Cruiser (43 page)

Others were not so glowing. One of Waller's sub-lieutenants in
Perth
, Norman ‘Knocker' White, wrote that he despaired of ever pleasing his captain:

Waller's sailors, though, were unstinting in their regard. They especially liked the way he dressed at sea. Bowyer-Smyth on the bridge had always looked like an advertisement for Gieves, the naval tailor in Savile Row. Hec turned out as if he was going fishing. In summer, he sported a pair of tattered shorts and sandals. In winter, it was a hand-knitted pullover and baggy trousers with an old beret jammed on his head – his ‘pirate rig', he called it. There was invariably a fuming pipe clenched between his teeth. One of his signalmen in
Stuart
, Les Clifford, summed up in his memoir what the mess decks thought of their captain:

Waller returned the confidence. When
Stuart
's elderly engines broke down in the Mediterranean, the ship lay motionless for five hours, a sitting duck for any passing enemy. The Captain never once called down to the engine room to tell his engineer officer to get a move on. He simply let him get on with the job. Stories such as this became part of the Waller legend. Sailors, when they tell a yarn, call it ‘spinning a dit'. The dits gathered around Hec like barnacles, growing ever more colourful with the retelling. There was the time in
Stuart
when Hec emptied a revolver into the head of a shark caught by the crew. In the Mediterranean, he would sometimes detonate floating enemy mines by firing at them with a rifle. Socially, he enjoyed a whisky and he liked his scran, especially a sweet dessert. Invited to stay with the governor of Malta, he spent a happy afternoon pruning the vice-regal roses. Returning to Alexandria from the perils of a Tobruk ferry run, he would take a packet of sandwiches and hop into a sailing dinghy to potter around the harbour for a few solitary hours. Most of all, the dits told of his coolness in battle. Sprawled flat on the deck during an air raid, Waller once remarked to a man lying beside him, ‘Not so bad, is it, son?'

‘Not so fucking good, either, sir,' said the sailor.

Everyone knew that Waller at sea liked nothing better than going in for the attack. He would fire a shot across the bows of an errant merchantman almost for the fun of it or drop a few depth charges to ‘get a bang in the water' at even the most improbable hint of a submarine lurking below. Admiral Cunningham, working at his desk in his flagship, was once startled by some explosions in the distance. ‘I hear Commander Waller's rejoined the fleet,' he quipped dryly. Undaunted by rank, Waller once had the temerity to question one of the Commanders-in-Chief's decisions in front of a table full of
captains. ‘Get out of my cabin, you bloody Australian,' snapped the Admiral. But he later invited him back in to drink gin. Cunningham, a hard marker, knew quality when he saw it. The two got on like a house on fire. ‘Now you are going to meet one of the greatest captains who ever sailed the seas. His name is Waller,' said Cunningham to Menzies as they went to inspect
Stuart
in Alexandria in 1941. It was not an idle remark.

All this was the measure of the man. The shopkeeper's son from Benalla, now the RAN's most tried and tested captain, would take command of Australia's most seasoned warship – although, curiously, it was not a job he wanted. Waller confided to friends that he much preferred the knockabout intimacy of destroyers, where the crew was counted in dozens and a captain knew his officers and men by their names, nicknames, strengths and foibles. And there was another matter more private still. At the end of 1941, Hec Waller was a sick man. He suffered from a gall-bladder condition and a mild jaundice that brought on painful cramps and bouts of vomiting. Sam Stening, who had stayed on as
Perth
's doctor after his passage home from the Mediterranean, would give his captain the occasional painkiller. This condition, and the accumulated strain of two years of command in constant battle, should have kept him ashore. It did not. Hard Over Hec returned to the fight because there was no one to take his place.

The day Elmo Gee's leave was up, Kath Brewer's father drove him to Albury to catch the train back to Sydney, tactfully leaving the young sailor and his daughter sitting alone for a moment in the back of the family's big blue Dodge tourer. Elmo asked Kath to marry him, to wait for him until the war was over, and she promised she would.

There were farewells around the country as men journeyed back to Garden Island to take up arms again, or to go to war for the first time. By mid-November,
Perth
's fire damage was
being repaired. Stores and ammunition had been taken on board. There was the usual blizzard of lists and paperwork; new ratings were handed the watch tickets that assigned them to their messes, their divisions, their action stations. In the time-honoured wording of the navy, the ship was making ready in all respects to proceed. At first, she would stay in Australian waters for the new Captain and crew to work back up to fighting efficiency.

In the last week of November, a new buzz began to circulate around the RAN. It seemed incredible – a rumour so outlandish that few believed it.
Perth
's sister ship HMAS
Sydney
was missing. She had been in the Indian Ocean but nothing had been heard from her since 19 November. Was she merely observing wireless silence or had something sinister happened to her? Gradually, the rumours swelled and spread. By 23 November, the Naval Board and the new Curtin Labor Cabinet had to face the chilling possibility that
Sydney
and her crew of 645 had very likely been lost, most probably due to enemy action.

Both Board and government then proceeded to bungle the matter badly. Two days later, the government issued a censorship instruction ordering ‘no reference press or radio to HMAS
Sydney
', which only inflamed the rumours in every journalists' pub in the country. Another two days passed before the Board sent telegrams to
Sydney
families to tell them that the ship and their husbands, fathers, sons were missing. Whispers of a disaster rocketed around the nation, in naval ports and barracks, over backyard fences, down the street at the shops, in frantic telephone calls. Yet it was not until 30 November that Curtin made a formal announcement. In fairness to him, he had been Prime Minister for just over a month and was genuinely distraught at the thought of so many broken families. The wording was carefully constructed to conceal many of the known facts and to put the best possible gloss on those that were revealed:

Then followed a clumsy attempt to explain the delay, with a finishing flourish: ‘fine ship … gallant complement … glorious career … successful action against the enemy'.

It is no exaggeration to say that the news devastated both the navy and the nation. Never had Australia suffered such a catastrophe at sea. The shock was the greater for
Sydney
was special – the famous victor in the first Australian naval triumph of the war, the destruction of the
Bartolomeo Colleoni
in 1940.

Perth
was at sea when Curtin's statement was released, steaming towards New Zealand to escort the American liner
Mariposa
back to Sydney. The buzz had been true. The shock among her ship's crew was profound. A sister had gone, a ship almost as familiar as their own. Friends and shipmates had vanished with her, men they had known in their training days at Flinders, in other ships at sea, or in the pubs where sailors gather. Worse, some had lost family. Hec Waller himself had a young cousin, Richard Sievey, on board. One of
Perth
's bandsmen, Perce Partington, lost his brother Leslie, a trombonist and now the second of his parents' three sons to die in the war.
Sydney
was deeply mourned. And if that news was not grim enough, another sadness followed: on 27 November, the sloop
Parramatta
was torpedoed by a U-boat in the Mediterranean on a run to Tobruk. There were only 24 survivors. Another 138 men lost their lives, including all her officers.

The Prime Minister nursed his grief at The Lodge alone with Elsie. The moment, though, could not last long. Events hurried in upon him, from every direction. He and Winston Churchill had been conducting an increasingly icy exchange of telegrams over Australia's insistence on withdrawing the army's exhausted 9th Division from Tobruk. And, on 29 November, the Australian Minister in Washington, Richard Casey, filed a ‘Most Secret' cable to Canberra detailing a discussion with the US Secretary for War, Henry Stimson. For all its prosaic diplomatic language, it was the sound of the time bomb ticking. As Casey reported, Stimson believed that the Japanese Navy, Army and Air Force were massing in threatening strength in southern Indochina and Taiwan:

And there was one more chilling note. According to the Americans, there was evidence that the Japanese were ‘prepared to use chemical and probably bacteriological warfare whenever and wherever they deem it necessary or profitable to do so'.

There was some good news, though. At long last, London had begun to do something concrete about the Japanese menace. In October, over the protests of the Admiralty, Churchill despatched HMS
Prince of Wales
, the battleship that had taken him to meet Roosevelt, and the older battlecruiser
Repulse
, to the Far East, where, the plan was, they would be joined by the brand-new aircraft carrier
Indomitable
. These three capital ships, with their destroyer screen, would be known as Force Z. It was far from being ‘Main Fleet to Singapore', but it was at least something. This very public show of British naval power should give Japan pause for thought. There was a setback when
Indomitable
ran aground in the Caribbean and had to be docked for repairs; Force Z would have to do without carrier air support. But, by December, the two remaining ships were in the Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malayan mainland.

Curtin called an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet in Canberra on the evening of Monday 1 December to discuss the Casey cable, and another in Melbourne three days later. The prevailing fear – in Washington and London, and therefore in Canberra – was that Japan might make a seaborne attack upon the Kra Isthmus, the narrow stretch of land that connects modern Malaysia to Thailand. This would significantly ratchet up the threat to British colonial Malaya, including Singapore, and consequently Australia as well. A flurry of cables went back and forth across the hemispheres. What would Britain do if this happened? Would the Americans now come in at last? Cabinet agonised over the possibilities.