US Navy ACMM George Hosmer Cumming Jr. was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 19, 1909, the son of George Hosmer Cummings Sr. (1889-1958) and Mary Isabella McGilvray (1884-1953). At the time of George Jr.'s birth, his father was supporting the family as a drayman for a delivery company. George Jr. enlisted in the US Navy sometime before 1929 and was stationed at Fort Barrancas, Pensacola and housed in Barracks #23. Here, he would meet and marry a Pensacola girl, Miss Flora Mae McCall (1911-1974) on December 7, 1930. She was the daughter of a railroad machinist, Joseph E. McCall and Maggie May Carlisle. She was also the granddaughter of Samuel Alexander McCall (1839-1926) a Confederate soldier of the 1st North Carolina Infantry Regiment.
In the meantime, George and Flora had moved to Cantonment, Florida by 1935 with George still a Naval aviation machinist mate and Flora raising their two-year-old son George Elwood (1932-1998). By November 7, 1940, George was promoted to Chief and deployed aboard the cruiser USS Houston along with another Pensacolian by marriage Sidney Franklin Myers (1909-1942).
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Houston found itself confronting a Japanese invasion fleet en route to land at Java. The ship was known to the Japanese as "the Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast" because they thought they had sunk her so many times. But on March 1, 1942, the cruisers Perth and Houston sailed into Banten Bay in hopes of destroying the enemy invasion forces there. They sank one transport and forced three others to run aground, but the two ships were outnumbered and outgunned, thus their fate was already sealed.
As written by David Beck, a relative of George, "They took on heavy fire from every direction. Planes bombed them & hit them with several torpedoes as they fired close range machine guns from nearby destroyers. They fought a valiant fight until they were out of ammunition. The last thing to be seen as the ship went down was a lone Marine up in the mast still firing his machine gun until he reached the water followed by the American flag slowly sinking into the sea. Commander Walter Winslow recalled, “It seemed as though a sudden breeze picked up the Stars & Stripes and waved them in one last defiant gesture. But the Japanese were shooting the men in the water as they fought to survive. Many were eaten by sharks. The 368 survivors that made it to shore were quickly caught and lived brutal lives in Japanese POW camps. The men were forced to work on the most notorious slave labor project in World War II, the building of the 250-mile Thai-Burma Railway, known as the Death Railway. Seventy-nine men died in captivity, unable to endure the torture, neglect, disease, and starvation. Nobody knew what happened to the Houston until survivors were liberated from the POW camps in September of 1945. The wreck of the Houston was finally discovered in the late 1960’s. As a grave site for the Houston’s crew, it was respectfully placed off-limits to any salvage or recreational diving. When the movie, "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was released in 1957, there was a part when someone asks a POW where he came from and he said he was on the Houston."
Pensacola News Journal 1-23-1946
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