Cruiser (45 page)

‘Blood' Bancroft, another 19-year-old, born in Fremantle, also found himself loading 4-inch shells, but on the P1 gun crew, on the opposite side of the ship to Fred Skeels. His first
action station was below in the 6-inch shell lobby, but that was a bit too confined for comfort and he'd talked his way out of that and onto the upper deck, where you could see what was going on. His proper name was Arthur. The nickname ‘Blood' came from his shock of flaming red hair. He'd had a good job in Perth with the Union Bank, and he was seeing a lot of a girl named Mirla Wilkinson. Fit from weekends of cricket in summer and Aussie Rules in winter, Blood joined up in 1940 because it seemed the right thing to do.
Perth
was his first ship.

The word ‘teenager' had barely been coined in the 1940s, but that's what so many of
Perth
's new recruits were. Signalman William Arthur Bee – inevitably nicknamed ‘Buzzer' – a baby-faced youngster, also 19, and not quite 1.6 metres tall, had joined in the Mediterranean just before
Perth
had left for home. That more or less gave him the status of an old hand. The eldest of a family of five from Victoria Park in Perth, after leaving school he had begun to study aircraft engine maintenance. With the outbreak of war, he'd applied for a commission in the RAAF but was told they didn't want him, so the navy it was. His job on the flag deck brought him under the wing of Percy Stokan, the bearded, piratical Yeoman of Signals who had been with the ship since Portsmouth and who was famed for his pusser's dirk, the razor-sharp knife he kept hanging from his belt.

With so many youngsters in the crew, most of them at sea for the first time, Hec Waller and his officers and senior rates set to training them up.
Perth
spent the final months of 1941 in peaceful Australian waters, where there was ample time for exercise upon exercise. But many of the officers themselves were new, some of them as green as grass. Happily, there were others Waller knew well enough. His new Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Peter Hancox, aged 28, born in Ipswich in Queensland, had been with him in
Stuart
in the Mediterranean and could be relied on. The same went for Lieutenant Bill Gay, who'd also been in the Scrap Iron Flotilla, in
Vampire
.

These were seasoned men, as were Lieutenant Michael Highton, a young Royal Navy officer and a dependable
watchkeeper who had sailed with
Perth
since her commissioning in Portsmouth, and the new Navigator, John Harper, who was as competent as you would expect. Harper's assistant, Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, had been a merchant officer. Bob Gray continued to reign over his kingdom in the engine room. But, as always, it was the senior rates who were the backbone of the ship, men such as Jan Creber, Ray Parkin, Percy Stokan, Reg Whiting and Jack Lewis. To the new faces, these men were seasoned veterans, toughened by war.

Not all the new draft came from Western Australia. Ordinary Seaman Ernie Toovey, born in Warwick on the Queensland Darling Downs, was a promising young cricketer who had played First Grade in Brisbane and was a prospect for the state in the Sheffield Shield competition. Charles ‘Chilla' Goodchap, from Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, just 18, had come almost straight from Churchie, Brisbane's upper crust Church of England grammar school. He'd had a stint in the school cadets and the Light Horse militia, where he found that he actually hated horses; the navy was a good way to get away from them. Paul Doneley was another Queenslander, blond and fair-skinned, and at 17 the baby of a family of eight children. His older brothers had got the money together to send him to Downlands, the renowned Catholic boarding school at Toowoomba, where he had made the First XV rugby team, and he had gone directly from there to the navy, with the reluctant permission of his father. These three Queenslanders would stick together through thick and thin.

The McGovern brothers from Sydney joined separately. Vince McGovern, the elder at 24, was an ERA who had entered the ship during her wintry stopover at Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1940. Two years younger than Vince, Frank – or, more formally, Francis Joseph McGovern – arrived on board in November 1941. They were inner-city kids, born and bred in Paddington in the days long before its winding lanes of colonial terrace houses were gentrified with coach lamps and trendy cafes. Frank recalls:

Vince did an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at the Eveleigh railway yards. Frank, equipped with his school Intermediate Certificate courtesy of the Marist Brothers, got work as a clerk at the Sydney Water Board. He had been in the naval reserve to make a few bob and was called up right at the outbreak of war. ‘I'll be back in a few weeks,' he told them at work. They promised to keep his job open for him.

In
Perth
, the brothers lived in separate messes and didn't see a lot of each other at sea. Vince worked down in the engine spaces. For a short time, Frank's action station was on the bridge at starboard lookout, and then in the 6-inch X-turret. Eventually, he moved to the .5-inch machine-gun mount on
Perth
's stern. There, too, you got a look at what was going on.

In the weeks before Christmas 1941,
Perth
was constantly at sea. The drills piled up. Action stations, abandon ship stations, away sea boat, close up damage control parties: the ship rang
to the sound of piped orders. In harbour, Waller pestered the powers-that-be to replace the radar set removed from the ship after the Mediterranean, but there was always a reason why nothing could be done. The old radar antenna remained tacked to the foremast, useless.

There was better news in November, when the ship embarked a new Pusser's Duck, another Walrus amphibian. With her came a new pilot, Flying Officer Allen ‘Jock' McDonough of the RAAF's 9 Squadron, a 27-year-old from Adelaide. He was joined by a new naval officer Observer, Lieutenant David McWilliam, 26, of Lindfield in Sydney. The navy also provided the Duck's Telegraphist Air Gunner, Ken Wallace, from Leichhardt in Sydney, a knockabout bloke who had joined the RAN in 1936. Plus, a crew of five air-force maintenance fitters came aboard. Everyone had a nickname. The initial letters of Ken's rating landed him with Tag. Flying for the navy earned him an extra two shillings and sixpence a day in danger money.

There was another addition to
Perth
's ship's company. Bob Collins smuggled a cat on board. He was standing at the Man O'War steps in Sydney, waiting for the liberty boat, when the daughter of a friend thrust a little grey and white tabby at him. There wasn't much he could do but take it, so he stuffed it inside his jacket.

Able Seaman Robert Alfred Charles Collins, born at Waverley in Sydney, a volunteer enlistment in 1938, was
Perth
's Asdic operator and a bit of a stirrer with it. An outgoing bloke, he was popular with his messmates but trouble seemed to follow him around. He was a
Perth
original, one of the
Autolycus
crew, but in November 1940 his service record had been marked ‘Run' – the official term for desertion. Collins had taken a few weeks' leave without feeling the need to inform the navy, which got him three months in detention. Eventually returned to
Perth
, he found himself constantly under the baleful eye of Pricky Reid, a relationship already chilly after an incident in Haifa when Reid's cap, only newly encrusted with a commander's
gold braid, had blown overboard. Reid had turned to find Collins laughing fit to bust. Getting the cat on board was Bob Collins's sweet victory over authority. The crew named it Redlead after it knocked over a pot of red lead paint. Collins laughed about it years later:

On 1 December, as John Curtin was in Canberra holding his emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the deepening menace to Australia, Hirohito was presiding over another of his glacial conferences at the palace in Tokyo. The Japanese mood had hardened since the last audience in September. The empire must choose between glory or disaster, Prime Minister Tojo told
the impassive figure enthroned before him. Should His Majesty graciously accede to the Cabinet's unanimous recommendation for war, his loyal subjects, trembling in obedient awe, would do him the highest honour.

This time, Hirohito remained as silent as the grave. There was a long pause. Then he withdrew to a private chamber and fixed the imperial seal to the Cabinet papers. War it must be; war it would be.
Tenno heika banzai!
Ten thousand years to the Emperor!

The next morning, General Haijime Sugiyama, the army chief, and Admiral Osami Nagano, chief of the navy, returned to the palace to inform Hirohito that 8 December would be X-Day. In the afternoon, that date was confirmed to the army. Yamamoto, in his flagship, the battleship
Nagato
, in Hiroshima Bay, radioed it to his commanders in the Kido Butai and across the Pacific. The coded signal to commence hostilities had been agreed:
Niitaka Yama Nobore 1208
. Climb the New High Mountain 1208. The numerals indicated the month and day.

The Americans had cracked Japan's diplomatic cipher used for cables between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and its embassies abroad. The intelligence revealed was referred to as MAGIC. In theory, MAGIC meant they were able to read messages as quickly as the Japanese themselves. In practice, they rarely did. Notoriously, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, had once remarked that ‘gentlemen do not read each other's mail', and Washington's intelligence agencies were understaffed, underfunded and intently engaged in bureaucratic turf wars. Important cables between Tokyo and the embassy in Washington or the consulate in Hawaii were frequently shoved into files for decoding and translation on a later day, especially if a weekend was on the way. The Americans had read more than enough to know that Japanese diplomacy was certainly
hardening towards war, but that was about it.