by Mike Carlton
Getting pretty full we went back on board. Resting up on Tuesday afternoon we went off last boat and strolling around in the cool evening eventually started drinking about ten. We made up our minds to get drunk, Nick and I getting a car. We called at the Lido where they had no beer. Perforce we started on champagne at 40 francs per bottle. From there to the La Fayette we continued on champagne. I danced a lot but my recollections are vague. On the way back to Papeete we called at the beach where a mixed party were swimming in the nude. Let no one misconstrue those words, just a gay frolic where one swam as nature made us. Getting back to Papeete we went to sleep on the grass under a brilliant tropical moon till next morning when rising we visited the ‘Au Col Bleu’ and quenched our parched throats. Leaving today a large crowd controlled by soldiers with fixed bayonets saw us go. I was sorry to leave but for my general health and pocket it is best.21
In what sounds like a riotous escapade, three sailors stole and crashed a car – an episode that cost the RAN the sum of £129.1s.5d in compensation. Norm King and a mate overstayed the midnight ending of their leave and were escorted back to the ship next morning by the local gendarmes. Like Cook’s men so long before, they left Tahiti enraptured by the sensuous reception they had received.
After that, a brief stopover at their next port of call – the starchy British colony of Fiji – was an anticlimax, and as they drew ever closer to Australia they began to come down with what for centuries the navy has known as Channel Fever: the manic urge for the voyage to end. They had been away for ten months – some of them for longer. But they were very different men from the bunch of raw recruits who had set out on the Autolycus what now seemed like aeons ago. They had been around the world, travelling more than 115,000 kilometres, and although they had not met the enemy they could legitimately say they had been at war. Ray Parkin, the experienced seaman and an astute observer of humanity, thought the time spent in the Caribbean had done them a power of good:
This past six months had a powerful effect upon both the ship and her men. The character of both had been melded into an inseparable one. Admittedly, the ordinary seamen had learned to swagger a little more when they went ashore but, on board, they had learned their job in a way no book could teach them. And they had, through direct experience, learned the real meaning of responsibility. They had grown up. They felt a new integrity within themselves and a readiness to act spontaneously with a knowledge of what they were about. And they felt something very satisfying about it. The whole ship’s company had been knit into something that transcended rank or rating and were made One. There was a real familial quality holding us together, as if it were the ship herself that held us all so close. As if she were the Common Good to which we were beholden.22
On 31 March, an early-autumn Sunday, they were out of their hammocks well before the pipe, laying out their best white uniforms, itching to catch sight of Australia again. With the sun rising astern, the watch on the bridge saw the Sydney coastline emerging from the morning mist, the lights ashore glittering like a long row of diamonds, the Macquarie Lighthouse near South Head making its welcoming two short flashes every ten seconds. There would be time for breakfast before they entered harbour.
CHAPTER 7
FIRST HOMECOMING
Sydney has always loved a sailor. Wartime secrecy had been abandoned for the day. The city knew Perth was coming home and an armada of small craft and hired ferries was waiting to greet her as she hove into view on the horizon and passed between the Heads at 10 am, exactly on time. Her crew lined the rails and upperworks, stiffly at attention. On the quarterdeck, the band, resplendent in scarlet and blue, played stirring nautical marches. Horns blared, steam whistles shrilled, and cheer after cheer echoed across the harbour waters. ‘On yachts and launches, girls in flowered sunsuits revealing sun browned limbs laughed and cheered as the Perth rocked them with her wash,’ reported The Sydney Morning Herald approvingly, and the ABC broadcast a live description of her arrival.
She went alongside at the Garden Island Naval Base just after 10.30 am, nosed into her berth by a pair of tugs. High on the bridge above the excited crowd milling on the wharf, Farncomb ordered ‘finished with main engines’, and the brow went clattering from wharf to quarterdeck. There were families and lovers and mates to see again, newborn children to hold for the first time.
Perth was the first Australian ship to return from ‘strenuous war service’, as the Herald called it. The Caribbean had hardly been strenuous, still less Tahiti, but nobody was arguing. To drum up patriotic fervour, the Menzies government organised a naval parade through the streets of Sydney the next day, with the Perth men as its centrepiece. A cold southerly wind and a grey day had the men shivering in their summer whites, but with rifles at the slope and bayonets fixed, led by the ship’s band, they were cheered to the echo as they swung along Macquarie Street and down past the Cenotaph in Martin Place. Coloured streamers showered down from the upper windows of the banks and the GPO. At the Town Hall, the Governor General, the Prime Minister and more naval and military brass than you could poke a stick at were arrayed on the saluting dais. It was a propaganda triumph, filmed for the newsreels to be shown at cinemas around the country within days.
Not that the crew cared a fig for any of that. Leave was what mattered. The ship went into dock for a month’s refit and her officers and men scattered out across the country. Reg Whiting went home to Allie and his two beloved sons in their cottage at Chatswood in Sydney, laden with the souvenirs and gifts he had bought on his travels, as his son recalled:
It is funny the things you remember from childhood. I don’t remember much about the ‘bonza’ motor car referred to in my father’s letter to me from Kingston, although I vaguely recall that I had a car to get in, just big enough for a five-year-old. However, I do remember clearly the Lionel train set which my father brought back from New York for my brother John, who was seven years older than me. He had it set up on the timber floor of the enclosed sleep-out verandah, and although I could sit and watch the train run on its track, I was not allowed to touch it or play with its controls.1
Reg set about some gardening, cutting into the overgrown paspalum grass in the backyard and laying out vegetable beds and a fence.
Not so lucky, Elmo Gee came down with appendicitis and was hurried off to the naval hospital at HMAS Penguin, on the shores of Sydney Harbour near Mosman. Recovering, he served for a time as coxswain on Penguin’s cutter, exploring the harbour coves and beaches.
At grimy Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, Bill Bracht was welcomed as a conquering hero – heady stuff for a coalminer’s son. The council turned on a civic reception and a dance in the solid brick respectability of the School of Arts. Speeches were made. Bill was presented with a gold-plated pencil, and his mother was given a silver teapot to commemorate the great day. What was then resoundingly known as the Returned Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia invited him to join as its first new member from this second war of the century. Most satisfying of all, the local newspaper Bill had once delivered as a kid reported his homecoming under the vigorous headline: ‘CESSNOCK’S WELCOME TO LOCAL MAN RETURNED FROM WAR’. The accompanying story sagged a bit, though, when it described him as ‘battle scared’. The paper solemnly corrected that the next day to ‘bottle scarred’, finally getting it right on a humbly apologetic third attempt.
Norm King caught the train home to Adelaide and a new house his family had bought in Blair Athol, to find that his young brother Don had grown up in his absence and discovered the use of condoms. Norm, the worldly sailor home from the sea, loyally copped the rap when their father discovered two of the young bloke’s rubbers in the septic tank.
Ray Parkin went to Melbourne to rejoin Thelma and their kids, Jill and John.
George Hatfield lost no time; he and Alma Parkin got married on 4 April.
Jack Lewis was reunited with his fiancée, Joan Flynn, in Sydney, where they laid plans for their wedding at no less than St Mary
’s, the Catholic cathedral. Joan loved her handsome young sailor to distraction, as he did her. ‘When us Flynn girls get going, we get going,’ she liked to say to him.2
These were happy, easy-going days. The men of the Perth could forget the war for a bit. And anyway, it hadn’t been all that bad, really. It was good to be out of uniform, away from naval discipline and the ship’s routine of pipes and watches, drills and orders.
This was now a very different Australia from the one they had left behind when they had sailed in the Autolycus. The RAN was calling up the men of the reserve, deploying what ships it had available, reactivating old vessels and planning new ones. The shipping lanes around the nation had to be patrolled and guarded against surface raiders, submarines and mines. The army was beginning to put together the tens of thousands of troops, the Second Australian Imperial Force, who would be sent in sea convoys to the Middle East in early 1940. It would be the navy’s duty to see those convoys safely across the Indian Ocean and into the Suez Canal.
These were formidable tasks for a less than formidable force – although, at the outbreak of war, the RAN had been in better shape than might have been expected only a few years before. The heavy cruisers Australia and Canberra were the backbone of the fleet, together with Perth and her sisters Sydney and Hobart. Other ships had been hurried back into commission. The thorniest problem was finding crews. There were only 5010 permanent service officers and men. As the RAN’s official historian, G. Hermon Gill, put it:
The parade ground at the Naval Reserve Depot at Edgecliff [in Sydney], where a gunnery school had been established on the 2nd of September, resounded to the shouts of instructors and loading numbers, and the rattle and slam of breech blocks as ratings, mobilised from reserve, many of them to be afloat in a day or so and in European waters within a few weeks, were licked hurriedly into shape.3
In some remote quarters, there was the radical thought that perhaps women could be of some use to the service in wartime, releasing men from shore jobs for duty at sea. In the meantime, the reserves and new recruits would have to fill the holes.
In London, the war had propelled Winston Churchill back into office as First Lord of the Admiralty, the ministerial head of the Royal Navy. It was a job he had held for a time during the First World War. ‘Winston is back,’ the Admiralty signalled to its ships when he returned in triumph to the First Lord’s office in the Admiralty building in Whitehall. It was from that very room, with its imposing wall maps, its vast desk and clusters of black Bakelite telephones, and its tall windows overlooking Horse Guards Parade, that Churchill had urged, pleaded and argued for the ultimately disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915. No less energetic this second time around, the First Lord crackled with new ideas – some practical, some cunning, some outlandish and absurd. He chafed beneath the confusion of Chamberlain and the defeatism of Foreign Secretary Halifax, who, many thought, was still keen to seek an accommodation with Hitler.
The month of May brought an end to all that, in tumultuous events that changed the course not just of European history but of civilisation itself. As dawn broke on Friday 10 May, Hitler stirred awake in his private train, Amerika, which had carried him from Berlin across the Rhine to the small town of Euskirchen, near the Belgian border. The news was good. Denmark and Norway had fallen to him. Now Fall Gelb, or Case Yellow – the invasion of Holland, Belgium and France – had begun and was following the blueprint so carefully drawn up by the Wehrmacht High Command. The Führer was beside himself with glee. No fewer than 136 German divisions were crunching into Western Europe, crushing all in their path. The Luftwaffe was bombing airfields: Goering’s fighters and Stuka dive-bombers destroyed almost half of the Royal Netherlands Air Force in that one spring morning. Airborne troops commanded by the vigorous parachute general Kurt Student descended upon The Hague, Rotterdam and a key Belgian strongpoint, the supposedly impregnable Fort Eben-Emael, which succumbed within 24 hours.
The Dutch and the Belgians appealed for help from Britain, but in London that day British politics were near paralysis. Confronted by the new Nazi onslaught across the Channel, Chamberlain was a drowning man grasping at flotsam to stay afloat. Still convinced that he and no other should lead the British people through the war that his policies of appeasement had done so much to bring about, he sought to cling to power by enticing the Labour opposition to join him in a national coalition government. It was his last gasp. Labour would have no part of him. The Tory establishment made a rearguard attempt to replace Chamberlain with Halifax, but it became apparent, within hours, that only Winston Churchill could command the confidence of the King, the House of Commons and the nation. By six o’clock that night, Churchill had observed the ancient custom of kissing the King’s hands and was, at last, prime minister.
In the coming days, the bloody tide of blitzkrieg surged into France. On the morning of 15 May, Churchill was awoken in his bedroom at the Admiralty to take a phone call from Paris. It was the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud. ‘We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle,’ he sobbed down the line.4
Churchill flew to Paris the next day to try to stiffen the French but was ‘dumbfounded’ – his word – to find the government preparing to flee. The Cabinet and its military advisers stood about, shoulders slumped, sunk in gloom and defeatism. Through the windows of the Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay, Churchill could see frantic civil servants heaping barrow loads of documents onto bonfires in the garden below.
Ten days later, the British Army was on the beaches of Dunkirk, awaiting the miracle of its deliverance. Operation DYNAMO, so named because it was commanded from the dynamo room in the bowels of Dover Castle, scraped together every vessel that could make it back and forth across the Channel. By Churchill’s count, 338,226 soldiers – slightly more than half of them British, the rest French – were snatched from the beaches and Dunkirk Harbour. On the evening of 4 June, the new Prime Minister would make to the House of Commons a call to arms to echo down the ages:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Six days later, Benito Mussolini finally summoned the courage to join in. On 10 June, like a thief at a back-alley brawl, Il Duce grabbed for his share of the pickings. As the panicked remains of the French Government stampeded from Paris to Bordeaux, Italy declared war on Britain and France. ‘The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbour,’ said President Roosevelt in Washington.
A sailor’s leave is never long enough. Perth’s refit had been finished by 29 April, her bottom scraped of the weed she had gathered in the Caribbean, her boilers cleaned, her engines tuned up. Amidships on her upper deck, between her two funnels, she now carried the aircraft catapult that should have been installed in Portsmouth; if not yet the actual aircraft. Her men returned to her for sea trials and a gunnery shoot to make sure that all was in working order. In May, she began the job of patrolling and convoying in Australian waters – a routine that would keep her occupied for most of the rest of 1940.
June saw her back in Sydney again. There was to be a change to her world, too – a change of captains. ‘Fearless Frank’ Farncomb was posted to a new command: the heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra – a mark
of the RAN’s confidence in his abilities. He had done well in turning Perth and her raw ship’s company into a competent operational unit, and it was as sure as could be, given the fortunes of war, that a distinguished career lay ahead of him.
But it cannot be said that the crew of Perth was sorry to see him go. The men respected him, but they did not like him. They thought him aloof and humourless, curt in speech and abrupt in manner, and all too ready to punish heavily for minor offences. Some thought him firm but fair. Others would say he was ‘a bit of a bastard’. Worse, they were not impressed by him as a ship handler – a grievous sin for a captain in the estimation of the Lower Deck. Jack Lewis used to call him ‘Crasher’ Farncomb. He told Joan that, from below in the engine room, as the ship was coming alongside in harbour, you could always tell if the Captain had the con. There would be sudden and urgent helm and engine orders, back and forth, often followed by a not-so-gentle crunch as the ship thumped the dock.
Stoker Norm King, the Reluctant Warrior, has a revealing story in his memoirs. King was a stirrer in the larrikin tradition, chafing at authority – the sort of man the navy calls a sea lawyer. He had been a willing participant in the famous mutiny over the white uniforms in New York. After that episode, he had obtained a copy of King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions, where he discovered, to his delight, that attendance at Sunday religious services was not compulsory:
I decided to rock the boat and ask to be excused church. To the uninitiated, this may seem quite a reasonable request. To the navy of 1939, it was akin to walking into the Lion’s den. The decision belonged to Captain Farncomb so, in line with navy tradition, I requested to see the Captain, through the Commander, through my Divisional Officer, through the Master at Arms and the Regulating Chief Stoker, at every stage getting a very cool reception.