Cruiser (59 page)

Most of the bridge personnel left when they heard the order to go, every man for himself. Jock McDonough went aft to his cabin, where he stripped off his heavy anti-flash gear. Almost absent-mindedly, he took a piece of chocolate from his locker and began to chew it, then found his way back to the deck and jumped. He went under so deeply that he feared he was being sucked down with the ship, and he blacked out. He came to floating on the surface, with no recollection of how he had got there.

Ray Parkin heard the abandon-ship order at the wheel, and he told the handful of men there to leave. He had his foot on the first rung of the ladder when the Captain called to him down the speaking tube. He turned back to answer: ‘Lower Steering Position. Chief Quartermaster.'

‘Leave both engines half-speed ahead – I don't want the Old Girl to take anyone with her,' Waller said.

‘Aye, aye, sir. Both engines are half-speed ahead now, sir.'

‘Good.'

Then Parkin had another thought. ‘Do you require anybody to stand by the telegraphs, sir?' he asked. He recorded Waller's response in his memoir:

Towards the end, there were only three figures left on the bridge: Waller, Peter ‘Guns' Hancox and Lieutenant Willie Gay, the Officer of the Watch. Hancox was bleeding from a shrapnel wound near his ear. ‘Let's get off before she turns over,' he said.

‘What about Hec?' Gay asked. The Captain was standing a short distance away, in his Mae West, both hands on the bridge rail, staring down at the silent 6-inch turrets below.

‘He says he won't come,' Hancox replied.

Waller turned to look at them. ‘Get off the bridge, Gay,' he said.

And that was all.

Peter Hancox went down the port ladder and was killed when a shell or a bullet or another piece of shrapnel smashed into it. Willie Gay went down the starboard side, unscathed. He was the last man to see Hector Macdonald Laws Waller alive.

Most of the men who abandoned ship were in the water when the third torpedo struck well aft, again to starboard. Those nearby had the life crushed out of them by the explosive power of 500 kilograms of TNT, and others even a few hundred metres away felt the shock waves like mallets on their chests, their stomachs, their testicles. Each shell that exploded in the water radiated another force to hammer at men struggling in their Mae Wests, clinging to debris or attempting to clamber onto a raft.

Still they kept coming. Sam Stening was thrown into the air and knocked unconscious by one of the torpedo strikes. He eventually woke to find himself on a raft, with a broken nose, dizzy from concussion. Polo Owen dived overboard like an Olympic champion but found that his Mae West would not inflate, so he struggled out of it and stripped naked to make swimming easier. Blood Bancroft pulled off his boots, stripped down to some football shorts and jumped. Ray Parkin jumped, too. Bob Collins took the plunge clinging onto Redlead. Frank McGovern, standing by the guard rail on the quarterdeck, kicked off his sandals but hesitated, fearful that he might get sucked into the ship's propellors:

The fourth and final torpedo hit at about 12.15 am, this time on the port side. Gavin Campbell, the Captain's secretary, had
a leg cocked over the guard rail just as it exploded, and he was sent flying through the air:

These were some of the lucky ones, and there were more. When the first torpedo hit, Lieutenant Frank Gillan, in B-boiler room, tried frantically to find out what was going on. Snatching up a phone, he called the after engine room, the Damage Control Office, then the bridge. Not a sound. The ship's communications were dead. Time to get out. But there was one more duty for him and for the handful of stokers staring wordlessly at him. They had to shut off the boilers – otherwise they would explode as the ship went down, probably killing everyone in the water. Methodically, the men closed off the oil supply and opened safety valves. Job done, they scrambled up the Stokehold ladders, fighting their way through the heavy steel door at the airlock. Lights were still burning fitfully, so they could see their way, but as
Perth
began to list still further they found themselves crawling along bulkheads, with the deck alongside them. A man lost his footing and fell, screaming, into a black hole that had been a passageway. Suddenly, Gillan found himself underwater, still inside the ship, but he knew he was close to a manhole leading to the upper deck. Lungs bursting, he rolled himself into a ball and, by some miracle, the backwash sluiced him over the ship's side. It is likely he was the last man to leave.

Many were not so fortunate. Some died mercifully quickly, others in slow agony. They died deep down in the groaning hull, blown to pieces instantly by the torpedoes or drowning in the prolonged horror of men trapped alive by a crushed bulkhead or a jammed hatch that would not open. Others were shot to ribbons by the gunfire that swept the starboard side of the ship as they tried to leave her. One of the men with Gillan, Chief Petty Officer Stoker Bill Reece, disappeared within seconds of reaching safety, lost in the swill of water inside the ship. A stalwart of the engine room, Reece had been decorated for bravery when
Perth
was bombed in the Mediterranean. Vince McGovern, Frank's brother, was never seen again. George Hatfield, one of the original Portsmouth diarists, vanished as well, like so many others. His wife, Alma, would give birth to George Jnr in Sydney a few months later. Michael Highton, the B-turret officer, was blown away by a direct hit to a cutter he was lowering. So many names, some of them old hands from the
Autolycus
days, some of them new kids. There were 681 men on board
Perth
that night. Just over half of them – 353 – were lost with the ship or in the struggle to stay afloat afterwards.

Houston
was still fighting. In the distance, the
Perth
men in the water could see flashes of gunfire, stabbing white cones of searchlights and the occasional flurry of coloured tracer bullets soaring on the horizon. But for those who had abandoned ship – all of them exhausted and frightened, some of them, such as Bill Bee, injured and nauseous with waves of pain – the battle now was simply the elemental struggle to cling to life:

Slowly, the ship left them all behind her. The fourth torpedo, on the port side, had steadied her list a little, but she was heavily down by the bow. Her stern was out of the water, where one of the four propellors was still turning, turning. The last they saw of her was a battle ensign flying at her mainmast, lit by the Japanese searchlights – a splash of red, white and blue in the night.

And then she was gone, a stately actress at her last curtain call. Almost serenely, His Majesty's Australian Ship
Perth
slipped under – some of them said she
steamed
out – about six kilometres to the north-north-east of St Nicholas Point. Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, the Assistant Navigator, noted the time on his watch. It was 12.25 am, on Sunday 1 March 1942. For the men still alive, a new and terrible ordeal of months and years was just beginning.

Houston
fought on alone, every bit as gallantly as
Perth
. She too was reduced to firing star-shell and practice ammunition. With his magazines flooded, on fire for'ard and listing heavily, and his decks strewn with the dead and dying, Captain
Rooks ordered his bugler to sound abandon ship as
Perth
was disappearing below the surface.

It was the last order he gave. Another shell hit near
Houston
's bridge, and two young ensigns turned to find their captain dying in a pool of blood. One injected him with some morphine from a first-aid pack, the other covered him with a blanket. When the officers looked back again, they saw Rooks's lifeless body being cradled by his weeping Chinese steward, Ah Fong. Both men, captain and steward, went down with the ship, at about 12.45 am. Of
Houston
's crew of 1061, only 368 would survive the battle, to become prisoners of the Japanese.

In all, the Japanese launched 87 torpedoes at the two Allied cruisers. Only seven of them hit. At least some of the Japanese captains simply lost their heads and fired at shadows. To this day, it is uncertain how many torpedoes sank or damaged their own vessels. One explosion rocked and almost capsized the
Ryujo Maru
, the transport carrying General Imamura, who was flung overboard and rescued after floating about for three hours clinging to a lump of timber. The General struggled ashore, covered in fuel oil and distinctly bad tempered, to be congratulated by an aide on his deliverance. The
Ryujo Maru
was beached, but her cargo of armoured vehicles followed Imamura into the sea. He would claim later his ship had been torpedoed by
Houston
– a face-saving invention to conceal the embarrassing fact of the Japanese own goals.
Houston
, as we have seen, carried no torpedoes.

Certainly, both
Perth
and
Houston
scored hits on the enemy, although none of them was fatal. But they held out to the very last, against crushing odds. For the navies of both Australia and the United States, the Battle of the Sunda Strait was a bitter coda to three disastrous months of wartime retreat and reverse, redeemed only by the gallantry of those who fought there.