I was not surprised, therefore, when someone in the crowd of reporters that surrounded me after the final HMA3S press conference in Fremantle asked if I thought I could find the Centaur. The little I knew about where the ship was sunk already told me it would be an easier puzzle to solve than Sydney. That didn’t mean easy, I explained, just easier than Sydney. In my opinion the Centaur was definitely findable. I wasn’t worried about the technical aspects; the main challenge was whether the government would have the political will to commit public funds for yet another deep-water shipwreck search. As I told the reporters: ‘How it’s organized and who funds it, those are the big questions.’
When the Centaur set out from Darling Harbour, Sydney, on 8 May 1943 for what turned out to be her final voyage, she seemed oblivious to the possibility that she might become a casualty of the war. Whereas all other ships transiting at night were totally blacked out to avoid attracting the attention of enemy submarines, the Centaur was fitted with oversize floodlights and a row of green lights encircling the ship at deck level that blazed brilliantly. In contrast to all other merchant ships, the Centaur was purposely designed and liveried to be easily seen at day or night. As one officer later commented, she was lit up like glory’. The passengers on board during this voyage were equally carefree about making excessive noise that might be heard by passing ships. Hours before the attack, one group were having what can only be described as a loud and raucous deck party, accompanied by musical instruments, not the type of behaviour a merchant captain at the time would normally tolerate. But if the Centaur was acting as if she was immune from attack, that was precisely because she was immune from attack. Or at least she should have been.
AHS Centaur was an Australian hospital ship. Properly designated and marked hospital ships, whose function was purely to provide medical assistance to wounded, sick or shipwrecked personnel, were afforded protection under the terms of the Geneva Convention of 1907. Under the convention, to which Japan was a party, an attack on a hospital ship constituted a war crime. Despite this protection, hospital ships were nevertheless attacked and sunk during the war by both the Allied and Axis forces. Most of these casualties were caused by aircraft bombings, where it could be argued that the ships’ distinctive markings couldn’t be clearly seen by a plane at high altitude or whose vision was obscured by cloud cover. Attacks on hospital ships by submarine, which by their very nature had to take place at relatively close range, were very rare. Although it was never admitted during the war, the Japanese submarine 7–777, commanded by Hajime Nakagawa, was identified as most likely responsible for the attack on Centaur.
The attack was also one of the most deadly in history, with 268 of the 332 persons on board dying as a result. This callous and cold-blooded killing of doctors, nurses, field ambulance personnel and ship’s crew – all innocent non-combatants on a mission of mercy – caused outrage in Australia. It left an open wound in the hearts and minds of countless relatives that would never totally heal until Centaur’s wreck was found and those who died within her were properly remembered. It also left the relatives, and the sixty-four survivors, with numerous questions. Why did the 1–177 attack such a brightly lit and clearly marked hospital ship? Why did the Japanese navy not admit to the attack, even if it was an unintentional mistake? Why did Nakagawa never face a war crimes trial? And finally, for the families who organized themselves as the Centaur Association, and for the last living survivor of the ship’s crew, Martin Pash: where was the wreck of the Centaur?
Compared with the inordinately long time it took campaigners to raise awareness and the funding for the Sydney search, the government’s backing for an expedition to find the Centaur was organized so quickly it felt to me like the decision was made virtually overnight. That wasn’t literally the case, of course, but when a joint press release came out later in 2008 from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Queensland premier Anna Bligh announcing up to $4 million to fund a search, it revealed that my initial feeling wasn’t far from the truth.
Within a fortnight of our discovery of Sydney, prominent newspapers in Australia had already started running articles suggesting that the next ship on the list should be the Centaur. These early articles featured interviews with members of the 2/3 AHS Centaur Association, an organization with about 300 members that included Centaur survivors, descendants, relatives and friends. This was how I learned about Ted Leask, whose father lost three brothers when the Centaur went down. In echoes of the movie Saving Private Ryan, Ted’s father Malcolm would also have been on the ship serving with his brothers but for a decision by the authorities that he stay home to look after his pregnant wife, and because they thought that three brothers serving on one ship in wartime was enough. Ted was the first to contact me while I was still in Australia to ask me to support the association’s calls for a search, which I gladly agreed to do. The newspaper articles began a groundswell of public support that was quickly taken up by local politicians. Peter Slipper, the federal MP for Fisher, Queensland, was one of the first to add his voice to the campaign, and went as far as having one of his aides contact me to get my opinion on the likelihood that the Centaur could be found.
On the sixty-fifth anniversary of the sinking, the stage was set for intervention from a higher source. Anna Bligh, the first woman elected as a state premier in Australia – and incidentally a descendant of Captain William Bligh of the infamous HMS Bounty mutiny – wrote to Kevin Rudd requesting federal assistance with a search for Centaur’s wreck. Bligh made a ministerial statement in Queensland’s parliament the same day, recounting the loss of the Centaur and those who perished in her, among whom were forty-five Queenslanders. Seven months were needed to work out the details between the two governments, but in early December they announced plans to jointly conduct the search and to equally share the $4 million budgeted costs. Premier Bligh summed up her reasons for taking this extraordinary action:
If we can find the Centaur, it will be of considerable emotional significance for many of the relatives of those lost on her. This site is part of our state and nation’s history and we should try and find, preserve and protect it. For them and their families it is right that we try to find and mark its exact location. The 268 Aussies and their lost ship are reminders of what we as families, a state and a nation have lost in war. It is right that in our remembering them we can say exactly where they lie.
With the necessary funds allocated, it was agreed that the Queensland state government would take the lead in managing the project, and that it would be a fully contracted affair with all contractors chosen via a competitive procurement process. A joint steering committee (JSC) made up of representatives from the army, navy, Queensland Museum, Maritime Safety Queensland, and Queensland’s Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) was formed to oversee the project and to take major decisions regarding the selected contractors. The first order of business for the DPC, who would be chairing the committee, was to select an experienced project manager to assist in planning and conducting the search operations. With the formal structures being put in place, this was certainly shaping up to be run very differently from how the volunteers of HMA3S had operated. The experience was undoubtedly a new one for the DPC too; in the history of Queensland’s procurement practices, I have no doubt this was their first time hiring a shipwreck hunter.
With the Kormoran and Sydney I had earned my place to lead the search expedition based on my own pro bono research, my years working alongside HMA3S in the same voluntary capacity and my prior track record of success. I naturally wished to be involved with the search for Centaur, but I would be given no special advantages. The interest and competition for such an unusual and high-profile project would be intense. The DPC’s advertisement for the provision of project management services issued in early January of 2009 attracted corporations from around the world, and in the end more than ten national and international firms tendered offers. I had no idea who the other bidders were, but I eventually learned that even Ted Graham
himself had submitted an offer. Despite my good work in leading the search for Sydney on behalf of HMA3S, Ted continued to promote the idea that such iconic Australian shipwrecks should be found by Australians. Fortunately, his parochial attitude wasn’t shared by the navy in the case of Sydney, and I could only hope the DPC were similarly open-minded regarding the Centaur.
The DPC’s procurement process was an arduous undertaking, but I was pleased to make it through as one of the three short-listed tenderers invited to make a thirty-minute presentation to the JSC. In the weeks after the contract was announced I had received five unsolicited requests to join other teams planning to submit offers. Some were large professional project management companies with offices around the world and thousands of employees. I was slightly concerned how the JSC members would evaluate my offer compared to the larger firms with limitless resources. I was confident I had all the necessary skills to run the project myself and that my track record was hard to beat: by this time in my career I had led the research and discovery of more than twenty major deep-water shipwrecks, with a success rate of 85 per cent. But would the JSC take the risk of trusting such an important project to one person located over 10,000 miles away, or would they be swayed by Ted’s political call for an Australian to lead the search?
I had to wait a couple of weeks following my presentation to the JSC before I was notified of the final decision. Because of the ten-hour time difference between Brisbane and the UK, I learned I had won the contract from a voice message left on my mobile by Anthony Crack, the DPC’s executive director for state affairs and the chairman of the JSC, who was as keen as I was to get the project started. Despite a delay caused by the state government going into caretaker mode because of a general election, we quickly negotiated a contract, and on 19 March another joint press release from Kevin Rudd and Anna Bligh officially announced that Blue Water Recoveries had won the tender process and would be managing the search. Two days later Anna Bligh was elected premier in her own right, capping off what might be considered a winning weekend for both of us.
Opportunities to work directly for a foreign government at a very high level don’t come along that often, so I was delighted to have won the contract, but more than anything I was extremely relieved to have done so in the face of all the competition and politics. In the lead-up to the decision I had developed a very good relationship with some of the key members of the Centaur Association, including Ted Leask, Jan Thomas and Richard Jones. My role as project manager was a responsibility I took very seriously, and I knew I could only repay the trust they had shown in me by finding the wreck for them. However, I quickly realized that the search wasn’t going to be as easy as perhaps everyone was expecting. We had set the bar very high in locating Kormoran and Sydney so quickly, but as I frequently remind people, there is never a guarantee when it comes to finding long-lost shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean.
If Michael Montgomery’s provocative book Who Sank the Sydney? was the spark that restarted the debate and re-evaluation of the battle between Sydney and Kormoran that ultimately led to the 2008 discovery of the wrecks, then it would be fair to accord Chris Milligan and John Foley’s Australian Hospital Ship Centaur, The Myth of Immunity the same credit. This book, which began as a ‘short-term personal history project’ by Milligan, a Montreal-based social sciences professor, and evolved into a fourteen-year research project and subsequent writing partnership with Foley, a Queensland Coast and Torres Strait pilot and maritime historian, is the definitive history of the Centaur. In fact, its contents were so important to me that meeting Chris was my first priority once I began my own research into the sinking.
McGill University in Montreal might seem an unusual place to start researching an English ship sunk off the eastern coast of Australia, but it is where Chris Milligan teaches and lives, and if I wanted a direct line to the key documents about where the Centaur was lost, there was no better person in the world to help me. Chris’s interest in the Centaur stemmed from the fact that his father’s brother, Able-Bodied Seaman David ‘Sunny’ Milligan, lost his life when the ship was attacked and sunk on 14 May 1943. Chris was investigating the life of this uncle he had never met for a teaching assignment when he got hooked on the bigger story of the Centaur. At the time, in the late 1970s, there were no books or articles about the ship, so it fell to Chris to begin piecing together her history, which included the unverified submarine attack resulting in her loss. In his words, ‘Somehow it did not seem right to allow this tragic incident, with its cloud of rumours, to slip unnoticed into history and be forgotten.’
Other than a brief dalliance with the Kormoran, having rescued Captain Detmers’ drifting lifeboat after the battle with Sydney, Centaur had enjoyed a fairly uneventful war. Built in 1924 for the Ocean Steam Ship Company, the main operating subsidiary for the legendary Blue Funnel Line, she was a 96-metre-long, 3,066 gross ton passenger liner and cargo ship employed on the Singapore to Australia service. Throughout their long history, Blue Funnel ships were well known for their excellent build quality, their upright smoke stacks painted powder blue with a black top, and for being named after characters from Greek mythology.
In late 1942, the Australian army were in need of a fourth hospital ship for evacuating sick and wounded soldiers from the north-east coast of New Guinea to Townsville. Because it could provide accommodation for 200 passengers and had the shallow draft needed to reach the embarkation ports, the Centaur was identified as the most suitable vessel available. A simple conversion costing £20,000 was envisioned, but this quickly ballooned into a major internal refit once the army officers, medical officers and seaman’s union had all had their say. In the end, Centaur was transformed into a modern hospital ship capable of carrying 280 cot cases, enabling two major operations simultaneously, and being able to proceed on voyages of up to eighteen days equipped with special ventilation for tropical use. By 12 March 1943, she was ready to begin her new life on the eastern coast of Australia and left port for her maiden voyage as a hospital ship. The additional improvements had driven the final bill for the conversion up to £55,000.
Along with her new interior, the Centaur was also sporting a vivid new paint scheme that completely changed her outward appearance. Gone was the original jet-black hull, repainted a stark white against which the iconic Geneva Convention markings for a hospital ship would stand out. These consisted of a four-foot-wide green band that encircled the entire ship, with three seven-by-seven-foot red crosses painted on each side of the hull, at the bow, amidships and at the stern. The Centaur’s distinctive blue funnel was changed to dark yellow, as were the masts and derricks, and two four-by-four-foot red crosses were installed on either side of the funnel, up high so that they could be seen from a distance. The ship was still called Centaur, but in place of the name on the bows, a white ‘47’ was painted within a black square to represent the hospital ship number registered under the Geneva Convention.
From virtually every angle, whether from a plane up high or a ship on the water, the new paint scheme and prominent red crosses, brilliantly illuminated at night by electric lights and flood-lamps, ensured that Centaur was easily and immediately recognisable as a hospital ship. Neither could the Japanese forces, and their submarine fleet in particular, have been unaware of the ship’s change in status: on 8 February, they were notified by the Swiss legation that Centaur would be commissioned as a hospital ship on 1 March 1943, with details of her particulars and distinctive markings.
Whether he had murder on his mind or was simply frustrated at recording just one kill during his current war patrol, the Japanese submarine commander ignored all the visible signs that the ship framed in his periscope was an innocent non-combatant. Travelling alone, without an escort, and lit from stem to stern against the backdrop of a moonless night, Centaur was too inviting a target to pass up, and he brought his boat up to a surface shooting position. With no threat of a counterattack by gunfire or depth charges, he could close to within a few hundred met
res for a strike that was unmissable. At that distance there was no need to fire a spread of torpedoes in case one veered off target: a single shot aimed to hit the ship dead centre was all that was needed.
The torpedo slammed into Centaur’s port side just forward of the bridge, with devastating effect, opening up a huge hole and instantly flooding the no. 2 hold and patient wards with seawater. A second explosion immediately followed, erupting from the belly of the ship in a tower of flames and burning fuel oil that ignited the bridge and boat deck amidships. The torpedo’s detonation had also caused the main fuel oil tank to explode, shooting flames and oil in every direction. The twin explosions rocked the ship to port, and then over to starboard, throwing people violently to the deck and against bulkheads. Those nearest the seat of the explosions were killed outright by the shock wave, while many others were badly burned. As the ship began to rapidly settle by the head, it became apparent that she was sinking quickly. Anyone still alive had scarcely two minutes to escape the confines of the hull. Some dived into the water and swam clear, while others were pulled downwards by the suction of Centaur’s death plunge. The unlucky ones trapped inside could only count on the mercy that their deaths came quickly. The last anyone saw of the ship was the poop deck sticking vertically out of the water. It was 4.12 a.m.
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 31