by Mike Carlton
I do not think myself that Japan will declare war unless Germany can make a successful invasion of Britain. Once Japan sees that Germany has either failed or dares not try I look for easier times in the Pacific. In adopting against the grain a yielding policy towards Japanese threats we have always in mind your interest and safety.2
He smoothly assured the Dominions down under that the Japanese would also be hesitant to risk taking on the might of the Americans in the Pacific, and went on that if there were somehow to be an Anglo-Japanese war:
we should of course defend Singapore, which if attacked – which is unlikely – ought to stand a long siege. We should also be able to base on Ceylon a battle-cruiser and a fast aircraft carrier which, with all the Australian and New Zealand cruisers and destroyers, which would return to you, would act as a very powerful deterrent upon the hostile raiding cruisers.
We are about to reinforce with more first-class units the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet. This fleet could of course at any time be sent through the Canal into the Indian Ocean, or to relieve Singapore. We do not want to do this, even if Japan declared war, until it is found to be vital to your safety. Such a transference would entail the complete loss of the Middle East, and all prospect of beating Italy in the Mediterranean would be gone.
This was Churchill at his most difficult – the impetuous amateur meddling again in grand designs, as he had done so disastrously at Gallipoli. The Blue Water Strategy would prove to be a grievous error that would cost tens of thousands of Allied lives in both the Middle East and the Pacific. Many of the dead would be Australian.
As the Italians simultaneously succumbed to the British onslaught in North Africa and lay bogged in a stalemate with the Greeks, Hitler was planning his next move. Preoccupied with a possible invasion of the British Isles and, deeper in the recesses of his mind, with the destruction of the Soviet Union, he was nonetheless alive to the threats and opportunities of the Mediterranean. As a matter of both diplomatic and military prestige, he was willing to help out his Axis partner in Rome.
By December 1940, British intelligence was aware that Germany had begun a substantial build-up of land and air forces in the Balkans. In the intelligence coup known as ULTRA, Britain’s code-breakers had begun to decipher signals coded and sent on Germany’s top-secret Enigma machines. Enigma messages transmitted by both the Luftwaffe and the German railway system, combined with reports from agents in the field, left no doubt that as many as 23 divisions of the German Army had been sent south through Hungary and into Romania. This secured Romanian oilfields for Germany. But those divisions might well be deployed to Greece, or perhaps to the Middle East. Or possibly both.
More ominous still, there were other ULTRA intercepts that made it plain the Luftwaffe was readying to join the battle. A few weeks before Christmas 1940, an entire Luftwaffe air wing known as Fliegerkorps X was transferred from Norway to bases in Sicily and mainland southern Italy. It comprised squadrons of heavy bombers, the lighter and slower but much feared Stuka dive-bombers, and substantial numbers of fighters. Fliegerkorps X and its Commander, Generalmajor Hans Geissler, were experts in anti-shipping warfare. By January, they were ready for action. They would put the skills and tactics they had gained in the Norwegian campaign to devastating effect against the British in the Med.
Christmas 1940 went off well. In the absence of anything like a traditional Christmas tree, the ships in harbour at Alexandria had hoisted festive palm fronds to their mastheads. The Italians, presumably in the spirit of goodwill, refrained from any bombing raids. Perth, the newcomer swinging at her buoy, was roused on Christmas morning, as she had been the year before in the Caribbean, by the ship’s bandmaster bawling ‘Christians Awake’ over the speaker system. The cooks sweated all morning in her galleys and Captain Bowyer-Smyth strolled informally through the messes, chatting to the ship’s company – all much to the approval of young Jim Nelson:
Christmas Day!! All Night leave was granted to a small section of the crew, about a quarter were lucky! We who stayed aboard enjoyed a special Christmas Luncheon beautifully prepared by our own cooks. It seemed unfair to have to remain on board on this special day but our Captain and officers were wonderful and joined in with the celebrations. By naval tradition, the youngest ordinary seaman took command as ‘Officer of the Watch’ and, also following tradition, the Captain served him his meal. The meal! The cooks excelled themselves. Roast Pork, Ham and gravy followed by the Christmas Pudding prepared to the naval recipe known as ‘Pusser’s Plum Duff’ with brandy sauce as dessert. Ample for all. I doubt that those who went ashore enjoyed the day as much.3
Other men were not so happy. James Cooper, an able bodied seaman from Largs Bay, in South Australia, was older than most of his shipmates. He was 33, with a bushy black beard. He had joined the navy in 1928 – the same year that he married his wife Henrietta, or Etty, as he called her. But maturity and long service were no hedge against a longing for home, as he recorded in his diary:
Xmas in Alexandria. Went to Mass on HMS Eagle at 6.30 am. Had four bottles of beer for dinner. Did I get drunk. Still, it is the only thing I do when I go ashore, and I never go with women, as it keeps me out of trouble and helps me to forget about being homesick. How I wish I was home this day.4
Elmo Gee sent home a Christmas card, with a rhyming message he had composed himself and written in a careful hand, the first letter of each verse inked in red:
This Christmas I’ll spend at sea with the ‘Perth’
While keeping Australia from harm –
But Oh, I will long for the rich brown earth
And cheer of the old home farm.
I’ll think of you mother, father and Lew
This Christmas at far Silver Creek,
And send all the best of good wishes to you
That you find all in life you may seek.
May the harvest be rich, the sun and the rain
Make fruitful the hours of your toil –
Good health be your wealth, ’til peace comes again
And your Allan comes home to the soil.
From your loving son Allan, XXXXX5
Roy Norris and a few mates managed a run ashore after lunch. George Hatfield found the Fleet Club, where an Australian Army concert party put on a show called ‘Aussies on Parade’. Even on Christmas Day, Alexandria hummed with life. The city was an exotic stew of Araby and Europe, a profusion of elegant palaces and hotels, teeming souks and stinking slums. In the old quarter beyond the harbour corniche, mosques jostled for space with bars and brothels. Broad boulevards and twisting lanes were choked with donkey carts and ancient, wheezing French and American cars. Heavy-lidded men with thick moustaches sat drinking coffee at footpath cafes. The women waddled past, swathed in black.
The Perth men eventually found their way to the Australian Club – a services canteen set up for soldiers on leave and sailors ashore. They had a wet, a couple of bottles of beer, before moving on again, as sailors do, to see what the night would bring.
Like any ancient seaport, Alexandria knew how to cater for sailors ashore. The red-light district spilled along the Rue des Soeurs, or Sister Street, as everyone called it. It was life on the wild side. From bar to bar, the street throbbed to the sound of guitars and pianos, and songs in English, French, Arabic and Italian, and the night air carried a heady odour of Egyptian cooking, garbage and horse manure. Semi-naked whores beckoned and crooned from windows and doorways. Every man was a Johnny, as in ‘You wanna girl, Johnny?’ Or, for a few piastres, you could just drink at a table with the bar girls, ice-cold beer for yourself and coloured water for them. A fondle or a blow job under the table cost extra. Sometimes, the street would erupt in a swift and sudden knife fight, the blades expertly wielded. British Army military police, the Redcaps, patrolled Sister Street, and there were local cops on horses as well. Roy Norris was no shrinking violet, but this was very different to back home:
Goodness knows how we got to some of the joints and dives. The horrib
le sights we saw in some places. Everything is in total darkness, and how we found our way is a miracle to me … Alex is not a very nice place – of that I am convinced. In future, I think I’ll spend most of my time on board.6
He yielded soon enough. A few days later, in a more salubrious outing, he joined a group of about five dozen Perth sailors who hired a convoy of cars to see the ancient sights of the city. They marvelled at the tall, red granite shaft of Pompey’s Pillar and the catacombs built by the Romans. They snapped photos and bought souvenirs to send back home. These were deceptively tranquil moments, a brief respite before the storm of war broke upon them.
On 28 December, Perth’s crew was over the side with the paint pots and brushes again. It had been decided, on high, that the ship’s pale grey paint should be replaced by a dazzling camouflage pattern to confuse enemy lookouts. In the days before radar – the Italian Navy had none at all – the theory was that an observer would have difficulty telling whether the ship was coming or going.
There had already been an attempt in this direction. Some genius had got the idea of breaking up the cruiser’s distinctive silhouette by adding odd-shaped sheets of metal to her two tall funnels. There was no science to back this up, just a rather vague hope that it might have some effect. No one ever found out if it did or not.
And there was not much more science in the camouflage. Everyone on board was asked to come up with ideas for a pattern. Ordinary Seaman Ross Birbeck, a young bloke who had been a hairdresser at Victor Harbor, in South Australia, won two bottles of beer with a design of big arcs of paint swooping along the ship’s sides and superstructure in contrasting shades of grey. They thought that, from a distance, it made Perth look like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which ought to be more than enough to fool the dopey Eye-ties.
On 31 December, Bill Bracht celebrated both his birthday and the passing of his exam for promotion to petty officer.
At four o’clock on that last afternoon of 1940, Perth sailed from Alexandria in company with HMS Ajax, a Leander class cruiser like herself, although of the unmodified, single-funnelled variety. Ajax was one of those ships that had so famously hunted down the pocket battleship Graf Spee at the opening of the war. She and Perth were to become part of the Mediterranean Fleet’s 7th Cruiser Squadron, under the command of a Royal Navy officer designated Vice-Admiral Light Forces, Henry Pridham-Wippell. Heading out past the Ras el-Tin, they turned north-west across the Mediterranean towards Crete, bows dipping into a moderately heavy sea, closing up to evening action stations as the sun sank away to port. It was a sombre New Year’s Eve. James Cooper thought of his wife again:
The last day of the old year, and what a day. I wonder if Etty remembers the promise I made to her in 1928 at the back gate on New Year’s Eve, that I would always spend that night with her. How I wish I could keep that promise, for I would give anything to be with her tonight. I am very homesick, and have got the blues and horrors.7
The only celebratory drink to toast the New Year was a steaming mug of kye, the navy’s nickname for the thick and villainous brew of cocoa that sustained men at sea in the long watches of the night. Kye wasn’t proper kye unless you could stand your spoon in it. The galley kept a pot of it ready to hand, always. It warmed both the stomach and the spirit.
On the north-west coast of Crete, there lay a long, almost landlocked harbour – Suda Bay – a forward base and refuelling point for the fleet. It was within easy striking distance of Piraeus, the port for Athens, and it commanded the approaches to the Aegean Sea, that beautiful and ancient body of water, sprinkled with sun-dried islands, that separates Greece and Turkey.
They fetched Suda on a cool but sunny New Year’s morning, a Wednesday. It was a truly lovely sight, with picture-postcard tranquillity. The entrance to the harbour was framed by snow-capped mountains. Gentle green hills rose from the shore, dotted with small farm buildings, olive groves and – a happy sight for Australian eyes – straggling flocks of sheep. The waters were a deep blue, barely ruffled by a light breeze that carried the scent of native thyme growing wild in the hills. As ever, Ray Parkin found time to whip out his paintbox. Jim Nelson admired a little white Greek Orthodox church with a red roof and a belltower topped by a cross.
Bowyer-Smyth took the ship in a careful curve alongside a tanker, the Olna, to take on fuel. The Seagull aircraft – or the Walrus, as her crew mostly called her – was flown ashore and kept there for reconnaissance work in the coming months. At moments like this, the war seemed far away.
But not for long. The air-raid alarms shattered the peace about halfway through the afternoon watch. While an Alarm Yellow warned of an imminent air raid, an Alarm Red was not just a warning but an alert of aircraft in sight and about to attack. This was an Alarm Red. A lone Italian bomber suddenly roared over the hills towards them at a height of perhaps 5000 feet. By the measure of what was to unfold in the months ahead, it was not much, but this was Perth’s first experience of a real threat from the sky. As the alarm rattles clattered, the men raced from the mess decks and pounded to their action stations, hearts beating, nerves and muscles bracing for their first shots in anger.
Perth’s anti-aircraft armament, her four sets of twin 4-inch guns, thundered into life, the shells arcing into the air, glowing red tracer exploding in sharp puffs of woolly black smoke. The heavy brass shell cases clattered to the deck. Across the bay, Ajax joined in. So did some anti-aircraft batteries ashore. The bomber jinked and circled around the hills, now closer, now further away. On deck with one of the damage control parties, the First Lieutenant, Pricky Reid, was shaking his fist in the air and shouting ‘Come here, you dirty Dago bastard’. But for all the sound and fury, not one shell from either ship got anywhere near making a hit.
The trouble was that the anti-aircraft gunnery system just didn’t work. In the Leander cruisers, it involved a lot of machinery and a lot of manpower, but it was almost entirely useless. The raw truth was that if enemy aircraft were shot down, it was more by good luck than good management.
Perth’s air defence began on the ship’s bridge. Searching the skies back and forth through an arc assigned to him, a keen-eyed lookout with binoculars would spot and report an attacker, or a swarm of them, which might be only a speck on the horizon.
‘Aircraft bearing green nine-oh, range two miles, sir!’
Green nine-oh meant a sighting on the starboard or right-hand side, at an angle of 90 degrees. The Captain or the Officer of the Watch would sound action stations. The ship’s air-defence officer, a lieutenant, would select the aircraft to be targeted. This was a split-second call. He would bark that information to a compartment situated well above the height of the bridge and before the foremast: the High Angle Director Tower. This could rotate in a full circle; it was open to the sky above, and its sights could elevate through 90 degrees. It had a crew of four men who kept their sights trained on the incoming enemy to estimate distance, speed, height and bearing.
The Director Captain, generally a sub-lieutenant or midshipman, transmitted that data to another compartment deep below the waterline in the guts of the ship: the High Angle Control Position. That contained a top-secret piece of equipment: the Admiralty High Angle Fire Control Table. In effect, this was a primitive analog computer. It looked a bit like a car engine tipped on its side. Bending over this contraption was a small team of trained ratings – usually the ship’s bandsmen – who, by turning wheels, dials and pointers, could work out where the anti-aircraft weapons on either side of the ship should be aimed.
Other number-crunching took into account the pitch and roll of the ship if it was at sea, along with variables such as air temperature and wind speed and direction. These mathematics were essential for deciding at what height the anti-aircraft shells should be fused to explode.
The result was then transmitted to the guns themselves, where the gunlayers and trainers followed the movements of electrical pointers that gave them the height and direction of the incoming aircraft. Each pair of the
guns required small variations to compensate for their position on the ship – port and starboard, fore and aft. The shells were fused for the correct height, and the guns were then loaded and fired. At an elevation of 80 degrees, the guns had a range of around 18,000 metres. A trained crew could fire about 15 to 20 shells a minute.
That, anyway, was the theory. In a well worked-up ship, it happened smoothly and quickly. But in practice it rarely delivered. No matter how skilled the men involved, the High Angle Fire Control Table was simply not up to the job. It was never quick or accurate enough. The navy’s technology had not kept pace with the development of modern aircraft. The table could track a plane flying towards the ship in a straight line, at a constant height and speed, but that was about it. Few enemy pilots were ever so obliging – especially the veterans of Fliegerkorps X. After a while, the Mediterranean Fleet developed a technique called hosepiping, which was just what it sounded like: spraying shells all over the place in the hope of hitting something.
Bill Bracht was up in the High Angle Director that day in Suda Bay, as Director Trainer. His diary glumly records ‘no score’. Roy Norris, often an acid observer, was more scathing:
Owing to the terrific panic from all hands connected with the defence of the ship a most lamentable shoot was put up. According to the H. A. director it made a perfect plot but the 4-inch failed badly in following the trainer. They didn’t get within miles of the plane anyhow and there is even some doubt as to whether they were fusing the shells. God help us if we get into something big and they don’t buck up … the aircraft flew over the crest of a hill and then back again but did not drop anything, so we were probably lucky.8
Ajax and Perth put to sea again. There was no point sitting in Suda Bay as stationary targets for another air attack – and, anyway, there was work to be done. On 3 January, they arrived in Piraeus.