Cruiser (26 page)

On Friday 7 March,
Perth
went alongside in Alexandria to begin her role in the LUSTRE convoys to Greece. In the coming weeks, the fleet would carry and escort nearly 60,000 men, with their weapons and ammunition, vehicles and food, across the Mediterranean on the dangerous 1000-kilometre journey from Alexandria to Piraeus. It would be an epic feat.

The tragic irony was that, as these Commonwealth forces were leaving the Middle East, the Germans were arriving. Two thousand kilometres to the west of Alexandria, at the port of Tripoli on the edge of the Libyan desert, Rommel was welcoming the advance guard of his Afrikakorps. He was about to unleash havoc upon the remnants of the once-unstoppable Allied armies that had swept aside the Italians.

On the wharf at Alexandria, there was organised chaos under a blazing sun. Swarms of khaki-clad bodies milled around in the way that soldiers do when they have nothing to do.
Perth
that day was assigned to embark 650 men, which would almost exactly double her ship's complement. Cruisers were not designed as troop transports, but somehow space had to be found for them above and below decks, and food provided. The sailors were at first taken aback by their new army passengers, who seemed to be of every nationality under the sun, including, to everyone's astonishment, some Germans. They turned out to be Jews who had joined the fight against Hitler. The rest comprised Palestinians and Czechs, Poles and Austrians, and some British Royal Engineers, and even
a handful of Australians from a field ambulance unit. More startling still was the amount of personal baggage they lugged along with them. The 58 officers coming on board had been instructed to bring only one small suitcase and a kitbag, but some arrived with wardrobe trunks as if preparing for a parade. And there were three dogs – whether pets or regimental mascots, nobody quite discovered. Two of them were seasick, which was not welcomed.

Shortly after noon,
Perth
put to sea, in company with
Orion
and
Ajax
, who were similarly laden. Happily, the weather was kind. They did some high-angle anti-aircraft practice just to sharpen up, but there was no attack by the enemy even in the danger area of the narrow Kaso Strait east of Crete, and the three cruisers arrived safely in Piraeus the next day to disembark their khaki cargo. Germany and Greece not yet being at war, the troop landings that day and over the coming weeks were carefully watched and counted by spies from the German Embassy. The German military attaché had Scottish ancestry and spoke flawless English; clad in tweedy civilian clothes, he chatted amiably with unsuspecting British officers to ask what they might be up to.
Perth
moved out and anchored in the Salamis Roads, and the crew were delighted to hear the pipe ‘Hands to bathe'. That meant a swim. They plunged overboard into deep blue waters, exulting in the salty freshness.

But there was to be no rest. The next few days saw the three cruisers at sea again on a fruitless patrol off Greece, and then it was back to Suda on Monday 10 March, where they encountered the main battle fleet, led by the battleship
Barham
. That afternoon, the Germans again favoured them with an air attack, which was beaten off by a heavy barrage, some shrapnel landing on
Perth
's decks.

The curious thing was that the ship's company had no real idea of what was happening. All this transporting of troops and the appearance of the main battle fleet meant that a flap was on, but they didn't know what sort of flap. The gilded gods of the High Command could deploy and dispose, but it was not
for the humble sailor to reason why. This was war. You just got on with it. You did what you were told, when you were told, and listened to the buzzes that rippled around the mess decks or the wardroom. The BBC radio news was a source of information, but only sketchy information. Newspapers, when they arrived, were often weeks old. Sometimes, the crew listened to the German radio, if only for a laugh. They particularly enjoyed it when they heard, not once but several times, that they themselves had been sunk by the gallant Luftwaffe.

But there was indeed a flap on. In the second week of March,
Perth
took another load of troops to Piraeus – this time 500 New Zealanders, who came with much less luggage and no dogs, and whose company they especially enjoyed. They sent them ashore with the ship's band playing a stirring popular tune picked up from the Greeks, the words of which invited Mussolini to perform an unlikely feat of sexual gymnastics.

At Alexandria, Cunningham was relieved that, so far, the LUSTRE convoys had done their job almost without incident. For reasons nobody quite understood, but for which they were thankful anyway, there had been very little attack from the air and nothing by sea. The troops were being carried safely to Greece, as the army required. But the Commander-in-Chief was confronted now by new threats.

His next task was to run a massive supply convoy through from Alexandria to beleaguered Malta – the second of the year. This brought out the battle fleet in full strength, with Cunningham himself in command at sea.
Perth
, in Vice-Admiral Pridham-Wippell's 7th Cruiser Squadron, was a part of the prowling escort for the big ships. Now they were conscious that they were part of a mighty naval occasion. Here was Britannia's sinew and muscle arrayed before them.
Warspite
, Cunningham's flagship, had the most famous name in the Royal Navy. Now very much modernised, she had fought at Jutland in the First World War, and there had been no fewer than seven
Warspites
before her, the first a 29-gun galleon launched in Elizabethan times. Her battleship consorts were
her sister ships
Barham
and
Valiant
, the three of them armed with eight massive 15-inch guns. The new aircraft carrier
Formidable
replaced the stricken
Illustrious
. This was the steel grey embodiment of 300 years of history and tradition.

On
Perth
's signal bridge, ready at the flag locker and the halliards, Brian Sheedy looked on in awe and wonder:

Roy Norris, less technically minded, was moved by the majesty of it all:

Close to Malta, the battle fleet turned back and left the cruisers to escort the convoy towards the island. The next day, there
was another ferocious Luftwaffe air attack by five waves of JU88 bombers coming from out of the sun – an onslaught that had the cruisers closed up at action stations for most of the afternoon. Happily for
Perth
, the Germans concentrated their attack on
Gloucester
, probably because her silhouette, though smaller, was similar to that of a battleship. At times, she disappeared behind enormous pillars of filthy yellow water thrown up by the exploding bombs. But there were no hits. As Norris recorded, ‘We had no luck but neither did they, so stumps score could probably be called a draw when an appeal against the light was successfully upheld.'
²⁶

Perth
returned to Piraeus, the ship's routine turned upside down when a top-secret code book inexplicably went missing from her bridge. This was unprecedented, and a very serious matter. The ship was searched from stem to stern, which turned up all sorts of illicit material from bottles of whisky to colourful pornography. But the signal book was not found.

For months, the Germans had been pressing their Italian partners for more aggressive action in the Mediterranean, both at sea and in the air. In February 1941, the commanders of the two navies had met at the picturesque little Alpine town of Merano in the Italian Tyrol. Tactfully but firmly, the Kriegsmarine chief, Admiral Raeder, tried to stiffen the spine of his Italian opposite number, Admiral Arturo Riccardi. Raeder pressed for the Italians to deliver the knockout blow to Malta, to attack the British at sea and to throw support behind the convoys carrying Rommel's forces to Libya across the Sicilian Narrows. Riccardi made warlike noises in reply but complained to his German guest that the Italian Navy was so desperately short of fuel that its ships might be paralysed in harbour by the summer of 1941. After two days, Raeder returned to Berlin, unimpressed, but promising to see what could be done about the fuel situation.

Towards the end of March, there were signs that things might be changing. ULTRA decrypts of Luftwaffe and Italian Navy signals suggested that a major operation was
being planned for the eastern Mediterranean. The Admiralty informed Cunningham that the Germans were withdrawing squadrons of fighter aircraft from Libya to Palermo in Sicily and that the Italians were readying for action in the Aegean. It was also noticeable that the Italian Air Force had increased its reconnaissance patrols over the waters south and west of Greece and Crete, and over Alexandria itself, obviously to keep a closer eye on the British fleet.

So something was up, but what? There were several possibilities. The Italians might have been planning, at last, to make a major descent on the LUSTRE convoys heading for Greece. They might have been intending to attack Malta by sea. Or to attack Crete. Or even to make some sort of naval move towards North Africa. Cunningham and his staff weighed the information as it came in, maddeningly incomplete though it was, attempting to guess the Italians' intentions. A wrong decision could be disastrous.

On Thursday 27 March came the breakthrough the British needed. ULTRA intelligence decrypts reported that the Italian fleet had put to sea the evening before, from its bases in Naples, Brindisi and Taranto, heading in a south-easterly direction towards Crete. At last, Cunningham had something solid. He made his decisions. A LUSTRE convoy at sea just south of Crete, heading for Greece, was ordered to turn about and return to Alexandria. Another convoy gathered in Piraeus was instructed not to sail. And the 7th Cruiser Squadron, including
Perth
, was ordered to position itself off Gavdo Island, south of Crete, by daylight the next day. Cunningham would take the battle fleet to sea to meet them.

And then came a little deception. ULTRA could not be compromised. The Italians, and for that matter the Germans, could not be allowed to suspect that their codes had been cracked. An RAF Sunderland reconnaissance aircraft was scrambled from Crete to show itself to whatever enemy ships it could find. The Italian Admiral could believe that was how he had been discovered. Shortly after midday, the aircraft – flown
by an Australian, Flying Officer R. S. Bohm, of Rockhampton in Queensland – reported three Italian cruisers and a destroyer east of Sicily and on course for Crete. Cunningham ordered the battle fleet to put to sea that evening and prepared another ruse of his own. Aware that his every move was watched by enemy spies, he very publicly went ashore from
Warspite
clad in civvies and carrying a suitcase, as if to play golf and later spend the night there. He returned to the ship under cover of dark, and the fleet sailed at 7 pm.

The Battle of Matapan was about to begin.

Cape Matapan is a barren headland at the tip of the Mani Peninsula of mainland Greece, which makes it the most southerly point of Continental Europe. The poet Homer's wine-dark sea beats on its shores and a crumbling stone lighthouse dominates the skyline. On a windy cliff, there are the pillared remains of a temple to Poseidon, the god of the seas, and a cave that the ancients feared as the home of Hades, the god of the dead. The Cape would give its name to the last great fleet engagement fought by the Royal Navy.

The Italians had sailed, in all confidence, to pick off what they believed would be the lightly defended British convoys ploughing between Alexandria and Piraeus. Their optimism was shared by a German intelligence assessment that claimed, inaccurately, that only one of the three British battleships in the eastern Mediterranean was ready for sea. The Germans were attempting to prod their ally into action.

The Italians would claim after the war that this hurry-up, incorrect as it was, had not influenced them. But the fleet Commander, Ammiraglio di Squadra (Vice-Admiral) Angelo Iachino, who had captained a torpedo boat in the First World War on the Allied side, nonetheless believed his forces would be sufficient to overcome whatever opposition he might meet. The Regia Marina would show the arrogant Germans what it was made of.

Iachino flew his flag in
Vittorio Veneto
– a handsome battleship completed only in 1940. At 45,000 tons full load, with a main armament of nine 15-inch guns mounted in three triple turrets and a top speed of just over 31 knots, she was, on paper at least, more than a match for any one of the Royal Navy's smaller, slower and older battleships.
Warspite
, at 33,000 tons, carried eight 15-inch guns – one fewer than the Italian, with a shorter range – and her best speed was only 24 knots.

To back him up, Iachino had six 8-inch heavy cruisers, each of 10,000 tons (
Trieste
,
Trento
,
Bolzano
,
Zara
,
Fiume
and
Pola
), two lighter 6-inch cruisers (
Duca degli Abruzzi
and
Garibaldi
) and 17 destroyers. It was a formidable concentration of sea power. But, as a fleet, it contained deep flaws.

In its haste to rebuild in the interwar years, the Regia Marina had entirely neglected the development of radar, and it
had no aircraft carrier to contest mastery of the air space above a sea battle. Like so many of their peers in other navies, Italy's admirals had argued among themselves about the effectiveness of aircraft carriers, many regarding them as not proven in modern warfare. Iachino had been one of the sceptics. Those in favour were anyway overruled by Mussolini, who believed, with a dictator's stubbornness, that air power could best be deployed by the most ardently Fascist of his forces, the Regia Aeronautica. Italy itself was an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean, so the argument went.

More foolish still, a fierce rivalry between the two services made cooperation almost entirely unworkable. To request air support at sea, an Italian admiral had to apply to navy headquarters ashore – the Supermarina – who in turn would have to put the request to air-force headquarters – Superaereo – who might or might not approve it in their own bureaucratic good time and then, perhaps, pass the order down to the appropriate squadron. It was a farce that would have disastrous consequences.

Andrew Cunningham did have a carrier. Commissioned just the previous November, HMS
Formidable
had recently replaced her sister ship, the bombed
Illustrious
. She carried 27 aircraft: 13 Fulmar fighters, ten Albacore torpedo bombers and four Swordfish torpedo bombers – the rickety-looking ‘Stringbags' that had ravaged the Italian fleet at Taranto.

In addition to
Warspite
and
Formidable
, the British order of battle numbered two more battleships:
Barham
, which was slow and little modernised over the years, and
Valiant
, which was equipped with radar. These four capital ships were accompanied by the 10th Destroyer Flotilla of
Greyhound
,
Griffin
,
Hotspur
and
Havock
, under the command of Hec Waller in the battle-scarred HMAS
Stuart
, and the 14th Destroyer Flotilla of HMS
Jervis
,
Janus
,
Mohawk
and
Nubian
.

Pridham-Wippell's 7th Cruiser Squadron – or Force B, as it would now be called – was made up of his flagship
Orion
, plus
Gloucester
and the Hair-Trigger Twins
Ajax
and
Perth
, all 6-inch
light cruisers, with the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of
Ilex
,
Hasty
and
Hereward
, plus HMAS
Vendetta
, one of the Australian Scrap Iron ships, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Rodney ‘Dusty' Rhoades RAN. On this Friday 28 March, all these ships – British, Australian and Italian – were sailing to meet each other. Neither side knew the strength or position of the other.

It was a transparently lovely day. Spring had come to the Mediterranean, despatching the cruel blasts of winter at long last, although the nights were still cold. A light rain had cleared. The morning watch on
Perth
's bridge, yawning after a long night, was treated to a rosy sun rising off the port quarter. As the ship's company clattered to the daily routine of stand to the dawn, the gathering light revealed a calm sea of deep indigo, ruffled only by the white wakes of the squadron. The cruisers were well to the south of Crete and heading south-east towards Cunningham and the battle fleet coming up from Alexandria. They were cruising in line ahead,
Orion
followed by
Ajax
, then
Perth
and
Gloucester
.

Cunningham was heading towards them, about 145 kilometres away. Much to his frustration, on leaving harbour the previous evening
Warspite
had run too close to a mud bank and clogged her condensers, which reduced her speed and therefore that of the rest of the fleet to a grindingly slow 22 knots. At dawn,
Formidable
flew off four Albacores and a Swordfish for an air search, and at about 7.30 am they reported a force of cruisers and destroyers well ahead. From the position radioed back by the aircraft, Cunningham assumed these were Force B.

Then everything altered, with startling speed. Just before eight o'clock,
Perth
's crew had finished breakfast and the watch was about to change when they saw a group of ships appear over the horizon, astern of them to the nor'east and heading in their direction. In that position, they could only be Italian. A flag hoist whipped up
Orion
's signal halliards: Enemy in sight! Pridham-Wippell radioed to Cunningham that he had
three enemy cruisers and a group of destroyers in view. The Commander-in-Chief knew that the fight was on at last. In
Perth
and the ships of Force B, the bugles blared and the alarm rattles clattered. Some 4000 men raced to their action stations for the fight, to bridges and engine rooms, gun turrets and magazines, Director Control Towers and torpedo tubes, Sick Bays and Damage Control Positions.

In all the war so far, this was the first time that
Perth
and her ship's company had seen an enemy surface vessel. It was electrifying. Brian Sheedy's post was the After Control Position, an open platform just abaft the mainmast, with the Executive Officer, Commander Reid. This was a routine precaution. Reid could take over conning the ship from there if the bridge was destroyed and its personnel killed. Sheedy was his signalman. Adrenalin pumping, he scrambled up to the platform, ducked past the big 44-inch searchlight and began to check the communication lines, the telephones to the fore bridge, main Wireless Office, to X and Y gun turrets, to the engine room and Damage Control Centre.

As he did so, the ‘enemy in sight' signal whipped up
Perth
's foremast, to be repeated to
Gloucester
astern. And then, glory of glories, the Australian flag soared aloft beside it, streaming taut as the cruiser gathered speed.

Force B had run into three of the Italian heavy cruisers,
Trento
,
Trieste
and
Bolzano
. This was seriously dangerous. The enemy was both stronger and faster. Their 8-inch guns had greater range and explosive power than the British cruisers' 6-inch. There was no question of standing to fight them. On the bridge of
Orion
, Pridham-Wippell took the sensible course of action. He ordered his ships to run to the south-east, hoping to draw the Italians after him and under the big guns of Cunningham's battleships. In the engine rooms, they threw open the oil sprayers and the cruisers worked up to 28 knots, throbbing and vibrating, sterns digging deep, wakes boiling furiously behind them, the destroyers battling to keep up.

The Italians took up the chase and opened fire at 8.12 am,
from a range of about 20 kilometres. In
Perth
's High Angle Director Tower, Bill Bracht heard a sound like a steam locomotive thundering past, and suddenly tall gouts of dirty yellow seawater shot skywards as shells landed in the sea only a few hundred metres away. This was good shooting – too close for comfort. Brian Sheedy, on the After Control Platform, struggled to hoist a battle ensign up the mainmast. It was a moment he had been waiting for:

The Allied cruisers were now ‘snaking the line', zigzagging irregularly at speed to confuse the Italian range-finders.
Gloucester
, the rearmost ship and therefore closest to the enemy, fired off three 6-inch salvoes of her own – a gesture of hope over experience. They fell well short.

After about 45 minutes of this furious pursuit, the Italians had second thoughts. It occurred to them that they might be heading into a trap. Two could play at that game. They decided to set a trap of their own, hoping to lure the enemy to certain destruction at the hands of
Vittorio Veneto
and the other heavy cruisers. At 8.55 am, they turned nor'west by west, heading back in the direction they had come from, towards the Italian main force. Pridham-Wippell turned his ships after them to keep touch. At this point, HMAS
Vendetta
, which had been struggling along with the cruisers, developed engine trouble. To her great disappointment, she was sent limping back to Alexandria.

Something of a lull now developed. To the south, Cunningham and the battle fleet were doing their level best to join the fray, the Commander-in-Chief fuming at the slow speed forced on him by
Warspite
's condenser problem. And he was further hampered by the need for
Formidable
to turn off course and into the wind so she could launch her aircraft for reconnaissance sorties. The battleships and the carrier swept on, majestic in the slight swell, the destroyers fussing around them in a screen to ward off possible submarines. Cunningham paced his admiral's bridge – the caged-tiger act, his staff called it – thirsting for action.