by Mike Carlton
Not everyone thought this was a good idea – least of all Rear-Admiral John Crace, the officer commanding the Australian Squadron. Crace constantly fumed at the way ships were snatched from him every so often by the government or the Naval Board without, he thought, any good reason. The despatch of Perth was particularly galling because it meant a further stripping of the defence of Australian waters in favour of a hazardous and quite possibly fruitless foray to the north. Crace confided his anger to his diary, which now rests at the Imperial War Museum in London:
About 2030 got a cipher from NB [Naval Board] saying Commonwealth government had concurred with a request that Perth should join the force in ABDA area and that she was to escort a US troop convoy leaving on 7th Feb.
This is maddening and must be, I think, an overruling of NB opinion by Government. Perth cannot make all the difference to ABDA whereas her loss here makes this force inadequate for its job. We must concentrate, and if there is to be a force in Anzac area it should be big enough for its job of trade protection and capable of dealing with a Japanese landing force in the Islands. If this cannot be provided then the cruiser force in Anzac waters should go complete to ABDA.
We shall be eaten up piecemeal if the present policy of having a few ships everywhere is continued. Sent a long cipher to NB in the above sense.24
The Admiral’s concerns were well founded. ABDACOM was a shambles. Impossibly, its boundaries stretched thousands of kilometres, from the Burmese frontier with India in the west, to the Philippines and as far as Taiwan in the north, south to Darwin, and east from Malaya across the sprawling archipelago of the Netherlands East Indies to New Guinea. It was a theatre of war vastly bigger and more populous than Continental Western Europe – a concept that evidently escaped the fine minds of Washington and Whitehall. ABDACOM’s army, naval and air forces were a jumble of whatever could be scraped together in the panicky months after Pearl Harbor and Singapore, commanded by generals, admirals and air marshals of four nationalities who, in most cases, had never met each other, let alone formed any common strategy to confront an experienced and cohesive enemy. Headquarters were hastily set up in various ports and cities in Java, creating a tangle of red tape exacerbated by the need to translate orders from English into Dutch and vice versa.
It would not be fair to blame General Wavell for the mess. He had been handed the job by Churchill, with Roosevelt’s concurrence, and told to get on with it, which he did. ‘Talk about being left holding the baby,’ he had remarked drily to his staff. ‘They’ve given me twins.’25 They were twins stillborn.
Perth and Hec Waller had more immediate matters to deal with. On the way to Melbourne, there was a report of a German raider off Wilsons Promontory, the southernmost point of the Australian mainland. With the loss of Sydney still fresh in mind, they went to full speed and the Duck was scrambled to take a look, although the seas only just qualified for a safe take-off and recovery. Happily for Jock McDonough and his aircrew, the report turned out to be false.
Happier still for most of the ship’s company was the news when they reached Melbourne that Pricky Reid was to be replaced as Perth’s Executive Officer. As ever, the Naval Board gave no public reason for the change, but the buzz was that he had been made the scapegoat for the fire in Sydney before Christmas, even though he had been ashore when the alarm was raised. Privately, he was officially informed that he had ‘incurred the Naval Board’s displeasure’ – a serious censure. Charles Reid had been an unfortunate figure but he was by no means an incompetent officer. He had performed his duties conscientiously under Captains Farncomb, Bowyer-Smyth and, briefly, Waller. But his manner had grated. The nickname said it all. Starchy, however well he meant, he had not been a good manager of men. He had got the sailors’ backs up – a failing quite possibly recognised by Waller, who, presumably, could have pulled strings to retain Reid as his second-in-command had he wanted to. His career was blighted. He was never to be confirmed in his acting rank of commander and never served at sea again. The scapegoating was an injustice, but there it was.
The new XO who marched up the gangway at Williamstown was Commander William Harold Martin, known as ‘Pincher’, the nickname inevitably bestowed upon Martins in the navy, like it or not. Born in 1903 at suburban Drummoyne in Sydney, Pincher passed out from the naval college as a midshipman in 1921 and, after the usual Snotty spell in two battleships of the Royal Navy, he set about making a career as a hydrographer, or marine surveyor. Before his posting to Perth, he had commanded the RAN’s sole survey vessel, the elderly sloop HMAS Moresby, which led to some raised eyebrows in Perth’s wardroom. Hydrographers were a rare breed, regarded as slightly dotty by more conventional officers, whose household gods were guns, signals and navigation. Commander Martin had not served in a cruiser since a short stint in HMAS Canberra as a young lieutenant in 1930 and, so far in this war, he had not heard a shot fired in anger. But he and Hec Waller had known each other from their days at the Admiralty in London and were good friends. Their young sons had played together. Pincher, though, would be on a steep learning curve as Waller’s second-in-command.
By 8 February, Perth was in Fremantle, where the confusion of ABDACOM descended upon her. The next day, she was ordered to Batavia, but hardly had she steamed out of Gage Roads and into the Indian Ocean when that was countermanded and it was back to Fremantle again. This was fine by the Western Australians in the crew, who found themselves with a spot of unexpected home leave. Bill Bee went back to Howick Street in Victoria Park to see his father, who had served in the First AIF and was now joining the Second at the age of 53, and he paid his respects to the Whitton family across the road, who had lost their son Bert, a telegraphist in Sydney. But the uncertainty added to the unease among the ship’s company and there was more dither to come.
Their next assignment was to sail on 13 February with a convoy of tankers to the port of Oosthaven (now modern Panjang) in southern Sumatra, where they would take on oil from the refineries at Palembang. This was not good. The 13th was a Friday, and sailors are a superstitious lot. To put to sea on a Black Friday would be courting disaster, and, as if that wasn’t enough, there was another worry to contend with: Perth now had two chaplains. Her original padre, Ron Bevington, had been joined by the Reverend Keith Mathieson, a Methodist from Victoria, who had turned up to take passage to Batavia, where he was to transfer to Hobart. Two God-botherers in a ship was a very bad omen indeed. The gloom deepened. In a moment of solitude on that Black Friday, Reg Whiting wrote a longing letter to his wife, Allie, back in Sydney, in his neat copperplate hand. The strain was beginning to prey upon him. He had applied for a transfer out of the ship, but it seemed not to be happening:
We are as you can guess standing by for any emergency and tonight we are off, where to I wouldn’t like to suggest, but I have ideas and am not very enthusiastic, however, I suppose I can weather it all, I hope. What hurts is having to go through it all again, especially when you know there are many who haven’t had a go up to date.
…all I feel like is a change, there are not many left on board now of the original ship’s company and I feel like a break, being not quite the man I used to be. I would have liked to have heard from you, Darling, before pushing off for the third time …
I hope everything is all right, possibly there may be an Air Mail this evening and I may be mentioned. If not, well I take the opportunity now, Darling, in sending you all my Fondest Love, and fondest love to Johnny and Bren. I don’t know what is ahead of us, but I feel sure everything will be all right, and our Guardian angel keeps over us.
We have already taken a trip North but were recalled, you can guess why by hearing the news, and now it looks as if we are going up again into it. So here’s keeping my fingers crossed. Just heard the buzz, we go on starting tomorrow, so it looks as if we are for it, however you never know, plans can change in a matter of an hour or so. I don’t want to go places. I just want to go home …
…now don’t go getting any ideas into
your head and don’t listen to any rumours you may hear, we have been through it before and I guess we can do it again …
Well my dearest Darling, chin up and a big cheerio. I am well, considering. Sending you all my fondest love, Sweetheart.
Your Loving Boy,
Reg
Love and kisses for Johnny and Bren,
Daddy.26
It was the last letter Allie would ever get from him. Decades later, when he found the faded notepaper in his mother’s old red cedar box, Brendan Whiting came to believe that his father had knowingly written a final farewell. Perhaps there had been some premonition. Reg, like so many of his shipmates, like Hec Waller himself, was about to leave Australian shores for the final time.
But not on Black Friday. Aware of the crew’s disquiet, the Captain contrived to delay their departure until after midnight. The lines were cast off when Saturday the 14th was just 30 minutes old. A few more bodies had joined at the last minute, including Lieutenant-Commander Philipp ‘Polo’ Owen, an old friend of Waller who was also taking passage, like Mathieson, to meet up with Hobart.
Perth found her tankers off Cape Leeuwin the next day and, with the old cruiser Adelaide in company, began the slow haul towards Sumatra. Then they heard on the radio that Singapore had fallen and with that the dithering descended into dark farce. Everybody was making decisions, nobody was making decisions. The Palembang refineries had also been taken by the Japanese. There would be no oil for the tankers in Oosthaven, so again Perth was ordered back to Fremantle to refuel before heading north once more, for a third time, with a regrouped convoy.
And this was on the back of perhaps the worst news of all. On 19 January, the carriers of Admiral Yamamoto’s Kido Butai had penetrated south into the Timor Sea and bombed Darwin. Eight ships in the port were sunk – including the American destroyer USS Peary – many more were damaged and an estimated 243 people were killed. Darwin, in those days little more than a ramshackle tropical outpost, was devastated, a tableau of smoking rubble, sunken and burning ships, and charred bodies floating in the harbour. There was panic and looting and cowardice. Anxious to minimise the psychological damage, the Curtin government dishonestly claimed that only 17 people had been killed, but it could not conceal the horrifying truth: that at last the war had arrived on Australian soil.
At his ABDACOM headquarters outside Bandung – a pleasant hilltop town in Java some five hours’ drive to the south-east of Batavia – Archibald Wavell was considering his options. The Dutch, still resentful that they were not in command, constantly urged him to fight to the last. A similar stirring message had arrived from the American and British chiefs in Washington:
Every day gained is of importance. There should be no withdrawal of troops or air forces of any nationality, and no surrender.27
But Wavell was by now a past master at playing a losing hand, and he realised that yet again he had been dealt one. ABDA was plainly disintegrating before his eyes. Its naval command, ABDAFLOAT, had fought some hapless battles in the seas surrounding Java – dispiriting affairs that had seen ships and men lost but had done nothing to stem the Japanese thrust. The ABDAFLOAT Commander, Admiral Thomas C. Hart of the United States Navy, quit his post on 16 February, ostensibly for health reasons but in fact because Washington did not want a high-ranking American officer seen to preside over yet another major defeat.28 Wavell’s resources in the air were a few struggling squadrons of bombers and reconnaissance planes, with no fighter aircraft to speak of. His ground forces, apart from a handful of British and Australian troops, consisted largely of the KNIL, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, commanded by a resolute Dutch officer, Lieutenant-General Hein Ter Poorten, but made up of Indonesian conscripts with no love for their colonial overlords. Batavia and its port of Tanjung Priok, and the naval base at Surabaya, were being bombed virtually around the clock. Wavell recognised that the party was over. On 21 February, he cabled Churchill to tell him so:
I am afraid that the defence of ABDA area has been broken down and that defence of Java cannot now last long. It has always hinged on the air battle … Anything put into Java now can do little to prolong struggle; it is more a question of what you choose to save … I see little further usefulness for this HQ … I hate the idea of leaving these stout-hearted Dutchmen, and will remain here and fight it out with them as long as possible if you consider this would help at all …29
By this time, Churchill had also decided to abandon Java and the Dutch. His restless energies had turned to Burma, the last bulwark between the expanding Japanese Empire and the jewel in the British imperial crown, India. Burma would be saved, he thought, by diverting the Australian Army’s 7th Division, now on its way home from the Middle East, to the Burmese capital, Rangoon. This was a ludicrous proposition. Most of the division’s heavy stores had been loaded in separate ships. The Australians would have arrived with little more than rifles and their officers’ pistols to confront the IJA. Politically and, indeed, emotionally, Australians wanted their diggers back to defend the homeland, not floundering around in yet another distant foreign expedition. In an exchange of cables with John Curtin, Churchill attempted first some honeyed blandishments and then the mailed fist:
…I am quite sure that if you refuse to allow your troops, who are actually passing, to stop the gap and if in consequence the above evils affecting the whole course of the war follow, a very grave effect will be produced upon the President and the Washington circles on whom you are so largely dependent … We must have an answer immediately, as the leading ships of the convoy will soon be steaming in the opposite direction from Rangoon and every day is a day lost. I trust therefore that for the sake of all interests, and above all your own interests, you will give most careful consideration to the case I have set before you.30
Curtin resolutely stood his ground and Churchill had to back down. The 7th Division, or most of it, returned to Australia. But the British Prime Minister had now lost interest in holding what everyone had once so boldly referred to as ‘the Malay Barrier’ protecting Australia’s northern approaches, and he gave Wavell permission to quit. ABDA collapsed. Tasting yet again the ashes of failure, Wavell flew back to India on 25 February.
‘Stand to the dawn!’ The familiar pipe marked the beginning of each new day for Perth as she continued north with her convoy, the sun rising on her starboard quarter, the weather growing ever more close and hot. If it was uncomfortable for the men at action stations above decks in their protective anti-flash clothing and steel helmets, it was far worse for those in the engine spaces and boiler rooms, where temperatures went well over 120 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. The ship’s veterans, such as Commander Gray or Jack Lewis, took it in their stride, but for the younger stokers just joined it was hard labour in a blast furnace. Drenched in sweat, bodies quivering, they vomited or collapsed from sheer exhaustion, to be revived with a bucket of water.
After a quick breakfast for Jock McDonough and the aircrew, the Pusser’s Duck roared off the catapult to scan the sea and sky ahead. They did it again in the evening, at the start of the second dog watch. These were dangerous waters now, and Hec Waller was taking no chances. ‘We shoot first and ask questions afterwards,’ he told his officers.31 A small island trader that appeared on the western horizon was startled to hear a 6-inch shell whistling across its bows when it failed to identify itself quickly enough.
To people who knew him well, Waller’s mood seemed to have changed. He seemed a little tired, preoccupied, which concerned Polo Owen:
I spent some hours with him yarning in his sea cabin. Things were different from the Mediterranean days where, despite the shortages of men, ships and material, the operations were British almost entirely. Certainly the Command was; whereas in this sphere, the ABDA Command was being constantly changed with resulting confusion. The news was of course as despondent as it could possibly be; and we all felt we were moving towards the trap. Waller reminisced over Mediterranean days: ‘Polo, you’ve had your fill of bombin
g but, believe me, gunfire is really hell let loose and far more frightening!’ he said.32
Then the game changed again, with more dithering on high. On 21 February, the very day that Wavell was conceding defeat to Churchill, the Naval Board again ordered Waller to reverse course and return to Fremantle. Hardly had that message been decoded when yet another signal arrived, instructing Perth to press on once more for Tanjung Priok, leaving the convoy to make its own way home. The confusion was infuriating, but at least they could now get a move on. The Captain rang down for a much more gratifying 28 knots.
The order to proceed to Priok came from John Collins, who had sunk the Colleoni in 1940 and who now, with a broad gold stripe on his sleeve, was Commodore Commanding China Force. In the tangled mess of ABDA, it went without saying that China Force had nothing to do with China. The name was a relic of better days. Collins was based at Batavia, in charge of a motley collection of British and Australian cruisers and destroyers covering the chaotic exodus from Singapore and protecting the seas off the western end of Java. Some controversy still surrounds his summons to Perth. With Wavell’s cable to Churchill in mind – ‘Anything put into Java now can do little to prolong struggle; it is more a question of what you choose to save’ – historians have asked, and rightly, why the ship was despatched to prop up a lost cause.
It was not Collins who had made the decision but his masters at the Naval Board back in Melbourne and, above them, the War Cabinet. In one aspect, the matter is academic. Orders were to be obeyed without debate, and Perth was therefore on her way. But, in a larger view, the question and answer are crucial. Once again, Australian fighting men were being committed to a battle that made no military sense at all. It was Gallipoli, it was Greece and Crete, it was Malaya and Singapore, the old story all over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Political expediency trumped military strategy, as it so often does. The War Cabinet had agreed to the request of the Chiefs in Washington that Perth should go. Australia could not be seen to back away from the fight, however futile that fight might be.