by Mike Carlton
After that bloody nose, the Regia Marina became still more reluctant to put to sea. In November, a handful of Swordfish torpedo bombers,9 the famous ‘Stringbags’, launched from the carrier HMS Illustrious, attacked the Italian fleet in harbour at Taranto. Three Italian battleships were crippled, for the loss of just two aircraft. It was the first naval action ever undertaken by aircraft alone, without the ships involved sighting each other – a triumph for seaborne air power.
A world away in Tokyo, Japanese admirals and aviators studied Taranto with care, absorbing its lessons and drawing some profound conclusions about the use of airborne torpedoes against ships berthed in harbour. As the war in Europe swelled, Japan had moved ever deeper into planning Nanshinron, the southward ‘expansion’ towards the rich resources of oil, rubber and tin in South East Asia. This took on increasing urgency as the Americans sought to curb the Japanese rampage in China by ratcheting up trade sanctions and embargos. On 2 July, President Roosevelt signed an Export Control Act that banned the sale of aviation fuel to Japan and restricted the export of other oil and steel products. The Japanese Foreign Minister cabled his ambassador in Washington, the one-eyed Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura:
Commercial and economic relations between Japan and third countries, led by England and the United States, are gradually becoming so horribly strained that we cannot endure it much longer. Consequently, our Empire, to save its very life, must take measures to secure the raw materials of the South Seas.10
Their grievances festering, their paranoia deepening, the Japanese plunged on. In September, the Vichy administration in French colonial Indochina signed what it hoped would be an accord to limit Japan’s penetration there. The ink was still wet on the treaty when the Japanese invaded Indochina in force, tossing aside the feeble local defences and taking effective control of what is now northern Vietnam. Both the United States and Australia viewed this with alarm. In one leap forward, Japan now menaced the South Pacific and south Asia in an arc that curved from the Hawaiian Islands in the east, through the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies, and westwards to Malaya and Burma.
Hardly had that blow landed when there was another and greater bombshell. Germany, Italy and Japan came together in an alliance the world would know as the Axis. In Berlin, on 27 September, they signed a tripartite pact that began with a flourish of diplomatic cynicism on an epic scale:
The Governments of Japan, Germany, and Italy consider it the prerequisite of a lasting peace that every nation in the world shall receive the space to which it is entitled. They have, therefore, decided to stand by and cooperate with one another in their efforts in the regions of Europe and Greater East Asia respectively. In doing this it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things, calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned. It is, furthermore, the desire of the three Governments to extend cooperation to nations in other spheres of the world that are inclined to direct their efforts along lines similar to their own for the purpose of realizing their ultimate object, world peace.
Perth was constantly at sea towards the end of 1940. There were more convoys of troopships and men to escort, with occasional reports of German raiders operating against Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean. And at last the ship had her aircraft aboard. The RAAF’s 9 Squadron had been persuaded to part with a Vickers Supermarine Seagull V – an amphibious biplane as plain and stumpy as a bullock cart. It had a single Pegasus radial engine mounted above the cockpit, with the propellor at the rear, which pushed rather than pulled the aircraft along at a groaning maximum speed of 210 km/h. But the Seagull, affectionately known to the air force as the Shagbat and to Perth’s crew as the Pusser’s Duck,11 was a tough and versatile beast with a metal hull, capable of operating off both water and land. With a crew of three, and a range of almost 1000 kilometres, it was, for a time, an invaluable extension of Perth’s horizons.
Roy Norris, a petty officer cook from Carlton, in Melbourne, was one of the most experienced sailors on board. He had joined the navy in 1927, signing up for the customary 12 years, which meant he could be out again in 1939. The war changed that. In 1940, he was another of the Perth sailors who began to keep a diary in the unspoken thought that they would be witness to great and terrible events:
The 20 October 1940 proved to be the zero hour: when we left Sydney with a convoy, bound, as we thought, for Western Australia and a quick return to Sydney. Crowds had assembled at Man o’War steps and many other points of vantage lining the harbour. Launches were doing a roaring trade urged on by brazen lunged spruikers who offered trips – ‘Right round the Queen Mary. Only two bob return. Only two more seats left, sir. Goin’ strite away, madam. Take the lady and the gent for two bob each, nothin’ for the youngster, sir.’
It had all the appearance of a gala day. Bunting, etc. decorating the numerous small craft. Glorious sunshine. Sydney at her most gracious best. We didn’t mind much. Only a few days out and we’d be back again with the glorious promise of leave at Xmas to spur us on for this short time away from home.
The Queen Mary loafed like a bloated plutocrat at her anchorage off Taronga, a slight plume of smoke denoting that she had at last stirred herself to action. Boats buzzed everywhere. We just slunk at our buoy like a poor relation. The huge troopships were the glamour girls for today. No one thought to see us off. We were there just to make everything look ship-shape.
Ten o’clock and movement began. The Mary and Aquitania moved out, followed by the buzzing multitude of small fry and cheered by thousands on beach, shore and headland.12
Norris’s hopes of home leave at Christmas were dashed. It would be many long months before Perth would see Sydney again.
A few days later, in Melbourne, the convoy collected a third great liner turned troopship, the Mauretania, and Perth escorted them across the Indian Ocean as far as the Cocos Islands, shepherding a precious cargo of 14,000 men on a long passage to the Middle East.
The dangers were real: the war was coming to Australia’s doorstep. Two German auxiliary cruisers, Komet and Orion, both disguised as merchant ships, were active in the Pacific Ocean. In November, they sank the liner Rangitane off New Zealand, and then Komet headed north to destroy no fewer than six helpless merchant ships waiting to load cargoes of phosphate at Nauru. More menacing still, another German raider, Pinguin, laid mines on shipping lanes around Australia’s eastern and southern coasts, at one stage brazenly coming close enough inshore to see the lights of Sydney Harbour and the lighthouse at Barrenjoey, north of Sydney. Slipping back westwards below the Great Australian Bight, she then went on a rampage in the Indian Ocean, attacking and sinking unguarded merchant ships almost at will.
The RAN was powerless to stop the carnage. Perth was one of just a handful of ships available to hunt for an enemy that had the advantage of surprise and the empty wastes of two great oceans in which to hide. It was an unequal game, played on German terms. Perth and whatever other ships the navy could scrape together were despatched here and there as reports of sinkings came in, but they had no luck. It was one wild goose chase after another.
Unknown to the navy at the time, the saving grace was that the Kriegsmarine had instructed the raider captains they should not seek battle with Allied warships. There was no need to. There were rich pickings to be had without risk. The troop convoys sailed unmolested.
In late November, Perth headed out again from Fremantle with the cruiser Canberra, escorting yet another convoy to the Middle East. This time, she would be going all the way. The Navy Board and the Cabinet had decided that Sydney should be brought home from her Mediterranean deployment and that Perth should replace her. After a stop at Colombo and a stretch of more routine convoy duty back and forth in the Red Sea, Perth cleared the Suez Canal – cheered on her way by Australian soldiers camped on the canal banks – and entered the Mediterranean at exactly 7.30 on the morning of 24 December.
Turning west, Bowyer-Smyth steamed at a brisk 28 knots alon
g the Egyptian coast towards Alexandria. They arrived that evening, Christmas Eve. With the ship bathed in the glow of a brilliant sunset, they moved slowly past the Ras el-Tin lighthouse with its distinctive black and white stripes and in through the boom defence net, going alongside an oiling wharf to refuel.
The harbour was packed with the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, from the majestic bulk of the battleship Warspite to flocks of cruisers and destroyers swinging off buoys in the stream. As luck would have it, Perth drew the short straw and was nominated as guard ship for the night, which meant attending to any and all of the bits of housekeeping required by a fleet at anchor. Not far away, they could see the remnants of the French squadron that had been disarmed back in July, and Perth was ordered to keep her 6-inch turrets trained on the forlorn silhouette of the battleship Lorraine for the night, just in case of any funny business. Being guard ship meant that her bugler would sound the traditional ‘lights out’ for the fleet at 9 pm. Jim Nelson got the job. He stepped onto the quarterdeck, his mind racing:
Imagine yourself as an eighteen-year-old youth standing on the deck of an Australian cruiser thousands of miles from home, in a seemingly peaceful but war torn harbour, knowing that thousands of other lonely homesick sailors are out there awaiting your call. The bugle is placed to your lips and you send out the call across the water signalling ‘Lights Out’.
The harbour then closes up, the darkness of the night claims its own and the night watches settle down for whatever the night may bring. The officer of the watch approaches, congratulates you and we complete our watch together. At this time the war was still a wonderful adventure, but the atmosphere was there. It hung heavy with its pregnancy in the air, its presence invaded me, it took over my senses, I could feel it but could not define it and was too young to understand it. The long journey to get here, the training and anticipation of battle. Oh the wonderful battle, how we looked forward to it!
Yes we were ready. Fear did not enter our thoughts, we were unafraid. That was still an unknown and a long way away however, yet to come! Democracy, civil rights, to fight and die for your country and flag were still unknown factors and in the main unheard of. I was there because a fellow called Adolf Hitler had done the wrong thing and for this he had to be stopped. The battle call was ‘Stop Hitler’.
This part of the scenario, even in my callow youth, I did understand. At eighteen years of age I loved my country, its way of life and opportunities and I was prepared to fight to preserve it.13
PART 2
War in the Mediterranean
CHAPTER 8
TO THE MEDITERRANEAN
The Mediterranean Sea, the sea of Middle Earth, was the nursery of civilisation. Down the centuries from antiquity, kingdoms, empires, republics and caliphates have risen and fallen in contest for the mastery of its shores and waters. Arts and sciences have flourished in its palaces and libraries, commerce in the ports and marketplaces. But no part of the planet has seen more war, death and destruction. Greeks and Romans, Venetians and Phoenicians, Egyptians and Persians, Assyrians and Spaniards, Turks and Russians, Americans and Germans, Britons and Frenchmen have all come and gone, leaving behind the bones of their ships and sailors on the Mediterranean sea floor.
From the Straits of Gibraltar in the west to Syria and Lebanon in the east, the Mediterranean spans nearly 4000 kilometres. Between its northern and southern shores, the distances are shorter – no more than 1400 kilometres, and in some parts very much less. Its waters cover 2.5 million square kilometres of the planet. The coastline, from Spain eastwards across southern France and around Italy, on through the Balkans and down to Turkey, to the Middle East and across westwards through North Africa to Morocco, runs for 46,000 kilometres. The weather can be benign, with warm, sunlit summers, but the winters in the northern Mediterranean are often icy. The cold Mistral winds howling down from the Alps-Pyrenees can whip up a nasty, short-pitched sea in next to no time. From Africa, the burning gales they call the Sirocco or the Khamsin or the Ghibli are laden with sand and dust – a misery to sailors.
For the British, the Med, as they called it, was the highway to Empire. Britain won Gibraltar and its famous rock from Spain in 1713 and for centuries maintained an impregnable naval base there, dominating the gateway to and from the Atlantic. Nelson guaranteed Britain the command of the Mediterranean for a hundred years when he destroyed a French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and then a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. In Victorian times, the Royal Navy was a familiar sight in all the great ports, equally admired and resented for its pomp and swagger. The Suez Canal became the road to India, the Far East and Australia.
Australians, too, had fought in these waters before. Perth’s men knew the story of their fathers and uncles who had sailed there in 1915 to plant the roots of the Anzac legend on the beaches and the heights of Gallipoli. In 1917, Harry Chauvel, the outstanding Australian General of the First World War, sent the immortal 4th Light Horse to crush the Turks in history’s last great cavalry charge at Beersheba in Palestine. Now, in this war, Australia would make its mark here again.
As the year 1940 drew to a close, there was some cause for optimism in the Mediterranean theatre. Wherever he turned, Mussolini saw his grand fantasies of empire collapsing with embarrassing speed. His invasion of Greece in the northern autumn of 1940 had turned into an unmitigated disaster. In North Africa, Operation COMPASS, the westward thrust by the British Army’s Western Desert Force, had Il Duce’s legions either in scattered retreat or, more humiliating still, staying put to surrender at the first opportunity.
The Australian Army’s 6th Division played a signal role in the stunning British successes. On 4 January 1941, in the army’s first major battle of the war, the men of the 6th routed the Italians at Bardia in Cyrenaica, or modern Libya.1 They lost 130 killed, but captured some 40,000 Italian prisoners and staggeringly large dumps of weapons, food and alcohol. Three weeks later, they smashed through the defences of the strategically important port of Tobruk. The RAN’s Scrap Iron destroyers under Captain Hec Waller took part in bombarding the Italians from the sea, in guarding the supply lines for the troops ashore, and in ferrying some of the tens of thousands of wretched prisoners back to Alexandria. This was the encouraging landscape in which Perth began her Mediterranean service.
At sea, the Royal Navy held the upper hand. The French fleet had been neutered. HMAS Sydney’s destruction of the Colleoni and the air attack on Taranto had left the Regia Marina with little more enthusiasm for the fight than the Italian Army. The Kriegsmarine was concentrating on the war on British trade in the Atlantic. In London, Winston Churchill was convinced that his Blue Water Strategy, British command of the Mediterranean, would be key to taking the fight to the Axis powers.
His instrument would be the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. Ever the romantic, Churchill believed that Nelsonian boldness in the Mediterranean and the Middle East would bring Italy to her knees and turn the tide of war against Germany. With his customary combination of charm and bullying, he forced that view upon his admirals, generals and air marshals.
To guard the approaches to the western Mediterranean, the navy had Force H at Gibraltar: the battlecruiser Renown, the battleship Barham and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, with their attendant cruisers and destroyers. Force H might range into the Atlantic, but its principal task was to pass Britain’s convoys of men, weapons, fuel and food eastwards into the Mediterranean and to take the war to the Italians where it might find them.
The Mediterranean Fleet operated at the other end of the line. From Alexandria, its role was to command the sea itself, to deliver those supply convoys safely to the army in North Africa, to keep open the Suez Canal, and, again, to oppose and destroy Mussolini’s navy. At the beginning of 1941, it comprised four battleships (Warspite, Malaya, Ramillies and Valiant), two aircraft carriers (the brand-new Illustrious and the older Eagle), together with squadrons of cruisers (including HMAS Sydney and then Perth) an
d the smaller but faster destroyers (including five of Waller’s Australians). There was also a force of 15 submarines.
Alexandria existed in a peculiar limbo. Egypt owned it; Britain controlled it. In 1936, with a well-judged combination of threats and bribery, the British had forced the Egyptian monarch, the dissolute young King Farouk, to sign a treaty of alliance, which permitted Britain to treat the place as just another outpost of Empire. The Admiralty quickly set about building up a dockyard and headquarters that could become the Royal Navy’s principal base in the event of war in the Mediterranean.
Central to the entire British strategy was the island fortress of Malta. For centuries, he who occupied Malta dominated the whole Mediterranean. Lying 100 kilometres to the south-east of Sicily, midway between Gibraltar and Alexandria and therefore more or less in the centre of the Mediterranean, Malta was the lynchpin. It had been a British colony since 1800, and the Grand Harbour of the capital, Valletta, was the Royal Navy’s principal Mediterranean base in peacetime.
The scandal was that Malta’s defences had been grievously neglected. When war with Italy broke out in 1940, the island had only a handful of anti-aircraft guns. The RAF maintained exactly three ancient Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters, which the cynics had nicknamed Faith, Hope and Charity. And for all the grandeur of its ancient forts and ramparts, Malta was no longer tenable as a permanent home for warships for it lay within easy range of Italian bomber bases. This was what had forced the Mediterranean Fleet to relocate further east to Alexandria. The Battle for Malta would become one of the epic struggles of the war, stretching the Royal Navy to breaking point.
After committing to the Mediterranean option in 1940, much against the misgivings of his professional naval advisers, Churchill sought to soothe the concerns of the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand, writing to them that: