Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  The day Elmo Gee’s leave was up, Kath Brewer’s father drove him to Albury to catch the train back to Sydney, tactfully leaving the young sailor and his daughter sitting alone for a moment in the back of the family’s big blue Dodge tourer. Elmo asked Kath to marry him, to wait for him until the war was over, and she promised she would.

  There were farewells around the country as men journeyed back to Garden Island to take up arms again, or to go to war for the first time. By mid-November, Perth’s fire damage was being repaired. Stores and ammunition had been taken on board. There was the usual blizzard of lists and paperwork; new ratings were handed the watch tickets that assigned them to their messes, their divisions, their action stations. In the time-honoured wording of the navy, the ship was making ready in all respects to proceed. At first, she would stay in Australian waters for the new Captain and crew to work back up to fighting efficiency.

  In the last week of November, a new buzz began to circulate around the RAN. It seemed incredible – a rumour so outlandish that few believed it. Perth’s sister ship HMAS Sydney was missing. She had been in the Indian Ocean but nothing had been heard from her since 19 November. Was she merely observing wireless silence or had something sinister happened to her? Gradually, the rumours swelled and spread. By 23 November, the Naval Board and the new Curtin Labor Cabinet had to face the chilling possibility that Sydney and her crew of 645 had very likely been lost, most probably due to enemy action.

  Both Board and government then proceeded to bungle the matter badly. Two days later, the government issued a censorship instruction ordering ‘no reference press or radio to HMAS Sydney’, which only inflamed the rumours in every journalists’ pub in the country. Another two days passed before the Board sent telegrams to Sydney families to tell them that the ship and their husbands, fathers, sons were missing. Whispers of a disaster rocketed around the nation, in naval ports and barracks, over backyard fences, down the street at the shops, in frantic telephone calls. Yet it was not until 30 November that Curtin made a formal announcement. In fairness to him, he had been Prime Minister for just over a month and was genuinely distraught at the thought of so many broken families. The wording was carefully constructed to conceal many of the known facts and to put the best possible gloss on those that were revealed:

  Information has been received from the Australian Naval Board that HMAS Sydney has been in action with a heavily armed enemy merchant raider, which she sank by gunfire.

  The information was received from survivors from the enemy vessel, who were picked up some time after the action.

  No subsequent communication has been received from the HMAS Sydney, and the Government regrets to say that it must be presumed that she has been lost.

  Extensive search by air and service units to locate survivors continues …12

  Then followed a clumsy attempt to explain the delay, with a finishing flourish: ‘fine ship … gallant complement … glorious career … successful action against the enemy’.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the news devastated both the navy and the nation. Never had Australia suffered such a catastrophe at sea. The shock was the greater for Sydney was special – the famous victor in the first Australian naval triumph of the war, the destruction of the Bartolomeo Colleoni in 1940.

  Perth was at sea when Curtin’s statement was released, steaming towards New Zealand to escort the American liner Mariposa back to Sydney. The buzz had been true. The shock among her ship’s crew was profound. A sister had gone, a ship almost as familiar as their own. Friends and shipmates had vanished with her, men they had known in their training days at Flinders, in other ships at sea, or in the pubs where sailors gather. Worse, some had lost family. Hec Waller himself had a young cousin, Richard Sievey, on board. One of Perth’s bandsmen, Perce Partington, lost his brother Leslie, a trombonist and now the second of his parents’ three sons to die in the war. Sydney was deeply mourned. And if that news was not grim enough, another sadness followed: on 27 November, the sloop Parramatta was torpedoed by a U-boat in the Mediterranean on a run to Tobruk. There were only 24 survivors. Another 138 men lost their lives, including all her officers.

  The Prime Minister nursed his grief at The Lodge alone with Elsie. The moment, though, could not last long. Events hurried in upon him, from every direction. He and Winston Churchill had been conducting an increasingly icy exchange of telegrams over Australia’s insistence on withdrawing the army’s exhausted 9th Division from Tobruk. And, on 29 November, the Australian Minister in Washington, Richard Casey, filed a ‘Most Secret’ cable to Canberra detailing a discussion with the US Secretary for War, Henry Stimson. For all its prosaic diplomatic language, it was the sound of the time bomb ticking. As Casey reported, Stimson believed that the Japanese Navy, Army and Air Force were massing in threatening strength in southern Indochina and Taiwan:

  There appears to have been substantial reinforcement of Southern Indo-China both from overseas and at expense of Japanese forces in Northern Indo-China. Conservative estimate is at least 7000 Japanese troops now in Southern Indo-China. Aircraft and military equipment has been landed in Southern Indo-China over the last two months in substantial quantities.

  There are believed to be about 50,000 troops on Island of Hainan … United States Military Intelligence concludes from foregoing it appears evident that Japanese have completed plans for further aggressive moves in South-Eastern Asia …

  …a task force of about 5 divisions, supported by appropriate air and naval units, has been assembled for execution of these plans. This force is now en route southward to an, as yet, undetermined rendezvous …

  United States Navy has sent precautionary war warning telegrams to the Commanders of the United States Pacific and Asiatic fleets. War Department has sent out similar warnings.13

  And there was one more chilling note. According to the Americans, there was evidence that the Japanese were ‘prepared to use chemical and probably bacteriological warfare whenever and wherever they deem it necessary or profitable to do so’.

  There was some good news, though. At long last, London had begun to do something concrete about the Japanese menace. In October, over the protests of the Admiralty, Churchill despatched HMS Prince of Wales, the battleship that had taken him to meet Roosevelt, and the older battlecruiser Repulse, to the Far East, where, the plan was, they would be joined by the brand-new aircraft carrier Indomitable. These three capital ships, with their destroyer screen, would be known as Force Z. It was far from being ‘Main Fleet to Singapore’, but it was at least something. This very public show of British naval power should give Japan pause for thought. There was a setback when Indomitable ran aground in the Caribbean and had to be docked for repairs; Force Z would have to do without carrier air support. But, by December, the two remaining ships were in the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malayan mainland.

  Curtin called an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet in Canberra on the evening of Monday 1 December to discuss the Casey cable, and another in Melbourne three days later. The prevailing fear – in Washington and London, and therefore in Canberra – was that Japan might make a seaborne attack upon the Kra Isthmus, the narrow stretch of land that connects modern Malaysia to Thailand. This would significantly ratchet up the threat to British colonial Malaya, including Singapore, and consequently Australia as well. A flurry of cables went back and forth across the hemispheres. What would Britain do if this happened? Would the Americans now come in at last? Cabinet agonised over the possibilities.

  On Friday 5 December, Curtin abruptly cancelled his plans to return to Canberra by train and retired to his room at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Melbourne. There, in his shabby suite with its potted palms and aspidistras, the air blue with cigarette smoke, he spent the weekend awaiting developments. The storm he had long feared was about to engulf him and the nation. And the world.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE TIME OF INFAMY

  The Emperor Hirohito maintained a court protocol around
the ancient Chrysanthemum Throne so stiff that it verged on the catatonic. To the ministers, generals and admirals summoned to grovel before him in audience at the Kyuden – his Tokyo palace – he spoke not a word. He gave no sign that he had even seen them. Clad in a black silk tail coat and striped trousers, the godly descendant of the sun itself stared impassively ahead from a raised dais as the president of his privy council barked questions and instructions. There was no debate. The most powerful figures in Japan sat immobile at a long table, stated their positions, parroted their answers and lapsed into silence again to await the imperial decision – if, indeed, there was one.

  Such a conference was held at the palace on 16 September 1941. The Cabinet had prepared the ground. Negotiations were continuing with the United States, but the Americans were making impossibly insulting demands. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was insisting that Japan must abandon the Axis pact with Germany and that Italy should withdraw its forces from China and Indochina and call a halt to Nanshinron. Japan could never accept such humiliation. Yet she was being bled dry by the embargo imposed by President Roosevelt back in July. There was little likelihood of diplomacy succeeding. War with the United States was therefore almost certain, as the Cabinet briefing paper argued:

  Although America’s total defeat is judged utterly impossible, it is not inconceivable that a shift in American public opinion due to our victories in Southeast Asia, or England’s surrender, might bring the war to an end. At any rate, our occupation of vital areas to the South will ensure a superior strategic position. Our development of the rich resources of the region and our use of the economic strength of the Asian continent will provide the economic base for long-term self sufficiency. By co-operating with Germany and Italy, we will shatter Anglo-American unity, link Asia and Europe, and we should be able to create an invincible military alignment.1

  At the end of the presentation, to the amazement of the grandees assembled before him, Hirohito flung off centuries of imperial tradition. He spoke. It was not much, just two lines of a poem composed by his Meiji grandfather:

  All men are brothers, like all the seas of the world.

  So why do winds and waves clash fiercely everywhere?

  Such piercing insight. What exalted moral tone. There were gasps of wonder. Everyone knew immediately the import of this divine wisdom. Or thought they knew. The moderates, so-called, believed their emperor’s words to mean that war was probable but that diplomacy should continue. The militarists took it that there should be a fig leaf of diplomacy while the Great East Asia War was whipped along. Audience over, everyone scraped out of the antechamber and Hirohito returned to his leisurely study of aquatic organisms. Japanese politics threw itself into another of its convulsive fits of rumour, revolt and assassination plots. In mid-October, Prince Konoye resigned the prime ministership and was replaced by the Army Minister, General Hideki Tojo – one of the hotheads who had rampaged through China. Critical mass was now very close.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the Japanese plan for war was a work of military genius. That it was duplicitous at its outset, barbarous in its execution and ultimately a lunatic act of national suicide does not detract from its audacity and its theatrical grandeur. Its object was to seize, in months, the sort of sprawling empire the European powers had built over painstaking centuries. It envisaged no less than the conquest of the entire western Pacific, in separate but synchronised hammer blows that would cripple the United States Navy, rout the British and Dutch from their colonial domains in South East Asia, and yoke almost half the world’s peoples to the economic engine of Greater Nippon. The Home Islands would then prosper behind a vast land and sea frontier.

  In an age before computers, the logistical challenge alone was breathtaking. The festering rivalry between the army and navy, and their respective air arms, would have to be submerged for the common good. Some two million soldiers, sailors and airmen were to be trained and equipped and marshalled into position. Thousands of warships, aircraft and land vehicles had to be fuelled, ammunitioned and deployed to strike, then maintained and repaired afterwards. There had to be military headquarters, military bases, military airfields, military hospitals, military post offices, military brothels. Intelligence was gathered from Hawaii to Hong Kong, New Guinea to Singapore, Java to Thailand; Japanese spies posing as waiters, barbers, taxi drivers, tourists, fed information back to Tokyo. Orders were drawn up with scrupulous attention to detail, to be transmitted across two hemispheres and a dozen different time zones. And there had to be the utmost secrecy, to catch the enemy off guard.

  The paradox that was Hirohito’s Japan, in all its seething contradictions, was personified in one of its most familiar public figures. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, from a minor samurai family, was the negotiator who had walked out of the London naval conference in 1936 and thrown himself into convincing the Imperial Navy that air power was the future of war at sea. A diminutive 1.6 metres tall, but barrel-chested with it, he had fought the Russians as a young ensign at Tsushima in 1905, where he had lost two fingers to a stray piece of shrapnel. He was a chronic gambler, fond of Scotch whisky and geisha girls. By 1941, 57 years old, he was Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, and a favourite of the Emperor’s, to whom he was unswervingly devoted.

  Yamamoto was the strategist who created Operation Z, the plan to smash the US Navy by a surprise air attack on its Pacific base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He had refined its details over long months, with the assistance of a brilliant young naval flyer, Commander Minoru Genda. But therein lay his personal turmoil. He was an opponent of the Axis pact, so outspoken that he had been posted to the fleet to remove him from the reach of fanatics in the army who wanted him murdered. And although he believed passionately in Japan’s pre-eminence among nations, he did not think that could be realised by war with the United States. As a young officer, he had studied at Harvard and had twice served as a naval attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, which had left him fluent in English, with an understanding of the world far beyond the insular prejudices of most of his countrymen. Aware of American industrial might and the character of the American people, Yamamoto feared that war with the arsenal of democracy across the Pacific would end only in disaster for Japan. But he recognised also that he was powerless to stop his country’s headlong rush to the precipice, and would therefore do his duty to his nation and Emperor. ‘If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences, I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year,’ he told Prince Konoye in 1940. ‘But I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years …I hope you will endeavour to avoid an American–Japanese war.’2

  The September imperial conference left him no choice. The sword of the samurai was to be unsheathed. On 5 November, Yamamoto activated Combined Fleet Top Secret Operation Order No. 1, the plan for the Imperial Japanese Navy’s descent upon the Pacific and South East Asia. Two weeks later, the Pearl Harbor Carrier Strike Force – the Kido Butai – began to assemble at a remote bay in the snowy Kurile Islands, 1600 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.

  Like actors waiting for the curtain call, other fleets and squadrons also took their places for the assault on the Philippines and the American islands of Wake, Midway and Guam. At Hainan Island, off the southernmost tip of China, the Malaya Invasion Force of seven cruisers and 13 destroyers gathered around a convoy of 19 transport ships, whose holds and decks were jam-packed with some 26,000 soldiers. This would be the sword pointed at the British and Dutch colonial Empires and, ultimately, towards Australia. In Indochina, squadron upon squadron of land-based reconnaissance, fighter and bomber aircraft stood ready. And in China itself, the army prepared to roll into the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

  Yamamoto had set the time and date for X-Day, when war would begin. West of the International Dateline, which cleaved the Pacific, it would be Monday 8 December. East of the line, in Hawaii, it would be early Sunday morning, 7 December. There would be a full moon to help the carriers lau
nch their aircraft before dawn. Spies had reported that the US Pacific Fleet spent its weekends relaxing in Pearl: American admirals and captains enjoyed their Sunday routine of morning church, golf and lunch at the officers’ clubs.

  In the Kuriles, Wednesday 26 November brought a clear dawn and the promise of a cold but sunny day. There had been a big sake party and stirring speeches in the ships of the Kido Butai the night before. Now, a string of signal flags broke out on the flagship, the carrier Akagi (Red Castle). The silence of the bay was broken by the rumble of anchor chains through hawse-pipes as the ships weighed for sea. Akagi led out, with the carriers Kaga (Increased Joy), Soryu (Green Dragon), Hiryu (Flying Dragon), Zuikaku (Happy Crane) and Shokaku (Soaring Crane) forming two columns, flanked by their escorts of two battleships, two cruisers and a screen of destroyers. There were 360 strike aircraft aboard these six carriers – fighters, high-level bombers, dive-bombers and torpedo bombers – their crews inspired by the vision of the glory they would attain in the name of the Emperor. A light mist began to form as the Kido Butai bent to the open sea to begin its long journey first east then south-east across the Pacific, through gathering fog, purple storms and high ocean rollers. There was one last proviso. If, by some miracle in the next few days, the negotiations under way between Tokyo and Washington produced a result satisfactory to Japan, the entire enterprise would be called off and the fleets and men returned to their bases. Yamamoto hoped for that miracle but knew that it would not happen.

  Many of the new faces joining Perth hailed from Western Australia. The navy had decided it would help morale if men were posted to ships named for their state capital cities or home towns. Fred Skeels was 19 when he boarded the ship in Sydney in October. He and his mate Wally Johnston had mucked around together at Inglewood Primary School in suburban Perth. They shared the same birthday. Now – happy coincidence – they found themselves together again in Perth’s mess decks.