Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Edith Rooks had flown to Hawaii from their home in Seattle to farewell her husband on his way to Manila to take over the new ship in August 1941. They had not seen each other since, and Rooks, in his letters home, was eager for news of their two boys, Albert Jnr, 12 years old, and Hal, who was at Harvard and destined to follow his father into the navy. Like his crew, Rooks had not received any mail since well before Christmas, and his words to Edith sometimes displayed a streak of loneliness and pessimism. At other times, he sought to cheer her up. ‘I have a feeling that fate is going to be kind to me and that on some happier tomorrow we will be walking the streets of Seattle in company as we do now in spirit,’ he wrote.4

  Here was another connection with Hec Waller, also a father of two sons, one of whom was also a future naval officer. We can imagine that home and family threaded their way into the conversation, over a beer or a gin in the cabin, surrounded by Hec’s collection of models of his Scrap Iron Flotilla ships. Or perhaps they kept to professional topics: Doorman’s disastrous leadership; his inexplicable failure to bring the cruisers within range for so long or the turn south that had come so close to running them both aground. Or maybe they took a wider view of the tide of war running so heavily against the Allies. And there was another touchstone: the memoirs of Houston’s survivors show that Rooks, like Hard Over Hec, had the profound respect of his crew. Some of his sailors had signed a letter vowing to serve with him through thick and thin.

  After farewelling the American, Waller turned to his friend, Polo Owen, who was still officially destined for Hobart. ‘Well, Polo, are you coming with us?’ he said. ‘Or would you rather be taken prisoner by the Japs?’

  ‘I’m coming with you.’

  While the Captain had been ashore, the usual buzzes went around the ship. Java was done for. Nothing was going to save the Netherlands East Indies. The bloody place wasn’t worth saving anyway. Surely, now, they would be returning to Australia. Men readied themselves in their own way, the young hands such as Buzzer Bee seeking assurance from the wisdom of their elders. ‘We’re not finished with those little yellow bastards yet,’ Percy Stokan told him.

  Not long before they sailed, there was a brief alarm when a Japanese reconnaissance plane flew low over the harbour, although without doing any damage, and there was another alert when a Dutch anti-aircraft battery on shore mistakenly shot at one of Houston’s scout planes returning to the ship, fortunately without hitting it. Far more worrying was a desertion in Perth’s crew: Redlead the cat had suddenly vanished ashore. Having two chaplains in the ship was bad enough, but for the ship’s cat to suddenly disappear before sailing sent a chill through everyone. Bob Collins, her keeper, was ordered to find her and bring her back, which he did, but Redlead made two more attempts to escape. Jan Creber, the Master-at-Arms, finally solved the problem by clapping her in irons – a kerosene can with holes cut in it. There might have been more disquiet still if they’d learned that Houston’s cat had also attempted to jump ship that afternoon.

  The sun, dirty red in the smoke, was lowering over the port as they heard the familiar pipes.

  ‘Special sea-duty men close up.’

  Waller had ordered Evertsen to join them, but the Dutch destroyer replied that she had no orders and no steam, so there was nothing to do but leave her behind.

  ‘Cast off for’ard.’

  The harbour pilot had disappeared and there were no tugs, but that couldn’t be helped either. They would have to make it through the protective minefield on their own, with Harper and his Assistant Navigator, Lloyd Burgess, trusting to their charts.

  ‘Let go back spring.’

  They were free. The two cruisers nosed past the breakwater and down the channel, Perth in the lead, the treacherous beauty of the palm-fringed Java coast disappearing astern in the gathering night. They were glad to get out of Priok, and, although weariness still sat heavily upon them in the heat, all seemed normal enough. The ship’s routine went on. Bill Bee, on the flag deck with his special charge, the starboard 18-inch signal projector, noticed that visibility was good in a rising moon. Gavin Campbell stretched out at his action station, the multiple .5 machine-gun mounting aft above Y-turret. In the wardroom, Dolly Gray and two of his engineer lieutenants, Frank Gillan and John Mears, were snatching a meal of Cornish pasties, the navy’s famous tiddy oggies. Also in the wardroom, the doctor, Sam Stening, thought he might try to get some sleep and went to his cabin. For Reg Whiting below at the gyro compass, Jack Lewis with his boilers, the McGovern brothers, Frank and Vince, Elmo Gee, Blood Bancroft, Bob Collins, George Hatfield, Fred Skeels, Ray Parkin, all of them, it was business as usual. Clear of the land, Waller ordered revolutions for 22 knots and signalled Houston to conform. The wakes opened up behind them in a silvery zigzag.

  ‘This is the Captain speaking.’ The loudspeakers crackled to life. ‘We are sailing for the Sunda Strait for Tjilatjap on the south coast of Java. Shortly, we will close up to the second degree of readiness. Air reconnaissance reports that the strait is free of enemy shipping, but I have a report that a large enemy convoy is about 50 miles north-east of Batavia, moving east. I do not expect, however, to meet enemy forces.’

  Tjilatjap? They had not been there before, and it was certainly not Australia, although it was closer to home, which was a good start. But the news would not have been well received in Houston: the Americans knew Tjilatjap only too well. They had buried their dead there after the battle in the Makassar Strait a few weeks ago, and it was a stinking hellhole, full of shit. Hopes of a return Stateside fell to the deck.

  Banten Bay lies on the north-west coast of Java, almost at the end of the island. Wide and open to the north, it was the logical place for the Japanese to land their Western Invasion Force of some 35,000 troops of the 16th Army, packed into the convoy of 56 transport ships that had been moving slowly down from Indochina in the last weeks of February. For the army’s Commander, Lieutenant-General Hitoshi Imamura, travelling on board the transport Ryujo Maru, everything so far had gone exactly to plan. A seasoned veteran of the wars in China, Imamura expected to put his force ashore in Banten and at another nearby port, Merak, in the early hours of Sunday 1 March.

  He had a strong naval escort to get him there. The close screen for the convoy was the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, led by the light cruiser Natori, with eight modern destroyers. Slightly further away was the 7th Cruiser Squadron of four heavy cruisers with a destroyer screen, and providing distant cover was the light aircraft carrier Ryujo. At 10 pm on 28 February – at the same time as Hec Waller was telling his crew he did not expect to meet the enemy – the transports entered Banten and began to drop anchor.

  Perth and Houston, hugging the long, dark line of the Java coast as they headed west, would pass Banten to port and then round St Nicholas Point, at the tip of the island, to enter the Sunda Strait. At 10.45 pm, they saw the gleam of the lighthouse on Babi Island – one long white flash every six seconds – off to starboard as expected. Waller had taken a break to kip flat-out on the deck. ‘Kick me if anything happens,’ he told the Officer of the Watch. Waking himself a little later, he stepped back to the rear of the bridge for a cup of kye. Jock McDonough, with nothing much to do, was peering through one of the big bridge rangefinders and thought he saw a dim shape ahead.

  And then, from one of the lookouts, a loud cry: ‘Ship, sir, bearing green oh-five!’

  Heads on the bridge turned to see a dark blur on the starboard bow, perhaps eight kilometres away, close to St Nicholas Point.

  ‘Very good. Make the challenge.’

  It was probably friendly, most likely one of the Australian corvettes they had been told might still be patrolling the strait. Percy Stokan clacked out the challenge on the Aldis projector, which should have produced the Allied Night Recognition Signal in response. It did not. The stranger flashed back two green lights, which the signalmen recognised as Morse for the letters U B. That was odd.

  ‘Challenge again,’ said Waller.

  This
time, there was no reply. The distant shape turned away and began making smoke, her silhouette broadening into the distinctive shape of a …

  ‘Jap destroyer!’

  ‘Action stations. Sound the alarm!’

  It was 11.06 pm. The rattles sounded through the ship. A Japanese destroyer! There weren’t supposed to be any bloody …

  ‘For’ard turrets open fire!’

  Four 6-inch guns thundered out their opening salvo.

  ‘One unknown,’ said Waller. That report went out from the Radio Room behind the Plot, and in faraway Darwin it was the first news that Perth was under attack.

  Houston spotted the enemy only seconds after the Australian cruiser, and her big 8-inch turrets opened up in quick succession. The Battle of the Sunda Strait had begun.

  It was not a trap. The Japanese were equally startled to find their enemy suddenly emerging in their midst. The destroyer Fubuki, patrolling out to sea from Banten, had sighted the two cruisers heading towards her at around 10.30 pm and apparently had assumed they were battleships. Perth, with her two tall funnels, had a silhouette easily mistaken for one of the Royal Navy’s King George V class. Fubuki shadowed these unwelcome intruders at long distance for half an hour, unnoticed by the lookouts in either ship. They should have seen her, but these were sleepless men far from their best. Radar would probably have detected the shadower, but Perth’s replacement set, the one Waller had argued and pleaded for, was still buried in navy paperwork back in Sydney.

  The destroyer that flashed the green light was Harukaze, patrolling with the 5th Flotilla. But if it was not a trap, it soon turned into one for Perth and Houston. To port, Banten Bay opened up to reveal a forest of masts, the transports already unloading their troops. Ahead, both to port and to starboard, the two cruisers could see the sea was now alive with enemy ships, blocking their way to St Nicholas Point and the strait. Counting them from the bridge was anyone’s guess. Two cruisers, maybe three, and who knew how many destroyers. And now flames were flashing from their guns. White searchlights blazed on and off, followed by the roar of shells flying overhead and landing in the frothing sea. ‘God, they’re all around us,’ said McDonough.

  Waller called for a speed of 26 knots and threw Perth into a hard turn to starboard that would open up his A-arcs, bringing his two after turrets to bear as well – a full broadside. Rooks, in Houston, would follow the Australian’s movements in close order throughout the battle, uncomfortably aware that his single rear turret remained out of action.

  The Japanese had panicked when they discovered the two Allied cruisers in their midst. When the alarm went up, the heavy cruisers Mikuma and Mogami were frantically summoned from the north, and Fubuki fired off a spread of torpedoes before disappearing into her own smoke. Thanks to Hec Waller’s skilful evasions and a serving of good luck, not one of these hit the target. Instead, they sped on into Banten Bay, where they created havoc among the troop convoy. Fubuki’s fish managed to sink a small minesweeper and at least one of the transports, the Sakura Maru, still filled with soldiers. Many of those men, heavily laden, some still carrying rifles over their shoulders, were swept out to sea to be drowned.

  But there were so many foes now, such a seething pack of ships ranged against them, that Waller ordered the guns into local control. There was no point in trying to coordinate their firing from the Directors and the Transmitting Station anymore, none at all. Fred Skeels, the 19-year-old from Inglewood in Perth, was loading at S1, the starboard-side for’ard 4-inch:

  Our own gunlayers frantically determined the targets and what they saw through their eyepieces I wouldn’t know. However, at times we were chasing the rear of the gun around, trying to get a 4-inch shell into the breech while they were changing their targets constantly in the mayhem of attacking and running at the same time …

  …you could see in the distance tracer shells soaring across the ocean, either after the searchlights or before them, and the outline of the enemy ship itself, before a number of flashes suddenly burst forth as the shells sought their target. Our 4-inch guns answered the attack as best they could and we just kept firing until there were empty shell cases all over the deck, which we had to kick aside to get up to the breech.5

  Perth swept into her long, fast turn, steaming in an arc of about eight kilometres in diameter. Frank McGovern, at one of the aft .5 quad gun mounts, could see Houston in their wake, guns spitting. The two ships twisted and heeled as their captains tried to anticipate the fall of the next shot. Hec Waller, leaning almost nonchalantly on the pelorus, the gyro-compass repeater, was calling helm and engine orders down the voice-pipe to Ray Parkin at the Lower Steering Position. Parkin’s arms were aching, back muscles knotting, as he wrestled with the wheel, which seemed almost to have a mind of its own.

  ‘Port thirty-five.’

  ‘Port thirty-five, sir.’

  ‘Slow port. Full ahead starboard.’

  At times, Parkin had to shout his responses above the crash of the ship’s own guns or the whine of an incoming shell.

  ‘Thirty-five of port wheel on, sir. Starboard engine full ahead, port engine slow ahead, sir.’

  Then it would begin again, the compass-card spinning.

  ‘Midships!’

  ‘Midships, sir.’

  ‘Steady on oh-four-five.’

  ‘Course oh-four-five degrees, sir.’

  The first shell hit them at exactly 11.26 pm, boring into the for’ard funnel and rupturing a steam pipe, which added its banshee shriek to the din. Another struck a few minutes later near the flag deck, where Bill Bee was waiting for an order to use his searchlight. Before the battle began, Buzzer had been chatting with a mate, Chief Petty Officer Don Viney, who was manning one of the multiple .5 machine guns just beneath him:

  One almighty crash just below and behind me, followed by a hot blast, simply hurled me about 15 feet in the direction of B turret. When I regained my senses I found Don Viney lying beside me in a pool of blood, obviously in great pain from wounds. In attempting to get to my feet I realised that I, too, had been hit in the right leg and could not put my foot to the deck. Don could not be moved at all. Somehow I managed to drag myself back across the flag deck, which was a shambles with a number of mutilated bodies strewn among the debris, and gain entrance to the Signal Distributing Office via the Visual Signalling Flat. I asked the first person I saw to take a stretcher to Don Viney, this was done promptly, and I saw him being carried down to the Sick Bay by Tom Risley and another signalman. Unfortunately, this was the last I saw of them.6

  Viney, an old hand who’d begun his naval life as a boy in Tingira back in 1920, was one of the first to die, his life draining away from an artery where an arm had been shot off. Tom Risley, Buzzer’s best mate, his go-ashore ‘Oppo’, would be killed minutes later, a young man not yet 22. And among the broken corpses strewn on the flag deck was the ship’s youngest officer, a 19-year-old farmer’s son from Winton in Queensland, Paymaster Midshipman Frank Tranby-White. He had joined the ship just two days before Christmas. In the Signal Distributing Office, faint from loss of blood, Buzzer could feel someone – he never found out who – whip a tourniquet around his leg. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in the bone.

  Fear began to grip many of them now: fear that they would not make it after all; fear that they would never see home again; fear that they would die. It welled up, ice cold. Some men found it paralysed them for a moment. In others, it produced an out-of-body vision, as if they were observing their personal torment from some safe and distant place. Images of home and family, of long-forgotten incidents of childhood, flashed into the mind’s eye and as quickly vanished. The terror of the imagination could be worse below decks, where every shell was a hammer blow and in some places you could watch the ship’s plates flexing. Other men had no time for fear. Thrusting shells into hoists and breeches, wrenching the wheels around to lay and train the guns, they laboured like beings possessed, gasping and retching in the stink of smoke and cordite, greasy in their o
wn sweat and urine. The noise was like punch after punch in the eardrums.

  On the bridge, Hancox worried that their ammunition was running low. He was counting the 6-inch as they fired, but it was impossible to keep track of the 4-inch guns. If the battle kept up at this rate, there’d soon be nothing left. Waller decided to get the torpedoes away, eight of them, loaded into their tubes in the waist below the 4-inch deck.

  ‘Get rid of them,’ he told the Torpedo Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Guy Clarke, one of the Royal Navy officers who had been with the ship since Portsmouth. The tubes were already trained outboard, the torpedoes armed. The starboard four rumbled into the water, then the four to port. There was not much point in selecting targets; there were so many of them. Clarke saw some explosions and thought they had scored a hit, maybe a couple, and so did his Torpedo Gunner, Len Smith.

  The Japanese destroyers were becoming more daring, darting in upon them. Further out, the heavy cruisers were firing over and between the smaller ships. Shells, large-calibre bullets and shrapnel seemed to fill the air. One destroyer raced towards them, searchlight blazing. ‘Put that bloody light out!’ shouted the Captain. Someone shot it away.

  Perth was taking more punishment now. A smashed boat hung from one end of its davits. The Pusser’s Duck exploded in flames and toppled overboard, taking the catapult and the ship’s crane with it. At around midnight, Hancox told Waller there was hardly any 6-inch ammunition left. And some of the 4-inch guns had begun to fire star-shell and practice rounds – anything to keep shooting. The Captain decided there was only one course of action left. They would make a break for it, to force a passage through the enemy, past St Nicholas Point and into the strait. Rooks and Houston, he knew, would follow him.