The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  Forward of the chiefs’ mess is the ship’s hospital and petty officers’ mess, and a deck below are the male and female junior sailors’ messes where up to sixty young sailors share a sleeping and recreation space not much bigger than an average suburban lounge room. Aft of the chiefs’ mess is the junior sailors’ café where all non-officers apart from chiefs and petty officers eat their meals. The senior sailors stand in line with everyone else to be served their meals, but they then retreat to their messes to eat in relative comfort. The chiefs’ and petty officers’ messes are strictly off-limits to all other ranks. Even the skipper has to knock and wait to be admitted by a mess member.

  The junior sailors’ café is the venue for combined crew briefings. Most games are played there, too, and can provide some robust entertainment and a welcome boost to morale, especially when a junior sailor is beating a senior officer at the traditional navy board game, Uckers. This take-no-prisoners game is like Ludo on steroids with two dice and some specific and aggressive rules and tactics, such as ‘ucking’ or knocking off an opponent’s piece should you land on a square already occupied by their piece. The hints and tips section of the rules sheet provides some handy tips for ucking the offending piece with as much force as possible. There are degrees of ucking, and the most violent reaction should be reserved for ucking a double (two pieces) or when an opponent is lined up for a run home.

  ‘It is a no-no to uck pieces overboard,’ the rules state. ‘Any sign of weakness or political correctness from any player should warrant a caution. Uckers is not a game for the weak, lily livered or soft hearted. It should be played with as much venom, underhandedness and spite as indeed is possible. The sensitive, introverted and touchy-feely type should avoid it at all costs.’

  But for now, my first day living in HMAS Darwin as she steams across the vast ocean ends with ablutions at 9.30 p.m. Showering in a rocking frigate without crashing into the plumbing is another early test, with the water sloshing about thong-clad feet a constant reminder that we are indeed at sea in a steel box.

  Following the clean-up it is time for bed, the ungainly scramble up to my designated top rack and a painful collision of skull with ceiling before settling in for a deep seven-hour sleep as the warship rolls on through the Indian Ocean swells, towards its perilous hunting grounds.

  2

  Cauldron of conflict

  The Middle East is one of the most troubled and troublesome places on earth. Religious, political and territorial conflicts have raged for thousands of years, and Australia’s military involvement dates back more than a century to 1914 when the first batch of soldiers from the Australian Imperial Force arrived in Egypt before taking on the Turks at Gallipoli.

  In 1915, Brigadier General Harry Chauvel led the Australian Light Horse Brigade into Cairo and in 1917, as part of the ANZAC Mounted Division, it moved to Palestine – a cauldron of twentieth-century conflict – before heading north to Syria.

  The Royal Australian Navy was represented in the World War I campaign by the submarine AE2 and the navy’s most decorated and possibly least known unit of the war – the RAN Bridging Train. This land-based engineering and logistics support team took part in two amphibious landings: at Gallipoli and at El Arish on the Sinai Peninsula. One of just fifteen fighting ships in the fledgling Australian navy, the AE2 was the first Allied vessel to penetrate the heavily defended Dardanelles, running amok before being sunk a few days later. A further six navy destroyers served in the Mediterranean theatre of the Great War.

  During World War II, Australians fought and died throughout North Africa and the Middle East, beginning in Bardia, Libya, in early 1941 and continuing through Tobruk, El Alamein, Syria and Lebanon. The navy had entered the fray in December 1939 when the ‘scrap iron flotilla’ – the derogatory name bestowed by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels – of five ageing destroyers arrived in Malta. The ill-fated light cruiser HMAS Sydney joined them later, and eight Australian-built Bathurst Class corvettes were sent to Egypt in 1943 to support the invasion of Sicily.

  So Australia’s naval engagement in this ancient trouble spot dates back more than 102 years. And since early August 1990, when strategic and operational staff in Canberra began compiling a plan to participate in a possible multinational force after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait, the military’s senior service has been almost continually focused on the Middle East Region, including the Horn of Africa and the western Indian Ocean. It is unlikely that any of the officers assembled in the ‘head shed’ that year would have imagined that their successors – many of them not yet born – would still be operating in the same waters nearly thirty years later.

  Apart from some gaps between 1993 and 1996 and 1996 and 1999, the RAN has had at least one warship on patrol in the region since then. Twenty major fleet units and more than 3000 officers and sailors have patrolled countless square kilometres of ocean conducting diverse missions – from shelling land-based enemy targets during the Iraq War to counter-terrorism, counter-piracy and counter-narcotics boarding operations. They have secured Iraq’s offshore oil terminals and even rescued shipwrecked fishermen. The deployment of the Anzac Class frigate HMAS Arunta in late 2016 marked the sixty-fourth rotation of an Australian navy ship in the region. She was followed by the upgraded frigate HMAS Newcastle in mid-2017.

  Looking back on the 1990 planning, former Vice-Admiral Rob Walls told a Sea Power Centre conference in November 2003 that the RAN’s operational philosophy for the United States-led multinational Maritime Intercept Force was, ‘Give us a task and we will get on and make it happen.’ That simple one-line mission statement has driven every one of Australia’s sixty-four naval deployments since the world’s first post-Cold War military coalition was formed in 1990.

  Walls, who was a commodore and the director-general of naval policy and plans at the time, is a no-nonsense character from Colac in western Victoria who was ideally suited to being Australia’s point man early in its first Middle East mission under the coalition, codenamed Operation Damask.

  In typical Australian fashion, he marched into the office of the US commander, Admiral Hank Mauz, and proposed that the Australian rules of engagement should be the template for the entire combined force. With the Arab states, European Union, Britain and France all vying to promote their own, differing rules, Mauz was clearly impressed by the robust Australian template for war and by the man advocating them, and he was keen to have them tabled first at the planning conference in Bahrain.

  After much debate, the Australian document was adopted as the baseline for the combined force under Operation Desert Shield and United Nations Security Council Resolutions 661 and 665 authorising the enforcement of an economic embargo against Iraq.

  At first the Hawke government barred Australian ships from transiting the narrow Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the United Arab Emirates – one of the world’s most dangerous sea lanes – and entering the Arabian Gulf (also called the Persian Gulf). They were ordered to remain at all times in the Gulf of Oman.

  However, Walls used his close relationship with Mauz to ensure that the Australian Task Group – the guided missile frigates HMA Ships Darwin and Adelaide and the replenishment vessel HMAS Success – would operate where the action would be in the North Arabian Sea.

  Former navy chief, retired Vice-Admiral Chris Ritchie, is an expert in anti-submarine warfare. He grew up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and joined the navy straight from school as a sixteen-year-old. The 1991 Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm were the culmination of his ‘at sea’ career as a seaman officer.

  Ritchie’s family spent their holidays at Queenscliff on the Bellarine Peninsula at the western entrance to Port Phillip Bay. The young lad who watched ships steam in and out of the bay and would one day command a fighting ship in a shooting war comes from a long line of seafarers. His great-grandfather was an able seaman in the Victorian colonial navy who fought in the Maori Wars in 1860 on board the steam sloop HMVS Vict
oria and was also on the ship when she went to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861 to search for the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition.

  ‘As a kid from about the age of seven or eight I intended to join the navy,’ Ritchie says. In 1968, as a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old, he graduated as a seaman officer from the naval college at HMAS Creswell in Jervis Bay. Just five years later, in 1973, he was appointed commanding officer of the 300-tonne landing craft HMAS Tarakan and after more training and a stint in Canberra he became CO of the destroyer escort HMAS Torrens.

  During the 1982 Falklands War, Ritchie went on exchange with the Royal Navy as an ancillary warfare teacher, and a number of his students went on to fight in the war.

  ‘A lot of them came back and said, “Well, this was good and this was bad and this was right and that’s rubbish, what they’re teaching,” and so I had a hint of what [war] would be like – but I didn’t experience it until 1990,’ Ritchie says.

  After a few more jobs at navy headquarters in Canberra, the then Captain Ritchie took command of the guided missile destroyer HMAS Brisbane in mid-1990 before her deployment to the Arabian Gulf. Being the commanding officer put him at the pointy end of Australia’s first war since Vietnam, and right in the middle of the most powerful and complex naval force ever assembled. Brisbane was one of sixty-seven destroyers and frigates from fifteen nations operating in coalition with six aircraft carriers, two battleships, fifteen cruisers, more than a hundred logistics, amphibious and smaller craft, and some 800 aircraft deployed to the Joint Task Force.

  The period between the end of Australia’s involvement in Vietnam in 1972 and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 is known in Australian military circles as the ‘quiet time’. In bureaucratic circles, it was the era of the so-called ‘peace dividend’ of budget savings when defence spending fell to historic lows. For the navy, it had meant mainly diplomatic ship visits to Asia and military exercises such as the Rim of the Pacific with the US Navy off Hawaii.

  ‘We spent a lot of time in Singapore and Hong Kong, places like that,’ Ritchie recalls.

  This all changed when the first Australian task group, under the command of Commodore Don Chalmers, sailed from Sydney for the Gulf in August 1990. It had no time for a proper workup, where ships are put through their paces to prepare for war. Planning began immediately for the second rotation, and Brisbane went into Garden Island dockyard in Sydney for an urgent upgrade.

  ‘We had two close-in weapon systems fitted, we had armour protection fitted, we had a lot of communications equipment fitted – a lot of things that brought the ship up to a standard that you could expect it to fight with,’ Ritchie recalls. ‘And then we worked up. That work-up went as we continued all the way to Diego Garcia, in fact. Yeah, it was pretty hard actually.’

  The second Damask deployment (HMA Ships Brisbane and Sydney) marked the first time in almost twenty years that RAN vessels had conducted a work-up for a possible shooting war. Ritchie had been a sub-lieutenant on the last ship that had been placed on a war footing – the guided missile destroyer HMAS Hobart, when it was preparing to deploy to the Vietnam War in 1971. But she never joined that troubled conflict. The deployment was cancelled a week before she was due to sail because Australia’s involvement in the war came to an end.

  Ritchie recalls that the work-up for Vietnam was nowhere near as intense as the preparations for deploying to the Gulf. Australian navy ships had not been involved in the Falklands War, which took place in 1982, but some Australian naval people had deployed to the Falklands either through secondments or while serving in the British navy, and they knew what to expect.

  ‘One of them was a bloke called Ted Walsh who was the fleet [nuclear, biological, chemical defence expert],’ Ritchie recalls. ‘He’d been the XO of a frigate there [Falklands] and he saw what happened so he was really the strength of that work-up. He was the bloke who really made you understand what you might expect if things went bad. It wasn’t easy to work up the ship and we had all sorts of extra people put on board. We ended up with about 350 I think. There were people everywhere. They were almost hanging from the rafters! It took some time to get the new culture across, but eventually we did.’

  In early December 1990, the Hawke government gave the green light for Brisbane and Sydney to steam through the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Gulf states to conduct operations inside the Gulf. So, the two ships spent Christmas 1990 in the bustling port of Bahrain – home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet and its Central Command, which includes the combined naval task forces operating in the region. It was also the main base for ships from more than a dozen other nations deployed with the multinational Maritime Interception Force.

  In the event, Brisbane did not do any war fighting – although during Operation Desert Storm she was placed on alert for a possible mission to shell land-based targets in support of a Marine Corps landing that was supposedly being planned by the US commander, General ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf.

  ‘Schwarzkopf never really intended there to be a Marines thing,’ Ritchie explains. ‘But he was sold on the idea that if the rumour was there and if ships were seen to be practising, it would be a diversion, bringing Iraqis to the Kuwaiti coast.’

  He has no doubt that the first Gulf War was always intended to be predominantly a land campaign. That does not mean there were no risks to the ships.

  There were early concerns that the large and quite capable Iraqi Air Force, which had 910 combat aircraft in August 1990, might launch Exocet missile strikes against coalition warships.

  ‘A whole lot of Iraqi aircraft disappeared and went to Iran and nobody knew why they’d gone there. The feeling was that they could possibly fly from the north of Iran down to the eastern side of the Zagreb Mountains, which run down that eastern side of the Gulf. And then they would pop up over the mountain and you would really have [only] about 20 miles in which to see them,’ Ritchie says.

  The airborne threat never emerged, but there was a big and real hazard to the flotilla – sea mines. The Iraqis released hundreds of free-floating, deadly contact mines into the Gulf, and they remained a significant and unpredictable danger to shipping throughout the conflict. Two United States warships – the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli and the aegis cruiser USS Princeton – were seriously damaged on 18 February 1991 when they struck sea mines. No one was killed, but both ships were forced into dry dock for repairs at a cost of more than $20 million. A sea mine costs only about $12,000 – a pittance compared with the costly damage it can inflict.

  Brisbane also had a close encounter with half a dozen mines during a patrol in the northern part of the Gulf and was ever vigilant about the threat, with enhanced lookouts and electro-optical sensors used to search for the floating bombs.

  ‘We’d been sleeping all night and we turned around and there were five or six mines floating in the area that we’d just been through,’ Ritchie recalls.

  Mine protection was a major preoccupation during both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War when minesweeping and mine-hunting vessels, specialised navy clearance divers, aircraft and even trained dolphins were used to detect and then defuse or destroy both ‘contact’ and ‘influence’ mines. This work is highly skilled and horrendously dangerous. Contact mines explode on impact but influence mines are built to detonate in response to a particular ship-type’s noise or magnetic signature. This makes them even more difficult to counter.

  Although the danger of mines continues to this day, RAN ships deployed to the region are now retrofitted with the latest Mine and Obstacle Avoidance Sonar that allows them to detect and avoid a variety of mines.

  Australian navy divers played a key role in clearing Iraq’s only deep-water port at Umm Qasr in 2003 where the US Navy dolphins, trained in San Diego, were also employed on the dangerous work. The marine mammals were not very successful, and some simply went native, prompting one memorable newspaper quote from a navy diver that read, ‘Flipper’s fucked.’

  Once it was apparent tha
t the Iraqi Air Force was out of the game in the first Gulf War the Australian warships settled into a routine of patrolling as part of the air defence screen around the aircraft carrier USS Midway in the area known as the Central Arabian Gulf.

  By mid-January 1991, things began hotting up for warships that were engaged in the Arabian Gulf naval strike force designated Battle Force Zulu.

  Early on the morning of 17 January the glowing radar screens in the operations rooms on board Sydney and Brisbane lit up like Christmas trees when dozens of Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and carrier-based strike jets were launched by the coalition against Iraqi forces to kick off Operation Desert Storm. The skies above the Gulf were crisscrossed with smoke and condensation trails; ‘happy trails’ – American code for ‘missiles away’ – was announced on the radio network while the weapons streaked towards their targets. More than a billion people around the globe witnessed the spectacle when CNN telecast the bombardment of Baghdad in real time from the roof of the Al Rasheed hotel.

  Ten years later, Chris Ritchie had become a Rear Admiral and the Commander Australian Theatre for a new Middle East mission known as Operation Slipper. With Australia’s commitment in East Timor gradually winding down, he had taken on the job, thinking it would give him some time to think about future operational concepts. Such a luxury would never eventuate. That year would be the busiest of Ritchie’s entire career.

  ‘I had a week to think about that – and then Tampa turned up and I never wrote anything,’ he says.

  In August 2001, the Norwegian container ship MV Tampa rescued 438 asylum seekers from their sinking vessel in international waters off the Australian Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island. The Howard government denied the captain, Arne Rinnan, permission to land his distressed human cargo on the island or at any other Australian port and despatched troops from the elite Special Air Service Regiment to board the cargo ship and enforce the blockade. Then, on 11 September, Al Qaeda terrorists brought down the World Trade Centre in New York and the world changed forever.