Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  That Sunday morning, at 9 am, the force made a dog-legged turn to the south-west, towards its three landing points on the east coast of the Malayan Peninsula at Patani and Singora in southernmost Thailand, and across the border at Kota Bharu in what is now northern Malaysia. In the afternoon, a long-range Catalina flying boat of the RAF’s 205 Squadron lumbered through a patch in the clouds to find the force arrayed across the sea beneath. The Japanese Commander, Rear-Admiral Takeo Kurita, ordered it to be shot down to preserve the secrecy of his new course. The eight men of the Catalina’s crew had no time to radio their discovery back to Singapore before enemy fighters bounced them and sent them plummeting into the sea in flames – a fact discovered only after the war. The Navigator of the aircraft was an RAAF sergeant, Colin ‘Ike’ Treloar, a 21-year-old from Adelaide. He was the first Australian to die in the war with Japan.

  A strong surf met the invasion force as its transports dropped anchor off the three landing sites. It was now well after 10 pm. Clouds covered the full moon and there was, at first, near chaos as the Japanese attempted to send their landing craft through the breakers towards the beaches. On the Thai coast, about half the landing barges capsized, drowning hundreds of soldiers, although the expedition’s Commander, the squat and balding Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, managed to scramble ashore at Singora. His forces met only token opposition from the Thai Army and police.

  The surf caused similar troubles for the 5500 troops attempting to land at Kota Bharu – a delay that alerted the Indian Army brigade defending the area and that brought Hudsons of the RAAF’s No. 1 Squadron into the attack, bombing and strafing. They sank one of the transports, but by 12.45 am on what was now Monday 8 December the Japanese had penetrated the barbed-wire defences on the beaches and gained a foothold for the advance inland. The stage was set for Yamashita and his 25th Army to drive south to Singapore, the feat that would bring him the nickname The Tiger of Malaya.

  Far across the Pacific, to the north of Hawaii, where it was still early on the Sunday morning, the six carriers of the Kido Butai were breasting a heavy swell to turn into the wind to launch their aircraft. The air crews had taken a hot bath, donned mawashi loincloths similar to those worn by sumo wrestlers and had eaten a special breakfast of rice and fish. As the flag signal for take-off was hoisted and then dropped at the mainmast of Akagi, the first wave of Zero fighters, then the high-level and dive-bombers, and finally the torpedo planes thundered from the flight decks and formed up above the fleet, black silhouettes against a crimson dawn.

  On Hawaii’s main island, Oahu, it was the beginning of a perfect day. A light trade wind blew wisps of cloud across purple mountains and the green of the cane fields below, carrying the sound of church bells ashore in Honolulu and the pipes of ships alongside in Pearl. Shortly after seven o’clock, at a radar station on the northern coast of Oahu, two privates of the US Army Air Corps were surprised to see a cluster of airborne blips growing on the screen before them, but when they reported it to their headquarters at Fort Shafter they were told not to worry: they could only be friendly aircraft.

  Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leading the air fleet, radioed back to the Kido Butai the code words ‘Tora, Tora, Tora’ – Tiger, Tiger, Tiger – indicating that the surprise was complete. Fuchida – who, remarkably, converted to Christianity after the war and became a preacher in America known as God’s Samurai – recalled the moment in his memoirs:

  As we neared the Hawaiian Islands that bright Sunday morning, I made a preliminary check of the harbour, nearby Hickam Field and the other installations surrounding Honolulu. Viewing the entire American Pacific Fleet peacefully at anchor in the inlet below, I smiled as I reached for the mike and ordered, ‘All squadrons, plunge in to attack!’ The time was 7.49 am.

  Like a hurricane out of nowhere, my torpedo planes, dive bombers and fighters struck suddenly with indescribable fury. As smoke began to billow and the proud battleships, one by one, started tilting, my heart was almost ablaze with joy. During the next three hours, I directly commanded the fifty level bombers as they pelted not only Pearl Harbor, but the airfields, barracks and dry docks nearby. Then I circled at a higher altitude to accurately assess the damage and report it to my superiors.7

  Eleven minutes after Fuchida’s radio message, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, radioed Washington and his fellow commanders, ‘Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill.’ It was too late. On Battleship Row, where seven great ships lay alongside in lines that formed a perfect target, the first bombs were hitting the USS California, then Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia.

  Minutes later, Arizona sank in a volcanic ball of smoke and flame when a bomb struck a for’ard magazine. Blazing fuel oil spread across the harbour, frying hundreds of men alive. Ashore, almost every American fighter aircraft was destroyed or damaged on the ground. Within half an hour, by 8.25, the pride of America’s Pacific battle fleet had been devastated. An hour later, as Fuchida’s first-wave squadrons formed up again for the return to their carriers, 18 ships rested on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, including five battleships, and 2386 Americans were dead. The Imperial Japanese Navy lost only 29 planes and 55 air crew.

  Operation Z had been executed to perfection. But there were fatal flaws in its plans. Yamamoto had neglected to order his squadrons to destroy Hawaii’s oil reserves and ammunition stores, which would have crippled what remained of the fleet for months. And the three aircraft carriers normally based at Pearl – Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga – were not there. Enterprise and Lexington were at sea that morning, and Saratoga was at San Diego, in California. They lived to fight again.

  As the day wore on, the final parts of Japan’s descent upon the Pacific fell into place. US commanders in the Philippines, including General MacArthur, had been aware for four hours of the destruction at Pearl but here, too, was inexcusable confusion. Generals and admirals could not contact each other. Urgent phone calls went unanswered. Orders were given and countermanded. Again, long-range Zero fighters destroyed the bulk of the American aircraft on their airfields. The ground was laid, the theatre prepared, for the conquest of the Philippines. A few hours later, the small American Pacific outposts of Guam and Wake were attacked, and the Japanese began bombing the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

  The news of Pearl Harbor spread rapidly to friend and foe alike. In his cabin on board Nagato in Japan’s Inland Sea, an exultant Yamamoto drank a sake toast with his staff. At the Kyuden, Hirohito solemnly placed his imperial seal on history’s most belated declaration of war. Loudspeakers outside in the streets were already boasting of the glorious victory.

  Franklin Roosevelt was lunching at his desk in the Oval Office when Admiral Kimmel’s signal was handed to him at 1.47 pm Washington time. Calmly, the President telephoned Cordell Hull to inform him of it, just as Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu were arriving at the door of the State Department in what is now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Hull kept the envoys standing as he pretended, with icy disdain, to scan their document. Then he ripped the two men to shreds and sent them packing, in words he recounted later:

  ‘In all my fifty years of public service I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.’

  Nomura seemed about to say something. His face was impassive, but I felt he was under great emotional strain. I stopped him with a motion of my hand. I nodded towards the door. The Ambassadors turned without a word and walked out, their heads down.8

  At Chequers, the country home of Britain’s prime ministers, Winston Churchill was at ease with cognac and cigars after a Sunday-evening dinner with the US Ambassador, John G. Winant, and the American diplomat Averell Harriman. The butler, Frank Sawyers, entered the room to say he had heard a report of the attack on the BBC 9 pm news. Churchill put a call through to Roosevelt, who replied, ‘It’s quite true … we are all
in the same boat now.’

  Australians woke on Monday morning to hear that the spectre they had long dreaded was now reality. White civilisation – the British Empire, of which they were so proudly a part, and the United States – had been violated by the Yellow Peril. John Curtin was asleep at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Melbourne when he was aroused by his press secretary, Don Rodgers.

  ‘Well, it has come,’ Curtin said. He called the War Cabinet together – a meeting that produced a small but remarkable step forward in Australian constitutional history. In 1939, Menzies had declared war on Germany ‘as a result’ of Britain’s declaration. In 1941, Australia beat the British to the punch by several hours. King George VI found himself at war with Japan by the decision of his Australian Government, not his ministers at Westminster. That evening, Curtin broadcast on radio to the nation, sounding a call to arms:

  …One thing remains, and on it depends our very lives. That thing is the cooperation, the strength, and the willpower of you, the people. Without it, we are indeed lost.

  Men and women of Australia, the call is to you, for your courage, your physical and mental ability, your inflexible determination that we, as a nation of free people, shall survive. My appeal to you is in the name of Australia, for Australia is the stake in this conflict. The thread of peace has snapped – only the valour of our fighting forces, backed by the very uttermost of which we are capable in factory and workshop, can knit that thread again into security.

  Let there be no idle hand. The road of service is ahead. Let us all tread it firmly, victoriously.

  Remarkably – we will not hear its like again – he concluded with lines from the poet Algernon Swinburne:

  Come forth, be born and live,

  Thou that hast help to give,

  And light to make man’s day of manhood fair,

  With flight outflying the sphered sun,

  Hasten thine hour

  And halt not till thy work be done.

  Perth was in Sydney when the news of Pearl Harbor and the Malayan landings came through, refuelling after bringing the Mariposa into port. Some of her men were ashore on a brief liberty. Others heard Curtin’s speech broadcast over the PA system. They rolled into their bunks and hammocks that night tense and sombre, nerves on edge. It had finally happened. War with Japan. Everyone knew they would be in the front line of the nation’s defences.

  The next morning, with all the other warships in the harbour, Waller sent the crew to air-defence stations, the men manning the 4-inch guns in case of yet another surprise Japanese air attack. A day later, they were at sea again for gunnery practice, firing both the anti-aircraft weapons and the main armament at targets towed for them, and that evening they did night exercises with a Free French destroyer, Le Triomphant.

  In the coming weeks, the news would grow ever more grave. Far to the north, great and terrible events were unfolding. Once again, decisions taken in faraway places, London and Tokyo, would touch off a chain of events that would shape the destiny of Perth and her crew.

  It is an axiom of warfare that the best laid plans do not survive the first encounter with the enemy. This now proceeded to come true across the Pacific and South East Asia. The Royal Navy’s Force Z – Prince of Wales and Repulse and a handful of elderly cruisers and destroyers, which included HMAS Vampire, a Scrap Iron Flotilla veteran – were at Singapore when the air-raid sirens sounded and the first Japanese bombs began to fall upon the island. After a round of hurried meetings, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Fleet, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, decided that he must take his ships to sea to forestall more Japanese landings to the north.

  Far from meeting the time-honoured British promise of Main Fleet to Singapore, however, Force Z was barely a squadron. Without the carrier Indomitable, still absent under repair, it was unbalanced. Air cover would have to be provided by land-based aircraft of the RAF and RAAF, if and when they were available.

  And Phillips himself was the wrong choice for the job. Pint-sized at just 1.6 metres – he was known throughout the service as Tom Thumb – he was as feisty as a gamecock, but his entire war so far had been spent behind a desk at the Admiralty as Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff. Nor did he have an impressive record of pre-war command at sea. Clever and political, he had been a protégé of Churchill until they clashed over the disaster of Greece, when, it was said, their relationship cooled. Some of his fellow admirals, vastly experienced men of the calibre of Andrew Cunningham, were appalled that he had been chosen for Singapore.9 He was known as a ‘big gun’ man, one of those who still believed the bomber was no match for the battleship.

  At sunset on that Monday 8 December, Prince of Wales, flying Phillips’s flag, slipped out of the great naval base with Repulse, formed up with the screen of four destroyers – Vampire and Tenedos, Electra and Express – and, in squalls of heavy tropical rain, took a dog-leg course north towards the Gulf of Siam.

  Captain William Tennant of Repulse addressed his crew. ‘We are off to look for trouble,’ he said. ‘I expect we shall find it …’

  The next morning, Phillips was informed from Singapore that the land-based air cover he had requested before sailing was not available. He could only press on, hoping that the monsoon weather might conceal his presence. In fact, he was spotted by a Japanese submarine that afternoon, which accurately reported his course and speed. Later that evening, as the clouds suddenly cleared, the bridge lookouts discovered that they were being shadowed at a distance by at least two Japanese planes. For Force Z, all surprise was lost. At bases in Indochina, the 22nd Japanese Air Flotilla of long-range bombers was loading armour-piercing bombs and torpedoes designed to attack shipping.

  Phillips now fell into confusion. He decided to return to Singapore, and, under cover of night, he headed back south. Then, shortly after midnight – it was now 10 December – he received a signal to tell him the Japanese were making new landings on the Malayan coast at Kuantan, far to the south of their original thrust at Kota Bharu. The Admiral decided he might now take this enemy force by surprise, and he changed course again. Muddle piled upon indecision. A Walrus aircraft from Prince of Wales flew over Kuantan and reported a false alarm; there was no sign there of any landing. So, once again, Phillips turned towards Singapore, still without air cover. With effortless efficiency, the Japanese closed the trap.

  Alarm starboard! At eleven o’clock that morning, nine Japanese bombers in tight formation were sighted heading for Force Z out of a sunlit sky. The big ships opened fire, hurling a blizzard of steel towards the attackers, but the Japanese pressed on untouched to straddle Repulse with an impressively accurate stick of bombs, one of which scored a direct hit and exploded below her catapult deck. Once again, the navy’s anti-aircraft-gunnery-control systems were simply not up to the job. Next came the torpedo bombers – Mitsubishi G4-M1 ‘Bettys’,10 a make the British never knew existed, capable of 400 km/h.

  Force Z writhed beneath the onslaught, but Phillips, who had not once in his career been under air attack, neglected to order a smokescreen, which might have helped shield his ships from their tormentors. The Japanese airmen ignored the destroyers. They wanted the big ships. Prince of Wales was hit by two torpedoes on her port side – one amidships and another one aft. The aft torpedo blasted a huge hole in her hull, killed dozens of men below, crippled her two port propellors and sent thousands of tons of seawater flooding into her stern. Circling helplessly at 15 knots, with her pumps making no headway against the inrushing water but her guns still firing, she began to settle. The sea surged over her quarterdeck. It was the beginning of the end.

  Captain Tennant of Repulse now took it on himself to signal Singapore requesting urgent air cover. Phillips should have done this when the first Japanese planes were sighted but, inexplicably again, he had not. Tennant’s signal was too late to save his ship. The bombers rounded upon Repulse as she nobly closed the flagship to see if she could assist. Manoeuvring skilfully, Tennant managed to comb the tracks of at least
nine torpedoes, perhaps more, but the enemy split up for a second attack, coming from two different directions, and no fewer than four torpedoes found their mark. Mortally wounded, Repulse began to list. She landed some blows of her own, shooting down two aircraft, but the list turned into a slow roll and her captain, realising that all was lost, gave the order to abandon ship. Men scrambled like ants down the starboard side, or jumped into the water to strike out for Vampire and Electra, which, ignoring the danger, had come to save them.

  Five young midshipmen of the RAN were serving in Repulse, a carefree bunch who had joined ‘The Old Lady’, as they called her, on the River Clyde in Scotland the previous March. At his action station below decks in the High Angle Control Position – a prison of four steel walls – Midshipman Guy Griffiths, an 18-year-old from Annandale in Sydney, recalls that he felt the torpedoes slam home and, not long afterwards, heard the order to leave:

  There was no panic or anything of that sort, just an orderly queue for the ladders. The power hadn’t gone, so we still had lighting to see by. I made it up – it must have been three or four decks – to a mess deck and managed to squeeze out of one of the scuttles, still in my uniform of white shirt and trousers. Then I just went down the starboard side and into the water. I was lucky I kept my shoes on, because the ship’s side was rough, and a lot of men had their feet cut to pieces. After a while, they took me on board Electra.11

  Griffiths was lucky to make it. He would see out the war fighting in some of the great Pacific battles to roll back the Japanese, and he ended his career as an admiral.