by Mike Carlton
For a Western onlooker at this distance of years, it is hard to make sense of the interwoven and competing ultra-nationalist and militarist groups that fought for power and influence in Japan between the two World Wars. Murder was a common political tool. Junior army officers, lieutenants and captains, thought nothing of assassinating more senior officers, colonels and generals, if their warrior spirit or devotion to the God Emperor was thought to be insufficiently ardent. This violence would not have mattered a great deal to the rest of the world, perhaps, had it been confined to the Japanese islands. But it was not confined. It would spread like a plague throughout what the British, and Australians too, called the Far East.
China and Japan had been at each other’s throats since the latter part of the nineteenth century, at first warring for control of the Korean peninsula. The Chinese – corrupt, politically divided, militarily ill-equipped and incompetent – were no match for the sons of Nippon, who swarmed from Korea through their northern province of Manchuria. In the 1930s, the IJA began a bloody rampage across China, taking the great coastal city of Shanghai after three months of blood-drenched warfare. Worse was to come at Nanking, then the capital of China, on the Yangtze River inland from Shanghai.
The Rape of Nanking was an atrocity – barbarism that set a new benchmark for the twentieth century. The accepted estimate is that 200,000 Chinese were massacred in the six weeks over Christmas 1937.14 Women were literally raped to death, sometimes by the penises of gangs of drunken Japanese troops, sometimes by a sword rammed into the vagina. Babies were spitted on bayonets. Leering soldiers forced farmers, at gunpoint, to rape their children or their animals. Tens of thousands more civilians were shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death, their corpses thrown into the Yangtze River, which ran with blood and guts to the sea at Shanghai.
At home, successive Japanese civilian governments found themselves increasingly enmeshed in the iron net of militarism and ultra-nationalism. Cabinets came and went. The army was out of control. In 1936, there was a coup attempt from a renegade army faction that, ominously, included elements of the Imperial Guard. In an uprising designed to assassinate the usual targets of ministers and palace chamberlains, tanks rumbled through the streets of Tokyo, artillery pieces took up positions and battalions were deployed. Hirohito, who had become emperor in 1926, roused himself from the pleasing diversions of his study of marine biology and appointed a new prime minister, a former admiral and nobleman, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who helpfully arranged to have 19 of the coup leaders shot for treason. This plunged a fierce rivalry between the army and the navy to a new low.
Two more naval treaties, both drawn up in London, had placed further limits on the size and construction of warships by the major powers, including battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines, and limits on the weapons they carried. The United States, Britain and France signed the second London Treaty in 1936, agreeing that capital ships should be no larger than 35,000 tons, with guns no bigger than a calibre of 14 inches. Italy and Japan walked out, refusing to sign.
The Japanese delegation was led by one Isoroku Yamamoto, then a vice-admiral, but a rising star, having been Harvard educated and twice Japan’s naval attaché to the United States. His genius was to recognise the future of naval aviation, thinking far ahead of his counterparts in Western navies, especially the British. Freed from the inconvenience of international treaties, at Yamamoto’s urging the Imperial Japanese Navy began a swift program of expansion that would include a new fleet of fast aircraft carriers and two great battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi. At 72,000 tons, and armed with enormous 18-inch guns, these leviathans would be the biggest battleships ever built, dwarfing the best that any other navy could range against them.
Japanese naval pilots were trained in large numbers and imbued with a Samurai-warrior thirst for conquest. Scientists and engineers worked to perfect one of the most effective naval weapons of the era. The Type 93 torpedo, or the Long Lance, as it came to be known, would have such range, speed and power that Allied ships’ captains in the opening months of the Second World War would quite literally not know what had hit them.
As these acts and actors passed in tremendous parade across the world stage, Australia was no more than a spear-carrier in the back row of the chorus. Although nominally an independent nation, the hard fact was that, in foreign and defence policy, Australia was a client of the politicians of Westminster and the patricians of the Foreign Office in Whitehall, and therefore largely ignored by everyone else. If some Australian politicians chafed at this impotence – and at times they did, both conservative and Labor – there was nothing they could do about it but fret in public and complain in private.
In turn, the British Establishment – statesmen, archbishops, newspaper editors – would profess concern and affection for their kin down under. Quite often, they meant it. They had a sentimental, if condescending, vision of a vigorous young nation sprung from Britannia’s loins, bathed in a rosy glow of loyalty to King and Empire, populated by sun-bronzed sheep farmers and sinewy cricketers ready at any moment to answer the Mother Country’s call.
Australians believed, emphatically, in the same red, white and blue pantomime. They were of the British race, manning an outpost of the realm, far-flung bearers of the white man’s burden, superior by blood and birth to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’. Occasionally, they might snub their noses at English arrogance or pretension, sometimes rightly, sometimes merely in a two-finger gesture of touchy adolescence. Every so often, there would be a grand imperial conference in London, at which the prime ministers of the Dominions would be invited to put their views to the current occupant of No. 10 Downing Street and hear what wisdom he and his ministers might choose to impart. Business done, there would be the delights of the London season: a glittering dinner with the King and Queen at Windsor, a Test at Lord’s or The Oval, racing at Ascot and then a leisurely voyage home again in an elegant stateroom of a liner of the P&O. At times of crisis, Canberra might send a respectful telegram to London proposing a slightly tougher line with the Japanese on something or other, or suggesting that another polite appeal to the good offices of Signor Mussolini might do the trick, but that was about it. In history’s page, we made barely a mark.
As Australia slowly began to drag itself free from the coils of the Depression, the federal election of 1931 saw the conservatives take power in Canberra under the banner of the newly formed United Australia Party, led by a former Labor minister, the Tasmanian Joe Lyons. For a few brief years, some degree of domestic political and economic stability, if not tranquillity, began to emerge. Conscious of the ominous noises-off emanating from the Japanese, and from Germany and Italy, Lyons began the job of restoring Australia’s defences as best the nation’s finances would permit.
It was a modest start, but it was something. In 1933, Britain offered the RAN the loan of five destroyers of Great War vintage. HMAS Stuart was a destroyer-flotilla leader, launched in December 1918. The other four were ships of the even older but equally sturdy V & W class (so called because their names all began with a ‘V’ or a ‘W’), Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager and Waterhen. In a rational world, they would have gone quietly to the breakers’ yard years before, their passing mourned only by those who had sailed in them. Instead, these five would become the storied Scrap Iron Flotilla of ships and men whose exploits in the far-off Mediterranean would write an indelible page in Australian naval legend.
The next year, 1934, things got better again. The government announced a three-year building program for the navy, which would include much-needed improvements to the dockyard at Sydney’s Garden Island and, most encouraging of all, the acquisition of those three modern light cruisers from the Royal Navy: Sydney, Hobart and Perth. Recruiting was fired up again, and young men were encouraged to join the naval reserves, where they could learn a seaman’s skills at weekly drill nights, row a whaler around on weekends and pick up a few extra bob into the bargain. Should there ever be anoth
er war, they could be quickly mobilised.
As the ’30s wore on, the spectre of a belligerent Japan began to loom larger. The trade-union movement feared that iron exported to Japan would be turned into steel for weapons of war that one day might be aimed at Australia. The crunch came in November 1938, when waterside workers at the New South Wales steel town of Port Kembla refused to load a British tramp ship, the Dalfram, with a cargo of pig iron from the BHP mill destined for the Mitsui steelworks in Kobe. Over the next few weeks and into Christmas, the dispute spread to other ports, with ships blacked and wharfies locked out from their jobs. In reply, the Lyons government threatened to use the sweeping powers of the Transport Workers Act, popularly reviled as the Dog-Collar Act, to send in strike-breakers if necessary and to deprive the wharfies of their licences to work on the waterfront.
By January, 7000 men were out of work. The Federal Attorney General, a silver-tongued Melbourne lawyer named Robert Menzies, went to Port Kembla to confront the workers on the docks. Union leaders reluctantly cleared a path for him through an angry crowd. Menzies told them that government policy decreed the iron should go to Japan. That policy could not be set aside by a trade union or anyone else. In the end, it was the Dog-Collar Act that broke the union’s resistance. The wharfies crumbled and the pig iron was loaded and shipped. Forever afterwards, trade unionists would refer to Menzies contemptuously as Pig Iron Bob.
Every so often, though, the Lyons Cabinet sought reassurance that the British were awake to the Japanese threat. Comforting noises flowed smoothly back from London. As ever, Singapore would be the rock upon which any Japanese wave would break. The British had resumed work on the naval base there, in fits and starts, as the Depression receded. Some Australian leaders, however, held strong doubts about the promise of ‘Main Fleet to Singapore’. While still in opposition in 1936, the new Labor leader, John Curtin, put his finger on the matter with telling foresight:
If an Eastern first-class power sought an abrogation of a basic Australian policy, such as the White Australia Policy, it would most likely do so when Great Britain was involved, or threatened to be involved, in a European war. Would the British government dare to authorise the despatch of any substantial part of the fleet to the East to help Australia? The dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard upon which to found Australian defence policy.15
The speech provoked predictable uproar from the government benches, with cries that Curtin, the wretched socialist, had insulted Britain and trampled the bonds of Empire. But the question he had posed would not go away, despite purblind complacency in official quarters. In March 1937, the Australian naval staff prepared for the government a confident appraisal, which read, in part:
The only possible enemy is Japan, and although the disparity of force in our disfavour will be large at the outset, we shall be in possession of a first-class and almost impregnable base – Singapore. Furthermore, it is impossible to conceive of a world situation such that the United Kingdom would be unable to despatch a large proportion of the Main Fleet to Eastern Waters in the case of such a war. Hence, we may expect the balance of forces at the scene of operations to be levelled up in a comparatively short time.16
The ‘almost impregnable base’ was opened, with great fanfare, in early 1939. Winston Churchill would call it ‘the Gibraltar of the East’, and it was, indeed, a monumental feat of engineering and construction. There was only one flaw: there was barely a warship in sight and only a handful of obsolete aircraft of the RAF. Fortress Singapore was an empty shell, a grand delusion that would have tragic consequences.
CHAPTER 3
TO THE WORLD BEYOND
The Autolycus berthed in Hobart only long enough to load her cargo of apples, then plodded back north across Bass Strait and into Port Phillip Bay to collect another contingent of sailors from Melbourne.
There were 300 men waiting at Station Pier to join the Perth crew. Many of them, too, were still teenagers, wet behind the ears, fresh from their basic training at the Naval Depot. They were rated as ordinary seamen and wore the square-rig naval uniform as proud as you like, but they had not yet been to sea. Others were more experienced sailors with homes in Victoria, or who had returned from leave in Tasmania, South Australia or Western Australia. One of them was Charles William Lawrance, 26 years old, a leading stoker, known to everyone as Jock. Born in Rotherham, near Sheffield, in England in 1913, Jock’s few years in Australia had done little to take the edge off the thick Yorkshire burr of his youth. His shipmates had decided off their own bat that he was Scottish, so Jock he became.
His early life had been hard. His mother had died when he was a baby. When Jock was just eight, his father, a railway ganger, was found badly hurt beside the tracks one morning after a night of thick Yorkshire fog. Months later, he died of his injuries. Jock lived with his elder sister and eventually worked on the railways for a while himself, training to be a signalman for the old LMS – the London, Midland and Scottish company – but they sacked him when he became entitled to a man’s wage at the age of 20. With the Depression beginning to bite, he wrote to an uncle in Tasmania and another in Canada, asking about emigration. The Tasmanian uncle offered him a roof over his head and a job on his small farm on Bruny Island, south of Hobart:
I had some money left. My father had left me a bit from war bonds, and my married sister living in Manchester put in a bit. There was no dole. The trip to Australia cost me £54, a lot of money in those days. I had the fifty but not the four, so my sister gave me that, plus £5 to land with. There were no migration schemes, that was finished. My uncle had to swear I wouldn’t be on the susso for two years when I got out here.
I came out on the Themistocles out of Liverpool. Left in November 1933. I got out here to Melbourne, across to Launceston on the ferry, then by train to Hobart, and they met me there. I worked on my uncle’s farm, and got no pay for a while, because I was absolutely green, chopping wood and everything. I chopped my foot a few times. I said I’d have to have a weekend in Hobart now and then. He said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let you have a weekend in Hobart. Stay at the YMCA.’
So I went to the YMCA in Hobart and there was a big sign saying ‘Wanted. Men For The Royal Australian Navy’. I couldn’t get in there quick enough, to get away from slavery, six days a week.
Anyway, I said, ‘Can I join the navy?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we want people for the navy. We’ve got to have a squad for Tasmania, and you’ll make one of them.’ So I did a few sums for them and then I joined the navy, at Flinders Naval Depot. When pay day came around, they put so many pound notes in my hand, I’d never seen so much money.
I loved it. Anything better than farming. I loved it and I got on with it. I got a square meal and a few pounds in my pocket, and good mates.1
Jock signed up on 4 June 1934. When he passed out from Flinders, he thought about becoming a seaman or perhaps a cook, but the navy told him it wanted stokers, so a stoker he turned out to be. The name came from the early days of steam, when coal was stoked into the furnaces to fire a ship’s boilers. Naval folklore had it that stokers were all muscle and no brain; they messed apart from other sailors in all but the smallest ships and tended to stick together when they went for a run ashore in a foreign port. If there was a brawl in a dockside pub, it was a fairly safe bet there would be a stoker in it somewhere. The name lasted beyond the arrival of oil-fired machinery even though the job changed, and by 1939 stokers needed more brains and had significant mechanical skills. But they still did the dirty work.
Jock’s farewell from Melbourne was a family affair because his brother-in-law, Arthur Close, was sailing with him. Not long after Jock had joined the navy, he had chatted up some girls in Melbourne’s Swanston Street, and the prettiest of them, Mavis Malloy, had stayed in touch. As they’d got to know each other, the Malloy family had welcomed him as one of their own, and in 1935 he and Mavis were married at a church in suburb
an Brunswick. Baby Joan was born in 1938. The Malloy girls must have liked a sailor, because Mavis’s sister Jean married one too. Arthur Close was not a stoker but a leading seaman. He and Jock got on like brothers and, with a bit of luck and good management, they wound up together in the Melbourne draft for HMAS Perth. On Saturday 20 May, the girls were there to see them off.
Another man waiting in the crowd with them at Station Pier, Ray Parkin, would, in time, prove to be one of the most extraordinary men ever to wear the uniform of the RAN. Like so many working-class boys of his generation, he had left school at 14, but he was a voracious reader and a talented painter and writer, with remarkable powers of observation. He carried a small collection of carefully chosen books to sea, and the study of history, philosophy and natural science, entirely self-taught, enriched his mind. Towards the end of his years, the gifts of his intellect and his achievements in literature would win him a global reputation as a naval historian and the award of an honorary doctorate of letters from Melbourne University. But on this day he was merely Petty Officer Raymond Edward Parkin, aged 28, with the two crossed anchors and the king’s crown of his rate displayed on the left sleeve of his brass-buttoned jacket, and another crown and circled anchor on his cap.
Ray was a Collingwood boy, the son of Arthur James Parkin, a coach and motor trimmer, and his wife Laetitia. In later life, he would write of the sights and sounds of his birthplace: the gritty gaslit streets; the lamplighters cycling by with their long poles at dusk; the bells of the trams and the rumble of iron cartwheels; the roar and clang and heat of the local blacksmith’s forge, where the ‘blackie’ hammering horseshoes would sometimes let him pump the bellows to set the coals glowing red.