Cruiser
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Bowyer-Smyth made sure his men got time off to stretch their legs on dry land, although there was little enough to do in Alexandria once you had knocked around the bars, the clubs and the few picture theatres. Some men went for a swim at the local Stanley Beach. Ray Parkin strolled through the bazaars of Mohamed Ali square, trawling for antiques. He read Julian Huxley’s Essays of a Biologist and did more painting and model making. Jim Nelson hung out at the Fleet Club – a converted hospital with a sign outside on the pavement reading ‘NAVY AND RAF ONLY’, where he played the trumpet one night in an impromptu jam session. Roy Norris and some mates played some tennis, went to the pictures and slept a night at the Australian Club, where – a pleasant change from the petty officers’ mess on board – they were awoken in the morning with a hot cup of tea:
We drove back at sunrise through the narrow streets of Alex – our gharry taking us up and down all the byways and sly ways imaginable. The teeming crowds were not yet astir, only a few early risers on the way to honest toil were our companions of the early morn, while the rising sun gave to the squalor a new, fresher outlook as it gilded the queer-shaped dwellings turning them into something more like a magic oriental city than I had so far seen in the back alleys and streets of Alexandria. Perhaps poets, travel writers, novelists, etc. rise early at dawn to see the beauties they always have so much to say about – I hadn’t seen much of the beauty and romance of these strange countries but this morning it did have an appeal of its own, although I still prefer Australia of all places. The days are getting more warm at present and plagues of flies pester us by day and night.16
Bags of mail arrived to everyone’s delight, with a lot of long-delayed Christmas presents. But all too soon it was time to go back to the war.
Kastellorizo is Greece’s most easterly island in the Mediterranean, a compact jewel of breathtaking beauty in the Dodecanese archipelago just a stone’s throw from the coast of Turkey. Whitewashed tumbledown houses are reflected in the deep blue waters of a small harbour dominated by pink granite cliffs and the gleaming walls and terracotta dome of the church of Agios Nikolaos.17 In 1941, Kastellorizo was in the hands of the Italians, who maintained a small garrison and a wireless station there. It was a useful base for attacks by their E-boats – fast torpedo craft. The British decided to oust them and take the island for themselves as a foothold in the Aegean Sea. On 24 February, in an operation code-named ABSTENTION, a small force of army and Royal Marine commandos sailed from Crete in the destroyers HMS Decoy and HMS Hereward and the gunboat HMS Ladybird. Before dawn the next day, faces blackened, weapons cocked, the soldiers slipped ashore in the Kastellorizo harbour.
It was a fiasco. The Italians fought back with surprising vigour and, worse, managed to radio for help to the Italian eastern base on the nearby island of Rhodes. Within hours, the Regia Aeronautica had arrived to bomb both the British ships and the commandos ashore. Ladybird was damaged by a single hit, ran short of fuel and retired, which meant the commandos losing their radio contact with Alexandria.
Perth and another couple of British destroyers were sent in as reinforcements on the 28th, only to find that Italian destroyers and gunboats had also turned up. In a violent electrical storm that night, there was a confused melee with the destroyers lunging here and there and launching torpedoes at each other but neither side scoring a hit. Perth fired star shells in a largely futile attempt to illuminate the scene, and then aimed a few live rounds at an Italian destroyer that was escaping in the uproar. In heavy seas, with waves breaking high above her bridge, she narrowly avoided a collision with the destroyer HMS Jaguar by going full astern.
In the end, everyone gave it away as a bad job. Nobody knew who was in charge, the army or the navy. The commandos, ill equipped for a long firefight, were hastily extracted but left behind some 30 prisoners. Cunningham, who honourably took responsibility, later wrote to the First Sea Lord in London that ‘the taking and abandoning of Castelorizzo [sic] was a rotten business and reflected little credit on anyone’. They should have abstained from ABSTENTION.
Now, Perth would be called upon to play her part in Operation LUSTRE. In the first week of March, she returned to the dreary Mediterranean routine of patrol and convoy, buffeted by a heavy gale south of Greece that saw two men washed overboard from Ajax nearby. The Hair-Trigger Twins beat off an attack by a lone torpedo bomber – an event that was becoming so common now that it barely rated a mention. At sea, the ship’s company, from the Captain to the youngest ordinary stoker, lived at almost unceasing alert, which chipped away at a man’s physical and mental reserves. Nobody ever got a good night’s sleep. Exhaustion was a constant companion. Men would go on watch with aching muscles and legs like jelly, sometimes struggling to put one foot forward of the other. A small grievance could suddenly explode into a major crisis if you let it. And ever present were those two outriders of a sailor’s despair: a longing for home and loved ones and the fear – sometimes secret, sometimes spoken – that they might never be seen again.
A run ashore in Piraeus or Alexandria was always a welcome tonic, but it treated the symptoms, not the disease. Ray Parkin drew strength from mateship under adversity:
These experiences and this constant sea-keeping had bound the ship and her company even closer together. We gained an even greater confidence in the ship – no matter what! She had never let us down and, somehow, this had also given us greater confidence in our own part in it, and had come to grips more soberly with what we were up against, and able to see more clearly subsequent inconveniences for what they actually were: a simple necessity of the times.
There was a mutual acceptance stifling all cavilling and complaint. In any emergency there was an immediate compliance in dealing with whatever was confronting us. There was a common understanding – a familial understanding of each other. This was the spirit that held us together. Of the ship herself, as Action Chief Quartermaster steering her through every action and assault on her, I could actually feel her every shock or surge of action which we both felt together. There is an indelible imprint made deep within when sharing such experiences.18
Bowyer-Smyth carried the ship, as a good captain should. He spent long stretches on the bridge, but even in those few broken hours when he could leave things to the Officer of the Watch there was the daily grind of a captain’s duties. Paperwork crowded in. The Report of Proceedings had to be written up for whichever authority ashore might choose to read it. An eye had to be kept on the state of fuel and ammunition, and, ultimately, on the welfare of more than 600 men in his care. Even when he could get his head down for some sleep, there was a part of him that remained awake, unconsciously alert to the changing of the watch, or an alteration of course, or some small variation in the weather. Time and again, a moment of relaxation in his sea cabin would be interrupted by the urgent call of ‘Captain to the bridge’.
His responsibility was the greatest of all, but he wore it lightly, conscious that his officers and men looked to him for leadership. He was a superb ship handler and a skilled seaman. On the bridge in command, or with a defaulter brought before him in his cabin, he radiated calm, humanity and good sense. He handed out punishment with a notably lighter hand than his predecessor, Harold Farncomb, and the men responded accordingly. The Perth diaries and memoirs are studded with complaints about Farncomb – perhaps not all of them justified – but Bowyer-Smyth comes in for universal praise. His Gunnery Officer, Warwick Bracegirdle, would say of him:
Bow-Wow Smyth, as he was affectionately called by his Australian ship’s company, was a very special kind of leader of men. He demanded in war absolute efficiency, and he had that happy knack of understanding the Australians under his command in HMAS Perth. He was very strict and would hit anybody hard who had brought disfavour on the good name of HMAS Perth. On the other hand, he was very humane in his handling of compassionate cases coming to his notice.19
The Commander, Pricky Reid, not himself the most popular officer in the ship, offered similar praise
:
B. S. was an humanitarian and understood the sailor. And this included the Australian sailor. His philosophy as expressed to me on several occasions was to ‘ignore the weeds and cultivate the roses’. He maintained always a great dignity and courtesy.20
Roy Norris was more direct, noting in his diary that Bowyer-Smyth was ‘a great skipper – the best I have known, and no mistake about it’.21 Ray Parkin found him to be ‘as staunch a commanding officer as any ship could desire, immediately becoming part of the ship and the ship’s company in a very real way’. And the harshest critic of all, Norm King, no lover of gold braid, would write that Bowyer-Smyth ‘despite the handle, was a good Captain without the stern visage of his predecessor. It is true to say that without his skill at making the ship a very difficult target for aircraft we would have not survived the onslaught that was soon to come.’
As the weeks rolled into months, other men helped to hold it all together. One such was the ship’s chaplain, the Reverend Ronald Bevington, a Church of England clergyman born in Hampshire. He was, said Jim Nelson:
a quiet well spoken man and truly a man of God. Until our arrival in the Med his duties were mainly confined to compulsory Sunday Divisions, where all the ship’s company assembled on the quarterdeck. The chaplain held service and the Captain read the lesson. Ninety percent of the crew appeared bored, but under the threat of punishment saw it through. The service was ecumenical with the exception of Catholics, who were exempted from attending.
Reverend Ron conducted bible classes and counselling below deck at sea, although only a handful of the true believers attended. I attended his meetings but not on a regular basis. In my youth I attended the Salvation Army Corp. of Belmore NSW and played the cornet in the band. I still had faith in my chosen religion and I enjoyed the meetings, especially at sea.
During the nights in harbour, Ron was accustomed to ‘pace the quarterdeck’ of an evening for exercise and silent communion with God. He and I would talk together and occasionally say a prayer. At sea I would meet with him. There is nothing to equal a quiet talk whilst gazing out over the ocean. The wake churned up by our quadruple screws and the moon appearing on the horizon sending a shard of silvery light across the water, added to the tranquillity.
I would talk to ‘My Lady of the Sea’. Ron, no doubt, would talk to God.22
On Friday 7 March, Perth went alongside in Alexandria to begin her role in the LUSTRE convoys to Greece. In the coming weeks, the fleet would carry and escort nearly 60,000 men, with their weapons and ammunition, vehicles and food, across the Mediterranean on the dangerous 1000-kilometre journey from Alexandria to Piraeus. It would be an epic feat.
The tragic irony was that, as these Commonwealth forces were leaving the Middle East, the Germans were arriving. Two thousand kilometres to the west of Alexandria, at the port of Tripoli on the edge of the Libyan desert, Rommel was welcoming the advance guard of his Afrikakorps. He was about to unleash havoc upon the remnants of the once-unstoppable Allied armies that had swept aside the Italians.
On the wharf at Alexandria, there was organised chaos under a blazing sun. Swarms of khaki-clad bodies milled around in the way that soldiers do when they have nothing to do. Perth that day was assigned to embark 650 men, which would almost exactly double her ship’s complement. Cruisers were not designed as troop transports, but somehow space had to be found for them above and below decks, and food provided. The sailors were at first taken aback by their new army passengers, who seemed to be of every nationality under the sun, including, to everyone’s astonishment, some Germans. They turned out to be Jews who had joined the fight against Hitler. The rest comprised Palestinians and Czechs, Poles and Austrians, and some British Royal Engineers, and even a handful of Australians from a field ambulance unit. More startling still was the amount of personal baggage they lugged along with them. The 58 officers coming on board had been instructed to bring only one small suitcase and a kitbag, but some arrived with wardrobe trunks as if preparing for a parade. And there were three dogs – whether pets or regimental mascots, nobody quite discovered. Two of them were seasick, which was not welcomed.
Shortly after noon, Perth put to sea, in company with Orion and Ajax, who were similarly laden. Happily, the weather was kind. They did some high-angle anti-aircraft practice just to sharpen up, but there was no attack by the enemy even in the danger area of the narrow Kaso Strait east of Crete, and the three cruisers arrived safely in Piraeus the next day to disembark their khaki cargo. Germany and Greece not yet being at war, the troop landings that day and over the coming weeks were carefully watched and counted by spies from the German Embassy. The German military attaché had Scottish ancestry and spoke flawless English; clad in tweedy civilian clothes, he chatted amiably with unsuspecting British officers to ask what they might be up to. Perth moved out and anchored in the Salamis Roads, and the crew were delighted to hear the pipe ‘Hands to bathe’. That meant a swim. They plunged overboard into deep blue waters, exulting in the salty freshness.
But there was to be no rest. The next few days saw the three cruisers at sea again on a fruitless patrol off Greece, and then it was back to Suda on Monday 10 March, where they encountered the main battle fleet, led by the battleship Barham. That afternoon, the Germans again favoured them with an air attack, which was beaten off by a heavy barrage, some shrapnel landing on Perth’s decks.
The curious thing was that the ship’s company had no real idea of what was happening. All this transporting of troops and the appearance of the main battle fleet meant that a flap was on, but they didn’t know what sort of flap. The gilded gods of the High Command could deploy and dispose, but it was not for the humble sailor to reason why. This was war. You just got on with it. You did what you were told, when you were told, and listened to the buzzes that rippled around the mess decks or the wardroom. The BBC radio news was a source of information, but only sketchy information. Newspapers, when they arrived, were often weeks old. Sometimes, the crew listened to the German radio, if only for a laugh. They particularly enjoyed it when they heard, not once but several times, that they themselves had been sunk by the gallant Luftwaffe.
But there was indeed a flap on. In the second week of March, Perth took another load of troops to Piraeus – this time 500 New Zealanders, who came with much less luggage and no dogs, and whose company they especially enjoyed. They sent them ashore with the ship’s band playing a stirring popular tune picked up from the Greeks, the words of which invited Mussolini to perform an unlikely feat of sexual gymnastics.
At Alexandria, Cunningham was relieved that, so far, the LUSTRE convoys had done their job almost without incident. For reasons nobody quite understood, but for which they were thankful anyway, there had been very little attack from the air and nothing by sea. The troops were being carried safely to Greece, as the army required. But the Commander-in-Chief was confronted now by new threats.
His next task was to run a massive supply convoy through from Alexandria to beleaguered Malta – the second of the year. This brought out the battle fleet in full strength, with Cunningham himself in command at sea. Perth, in Vice-Admiral Pridham-Wippell’s 7th Cruiser Squadron, was a part of the prowling escort for the big ships. Now they were conscious that they were part of a mighty naval occasion. Here was Britannia’s sinew and muscle arrayed before them. Warspite, Cunningham’s flagship, had the most famous name in the Royal Navy. Now very much modernised, she had fought at Jutland in the First World War, and there had been no fewer than seven Warspites before her, the first a 29-gun galleon launched in Elizabethan times. Her battleship consorts were her sister ships Barham and Valiant, the three of them armed with eight massive 15-inch guns. The new aircraft carrier Formidable replaced the stricken Illustrious. This was the steel grey embodiment of 300 years of history and tradition.
On Perth’s signal bridge, ready at the flag locker and the halliards, Brian Sheedy looked on in awe and wonder:
The whole concourse of ships manoeuvring, altering
course 180 degrees … the battleships like plodding Clydesdale horses, ponderously turning; the destroyers like two-year-old colts, darting around protecting them; the flags streaming from all ships, passing on the flagship’s orders. The precision of it all makes for an awe-inspiring vista. How fortunate we Australians were to see in actuality all those manoeuvres we had studied in signal school back home.23
Roy Norris, less technically minded, was moved by the majesty of it all:
It really is a magnificent sight – 12 destroyers ahead in a vast semi circle followed by the 7th Cruiser Squadron abreast then line ahead. After the Orion came the battleships and Formidable in centre, while making the rear position on each quarter was the York to starboard and Gloucester24 to port. From our position we had a sweeping panorama of the entire fleet which was one of the most awe-inspiring spectacles as it swept across a roomy sea at sunset – one of those sunsets of gold and crimson with low hung sailing squadrons of clouds backed by sunbursts of light shining through eggshell blue and saffron. Ragged banners of clouds closed in from the west whilst fluffy smoky gold puffs raced from the bonfires of the sun to make a safety curtain of night into which we sped silently to hide ourselves in the hours of darkness.25
Close to Malta, the battle fleet turned back and left the cruisers to escort the convoy towards the island. The next day, there was another ferocious Luftwaffe air attack by five waves of JU88 bombers coming from out of the sun – an onslaught that had the cruisers closed up at action stations for most of the afternoon. Happily for Perth, the Germans concentrated their attack on Gloucester, probably because her silhouette, though smaller, was similar to that of a battleship. At times, she disappeared behind enormous pillars of filthy yellow water thrown up by the exploding bombs. But there were no hits. As Norris recorded, ‘We had no luck but neither did they, so stumps score could probably be called a draw when an appeal against the light was successfully upheld.’26