by Mike Carlton
Every so often, there were sad lists in the newspapers of young men killed or wounded in distant battles, or perhaps taken prisoner, but the daily numbers were still small, in sixes and sevens. Few families knew the ache of bereavement. For most, life went on. Dances and the picture shows were the big night out. Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported approvingly that £2000 had been lavished on refurbishing the city’s Theatre Royal. In Sydney, Citizen Kane was showing at Hoyts, and the Victory Theatre had Gone With the Wind, in amazing colour. The weekend before Perth came home, Sydney rugby league fans had been stunned by the news that the Balmain captain, Frank Hyde, had broken a leg and would be out for the rest of the season. ‘I feel like turning up football,’ said Hyde to The Daily Telegraph. ‘I must be the unluckiest player in the game.’ The Age in Melbourne recorded that Scotch, by a length, beat Melbourne Grammar and Wesley in the head-of-the-river boat race rowed over the Henley-on-Yarra course. Clinging to the comfortable rituals of peacetime, Australians fervently hoped the war could be kept from their shores.
In the Indian Ocean on the way home, Jim Nelson had read a signal on a mess deck noticeboard seeking volunteers ‘for dangerous and hazardous missions in small boats’, and he put his hand up. He was posted away to HMAS Lolita – a pleasure cruiser taken over by the navy as a harbour-defence vessel in Sydney – and was in her as coxswain when she dropped two depth charges on one of the Japanese midget submarines, I-27, that attacked the harbour in 1942. Later again, his war became indeed hazardous when he joined the top-secret Services Reconnaissance Division of the now famous Z Special Unit, manning fast motor launches to run commandos through Japanese waters around the South East Asian islands.
Another of the diarists, Roy Norris, never went to sea again. He spent the rest of his time as a cook ashore in Sydney and in Melbourne, finally retiring from the navy in 1961 as a commissioned officer, a supply lieutenant at the grand old age of 57 with 24 years of service under his belt. Jim Cooper, Bill Bracht and Rowley Roberts also left – Cooper discharged from the navy with chronic bronchitis in 1944, Bracht and Roberts transferred to other RAN ships until war’s end. And more of Perth’s officers went, too. The popular Warwick Bracegirdle, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his exploits after the bombing of the Clan Fraser in Athens, became Gunnery Officer in another cruiser, HMAS Shropshire, and fought in her at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, where he won a bar to his DSC. The RAN, expanding furiously as the war widened, was in desperate need of experienced men for the new ships that were rolling from the slipways. Perth saw about half her Mediterranean ship’s company leave forever in that winter of 1941.
There was another departure, much lamented when the men got word of it. Their captain was ordered back to the Royal Navy. Sir Philip Bowyer-Smyth, the British aristocrat who had won the loyalty of his Australian crew, left on 1 September, taking with him a prized possession, one of Ray Parkin’s watercolours of the ship. He went without ceremony but with much regret. An officer and gentleman to the last, he wrote a personal farewell to every man who had served under him, an elegant letter that many would treasure all their days:
Officers, Petty Officers and Men of HMAS Perth.
I am more sorry than I can say to be leaving the ship at a time when so many of you are away on well earned leave, and it is not possible to say goodbye as I wished to do.
We have lived through stirring times together. Many of you have seen the distant seas for the first time. Others have been re-visiting places you knew when they were not twisted by the savagery of war. All of you have watched with me at close quarters the bestial savagery of the Nazi way of fighting.
We have left some good comrades behind; but with God’s help most of us have returned safely to this great and lovely Country and have brought back our ship, a little battered, but soon to be sound and ready to fight again.
I congratulate you heartily on your bearing under stress. I thank you for the faith I have had in you and still more for the trust I think you have placed in me. Mutual faith between leader and led is the foundation of communities, be they ships or states.
I return to England to do other work. You will often be in my mind and I will follow our ship’s future carefully.
My parting message to you is this:
Do not forget the savagery we have seen and the tyranny from which it springs. Enjoy the freedom of this great Country and determine to fight for it in war and give service in peace; so that it may know neither tyranny nor licence but a liberty based on service and mutual faith.
Good bye and good luck.
P. Bowyer-Smyth
Captain RN.
Sir Philip sailed for Britain in the liner Empire Star and took a staff job at the Admiralty. He never gained another seagoing command after Perth, some saying that his career had been derailed by Cunningham after that ‘unfortunate’ failure at the evacuation of Kalamata. He finished the war ashore in London but perhaps found some consolation in being appointed an honorary aide-de-camp to King George VI in 1946. Eventually, he retired in the English countryside, where he welcomed the occasional visit from Australians who had served with him.
Commander Reid, the Executive Officer, took over the ship until another captain could be appointed. Other men found they, too, were staying on. The luck of the draw would see them returning to Perth after their leave. Ray Parkin went home to Melbourne, to Thelma, whose loving letters had sustained him through the Mediterranean, and his two children, Jill, now five years old, and John, just three. In six months, they seemed to have sprouted like new shoots. In Sydney, Reg Whiting returned to his brick cottage in suburban Chatswood and to Alice and John, now a young man of 13, and Brendan, newly turned six. There were lawns to mow and the vegetable garden to be tended – domestic tasks that he went to with pleasure. Jack Lewis, the book-loving Engine Room Artificer, was reunited in Sydney with his wife, Joan. They played the piano together again, went to the pictures and spent a quiet few days up at the shack at Dark Corner, relishing the solitude of Broken Bay. But Joan could see that a change had come over her husband. He was quieter now, more introspective. He shielded her from the inexplicable ordeal he had endured, as most of Perth’s returned sailors did with their families, but she realised that terrible things had happened.
‘If the ship goes down, it will be my job to let steam off the boilers so they won’t blow up,’ he told her in one quiet moment of candour. She knew exactly what that meant: her man would be deep below decks with little chance of escape. Joan never forgot that remark, but she was not alone with her burden. Other women found their men would jump like cats at a sudden noise or cry out in bed in the grip of sweaty nightmares. Some were angry and moody, drinking heavily to dull the memories.
Elmo Gee travelled back to northern Victoria, to his homely bush roots in Ned Kelly country. As ever, the winter at Silver Creek was crisp and cold. In the mornings, frost lay on the paddocks and fence posts, the stillness occasionally disturbed by the shadow of a fox darting for cover or a startled flight of wild ducks. By night, the sky was a myriad of stars sparkling above the Mopoke Ranges and the tracery of gum trees. Napier and Alice Gee welcomed their son back to the old weatherboard cottage with its fire blazing in the kitchen, and he knew again the delight of simple things: Mum’s cooking, five brothers and sisters, the dogs and the farm animals, the Roman Beauty apple tree he had climbed as a kid. The district also hailed the hero home, with a formal welcome at Zwar Bros Tannery, where he had once worked for a bit. ‘Patriotic airs were broadcast through Pastor Fullarton’s address system during the proceedings,’ reported The Ovens and Murray Advertiser.
Civic dignitaries were all very well, thank you, but Elmo had other things in mind. On that leave, he fell in love. Kathleen Brewer was the daughter of family friends, still a teenager, who worked as a telephonist at Wodonga, up on the New South Wales border. A slender, pretty girl and a good tennis player, she had no shortage of local admirers, but there was something about the young Gee boy, with h
is tales of travel and adventure, that drew her like a magnet. He had eyes only for her. Each day, they grew happier in each other’s company, at bush dances or just walking out.
When the winter evenings drew in and tea was on the table, there was the news on the radio, and that seemed to be improving. The Russians were putting up a stout resistance to the Germans near Leningrad. The RAF had raided Berlin. Federal Cabinet would meet to consider the situation in the Far East. Of course, though, the hard truths of the war were carefully concealed by the military censors, and the threat to Australia was moving closer. Japan, now irrevocably committed to Nanshinron, moved to guard its northern back door. In April, the Japanese Foreign Minister, the neurotic Yosuke Matsuoka, travelled to Moscow to parley in the Kremlin with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. Watched over by an impassive Joseph Stalin, the two Ministers signed a Soviet– Japanese Neutrality Pact, in which each country pledged to remain neutral if the other was attacked.
This stirred the Americans. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull presented the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Kichisaburo Nomura – a former admiral – with a demand for a halt to any further warmongering. Japan, he warned, should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations and agree not to interfere in their affairs. He might as well have delivered it to a brick wall. Matsuoka ordered his ambassador to reply with a peremptory request for Washington also to sign a neutrality pact. This stalemate sputtered along until July, when the IJA lunged again. With the ‘agreement’ of the hapless Vichy French colonial government in Hanoi, the IJA occupied the southern part of Indochina, present-day southern Vietnam and Cambodia. Japan now controlled air and naval bases on the South China Sea – an ideal springboard into the Pacific or towards the British and Dutch colonies in South East Asia.
The alarm bells rang once more. His patience thinning by the day, President Roosevelt retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States. Britain and the Dutch East Indies followed suit. The results were profound. Overnight, Japan saw three-quarters of its overseas trade wiped out, including the imports of tin and rubber vital for its war machine. Worse, its imports of oil were virtually choked off, provoking a mixture of fury and panic as the generals and admirals realised they had only a year’s supply in reserve. What the West threw down as a warning, they took as yet another mortal insult. If there was any single point at which the militarists in Tokyo decided that war with the United States was inevitable, this was it. Upping the ante yet again, the army swept aside the Vichy French and occupied Saigon.
The Australian Government was also alarmed by this new escalation. The Ambassador to Japan, Sir John Latham, sought an urgent meeting with Matsuoka to ask, in polite diplomatic language, what on earth was going on. On 29 July, he reported the conversation to Canberra, with the Foreign Minister’s suave assurance that the invasion was:
‘entirely peaceful and defensive. It was greatly to be regretted that this was not understood. The only object was to promote peace in the Pacific. If Indo-China was attacked a different position would, of course, arise. But the agreement was not directed against any third party.’
He added that Japan was very interested in the natural resources of Indo-China.
In particular Japan would carry out completely her undertaking to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Indo-China, and this fact should remove all objections to her action.
At this point I said that I understood that Japan was taking possession of Saigon and Camranh Bay as naval bases, and would occupy the country with thousands of troops. The Minister said nothing in response to this statement. I then said that apparently Japan was giving a new definition to territorial integrity.2
In London and in Canberra, as ever, Singapore was the hinge on which everything swung. And at nearby Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies, the Dutch colonial administration also saw Singapore as its front line.
But the United States disagreed, and fundamentally. At joint military staff talks held in Singapore in April, the British, Australians and Dutch were on one side of the argument and the still neutral Americans on the other. After days of negotiation, they politely agreed to differ. For the American officers at the conference, if Singapore was lost to the Japanese it would be ‘unfortunate’ but not disastrous. On instructions from Washington, they were adamant that the United States Navy would not divide its naval force in the western Pacific – the Asiatic Fleet, based in the Philippines. No American ships would be sent to Singapore, either to forestall a Japanese attack there or to meet one if it happened. If push did come to shove and the US was somehow drawn into a war, the American strategy would be to draw the Japanese fleet further east, towards the Marshall Islands, and meet it there. Tactfully, they refrained from saying that it was not worth spilling the blood of American boys in defence of a British colony, but the implication was clear. Japan was a menace to everyone, no doubt about that, but the defence of the American eastern seaboard was the primary concern in Washington. As if to emphasise that, between April and June the US Navy sent the battleships Idaho, Mississippi and New Mexico, the carrier Yorktown, four cruisers and two full destroyer squadrons from the Pacific to American Atlantic bases.
Robert Menzies had returned from his overseas trip to Britain and the United States at the end of May, well satisfied with his reception. He had been lionised by the British Establishment as just the sort of stout-hearted colonial chap the Empire could depend on in its hour of peril, and he had met all the right people in Washington, including President Roosevelt for an hour. He had done his best to push Australia’s concerns about Japanese expansion to a British prime minister preoccupied with the war in Europe, and he believed he had gained at least a sympathetic ear on the same subject in Washington.
But the raw truth was that Australia was a small country, and far away. Despite flattering himself that men of influence in Britain wanted him somehow to become a member of the House of Commons, Menzies was only a bit player on the world stage. The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, bent on forging an increasingly close partnership across the Atlantic, had no intention of including him or anyone else in a ménage à trois. Australia would, in due course, be informed of the decisions they had taken.
That August, as Perth was preparing for her triumphant entry into Sydney Harbour, Roosevelt and Churchill were holding their first meeting face to face, at distant Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, off the east coast of Canada. It was an occasion rich in history’s drama. The Prime Minister, always the showman, crossed the Atlantic in the battleship Prince of Wales. The President, not needing to impress, turned up in a smaller ship, the heavy cruiser USS Augusta. Their talks, interspersed by formal luncheons and dinners and a solemn religious service for which Churchill personally chose the hymns, laid out what became known as the Atlantic Charter. It was their vision for a democratic post-war world. But Roosevelt knew that the American people were not ready to be drawn into the fight for it. The United States would send Britain all the sinews of war: guns, ships and aircraft, food and oil (albeit for a price) but it was not yet willing to start shooting. Least of all against the Japanese. When the conversation turned to the Far East, Churchill urged the President to take an uncompromising stand against Japanese aggression by publicly declaring that:
any further encroachment by Japan in the South-West Pacific would produce a situation in which the United States Government would be compelled to take counter-measures even though these might lead to a war between the United States and Japan.3
In the niceties of diplomatic language, this would have been tantamount to a declaration of war, and the President was not buying it. After more splendid diplomatic and naval flourishes, Churchill sailed back to Britain warmed by Roosevelt’s firm support for the destruction of ‘Nazi tyranny’ but disappointed by his equivocation on Japan. Five days later, Ambassador Nomura in Washington was handed a note that warned only that:
If the Japanese Gove
rnment takes any further steps in pursuance of a policy or program of military domination by force or threat of force of neighboring countries, the Government of the United States will be compelled to take immediately any and all steps which it may deem necessary toward safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the United States and American nationals and toward insuring the safety and security of the United States.4
In the view from Washington, where Congress sat on Capitol Hill in splendid isolation, the ultra-militarists in Japan should be given yet another chance to behave themselves.
Australia in those days was governed not from one city but from three. Canberra had the squat, white wedding cake of the temporary Parliament House, opened in 1927, but the bush flies in the new capital outnumbered the public servants. As it had been since Federation, Melbourne was home to the Departments of State, including the Navy Office, and the War Cabinet met there regularly when parliament was not sitting. Sydney, the principal air and sea port, liked to think that it shaded its southern cousin as the bustling commercial capital, although the honours were actually about even. Communications were by telegram, chugging teleprinters or on staticky telephone lines. Weary politicians and their senior bureaucrats were constantly on the move, sometimes by air but more often by steam train. They would have to change trains at state borders to accommodate the different railway gauges inherited from the colonial era.
In August, a political crisis exploded upon all three cities, and around the nation. Menzies was stabbed in the back by his own United Australia Party and thrown out of office. The tensions had built during his long stay abroad. A final entry in Menzies’ diary of his travels records ‘a sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension’ as his aircraft neared Sydney. ‘If only I could creep in quietly into the bosom of the family, and rest there,’ he wrote.5 His deputy prime minister, Arthur Fadden, leader of the Country Party, who met him at the flying-boat base at Rose Bay, recounted that he ‘seemed as happy as a sailor on a horse’.6 Politics was about to turn nasty.