Cruiser (25 page)

Later commentators were far more caustic. The official British naval historian, Captain Stephen Roskill, wrote after the war that ‘no matter how strong were the political arguments for sending aid to Greece, in terms of strategy such action now seems to have been little short of lunacy'.
¹⁴

Before LUSTRE began,
Perth
enjoyed a brief rest. The ship put her ammunition ashore and went into Alexandria's floating dry dock again for ten days for more repairs to the damage sustained at the bombing in Malta. It was a makeshift job, but leaks in her strained plates were patched up and the scuttles, the portholes, in her hull were welded shut for added strength. And, at last, to everyone's surprise, she got radar.

It was the British Type 286 – an early model that had a fragile-looking wire antenna attached to the foremast. There was a receiver on one side of the antenna and a transmitter on the other, and in ideal conditions it had a range of about 15 kilometres. The great defect was that the antenna did not rotate, meaning that the ship itself had to turn to scan for an incoming aircraft. Three trained Royal Navy ratings were sent to
Perth
to operate it, but there is no indication that, despite some optimism, it ever amounted to much. The human eye was still the ship's best defence.

Far more usefully,
Perth
's anti-aircraft armament was beefed up. The Italian rout in North Africa had delivered the Allies huge dumps of intact weapons and ammunition. Among the most prized of the spoils were literally hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, the Cannone-Mitragliera da 20/65 modello 35, better known as the Breda. Operated by just one man, it was a light
and accurate machine gun that fired a 20 mm shell at around 240 rounds a minute, with an effective range of 1.5 kilometres against aircraft.
Perth
unofficially managed to acquire two of them, which were placed on either side of the catapult deck between her two funnels.

Every so often, there would be air raids on Alexandria, which would send everyone to their action stations in the ship or to the shelters ashore if they had liberty. The warships in the harbour put up a ferocious barrage, augmented by the batteries on land, which was generally enough to drive the attackers off, although some got through. The chief effect of the raids was to place extra stress on jangled nerves longing for a rest. Norm King recorded a black moment:

Bowyer-Smyth made sure his men got time off to stretch their legs on dry land, although there was little enough to do in Alexandria once you had knocked around the bars, the clubs and the few picture theatres. Some men went for a swim at the local Stanley Beach. Ray Parkin strolled through the bazaars of Mohamed Ali square, trawling for antiques. He read Julian Huxley's
Essays of a Biologist
and did more painting and model making. Jim Nelson hung out at the Fleet Club – a converted hospital with a sign outside on the pavement reading ‘NAVY AND RAF ONLY', where he played the trumpet one night in an impromptu jam session. Roy Norris and some mates played some tennis, went to the pictures and slept a night at
the Australian Club, where – a pleasant change from the petty officers' mess on board – they were awoken in the morning with a hot cup of tea:

Bags of mail arrived to everyone's delight, with a lot of long-delayed Christmas presents. But all too soon it was time to go back to the war.

Kastellorizo is Greece's most easterly island in the Mediterranean, a compact jewel of breathtaking beauty in the Dodecanese archipelago just a stone's throw from the coast of Turkey. Whitewashed tumbledown houses are reflected in the deep blue waters of a small harbour dominated by pink granite cliffs and the gleaming walls and terracotta dome of the church of Agios Nikolaos.
¹⁷
In 1941, Kastellorizo was in the hands of the Italians, who maintained a small garrison and a wireless station there. It was a useful base for attacks by their E-boats – fast torpedo craft. The British decided to oust them and take the island for themselves as a foothold in the Aegean Sea. On 24 February, in an operation code-named ABSTENTION, a small force of army and Royal Marine commandos sailed from Crete in the destroyers HMS
Decoy
and HMS
Hereward
and
the gunboat HMS
Ladybird
. Before dawn the next day, faces blackened, weapons cocked, the soldiers slipped ashore in the Kastellorizo harbour.

It was a fiasco. The Italians fought back with surprising vigour and, worse, managed to radio for help to the Italian eastern base on the nearby island of Rhodes. Within hours, the Regia Aeronautica had arrived to bomb both the British ships and the commandos ashore.
Ladybird
was damaged by a single hit, ran short of fuel and retired, which meant the commandos losing their radio contact with Alexandria.

Perth
and another couple of British destroyers were sent in as reinforcements on the 28th, only to find that Italian destroyers and gunboats had also turned up. In a violent electrical storm that night, there was a confused melee with the destroyers lunging here and there and launching torpedoes at each other but neither side scoring a hit.
Perth
fired star shells in a largely futile attempt to illuminate the scene, and then aimed a few live rounds at an Italian destroyer that was escaping in the uproar. In heavy seas, with waves breaking high above her bridge, she narrowly avoided a collision with the destroyer HMS
Jaguar
by going full astern.

In the end, everyone gave it away as a bad job. Nobody knew who was in charge, the army or the navy. The commandos, ill equipped for a long firefight, were hastily extracted but left behind some 30 prisoners. Cunningham, who honourably took responsibility, later wrote to the First Sea Lord in London that ‘the taking and abandoning of Castelorizzo [
sic
] was a rotten business and reflected little credit on anyone'. They should have abstained from ABSTENTION.

Now,
Perth
would be called upon to play her part in Operation LUSTRE. In the first week of March, she returned to the dreary Mediterranean routine of patrol and convoy, buffeted by a heavy gale south of Greece that saw two men washed overboard from
Ajax
nearby. The Hair-Trigger Twins beat off an attack by a lone torpedo bomber – an event that was becoming so common now that it barely rated a mention.
At sea, the ship's company, from the Captain to the youngest ordinary stoker, lived at almost unceasing alert, which chipped away at a man's physical and mental reserves. Nobody ever got a good night's sleep. Exhaustion was a constant companion. Men would go on watch with aching muscles and legs like jelly, sometimes struggling to put one foot forward of the other. A small grievance could suddenly explode into a major crisis if you let it. And ever present were those two outriders of a sailor's despair: a longing for home and loved ones and the fear – sometimes secret, sometimes spoken – that they might never be seen again.

A run ashore in Piraeus or Alexandria was always a welcome tonic, but it treated the symptoms, not the disease. Ray Parkin drew strength from mateship under adversity:

Bowyer-Smyth carried the ship, as a good captain should. He spent long stretches on the bridge, but even in those few broken
hours when he could leave things to the Officer of the Watch there was the daily grind of a captain's duties. Paperwork crowded in. The Report of Proceedings had to be written up for whichever authority ashore might choose to read it. An eye had to be kept on the state of fuel and ammunition, and, ultimately, on the welfare of more than 600 men in his care. Even when he could get his head down for some sleep, there was a part of him that remained awake, unconsciously alert to the changing of the watch, or an alteration of course, or some small variation in the weather. Time and again, a moment of relaxation in his sea cabin would be interrupted by the urgent call of ‘Captain to the bridge'.

His responsibility was the greatest of all, but he wore it lightly, conscious that his officers and men looked to him for leadership. He was a superb ship handler and a skilled seaman. On the bridge in command, or with a defaulter brought before him in his cabin, he radiated calm, humanity and good sense. He handed out punishment with a notably lighter hand than his predecessor, Harold Farncomb, and the men responded accordingly. The
Perth
diaries and memoirs are studded with complaints about Farncomb – perhaps not all of them justified – but Bowyer-Smyth comes in for universal praise. His Gunnery Officer, Warwick Bracegirdle, would say of him:

The Commander, Pricky Reid, not himself the most popular officer in the ship, offered similar praise:

Roy Norris was more direct, noting in his diary that Bowyer-Smyth was ‘a great skipper – the best I have known, and no mistake about it'.
²¹
Ray Parkin found him to be ‘as staunch a commanding officer as any ship could desire, immediately becoming part of the ship and the ship's company in a very real way'. And the harshest critic of all, Norm King, no lover of gold braid, would write that Bowyer-Smyth ‘despite the handle, was a good Captain without the stern visage of his predecessor. It is true to say that without his skill at making the ship a very difficult target for aircraft we would have not survived the onslaught that was soon to come.'

As the weeks rolled into months, other men helped to hold it all together. One such was the ship's chaplain, the Reverend Ronald Bevington, a Church of England clergyman born in Hampshire. He was, said Jim Nelson: