Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Of all the officers who might have been sent to command the AIF and its 8th Division in Malaya, Major-General Henry Gordon Bennett was the worst possible choice. A braggart with a colonial chip on his shoulder, his dislike of the British was not a good start. In fact, he didn’t like anybody very much. Quarrelsome, suspicious to the point of paranoia, Bennett was a poisonous cauldron of frustrated ambition. He had fought well at Gallipoli and in France in the First World War, finishing with the acting rank of brigadier-general and then returning to civilian life, but, as a part-time militia soldier, he had developed a fierce contempt for the army’s senior career officers. He believed they were conspiring to keep him from the top commands, and he nurtured a particular loathing for General Blamey, who, he sneered, was snatching all the glory in the Middle East – laurels that rightfully should have been his. Bennett was convinced that he should be commanding the entire Australian Army, not merely a division. He feared that his own staff officers were plotting against him – the ‘whispering gallery’, he called them – and he played favourites and bullied others mercilessly. He believed in astrology. Some of his senior officers, colonels and brigadiers, thought their commander was not right in the head.

  The reality of Singapore is that Percival and his senior commanders, Bennett included, were out-generalled by Yamashita at almost every turn. Brooke-Popham was the first to fail. When he telephoned the Governor to report that the Japanese had landed at Kota Bharu, Thomas loftily retorted, ‘Well, I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’10 Sadly, Brooke-Popham did not. Although he had in place a plan, Operation MATADOR, designed to counter just such a landing, he shrank from activating it without approval from London. Hesitating, Brooke-Popham was lost. Time and General Yamashita beat him. Close to a nervous breakdown, he was recalled home two days after Christmas.

  The Japanese, most of them experienced troops blooded in the war in China, swarmed south down the Malayan Peninsula. Individual British, Australian and Indian Army formations made brave but hopeless stands to stem the tide, only to fall back as the enemy outflanked them through the jungle or leapfrogged down the coast in flotillas of small craft. In the skies, the lumpy Brewster Buffalo fighter – ‘the Flying Barrel’ – was no match for the Japanese Zero, and airfield after airfield was overrun. Communications were chaotic; one fighter squadron was reduced to receiving its orders from Singapore passed on by the local railway stationmaster. Bennett himself bungled a crucial battle at Muar just north-west of Singapore in mid-January by placing a raw Indian brigade under his command in a suicidal position, which allowed the Japanese to surge through. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Anderson of the AIF’s 2/19th Battalion won a Victoria Cross in the fighting retreat that followed, but 110 Australian wounded were left behind to be murdered in scenes of unspeakable savagery by the Japanese Imperial Guards Division at nearby Parit Sulong. Typically, Bennett blamed the wretched Indians, but he had demonstrated that he was no better than the British generals he had so arrogantly disparaged.

  In Canberra, Curtin and the War Cabinet were beginning to think the unthinkable: that the British would abandon Singapore. On 23 January 1942, the Cabinet sent to Churchill a cable in Curtin’s name, although it was almost certainly written by the fiery External Affairs Minister, Herbert ‘Doc’ Evatt. The language was acid:

  After all the assurances we have been given, the evacuation of Singapore would be regarded here and elsewhere as an inexcusable betrayal. Singapore is a central fortress in the system of Empire and local defence.11

  As January drew to a close, Vivian Bowden’s reports to the Department of External Affairs painted an ever more depressing picture. Percival, he wrote on the 26th, was simply not up to the job:

  He appeared for instance to have no answer to Japanese infiltration tactics but to retreat, and I do not remember his ever proposing any counter-offensive action. Other incidents have suggested lack of decision. If Singapore is to be held I feel that high qualities of leadership, resource and determination will be necessary and I cannot feel confident that these will be found in the present General Officer Commanding Malaya.12

  It was all for naught. The disaster rolled on like lava from a volcano. On 31 January, the Allies abandoned the Malayan Peninsula and withdrew pell-mell to Singapore. The Japanese landed on the island on 8 February, scything through the defences – mostly the Australians – that Percival had spread too thinly across a front of 180 kilometres. Churchill sent the Supreme Commander, Wavell, another of his blood-and-thunder herograms:

  There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs … Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form …13

  Wavell flew into Singapore on 10 February. After a round of conferences, during one of which he was nearly killed by a Japanese bomb, he privately concluded that all was lost. Nonetheless, he issued his own ringing do-or-die exhortation for Percival to pass on to his commanders:

  It will be disgraceful if we yield our boasted fortress of Singapore to inferior forces … I look to you and your men to fight to the end to prove that the fighting spirit that won our Empire still exists to enable us to defend it.14

  That done, he flew back to Java, abandoning Singapore and its people to their fate. There were fine words and flag-waving sentiments in abundance, but they would not stop the Japanese rampage through the island. Bowden suggested to Canberra that he and his two Australian staff – the Assistant Trade Commissioner, Norman Wootton, and his political secretary, John Quinn – should leave on a ship about to sail for Sumatra, but he was told in a reply from Evatt that his departure would be bad for morale. Whose morale was not explained. ‘Anyway there it is,’ Bowden wrote to his wife. ‘Naturally I am very disappointed, for the opportunity seemed God-sent, but if my staying upholds national prestige I’m not going to complain.’15 Two days later, recognising that the end was only days away, he cabled again:

  All merchant shipping under British naval control has already left Singapore and naval and other offices for dealing with it including Harbour Board have been closed. Full programme demolition and denial is now being carried out including destruction of all money not in private hands. Except as a fortress and battle field Singapore has ceased to function.16

  On Sunday 15 February, it was all over, in an epic final act. Japanese aircraft were bombing and strafing at will. The great naval base had been abandoned in flames and everywhere across the island there were fires burning beneath a shroud of oily smoke. Rotting corpses lay in gutters and drains. Water and gun ammunition were running low. Government House was in ruins, forcing Shenton Thomas and his wife to doss down in two rooms at the Cricket Club. At Raffles Hotel, where Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham had stayed, the Chinese staff buried the restaurant silver in the garden. Gunfire cracked around Colonial Tudor bungalows whose facades were spattered with bullet holes and where slit trenches had been dug into the once-manicured lawns. European civilians thronged the docks at Collyer Quay, some stoically stiff upper lip, others weeping and begging for a place on the few ships left to make an escape. British and Australian deserters roamed the streets, drunk and violent. Scandalously, some of the Australians had been rushed to Singapore as reinforcements only a fortnight before; barely trained and poorly officered, many unable even to load a rifle, they broke and ran, and one panicked group of perhaps a hundred men forced their way at gunpoint on board a departing tramp steamer, the Empire Star, to the disgust of its captain and the women civilians on board. Japanese soldiers stormed into the Alexandra Military Hospital and bayoneted 200 patients, doctors and nursing staff, including one man about to undergo surgery on an operating table. In the Battle Box, Percival’s dank and gloomy command bunker buried in the hill of Fort Canning in the heart of the city, the GOC took the decision to surrender.

  Late that afternoon
, a sombre quartet of British officers plodded along the road to General Yamashita’s headquarters at the offices of the Ford Motor Company at Bukit Timah, just north of the city. Percival was to the fore, still wearing his tin helmet, with a brigadier beside him carrying the Union Flag on a pole. The Tiger of Malaya was waiting for them, seated impassively at a plain wooden table in the Ford boardroom. Head bowed, Percival signed a document of unconditional surrender. With nothing left but their dignity, he and Shenton Thomas went into captivity. The eclipse had taken just 70 days.

  Gordon Bennett, with different notions of dignity, had no intention of joining his British colleagues. Unknown to Percival, he had been planning his escape from Singapore since the beginning of February. On the evening of the capitulation – having ordered his own troops to stand fast – Bennett deserted them and fled. With two of his staff – Major Charles Moses and Lieutenant Gordon Walker – he escaped on a sampan that Walker found in the harbour. A British soldier, an accountant in civilian life, noted what he saw:

  There was complete chaos on the sampan. The General screams like a young girl and curses Gordon Walker who is standing up in the nude for being so, saying that it would be scandalous if the Japs saw him like that. He was like that because he had swum out to collect the sampan … Bennett completely useless, first crying, then imploring Moses or Walker to do something …17

  Bennett made it back to Australia, explaining to anyone who would listen that he had left because his first-hand knowledge of Japanese tactics would be vital in the battles ahead. The true reason was despicable: Bennett still nursed his febrile ambition to eclipse Blamey and command the entire army. Surrender would have ended all hope of that.

  At first, he was hailed as a hero, but the army brass spurned him and he was never employed to lead fighting troops again. After the war, a Royal Commission found Bennett ‘was not justified’ in relinquishing his command.18

  Vivian Bowden’s last cable, on the morning before the surrender, was sent from a small handset plugged directly into the telegraph line on the waterfront. It was to the point:

  Our work completed. We will telegraph from another place at present unknown.19

  With Wootton and Quinn, he found space on a motor launch, the Mary Rose, heading for Sumatra. On 17 February, two Japanese patrol boats stopped them and landed them on Bangka Island in the straits south of Singapore, where they were held in a cinema. Bowden had been told by Canberra to demand diplomatic protection if he was taken, but his Japanese captors were not impressed and he was badly beaten. When he argued with a soldier who demanded his gold watch, he was taken out of the cinema and led away.

  ‘He drew himself up, squared his shoulders and marched out of the hall between the two guards, who were carrying their rifles with bayonets fixed,’ Wootton reported after the war. ‘That was the last that I saw of Mr Bowden, but about half an hour later I heard the sound of two shots being fired, and shortly afterwards the guards returned to the hall and were observed cleaning their rifles.’20

  Vivian Gordon Bowden had been made to dig his own grave and was executed as he stood beside it. Almost forgotten now, he merits the approval of history.21 He was not the only Australian to die bravely on Bangka. At an isolated beach, Japanese soldiers marched 22 nurses and a civilian woman into the sea and machine-gunned them. Only one, Sister Vivienne Bullwinkel, survived. Badly wounded, she played dead in the water until the troops departed.

  The collapse of Malaya and Singapore was the greatest defeat of the war for Britain and Australia, and a catastrophe for the local population of Chinese, Malays and Indians. In all, 1789 Australians were killed, with 1306 wounded. The Japanese took more than 130,000 Commonwealth prisoners of war, military and civilian, including almost 18,000 Australians. Locals, especially prominent Chinese, were tortured and raped. On a larger scale, it was the death knell of the British Empire. Churchill was stunned by the destruction of the fortress – the vaunted citadel, the impregnable Far Eastern redoubt – which had fallen so easily and so quickly to an inferior number of troops. It was, he said later, the ‘worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.

  For Australians, it was indeed the inexcusable betrayal that many had feared but had hoped could never happen. The promise of Main Fleet to Singapore had been no more than the soothing swindle of statesmen down the decades. ‘Mr Churchill might be the world’s greatest spellbinder, but he has proved himself the world’s worst campaigner,’ barked The Bulletin magazine on 23 February. ‘The direction of strategy and the disposition of forces, weapons and munitions must, once and for all, be taken from his guilty and incapable hands.’

  Curtin told the Australian people the day after the surrender that:

  The fall of Singapore can only be described as Australia’s Dunkirk. It will be recalled that the fall of Dunkirk initiated the Battle for Britain. The fall of Singapore opens the Battle for Australia …22

  Actually, it was worse than Dunkirk. There, a British army had been saved. In Singapore, an entire Australian division was lost, almost one-quarter of the army’s front-line fighting strength. On the urgent recommendation of the government’s military advisers, Curtin and the Cabinet resolved to request the return home of the Australian divisions serving in the Middle East – a decision that would provoke the most furious row of all with Churchill.

  From the Australian perspective, there was no choice. Even before the fall of Singapore, the Japanese octopus had begun to extend other tentacles into the islands of the Netherlands East Indies, sending invasion forces into Borneo and the Celebes and quickly capturing the oil refineries at Palembang in southern Sumatra. On the island of Ambon, the local Dutch defenders and an expanded Australian battalion known as Gull Force were overwhelmed in early February. Beyond the East Indies, the port of Rabaul in New Britain, a gateway to Papua New Guinea, had been taken from Lark Force – a brave but hopelessly outnumbered Australian garrison. Port Moresby, Batavia and the Dutch naval base at Surabaya in East Java were being bombed regularly. Looking north in the summer of 1942, Australians saw peril advancing upon them, a new barbarism that was insatiable and apparently unstoppable.

  Perth had spent the first weeks of the New Year plodding here, there and everywhere on the humdrum routine of convoy duty off the Australian east coast. First, it was escorting troopships to Port Moresby, then trips to Noumea and Fiji – tedious work that meant keeping to the speed of the slowest ship in company. Waller relieved the monotony by exercising the ship in drill after drill and by dropping the occasional depth charge to shake up submarines real or imagined. Several whales met their end this way – victims of a suspect Asdic echo – but no enemy submariners. And he delighted in playing with his new toy, the Walrus, honing the skills of her crew and his own as a ship handler.

  Recovering the boxy little Pusser’s Duck could be tricky. The theory was that the aircraft should land in the slick of calmer water made by the cruiser’s wake as she turned in a slow arc, but it rarely worked out that simply in practice. The job required skill and luck in about equal proportions, for both ship and aircraft had to keep moving. Just one wave bigger than expected could swamp the Duck’s fragile fuselage or send a wing tip crunching into the ship’s side. The toughest part fell to Tag Wallace, who had to worm his way out of the small hatch above the cockpit and clamber past the engine nacelle onto the upper wing to seize the heavy hook swinging from the ship’s crane that would hoist the Duck on board. The first time they’d tried a recovery had been in the calm of Port Phillip Bay, and it had been a near-disaster. Hec hadn’t slowed the ship enough and Jock McDonough practically had to chase him to catch up, the Walrus bouncing across the swell like a ping-pong ball.

  Eventually, he perfected it. Perth would ease back to ten knots. McDonough, judging his landing nicely, would taxi alongside as the Observer, David McWilliam, grabbed the towing line from the cruiser to keep the two moving at the same speed. Wallace, balancing like a circus artist, joined the hook to the inbuilt sling on the
wing, and the Duck would rise neatly from the water, to be lowered back onto the catapult and held in position by the locking lugs. There was something very satisfying about getting this right.

  Hec Waller enjoyed using the Walrus – something he had never had in destroyers. It was a luxury that gave him eyes beyond the horizon; not as good as the replacement radar set that the navy was still declining to provide despite his repeated requests, but far better than nothing at all.

  Everyone knew that, sooner or later, they would be heading north. Paul Doneley, the young footballer from Queensland, was granted a brief leave and made a point of snatching some time with an older sister, Merle, who was in the WAAAF at Point Piper in Sydney. They took in the sights of Kings Cross, and he popped back again the next day to say goodbye. It was 20 January, his 18th birthday. She watched, with a catch in her heart, as he gave a final wave and walked away down Wolseley Road, bell-bottom trousers swinging and his cap with the Perth tally band set at a jaunty angle.23

  On the last day of January, a Saturday, Perth sailed from Sydney with the flagship Australia and the New Zealand cruiser Leander for another spell of convoy escorting in the Pacific. Next day, out of the blue, she was ordered to Melbourne. The change of course had been dictated by no less than the British and American Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Contemplating the disasters unfolding off Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, the Chiefs specifically asked that Perth be sent to stiffen the naval forces of ABDACOM, the ABDA command. Confronted by such a formidable request, the Curtin War Cabinet could only agree, however reluctantly. From Melbourne, Perth was to head west to Fremantle, then north through the Indian Ocean to Batavia to join Hobart in the battle to stem the oncoming Japanese tide.