Cruiser (19 page)

Two of Brian's uncles, his mother's brothers, had been killed in the First World War – one at Gallipoli, the other at Villers-Bretonneux in France. Vera worried about her son joining the navy in troubled times, but Brian thought it was heaven compared with the weary grind at the bakehouse:

Like Rowley Roberts, Brian Sheedy took his place as one of the elite on
Perth
's signal bridge – an astute and passionate observer.

Adolf Hitler flew to Paris before dawn on 23 June 1940, arriving at sunrise. It was a summer Sunday, the chestnuts along the Champs Elysées in early leaf. Few Parisians were on the streets. For the conqueror of France – a triumphant dictator who was now master of Europe from Norway to the Mediterranean – it was a surprisingly low-key visit. He was accompanied by his secretary, Martin Bormann, and his favourite architect, the clever but fawning Albert Speer. They toured the near-deserted boulevards in a small convoy of open-topped Mercedes-Benz limousines, stopping first at the Opéra, which Hitler, the self-styled aesthete, excitedly described to Speer as ‘the most beautiful theatre in the world!'.

After pausing for photographs at the Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower in the background, they drove to Les Invalides. Hitler stood in rapt silence staring down, tyrant to tyrant, at the tomb of Napoleon in the great rotunda. By nine o'clock, he was in the air again, heading back to his headquarters, curiously subdued. ‘Draw up a decree in my name ordering full-scale resumption of work on the Berlin buildings,' he told Speer. ‘Wasn't Paris beautiful? But Berlin must be made more beautiful.'
⁸

Hitler's misty-eyed contemplation of the beauties of the City of Light were quickly swept away by his order for the planning of Unternehmen Seelöwe, Operation Sea Lion – the cross-Channel invasion of Britain. As that northern summer of 1940 turned to autumn, it seemed that nothing stood in his way. Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, boasted that the British would be brought to their knees by air power alone, and in the Atlantic
Ocean Dönitz's U-boats had the upper hand over the slow and weakly defended convoys that carried oil and machines from America to Britain, and men and food from all over the Empire, including Australia.

Winston Churchill, on the other hand, contemplated a strategic calamity. In a few weeks, the balance of power had tipped alarmingly. The U-boats now had bases on the Atlantic coast of France – a huge advantage over the long and dangerous trip from Kiel or Wilhelmshaven north around the British Isles. In the Mediterranean – the sea highway that led to Egypt, the Suez Canal, India and the rest of the Empire – there was the fear that the powerful and modern battleships of conquered France would fall into Italian or, worse, German hands.

Churchill, unflinching, ordered his admirals to prevent this at all costs. The French were made an offer: they could sail their warships to England or to French colonial ports and remain in the Allied fight; they could disarm their guns; or they could be destroyed at anchor by the Royal Navy. The worst happened. French pride and honour collided with British desperation and resolve. On 3 July, a French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria refused the British ultimatum. A Royal Naval task force led by the battlecruiser HMS
Hood
opened fire. The French were all but destroyed, their ships sunk or run aground, with 1297 men killed. Only the battleship
Strasbourg
escaped. Further east at Alexandria – the main port city of Egypt – another French squadron, including the old battleship
Lorraine
, agreed to disarm its guns.

In Europe, the great battle in the skies over Britain began. The Blitz rained fire on London. And, in the Mediterranean, the Italians finally began to stir. On land, Mussolini ordered Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the ‘Butcher of Libya', to attack the British Army in Egypt, and in October the Italian Army invaded Greece. But, in embarrassing succession, Il Duce's dreams of quick and glorious victories were shattered in a matter of months. British and Indian troops and the Australian Army's newly blooded 6th Division sent the Italians tumbling
back to Libya in a frantic retreat, capturing literally tens of thousands of prisoners. The campaign in Greece was a similar fiasco, with the Italians quickly thrown back to Albania by the small but feisty Greek Army.

The Italian Navy, the Regia Marina, fared little better. On paper, it was a force far superior to the British Mediterranean Fleet based at Alexandria. At sea, the story was very different. The Italian admirals and captains were cautious, hesitant, prone to flight at a sign of trouble. On 19 July, the Australian cruiser
Sydney
scored the RAN's first big victory over the Italians in the Kaso Strait off Cape Spada, the northernmost point of the island of Crete.

Under the command of Captain John Collins, a naval-college classmate of Frank Farncomb,
Sydney
and a small squadron of British destroyers attacked and routed two Italian cruisers,
Bartolomeo Colleoni
and
Giovanni Delle Bande Nere
. It was a pell-mell chase on a hazy morning that turned into a perfect Mediterranean summer's day. The Italians were desperate to escape down the west coast of Crete, laying smoke as they fled.
Sydney
and her destroyers, guns blazing, ran down and sank
Colleoni
, and
Bande Nere
fled. By midday it was all over. Collins and his men returned to Alexandria and a hero's welcome from the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, including the Australian Scrap Iron destroyers, which were festooned with Australian flags. When news of the victory reached Australia, there was an explosion of national pride and joy.

After that bloody nose, the Regia Marina became still more reluctant to put to sea. In November, a handful of Swordfish torpedo bombers,
⁹
the famous ‘Stringbags', launched from the carrier HMS
Illustrious
, attacked the Italian fleet in harbour at Taranto. Three Italian battleships were crippled, for the loss of just two aircraft. It was the first naval action ever undertaken by aircraft alone, without the ships involved sighting each other – a triumph for seaborne air power.

A world away in Tokyo, Japanese admirals and aviators studied Taranto with care, absorbing its lessons and drawing
some profound conclusions about the use of airborne torpedoes against ships berthed in harbour. As the war in Europe swelled, Japan had moved ever deeper into planning Nanshinron, the southward ‘expansion' towards the rich resources of oil, rubber and tin in South East Asia. This took on increasing urgency as the Americans sought to curb the Japanese rampage in China by ratcheting up trade sanctions and embargos. On 2 July, President Roosevelt signed an Export Control Act that banned the sale of aviation fuel to Japan and restricted the export of other oil and steel products. The Japanese Foreign Minister cabled his ambassador in Washington, the one-eyed Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura:

Their grievances festering, their paranoia deepening, the Japanese plunged on. In September, the Vichy administration in French colonial Indochina signed what it hoped would be an accord to limit Japan's penetration there. The ink was still wet on the treaty when the Japanese invaded Indochina in force, tossing aside the feeble local defences and taking effective control of what is now northern Vietnam. Both the United States and Australia viewed this with alarm. In one leap forward, Japan now menaced the South Pacific and south Asia in an arc that curved from the Hawaiian Islands in the east, through the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies, and westwards to Malaya and Burma.

Hardly had that blow landed when there was another and greater bombshell. Germany, Italy and Japan came together in an alliance the world would know as the Axis. In Berlin, on 27 September, they signed a tripartite pact that began with a flourish of diplomatic cynicism on an epic scale:

Perth
was constantly at sea towards the end of 1940. There were more convoys of troopships and men to escort, with occasional reports of German raiders operating against Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean. And at last the ship had her aircraft aboard. The RAAF's 9 Squadron had been persuaded to part with a Vickers Supermarine Seagull V – an amphibious biplane as plain and stumpy as a bullock cart. It had a single Pegasus radial engine mounted above the cockpit, with the propellor at the rear, which pushed rather than pulled the aircraft along at a groaning maximum speed of 210 km/h. But the Seagull, affectionately known to the air force as the Shagbat and to
Perth
's crew as the Pusser's Duck,
¹¹
was a tough and versatile beast with a metal hull, capable of operating off both water and land. With a crew of three, and a range of almost 1000 kilometres, it was, for a time, an invaluable extension of
Perth
's horizons.

Roy Norris, a petty officer cook from Carlton, in Melbourne, was one of the most experienced sailors on board. He had joined the navy in 1927, signing up for the customary 12 years, which meant he could be out again in 1939. The war changed that. In 1940, he was another of the
Perth
sailors who began to keep a diary in the unspoken thought that they would be
witness to great and terrible events: