Cruiser (17 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
That touched off an extraordinary game of naval and diplomatic cat and mouse. Over the next four days, the Germans became convinced that overwhelming British naval forces were gathering off the River Plate to destroy
Graf Spee
if she attempted to put to sea again. Langsdorff eventually decided to scuttle his ship. An American radio reporter in Montevideo broadcast a live coverage of her last hours. On 17 December, far away in the Caribbean,
Perth
's ship's company listened enthralled at his description of the pocket battleship steaming slowly out into the Plate estuary and going down in a Wagnerian convulsion of fire and smoke. Langsdorff, a competent commander far from the stereotype of the heel-clicking Nazi, shot himself in Buenos Aires two days later, wrapped in his ship's ensign. The Battle of the River Plate had been a stunning British victory.
Perth
would eventually meet both
Ajax
and
Exeter
, under very different though no less dramatic circumstances.
16
And then came Christmas â the first of the war. After an unsuccessful attempt to tow off a British freighter stranded on a reef,
Perth
was back in Kingston for the festivities. This moment, too, they would remember all their lives. On Christmas Day, the ship was aroused by the strains of âChristians, Awake, Salute the Happy Morn' in place of the usual âReveille', and,
with the mess decks hung with flags and coloured paper streamers, the men threw themselves into partying.
Lunch was a triumph for the cooks â a feast of ham and turkey with all the trimmings, traditional plum pudding and brandy sauce, finished off with fresh fruit and nuts. Some of the crew washed it down with a big flagon of rum provided by the ever hospitable Shanghai Lil. They exchanged visits with the Canadian destroyer
Assiniboine
berthed nearby and in the evening there was a hilarious conga-line of singing, drumming and yahoo-ing through the clammy streets of Kingston. As Bill Bracht recalled it, they paid âcourtesy calls at the various dens of vice to wish the habitués, particularly the hostesses, the compliments of the season'.
17
There were a lot of sore heads the next morning, grateful that the Admiral had cancelled their sailing orders at the last minute.
Perth
's final weeks in the Caribbean saw her doing more of the same old routine patrols, in and out of Kingston. New Year's Eve came and went quietly. But the rumours were flying around the ship â the buzz, as they called it â that soon they would be heading home. At last, on 29 February, the buzz came true.
The ship's movements were supposed to be secret, but inevitably the word got out. They were farewelled at a dance put on by the Kingston Town Ladies Auxiliary and by a huge crowd of well-wishers at the dock, including a group of about a dozen local women who, with tears in their eyes, sang that most tender of sailors' hymns, âAbide With Me'. Gifts of fruit were thrown on board, and a gaggle of small boats followed them out of the harbour.
At sea, Farncomb cleared lower deck to tell the men that the passage back to Australia would be through the Panama Canal and then on to Sydney via Tahiti and Fiji. Elation at the thought of home was tempered that night by the news that two German ships they had been watching in Aruba had broken out in their absence, and they felt robbed again when they heard next morning that British cruisers had caught them.
Through the canal, they headed south-west, crossing the equator with another visit from King Neptune, and on 17 March they raised the high peaks of Tahiti in a blaze of pink and blue sunrise. A pilot came aboard to take them through the reefs of Papeete Harbour, and they noticed that the foreshore was lined with welcoming people. Farncomb addressed the crew over the loudspeaker system with a stiff warning, as Bill Bracht put it:
You are cautioned to conduct yourselves in a proper manner, as the Tahitians have the reputation of being over-friendly. Remember Tahiti is reputed to be the Island of Free Love.
18
The Captain might have saved his breath. His sailors were keenly aware of Tahiti's reputation, and they were anxious to test it. They were not disappointed. The Tahitians turned on the sort of exotic, erotic welcome that had so transfixed Captain James Cook and the crew of the barque
Endeavour
170 years before. The ship's company, paid in sterling and with a lot saved, discovered they could buy a case, a whole case, of French champagne for less than a pound. For young men who had grown up in the sexual straitjacket of pre-war Australia, it was paradise on earth. To their surprise and delight, Norm King and a mate were invited home by two girls:
It was the real thing: wine, women and song. They really did sit outside their thatched dwellings and, as the sun set, sang South Sea Island songs to the thrumming of guitars. They really did swim in the lagoon, in fact everything that South Sea Islanders are supposed to do they did. They also drank a lot of champagne.
19
Bill Bracht joined the main event:
The Blue Lagoon was a large thatched roofed structure built of bamboo and woven cane matting nestled in the palm and
coconut trees about fifty yards from the beach. Inside it was a large dance hall which had an island bar in the centre. The place was well populated and the air was heavy with the exotic odours of hibiscus, frangipani and French cologne, which the girls splashed around indiscriminately.
The night was hot and the music and dancing were vigorous and, with the wine flowing freely, it was soon eviden[t] how the island had got its reputation. Couples would run from the dance hall down to the beach, stripping as they went, and it was hard to say whether there was more merriment on the beach or in the dance hall ⦠at times we would be treated to individual exhibitions of the hula-hula by girls within the hall and by others returning from the beach. I felt certain that some did not return from the beach.
20
George Hatfield was up for it as well:
Migrating to Quinn's Saloon we saw a Polynesian girl and a Chinese girl clad in grass skirts and brassieres do an exhibition Hula. How those girls waggled their stern pieces defies description. They danced faster until, flat out, they finished with a crash from the orchestra who were playing guitars and singing in native tongue.
Getting pretty full we went back on board. Resting up on Tuesday afternoon we went off last boat and strolling around in the cool evening eventually started drinking about ten. We made up our minds to get drunk, Nick and I getting a car. We called at the Lido where they had no beer. Perforce we started on champagne at 40 francs per bottle. From there to the La Fayette we continued on champagne. I danced a lot but my recollections are vague. On the way back to Papeete we called at the beach where a mixed party were swimming in the nude. Let no one misconstrue those words, just a gay frolic where one swam as nature made us. Getting back to Papeete we went to sleep on the grass under a brilliant tropical moon till next morning when rising we visited the âAu Col Bleu' and quenched our parched
throats. Leaving today a large crowd controlled by soldiers with fixed bayonets saw us go. I was sorry to leave but for my general health and pocket it is best.
21
In what sounds like a riotous escapade, three sailors stole and crashed a car â an episode that cost the RAN the sum of £129.1s.5d in compensation. Norm King and a mate overstayed the midnight ending of their leave and were escorted back to the ship next morning by the local gendarmes. Like Cook's men so long before, they left Tahiti enraptured by the sensuous reception they had received.
After that, a brief stopover at their next port of call â the starchy British colony of Fiji â was an anticlimax, and as they drew ever closer to Australia they began to come down with what for centuries the navy has known as Channel Fever: the manic urge for the voyage to end. They had been away for ten months â some of them for longer. But they were very different men from the bunch of raw recruits who had set out on the
Autolycus
what now seemed like aeons ago. They had been around the world, travelling more than 115,000 kilometres, and although they had not met the enemy they could legitimately say they had been at war. Ray Parkin, the experienced seaman and an astute observer of humanity, thought the time spent in the Caribbean had done them a power of good:
This past six months had a powerful effect upon both the ship and her men. The character of both had been melded into an inseparable one. Admittedly, the ordinary seamen had learned to swagger a little more when they went ashore but, on board, they had learned their job in a way no book could teach them. And they had, through direct experience, learned the real meaning of responsibility. They had grown up. They felt a new integrity within themselves and a readiness to act spontaneously with a knowledge of what they were about. And they felt something very satisfying about it. The whole ship's company had been knit into something that transcended rank or rating and were made
One. There was a real familial quality holding us together, as if it were the ship herself that held us all so close. As if she were the Common Good to which we were beholden.
22
On 31 March, an early-autumn Sunday, they were out of their hammocks well before the pipe, laying out their best white uniforms, itching to catch sight of Australia again. With the sun rising astern, the watch on the bridge saw the Sydney coastline emerging from the morning mist, the lights ashore glittering like a long row of diamonds, the Macquarie Lighthouse near South Head making its welcoming two short flashes every ten seconds. There would be time for breakfast before they entered harbour.
FIRST HOMECOMING
Sydney has always loved a sailor. Wartime secrecy had been abandoned for the day. The city knew
Perth
was coming home and an armada of small craft and hired ferries was waiting to greet her as she hove into view on the horizon and passed between the Heads at 10 am, exactly on time. Her crew lined the rails and upperworks, stiffly at attention. On the quarterdeck, the band, resplendent in scarlet and blue, played stirring nautical marches. Horns blared, steam whistles shrilled, and cheer after cheer echoed across the harbour waters. âOn yachts and launches, girls in flowered sunsuits revealing sun browned limbs laughed and cheered as the
Perth
rocked them with her wash,' reported
The Sydney Morning Herald
approvingly, and the ABC broadcast a live description of her arrival.
She went alongside at the Garden Island Naval Base just after 10.30 am, nosed into her berth by a pair of tugs. High on the bridge above the excited crowd milling on the wharf, Farncomb ordered âfinished with main engines', and the brow went clattering from wharf to quarterdeck. There were families and lovers and mates to see again, newborn children to hold for the first time.
Perth
was the first Australian ship to return from âstrenuous war service', as the
Herald
called it. The Caribbean had hardly been strenuous, still less Tahiti, but nobody was arguing. To drum up patriotic fervour, the Menzies government organised
a naval parade through the streets of Sydney the next day, with the
Perth
men as its centrepiece. A cold southerly wind and a grey day had the men shivering in their summer whites, but with rifles at the slope and bayonets fixed, led by the ship's band, they were cheered to the echo as they swung along Macquarie Street and down past the Cenotaph in Martin Place. Coloured streamers showered down from the upper windows of the banks and the GPO. At the Town Hall, the Governor General, the Prime Minister and more naval and military brass than you could poke a stick at were arrayed on the saluting dais. It was a propaganda triumph, filmed for the newsreels to be shown at cinemas around the country within days.
Not that the crew cared a fig for any of that. Leave was what mattered. The ship went into dock for a month's refit and her officers and men scattered out across the country. Reg Whiting went home to Allie and his two beloved sons in their cottage at Chatswood in Sydney, laden with the souvenirs and gifts he had bought on his travels, as his son recalled:
It is funny the things you remember from childhood. I don't remember much about the âbonza' motor car referred to in my father's letter to me from Kingston, although I vaguely recall that I had a car to get in, just big enough for a five-year-old. However, I do remember clearly the Lionel train set which my father brought back from New York for my brother John, who was seven years older than me. He had it set up on the timber floor of the enclosed sleep-out verandah, and although I could sit and watch the train run on its track, I was not allowed to touch it or play with its controls.
1
Reg set about some gardening, cutting into the overgrown paspalum grass in the backyard and laying out vegetable beds and a fence.
Not so lucky, Elmo Gee came down with appendicitis and was hurried off to the naval hospital at HMAS
Penguin
, on
the shores of Sydney Harbour near Mosman. Recovering, he served for a time as coxswain on
Penguin
's cutter, exploring the harbour coves and beaches.
At grimy Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, Bill Bracht was welcomed as a conquering hero â heady stuff for a coalminer's son. The council turned on a civic reception and a dance in the solid brick respectability of the School of Arts. Speeches were made. Bill was presented with a gold-plated pencil, and his mother was given a silver teapot to commemorate the great day. What was then resoundingly known as the Returned Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen's Imperial League of Australia invited him to join as its first new member from this second war of the century. Most satisfying of all, the local newspaper Bill had once delivered as a kid reported his homecoming under the vigorous headline: âCESSNOCK'S WELCOME TO LOCAL MAN RETURNED FROM WAR'. The accompanying story sagged a bit, though, when it described him as âbattle scared'. The paper solemnly corrected that the next day to âbottle scarred', finally getting it right on a humbly apologetic third attempt.
Norm King caught the train home to Adelaide and a new house his family had bought in Blair Athol, to find that his young brother Don had grown up in his absence and discovered the use of condoms. Norm, the worldly sailor home from the sea, loyally copped the rap when their father discovered two of the young bloke's rubbers in the septic tank.
Ray Parkin went to Melbourne to rejoin Thelma and their kids, Jill and John.
George Hatfield lost no time; he and Alma Parkin got married on 4 April.
Jack Lewis was reunited with his fiancée, Joan Flynn, in Sydney, where they laid plans for their wedding at no less than St Mary's, the Catholic cathedral. Joan loved her handsome young sailor to distraction, as he did her. âWhen us Flynn girls get going, we get going,' she liked to say to him.
2
These were happy, easy-going days. The men of the
Perth
could forget the war for a bit. And anyway, it hadn't been all that bad, really. It was good to be out of uniform, away from naval discipline and the ship's routine of pipes and watches, drills and orders.
This was now a very different Australia from the one they had left behind when they had sailed in the
Autolycus
. The RAN was calling up the men of the reserve, deploying what ships it had available, reactivating old vessels and planning new ones. The shipping lanes around the nation had to be patrolled and guarded against surface raiders, submarines and mines. The army was beginning to put together the tens of thousands of troops, the Second Australian Imperial Force, who would be sent in sea convoys to the Middle East in early 1940. It would be the navy's duty to see those convoys safely across the Indian Ocean and into the Suez Canal.
These were formidable tasks for a less than formidable force â although, at the outbreak of war, the RAN had been in better shape than might have been expected only a few years before. The heavy cruisers
Australia
and
Canberra
were the backbone of the fleet, together with
Perth
and her sisters
Sydney
and
Hobart
. Other ships had been hurried back into commission. The thorniest problem was finding crews. There were only 5010 permanent service officers and men. As the RAN's official historian, G. Hermon Gill, put it:
The parade ground at the Naval Reserve Depot at Edgecliff [in Sydney], where a gunnery school had been established on the 2nd of September, resounded to the shouts of instructors and loading numbers, and the rattle and slam of breech blocks as ratings, mobilised from reserve, many of them to be afloat in a day or so and in European waters within a few weeks, were licked hurriedly into shape.
3
In some remote quarters, there was the radical thought that perhaps women could be of some use to the service in wartime, releasing men from shore jobs for duty at sea. In the meantime,
the reserves and new recruits would have to fill the holes.
In London, the war had propelled Winston Churchill back into office as First Lord of the Admiralty, the ministerial head of the Royal Navy. It was a job he had held for a time during the First World War. âWinston is back,' the Admiralty signalled to its ships when he returned in triumph to the First Lord's office in the Admiralty building in Whitehall. It was from that very room, with its imposing wall maps, its vast desk and clusters of black Bakelite telephones, and its tall windows overlooking Horse Guards Parade, that Churchill had urged, pleaded and argued for the ultimately disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915. No less energetic this second time around, the First Lord crackled with new ideas â some practical, some cunning, some outlandish and absurd. He chafed beneath the confusion of Chamberlain and the defeatism of Foreign Secretary Halifax, who, many thought, was still keen to seek an accommodation with Hitler.
The month of May brought an end to all that, in tumultuous events that changed the course not just of European history but of civilisation itself. As dawn broke on Friday 10 May, Hitler stirred awake in his private train,
Amerika
, which had carried him from Berlin across the Rhine to the small town of Euskirchen, near the Belgian border. The news was good. Denmark and Norway had fallen to him. Now Fall Gelb, or Case Yellow â the invasion of Holland, Belgium and France â had begun and was following the blueprint so carefully drawn up by the Wehrmacht High Command. The Führer was beside himself with glee. No fewer than 136 German divisions were crunching into Western Europe, crushing all in their path. The Luftwaffe was bombing airfields: Goering's fighters and Stuka dive-bombers destroyed almost half of the Royal Netherlands Air Force in that one spring morning. Airborne troops commanded by the vigorous parachute general Kurt Student
descended upon The Hague, Rotterdam and a key Belgian strongpoint, the supposedly impregnable Fort Eben-Emael, which succumbed within 24 hours.
The Dutch and the Belgians appealed for help from Britain, but in London that day British politics were near paralysis. Confronted by the new Nazi onslaught across the Channel, Chamberlain was a drowning man grasping at flotsam to stay afloat. Still convinced that he and no other should lead the British people through the war that his policies of appeasement had done so much to bring about, he sought to cling to power by enticing the Labour opposition to join him in a national coalition government. It was his last gasp. Labour would have no part of him. The Tory establishment made a rearguard attempt to replace Chamberlain with Halifax, but it became apparent, within hours, that only Winston Churchill could command the confidence of the King, the House of Commons and the nation. By six o'clock that night, Churchill had observed the ancient custom of kissing the King's hands and was, at last, prime minister.
In the coming days, the bloody tide of blitzkrieg surged into France. On the morning of 15 May, Churchill was awoken in his bedroom at the Admiralty to take a phone call from Paris. It was the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud. âWe have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle,' he sobbed down the line.
4
Churchill flew to Paris the next day to try to stiffen the French but was âdumbfounded' â his word â to find the government preparing to flee. The Cabinet and its military advisers stood about, shoulders slumped, sunk in gloom and defeatism. Through the windows of the Foreign Ministry at the Quai d'Orsay, Churchill could see frantic civil servants heaping barrow loads of documents onto bonfires in the garden below.
Ten days later, the British Army was on the beaches of Dunkirk, awaiting the miracle of its deliverance. Operation DYNAMO, so named because it was commanded from the dynamo room in the bowels of Dover Castle, scraped together
every vessel that could make it back and forth across the Channel. By Churchill's count, 338,226 soldiers â slightly more than half of them British, the rest French â were snatched from the beaches and Dunkirk Harbour. On the evening of 4 June, the new Prime Minister would make to the House of Commons a call to arms to echo down the ages:
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Six days later, Benito Mussolini finally summoned the courage to join in. On 10 June, like a thief at a back-alley brawl, Il Duce grabbed for his share of the pickings. As the panicked remains of the French Government stampeded from Paris to Bordeaux, Italy declared war on Britain and France. âThe hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbour,' said President Roosevelt in Washington.