by Mike Carlton
A German officer fished out of the water by HMS Mohawk unwisely greeted his rescuers with a crisp ‘Heil Hitler!’. A beefy Australian on exchange with the RN, Ordinary Seaman Frank McAuliffe, from Randwick in Sydney, picked him up by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants and tossed him back overboard. ‘Salute properly when you come over the side of a British ship,’ McAuliffe shouted after him. The German grasped a rope and struggled back again, slinking off to the quarterdeck but taking care to stand apart from his bedraggled Axis shipmates.
At precisely 4.10 am, Jervis sank the Pola with torpedoes. She rolled over in the inky waters and went to the bottom. So ended the Battle of Matapan.
From the field of Waterloo, after his victory over Napoleon in 1815, the Duke of Wellington famously wrote in a despatch to London, ‘Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’
Perhaps Andrew Cunningham had much the same thoughts as the sun rose on the next morning, Saturday 29 March. Amazingly, he had lost only three men: the crew of the Albacore shot down after torpedoing Vittorio Veneto. But a panorama of desolation lay before him. The night had been cold. Corpses floated on a sea of stinking fuel oil, bobbing obscenely among the wreckage. Survivors on rafts, or clutching anything that would float, cried piteously for help. To the British and the Australians, these men had been the enemy, but they were also sailors like themselves. In Perth, Brian Sheedy made a sombre note:
At 1000 five boatloads of survivors came into sight in the direct line of approach of the fleet. Fleet steamed through them detaching two destroyers to pick them up. Much waving of arms by Italians, standing on rafts. Poor devils, they must have been through hell last night. From what ship we do not know. For almost twenty miles the Fleet came across Italian sailors adrift in hazardous craft. Some were on rafts in groups of about eight or ten; groups were floating in the water held up by lifejackets; then there were single sailors surrounded by wide stretches of water. And then there were the dead not in the water but floating on it, bloated by body gases, the white duck of their uniforms stretched to breaking point. They floated like grotesque balloons, white shapes on a blue sea.12
Like everyone else, the Australians were tired and drained. They had been at action stations all night. Warwick Bracegirdle noted that:
For us, in the cruisers, it was the beginning of our second day of tension. Everybody wore that grey look of tiredness, strain and stubble. Our Captain had, as always, made time to shave and alone looked immaculate. The smell of cooking from the galley was becoming quite unbearable to all hands.
Suddenly, on our port bow, we sighted a line of grey life rafts, wallowing low in the water. Packed tight with weary waving survivors. It’s never a nice sight at sea. You may be one of them yourself one day. It means the end of one fight, against a decent honourable foe, and the beginning of a new fight to keep alive. A fight against the elements – against the sea. That’s perhaps why sailors the world over get along so well together. They have an endless fight against the sea be they fishermen, or deep sea sailor men. A destroyer was detached from the small screening force to pick up survivors. The Fleet was manoeuvred clear at high speed. Enemy submarines were a certainty so frequent zig-zags of course were made.
The one destroyer stopped and commenced rescuing survivors by aid of scrambling nets let down her sleek grey sides. Suddenly a penetrating series of short, sharp blasts on a steam siren – the emergency signal for ‘enemy aircraft in sight’. This was followed by the air raid warning imminent signal (a red flag) from the carrier with radar. The cruisers packed in tighter to cover the carrier. The destroyers also eased in to tighten the ring. The lone destroyer with survivors shot ahead at speed leaving survivors in the water. She could not be caught stationary in an air attack.
Then the signal to fire a protective barrage, an umbrella of shell over the air carrier. The sky close above her became black with angry puffs of anti-aircraft shell forming a disturbing blanket of steel fragments. Then hose piping right ahead, every available gun of the carrier’s eight barrel pom-poms (nicknamed Chicago Pianos) pumped out vicious red tracer at diving aircraft. The swift attacks pressed home by German Junkers 88 dive bombers13 continued. The cracking tempo of the gunfire becoming more marked as fresh attacks developed. Off the carrier’s port bow, a huge detonation of a 1000 pound bomb followed by a black burst and a rising, towering 100 foot water column. The carrier had been near missed.14
With infinite irony, the rescue effort had been interrupted by the Luftwaffe. The air support so desperately requested by Admiral Iachino arrived 24 hours too late. A flight of JU88 bombers jumped the fleet in the afternoon at the start of the first dog watch. They flew low and level through a massive outpouring of high-angle fire to attack Formidable, but they scored not a hit and lost two of their own before disappearing over the horizon again. By this time, the British had rescued some 900 Italians, but, understandably, Cunningham had no wish to keep up the humanitarian effort at the risk of another German attack. In clear English, he broadcast his exact position to the Supermarina and invited them to send out a hospital ship, which, he said, would be granted safe passage. The Italians politely thanked him for this chivalrous gesture and did as he suggested.
Poseidon and Hades had presided over a devastating rout of the Regia Marina. Vittorio Veneto had escaped, but Iachino had lost three of his heavy cruisers and two destroyers, together with one of his cruiser squadron commanders, Vice-Admiral Carlo Cattaneo, and 2400 men. It was modern Italy’s greatest defeat at sea, with a mortal effect on naval morale. Individual Italian ships and men would take the fight to the Allies, at times with great courage, but the fleet itself never again ventured in strength from its harbours. Cunningham had emphatically asserted Britannia’s rule of the eastern Mediterranean.
As his weary ships and men returned to Alexandria, they were entitled to celebrate their triumph. But Perth did not join them. She and her Hair-Trigger Twin, Ajax, were sent off around Cape Matapan to Piraeus, back to the grinding routine of convoy escort.
In his neat printed hand, Jim Nelson wrote a postcard home to his sweetheart, Jean Connor, at the little cottage in Lewisham:
The last week has been exceedingly busy and started off by a fair dinkum air raid. Then an extra large naval battle with the Italian fleet, and then to top it off another dive bombing raid. A week of thrills and spills all for sixpence, pay as you enter the door.
By now you will have heard all about it and I can almost see what the headlines on the papers are like about the naval battle. It was quite thrilling while it lasted as for nearly two days our fleet belted the death out of the Dago fleet and I bet they will never put their noses outside their harbours again until this war is over.
There is nothing definite out yet as far as results and information is concerned so I cannot tell you about our part in it until later on when we know where we stand.
At present I am quite okay and haven’t lost any of my appetite over the affair, and looking forward to another smack at them again. But I do not think that we will get any more after the licking they got this time.
The dive bombers aren’t as game as they used to be, for they just come over, drop their eggs and clear off again as quick as they can go, usually leaving one or two smashed planes behind.
Well, Darling, there is nothing more I can tell you at present so I will finish now. You may not get another letter for a week or more after this one for we won’t have a chance to send any mail, so try not to worry.
Lots and Lots of Love
Jim x15
Nelson might have been telling a little white lie about the Stukas. It was the sort of cheerful thing you would write home to your girlfriend, making light of the danger. In fact, the Luftwaffe bombing was becoming more intense as Hitler’s invasion of Greece drew nearer. And, worse, the Germans were also attacking at night, which the Italians had rarely ventured to do. That meant even less sleep for men already wracked by tiredness and nervous strai
n. They got their heads down for a fitful rest when and where they could. All too often, a meal was a cold sandwich and a mug of kye, closed up at action stations. The assault on the mind was unrelenting.
But they had become smarter and more wily, too. Battle tested, they knew their job now. It was a very different ship’s company to the bunch of carefree young blokes who had begun their war so light-heartedly in the Caribbean 18 months earlier.
Bowyer-Smyth and his bridge watchkeepers had developed a new trick for dealing with the bombers. It required good judgement but it worked, and it saved them countless times at sea. Even under full rudder, Perth had an unusually wide turning circle. It was just the way she was built, but it meant she was sluggish under helm, which made evading an incoming aircraft that much more difficult.
So the Captain used her engines as well. To make a hard turn to starboard, he would order full helm – starboard 35 – and then full speed ahead on her two port engines and slow astern on her two starboard shafts. In layman’s terms, the left-hand side of the ship was being forced forward, while the right-hand side was pulled in reverse. Those competing forces helped her to turn, if not on sixpence then on something reasonably close to it.
The trick was to judge the exact moment. Go too early and the bomber pilot could follow the ship’s movements. Too late and he was upon you, directly overhead. It required instant reaction from Ray Parkin, who was usually on the wheel, and from the hands on the engine room telegraphs and below in the engine room itself. The coordination had to be perfect. Without warning, the telegraphs would jangle over an ‘emergency full speed’ and the rudder indicator would show hard a-port or starboard. Parkin would wrench the wheel around, greasy with sweat, muscles aching. The stokers below would cut off or throw open the sprayers that delivered vaporised oil to the furnaces. Ears throbbing from the air pressure, unable to hear a thing above the thunder of machinery, they watched the Chief Stoker’s hand movements: five fingers up, five sprayers on. Seven down, seven off. Then, urgently, three on to eight on. Other hands kept an eagle eye on the water levels in the boilers, which had to be finely judged: too much water with the steam would endanger the turbines; too little and the boilers could blow. Everything had to be done in split seconds. Perth would then lunge onto her new course. It placed enormous strain on the ship, on her machinery and the hull itself. No vessel had ever been designed for such violent handling, and she groaned at the brute forces exerted upon her.
On the last day of March 1941, they were at sea again with Ajax, escorting a convoy from Piraeus, plodding along in good order, enjoying another sunlit day in the knowledge that the Italian fleet was not going to bother them. Any danger would come from the air. As they did every evening, they stood to the sunset in their Number 8s – the heavy blue battledress with the anti-flash hoods, and steel helmets for those above decks. The lookouts scanned the skies. They did not have long to wait. Air Raid Red. As darkness drew in, another flight of Junkers 88s was on to them, weaving through the soaring arcs of tracer and the puffs of dirty black smoke from the exploding 4-inch shells. The bombs came tumbling down but landed harmlessly in the sea. And then there was a lull for a while.
But it was the sort of night they hated. A silvery full moon shed a luminously beautiful glow on the ships and the sea around them – a bomber’s moon, they called it. The phosphorescence in their wake was a gleaming silver arrow that pointed to their exact position and direction. It was a gift to the bombers. On this night, not far from Crete, it produced one of their most terrifying moments of all. With no warning, an aircraft was on them, another JU88. It came so low that it almost scraped the foremast as it thundered along the line of the ship from stern to stem. Jim Nelson flinched as he felt, rather than saw, it:
Ajax had detected aircraft in the vicinity, and gun crews were closed up and waiting for anything. On the flag deck we vainly strained our eyes upwards, attempting to see a bat like shape flitting between the stars. Then suddenly we heard a roar of engines directly overhead – it brought a sickening feeling in the stomach – and before a single gun had the chance to fire, and while we stood paralysed with fright, rooted to the flag deck, the plane passed over our foremast, so closely as to almost hit the mast. Green and blue flames from the twin engines made two circles of coloured flame. We waited for a bomb explosion. Nothing, thank God. He’d gone, and without a single bomb being dropped.16
That left nerves jangling. Their radar had not detected the aircraft’s approach, and they had not heard it coming, either. Perhaps it had cut its engines and glided down upon them, following their shining wake. There were no bombs because it had been a reconnaissance aircraft, they thought, but it was chilling evidence of their vulnerability. It was like someone spitting in your face when you were powerless to do anything about it.
Finally, a man broke. Driven beyond endurance, a petty officer named Peter Murdoch, from Croydon in Sydney, could take no more. That night, he left his post in the Transmitting Station, deep below the waterline, and climbed the ladders that led to the Low Power Room, up to the stokers’ mess and on towards the upper deck. Halfway there, he ran into Jock Lawrance, in charge of one of the damage control parties.
Lawrance had orders from the Engineer Commander that no one was to go on deck, and he challenged Murdoch, refusing to let him pass. Murdoch returned to the Transmitting Station, but as the ship drove on towards Suda he appeared again several times through the night. Finally, he convinced a suspicious Lawrance that he had an urgent message to take to Bowyer-Smith on the bridge.
It didn’t sound right, but, reluctantly, Lawrance stepped aside and waved him through. Later, at the change of the watch, Lawrance turned into his hammock and thought no more about it. But, the next morning, he was shaken awake by the Jaunty, Jan Creber. ‘You’re in trouble, mate. The Captain wants to see you straight away,’ Creber said.
Still half-asleep, Lawrance struggled into a clean pair of overalls and followed him to the Captain’s cabin. The Master-at-Arms, universally recognised to be a good bloke, filled him in as they mounted the ladders and came out on the upper deck. Murdoch had been reported missing. The ship had been searched, but there was no sign of him. They thought he’d gone over the side. Lawrance was probably the last person to have seen him alive.
‘Tenshun! Salute. Caps off. Leading Stoker Lawrance, sir!’
The Captain questioned him calmly and sympathetically – which was a relief, because Lawrance was expecting him to come down like the proverbial ton of bricks. He had feared he might even ‘lose his hook’, which meant being busted down a rank. He explained that several times he had stopped Murdoch. Finally, though, the man had been insistent, claiming he had information for the Captain that was vital for the safety of the convoy they were shepherding. Because Murdoch was a petty officer and Lawrance just a leading rate, Lawrance had finally given way. And that was that. There was nothing to be done. To Bowyer-Smyth and everyone else, it was sadly obvious that Murdoch had thrown himself overboard. Even if by some miracle he was still alive, he would now be many miles astern, and Perth could not leave the convoy unguarded to go and search for him.
As the hands stood to the dawn, the buzz went around the ship. Murdoch had been married, with three kids, and his messmates remembered him showing the family photographs around, as they all did. But they recalled, too, that sometimes he would say, in a gloomy way, ‘I’ll never see them again.’
Bowyer-Smyth did not report him as a suicide. Murdoch had joined the navy in 1936, signing on as an electrical artificer for the regulation 12 years. His service file was simply marked, ‘Dead. Lost overboard, 31.1.41.’ It was better that way, better for the family, especially for his kids.17 There was no shame in it, no cowardice. The Germans had killed him. But they destroyed his mind, not his body. In the end, it really made no difference.
CHAPTER 11
PRELUDE TO CRETE
The last days of March 1941 heard the drumbeat quicken in Berlin. Hitler and the OKW were absorbed in pla
nning Operation BARBAROSSA – the invasion of Russia. But events in the Balkans and the Mediterranean kept crowding in. Planning was also under way for Operation MARITA – the attack on Greece that would rescue Mussolini from yet another humiliating debacle.
With his usual combination of bribes and threats, Hitler had brought Bulgaria into the Axis orbit, and he believed he had done the same with a pliant government in Yugoslavia. These two countries, both bordering Greece in 1941, would help stage MARITA. But on the night of 26 March, in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, a coup d’état led by air-force officers overturned the pro-German regime of the regent, Prince Paul. The next morning, there was dancing in the streets. Belgrade was hung with British flags, and the car of the German Ambassador was spat on by crowds of angry Serbs.
This inexplicable defiance sent the Führer rocketing into one of his more spectacular rages. He summoned his military chiefs to the Berlin Chancellery, read them a furious lecture about Yugoslav perfidy and ordered Goering to send the Luftwaffe to destroy Belgrade. It was especially important, Hitler fumed, ‘that the blow against Yugoslavia must be carried out with merciless harshness and the military destruction be done in blitzkrieg style’. Führer Directive No. 25, issued that day, began:
The military revolt in Yugoslavia has changed the political position in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, even if it makes initial professions of loyalty, must be regarded as an enemy and beaten down as soon as possible.
The OKW Operations Chief, General Alfred Jodl, worked his staff through the night to update MARITA.1 Hitler fired off a long telegram to Mussolini, informing him that help was on the way. In a week, all was ready. On Sunday 6 April, the invasion began. In both Greece and Yugoslavia, it was Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Orthodox Christian Holy Week. At five o’clock that morning, the Luftwaffe dropped its first bombs on Belgrade – the prelude to three days of airborne savagery that would kill some 17,000 civilians. In Athens, half an hour later, the German Ambassador, Prince Erbach-Schönburg, politely presented a note to inform the government of the Hellenes that the Reich had declared war.