Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Finally the great day arrived. To describe the event: flanked by an escort, Stoker King was marched across the quarterdeck to face the Captain. ‘Left right, left right, halt, left turn, salute the Captain, off cap. Stoker King requests to be excused church, sir,’ barks the Master at Arms.

  The Captain, gold braid, epaulettes and telescope, glares at the stoker standing stiffly to attention, scared stiff. Alongside the Captain is the Master at Arms, behind the Captain is the Commander cradling a telescope, behind the Commander are various Lieutenant Commanders also cradling telescopes, and filling in the gaps are junior officers cradling sticks.

  The Captain addressed the assembled officers: ‘I go to church, you gentlemen go to church, why should a stoker want to be excused? Case dismissed.’

  Someone must have shown the Captain what was in the good book. The following Sunday’s Daily Orders followed the usual routine except for right at the bottom the notice: ‘Stoker King will be excused church but will be given suitable employment in the boiler room.’ Victory was sweet.5

  Perth’s new captain came aboard, with all due naval ceremony, on Thursday 6 June. Those who had disliked Farncomb must have wondered if they were in for something a fair bit worse. The signs were not encouraging.

  Captain Sir Philip Bowyer-Smyth was an officer of the Royal Navy and an aristocrat. The ‘Sir’ was no mere knighthood. Bowyer-Smyth was a hereditary baronet. To be precise, he was by style and title the 14th Baronet of Hill Hall – a gracious Elizabethan mansion of mellow red brick built by a Tudor ancestor at Theydon Mount in Essex, outside London. He could trace the baronetcy to a loyal courtier of the executed King Charles I, and beyond that his lineage went back to the Crusades.

  He had joined the Royal Navy as a cadet in his early teens and was an acting sub-lieutenant in time for the outbreak of war in 1914. But his mother was an Australian. He was born in 1894 at Moss Vale, then a country hamlet in the highlands south of Sydney, and he had served for three years with the RAN just after the First World War. A signals specialist, he had commanded a sloop on the East Indies Station and the seaplane-carrier HMS Pegasus. His last job before his return to Australia had been as naval attaché at the British Embassy in Rome. Perth would be Sir Philip’s first cruiser command.

  To complete the picture, he spoke with the urbane diction of the Royal Naval wardroom, played the flute in his cabin and never appeared on the bridge in anything less than immaculate uniform, as if expecting an invitation for lunch at the Admiralty.

  King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions would guarantee him the obedience of his ship’s company, or else, but earning their respect was another matter altogether. At least he would have time to get to know his ship and his men in the relative calm of Australian waters, although his task was not made any easier by the arrival of an admiral and his staff on board the very day after he took command. Perth became the flagship of Rear-Admiral John Crace, another Australian-born officer of the Royal Navy, whose job, officially described as Rear-Admiral Commanding Australian Squadron, placed him in charge of whatever ships of the RAN were to be found afloat in Australian waters. To Crace’s constant chagrin, there was precious little to command. Most of his naval strength, including Australia and Canberra, Perth’s sisters Sydney and Hobart, and the destroyers of the Scrap Iron Flotilla, had been despatched to foreign waters to bolster the Royal Navy. In 1940, Australia was still a backwater in the war. Most of the action at sea was on the convoy routes of the North Atlantic and in the Mediterranean – Mussolini’s boasted Mare Nostrum – where the storm clouds were gathering.

  As the months ticked by, Perth continued with the important but unspectacular job of convoy and patrol, much as she had done in the Caribbean. Sometimes, it was along the Pacific coast or across towards New Zealand; at others it was down around the Great Australian Bight and into the Indian Ocean. For the new Captain, it meant a breathing space to get the feel of his ship and the measure of his officers and men, and to exercise them to the standard he expected. For the ship’s company, while the work was monotonous, there was always the chance of a quick run ashore at the pubs and the girls, or the occasional longer bit of leave with friends and family.

  Jack Lewis found the time to get married to his sweetheart, Joan. He was 26; she was just 20. Joan was a Catholic and he was not, so it took a bit of arranging, but on Saturday 6 July they made their vows in the cool sandstone splendour of one of the chapels at St Mary’s. The wedding photographs, carefully tinted, show Jack standing proud and handsome in the blue and brass of his petty officer’s uniform, Joan slender and glowing in a long white satin dress with a sweeping train and veil, and holding a bouquet of sweet peas. Her mother worked as a chef at the swanky Australia Hotel in Castlereagh Street and knew all about planning a wedding breakfast. Even though it was wartime, they pulled out all the stops at a reception centre in inner-suburban Petersham. They danced the night away and managed a few days on honeymoon. Then Jack returned to sea again.

  When Perth was back in Sydney, Jack would not let Joan come to the ship itself. Too much of a risk, he said, with all those uncouth sailors likely to muck up or drop a swear word that a lady, most especially a respectable married lady, shouldn’t hear. But sometimes in the summer evenings after work at the photographic studio, when she knew Jack was on watch, Joan would catch a tram through the city to the Botanic Gardens, where she could see the cruiser alongside at Garden Island or moored at the naval buoy in Farm Cove. She would sit alone in the twilight beneath the great Port Jackson fig trees, warm in the knowledge that her man was there on board. Silently, she willed her love to him across the darkening harbour waters. The ship’s lights would come on as dusk fell, and there would be the momentary stir on Perth’s upper deck at six o’clock as the first dog watch changed to the second. Then she would catch the tram back home again. He never knew she did it.

  As the navy expanded in 1940, Perth began to lose some experienced senior men, who were needed to take their knowledge and skills to other ships. New names and faces arrived on board to replace them.

  Like so many of his shipmates, Jim Nelson had known the hardships of a kid growing up in the Depression years. Home was a rented two-bedroom cottage in the tough working-class Sydney suburb of Belmore. His father, Bill, was a foreman brickburner at the nearby Punchbowl Brick and Tile Works. When that job died with the collapse of the building industry, Bill was packed off with his mate Wally Anderson to some goldfields near Goulburn in southern New South Wales on a government relief scheme. Jim and his mother, Mary, and his two sisters, Norma and Vi, stayed behind to battle along as best they could. Every so often, they would push a wheelbarrow up to a government depot in Lakemba to collect a few humble groceries, and Mary took on cleaning jobs to make ends meet. As Jim recounts in his unpublished diary:

  I remember one very sad day when the pawnbroker came down and took all her rings and weighed them up and gave her a few pounds for her wedding ring and whatever she had. Things were very, very hard. My father was away for six months and came back. Never sent us any money because he never got any money.

  And he didn’t strike it rich on the goldfields, so when he came back, Wally played a double-bass and I played the cornet, and Dad rattled a box, and we’d go up and stand on the railway station when the trains were coming in of a night time. And we made a few bob that way.

  Wally had a big long backyard and we had enough room to put in a big potato paddy, and we used to get potatoes, plenty of potatoes, which became a staple diet. Then in our place we grew cabbages, lettuce, radishes and French beans along the fence, chokoes, and that’s how we managed to survive.6

  Wally Anderson became a sort of honorary uncle. It was he who taught Jim the cornet. And because he had been in the navy in the First World War, it was Wally who thought it might be a good idea if the young bloke joined the Royal Australian Naval Reserve.

  Jim was a bright kid and good with his hands, smart enough to get a job at 16 as an apprentice mechanic with B
ennett and Wood, a company that sold Harley-Davidson motorcycles. He loved the work. And there he met his sweetheart, Jean Connor, a beautiful young girl who lived with her maiden aunt at Lewisham. When he was not courting Jean, he would go for training at the Naval Reserve depot at Rushcutters Bay on the harbour. So, when war broke out, there was a uniformed petty officer knocking on the front door at Belmore in the middle of the night with an order for Able Seaman Nelson to report for duty. The navy taught him the ropes at Flinders, and in June 1940 Perth became his first ship:

  Imagine a young feller just turned 18, or nearly 19 by this stage, to get out and climb up the gangway and walk onto a real live battleship. Thrilling. You’d come up the gangplank and look around in the middle of the ship and you’d see these big turrets and guns and things, a thrill of a lifetime.

  But when we took off, nobody had ever told us about the mal de mer thing. As soon as we got out of Western Port Bay into Bass Strait we were headed into the most horrendous storm you could ever hit. And Perth did everything a cruiser should never do. She acted like a destroyer; she pig rooted, pitched and tossed and rolled. Gunners were washed from side to side, and I got horribly seasick. Some of the other sailors would come up and they’d say ‘Hey, breakfast is being served, there’s pork chops and eggs on, do you want any or can I have yours?’ And of course you hang further over the side then. You go green, greenish colour, and your stomach just revolts and you get continuous vomiting.

  Jim Nelson was assigned as a gunner in one of the 6-inch turrets. When it became known he could play the cornet, he joined Elmo Gee as a ship’s bugler, and the motorbike fanatic from grimy Belmore and the bush kid from Silver Creek became good mates. They ran the ship’s Crown and Anchor game, a dice game that had been a gambling favourite with sailors since time immemorial but was illegal in the RAN. This had them constantly running foul of Chief Petty Officer Hubert ‘Jan’ Creber, the Master-at-Arms, the ship’s police chief, but it made them some extra pocket money.

  A year or so older than Jim Nelson, Signalman Brian Sheedy had been an apprentice baker in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick when he joined up a year before the war in 1938. His father had died when he was seven. His mother, Vera, worked to keep food on the table for her four children, helped out by Brian’s wage from the bakehouse of 28 shillings for a minimum of 50 hours a week:

  We worked from 10 pm till 6 am weeknights, including Sunday nights … the word ‘sweatshop’ was often used metaphorically, but in a bakehouse its use was literal. The work was physically exhausting and one perspired freely during all hours, winters and summer. Even today I can recall my brother-in-law who was employed in the same bakehouse; he had been instrumental in getting me taken on there and was a master baker. We rode bicycles to and from work. Arriving home, we had breakfast before getting some sleep in preparation for the coming night’s work. He would fall asleep at the breakfast table while lifting a cup of tea from the saucer to his lips. When the cup was midway his head would fall forward onto the table. Many times I watched this. As a 16-year-old I accepted this as normal – it was the way things were.7

  Two of Brian’s uncles, his mother’s brothers, had been killed in the First World War – one at Gallipoli, the other at Villers-Bretonneux in France. Vera worried about her son joining the navy in troubled times, but Brian thought it was heaven compared with the weary grind at the bakehouse:

  Mustered into HMAS Cerberus training establishment, and given the choice between becoming a telegraphist and a signalman, I opted for the latter, a choice I never regretted. It was a happy choice, for I witnessed magnificences which, by necessity, are denied to the majority of men in a ship’s company, whose duties confine them below decks.

  …There were derisive shouts from earlier recruits as we new recruits, still in our civilian dress, marched through the grounds of Cerberus. The cry ‘You’ll be sorry!’ only met with grins from us. We had signed on for twelve years’ continuous service. It was peacetime and we were all young.

  Of all the training courses in the various disciplines required to man a man o’war, the communications course was the longest. We went over and over the Fleet Signal Book, codes and ciphers, fleet manoeuvring formations. We marched across the playing fields in line ahead, line abreast, and quarter line formations, turning in succession, turning together. We imagined ourselves as ships steaming in various formations; we waved little flags on sticks above our heads, simulating signals received and executed.

  Later, on blacked-out bridges, under war conditions, this repetition of the signal syllabus stood us in good stead. It was committed to memory.

  Like Rowley Roberts, Brian Sheedy took his place as one of the elite on Perth’s signal bridge – an astute and passionate observer.

  Adolf Hitler flew to Paris before dawn on 23 June 1940, arriving at sunrise. It was a summer Sunday, the chestnuts along the Champs Elysées in early leaf. Few Parisians were on the streets. For the conqueror of France – a triumphant dictator who was now master of Europe from Norway to the Mediterranean – it was a surprisingly low-key visit. He was accompanied by his secretary, Martin Bormann, and his favourite architect, the clever but fawning Albert Speer. They toured the near-deserted boulevards in a small convoy of open-topped Mercedes-Benz limousines, stopping first at the Opéra, which Hitler, the self-styled aesthete, excitedly described to Speer as ‘the most beautiful theatre in the world!’.

  After pausing for photographs at the Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower in the background, they drove to Les Invalides. Hitler stood in rapt silence staring down, tyrant to tyrant, at the tomb of Napoleon in the great rotunda. By nine o’clock, he was in the air again, heading back to his headquarters, curiously subdued. ‘Draw up a decree in my name ordering full-scale resumption of work on the Berlin buildings,’ he told Speer. ‘Wasn’t Paris beautiful? But Berlin must be made more beautiful.’8

  Hitler’s misty-eyed contemplation of the beauties of the City of Light were quickly swept away by his order for the planning of Unternehmen Seelöwe, Operation Sea Lion – the cross-Channel invasion of Britain. As that northern summer of 1940 turned to autumn, it seemed that nothing stood in his way. Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, boasted that the British would be brought to their knees by air power alone, and in the Atlantic Ocean Dönitz’s U-boats had the upper hand over the slow and weakly defended convoys that carried oil and machines from America to Britain, and men and food from all over the Empire, including Australia.

  Winston Churchill, on the other hand, contemplated a strategic calamity. In a few weeks, the balance of power had tipped alarmingly. The U-boats now had bases on the Atlantic coast of France – a huge advantage over the long and dangerous trip from Kiel or Wilhelmshaven north around the British Isles. In the Mediterranean – the sea highway that led to Egypt, the Suez Canal, India and the rest of the Empire – there was the fear that the powerful and modern battleships of conquered France would fall into Italian or, worse, German hands.

  Churchill, unflinching, ordered his admirals to prevent this at all costs. The French were made an offer: they could sail their warships to England or to French colonial ports and remain in the Allied fight; they could disarm their guns; or they could be destroyed at anchor by the Royal Navy. The worst happened. French pride and honour collided with British desperation and resolve. On 3 July, a French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria refused the British ultimatum. A Royal Naval task force led by the battlecruiser HMS Hood opened fire. The French were all but destroyed, their ships sunk or run aground, with 1297 men killed. Only the battleship Strasbourg escaped. Further east at Alexandria – the main port city of Egypt – another French squadron, including the old battleship Lorraine, agreed to disarm its guns.

  In Europe, the great battle in the skies over Britain began. The Blitz rained fire on London. And, in the Mediterranean, the Italians finally began to stir. On land, Mussolini ordered Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the ‘Butcher of Libya’, to attack the British Army in Egypt, an
d in October the Italian Army invaded Greece. But, in embarrassing succession, Il Duce’s dreams of quick and glorious victories were shattered in a matter of months. British and Indian troops and the Australian Army’s newly blooded 6th Division sent the Italians tumbling back to Libya in a frantic retreat, capturing literally tens of thousands of prisoners. The campaign in Greece was a similar fiasco, with the Italians quickly thrown back to Albania by the small but feisty Greek Army.

  The Italian Navy, the Regia Marina, fared little better. On paper, it was a force far superior to the British Mediterranean Fleet based at Alexandria. At sea, the story was very different. The Italian admirals and captains were cautious, hesitant, prone to flight at a sign of trouble. On 19 July, the Australian cruiser Sydney scored the RAN’s first big victory over the Italians in the Kaso Strait off Cape Spada, the northernmost point of the island of Crete.

  Under the command of Captain John Collins, a naval-college classmate of Frank Farncomb, Sydney and a small squadron of British destroyers attacked and routed two Italian cruisers, Bartolomeo Colleoni and Giovanni Delle Bande Nere. It was a pell-mell chase on a hazy morning that turned into a perfect Mediterranean summer’s day. The Italians were desperate to escape down the west coast of Crete, laying smoke as they fled. Sydney and her destroyers, guns blazing, ran down and sank Colleoni, and Bande Nere fled. By midday it was all over. Collins and his men returned to Alexandria and a hero’s welcome from the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, including the Australian Scrap Iron destroyers, which were festooned with Australian flags. When news of the victory reached Australia, there was an explosion of national pride and joy.