But only an empty shell was lost. What the Admiralty's submarine experts drooled over was of such significance that when engineer-officer Dodds was up before King George VI to be presented with his D.S.C., the King told him, according to the official historian, that the operation in which he had gained it was perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at sea.
In addition to his pair of Super Zeiss binoculars, young Balme also garnered a D.S.C. from U-110, and Baker-Cresswell his promotion to captain.
CHAPTER NINE
After the fact of her demise became known, the Sydney Bulletin carried a story headed: "Exit Vampire-Fighting."
The contemptible old rust-bucket of Herr Goebbels' scorn could have made her exit in no other way - a habit of years is hard to break.
This is a story of one brave ship's company, and of an unbelievably brave - or extraordinaryily lucky - coxswain of her motorboat. Maybe this chap still shivers when he thinks of what might have happened to him, if it had been anybody but Old-Close-the-Range... But I'm firing the broadside before it's loaded.
Since the 1,900-ton steel-hardened gnat christened Vampire (Aubrietia??) first tasted salt water in 1917, when her razor-stemmed bow and the lean flanks behind it slid with a streamlined splash into its native element, she had steamed scores of thousands of miles, in all kinds of weather, in all sorts of places, worked by all natures of men.
Acquired by Australia from the Mother Navy in 1932, she continued for another seven years steaming solidly, across to New Zealand in the summer, up to Singapore and points east in winter. By the time she docked in Malta, six months after Hitler beat the drum, she had clocked another 26,000 miles.
All that grim year she fought through the Mediterranean, valiant company of that immortal Scrap-Iron Flotilla; in at the Battle of Calabria; in and out of Tobruk countless times ferrying men, their food and munitions; establishing an advanced base at Swda Bay; and before she left for a brief spell in quiet home waters, in and out of the savagery of the Greek and Crete evacuations - and anyone who was in that lot knew what war was all about.
In the Mediterranean she was under the orders of Admiral (Old-Close-the-Range) Cunningham, whom you have met and of whom First Lord of the Admiralty A.V. Alexander said when the battlewise sea-fighter was raised to the peerage and promoted Admiral of the Fleet: "The greatest sea captain since Nelson."
A certain able-seaman in the Royal Australian Navy is wholeheartedly in agreement with that lofty assessment.
Shortly before the Battle of Matapan, in which Cunningham was to surprise and annihilate an Italian heavy cruiser squadron and send their newest battleship running for home, Vampire's. motorboat was alongside the landing stage in Alexandria.
Her driver, a stoker, was fiddling with the engine, for like her mother the boat seldom did more than one trip without a breakdown.
The coxswain and his bowman were patiently waiting and smoking - in the boat; an inexcusable breach of regulations - when a slightish man dressed quietly in a grey civilian suit and wearing a friendly smile stepped on to the pier. Politely he asked the coxswain to take him out to the Queen Elizabeth. Coxswain cocked an eye at the battleship, noted her position and replied:
"Okay, Cobber. I've gotta pass the big bastard. Soon as this bloody abortion of an engine's fixed we'll shove off. Hop in."
The quiet man hopped in and presently they cast off and chugged down-harbour, with the young bowman in earnest conversation with the passenger on the demerits of life in the Service, in hard-worked destroyers in particular. Approaching the battleship's port gangway, that one reserved for junior officers and libertymen, the coxswain cupped his hands and shouted aft above the clatter of the aged engine.
"Hey, there! You'll have to jump as we come alongside - this old bumboat won't go astern!" The one addressed acknowledged with a wave of his hand, and as Vampire's tattered craft surged alongside the glittering ladder he leaped to the platform and ran nimbly up its steps. As he reached the quarterdeck there was a frantic rush of marines, quartermasters, sideboys, midshipmen and the officer of the day from the Admiral's gangway on the other side where they'd been drawn up to receive him. but Vampire's coxswain missed all that flap. Not long afterwards the destroyer received a signal thanking her for assistance to the Commander-in-Chief.
"Commander-in-Chief!" gulped the motorboat coxswain. "Christ. I thought he was their canteen manager!"
The signal was characteristic of its sender's quiet humour - when he was quiet! When he was roused, as he often was by reports of the lacing his ships were taking by ridiculously superior enemy forces, he led his heavies to sea and fought for a respite for his small craft with almost tigerish ferocity.
Even danger can become monotonous; and Vampire's life (and the constant threat to it) in the Mediterranean was much the same as Waterhen's, which we have already covered. This story therefore concerns itself more with her life and death nearer home, against a different enemy.
Commander William Moran, fresh from the big-ship comfort of cruiser Canberra (in which I served under him), took over from Vampire's Mediterranean driver, Lieutenant-Commander J.A. Walsh, in September, 1941. Hailing from that old deep-water port Kalgoorlie, changing mine dust for cadet's uniform in 1917, Moran was a short, dumpy, quick-stepping officer who had served in battleship Valiant and was commander at the Royal Australian Naval College when Hitler marched. Though he lacked the personal magnetism of captains like Hec. Waller of Stuart of Matapan and John Collins of cruiser Sydney (that is no disparagement; theirs was a fine and rare quality), Moran was a first-class seaman, and a consistent disciplinarian.
He was well-rigged to drive Vampire, being a specialist in the torpedoes which, each packing in its warhead the blast of a cruiser's broadside, she carried in her triple tubes amidships. And, as it turned out, he was not lacking in the guts department; in fact, a specialist there, too.
Like all destroyers, Vampire was all works - 27,000 horsepower spinning her turbines in a whining blast that gave her 34 knots, the lot packed in a shell just strong enough to hold it, and to withstand the hammer blows of snorting at speed into any sort of sea. Anything heavier than a rifle bullet could pierce her skin - therefore she was built low in the water, to make a difficult target for enemy guns and given her speed, to whip round on her tail and dodge their shells.
The daily newspapers christened her breed "maids of all work"; they worked all right, days and nights for months on end, but there was little of the maid about them. Vampire, with her four 4-inch, shooting a 31-lb shell at 2,600 feet per second, smaller ack-ack guns, six 21-inch torpedo tubes and depth charges aft, was a termagant. In protection she was as a mother with chicks; in offence she could be pitiless.
Moran joined her after she had undergone a much needed refit in Sydney. With an almost new crew he sailed her to Singapore. In her company, due to the wisdom of the drafting office, Vampire retained a backbone of staid permanent-Service hands - staid meaning taut, or if you like, experienced. Hers were veterans of the Med.
The rest were Reserves. One had been a grocer's assistant, another a railway porter; there was a bus conductor and a car sprayer, a public schoolboy, a kangaroo shooter from Queensland, a shoemaker and a lad from Hobart who a few months before had been putting patterns on silk for ladies' dresses. But her captain had a set of good petty-officers, the real strength of his command. He had some good officers; he had a few who were green. But his navigating and torpedo-control officer, Ian Cartwright - a most important young man, as subsequent events in Endau Bay were to prove - was a lieutenant who'd had almost a year and a half in Vampire, and this included her Mediterranean stint.
A large fair man always ready to smile (well, mostly), Cartwright later became first-lieutenant of that N-class Fleet destroyer which changed her name to Wind Rode, and in which I served with him as captain of the iron-deck. This has no relevance, except insofar as now and again you could get him to talk...
But Moran is the lead character. Tallying h
is forces as a poker player would consider the laws of chance in a deck of cards kept Moran in his new command awake at night, and governed his drill orders for the all-too-short trip up north.
This was what command really meant. Not the flamboyant, Hollywood-esque dash of a 30-knot greyhound, but the insistent consideration of a hundred changing elements. At thirty-eight years of age it was a burden that formed his mouth into a thin line. It was a thing you could never tell anybody; it was something a man knew only after long years of experience. And the hundred or so men under him, whose lives rested on a single order from his lips, knew, and trusted. Such, as Conrad saw it, is the prestige, the privilege and the burden of command.
Vampire still had a few precious days of peace left her to workup in this Pacific area. all that her old hands had learned from the Luftwaffe and the U-boats was ground daily into the butchers and bakers and silk-pattern makers who formed the major part of her crew.
It was a hard, vital time. Daily, and through the night as well, gun crews drilled, damage-repair parties shored up bulkheads and quenched imaginary fires, ammunition-supply gangs whizzed the metal food up to the guns, masts of friendly ships were cut and spliced together in range-finder lenses, and almost without cease, Moran drilled the brains of the ship's fighting organisation - his bridge and gunnery-control teams. And the pay-off? She got out again from Endau Bay.
Apart from the constant drill she did convoy duties. Once she carried the G.O.C. Malaya (Lieut.-General Percival), with his staff, to Sarawak in Borneo. En route, lookouts sighted a small group of lights low down on the horizon. Japan was not yet in, but Vampire altered towards and racked on speed; and the lights disappeared. Though she searched diligently, gaining more practice, no sign of a surface craft was found. It was presumed that the lights belonged to a dived Japanese submarine, sniffing around its future hunting ground.
Things were pretty tense when she was assigned to escort battle-cruiser Repulse to Darwin. Half-way, a signal ordered both ships back to Singapore, "with all despatch."
On approaching harbour another signal told them to "open fire without hesitation on any suspicious aircraft sighted." In this ominous atmosphre 1941 drew towards its close.
When, without warning, Singapore was first raided, the navigator was asleep in his cabin. He was wakened by the steward clamping down the steel deadlights over the cabin scuttles, or portholes. He asked him what the devil he thought he was doing.
"Air raid, sir," answered the steward briefly, in the non-commital tones of a man who knew well the shelters of Malta.
To Pilot's rude and disbelieving reply he held up his hand.
"Listen."
Just then a flying Nip, aiming at the water-front oil tanks, plonked his load in the harbour. The slamming thud agaistVampire's old plates brought Cartwright out of his bunk in one leap. The morning light broke through a sky smudged with the smoke of burning oil.
Japan was in. Vampire was ready.
CHAPTER TEN
Her first big job was a sweep northwards in company withPrince of Wales and Repulse to smash a reported enemy landing. They liked this; the company. In the Med. there had been Queen Elizabeth and her heavy sisters, but they were of their own War I vintage, whereas this great 44,000-ton Prince of Wales was barely out of nappies, so to speak, and Vampire could just about sit on her quarterdeck. Repulse was old, but had been modified extensively, and in any case was a lovely brute of a ship, longer even than the battleships, with huge 15-inch guns. From Vampire's low deck both capital ships looked indestructibly powerful.
On December 8th, while Pearl Harbour was still smoking, the force steamed to sea down the island-cluttered channel. As Repulse passed the little Australian Morse lights were flashing from three different points on her rearing bridge at once. One of those eyes was blinking at Vampire:
"Take station ahead."
She had just got into position in the van when coming up-channel loomed the bulk of armed merchant cruiser Kanimbla. She flashed a peremptory signal to the destroyer, brief and to the point:
"Get out of my way!"
Vampire slunk to one side while Her Majesty steamed past. A few minutes later the signal yeoman, his mouth twisted under his telescope, spoke to Moran:
"Prince of Wales to Kanimbla, sir. `Keep clear to starb'd. Can't you see I am under way?' " There was a full Admiral behind that peremptory message. They grinned at each other on Vampire's bridge.
Late next day the clouds lifted, and revealed miles astern a lone aircraft, shadowing backwards and forwards across their wake. They stared at that unreachable vulture with silent hate. A carrier would have swiftly done something about it, but they had no carrier, nor any planes from ashore.
All that night Vampire's men got quietly ready for the dawn and what they knew it would bring; checking lifebelts, lashing hammocks tightly - one of these could keep a man afloat for hours - checking fire hoses and the slipping gear of boats and carley rafts: the guns needed no checking. Some men wrote letters to wives and mothers. You never knew. If you bought it, the ship might not, and then there was a chance that your last words would reach home.
They wore an odd assortment of clothes, from old grey flannels and khaki trousers to clean overalls, but all of them covering, some way or the other, arms and legs from the green-hot flashes from shells and bombs. Their faces were protected by the white, non-inflammable cloth of anti-flash helmets, which made them look like cowled monks. Their only real resemblance to monks was that many of them indulged in silent prayer: by now all hands knew about Pearl Harbour, and the number and efficiency of the Japanese planes. There were no misconceptions here about imitative little yellow men.
At 8am on the 10th, radar contact was made with a large formation of approaching aircraft. The British Fleet promptly turned east, to position itself as far as possible in its own element, and as far away from the bombers'. At 10.25 the bosun's mate aboard Vampire piped that familiar and gut-clenching tune:
"Hands will go to action station in five minutes' time."
The planes came over high, in tight formations of nine. As mentioned before, a Stuka's howl is frightening, but there can be nothing quite so ominous, at least to men waiting in a thin-skinned destroyer, as the remote, muted, approaching thunder shafted down from the sky by heavy aircraft.
Yet throughout the resultant mayhem Vampire was not directly attacked, except for a few strafing efforts of rear-gunners, and so she had a dress-circle view of the whole tragedy.
At its height, with planes snarling in, bombs exploding, the British heavies erupting in almost solid sheets of repelling flame, the whole back-clothed by rolling black smoke and white curtains of flung spray, Vampire's navigator, watching Repulse carefully so as to maintain correct station through all her gyrations, suddenly spoke:
"Repulse turning, sir."
Moran had his glasses up, and he answered grimly:
"No, by God, she isn't. She's going!" The great ship heeled, as though under full rudder. Leaned, till the bright red of the anti-fouling paint on her bilges showed clear against the sea. Over, farther, a frightful unnatural lean; then she was right over, and gone. A huge patch of boiling oil-black water was all that remained where a minute before 32,000 tons of battle-cruiser had fought and floated.
When Prince of Wales had followed her, slamming her great bilge keels against the rescuing destroyer Express as she rolled, Vampire was ordered to pick up survivors.
She collected 225, black and slimy with oil, choking and vomiting as the stuff burned their insides. Among them was Captain Tennant, of Repulse. He staggered up to the tiny bridge and hung, coughing uncontrollably, over the windbreak, watching the rescue. Then followed something the Australian seamen would never forget. From below in the scummy water, from whalers and rafts and floating spars. Tennant's men sighted him. One sailor in the water, hanging on the whaler's lifelines, raised his voice in a shout:
"Three cheers for Captain Tennant!" From oil-blinded faces, from mouths caked with
salt, the cheers floated hoarsely up. Tennant waved and turned away, blinking.
Vampire made Singapore at two o'clock in the morning of the next day. Moran and Cartwright had been on the bridge since ten the morning before, with a few minutes break for supper.
In port ambulances were waiting. The wounded went first, then the rest, with Tennant supervising their quartering ashore. And then, almost out on his feet, he came back aboard to personally thank Vampire's company for their assistance. Small wonder his men cheered him from the sea.
In the next six weeks Vampire had little time to remember the Royal Navy's worst tragedy for centuries. Her convoy run was from Singapore to Batavia and Sunda Strait, shepherding back more troops and supplies to try and stopper the Japanese tide welling, it seemed irresistibly, down through the Malayan neck.
Then a fresh enemy landing was reported at Endau Bay, on the east coast. Vampire and Thanet (a small 900-ton destroyer with only two 4-inch and a brace of tubes, but with 31 knots in her boilers) forgot their convoying and leaped up-coast to have a lash.
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