Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

The sea was getting a bit turbulent by this time, and one of their frigates was circling around us. We said, ‘What’s going on with this bastard?’ Slowly, he turned around to head away, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Then, one of the Nip officers came down on the quarterdeck with a loudhailer and shouted in English, ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’

  Bastards. We gave him a sailor’s farewell. So then we got into the other lifeboats, about ten or 11 of them. Vic Duncan and me and the others were in four boats, about 20 or 30 to a boat, and we decided to head towards China. Brigadier Varley and a number of survivors were in another six lifeboats all tied together. Another boatload came alongside with mainly Perth men in it, including Frank Ritchie and Danny Maher. They said they could take two more, and I was about to join them when two army blokes got there first. Ritchie said, ‘We’ve got enough now, Mac, see you later.’ That boat joined the Varley lot and headed north towards the Philippines. They were never seen again. The action of those two diggers stepping into the boat first proved fortunate for me. Again, the guiding hand of the Lord was with me.10

  Nobody ever discovered what happened to Varley and the men in those boats. They disappeared over the horizon. Not long afterwards, the Vic Duncan group heard gunfire coming from that direction and they recognised the sound of naval pom-poms – the sort you would have on a destroyer or a frigate. They assumed, with dread, that Varley’s people had been massacred in the water. Arthur Varley, the Victoria Cross winner, had been a fine leader in the fighting in Malaya and on the Railway of Death. Able Seaman Danny Maher was the bloke who had stuck with the crippled Gavin Campbell in their agonising trek down the Java coast after Perth’s sinking at Sunda. Duncan’s group, hungry and parched, continued to head west, hoping to reach the Chinese coast. Frank McGovern recalled:

  There was a following sea and we made good progress. Vic was buggered, because he’d been organising a lot of things, so I stayed on the tiller in our boat. We found an empty cigarette tin in the boat and used that to eke water out of the keg at dusk and sunset. It was stinking hot, so we’d look out for the ‘Noah’s Arks’, dunk ourselves over the side of the boat in the water then get back in.

  On the third morning, a Jap recce plane came over and then up came two Jap frigates, with the crew manning their guns. Max Campbell in one of the boats said, ‘I don’t like the look of that,’ because we’d heard machine-gun fire in the direction of the others the previous day. Campbell said, ‘If anybody believes in God, you’d better say your prayers now …’

  But the Jap skipper lowered a scrambling net over the side and we got on board. They took us to Hainan, put us on an oil tanker and then a whaling ship, and eventually we got to the port of Moji in Japan. There were sub attacks all the way.11

  The sea was still strewn with survivors, many hundreds of them. After a long and frustrating search, the Pampanito had found and torpedoed the other hell ship, the Kachidoki Maru. Of the 900 British prisoners aboard her, 244 were killed in the explosion and fires that followed, leaving 656 to the mercies of the Japanese and the ocean. They, and the remaining Australians from the Rakuyo Maru, struggled in a scum of fuel oil and debris spread across an ever-widening tract of the South China Sea. Some hung onto a plank or a spar alone. Others put together makeshift rafts, where they would, at least, have company.

  Into the second day and then the third, men started to go mad. And to die. Tormented by starvation and thirst, many succumbed to the temptation of gulping seawater, which plunged them first into hallucinations and then into the coils of insanity. They held rambling conversations with mothers, wives and children, cackling with laughter or moaning piteously. Others saw visions of desert oases or palm-fringed beaches, chimeras of ships with billowing sails come to rescue them, horses to ride away. Some men who turned violent in their insanity were either drowned or strangled to save others on the rafts endangered by their thrashing and raving.

  Still more died alone and anonymously, out of sight. The Turnbull brothers from Queensland – Jack, Bill and Ken – were all lost in the South China Sea. No one ever saw Bill and Ken, the young soldiers, after the Rakuyo Maru went down. A few men recalled seeing Jack, the Perth stoker petty officer, in the water but do not know what happened to him. Florrie Turnbull, their recently widowed mother in Brisbane’s West End, had lost all three boys. Jack was the eldest at 32, married, with four children.

  After a hurried dive to avoid a Japanese aircraft off Hainan, Commander Summers brought Pampanito back to the surface and resumed his patrol eastwards towards the Philippines. Sealion was with him, some 25 kilometres away over the horizon. Growler, her torpedoes expended, had already returned to Saipan. It was 15 September – three days after the sinkings. After the change of watch at 4 pm, the lookouts atop Pampanito’s conning tower spotted what looked like rafts with men on them. Suspecting that the waving figures might be Japanese, Summers ordered a boarding party on deck with machine guns, then swept warily past the rafts, inspecting them through his binoculars. It was hard to tell who or what they were until Pampanito’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Landon L. Davis Jnr, heard someone shout, in English, ‘Save us, please!’

  We decided to pick them up; we put the guns away, made a big circle and came back to them. The biggest problem with the first boatload was to keep the sons-of-guns from jumping off the raft. They wanted to jump and swim aboard right away. By this time we realized that they were British or Americans or something because they were speaking English – we could recognize it all right. We put a couple of men over the side, they jumped over and swam to this raft and persuaded the people to stay on it, and we fastened a line and pulled it in close to the sub and then put some men down on the side and heaved them aboard. They were very hard to handle, they were just covered with a heavy oil, all over their bodies, their hands, and we had a devil of a time trying to get them on board, they were slick, couldn’t pick them up. They were quite weak and they couldn’t help themselves very much because they had been in the water about four days and didn’t have much strength left. We didn’t know exactly what to do with them – they were just as happy as they could be – I remember the first one that came up – he actually kissed the man as he pulled him up on deck, he was so happy to get on there. They were quite in a state of hysteria.12

  The first man they hauled on board was an Australian, Frank Farmer, an army private with the 2/10 Ordnance Workshop and a former schoolteacher from Black Rock in Melbourne. Landon Davis questioned him at the foot of the conning tower, and the Americans were stunned at the dimension of the tragedy that confronted them. Horrified, they realised they had caused the death and destruction. It was war, and the ships had not been marked as carrying prisoners, but that did not diminish the anguish they felt. Summers radioed Sealion for help and began to fish men out of the water, moving from raft to raft, volunteers diving into the swell to secure lines to those too weak to help themselves.

  American submarines did not carry a doctor, just one pharmacist’s mate or medic. As the wretched figures were lowered down the hatches, Pampanito’s crew rallied around to tend to them. Gently, they swabbed their bodies with diesel fuel or raw alcohol to get the oil off, gave them shots of morphine if they were in pain, then laid them in bunks hastily knocked together on the racks in the after Torpedo Room. The cooks busied themselves with relays of beef broth, toast and cocoa, but some men could only suck on rags soaked in water.

  Eli Reich and Sealion, travelling at flank speed, arrived at 6.30, an hour before sunset, and the rescue now became a race to collect as many men as possible before darkness set in. Sealion was the first to pick up Perth sailors: Redlead’s keeper Bob Collins and A.B. Jack Houghton, a 23-year-old from Wynnum in Brisbane. Collins and an air-force mate, Leading Aircraftsman Noel Day, from Byrock in New South Wales, were floating on part of a hatch cover. Collins recalled:

  At first, they thought we were a couple of Japs who had survived the sinking. It’s a wonder they didn’t shoot us. Noel Day, who was on the hatch board
with me, yelled out: ‘Get that fucking thing over here, you bloody Yanks!’ The Americans later told us they thought: ‘They must be Aussies, they’re the only ones who cuss like that.’ A big bloke who looked like Johnny Weissmuller dived in, put a line around me and they hauled me up like a tuna. My rescuer later received the Navy Cross for this action.

  Delighted as I was to be rescued, I was upset because they made me throw away my nice leather wallet, which they were frightened might transmit some exotic disease on board. I was stripped naked and they scrubbed me down in a white tiled bathroom. It was marvellous. I had long hair and a long beard. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise myself.13

  As darkness fell, the submarine skippers called off the rescue with heavy hearts, knowing that they were abandoning men in the water. Pampanito had picked up 73 survivors, which meant doubling the number of bodies on board. Sealion recovered 54 men. Both boats bent on four engines and headed for Saipan. Questioned by Reich as they recovered in their bunks, Collins and Houghton told him of the loss of the Houston, the first eyewitness account the US Navy had received.

  Blood Bancroft watched in despair as Pampanito vanished into the night, the throb of her diesels fading into the distance. Her departure left a terrible quiet, broken only by the slap of the sea. He was on a crude raft with five other men, and there were still dozens more in the water, including Lloyd ‘Darby’ Munro, a Perth stoker from Byron Bay in New South Wales, 21 years old, who was hanging on to some wreckage not far away. Bancroft felt then that all hope of salvation had gone. The sun was pitiless by day and the nights were chilly. They were smeared with oil, blistered by sunburn, gasping to breathe, their tongues swollen in salt-caked mouths. They had no food or water. Some men tried collecting their own urine in cupped hands and drinking it. One knot of men attempted to open the veins of others who had died, to drink their blood. The next day, the weather began to blow up, and by the evening strong winds and a heavy rain were whipping the wave tops white. Blood and his mates managed to collect some rainwater in a small wooden bucket they had found, drank from it greedily and lashed themselves to the raft as best they could.

  But help was coming. Pearl Harbor had ordered two more submarines to head for the rescue zone. Barb and Queenfish, from the wolf pack Ed’s Eradicators, were on the scene the next morning, 17 September. Barb’s skipper, Commander Eugene Fluckey, conned his boat slowly through seas rising beneath a 25-knot breeze, the bridge crew sombre at the sight and stench of bloated bodies, both Japanese and friendly, drifting in the swell. There was no time to waste. The barometer was dropping sharply, with every sign of a typhoon approaching. At one o’clock that afternoon, Barb found her first survivors on a raft, and by the evening she had collected 14 of them, including Darby Munro. Fluckey, deeply moved like all his crew, noted in his log:

  The at first dubious, then amazed, then finally hysterically thankful look on their faces, from the time they first sighted us approaching them, is one we shall never forget … the appreciation of the survivors was unbounded. Even those who couldn’t talk expressed themselves tearfully through their glazed, oil soaked eyes.

  On the amusing side, the following remarks were recorded as the survivors were being carried to their bunks:

  ‘I take back all I ever said about you Yanks … three bloody years without a drink of brandy, please give me another … turn me loose, I’ll run to that bunk … be sure to wake me up for chow … Matey, we’re in safe hands at last … as soon as I can I’m going to write to my wife to kick the Yankee out; I’m coming home!’14

  Early that same afternoon, as their raft rose on a crest, the six men of Blood Bancroft’s group saw the conning tower of a submarine heading towards them and they waved and shouted with all they had left. Again to their dismay, this vision of mercy also turned away into the troughs, but a few hours later she was back, and the men on her deck tossed a line to haul the raft towards them.

  This was Queenfish. Her First Lieutenant, Jack Bennett, reaching down to help Bancroft on board, was amazed to hear the Australian insist that he would clamber onto the sub’s casing under his own steam. Filthy with oil, his flaming red hair matted like old rope, eyes sunken in a haggard, straggle-bearded face, as skinny as a rake and nearly naked, Ordinary Seaman Arthur Bancroft RAN, Service Number F3239, drew himself up to his full height and snapped off a salute as if he was joining a ship at Garden Island.

  ‘Permission to come aboard, sir?’ he said.

  The Americans marvelled at his courage.

  With night and the storm approaching, both skippers called off the search. Queenfish had taken 18 men on board. The two submarines set a course for Saipan on the surface, keeping watch the next morning on the chance of finding more men alive, but they had no luck in the peaks and troughs of waves tossed up by what was becoming a minor typhoon. The four boats of Ben’s Buster’s and Ed’s Eradicators had rescued a total of 159 men, although seven of them died on the way to Saipan and were buried over the side, some anonymously, for there had been no way of identifying them. In all, 92 Australians and 60 British lived to tell their stories.15 It was the war’s greatest rescue at sea, succinctly summed up by Gene Fluckey’s note in the log of the Barb:

  Having seen the piteous plight of the 14 survivors we rescued I can say that I would forgo the pleasure of an attack on a Jap Task Force to rescue any one of them. There is little room for sentiment in submarine warfare, but the measure of saving one Allied life against sinking a Jap ship is one which leaves no question, once experienced.16

  Only at the end of the war could the final death toll be compiled. In all, 543 Australians were lost in the sinking of the Rakuyo Maru. Most were army, seven were from the RAAF, and 33 were sailors from HMAS Perth. Among them was Wally Johnston, the fresh-faced kid who’d been Fred Skeels’s best mate since the age of ten at Perth’s Inglewood Primary School.

  CHAPTER 23

  SLAVES OF NIPPON

  The trip to Saipan took five days for Sealion and Pampanito and almost ten days for Barb and Queenfish, whose skippers had to slow down to batter their way through the storm. With proper food and care, most of the survivors began to make a slow recovery, regaining strength under the watchful eye of their sailor nurses, although some men remained too weak to leave their bunks. Asked what he would like for his first meal, Blood Bancroft cheerfully suggested sausages but was politely told that would be a little rich to begin with. After years of forcing rubbish into shrunken stomachs, the men had to be carefully re-accustomed to a normal diet with its fats and sugars, and the overworked pharmacist’s mates had instructions from naval doctors ashore to take it slowly.

  When they got to Saipan, the welcome was ecstatic. The word had gone around. As the subs tied up, ice cream and fresh oranges appeared from nowhere. The crews who had nursed them with such dedication did a whip around and stumped up hundreds of dollars for spending money. Dressed in US Navy dungarees, the men were met by cheering American sailors and army GIs, who tossed cigarettes and chewing gum as they were put into tenders and transported ashore to the US Army’s 148th Field Hospital. It was there that the glorious reality of their liberation hit home: female nurses laid them between crisp white sheets with the tenderness of mothers. The sight, the smell, the sound, the touch of a woman after so long seemed surreal at first and then just plain sublime.

  The next days passed in a whirl, a dream, almost a fantasy. There were hot baths with fresh soap, three meals a day and movies at night. Yet habit died hard; the men wolfed down their food as if each meal was to be their last. Telegrams were fired off to Australia and Britain with lists of names. American intelligence officers questioned the men about their experiences, and a Royal Navy captain flew in from Hawaii to debrief the Perth sailors, firstly about the loss of their ship and then about the atrocities they had experienced. After that came the problem of getting the Australians back home. There was no RAN ship anywhere in the area, and the Australian Government had no way of providing transport, so the Americans
once again stepped up to the plate.

  A troopship, the Alcoa Polaris, took them south across the equator to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where they thrilled to the taste of a cold Australian beer again, and from there they were loaded on board a minelayer, the USS Monadnock. On 18 October, they sailed into Brisbane’s Moreton Bay, lining the deck from before dawn, choked with emotion, bursting for that first glimpse of their homeland. As the Monadnock eased into the Brisbane River, a naval launch came alongside, and Bob Collins, leaning over the rail, saw his old foe Commander Charles ‘Pricky’ Reid, Perth’s former Executive Officer. The four ratings – Collins, Jack Houghton, Blood Bancroft and Darby Munro – were called to the captain’s cabin to meet him. Reid greeted them warmly, even Collins, and pumped them with questions as the ship went alongside.

  Their arrival was kept secret. An army band met them at the wharf and General Blamey himself was there to deliver a speech of welcome, but there were no crowds, no family or friends, no cameras whirring away for the newsreels. Nobody was quite sure what to do with them. The army survivors were marched off and held in seclusion at the Stuartholme Catholic convent in Brisbane for two weeks for medical check-ups and more interrogation by intelligence officers. Blood Bancroft found that the RAN, for some reason, was more relaxed:

  The navy just grabbed the four of us and away we went. We waved goodbye to the army fellers, and they took us around to the naval base and gave us cups of tea in the captain’s cabin there, with a doctor, and again the questions started. We had several hours with them and many cups of tea. Then one of the WRANs on duty there asked if she could come in to speak to us. She said her husband was one of us …1

  The WRAN was Betty Duncan, wife of Vic Duncan. Working in Naval Intelligence, she knew of the men’s return and was desperate for news of her husband. With callous insensitivity, the navy did not permit her to see them, and she was turned away. As it happened, the four had no idea that Duncan’s group had been picked out of the water by the Japanese, but it seems extraordinary that they were not allowed to speak to his wife. The navy, though, had other fish to fry. This was the first chance for the RAN, the Naval Board and the government to learn first-hand of Perth’s last hours.