by Mike Carlton
In the hazy dawn next morning, the Germans saw the pride of the Royal Navy racing towards them: the battlecruiser HMS Hood, and a brand-new battleship, Prince of Wales. Hood fired the first shots just before six o’clock, but soon after she herself was a blazing wreck, hit in her magazines by a lethal 15-inch shell from Bismarck. In a catastrophic explosion, she split in half and sank in three minutes, leaving only three survivors from some 1500 men. It was a savage blow to British prestige and sea power.
For the next four days, until Bismarck was laid by the heels and sunk on the morning of 27 May, nothing else mattered. The gathering disaster in the eastern Mediterranean had become a distraction, a distant sideshow. On the very day of Bismarck’s destruction, London was still persisting in the delusion that Crete could be won. Churchill sent Freyberg another of his florid herograms:
Your glorious defence commands admiration in every land. We know enemy is hard pressed. All aid in our power is being sent.
And, to the Commanders-in-Chief in the Middle East – Wavell, Cunningham and Longmore – he signalled:
Victory in Crete essential at this turning-point in the war. Keep hurling in all aid you can.
It was all too late. All was lost. That night, from his headquarters in Cairo, Wavell sent to his prime minister the fateful news:
Fear we must recognise that Crete is no longer tenable and that troops must be withdrawn as far as possible. It has been impossible to withstand weight of enemy air attack, which has been on unprecedented scale and has been through force of circumstances practically unopposed.
Student’s paratroops, so close to defeat, had turned the tide. The seaborne invasion had failed, but the capture of the Maleme airfield had opened the way for sending in fresh battalions by air – an opportunity the MERKUR command seized and exploited. Creforce, divided and in something close to chaos, with units out of touch with each other, was battered by unending bombing and strafing raids. Freyberg, finally comprehending that the battle was lost, ordered a fighting withdrawal and the inevitable evacuation.
The ashes of retreat were cold and bitter. Escape from Suda and other ports to the north of the island was now impossible – except, perhaps, from Heraklion. For most of Creforce, the only way out lay across the central spine of the White Mountains and steeply down towards the craggy south coast, where there was nothing that could be called a port.
Some units did not make it even that far, for they never received the order to retreat. They fought and died where they stood, or surrendered when further resistance became pointless. A few officers, such as the Commander of the Australian 2/11th Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond Sandover, offered their men the choice of going into captivity or of taking to the mountains and forcing their way to the sea. They took their chances, in good spirits, but other men simply turned and fled. Leaving their dead and seriously wounded behind, thousands of exhausted soldiers began a ghastly trek of two and three days through rocky mountain passes, down steep ravines and crumbling cliffs, harried all the way by the Luftwaffe. Sometimes there might be a cave to shelter in, at other times they were caught and killed in the open. Food had to be foraged from Cretan villages. Water was drawn from wells if they could be found, scooped up in steel helmets or sucked from moistened field dressings. Some units, well-disciplined infantry platoons and companies marched in good order. Many stumbled along in a rabble, wild-eyed men shedding their equipment and even weapons on the way. There were men who dropped off to sleep and woke to find their companions gone. Sergeants literally kicked others to their feet and forced them onwards.
The objective was Sphakia, a small fishing village on the south coast with a curving shingle beach no more than 200 metres long. The narrow mountain road to the village ended abruptly at the edge of a cliff, from which a rock-strewn pathway tumbled down the 500 metres to the shoreline. The only hope was that the navy would be there. There was more chaos – a nightmare born of fear, hunger, and mental and physical exhaustion – as the troops began to converge on the cliff top. James Hargest, a New Zealand brigadier who tried to bring about some order, described the scene:
There were hundreds of loose members, members of non-fighting units and all sorts of people about – no formation, no order, no cohesion. It was a ghastly mess. Into all this I was hurtled with no knowledge of it and with my hands already full. What had happened was that men had straggled; small units like searchlight detachments had walked off when their job was done; isolated troops of gunners, engineers, field ambulance with no one to look after them. But the stragglers were the worst, lawless and fear stricken. At night they rushed for water and ravaged the food dumps and crept back into caves at dawn – a hopeless lot – Greeks, Jews, Palestinians, Cypriots helped to swell the total. My mind was fixed. I had 1100 troops – 950 of the [5th] brigade and 150 of the 20th battalion. We had borne the burden and were going aboard as a brigade and none would stop us.23
Back in Alexandria, 580 kilometres away, Admiral Cunningham and his staff shouldered once more the burden of an operation in which they had grimly become only too expert. The numbers were forbidding. About 22,000 men would be awaiting evacuation from Sphakia, with a few thousand more at a point of even greater danger: at Heraklion on the north coast, only 150 kilometres from the German air bases on the island of Scarpanto. There might also be more men further along the north coast at Plaka, although nobody knew for sure because Creforce had lost most of its radio communication.
Every available ship would be needed: cruisers, destroyers and whatever troop transports could be found. The logistics alone were prodigious. Dozens of vessels had to be refuelled and rearmed, and some of them, including Perth, were in urgent need of repair before they could sail. They had to be stocked with any extra food and medical supplies that could be scraped together and then despatched to get them to the Cretan coast in the dark of night. They would have to wait offshore while boats brought the troops from the beach, taking on board as many souls as possible before beginning the return to Alexandria no later than three o’clock the next morning. There was one bright spot: the RAF in Egypt had offered a handful of fighters with long-range fuel tanks to provide some air cover over the sea. It was not much, but it was something.
To the doubters among his officers who feared a devastating loss of ships and sailors, Cunningham offered an elegant retort that has gone down in Royal Navy legend. ‘It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship,’ he told them. ‘It would take 300 years to build a new tradition.’24
For a few brief days – all too brief – Perth’s crew relaxed with a spell of leave in Alexandria while the ship was being patched together. There was a lot to be done alongside Shed 46. Her 4-inch gun barrels, worn from the thousands of rounds they had fired, had their liners replaced. There was rough patching for the shell and splinter holes that had spattered her hull and superstructure, and new radio aerials and signal halliards were fitted to her masts. The fierce working of the ship in her corkscrewing beneath the bombing had opened up some of the hull damage they had sustained in Malta – that now seemed ages ago – and there were steam leaks and ventilation blockages needing attention in her engine room. More critical still, some of the brickwork in one boiler had begun to crumble, but that could not be helped without a major dockyard job. The two Fire Control Tables for the guns also needed fixing. The hands were happy to leave the job to the dockyard mateys while they went for a run ashore, going to the pictures and searching out the ultimate prize: a cold bottle of Australian beer in the bars and service clubs. There was the occasional air raid, but after all they had endured they were hardly much to get excited about. The men laughed when they heard that a bomb had landed on Sister Street, the brothel district, much relieved that none of them had been there. And there was good news on 27 May when the BBC broadcast that the Home Fleet had found and destroyed the Bismarck. The loss of the mighty Hood had been avenged.
Repairs done, and with two landing barges hoisted on board to help ferry soldiers from the
shore, Perth raised steam and sailed at nine o’clock in the evening of Wednesday 28 May, in company with three other cruisers – Phoebe, Calcutta and Coventry – three destroyers and the troopship Glengyle. As an afterthought, Cunningham sent Hec Waller in HMAS Stuart, and two more destroyers, to chase after them for added protection. Every additional gun would make a difference.
A lone JU88 discovered the squadron the next morning and dropped two bombs not far from Perth, but the rest of the day passed quietly. By eleven o’clock that evening, they were off Sphakia, lowering their boats and boarding nets over the side to take the troops on board. The night was cloudy, with only a few stars. Absurdly, the men tiptoed about the upper deck and spoke to each other in whispers, as if Goering himself might hear them. Nerves as taut as guitar strings, they waited for the throb of engines on high and the hammering of the air-raid alarm. Across the bay, they could dimly see boats plying towards them from the beach and, to their wonder, men attempting to swim out. They welcomed the troops to their ship with a rough kindness, hurrying the wounded below to the doctor and the Sick Bay ratings in the cramped and stifling mess decks.
The unwounded men dropped where they landed, some falling instantly asleep. Filthy, unshaven and stinking, in tatters of uniform, some without boots, they looked not like men in the flower of their youth but like grisly spectres from hell. ‘Thank God for the navy,’ some of them said, attempting a grin. Others stared soundlessly into the distance. A few just sobbed, bodies quivering uncontrollably. In the galley, Roy Norris and his fellow cooks laboured over an endless supply of kye, soup and biscuits, but at first the soldiers wanted only water and more water:
Over 100 wounded taken on board – nearly a thousand troops all told and one woman and child.25 Mostly NZ divisions and the three in our mess spun some hair-raising tales of the blitz. Maoris, covering with the help of marines, landed day before. Germans reported very scared of Maoris and bayonets. Paratroops best equipped troops in the world according to these chaps, and German organisation perfect. One of these chaps must be the souvenir king of the army – he has almost a complete parachutist in his pockets and he bemoans the fact that he had to leave so much behind – wears three watches from dead Germans. Tales of treachery – lack of ammunition and supplies – no water for days and sheer horror of being ceaselessly bombed by Germans and no aid from RAF.26
Shortly after three o’clock in the morning, the admiral in Phoebe ordered the withdrawal and they weighed and slipped away towards Alexandria. There was a brief scare as some unseen aircraft dropped parachute flares near them, lighting the bay with a hideous glow, but nothing more came of that and they stole away at a plodding 20 knots, the best speed of the Glengyle. Dawn rose on a calm sea and an empty sky south of Gavdo Island, with Perth at the tail of the squadron and her upper deck still strewn with sleeping men.
The Luftwaffe woke them just before eight o’clock, Stukas and JU88s screaming out of the sun. They sprang to their weapons, at first hampered by the stumbling soldiers getting in their way. Then some of the Kiwis picked up their .303 rifles and a handful of Bren guns to join in the defence. Perth was singled out for special attention. She plunged on through the spray of near misses and roiling smoke, guns blazing, snaking the line as Bowyer-Smyth dodged the attack. There was a rousing cheer when one Stuka failed to pull out of its dive and crashed into the sea nearby. Not far to go now, not long. Alexandria was only a day away. They would make it okay. They always did.
CHAPTER 13
THE STARBOARD SLAUGHTERHOUSE
The bomb hit them just before ten o’clock. A stick of ten passed over the ship and exploded harmlessly in the sea beyond, but one stray, from an aircraft no one saw, found its target. Perth’s luck had run out.
High in the Director, Bill Bracht heard a sharp crack above his head. He looked back over his shoulder from the Director telescope to see a dark, finned cylinder plummet past not a metre away. The crack was the sound of it striking the radar antenna on the foremast – a glancing blow that, miraculously, deflected it away from the bridge and the flag deck. It then grazed the semaphore platform attached to the foremast, passing just an arm’s length from Colin Pike – a 21-year-old signalman from Glenelg in Adelaide – tumbling him head over heels. Designed to pierce armoured steel before exploding, the bomb penetrated to the very heart of the ship, rocketing through the incinerator room on the starboard side of the galley and down towards the boiler rooms and engine spaces. Roy Norris was in the galley with the other cooks, cleaning up after breakfast:
‘What was that?’ I asked Fraser1 as it hit. ‘Only the 4-inch,’ he replied. I was doubtful. ‘Like hell,’ I said. ‘That sounds like a bomb to me.’ I turned and walked ten yards away out into the preparing room to put on my anti-flash gear.2
Such is life. That simple movement saved Norris. And other men were also spared by God or whatever agent of fate they believed in. Jock Lawrance had just left his action station in a damage control party and was returning to his regular job tending the ship’s boilers. To get there, he had to open an air-pressure lock: one heavy door and then a second. For a joke, a mate tripped him up as he was turning the handle to go through the first door and he fell sprawling to the deck. That prank saved him. If he’d made it through that door, he would have been taken by the bomb to its journey’s end in A-boiler room, where, finally, it exploded.
But it did not do so immediately. For another heartbeat or two, it lay inert. Eight men on duty in the boiler room heard the dull metallic clang as it hit, and they lunged for a ladder on the port side of the compartment. Struggling frantically to open another pressure lock similar to the one that had saved Jock Lawrance, they made it safely onto the upper deck in the ship’s waist.
Only then did the bomb go up. An infernal storm erupted with the elemental force of a thousand pounds of TNT. It blew the boiler room to pieces in a volcanic convulsion of flame, choking black oil smoke and roaring jets of superheated steam. The ship staggered like a shot animal. Two stokers who had not made it to the ladder – Henry Straker, of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, and Harry Smith, a 20-year-old boy from Spotswood, Victoria – died then and there. Heavy steel bulkheads were bent and crushed like cardboard. By rights, the explosion should have torn the bottom out of the ship and sunk her, but, by yet another miracle, the shock waves were deflected upwards through the galley, where Roy Norris had been only seconds before. Bill Fraser, the cook who’d thought he’d heard a gun firing, and another cook, 19-year-old Noel Smith, a former station hand from Orange, New South Wales, were not so lucky. Norris was dazed and shaken:
In an instant the place was full of live steam and dust. The lights went out and I staggered to the door still minus my anti-flash gear, eyes full of dust but, thank God, unhurt. Outside in the 4-inch flat the troops had panicked and I was almost swept underfoot. I developed a fierce rage and with the help of one other sailor screamed, punched and fought them back with reassuring oaths. The noise of the escaping steam was terrifying …
The starboard side of the galley was a mass of tangled wreckage, hissing steam, oil fuel and darkness. Even my torch could not penetrate a foot ahead. I found Smith dead – Fraser was underneath all the wreckage, a mass of mangled flesh but still breathing and smothered in fuel oil. I called to soldiers who were peering in the door to assist me to get them out, but no one made the slightest move. Rushing out I found two of the medical party and kicked them in after a short argument – they recovered Smith while I tried for more assistance to get out Fraser. I found a stretcher – took it in and then found two cooks wandering in a bit of a daze, but they immediately came to my assistance and managed to get out Fraser.3
Outside the galley on the starboard side, the blast and flying debris dealt more death. Seven soldiers and two British Royal Marines – men rescued from Crete – were killed on the deck nearby, one of them cut neatly in half by a door flung off its hinges. On the bridge, Bowyer-Smyth ordered the firefighting and damage control parties into action. Below
in the engine room, Dolly Gray stopped the engines to assess the damage done, and Perth wallowed to a halt. And, in the shattered, darkened boiler room, Warrant Mechanician Henry Hill, born in Devonport, England, and Stoker Petty Officer Bill Reece, of Goulburn, New South Wales, plunged into the escaping steam in a brave but vain attempt to rescue their two stoker shipmates. Both were themselves badly scalded. For a long moment, Brian Sheedy feared all was lost:
There is a dreadful feeling when you feel a ship die beneath your feet. The thrumming vibrations of a ship’s engines always permeate all that live in her; the low roaring sound of the engine room fans forcing air to the boilers, the sound of the ventilation fans through the mess decks, are an always present background hum. All cease. A silence falls. Good God! Is this the end …?4
Perth did not die. She was wounded but she lived on. Her hull was sound, she still swam, as sailors say, and she had not lost all power. Working frantically, they found they could revive two of her engines. After half an hour, they could feel two screws turning, and the deck began to throb reassuringly beneath their feet again. In the noonday sunshine, she picked herself up and doggedly resumed her course to Alexandria, limping along at 20 knots, as Sheedy described:
I clambered down the ladders to the upper deck and went for’ard along the port side. The escaping steam was under control and the ship was moving to catch up with the group ahead. I came upon an Australian soldier in the port waist. He was shivering violently from shock; his hands were trembling and he was close to tears.
‘Are you all right, mate?’
‘It’s my mate,’ he replied. ‘I was standing with him round the other side and had just come around to this side for a few minutes when the bomb hit us.’