CHAPTER TWELVE
Those of you faithful followers of my naval novels may have gained there from the impression that the Navy can do no wrong. Not so. Mistakes were made, though it gives me no particular pleasure to record this one, for it was to cause the loss of one of our proudest ships, and the lives of some six hundred men. On the other hand, I have no hesitation in opining that in this case "the brave men" were enemy. This, of course, is not to denigrate the efforts of our own sailors; it is simply a matter of degree. The Germans did not have to fight; they could have surrendered honourably to a vessel of such superior capacity. But fight they did, and against all theoretical tenets, they won. It is a sad, but at the same time a tingling story of self-control, discipline and plain guts.
But first, something introductory about the main protagonist.
Even today, there is no naval name so firmly fixed in Australian minds as that of cruiser Sydney. Both ships of the name fought and convincingly won the first cruiser duels of their wars: the first Sydney against Emden off Cocos Islands in November, 1914, and her successor against the Italian Barolomeo Colleoni west of Crete in July, 1940.
Modern Sydney was a fast, strongly-gunned ship of 7,000 tons. Her main armament was formed by eight 6-inch guns mounted in four power-operated twin turrets: four guns forward and four aft, so that she could fight with equal weight both ahead and astern, and if necessary at the same time, as a secondary controlling director was fitted aft.
These long-barrelled guns fired an armour-piercing shell weighing one hundred pounds at high velocity - in fact, at three thousand feet per second. They left with a muzzle energy of six thousand foot-tons, and arrived with not much less. This is a smashing force, as will be shown by what happened to Bartolomeo Colleoni when her body met it.
In addition to her main armament (which was intended for use against ships her own size, and bigger), she carried eight 4-inch in twin mountings amidships (two more than the main armament of a Fleet destroyer).
Ostensibly anti-aircraft, these could be used just as effectively against surface ships, and of course submarines; that is to say, in gunnery terminology, they were dual-purpose weapons, and semiautomatic, with the run-out after firing opening the breeches ready for the next rounds. Their ammunition was "fixed" - the shell fitted to its brass cordite cartridge in much the same way as a bullet is. This made for a rapid rate of fire.
They could fire very fast indeed, for they were the Mark 16 type, a splendid gun. Aboard cruiser Hobart, sister to Sydney, towards the end of the war in the Pacific, I was officer of quarters of the four-inch gundeck, with the whole eight generally on my slop-chit, but my own particular gun being P1 - the forward mounting on the port side.
Hobart was heading north for Borneo, and busily working-up after being refitted from her torpedo damage suffered in the Coral Sea. Time and Borneo were getting close, so down came the gunnery officer to test, in flat-out drill, the efficiency of his secondary armament. My mounting (he said modestly) won the competition, at a loading rate of twenty-two rounds per minute. Atom-age gunners might smile, but our guns were loaded by hand... It seems safe to assume that under her first wartime captain, a man named Collins who knew something of gunnery, Sydney's cannon achieved a corresponding degree of competence.
But their testing-time was not yet. Originally H.M.S. Phaeton, her keel was laid in England in 1933, but while still on the slips she was bought by the Australian Government and renamed. Early in 1936 the brand-new Sydney arrived in Alexandria, there to join the 8-inch cruiser Australia, of whose company I was then one of the less significant members - ordinary-seaman, second-class, than which rating there was no lower.
At that time Collins was Sydney's commander - that is to say, her three-ringed second-in-command. Mussolini was bravely attacking the natives of Abyssinia, and just in case he got bigger ideas we were kept in the Med. to augment the British Fleet instead of sailing for home. This found small favour with us, yet it was to give me, and I am sure hundreds of others, an experience which still lives brightly in my memory. For in April, 1936, both Australian ships were allowed to visit Gallipoli.
We arrived the day after the 25th - our Anzac Day being a time of rejoicing for the Turks, the victors. After an address of welcome by the Turkish Premier on board Australia, men of both ships donned boots, gaiters and water bottles and trekked across the peninsular to Anzac Cove. A ceremony of remembrance was held at Lone Pine cemetery by Australia's chaplain, and after that tingling service we walked around.
Standing above the beach where many of their fathers had landed long years before, we visitors saw that it was still studded with rusting hulls and scattered with rust-eaten bully-beef and condensed-milk tins. To right and left below, old paths stooped over the hills in forky zig-zags, and at unexpected corners crumbling earthworks of some post bore mute witness to the violence those hills had known. It was a sad and proud experience.
Both ships left before dusk, with the senior officer timing his run to breast Cape Helles and its lofty monument right on sunset. The decks were packed with men as the sun touched the rim of hills to starboard. Standing on one of the bridge platforms, rigid and clear for all hands to see, the bugler raised his trumpet. He was a good bugler, bless his memory, and slow and haunting the notes of the Last Post sang across the polished sea, across to them. When the last note quivered to silence you could see men look at each other, and too quickly look away again.
A moment later course was altered, and Gallipoli merged into the night astern. Passing the Italian air base on Leros Island (from where submarine Scire was to carry her frogmen and their pigs to Alexandria), Mussolini's aircraft flew out to take photographs. In those days Governments, or at least cruiser captains, were less chary of offending aggressors, and both ships closed-up their 4-inch antiaircraft armaments to track the targets. Seeing this, the Italians swerved from the swinging barrels and high-tailed it for home.
A few months later, in August, Sydney also found herself home, still in company with her big country-mate.
By the end of May, 1940, she was back in the Mediterranean, a bare two weeks before Italy came in against us. On her bridge, now captain instead of commander, was John Augustine Collins.
One of the most battlewise seamen the Royal Australian Navy produced, an easy-to-serve fellow with a schoolboy grin never far below the surface of his weather-marked face, Collins was born near salt water at Deloraine in Tasmania, son of a doctor, brother of author Dale. He learnt his practical navigation in an exacting school - the War I Grand Fleet - and his gunnery (in which he specialised and topped his class) at that alma mater of British naval turreteers, Whale Island. Two years after that effort he qualified in the Advanced Gunnery Course, which means that what he didn't know about gunnery was hardly worth bothering with.
As executive officer of Sydney during her first two years of life, with the upper-decks his main province, not to mention the ship's standard of seamanship, he got to know her vital parts backwards, and was a natural choice for her command when the time came to land practice ammunition and restock with yellow-nosed armourpiercing shells.
When her name, and his, rang through the world's navies with Barolomeo Colleoni's sinking in 1940, it was not so much the result of that one short action as of years of patiently acquired gunnery and seamanship skill, brilliantly applied to a few hours' fighting.
Collins led his men through Sydney in February, 1941, and enjoyed the victory march like a schoolboy on holiday; afterwards he enjoyed the speeches as much as a four-hour watch in an Arctic blow. The contrast provides the index to his character.
As to that, there is another indication, personally experienced. It was just after the war. By then having climbed laboriously from ordinary-seaman second-class to Gunner, I was officer of the day of a frigate berthed at Garden Island in Sydney. Alongside us lay another frigate, aboard which there was to be a ceremony of prize-giving for some good effort which I have forgotten. To get to her you had to cross us.
Up our gangway from ashore came a certain rear-admiral, under whom, as a cruiser captain, I had served when a senior petty-officer. he could not have forgotten me (good captains always remember their higher ratings, and many of them the lower ones), and all he said was, curt and sharp:
"Where's So-and-so's gangway?"
"Over here, sir."
With relief I turned him over to So-and-so's officer of the day, and heard, in the same tone, "Take me to the ward-room," and then I returned to our gangway. And there came Rear-Admiral Collins he came - well, not quite bounding - up the gangway, but certainly and widely smiling, and after returning my best gunnery-school salute he shook hands and started with: "Well, Guns, how are you today? All well?" "Yes, thank you, sir."
"Good, good. Look, it's been a long time since I was aboard one of these floating fortresses. Lead across to the gangway, there's a good chap."
I felt like carrying him across! And there was no slick insincerity about his manner. He was then the Navy's senior rear-admiral, and there was hardly the need for him to curry favour with a lowly one-striper. Collins was (and still is, judging from our meeting at our last reunion) simply a damned nice bloke. He ruled by the power of personality, not gold rings.
An important shore post in Singapore took him from his old bridge before Sydney fought her last engagement, but he was soon afloat again, commodore commanding British naval forces under the Allied South-West Pacific command - the first Australian to go higher than captain.
On October 21st, 1944 (Trafalgar Day), Collins was wearing his pendant in cruiser Australia, then bombarding off Leyte. A Kamikaze suicide bomber bore in, smashed itself into the foremast and slewed across the bridge, trailing a curtain of high-octane fuel. A bomb exploded the lot in a searing wrap of flame which killed the captain, navigator, four officers and twenty-six men. Commodore Collins was badly burnt. He convalesced in Fremantle, returned to command the Australian Squadron, and was Australia's naval representative at the surrender in Tokyo Bay.
A very likeable, shortish, bouncy fellow, known universally (and unofficially) as "John," Collins was Australia's first commodore, rear-admiral, First Naval Member and Chief of the Naval Staff - a post which, until he gained it, had always been held by a British officer.
But, we are way ahead of the action...
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Even in war a warship's life mainly comprises monotonous searching, drills and exercises, with the intense nervous excitement of action rarely lasting more than a few hours. (Though men of the Scrap-Iron Flotilla might make a typical sailor's gesture to that claim!)
Even so, Sydney could hardly complain of boredom. British naval forces in the Mediterranean were numerically inferior by far to the enemy's, and with a British offensive mounting across Libya, the activities of our ships were commensurately increased.
Through the slower pattern of patrols and convoys - but quickening when enemy aircraft joined the game - was woven the nervy fibre of frequent contacts with the Germans and Italians; bombarding, destroyer-killing and full-scale Fleet engagements.
The first of these occurred when Sydney, with destroyer Stuart as her screen, flung a sizeable portion of her magazine contents at the cliff forts of Bardia. A week later, attached to the British 7th Cruiser Squadron, she made her first kill.
Six-inch ships have always been noted for gunnery, one reason why they were the standard cruiser in Commonwealth navies. I remember a throw-off practice shoot which Sydney carried out against my cruiser off Fremantle. The pointers which turret trainers followed were deliberately "put back," as you would the hands of a clock. This meant that while the controlling director was actually aimed at the target, in this case us, the guns were firing ten degrees to the left of it. Thus the control teams and gun crews gained almost the full effect of a real engagement: their target was an actual ship instead of a towed target, and except for line, they were firing to hit.
The big blue flags hoisted up and the exercise commenced. At a range of eight miles the salvoes lobbed dead in our wake, smack on for range. We zig-zagged and altered speed, and Sydney's fire-control table allowed for this and her falling shells dogged our stern with well-nigh omniscient exactitude. It was splendid shooting; had the guns not been thrown-off, we would have been continually straddled.
On June 28th, 1940, the squadron and destroyers of the 10th Flotilla were coursing at speed to overtake an east-bound convoy near the Sicilian Channel. Three Italian destroyers were unlucky enough to cross their path. Sydney picked Espero.
In a few minutes those deadly guns had smothered their target in a sustained storm of bursting explosions. Those left of Espero's crew jumped into the sea before their riven craft settled beneath it. Sydney, regardless of enemy air and naval bases nearby, cruised up and rescued those still alive.
Then followed the abortive Battle of Calabria, when the Italian Battle Fleet retired under cover of smoke, though not before one destroyer was sunk and battleship Cavour damaged.
For the Royal Navy this was the first full-scale engagement since Jutland; for Sydney it was a pipe-opener for the first cruiser duel of the war.
The ship's bottom had been scraped clean a few days before she sailed from Alexandria in company with five British destroyers on a submarine hunt north of Crete. She was to need that barnacle-freed bottom, for Italy built the fastest cruisers in the world. All of them could raise 35 knots or better, while one type, the Regolo-class was powered by a tremendous 120,000 horsepower (to Sydney's 76,000) and could reach a speed of 41 knots! Though, as Jane's mentions "Armour: Practically nil."
Captain Collins dispatched four ships south within sight of Crete to broaden his sweep, while with destroyer Havock (paired with Stuart in the Battle of Matapan), he patrolled about 35 miles to the north.
The night of July 18th was clear and dark. Sydney slipped through a quiet sea at 18 knots, making a difficult target for submarines while at the same time conserving her fuel. She was carefully darkened, with the only sounds the fingering of wind through her rigging and the muted hum of turbines.
She rounded the north-east corner of Crete without incident. Full light came to find both ships at action stations; about them spun the empty horizons.
But at sea in war you never believe what you see, or at least put little faith in it, for you can see only fifteen or twenty miles, and up over that curve below the horizon can come marching nasty things.
Farther south the sun ate up the veil of the morning mist and revealed the four British destroyers and two Italian cruisers to each other simultaneously. A terse coded signal flashed up to Sydney.
The destroyers at once turned northward, towards their big brother, and rang on speed. They needed all they had, for Bartolomeo Colleoni and Giovanni delle Bande Nere were among the fastest of Mussolini's fast squadrons.
Bracketed by the white towers of plunging salvoes, the destroyers performed their classic task of drawing the enemy on to bigger guns.
Sydney was working up to full speed. A spurting fan of spray in her teeth, big battle ensign whipping from the truck of the foremast, she raced to close the range before the Italians grew windy of the chase or a destroyer collected a salvo that could open her frail sides to the sea.
Then they heard it. From far ahead a dull pulse of sound rippled overhead and muttered away to silence. Again it came before the masthead lookout shouted his report: "Enemy in sight!"
The destroyers wheeled at once, and thankfully, to clear the line of fire of Sydney's waiting guns. She opened with triple deflection salvoes, and with the second hitting the nearest cruiser, went straight into rapid broadsides. Considering those combined speeds, and the range of 10 1/2 miles, that was superb gunnery.
The Italians swerved away and ran. They ran until Sydney, outpaced, sent a salvo that, overtaking easily and lobbing forward with fierce muzzle energy, knocked half of Bartolomeo Colleoni's bow off.
Anchors, cables and magazines dropped into the sea. The Italian was doing more tha
n 30 knots when hit; pressure of water against her bared bulkheads pulled her up like a sandbar. "Shift target" was the message to Sydney's guns.
But due to prolonged rapid broadsides ammunitions was running low, Bande Nere was running very fast for the horizon, and Sydney's guns fell reluctantly silent. It would have been nice to bag both ships... She came back to watch destroyer Hyperion shatter the crippled Italian with a brace of torpedoes.
Theoretically and practically, the Italians should have won their fight. Superior in speed, numbers and fire-power, these technical considerations were outweighed by the human factors of discipline, skill and courage. And training. Above all, that. And the man responsible for it was John Augustine Collins. In the enemy's case the main objective was to escape engagement; in Collins's, never were Nelson's words truer: "A captain can do no wrong who lays his ship alongside that of the enemy."
The British Fleet in Alexandria cleared lower-deck and cheered ship when, the paint on her gun barrels blistered and a hole in her funnel from Bande Nere's parting shot, the Australian steamed between the grey lines to her berth. It was a compliment her men never forgot.
J. E. MacDonnell - 119 Page 9