Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  ‘Full ahead both. Port 20.’

  ‘Full ahead both engines, sir. Port 20.’

  The first torpedo hit as they were settling onto the new course. Harukaze fired it, the destroyer they had seen first. It penetrated the starboard side between the for’ard engine room and A-boiler room, killing everyone there, including Dolly Gray, the Engineer Commander, and men above in the damage control party. The Gyro-Compass Room was just for’ard of the boiler room, part of Reg Whiting’s kingdom in the ship, and perhaps he died there too, although nobody ever found out for sure – least of all his wife, Allie, and their two boys, Johnny and Bren, back at their cottage in Sydney.

  The explosion sent Perth lurching upwards, heaving almost out of the water like a bathtub toy. Men were tossed around like dolls, and those on deck were drenched by a rushing wall of seawater. Bandsman John ‘Tubby’ Grant, below at the Fire Control Table in the Transmitting Station, was hurled off his feet:

  It was a hell of a thing, the blast. The ship shuddered, and the 6-inch and 4-inch tables both shattered, glass everywhere. We were in darkness until the secondary lighting came on. Johnny Ross, the Commissioned Gunner said: ‘We’ve got to get out of this, it’s no good down here.’

  So we headed for the one entrance out, through a manhole that could be opened from the T. S. We were hoping it wasn’t buckled. I climbed over a couple of blokes who couldn’t open it, and I went ‘whoosh’ and away she opened, and we all got out.7

  Fred Skeels, whose gun was right above the explosion, flew into the air and crunched back down again. Tag Wallace, sprawled on the deck in the Sick Bay flat, with the breath knocked out of him, could hear the screams of men being flayed alive by the superheated steam escaping in the boiler room. The ship slumped back into the water, listing to starboard and slowing noticeably as she lost power.

  ‘Christ, that’s torn it,’ said the Captain. He gave the order to prepare to abandon ship.

  ‘Abandon ship, sir?’ asked Hancox.

  ‘No, just prepare for it.’

  In the Sick Bay and the wardroom, the two doctors, Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Eric Tymms and Sam Stening, were working in a butcher’s shambles. Their white overalls were stained with blood and viscera. Nearby, where he was still humping 4-inch shells, Wallace could see his shipmates dying:

  The wounded were coming down to the Sick Bay flat in a steady stream now, and our doctors were attempting the impossible task of treating men with arms and legs blown away, riddled with shrapnel, burned beyond recognition by blast. The treatable injuries were bound up, but the serious cases were simply consigned to the growing pile of bodies in the starboard waist of the ship which, because of the violent changes of course, spread the pile across the whole side of the deck, and I was forced to climb over this mounting pile of dead.8

  Lieutenant Harper, standing by the binnacle on the compass platform, looking to starboard, saw the silvery phosphorescent streak of another torpedo heading for them. This hit them further for’ard, just below A-turret, and again the cruiser staggered like a wounded animal, although she was still moving through the water. But that was it. Waller, recognising that all was lost, now gave the order to abandon ship. Elmo Gee, on the bridge, reached for his bugle to make the pipe:

  We could hardly breathe from the thick smoke, and the Japs were continually firing at us. We took a lot of shelling up on the bridge. The shrapnel made a terrific noise, and sounded like we were being smashed with chains. All I could see were men moving around the ship, not knowing what to do next. Before midnight I felt the ship shudder when the first torpedo struck, and there was a shattering blast. By this stage some of the blokes had been hit, and a few were saying to jump into the water. I believed then that the ship was going down. I think I piped the ‘Abandon Ship’ order with my bugle over the loudspeakers.9

  Men began to make their escape. Some went obediently to their abandon-ship stations, only to find the Carley rafts there gone or smashed to ruins. Some milled around in the waist, trying to decide when to jump for it: get it wrong and you could be dragged down by the suction of the ship as she went under or chewed up in her still-turning propellors. On the quarterdeck, Fred Skeels and a few men snatched furiously at the lashings holding a Carley float and some of the timber rafts they had brought aboard at Priok. They freed them and pushed the rafts overboard. Fred hesitated for a moment, wary of the darkness below him, but then threw his tin hat over the side, heard it splash and jumped after it.

  Ken Wallace rummaged through the wreckage of the aircraft store for his pistol – a .45-calibre Webley issued to aircrew – and belted it around his waist. Then he thought it would probably hinder his swimming, so he tossed it away again. He fought his way to the ship’s rail and inflated his Mae West:

  A searchlight came on and blinded me in its glare. Then a storm of machine gun fire swept the decks; the water below my feet was lashed to foam like heavy rain and, as I hesitated at jumping into this cauldron, the torpedo hit almost under my feet. I remember flying into the air, perhaps ten metres high, felt a numbing shock of something striking my left wrist, then I fell towards the water and felt it close over my head. As I reached the surface I raised my left arm above the water to see how badly I was hit and was just in time to see my wristwatch snap its tiny thread of leather and drop into the sea.10

  Most of the bridge personnel left when they heard the order to go, every man for himself. Jock McDonough went aft to his cabin, where he stripped off his heavy anti-flash gear. Almost absent-mindedly, he took a piece of chocolate from his locker and began to chew it, then found his way back to the deck and jumped. He went under so deeply that he feared he was being sucked down with the ship, and he blacked out. He came to floating on the surface, with no recollection of how he had got there.

  Ray Parkin heard the abandon-ship order at the wheel, and he told the handful of men there to leave. He had his foot on the first rung of the ladder when the Captain called to him down the speaking tube. He turned back to answer: ‘Lower Steering Position. Chief Quartermaster.’

  ‘Leave both engines half-speed ahead – I don’t want the Old Girl to take anyone with her,’ Waller said.

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Both engines are half-speed ahead now, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  Then Parkin had another thought. ‘Do you require anybody to stand by the telegraphs, sir?’ he asked. He recorded Waller’s response in his memoir:

  The Captain’s reply came back clear and imperative, with all the warmth a father would use to tell a silly child to do something for its own good.

  ‘Get to buggery out of it.’11

  Towards the end, there were only three figures left on the bridge: Waller, Peter ‘Guns’ Hancox and Lieutenant Willie Gay, the Officer of the Watch. Hancox was bleeding from a shrapnel wound near his ear. ‘Let’s get off before she turns over,’ he said.

  ‘What about Hec?’ Gay asked. The Captain was standing a short distance away, in his Mae West, both hands on the bridge rail, staring down at the silent 6-inch turrets below.

  ‘He says he won’t come,’ Hancox replied.

  Waller turned to look at them. ‘Get off the bridge, Gay,’ he said.

  And that was all.

  Peter Hancox went down the port ladder and was killed when a shell or a bullet or another piece of shrapnel smashed into it. Willie Gay went down the starboard side, unscathed. He was the last man to see Hector Macdonald Laws Waller alive.

  Most of the men who abandoned ship were in the water when the third torpedo struck well aft, again to starboard. Those nearby had the life crushed out of them by the explosive power of 500 kilograms of TNT, and others even a few hundred metres away felt the shock waves like mallets on their chests, their stomachs, their testicles. Each shell that exploded in the water radiated another force to hammer at men struggling in their Mae Wests, clinging to debris or attempting to clamber onto a raft.

  Still they kept coming. Sam Stening was thrown into the air and knocked unconscious by one
of the torpedo strikes. He eventually woke to find himself on a raft, with a broken nose, dizzy from concussion. Polo Owen dived overboard like an Olympic champion but found that his Mae West would not inflate, so he struggled out of it and stripped naked to make swimming easier. Blood Bancroft pulled off his boots, stripped down to some football shorts and jumped. Ray Parkin jumped, too. Bob Collins took the plunge clinging onto Redlead. Frank McGovern, standing by the guard rail on the quarterdeck, kicked off his sandals but hesitated, fearful that he might get sucked into the ship’s propellors:

  But I had my Mae West on, so over I went. I just jumped over, and down I went, right under. And one of the screws was still slowly turning. I saw it as I went down. In the phosphorescence in the water, I saw this bloody huge blade, turning slowly and coming closer towards me. I said my last prayer and the next minute I was straight in amongst it. I was tumbled around like I was in a giant washing machine, and it shot me aft like I had a propellor up my backside. I went like a rocket and then shot out of the water. I looked back and I was about 200 yards astern of the ship. Then I got onto a piece of debris, one of the seats from the canteen, and later a Carley float that had been holed by one of the shells. There was a heap of blokes on that … for a while.12

  The fourth and final torpedo hit at about 12.15 am, this time on the port side. Gavin Campbell, the Captain’s secretary, had a leg cocked over the guard rail just as it exploded, and he was sent flying through the air:

  The fourth one hit just forward of me. I was about to jump overboard when the blast picked me up, and the sensation I had was of floating through the air, like sometimes you have in a nightmare. Fortunately, I had half-inflated my Mae West, and I was floating, floating. Then I landed in the water, and I noticed my shoes were missing. Another bloke came up and said, ‘Are you okay? Have you got enough air?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ and started to swim over to a raft, and then I felt something was wrong. I looked down and saw my leg wobbling. I’d finished up in the water with a broken leg.13

  These were some of the lucky ones, and there were more. When the first torpedo hit, Lieutenant Frank Gillan, in B-boiler room, tried frantically to find out what was going on. Snatching up a phone, he called the after engine room, the Damage Control Office, then the bridge. Not a sound. The ship’s communications were dead. Time to get out. But there was one more duty for him and for the handful of stokers staring wordlessly at him. They had to shut off the boilers – otherwise they would explode as the ship went down, probably killing everyone in the water. Methodically, the men closed off the oil supply and opened safety valves. Job done, they scrambled up the Stokehold ladders, fighting their way through the heavy steel door at the airlock. Lights were still burning fitfully, so they could see their way, but as Perth began to list still further they found themselves crawling along bulkheads, with the deck alongside them. A man lost his footing and fell, screaming, into a black hole that had been a passageway. Suddenly, Gillan found himself underwater, still inside the ship, but he knew he was close to a manhole leading to the upper deck. Lungs bursting, he rolled himself into a ball and, by some miracle, the backwash sluiced him over the ship’s side. It is likely he was the last man to leave.

  Many were not so fortunate. Some died mercifully quickly, others in slow agony. They died deep down in the groaning hull, blown to pieces instantly by the torpedoes or drowning in the prolonged horror of men trapped alive by a crushed bulkhead or a jammed hatch that would not open. Others were shot to ribbons by the gunfire that swept the starboard side of the ship as they tried to leave her. One of the men with Gillan, Chief Petty Officer Stoker Bill Reece, disappeared within seconds of reaching safety, lost in the swill of water inside the ship. A stalwart of the engine room, Reece had been decorated for bravery when Perth was bombed in the Mediterranean. Vince McGovern, Frank’s brother, was never seen again. George Hatfield, one of the original Portsmouth diarists, vanished as well, like so many others. His wife, Alma, would give birth to George Jnr in Sydney a few months later. Michael Highton, the B-turret officer, was blown away by a direct hit to a cutter he was lowering. So many names, some of them old hands from the Autolycus days, some of them new kids. There were 681 men on board Perth that night. Just over half of them – 353 – were lost with the ship or in the struggle to stay afloat afterwards.

  Houston was still fighting. In the distance, the Perth men in the water could see flashes of gunfire, stabbing white cones of searchlights and the occasional flurry of coloured tracer bullets soaring on the horizon. But for those who had abandoned ship – all of them exhausted and frightened, some of them, such as Bill Bee, injured and nauseous with waves of pain – the battle now was simply the elemental struggle to cling to life:

  The cool salt water had the effect of bringing me completely to my senses, and the thought suddenly struck me that I had better get clear of the ship, which I imagined was going to roll over on top of me. Luckily, my Mae West was still nearly inflated – it was, in fact, leaking air slightly – and so I had no difficulty in keeping afloat. My clothing at that time consisted of underwear, blue overalls with one trouser leg cut off, and one shoe which I kicked off. I struck out breast stroking as the ship glided by me, bows down, the starboard screws clear of the water and still turning.

  It seemed like ages paddling around in the water while I clung tenaciously to a plank of timber that happened to be drifting nearby. The sky was continuously being lit up by gunfire or searchlight as the Japs were now concentrating their fire on Houston. The concussion from every underwater explosion had the effect of being hit in the stomach as with some flat object, like the back of a shovel … a feeling of utter loneliness and abandonment came over me as I wallowed around in the oily water, wondering where in the world I was and how far away land might be.14

  Slowly, the ship left them all behind her. The fourth torpedo, on the port side, had steadied her list a little, but she was heavily down by the bow. Her stern was out of the water, where one of the four propellors was still turning, turning. The last they saw of her was a battle ensign flying at her mainmast, lit by the Japanese searchlights – a splash of red, white and blue in the night.

  And then she was gone, a stately actress at her last curtain call. Almost serenely, His Majesty’s Australian Ship Perth slipped under – some of them said she steamed out – about six kilometres to the north-north-east of St Nicholas Point. Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, the Assistant Navigator, noted the time on his watch. It was 12.25 am, on Sunday 1 March 1942. For the men still alive, a new and terrible ordeal of months and years was just beginning.

  Houston fought on alone, every bit as gallantly as Perth. She too was reduced to firing star-shell and practice ammunition. With his magazines flooded, on fire for’ard and listing heavily, and his decks strewn with the dead and dying, Captain Rooks ordered his bugler to sound abandon ship as Perth was disappearing below the surface.

  It was the last order he gave. Another shell hit near Houston’s bridge, and two young ensigns turned to find their captain dying in a pool of blood. One injected him with some morphine from a first-aid pack, the other covered him with a blanket. When the officers looked back again, they saw Rooks’s lifeless body being cradled by his weeping Chinese steward, Ah Fong. Both men, captain and steward, went down with the ship, at about 12.45 am. Of Houston’s crew of 1061, only 368 would survive the battle, to become prisoners of the Japanese.

  In all, the Japanese launched 87 torpedoes at the two Allied cruisers. Only seven of them hit. At least some of the Japanese captains simply lost their heads and fired at shadows. To this day, it is uncertain how many torpedoes sank or damaged their own vessels. One explosion rocked and almost capsized the Ryujo Maru, the transport carrying General Imamura, who was flung overboard and rescued after floating about for three hours clinging to a lump of timber. The General struggled ashore, covered in fuel oil and distinctly bad tempered, to be congratulated by an aide on his deliverance. The Ryujo Maru was beached, but her cargo of armour
ed vehicles followed Imamura into the sea. He would claim later his ship had been torpedoed by Houston – a face-saving invention to conceal the embarrassing fact of the Japanese own goals. Houston, as we have seen, carried no torpedoes.

  Certainly, both Perth and Houston scored hits on the enemy, although none of them was fatal. But they held out to the very last, against crushing odds. For the navies of both Australia and the United States, the Battle of the Sunda Strait was a bitter coda to three disastrous months of wartime retreat and reverse, redeemed only by the gallantry of those who fought there.

  PART 4

  Prisoners and Survivors

  CHAPTER 19

  FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

  The creeping light of dawn revealed a seascape of misery and death. Some men, the lucky ones, had managed to find their way onto one of Perth’s Carley rafts or a piece of flotsam big enough to get them out of the water. They sprawled in sodden heaps as the sun rose, some in scraps of clothing, some near naked, all of them exhausted beyond exhaustion. The bravest of the brave did their best to keep up spirits with a joke, a word of encouragement, even a song or a burst of swearing. Others were alone with their thoughts or their prayers. Some nursed an injury or cradled a dying shipmate.

  Men who had not made it to a raft floated in their Mae Wests, sometimes singly, sometimes clumped together seeking comfort in numbers. All around them were the dead: lifeless heads just visible above the surface or corpses floating face down among the junk, bobbing obscenely in the stinking pools of fuel oil that were already beginning to congeal.

  Oil is an insidious enemy of the sunken sailor. The stench is revolting, but that is the least of it. Exposed to water and sunlight, it thickens to an oozing tar, clinging to human flesh. A weakened man can find it coating his eyelids, blocking his nostrils and sealing shut his lips so that he suffocates. Or, if he swallows, it will poison his stomach and clog his lungs, killing him in an agony of cramp. The survivors saw the stuff spreading in the swell all around them, a sinister sheen in the growing sunlight, and many were slowly covered in its filth.