Cruiser (16 page)

Instead, they got a spectacular tropical sunset that evening, the crew captivated by its brilliant pinks and golds. They handed the convoy over to another British cruiser and two destroyers for its onward journey and with some relief turned about and headed back at 20 knots with
Berwick
towards Bermuda.

That sunset had been nature playing tricks. The next day, the barometer began to drop, slowly at first and then alarmingly, and by the afternoon watch of 15 October
Perth
and
Berwick
were being lashed by fierce winds, driving rain and waves crashing over their bows, each bigger than the last. As night fell, a full-scale tropical hurricane was upon them. Every man on board knew they were in the Bermuda Triangle.

The sea came at them in mountains and canyons.
Perth
pitched and staggered sickeningly as huge white horses of foam raced towards her down pyramids and cliffs of grey that towered higher, far higher, than her foremast. One minute, her bow would be buried deep as hundreds of tons of ocean surged across her fo'c'sle with frightening force and crashed past the armoured bulk of A-and B-turrets, racing on into the waist of the ship. The massive weight for'ard would thrust her stern high out of the sea, the four great bronze screws biting empty air. It was as if she was driving down towards the ocean floor. The next minute, she would recover, labouring upwards at an angle so terrifyingly steep that it seemed almost vertical. For a heartbeat, she would hover motionless on the crest. Then, she
would crash down into the next trough, her plates and rivets straining.

Peering into the cauldron, every fibre of his mind and body wire taut, Farncomb kept up a chant of helm and engine orders. The course for Bermuda was abandoned. All he could do was keep the ship's head towards the great waves marching at him. To allow her to broach, to take the seas on her beam, would be fatal. She would roll over and go down. The safety of the ship and the lives of all who sailed in her depended upon his ability to stay focused and remember his seamanship. The men on watch with him on the storm-swept bridge and the gun crews closed up on the even more naked 4-inch gun deck clung on for dear life, their faces stabbed by knife-points of horizontal rain and whipped by the winds howling at them through the rigging. Meeting the
Deutschland
would have been better than this.

There was worse to come. When they had last seen
Berwick
, she had been stationed four cables ahead of them – a distance of about 800 metres. Eventually, they lost her. Then, at 2.45 am, with terrifying suddenness, a ship's navigation lights loomed dimly towards them out of the inky black. The lights indicated it was probably a merchant ship of some sort, but in the peril of the moment nobody knew. Some
Perth
sailors would swear, much later on, that it had been the
Deutschland
sweeping past. Farncomb leaped to the wheelhouse voice pipe to order an emergency turn away. Gradually – so painfully slowly that it felt like a lifetime –
Perth
fell away, heeling to an angle they measured on the wheelhouse inclinometer at 45 degrees. In those seas, it was a cigarette-paper between life and death. A rogue wave from the wrong direction could have destroyed them. Rowley Roberts, on watch that night, thought his last hour had come:

Perth
was battened down, with hatches closed and watertight doors dogged shut, but still the seas penetrated below, sloshing from stem to stern, flooding the officers' cabins and wardroom and the mess decks, leaving the ship a shambles of gear and personal belongings tossed about among upturned furniture, broken glass and crockery. Men prayed or cursed in the midst of the wreckage, some of them vomiting in fear or from seasickness, others stoically nursing bruises and bloody cuts sustained from being flung about like rag dolls. Roberts continued:

At four the next morning, at the change of watch, the barometer had dropped to 970 millibars – a category-two hurricane – with winds of up to 195 km/h, suggesting that the worst might have passed. Farncomb remained on the bridge, drawn with fatigue, the source of strength that a captain should be. As a grey light
dawned, the rain was still sheeting down in torrents, but slowly the seas began to abate and the eldritch shriek of the storm through the masts and rigging began to lessen.

Towards the end of the forenoon watch, Farncomb felt he could attempt to turn the ship back on course. The idea was to stream a sea anchor – a big bucket of canvas and timber hurriedly knocked up by
Perth
's shipwrights and towed astern at the end of a long cable. In theory, it should produce a drag to stabilise the ship and allow her to go about on a wave at a safe moment.

Farncomb called down to the engine room to Dolly Gray to explain his intentions and to have him discharge fuel oil in the hope of calming the seas beneath its viscous surface. Steady hands on the engine throttles obeying orders from the bridge would be crucial. But eventually they had to admit defeat. The oil slicked out across the water, but the upper deck was still too hazardous for the men trying to deploy the sea anchor. It would be another five hours before the seas subsided enough to bring the ship back on course.

The next morning revealed the extent of the damage. Somehow, the galley managed to get some hot soup and coffee together, and the Captain and Commander Adams inspected the chaos. Guard rails and stanchions had been twisted out of shape, and, on one stretch of the quarterdeck, they had been swept entirely away. The depth-charge racks had been blasted overboard with the charges still in them but not primed, thank heavens, because that might have blown
Perth
's stern off. The starboard torpedo tubes were knocked awry and four Carley floats were smashed. Adams and his Captain of the Foretop, Ray Parkin, found the port whaler crushed and hanging from its davits by little more than a thread.

The ship's company was shaken but, thankfully, largely unharmed, apart from aches and bruises and a few cuts. Battered but unbeaten, they limped into dock at Bermuda on 18 October. HMAS
Perth
had survived. It was an Australian triumph – not over the enemy, but over the elements at sea – the
first of the war. They had made it through the Triangle.

But there would be little rest. After some hasty repairs to the storm damage, just four days later
Perth
was ordered north to the Canadian port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to pick up a new draft of 60 sailors who had been sent from Australia to join them. From the warmth of the Caribbean, they headed back towards the grey North Atlantic.

It was a miserable trip, of about 2500 kilometres there and back. In the northern latitudes, the weather turned cold and foggy – hardly unexpected, but still a shock to the system. Endless drizzling rain added to the discomfort of the men on the weather decks, and by the time they reached their destination, groping their way into Halifax Harbour in a peasouper fog, the temperature had dropped below zero and the foremast halliards were stiff with ice.

To their consternation, when they went ashore the men discovered that things were very different from the warm and hospitable Caribbean. The pubs and saloons were few and far between, and they seemed to close unhelpfully early. But it didn't take long for them to find the few illegal bars the town had to offer. Norm King and some mates were drinking in one speakeasy when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived to close it down. The Mounties diplomatically confiscated the illegal hooch and took it back to the jail for a party with the Australian visitors around a cheerful log fire.

But there were no regrets when
Perth
headed back south again. At sea on 7 November, the first Tuesday of the month, they happily cleaned out the ship's bookie when the 5/1 favourite Rivette won the Melbourne Cup. Four days later, they were back in sunny and welcoming Jamaica again, to find 17 bags of mail waiting for them.

Kingston had become a home from home. On an intersection in the main street, the younger blokes discovered Shanghai Lil's, a shanty-town bar and brothel with a crooked, overhanging verandah beneath a rusty corrugated-iron roof, which they made into an unofficial Australian headquarters.
Lil herself, big and black, with flashing white teeth and a laugh like a depth charge, knew all about entertaining sailors, offering ice-cold Jamaican rum downstairs and hot Jamaican women upstairs. Basil Hayler made his watering hole the rather more sedate Swiss American Bar:

Surgeon Commander Downward braced himself for a run of venereal disease. Ray Parkin took his paintbox ashore and squatted on the footpath across the road from Lil's to do a watercolour of the place as a souvenir. Delighted at his artistry, Lil enthusiastically offered him a girl for the afternoon in exchange for the picture, but he politely declined. Ray was staying true to Thelma, back home in Victoria. The diary he kept in the Caribbean is threaded with tender thoughts of her:

On a more salubrious plane than Lil's, there was the Constant Spring Hotel – a long, white, colonial wedding cake of a building set in a palm grove against a backdrop of Jamaica's Blue Mountains. Judy Patching and Charlie Downward would
fit in the occasional game at the hotel's immaculate 18-hole golf course, sometimes meeting Elmo Gee and Bill Bracht for drinks in the bar and dinner afterwards.

They were an unusual bunch. Brass-hatted surgeon commanders did not usually mix with Lower Deck sailors, but Charlie had played cricket with Judy, pre-war, in the navy team, and he and Elmo shared a love of reading. The Constant Spring was a reminder that civilisation still existed. Thoughts of home were never far away. Reg Whiting, the Electrical Artificer, wrote to his two boys in Chatswood – a letter penned in an elegant copperplate script that Brendan Whiting found with his mother's mementos:

For the next few weeks,
Perth
steamed from island to island and port to port in the Caribbean on her tedious task of blockading German ships in harbour or hoping to catch them if they attempted to escape. In late November, there was a change of scene when she travelled through the Panama Canal to refuel two Canadian destroyers in the Pacific Ocean, but it seemed, at times, as if the war was happening elsewhere.

December was enlivened by the Battle of the River Plate. In the months since sinking the
Clement
, Langsdorff and
Graf Spee
had created havoc in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, sending another seven ships to the bottom, three of which had been on passage from Australia to Europe. Some men of the RAN reserve, gunners on those ships, were the
first Australian sailors to be taken prisoner in the war. The Admiralty in London and the Navy Office in Melbourne hurled all their available resources into the hunt for the raider, and on Wednesday 13 December she was cornered in the South Atlantic.

The Royal Navy's South American Cruiser Squadron, led by the 8-inch heavy cruiser HMS
Exeter
, with two light cruisers, HMS
Ajax
and HMS
Achilles
, similar ships to
Perth
, found the pocket battleship off the great estuary of the River Plate between Uruguay and Argentina.
Graf Spee
dealt out heavy punishment to
Exeter
, which limped away from the battle badly damaged, but
Ajax
and
Achilles
harried Langsdorff and forced him to take refuge in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo.