Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Peering into the cauldron, every fibre of his mind and body wire taut, Farncomb kept up a chant of helm and engine orders. The course for Bermuda was abandoned. All he could do was keep the ship’s head towards the great waves marching at him. To allow her to broach, to take the seas on her beam, would be fatal. She would roll over and go down. The safety of the ship and the lives of all who sailed in her depended upon his ability to stay focused and remember his seamanship. The men on watch with him on the storm-swept bridge and the gun crews closed up on the even more naked 4-inch gun deck clung on for dear life, their faces stabbed by knife-points of horizontal rain and whipped by the winds howling at them through the rigging. Meeting the Deutschland would have been better than this.

  There was worse to come. When they had last seen Berwick, she had been stationed four cables ahead of them – a distance of about 800 metres. Eventually, they lost her. Then, at 2.45 am, with terrifying suddenness, a ship’s navigation lights loomed dimly towards them out of the inky black. The lights indicated it was probably a merchant ship of some sort, but in the peril of the moment nobody knew. Some Perth sailors would swear, much later on, that it had been the Deutschland sweeping past. Farncomb leaped to the wheelhouse voice pipe to order an emergency turn away. Gradually – so painfully slowly that it felt like a lifetime – Perth fell away, heeling to an angle they measured on the wheelhouse inclinometer at 45 degrees. In those seas, it was a cigarette-paper between life and death. A rogue wave from the wrong direction could have destroyed them. Rowley Roberts, on watch that night, thought his last hour had come:

  Collision seemed inevitable. It looked for the moment as if we could cleave her in halves. Wheel was put hard over, but with the ship surging and yawing in the mountainous seas, we could only trust to Providence. The trust held good and she slipped past us to lose herself in the gloom. Her escape from disaster was miraculous. Perhaps she will never know how luck was with her. Of all the Atlantic that she had to steam in, she had to pick such a small space to scrape through. It gave us a nasty taste in our mouths and the sudden turn to avert collision caused several injuries below decks.12

  Perth was battened down, with hatches closed and watertight doors dogged shut, but still the seas penetrated below, sloshing from stem to stern, flooding the officers’ cabins and wardroom and the mess decks, leaving the ship a shambles of gear and personal belongings tossed about among upturned furniture, broken glass and crockery. Men prayed or cursed in the midst of the wreckage, some of them vomiting in fear or from seasickness, others stoically nursing bruises and bloody cuts sustained from being flung about like rag dolls. Roberts continued:

  I think every member of the crew felt it was impossible to survive and that we would finish up in a watery grave in King Neptune’s domain. We had no option but to run with the typhoon. To attempt to turn would have resulted in a capsize; in fact we thought this would happen a number of times as the angry ocean buffeted us and tossed us around like a cork. This continued throughout the night, and I doubt that any person on board closed their eyes. I know I didn’t, as I expected to find myself in the water at any minute, and I found myself continually touching my Mae West to see that it was remaining inflated, and cogitating whether the ship’s boats or the Carley rafts would offer the best means of survival in such a sea.

  At four the next morning, at the change of watch, the barometer had dropped to 970 millibars – a category-two hurricane – with winds of up to 195 km/h, suggesting that the worst might have passed. Farncomb remained on the bridge, drawn with fatigue, the source of strength that a captain should be. As a grey light dawned, the rain was still sheeting down in torrents, but slowly the seas began to abate and the eldritch shriek of the storm through the masts and rigging began to lessen.

  Towards the end of the forenoon watch, Farncomb felt he could attempt to turn the ship back on course. The idea was to stream a sea anchor – a big bucket of canvas and timber hurriedly knocked up by Perth’s shipwrights and towed astern at the end of a long cable. In theory, it should produce a drag to stabilise the ship and allow her to go about on a wave at a safe moment.

  Farncomb called down to the engine room to Dolly Gray to explain his intentions and to have him discharge fuel oil in the hope of calming the seas beneath its viscous surface. Steady hands on the engine throttles obeying orders from the bridge would be crucial. But eventually they had to admit defeat. The oil slicked out across the water, but the upper deck was still too hazardous for the men trying to deploy the sea anchor. It would be another five hours before the seas subsided enough to bring the ship back on course.

  The next morning revealed the extent of the damage. Somehow, the galley managed to get some hot soup and coffee together, and the Captain and Commander Adams inspected the chaos. Guard rails and stanchions had been twisted out of shape, and, on one stretch of the quarterdeck, they had been swept entirely away. The depth-charge racks had been blasted overboard with the charges still in them but not primed, thank heavens, because that might have blown Perth’s stern off. The starboard torpedo tubes were knocked awry and four Carley floats were smashed. Adams and his Captain of the Foretop, Ray Parkin, found the port whaler crushed and hanging from its davits by little more than a thread.

  The ship’s company was shaken but, thankfully, largely unharmed, apart from aches and bruises and a few cuts. Battered but unbeaten, they limped into dock at Bermuda on 18 October. HMAS Perth had survived. It was an Australian triumph – not over the enemy, but over the elements at sea – the first of the war. They had made it through the Triangle.

  But there would be little rest. After some hasty repairs to the storm damage, just four days later Perth was ordered north to the Canadian port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to pick up a new draft of 60 sailors who had been sent from Australia to join them. From the warmth of the Caribbean, they headed back towards the grey North Atlantic.

  It was a miserable trip, of about 2500 kilometres there and back. In the northern latitudes, the weather turned cold and foggy – hardly unexpected, but still a shock to the system. Endless drizzling rain added to the discomfort of the men on the weather decks, and by the time they reached their destination, groping their way into Halifax Harbour in a peasouper fog, the temperature had dropped below zero and the foremast halliards were stiff with ice.

  To their consternation, when they went ashore the men discovered that things were very different from the warm and hospitable Caribbean. The pubs and saloons were few and far between, and they seemed to close unhelpfully early. But it didn’t take long for them to find the few illegal bars the town had to offer. Norm King and some mates were drinking in one speakeasy when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived to close it down. The Mounties diplomatically confiscated the illegal hooch and took it back to the jail for a party with the Australian visitors around a cheerful log fire.

  But there were no regrets when Perth headed back south again. At sea on 7 November, the first Tuesday of the month, they happily cleaned out the ship’s bookie when the 5/1 favourite Rivette won the Melbourne Cup. Four days later, they were back in sunny and welcoming Jamaica again, to find 17 bags of mail waiting for them.

  Kingston had become a home from home. On an intersection in the main street, the younger blokes discovered Shanghai Lil’s, a shanty-town bar and brothel with a crooked, overhanging verandah beneath a rusty corrugated-iron roof, which they made into an unofficial Australian headquarters. Lil herself, big and black, with flashing white teeth and a laugh like a depth charge, knew all about entertaining sailors, offering ice-cold Jamaican rum downstairs and hot Jamaican women upstairs. Basil Hayler made his watering hole the rather more sedate Swiss American Bar:

  Sex was very cheap for those who wanted it, and I guess that covered every sailor on the ship. However, there was a big risk for those willing to take the chance. Young girls would come up to sailors as soon as they stepped ashore with, ‘Hello Jack. You come with me for sixpence.’ Before leaving the ship all liberty men were fallen i
n for dress inspection and given the warning ‘Beware of Rum and Syphilis’. Both these things were a common danger in Jamaica.13

  Surgeon Commander Downward braced himself for a run of venereal disease. Ray Parkin took his paintbox ashore and squatted on the footpath across the road from Lil’s to do a watercolour of the place as a souvenir. Delighted at his artistry, Lil enthusiastically offered him a girl for the afternoon in exchange for the picture, but he politely declined. Ray was staying true to Thelma, back home in Victoria. The diary he kept in the Caribbean is threaded with tender thoughts of her:

  A wonderful woman. More than ever I know myself to be an incurable ‘victim’ of love of my wife. (Not so common as one might think in married men.) But I have come to wonder what anybody can substitute for it in life. To me it IS life. And what I say is not slop, either, for I am willing to back up my argument with cold reason as well as blind emotion. Completed letter to Thelma.14

  On a more salubrious plane than Lil’s, there was the Constant Spring Hotel – a long, white, colonial wedding cake of a building set in a palm grove against a backdrop of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. Judy Patching and Charlie Downward would fit in the occasional game at the hotel’s immaculate 18-hole golf course, sometimes meeting Elmo Gee and Bill Bracht for drinks in the bar and dinner afterwards.

  They were an unusual bunch. Brass-hatted surgeon commanders did not usually mix with Lower Deck sailors, but Charlie had played cricket with Judy, pre-war, in the navy team, and he and Elmo shared a love of reading. The Constant Spring was a reminder that civilisation still existed. Thoughts of home were never far away. Reg Whiting, the Electrical Artificer, wrote to his two boys in Chatswood – a letter penned in an elegant copperplate script that Brendan Whiting found with his mother’s mementos:

  Jove! Bren, it is too bad I cannot get home, on account of this war business, for I have some good toys for you, especially a bonza motor car that does nearly everything possible … my word, Bren, I like the photos Mummy sent to me. That one out the front with Teddy, John and yourself was grand, what were you playing, Red Indians? And that one taken in Sydney with collar and tie, Jove, you have grown, a real little man and, Bren, didn’t Mummy look nice. We have a bonza Mummy, haven’t we?… Fondest love and a big kiss, Your Loving Daddy.15

  For the next few weeks, Perth steamed from island to island and port to port in the Caribbean on her tedious task of blockading German ships in harbour or hoping to catch them if they attempted to escape. In late November, there was a change of scene when she travelled through the Panama Canal to refuel two Canadian destroyers in the Pacific Ocean, but it seemed, at times, as if the war was happening elsewhere.

  December was enlivened by the Battle of the River Plate. In the months since sinking the Clement, Langsdorff and Graf Spee had created havoc in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, sending another seven ships to the bottom, three of which had been on passage from Australia to Europe. Some men of the RAN reserve, gunners on those ships, were the first Australian sailors to be taken prisoner in the war. The Admiralty in London and the Navy Office in Melbourne hurled all their available resources into the hunt for the raider, and on Wednesday 13 December she was cornered in the South Atlantic.

  The Royal Navy’s South American Cruiser Squadron, led by the 8-inch heavy cruiser HMS Exeter, with two light cruisers, HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles, similar ships to Perth, found the pocket battleship off the great estuary of the River Plate between Uruguay and Argentina. Graf Spee dealt out heavy punishment to Exeter, which limped away from the battle badly damaged, but Ajax and Achilles harried Langsdorff and forced him to take refuge in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo.

  That touched off an extraordinary game of naval and diplomatic cat and mouse. Over the next four days, the Germans became convinced that overwhelming British naval forces were gathering off the River Plate to destroy Graf Spee if she attempted to put to sea again. Langsdorff eventually decided to scuttle his ship. An American radio reporter in Montevideo broadcast a live coverage of her last hours. On 17 December, far away in the Caribbean, Perth’s ship’s company listened enthralled at his description of the pocket battleship steaming slowly out into the Plate estuary and going down in a Wagnerian convulsion of fire and smoke. Langsdorff, a competent commander far from the stereotype of the heel-clicking Nazi, shot himself in Buenos Aires two days later, wrapped in his ship’s ensign. The Battle of the River Plate had been a stunning British victory. Perth would eventually meet both Ajax and Exeter, under very different though no less dramatic circumstances.16

  And then came Christmas – the first of the war. After an unsuccessful attempt to tow off a British freighter stranded on a reef, Perth was back in Kingston for the festivities. This moment, too, they would remember all their lives. On Christmas Day, the ship was aroused by the strains of ‘Christians, Awake, Salute the Happy Morn’ in place of the usual ‘Reveille’, and, with the mess decks hung with flags and coloured paper streamers, the men threw themselves into partying.

  Lunch was a triumph for the cooks – a feast of ham and turkey with all the trimmings, traditional plum pudding and brandy sauce, finished off with fresh fruit and nuts. Some of the crew washed it down with a big flagon of rum provided by the ever hospitable Shanghai Lil. They exchanged visits with the Canadian destroyer Assiniboine berthed nearby and in the evening there was a hilarious conga-line of singing, drumming and yahoo-ing through the clammy streets of Kingston. As Bill Bracht recalled it, they paid ‘courtesy calls at the various dens of vice to wish the habitués, particularly the hostesses, the compliments of the season’.17 There were a lot of sore heads the next morning, grateful that the Admiral had cancelled their sailing orders at the last minute.

  Perth’s final weeks in the Caribbean saw her doing more of the same old routine patrols, in and out of Kingston. New Year’s Eve came and went quietly. But the rumours were flying around the ship – the buzz, as they called it – that soon they would be heading home. At last, on 29 February, the buzz came true.

  The ship’s movements were supposed to be secret, but inevitably the word got out. They were farewelled at a dance put on by the Kingston Town Ladies Auxiliary and by a huge crowd of well-wishers at the dock, including a group of about a dozen local women who, with tears in their eyes, sang that most tender of sailors’ hymns, ‘Abide With Me’. Gifts of fruit were thrown on board, and a gaggle of small boats followed them out of the harbour.

  At sea, Farncomb cleared lower deck to tell the men that the passage back to Australia would be through the Panama Canal and then on to Sydney via Tahiti and Fiji. Elation at the thought of home was tempered that night by the news that two German ships they had been watching in Aruba had broken out in their absence, and they felt robbed again when they heard next morning that British cruisers had caught them.

  Through the canal, they headed south-west, crossing the equator with another visit from King Neptune, and on 17 March they raised the high peaks of Tahiti in a blaze of pink and blue sunrise. A pilot came aboard to take them through the reefs of Papeete Harbour, and they noticed that the foreshore was lined with welcoming people. Farncomb addressed the crew over the loudspeaker system with a stiff warning, as Bill Bracht put it:

  You are cautioned to conduct yourselves in a proper manner, as the Tahitians have the reputation of being over-friendly. Remember Tahiti is reputed to be the Island of Free Love.18

  The Captain might have saved his breath. His sailors were keenly aware of Tahiti’s reputation, and they were anxious to test it. They were not disappointed. The Tahitians turned on the sort of exotic, erotic welcome that had so transfixed Captain James Cook and the crew of the barque Endeavour 170 years before. The ship’s company, paid in sterling and with a lot saved, discovered they could buy a case, a whole case, of French champagne for less than a pound. For young men who had grown up in the sexual straitjacket of pre-war Australia, it was paradise on earth. To their surprise and delight, Norm King and a mate were invited home by two girls:

 
; It was the real thing: wine, women and song. They really did sit outside their thatched dwellings and, as the sun set, sang South Sea Island songs to the thrumming of guitars. They really did swim in the lagoon, in fact everything that South Sea Islanders are supposed to do they did. They also drank a lot of champagne.19

  Bill Bracht joined the main event:

  The Blue Lagoon was a large thatched roofed structure built of bamboo and woven cane matting nestled in the palm and coconut trees about fifty yards from the beach. Inside it was a large dance hall which had an island bar in the centre. The place was well populated and the air was heavy with the exotic odours of hibiscus, frangipani and French cologne, which the girls splashed around indiscriminately.

  The night was hot and the music and dancing were vigorous and, with the wine flowing freely, it was soon eviden[t] how the island had got its reputation. Couples would run from the dance hall down to the beach, stripping as they went, and it was hard to say whether there was more merriment on the beach or in the dance hall … at times we would be treated to individual exhibitions of the hula-hula by girls within the hall and by others returning from the beach. I felt certain that some did not return from the beach.20

  George Hatfield was up for it as well:

  Migrating to Quinn’s Saloon we saw a Polynesian girl and a Chinese girl clad in grass skirts and brassieres do an exhibition Hula. How those girls waggled their stern pieces defies description. They danced faster until, flat out, they finished with a crash from the orchestra who were playing guitars and singing in native tongue.