Cruiser (36 page)

Shortly after three o'clock in the morning, the admiral in
Phoebe
ordered the withdrawal and they weighed and slipped away towards Alexandria. There was a brief scare as some unseen aircraft dropped parachute flares near them, lighting the bay with a hideous glow, but nothing more came of that and they stole away at a plodding 20 knots, the best speed of the
Glengyle
. Dawn rose on a calm sea and an empty sky south of Gavdo Island, with
Perth
at the tail of the squadron and her upper deck still strewn with sleeping men.

The Luftwaffe woke them just before eight o'clock, Stukas and JU88s screaming out of the sun. They sprang to their weapons, at first hampered by the stumbling soldiers getting in their way. Then some of the Kiwis picked up their .303 rifles and a handful of Bren guns to join in the defence.
Perth
was singled out for special attention. She plunged on through the spray of near misses and roiling smoke, guns blazing, snaking the line as Bowyer-Smyth dodged the attack. There was a rousing cheer when one Stuka failed to pull out of its dive and crashed into the sea nearby. Not far to go now, not long. Alexandria was only a day away. They would make it okay. They always did.

The bomb hit them just before ten o'clock. A stick of ten passed over the ship and exploded harmlessly in the sea beyond, but one stray, from an aircraft no one saw, found its target.
Perth
's luck had run out.

High in the Director, Bill Bracht heard a sharp crack above his head. He looked back over his shoulder from the Director telescope to see a dark, finned cylinder plummet past not a metre away. The crack was the sound of it striking the radar antenna on the foremast – a glancing blow that, miraculously, deflected it away from the bridge and the flag deck. It then grazed the semaphore platform attached to the foremast, passing just an arm's length from Colin Pike – a 21-year-old signalman from Glenelg in Adelaide – tumbling him head over heels. Designed to pierce armoured steel before exploding, the bomb penetrated to the very heart of the ship, rocketing through the incinerator room on the starboard side of the galley and down towards the boiler rooms and engine spaces. Roy Norris was in the galley with the other cooks, cleaning up after breakfast:

Such is life. That simple movement saved Norris. And other men were also spared by God or whatever agent of fate they believed in. Jock Lawrance had just left his action station in a damage control party and was returning to his regular job tending the ship's boilers. To get there, he had to open an air-pressure lock: one heavy door and then a second. For a joke, a mate tripped him up as he was turning the handle to go through the first door and he fell sprawling to the deck. That prank saved him. If he'd made it through that door, he would have been taken by the bomb to its journey's end in A-boiler room, where, finally, it exploded.

But it did not do so immediately. For another heartbeat or two, it lay inert. Eight men on duty in the boiler room heard the dull metallic clang as it hit, and they lunged for a ladder on the port side of the compartment. Struggling frantically to open another pressure lock similar to the one that had saved Jock Lawrance, they made it safely onto the upper deck in the ship's waist.

Only then did the bomb go up. An infernal storm erupted with the elemental force of a thousand pounds of TNT. It blew the boiler room to pieces in a volcanic convulsion of flame, choking black oil smoke and roaring jets of superheated steam. The ship staggered like a shot animal. Two stokers who had not made it to the ladder – Henry Straker, of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, and Harry Smith, a 20-year-old boy from Spotswood, Victoria – died then and there. Heavy steel bulkheads were bent and crushed like cardboard. By rights, the explosion should have torn the bottom out of the ship and sunk her, but, by yet another miracle, the shock waves were deflected upwards through the galley, where Roy Norris had been only seconds before. Bill Fraser, the cook who'd thought he'd heard a gun firing, and another cook, 19-year-old Noel Smith, a former station hand from Orange, New South Wales, were not so lucky. Norris was dazed and shaken:

Outside the galley on the starboard side, the blast and flying debris dealt more death. Seven soldiers and two British Royal Marines – men rescued from Crete – were killed on the deck nearby, one of them cut neatly in half by a door flung off its hinges. On the bridge, Bowyer-Smyth ordered the firefighting and damage control parties into action. Below in the engine room, Dolly Gray stopped the engines to assess the damage done, and
Perth
wallowed to a halt. And, in the shattered, darkened boiler room, Warrant Mechanician Henry Hill, born in Devonport, England, and Stoker Petty Officer Bill Reece, of Goulburn, New South Wales, plunged into the escaping steam in a brave but vain attempt to rescue their two stoker shipmates. Both were themselves badly scalded. For a long moment, Brian Sheedy feared all was lost:

Perth
did not die. She was wounded but she lived on. Her hull was sound, she still swam, as sailors say, and she had not lost all power. Working frantically, they found they could revive two of her engines. After half an hour, they could feel two screws turning, and the deck began to throb reassuringly beneath their feet again. In the noonday sunshine, she picked herself up and doggedly resumed her course to Alexandria, limping along at 20 knots, as Sheedy described:

The upper deck on the starboard side was a slaughterhouse. Strangely, one soldier who had been asleep on a camp stretcher died without a mark on him. Others were dismembered in a sickening obscenity of flesh and gore – a torso here, limbs there. Rivulets of blood and entrails ran into the scuppers to drain over the ship's side. Jim Nelson and another rating, Able Seaman Alex Creasy, of Narrabeen in Sydney, were given the hideous job of gathering what mortal remains they could collect. Gagging, retching, they shovelled lumps of flesh and
bone into potato sacks, to be identified as best they could. In the naval tradition, they wrapped the bodies in canvas hammock covers weighted at the bottom and stitched them together with sailmaker's twine.

There were two more raids that afternoon, by JU88s coming in from the north, but they were successfully beaten off and no more damage was done. Then, in the evening, with the sun setting in a brilliant orange glow astern and a crescent moon rising on the port quarter,
Perth
buried her dead. The Captain brought the ship back to 14 knots at a slow zigzag – the safest possible speed with the risk of enemy submarines in the area. Sailors and soldiers mustered quietly on every vantage point. White Ensigns were lowered to half-mast at a word of command. In a sad silence broken only by the familiar drone of the fans forcing air down to the remaining boilers, and the wash of the sea below, Chaplain Ron Bevington read the age-old words of the naval burial service over the 13 shrouds lined in a neat rank along the quarterdeck:

Even in death, there was no peace. In the midst of the ceremony, four more enemy aircraft swooped low towards the ship and released a brace of bombs off to port, happily with no damage. They were chased off by Fulmar fighters, which had joined the convoy from Alexandria. One by one, the bodies were tipped overboard, to the crack of four rifles fired in final salute. Jim Nelson was the duty bugler that night:

Perth
made it back to Alexandria at two o'clock the next morning, slipping along the cleared channel, past the Ras el-Tin light and through the boom to tie up at her familiar berth alongside Shed 46, where the rescued troops were put ashore. But there was more for Jim Nelson to give. Assigned to hose down the starboard well deck that forenoon, he and Alex Creasy were sickened again when the jet of high-pressure water washed a man's head out from beneath the loading simulator. It was a shipmate, a face they recognised, although, in decent respect, they never revealed who it was. Another man, Petty Officer Charlie Garside of Port Melbourne, found the upper half of one of the dead soldiers. The funerals had already been held; there was nothing for it but to quietly dispose of these tragic remains over the side into the harbour. The dockyard workers were already swarming over the ship to patch up the damage.
Perth
's diarists wrote of their anguish and their deliverance, with Roy Norris reflecting:

Reg Whiting recorded:

The flight from Crete wrought a devastating toll on the fleet, as Admiral Cunningham had known it would. The first evacuation squadron sent to Heraklion in the north of the island suffered far greater losses than
Perth
's group. Two destroyers were sunk. HMS
Orion
, the cruiser
Perth
had met so long ago in happier times in the Caribbean, staggered in through the boom at Alexandria and up harbour little better than a floating wreck. Bombs from a Stuka attack had destroyed A-turret, her bridge and her stokers' mess, killing her captain and another 260 ratings and soldiers on board. With her internal communications destroyed, she had been steered by helm orders shouted along a chain of men from the emergency conning platform to the After Steering Position.
Dido
, another cruiser, was stained and blackened by fire, with her B-turret guns pointing drunkenly into the air.

As the month of June 1941 began, the Mediterranean Fleet had been all but crippled. The arithmetic was appalling. Three capital ships –
Warspite
,
Barham
and the carrier
Formidable
– had been put out of action. Three cruisers –
Gloucester
,
Fiji
and
Calcutta
– had been sunk, along with six destroyers. Six more cruisers, including
Perth
, and seven more destroyers, were damaged to varying degrees. In all, 1828 sailors of the fleet had been killed.

On the plus side, the navy extracted 16,500 men from the disaster. But 12,600 were left behind on Crete. Most became prisoners of the Germans, including 3102 men of the Australian 6th Division. Some were sheltered by the Cretans and managed
to escape from the island later in small boats, or in two submarines sent to get them. A still smaller handful stayed on, to fight as guerrillas in the hills.

Cunningham summed up the catastrophe in his final despatch to London: