by Mike Carlton
Fred’s memoirs, Java Rabble, paint a picture of a blissful childhood. Inglewood was a new suburb poking tentative fingers into the bush. Home was a brick cottage, where Fred and his two sisters slept out on the verandah – food for the mozzies in summer – protected by a canvas blind and a sheet of asbestos when the weather turned cold. There were bushwalks with his father, Horry, around what is now the sprawling Morley Shopping Centre, gathering spider orchids and kangaroo paws to take home to his mother, Dot. Horry was lucky to keep his job as a manager at Boan’s Department Store during the Depression, so there was always something to eat on the table, and out in the backyard there was room for a tennis court. In summer, the family would go on fishing trips to the beach at Safety Bay in Rockingham, where the kids would splash along the shoreline, or out to nearby Penguin Island, squishing stranded jellyfish between their bare toes.
Fred wasn’t too big on school. He and Wally once got six of the best for wagging classes to caddy at a nearby golf course. At 13, Fred left the classroom forever, got a couple of jobs running messages and then worked as an office boy with a car dealer. But a military life had always attracted him. At 16, he joined an army militia battalion as a cadet. In 1941, when he turned 18, he met a mate who’d enlisted in the navy and who talked him into doing the same thing. It was a big decision. Young Skeels was in love. Bonnie Pettit was the sister of a good friend, about 16 months younger than Fred, working as an apprentice tailor:
Bonnie was a good looker with stunning honey blonde hair and very fair skin which she hated but everyone else admired. Even though she was quiet you could sense her genuineness and her slight reserve didn’t stop her from joining in at dances and bike riding outings in the hills surrounding Perth. She was also good at netball so had a great figure from all the exercise this entailed. Eventually I mustered enough courage to ask her on a date but it was very understated and slightly embarrassing as it was the first time I had asked any girl to come out with me.3
Dates were a show at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Perth or dancing at the Maylands Town Hall on a Friday or Saturday night. The day before Fred left to go east for training at the Flinders Naval Depot, he took Bonnie for a walk in King’s Park and gave her a heart-shaped gold locket with a naval emblem engraved on it. No commitments, but they promised to write. Now, in Perth, Ordinary Seaman Fred Skeels, strong and wiry, was assigned as a loader on the S1 4-inch, the first of the twin-barrelled anti-aircraft mountings on the ship’s starboard side.
‘Blood’ Bancroft, another 19-year-old, born in Fremantle, also found himself loading 4-inch shells, but on the P1 gun crew, on the opposite side of the ship to Fred Skeels. His first action station was below in the 6-inch shell lobby, but that was a bit too confined for comfort and he’d talked his way out of that and onto the upper deck, where you could see what was going on. His proper name was Arthur. The nickname ‘Blood’ came from his shock of flaming red hair. He’d had a good job in Perth with the Union Bank, and he was seeing a lot of a girl named Mirla Wilkinson. Fit from weekends of cricket in summer and Aussie Rules in winter, Blood joined up in 1940 because it seemed the right thing to do. Perth was his first ship.
The word ‘teenager’ had barely been coined in the 1940s, but that’s what so many of Perth’s new recruits were. Signalman William Arthur Bee – inevitably nicknamed ‘Buzzer’ – a baby-faced youngster, also 19, and not quite 1.6 metres tall, had joined in the Mediterranean just before Perth had left for home. That more or less gave him the status of an old hand. The eldest of a family of five from Victoria Park in Perth, after leaving school he had begun to study aircraft engine maintenance. With the outbreak of war, he’d applied for a commission in the RAAF but was told they didn’t want him, so the navy it was. His job on the flag deck brought him under the wing of Percy Stokan, the bearded, piratical Yeoman of Signals who had been with the ship since Portsmouth and who was famed for his pusser’s dirk, the razor-sharp knife he kept hanging from his belt.
With so many youngsters in the crew, most of them at sea for the first time, Hec Waller and his officers and senior rates set to training them up. Perth spent the final months of 1941 in peaceful Australian waters, where there was ample time for exercise upon exercise. But many of the officers themselves were new, some of them as green as grass. Happily, there were others Waller knew well enough. His new Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Peter Hancox, aged 28, born in Ipswich in Queensland, had been with him in Stuart in the Mediterranean and could be relied on. The same went for Lieutenant Bill Gay, who’d also been in the Scrap Iron Flotilla, in Vampire.
These were seasoned men, as were Lieutenant Michael Highton, a young Royal Navy officer and a dependable watchkeeper who had sailed with Perth since her commissioning in Portsmouth, and the new Navigator, John Harper, who was as competent as you would expect. Harper’s assistant, Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, had been a merchant officer. Bob Gray continued to reign over his kingdom in the engine room. But, as always, it was the senior rates who were the backbone of the ship, men such as Jan Creber, Ray Parkin, Percy Stokan, Reg Whiting and Jack Lewis. To the new faces, these men were seasoned veterans, toughened by war.
Not all the new draft came from Western Australia. Ordinary Seaman Ernie Toovey, born in Warwick on the Queensland Darling Downs, was a promising young cricketer who had played First Grade in Brisbane and was a prospect for the state in the Sheffield Shield competition. Charles ‘Chilla’ Goodchap, from Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, just 18, had come almost straight from Churchie, Brisbane’s upper crust Church of England grammar school. He’d had a stint in the school cadets and the Light Horse militia, where he found that he actually hated horses; the navy was a good way to get away from them. Paul Doneley was another Queenslander, blond and fair-skinned, and at 17 the baby of a family of eight children. His older brothers had got the money together to send him to Downlands, the renowned Catholic boarding school at Toowoomba, where he had made the First XV rugby team, and he had gone directly from there to the navy, with the reluctant permission of his father. These three Queenslanders would stick together through thick and thin.
The McGovern brothers from Sydney joined separately. Vince McGovern, the elder at 24, was an ERA who had entered the ship during her wintry stopover at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1940. Two years younger than Vince, Frank – or, more formally, Francis Joseph McGovern – arrived on board in November 1941. They were inner-city kids, born and bred in Paddington in the days long before its winding lanes of colonial terrace houses were gentrified with coach lamps and trendy cafes. Frank recalls:
Primary school was at St Joseph’s, Edgecliff, and from there I went to Marist Brothers at Darlinghurst, the secondary school. It was a good life. We played cricket, got into that, in what they termed then the Colour Competition: knock-around social cricket over at Moore Park. We used to play there of a Thursday. And a bit of tennis. Paddo was a working-class suburb. We used to play hockey, one street against another, and use the old dustbin for playing cricket in the back lane.
Dad worked on the tramways, did a bit of driving at times, a ganger I think, in charge of a few blokes, looking after what they called the ‘parkway’, the tram tracks. Like everybody else, we didn’t have much. Things were tough during the Depression. Bread and dripping went down well; you’d get down to the bottom of the dripping container, where the gravy was. We kept it in the icebox. Before the Depression, you’d have a baked dinner. In the Depression, you might get a piece of bread. Rabbit was all right. The Rabbit-oh man used to come around and he’d call out ‘Rabbit alive-oh!’. I think it was a shilling at that time for a rabbit. Stewed rabbit, baked rabbit …4
Vince did an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at the Eveleigh railway yards. Frank, equipped with his school Intermediate Certificate courtesy of the Marist Brothers, got work as a clerk at the Sydney Water Board. He had been in the naval reserve to make a few bob and was called up right at the outbreak of war. ‘I’ll be back in a few weeks,’ he told them at work. They promised to keep his
job open for him.
In Perth, the brothers lived in separate messes and didn’t see a lot of each other at sea. Vince worked down in the engine spaces. For a short time, Frank’s action station was on the bridge at starboard lookout, and then in the 6-inch X-turret. Eventually, he moved to the .5-inch machine-gun mount on Perth’s stern. There, too, you got a look at what was going on.
In the weeks before Christmas 1941, Perth was constantly at sea. The drills piled up. Action stations, abandon ship stations, away sea boat, close up damage control parties: the ship rang to the sound of piped orders. In harbour, Waller pestered the powers-that-be to replace the radar set removed from the ship after the Mediterranean, but there was always a reason why nothing could be done. The old radar antenna remained tacked to the foremast, useless.
There was better news in November, when the ship embarked a new Pusser’s Duck, another Walrus amphibian. With her came a new pilot, Flying Officer Allen ‘Jock’ McDonough of the RAAF’s 9 Squadron, a 27-year-old from Adelaide. He was joined by a new naval officer Observer, Lieutenant David McWilliam, 26, of Lindfield in Sydney. The navy also provided the Duck’s Telegraphist Air Gunner, Ken Wallace, from Leichhardt in Sydney, a knockabout bloke who had joined the RAN in 1936. Plus, a crew of five air-force maintenance fitters came aboard. Everyone had a nickname. The initial letters of Ken’s rating landed him with Tag. Flying for the navy earned him an extra two shillings and sixpence a day in danger money.
There was another addition to Perth’s ship’s company. Bob Collins smuggled a cat on board. He was standing at the Man O’War steps in Sydney, waiting for the liberty boat, when the daughter of a friend thrust a little grey and white tabby at him. There wasn’t much he could do but take it, so he stuffed it inside his jacket.
Able Seaman Robert Alfred Charles Collins, born at Waverley in Sydney, a volunteer enlistment in 1938, was Perth’s Asdic operator and a bit of a stirrer with it. An outgoing bloke, he was popular with his messmates but trouble seemed to follow him around. He was a Perth original, one of the Autolycus crew, but in November 1940 his service record had been marked ‘Run’ – the official term for desertion. Collins had taken a few weeks’ leave without feeling the need to inform the navy, which got him three months in detention. Eventually returned to Perth, he found himself constantly under the baleful eye of Pricky Reid, a relationship already chilly after an incident in Haifa when Reid’s cap, only newly encrusted with a commander’s gold braid, had blown overboard. Reid had turned to find Collins laughing fit to bust. Getting the cat on board was Bob Collins’s sweet victory over authority. The crew named it Redlead after it knocked over a pot of red lead paint. Collins laughed about it years later:
When we got to sea Reid had an idea there was an animal aboard and he had me pinned as the perpetrator. I still don’t know why. Reid didn’t have any spies because he wasn’t very well liked. I thought the only way I can get the cat included in the ship’s company is if the Old Man, Captain Waller, will officially recognise her. So one day, I’m up on the bridge, and I had Redlead inside my jacket. The Old Man was sitting in his chair. I put Redlead down and the cat went up to Waller and said, ‘Meow, meow,’ as cats do. I’ll never forget what happened next.
‘What have we here, Collins?’ said Waller.
‘It looks like a cat, sir.’ What else could I say?
‘Well, don’t just stand there. Get something I can give it to play with.’
So I passed a piece of paper and some string to the Old Man and he’s going around the deck and Redlead’s chasing the piece of string. Then Reid came up on the bridge and, boy, did he glare at me. I pretended it had nothing to do with me. Once Waller had given Redlead the seal of approval she was free to roam around the ship … everyone agreed that Waller was a sailor’s captain, a very special bloke in every respect.5
On 1 December, as John Curtin was in Canberra holding his emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the deepening menace to Australia, Hirohito was presiding over another of his glacial conferences at the palace in Tokyo. The Japanese mood had hardened since the last audience in September. The empire must choose between glory or disaster, Prime Minister Tojo told the impassive figure enthroned before him. Should His Majesty graciously accede to the Cabinet’s unanimous recommendation for war, his loyal subjects, trembling in obedient awe, would do him the highest honour.
This time, Hirohito remained as silent as the grave. There was a long pause. Then he withdrew to a private chamber and fixed the imperial seal to the Cabinet papers. War it must be; war it would be. Tenno heika banzai! Ten thousand years to the Emperor!
The next morning, General Haijime Sugiyama, the army chief, and Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the navy, returned to the palace to inform Hirohito that 8 December would be X-Day. In the afternoon, that date was confirmed to the army. Yamamoto, in his flagship, the battleship Nagato, in Hiroshima Bay, radioed it to his commanders in the Kido Butai and across the Pacific. The coded signal to commence hostilities had been agreed: Niitaka Yama Nobore 1208. Climb the New High Mountain 1208. The numerals indicated the month and day.
The Americans had cracked Japan’s diplomatic cipher used for cables between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and its embassies abroad. The intelligence revealed was referred to as MAGIC. In theory, MAGIC meant they were able to read messages as quickly as the Japanese themselves. In practice, they rarely did. Notoriously, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had once remarked that ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’, and Washington’s intelligence agencies were understaffed, underfunded and intently engaged in bureaucratic turf wars. Important cables between Tokyo and the embassy in Washington or the consulate in Hawaii were frequently shoved into files for decoding and translation on a later day, especially if a weekend was on the way. The Americans had read more than enough to know that Japanese diplomacy was certainly hardening towards war, but that was about it.
US Army intelligence did discover in the final week of November that a large Japanese expeditionary force was moving south from China, although it had no idea that it was heading for Malaya. But the threat was enough to stir the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, to put his commanders in Hawaii and the Philippines on red alert:
This despatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking towards stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased. An aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo. Execute appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46.6
WPL 46 meant War Plan 46, which would deploy the US Navy for combat. At Manila in the Philippines, the Commander of US Army Forces in the Far East, Lieutenant-General Douglas MacArthur, received a similar message, as did the Army Commander in Honolulu. But no one had any idea that the carriers of the Kido Butai, under strict radio silence, were carving their long track through the Pacific towards the Hawaiian Islands.
In Singapore, all the lights were on. The deterrent presence of Prince of Wales and Repulse in the Far East had been widely publicised. An Asian race could hardly be expected to challenge the Royal Navy, which had ruled the waves since Nelson. It was well known that Japanese pilots, with their narrow little eyes, squinted uncomfortably in daylight and did not fly at night. Their aircraft – as badly made as the cheap Japanese toys that occasionally appeared in Western stores – would fall to pieces after a year or so.
Blithely unconcerned, the tuans and memsahibs danced the nights away at the Adelphi or the Tanglin Club, sipped their stengahs beneath the circling ceiling fans at Raffles, filled and refilled their plates at the renowned rijstaffel buffet of Dutch and Indonesian food so popular on Sundays at the Cockpit Hotel, queued for the pictures at the Cathay cinema, applied bat to ball at the historic Cricket Club on the Padang and flirted with the transvestites in the rau
nchy stews of Bugis Street. Up country, in Malaya itself, the rubber planters counted the money rolling in from this terrible but most profitable war in Europe. It was business as usual.
As had happened in 1914 and again in 1939, in December 1941 the descent into war had an inexorable momentum. Madness was in the air. No man or nation had the power to stop it. By now, Japan had not one but two ambassadors in Washington: Nomura, the former admiral, and Saburo Kurusu, a career diplomat married to an American.
The Americans missed yet another spurt of diplomatic traffic that should have alerted them. On 2 December, the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue was ordered to destroy all its code books bar one, which would be needed to receive a final message from Tokyo. On 3 December, Tokyo cabled the Japanese Consul General in Hawaii, asking urgently for details of US Navy ships in Pearl Harbor, whether those ships were equipped with anti-torpedo nets and if barrage balloons formed part of Pearl’s air defences. The consul replied in detail the next day. All three messages were intercepted in Hawaii and sent on to Washington, where, inexplicably, they lay untouched until someone found them in a file four days after the attack.
Such was the enormity of the destruction and the scale of its treachery, so powerfully does it live in legend and the American psyche, that most people today believe the attack on Pearl Harbor was Japan’s opening act of war in the Pacific. It was not. That niche in history is occupied by a small event now almost forgotten, but an event that would draw HMAS Perth and her crew into the whirlwind.
On Sunday 7 December – the date in Australia, South East Asia and Japan – the Malaya Invasion Force was in the Gulf of Siam, steaming through showery weather at a determined 16 knots. Hudson bombers of the RAAF had tracked its progress intermittently, although enough to convince the commanders in Singapore that the Japanese were on a course for Thailand. This was a careful deception and it worked, although it came within a whisker of discovery.