Cruiser (58 page)

The destroyer that flashed the green light was
Harukaze
, patrolling with the 5th Flotilla. But if it was not a trap, it soon turned into one for
Perth
and
Houston
. To port, Banten Bay opened up to reveal a forest of masts, the transports already unloading their troops. Ahead, both to port and to starboard, the two cruisers could see the sea was now alive with enemy ships, blocking their way to St Nicholas Point and the strait. Counting them from the bridge was anyone's guess. Two cruisers, maybe three, and who knew how many destroyers. And now flames were flashing from their guns. White searchlights blazed on and off, followed by the roar of shells flying overhead and landing in the frothing sea. ‘God, they're all around us,' said McDonough.

Waller called for a speed of 26 knots and threw
Perth
into a hard turn to starboard that would open up his A-arcs, bringing
his two after turrets to bear as well – a full broadside. Rooks, in
Houston
, would follow the Australian's movements in close order throughout the battle, uncomfortably aware that his single rear turret remained out of action.

The Japanese had panicked when they discovered the two Allied cruisers in their midst. When the alarm went up, the heavy cruisers
Mikuma
and
Mogami
were frantically summoned from the north, and
Fubuki
fired off a spread of torpedoes before disappearing into her own smoke. Thanks to Hec Waller's skilful evasions and a serving of good luck, not one of these hit the target. Instead, they sped on into Banten Bay, where they created havoc among the troop convoy.
Fubuki
's fish managed to sink a small minesweeper and at least one of the transports, the
Sakura Maru
, still filled with soldiers. Many of those men, heavily laden, some still carrying rifles over their shoulders, were swept out to sea to be drowned.

But there were so many foes now, such a seething pack of ships ranged against them, that Waller ordered the guns into local control. There was no point in trying to coordinate their firing from the Directors and the Transmitting Station anymore, none at all. Fred Skeels, the 19-year-old from Inglewood in Perth, was loading at S1, the starboard-side for'ard 4-inch:

Perth
swept into her long, fast turn, steaming in an arc of about eight kilometres in diameter. Frank McGovern, at one of the aft .5 quad gun mounts, could see
Houston
in their wake, guns spitting. The two ships twisted and heeled as their captains tried to anticipate the fall of the next shot. Hec Waller, leaning almost nonchalantly on the pelorus, the gyro-compass repeater, was calling helm and engine orders down the voice-pipe to Ray Parkin at the Lower Steering Position. Parkin's arms were aching, back muscles knotting, as he wrestled with the wheel, which seemed almost to have a mind of its own.

‘Port thirty-five.'

‘Port thirty-five, sir.'

‘Slow port. Full ahead starboard.'

At times, Parkin had to shout his responses above the crash of the ship's own guns or the whine of an incoming shell.

‘Thirty-five of port wheel on, sir. Starboard engine full ahead, port engine slow ahead, sir.'

Then it would begin again, the compass-card spinning.

‘Midships!'

‘Midships, sir.'

‘Steady on oh-four-five.'

‘Course oh-four-five degrees, sir.'

The first shell hit them at exactly 11.26 pm, boring into the for'ard funnel and rupturing a steam pipe, which added its banshee shriek to the din. Another struck a few minutes later near the flag deck, where Bill Bee was waiting for an order to use his searchlight. Before the battle began, Buzzer had been chatting with a mate, Chief Petty Officer Don Viney, who was manning one of the multiple .5 machine guns just beneath him:

Viney, an old hand who'd begun his naval life as a boy in
Tingira
back in 1920, was one of the first to die, his life draining away from an artery where an arm had been shot off. Tom Risley, Buzzer's best mate, his go-ashore ‘Oppo', would be killed minutes later, a young man not yet 22. And among the broken corpses strewn on the flag deck was the ship's youngest officer, a 19-year-old farmer's son from Winton in Queensland, Paymaster Midshipman Frank Tranby-White. He had joined the ship just two days before Christmas. In the Signal Distributing Office, faint from loss of blood, Buzzer could feel someone – he never found out who – whip a tourniquet around his leg. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in the bone.

Fear began to grip many of them now: fear that they would not make it after all; fear that they would never see home again; fear that they would die. It welled up, ice cold. Some men found it paralysed them for a moment. In others, it produced an out-of-body vision, as if they were observing their personal torment from some safe and distant place. Images of home and family, of long-forgotten incidents of childhood, flashed into the mind's eye and as quickly vanished. The terror of the imagination could be worse below decks, where every shell was a hammer blow and in some places you could watch the ship's plates flexing. Other men had no time for fear. Thrusting shells into hoists and breeches, wrenching the wheels around to lay and train the guns, they laboured like beings possessed, gasping and retching in the stink of smoke and cordite, greasy in their own sweat and urine. The noise was like punch after punch in the eardrums.

On the bridge, Hancox worried that their ammunition was running low. He was counting the 6-inch as they fired, but it was impossible to keep track of the 4-inch guns. If the battle kept up at this rate, there'd soon be nothing left. Waller decided to get the torpedoes away, eight of them, loaded into their tubes in the waist below the 4-inch deck.

‘Get rid of them,' he told the Torpedo Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Guy Clarke, one of the Royal Navy officers who had been with the ship since Portsmouth. The tubes were already trained outboard, the torpedoes armed. The starboard four rumbled into the water, then the four to port. There was not much point in selecting targets; there were so many of them. Clarke saw some explosions and thought they had scored a hit, maybe a couple, and so did his Torpedo Gunner, Len Smith.

The Japanese destroyers were becoming more daring, darting in upon them. Further out, the heavy cruisers were firing over and between the smaller ships. Shells, large-calibre bullets and shrapnel seemed to fill the air. One destroyer raced towards them, searchlight blazing. ‘Put that bloody light out!' shouted the Captain. Someone shot it away.

Perth
was taking more punishment now. A smashed boat hung from one end of its davits. The Pusser's Duck exploded in flames and toppled overboard, taking the catapult and the ship's crane with it. At around midnight, Hancox told Waller there was hardly any 6-inch ammunition left. And some of the 4-inch guns had begun to fire star-shell and practice rounds – anything to keep shooting. The Captain decided there was only one course of action left. They would make a break for it, to force a passage through the enemy, past St Nicholas Point and into the strait. Rooks and
Houston
, he knew, would follow him.

‘Full ahead both. Port 20.'

‘Full ahead both engines, sir. Port 20.'

The first torpedo hit as they were settling onto the new course.
Harukaze
fired it, the destroyer they had seen first. It penetrated the starboard side between the for'ard engine room and A-boiler room, killing everyone there, including Dolly
Gray, the Engineer Commander, and men above in the damage control party. The Gyro-Compass Room was just for'ard of the boiler room, part of Reg Whiting's kingdom in the ship, and perhaps he died there too, although nobody ever found out for sure – least of all his wife, Allie, and their two boys, Johnny and Bren, back at their cottage in Sydney.

The explosion sent
Perth
lurching upwards, heaving almost out of the water like a bathtub toy. Men were tossed around like dolls, and those on deck were drenched by a rushing wall of seawater. Bandsman John ‘Tubby' Grant, below at the Fire Control Table in the Transmitting Station, was hurled off his feet:

Fred Skeels, whose gun was right above the explosion, flew into the air and crunched back down again. Tag Wallace, sprawled on the deck in the Sick Bay flat, with the breath knocked out of him, could hear the screams of men being flayed alive by the superheated steam escaping in the boiler room. The ship slumped back into the water, listing to starboard and slowing noticeably as she lost power.

‘Christ, that's torn it,' said the Captain. He gave the order to prepare to abandon ship.

‘Abandon ship, sir?' asked Hancox.

‘No, just prepare for it.'

In the Sick Bay and the wardroom, the two doctors, Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Eric Tymms and Sam Stening, were
working in a butcher's shambles. Their white overalls were stained with blood and viscera. Nearby, where he was still humping 4-inch shells, Wallace could see his shipmates dying:

Lieutenant Harper, standing by the binnacle on the compass platform, looking to starboard, saw the silvery phosphorescent streak of another torpedo heading for them. This hit them further for'ard, just below A-turret, and again the cruiser staggered like a wounded animal, although she was still moving through the water. But that was it. Waller, recognising that all was lost, now gave the order to abandon ship. Elmo Gee, on the bridge, reached for his bugle to make the pipe:

Men began to make their escape. Some went obediently to their abandon-ship stations, only to find the Carley rafts there gone
or smashed to ruins. Some milled around in the waist, trying to decide when to jump for it: get it wrong and you could be dragged down by the suction of the ship as she went under or chewed up in her still-turning propellors. On the quarterdeck, Fred Skeels and a few men snatched furiously at the lashings holding a Carley float and some of the timber rafts they had brought aboard at Priok. They freed them and pushed the rafts overboard. Fred hesitated for a moment, wary of the darkness below him, but then threw his tin hat over the side, heard it splash and jumped after it.

Ken Wallace rummaged through the wreckage of the aircraft store for his pistol – a .45-calibre Webley issued to aircrew – and belted it around his waist. Then he thought it would probably hinder his swimming, so he tossed it away again. He fought his way to the ship's rail and inflated his Mae West: