS Houston ( code and identification number CA-30 ) was a heavy cruiser of the United States Navy , belonging to the Northampton class and so named by the homonymous city in Texas . Set in May 1928 and launched in 1929 as a light cruiser ( CL-30 ), it was heavily reclassified in July 1931 following the signing of the London naval treaty .

After the test trip the Panama Canal passed and entered the Asiatic Fleet base in the Philippines , from which it left in 1932 to protect US interests threatened by the brief war between the Japanese Empire and China in January. At the beginning of 1934 he returned to Pearl Harbor where he joined the Pacific Fleet , then in the summer he took President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on a cruise that ended in the Caribbean in Portland. The cruiser also served as a presidential ship, in detail in October 1935, in 1938 and again in January 1939 during a combined US navy exercise in the Atlantic Ocean ; in 1937 he also attended the inauguration of the Golden Gate Bridge . After extensive revisions lasted for much of 1939, he anchored in Pearl Harbor, from where he left at the end of 1940 to return to the Asiatic Fleet . On the morning of December 8, 1941, he escaped for a few hours to the devastating Japanese raids that struck the archipelago at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor . L ‘ Admiral Thomas Hart, commander in chief of the fleet, left the Philippines with all the ships and reached first Darwin in Australia , then joined the Anglo-Dutch forces that were preparing to fight the Japanese invasion convoys in the Dutch East Indies .

Damaged by an airstrike in January 1942, Houston only came into contact with Japanese warships on February 27 during the Battle of the Java Sea, which ended in disastrous results for the Allies . He received orders to fall back into the port of Tjilatjap on the southern coast of Java but was identified and sunk by numerous Japanese units on the night between 28 and 1 March; the approximately 370 survivors of the crew were almost all captured and lived a long imprisonment for the rest of the Second World War .
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