The annals of World War II are filled with epic dramas, but who remembers the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast"?

That's what they called the heavy cruiser USS Houston, gallant flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet and President Roosevelt's personal favorite, in the early days of the war.

She initially seemed charmed; the Japanese propaganda machine erroneously reported her sunk several times before she finally did go to the bottom.

		"SHIP OF GHOSTS" By James D. Hornfischer Bantam ($26)

Then began the most harrowing ordeal of survival and endurance in the Pacific theater, says author James D. Hornfischer.

Her survivors washed up on Java, where they were captured and forced into slavery on the Burma-Thailand Railway, laboring for years in the jungle alongside thousands of British, Dutch and Australian prisoners.

They suffered from tropical diseases, malnutrition, festering wounds and overwork at the hands of brutal Japanese overlords hellbent on building the railway made famous in the book and movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

Fate was especially cruel for a few of these sailors. At the end of the war, two died in the stinking holds of Japanese prison ships torpedoed by U.S. submarines.

For Hornfischer, author of "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors," the tale of the Houston and the Death Railway is all the more poignant because it is relatively unsung, at least compared to such well-documented horrors as the Bataan Death March.

"The story of the USS Houston was largely unknown even in its own time," he writes. "Since then, what may have been the most trying ordeal to beset a ship's company has lain in puzzling obscurity."

His book presents the tale in straightforward journalistic fashion, relying on historical documents and the recollections of the dwindling survivors -- 42 as of February.

Most of the 1,168 men aboard died when the ship sank off the coast of Java in 1942 as the powerful Japanese navy swept through the Dutch East Indies, hammering the Allies at every turn.

For the uninitiated, Hornfischer's descriptions of war at sea are a bit heavy on Navy terminology. But the scenes he paints are riveting, especially for anyone who's ever toured one of the few remaining World War II battlewagons such as the USS Alabama or North Carolina.

In one engagement, Hornfischer writes, shells the size of automobiles took more than a minute to travel to their target. For anyone on the receiving end, a minute is a long time to wait to find out if you're going to die.

But the real story of "Ship of Ghosts" doesn't start until the cruiser goes down and several hundred survivors slosh up on the beach covered in thick oil.

They're shipped off to Burma and Thailand and put to work by Japanese captors obsessed with "speedo," their pidgin English exhortation to get the railway done quickly regardless of how many workers die.

The book is a litany of suffering:

Starving men working without tools in stifling heat and monsoons, beaten by guards who chose to ignore the Geneva Conventions, withering to skeletons and in some cases simply losing the will to live.

Estimates vary, but as many as 16,000 Allied prisoners, the bulk of them British, died in Pacific POW camps, along with as many as 200,000 native laborers.

The Americans paid a small price compared to the other Allied nations, but as Hornfischer writes, the Houston survivors came to "envy the dead."

Of the 368 men who survived the sinking, 291 made it home. An index in the back of the book shows that most of the others died of disease in the camps.

Trapped in a jungle hell, many of them felt forsaken, then forgotten as the U.S. island-hopping campaign pounded the Japanese across the Pacific.

"In the end, when the puzzle of their fate was solved, the euphoric rush of victory swept their tale into the dustbin of dim remembrance," Hornfischer writes. "The story of the Houston got lost in a blizzard of ticker tape."