Cruiser (14 page)

The American welcome rolled along. Jack ‘Manassa Mauler' Dempsey, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, took the entire ship under his wing and threw open his restaurant on Broadway, ‘Where food and friendliness are knockouts'. He stood free drinks, posed for pictures, signed autographs, threw a few punches with a beefy fist, paid a return visit to the ship and introduced some of the men to Jack Johnson, the black boxer who had taken the world title in Sydney from the Canadian Tommy Burns back in 1908, in a legendary fight so bloody it had been stopped by the police.

Sightseeing in Times Square, Jock Lawrance and another stoker mate, Joe Hartley, were swept off their feet when a stranger gave them two tickets to a ball game at the old Madison Square Garden arena on Long Island:

It was a dream, an idyll, like that fantasy journey along the Yellow Brick Road from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City in
The Wizard of Oz
, the Judy Garland movie released that very same year.

Farncomb's diary, less exciting, recorded a punishing round of official calls on city officials, admirals and generals, punctuated by cocktail parties on board to return the hospitality and relieved only, perhaps, by a dinner dance for
Perth
's officers at the Waldorf Astoria, where the Surgeon Commander, Charlie Downward, had taken a suite.

The contrast between the naval base at Portsmouth, between a Britain grimly preparing for war, and an America living it up in splendid isolation could hardly have been more stark. Americans fervently believed their country would never again make the mistake of 1917 and become enmeshed in the quarrels of Europe. Across the Pacific, Japan could always be contained. The Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the 1930s, five of them, would keep the United States at peace. Progress and prosperity had returned to America, and if you didn't believe it, folks, why it was right there at the World's Fair itself.

‘Here are the materials, ideas, and forces at work in our world. These are the tools with which the World of Tomorrow must be made,' said the blurb for the fair. ‘They are all interesting and much effort has been expended to lay them before you in an interesting way. Familiarity with today is the
best preparation for the future.'

Come out to Flushing Meadow and see the Trylon, the Perisphere, and an amazing new invention known as television. Don't miss Billy Rose's Aquacade, a jaw-dropping extravaganza of gals in bathing suits starring Esther Williams and Tarzan himself, Johnny Weissmuller. The General Motors Futurama gave you a breathtaking glimpse of the miracles of the 1960s, where there would be driverless cars on automated freeways high in the air. At the Chrysler exhibition, you could watch them assemble a Plymouth with a new-fangled luxury called air conditioning and, if you had the money, honey – about $800 – you could drive one home that night. At Charles Hansen's Laboratory Inc., The Junket Folks, in Danish attire, demonstrated ‘the ease of preparing wonderful desserts'. The Heinz Pavilion boasted an animated stage show dramatising ‘the story of strained baby food'.

The crew hunted for souvenirs. ‘Rabbits', they called them. Bill Bracht bought a Mantel Model 7 valve all-wave radio set with a ‘magic eye' for $16. Jack Lewis, the piano-playing Engine Room Artificer, found the perfect present at the fair for Joan Flynn back home in Sydney at Pidcock Street, Camperdown. It was a silver metal powder box. There was a picture of the Trylon on the lid, and when you lifted that, it played ‘Two Sleepy People', their favourite tune. Joan would treasure it until the day she died.

Up against such wonders, the Australian Pavilion must have seemed just a little dull. Tacked on to the British display – in an area designated ‘Great Britain and its Possessions' – the Australian show was wool, wheat and stuffed kangaroos. But it was ‘Australia Day' at the fair on 11 August, and 150 officers and men duly boarded five buses for the ride out to Flushing Meadow, in a motorcade escorted through the traffic – big thrill again – by a squad of NYPD motorcycle cops with sirens wailing. They marched through the fairground to the strains of the ship's band and endured a round of florid speeches ‘emphasising the close relationship between the United States
and Australia in political and industrial development, aviation and sports', according to
The New York Times
. The mayor's representative was presented with a stuffed koala, which, to the not-so-stifled chortles of the Australians, he referred to as a ‘bunny'.

After 12 days of relentless socialising, the Captain must have been itching to get back to sea. On 16 August, just after midday, he gave the order for special sea-duty men to close up. The ship's band on the quarterdeck played ‘Auld Lang Syne' to a crowd of waving well-wishers and
Perth
backed out of her pier, slipped down the harbour and headed out once more into the Atlantic. Her next port of call was to be Kingston, Jamaica.

But the party was over. There was a world war waiting to happen. That same day, Commodore Karl Dönitz, the Kriegsmarine's Führer der Unterseeboote, arrived at his headquarters at the Baltic port of Kiel to begin deploying his U-boats for the coming battle at sea.

Perth
steamed south towards the Caribbean and the Panama Canal with Farncomb facing some knotty problems. He was still on track for the flag-waving visit to the west coast of the United States but the drumbeats from Europe made it appallingly clear that war with Germany was perhaps only days away. He knew that he and the ship would then be put at the disposal of the Admiralty. The question was how and where.

The other worry was that they were still not ready for war. There had been some drills, yes, but neither the crew nor the ship were worked up to anything like fighting efficiency. And it wasn't just the relentless partying in New York that had left things slack, although that had hardly helped. The men were keen enough but just not up to the mark. So many were wet behind the ears. They had never fired the big 6-inch guns, let alone worked at their gunnery until they were fast and accurate.

As they entered Caribbean waters, there was one awful occasion at evening quarters when what should have been a simple exercise in lowering and recovering two sea boats, port and starboard, turned into a grim comedy of errors. To the fury of Flip the Frog and the Buffer, the boats had jammed in the falls, unmoving. And, for reasons nobody quite understood, an electrical storm had caused the ship's steering gear to go on the blink for nearly half an hour, leaving her rudderless in the swell.

The strike over the uniform debacle in New York was still a worry for the Captain, too. It suggested a current of discontent
below decks and a reluctance to conform to naval discipline. This raised other questions about the senior ratings and the divisional officers, who, if they were on top of the job, should have detected the unrest and nipped it in the bud before it got out of hand. The outlook was not encouraging.

Perth
arrived in Kingston on Monday 21 August, skirting the old pirate lair and crumbling Spanish fort of Port Royal off to starboard, the turquoise waters of the harbour brilliantly clear on a spectacular Caribbean morning. Jamaica had been a sailor's island since Christopher Columbus discovered the place in 1494. The buccaneer Henry Morgan forged his bloody legend here, sugar and coffee plantations flourished with the slave trade and the American Revolution, and both Nelson and Bligh of the
Bounty
had sailed these waters. Kingston, a picturesque mix of shanty-town slums and sleepy colonial capital, welcomed the Australians with open arms, although, as Norm King remembered:

The Jamaica Swimming Club invited the
Perth
crew and the men of a British cruiser also in port, HMS
Orion
, to a swimming carnival that evening. The
Perth
team beat the Poms handsomely, as expected, but met stiff opposition from the locals, who, it was noted indignantly, had adopted the Australian-crawl style of swimming.

On the day they tied up in Kingston, Farncomb got another jolt of reality. At 3.15 pm, halfway through the afternoon watch, he received an Admiralty signal to all ships at sea, putting them on a heightened warning for war with Germany.
Perth
would now be under the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy's America and West Indies Station based in Bermuda.

In far-off Europe, the descent into war now had an unswerving momentum. As
Perth
was coming alongside in Kingston Harbour, another ship was leaving the teeming German naval base of Wilhelmshaven. In the last rays of a summer twilight, the pocket battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
slipped down the Jade River and out into the Schillig Roads to the North Sea for a voyage that would take her in a long loop past the Norwegian coast, far to the north of the British Isles, then west and south into the wastes of the Atlantic to prey upon British merchant shipping wherever she might find it. A few days later, the
Deutschland
, a sister ship to
Graf Spee
, left with a similar mission. And, at his base in Kiel, Dönitz was deploying his U-boats along the Atlantic trade routes that were Britain's lifeline.

Then, on 24 August, came the thunderclap. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. Tired of playing diplomatic pass the parcel with the dilatory British and French, Joseph Stalin decided it would be better to court Hitler than to confront him. For the moment, the Führer was happy to oblige. The daily rant against the evils of Bolshevism suddenly vanished from the Nazi newspapers in Berlin. In an act of spectacular cynicism, these two sworn enemies hurriedly concocted a tissue-thin veneer of friendship in a treaty that renounced warfare between them and pledged neutrality if either were attacked by a third party.

Beneath a portrait of Lenin in the Kremlin, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, and his Nazi counterpart, Ribbentrop, signed the documents before the beaming gaze of Stalin himself. It was late at night – a
measure of the urgency of their duplicity. They clinked glasses, exchanged toasts. Hitler was convinced, rightly, that his diplomatic triumph would rock the governments of Britain and France. With Russia out of the equation in the east, he turned his mind again to the rape of Poland.

News of the Nazi Wolf and the Russian Bear quaffing champagne together reached Jamaica the next evening. Signalman Rowley Roberts wrote an impassioned blast in his diary:

Fuelled and stored,
Perth
sailed from Kingston in company with
Orion
on 26 August. The two ships exercised together, practising visual signalling until
Orion
flashed the message ‘Good hunting' and, with her wake foaming behind her, headed over the horizon.
Perth
was alone again in the Caribbean, on course for the oil terminals of the Central American state of Venezuela.

That evening, the Captain cleared lower deck and told the ship's company of the decision to put the ship at the disposal of the British. It was a short speech, to the point. Farncomb was a man of few words. Should war break out, the job would be to protect British shipping and to blockade German ships that had taken refuge in neutral Caribbean ports. If the Germans tried to break for home,
Perth
would run them down. Captured vessels, though, were not to be sunk. Taken as prizes, they could be added to the British merchant fleet in the fight ahead.

On the mess decks, sweating in the tropical heat, the
Perth
men turned in to their hammocks that night, and the officers to their bunks, with the sombre prospect that they could be at war within days. Home seemed far away. There was little hope of being back in Australia for Christmas.

In those last days of August, Europe descended into chaos. No country knew what its potential friends or potential foes might do in the next hour, the next day, the next week. Dictators and prime ministers, Cabinets and foreign ministers, and military planners and ambassadors scurried in and out of crisis meetings in London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, more often than not in an agony of indecision. Armies were ordered forward, then halted. Telephones ran hot. A collective frenzy gripped the decision makers on all sides, as events spiralled beyond their control.

The British people were again steeling themselves for the worst. Sandbags were piling up in London and barrage balloons were sent aloft at night to deter Luftwaffe bombers. Gas masks were issued. Plans were made to evacuate children to the country. Hitler's increasingly hysterical diatribes against Poland had finally convinced at least some in the British Government, and some in Paris too, that Germany wanted war come what may.

At exactly 4.45 am on Friday 1 September, the Wehrmacht flooded across the Polish border in rivers of fire and steel, sweeping aside a brave but hopelessly outgunned Polish resistance like autumn leaves. Britain and France finally acted. That evening, they fired off diplomatic notes to Berlin to demand a German halt and withdrawal.

This produced yet another stalemate, which gave Germany another day to tighten its grip on Poland. In the House of Commons on the Saturday, Prime Minister Chamberlain, nearly paralysed with indecision, was howled down by his own
Conservative party when he appeared, yet again, to be playing for more time. Ever so slowly, the scales were falling from his eyes.

The next morning, Sunday 3 September, the British Ambassador in Berlin went in person to deliver an ultimatum to the German Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse. It was nine o'clock. Germany should reply with ‘satisfactory assurances' by eleven o'clock. If this did not happen, Britain would declare war.

From Berlin, there was only silence as the deadline came and went. On what everyone would recall for the rest of their lives as a perfect English summer's day, Chamberlain made to the British people and the world what has since become one of the defining radio broadcasts of history. Reedy with regret, his voice quavered. His words were tangled and banal as he declared war on Germany. Most devastating of all was his sense of personal affront and his failure to recognise, even now, his own culpable incompetence:

In Australia, it was eight o'clock on that Sunday evening. Prime Minister Menzies and a small group of his senior advisers listened to Chamberlain's speech on a crackling short-wave radio at the Commonwealth Offices in Melbourne. It was by no means an official government-to-government communication, but in this electrifying hour it was enough. At 9.15 pm, Menzies made Australia's own declaration of war in a radio broadcast carried nationally by the ABC and every commercial network:

In the Caribbean, Farncomb and
Perth
were prepared. They had received the Admiralty General Mobilisation Telegram on 1 September – a signal calling up the Royal Navy's reserves and placing all ships, wherever they might be, on readiness for war. The crew began to paint the cruiser's brass and brightwork a warlike grey. The shells for her 6-inch and 4-inch guns were fused, and warheads were fitted to her torpedoes. The Captain outlined his thoughts in the ship's war diary: