Cruiser (78 page)

It was common for the men to feel that life had passed them by, that the world had left them behind. They had so much to catch up with, but it was hard, so hard. They sought each other's company, sometimes daily, for that way you had nothing to explain and nothing to apologise for. Inevitably, some men handled things better than others. A few returned POWs, tormented by the horrors they had known, took their own lives. Some sought release in alcohol, drinking to numb the pain. Others had difficulty establishing normal relationships with parents, wives or children. For years, Jock McDonough, the pilot of the Pusser's Duck, nursed a resentment at his family's willingness to talk about his two brothers' more mundane war experiences while remaining strangely silent about his, as if there was some taboo. A lot found it hard to find or hold a civilian job when all they had known since leaving school was the navy at war.

Throughout his captivity, Fred Lasslett had sustained himself by writing his love letters to Nola Caldwell, the ‘beautiful angel' he had met at the ballroom in Prahran. When he reached Melbourne for a tearful reunion with his mother and father, they had to tell him that Nola had not waited for him. She had married and moved away. Fred tried to find her but she was gone.

Elmo Gee and his bugler mate Tubby Grant, both with fading eyesight from the ravages of beriberi, were flown from their camp in Burma to Rangoon, and then on to hospital in Singapore, where, after the usual few weeks of nobody knowing what to do with them, they were found a place on a troopship, the MV
Circassia
, heading for Melbourne. That voyage gave them time to relax a little and prepare for the reunions ahead. Tubby met some fellow musicians on board, and they put together a four-piece band to play at dances with the nurses. Elmo was at fever pitch when the journey ended early in November and he saw the crowds waiting for them at the Port Melbourne docks:

Elmo Gee was a sick man, in body and spirit. The vital youngster from Silver Creek who had so blithely sailed off to join
Perth
at Portsmouth in 1939 was now gaunt and frail at the age of 26, his best years stolen from him. The thought that his mother had died without knowing he was still alive weighed
heavily upon him and almost certainly hampered his recovery, and although the navy gave him careful treatment at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, which restored some of his sight and put some meat back on his bones, the mental trauma was harder to erase. For months, he found it difficult even to sit in a chair, preferring to be cross-legged on the floor or to squat on his haunches as they had done in the camps, and he shunned regular food in favour of rice. There was another blow, too, when he found that his family, thinking he had been killed in action, had emptied his bank account to keep the farm going through the war. His salvation was Kath Brewer, the girl he had proposed to on the day he left in 1941. She had promised to wait for him then, and she had. Kath would take a lot of the pain away.

The
Manunda
also brought Tag Wallace home from Singapore. When the ship touched at Fremantle, he went ashore to look up an old girlfriend, only to find she had married. The same thing happened again in Melbourne:

Wallace raced to catch up with life. At the Balmoral Naval Depot, he found the navy owed him £1400 in back pay – a fortune. Yet another girlfriend, Linda Willox, a radar operator with the WAAF, came down from North Queensland to welcome him, and within ten days they were married and on honeymoon.

Not every story ended so happily. As the first months of peace ticked by, hope for the homecoming of a father, a son, a brother, a husband faded and died in hundreds of families. At her small cottage in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, Allie Whiting scanned the lists of released prisoners of war published in the papers and listened intently to the names broadcast on the radio. Reginald Paul Whiting's name never appeared. The last she had heard from the navy was a letter sent on 30 August 1945 asking for a photograph of her husband to help in the search for information. After that, nothing. She battled on alone, caring for her two boys, making ends meet by every so often selling some brewery and BHP shares left to her by her father. John was 17 at the end of the war, angry and resentful at his loss and bitter that he had not been able to join the navy to avenge his father's death. Brendan, seven years younger, was shielded from his mother's bereavement.

One day, late in 1945, a petty officer turned up on the doorstep in Ashley Street. It was Vic Duncan, who had come with his wife, Betty. Reg and Vic, both electrical artificers, had been close shipmates. Brendan remembered the day well:

When Polo Owen returned to Melbourne from Japan in late 1945, he was in for a rude rebuff, as he recorded in a memoir for the Naval Historical Society:

Owen realised, again to his dismay, that no one had officially informed Nancy Waller of Hec's death. Like Vic Duncan, he took it on himself to break the news, and he went to the house at Kooyongkoot Road in Hawthorn to tell her what he knew. Nancy, too, was raising two boys by herself, both teenagers by war's end. Hec's younger son, John, was then at Scotch College, where his uncles were teaching:

Finally, the navy got its act together. In January 1946, letters went out to the families of all those who had died, including the Whitings and the Wallers:

This was not quite the last word. At the urging of Owen and Lieutenant Willie Gay – the last man to see Hec alive – the navy despatched the frigate HMAS
Macquarie
to search the Indonesian islands around the Sunda Strait for any
Perth
men who, by some miracle, might have avoided captivity by the Japanese and somehow survived. None was found. In August
1946, the Navy Board wrote again to the next of kin to tell them so. And that was that.

At Pidcock Street in Camperdown, Joan Lewis, the wife of Petty Officer Jack Lewis, realised that her hopes were ashes:

There were 681 men in
Perth
's ship's company when she was lost. Only 328 of them survived the battle, the sinking and the fatal currents of the Sunda Strait. Of those, four men died before they could be taken prisoner, and another 106 men died in captivity. Less than a third of her crew, 218 men, lived to return to Australia.

Perth
's survivors realised – gradually at first but then very keenly – that Australia had moved on without them. It was not just that a war had been won and peace achieved in their absence; there had also been countless political and social changes. Some were as profound as the death of John Curtin or the invention of the jet engine, others as curious as the arrival of the newly invented ballpoint pen. Personal changes had happened, too – a girlfriend gone, a little sister who was now a young woman, the bloke down the street who had not returned from the war. There was a lot of catching up to do.

In January 1946, the navy arranged for them to travel to Melbourne, where they stayed at a Toorak mansion named Grong Grong for three weeks of what was optimistically called ‘rehabilitation'. They were given another medical and dental examination, were shown newsreel films to bring them up to date and were offered lectures on this and that, but it all seemed a bit haphazard. For many of them, it was an excuse
to thumb their nose at naval discipline by giving cheek to their officers or going out and getting blind drunk at the nearest pub. Given the choice, most of them elected to leave the navy and to return to civilian life as discharged PUNS, as it was called – Permanently Unfit for Naval Service. Some did stay on, such as Lloyd ‘Darby' Munro, one of the four
Perth
men rescued by the American submarines in 1944. He had enlisted in 1941 for the duration of the war, but he served until he retired as a chief petty officer in 1966.

At Silver Creek, Elmo Gee struggled with his sight, which seemed to come and go. He and Kath Brewer were married at the Anglican cathedral in Albury in September 1946, and they settled down to raise a family. They bought a farm called Lyndale at Wooragee, a little north of Beechworth. It comprised about 90 hectares of gentle grazing country with an old cottage of warm red brick with a green corrugated-iron roof. Kath bore him three children – a son, Bruce, and twin girls, Christine and Margaret. Outwardly, life was happy, although by nights the bad dreams could set in. Elmo began a lifelong interest in Labor Party politics – not a popular choice in that part of the world – but he always thought of himself first as a sailor, the young boy who had been attracted to the sea by that old film,
Brown on Resolution.
Farming had its ups and downs, as it does, and his diminishing sight eventually deprived him of the pleasure of driving a car. He died in 1992 of prostate cancer. He would have been thrilled to know that his daughter Margaret was the ‘commissioning lady' when the third HMAS
Perth
, an Anzac-class frigate, was commissioned into the RAN at Fremantle in 2006.

Of
Perth
's diarists, those who so eloquently recorded those years for posterity, most settled back into the civilian world well enough. Bill Bee, Fred Lasslett, Fred Skeels and Ken Wallace led long lives and published their memoirs so their grandchildren might know the way it was and what they had done. In some cases, it was the children who held and collected their fathers' works. Jim Nelson,
Perth
's first bugler, who left the
ship after the Mediterranean, worked on his memoirs with his son, Ken. At the request of the family, the navy arranged for his ashes to be scattered at sea from the quarterdeck of
Perth
(III) in November 2008. It would have astounded Jim to know that the ship's Captain on that day was a woman, Commander Michelle Miller.

George Hatfield, who died at the Sunda Strait, never knew the son who was named after him. His diaries lay untouched for years until, in 2008, George Jnr began to transcribe them for private publication, again with the hope that future generations might one day read them.

Reg Whiting's diaries and letters were collated by his son Brendan, who used them as the basis for one of the best books on
Perth
, published as
Ship of Courage
in 1994. Brendan himself died in 2009.

Arthur ‘Blood' Bancroft and one of the ship's early chroniclers, Rowley Roberts, together wrote
The Mikado's Guests
– an account of Blood's imprisonment. He married Mirla, who had waited for him; Bob Collins was his best man. He returned to his banking career after the war and rose to a senior managerial position with the ANZ bank in Western Australia.

Throughout his time in the camps and on the railway, Ernie Toovey kept himself going with the thought of playing cricket for Queensland on his return. He did just that. He played 37 Sheffield Shield games from 1949 as a left-handed batsman and slow bowler, and when he packed up his bat for the last time in 1955 he began a long career as a much respected Queensland state selector.

Time eventually healed wounds and soothed apprehensions. Remarkably, not one of the survivors interviewed for this book grasped what would have been an easy opportunity to express a collective hatred for the Japanese people. Individual guards, yes: they had not forgotten The Boy Bastard, or The Pig, or The Ape. But, recognising the corrosive power of hatred, they had dealt with it by consigning those figures to the verdict of history. Yoshitada Nagatomo, perhaps their chief tormentor on
the railway, was hanged for war crimes at Changi Jail in 1947.

Of
Perth
's officers who figured in this story, Charles Reid was not confirmed in his temporary rank of commander and he never went to sea again, his career forever blighted by the Naval Board's ‘displeasure' over the fire in the ship in 1941. After a series of shore appointments, he retired as a lieutenant-commander in 1953. Attitudes mellowed over the years, and in time he was welcomed to reunions of the ship's company. His son Tony followed him into the RAN.

The officers taken into captivity all survived. Lieutenant John Harper, the Navigator, compiled an official account of
Perth
's last hours, of enormous value to historians, and Lieutenant John Thode wrote down his experiences in the lifeboat HMAS
Anzac
on its ill-fated voyage to Tjilatjap. Sam Stening, the young doctor, returned to a distinguished medical practice in Sydney. Sub-Lieutenant Norman ‘Knocker' White stayed in the navy after the war and retired in 1964 from his last job as Captain of HMAS
Creswell
, the Royal Australian Naval College at Jervis Bay. Genial and bearded, well liked by his fellows, he gave much time to promoting Australia–Japan relations. Philipp ‘Polo' Owen retired as a commander in 1946. His appreciation of his friend Hec Waller, written for the Naval Historical Society, cast a welcome light on a sometimes elusive character.

Although they never knew it, Hec and his last Executive Officer, Bill ‘Pincher' Martin, also had sons who followed them into the RAN. John Waller, the younger boy of the family, entered the Naval College as a cadet midshipman in 1947 and, in one of history's neat symmetries, so did David Martin. A photograph in the Australian War Memorial collection shows the two of them as teenage snotties, inspecting a painting of
Perth
. They graduated as midshipmen in 1951, becoming acting sub-lieutenants in 1953.

In his autobiography, Admiral Cunningham – by now Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope – wrote of Hec as ‘one of the very finest types of Australian naval officer. Full of good cheer, with a great sense of humour, undefeated and always burning to get at the enemy … greatly loved and admired by everyone, his loss … was a heavy deprivation for the young Navy of Australia.'
¹
It was all true, and the more forceful because Cunningham was never a man to bestow praise lightly, but it cannot have been easy for John following in the wake of such a celebrated father. He resigned as a commander in 1967.

David Martin, after a distinguished career at sea, retired as rear-admiral, was knighted and was a much respected governor of New South Wales when he died in 1990, of asbestos poisoning almost certainly brought on by his naval service. Other members of his family also joined the RAN.

Nancy Waller spent her years living quietly in suburban Melbourne. Never one to seek the limelight, she nonetheless made herself available for memorial services and the like, dutifully laying the occasional wreath when asked to do so. Behind the scenes, she was much loved as a ‘mother' to the HMAS
Perth
Association of former crew members. She died in 1977.

One thing does rankle with
Perth
's survivors to this day. Hec Waller was not awarded a Victoria Cross. They believe he should have been, pointing out that Albert Rooks,
Houston
's captain, was awarded the American equivalent, the Medal of Honor. But bureaucracy and imperial muddle stood in the way. During the Second World War, the government in Canberra had the right to award the Victoria Cross to personnel of the army or the RAAF but not the RAN; for reasons that are now obscure, naval Victoria Crosses were controlled by the Admiralty in London, and their Lordships in Whitehall apparently never found an Australian worthy of the honour.

Hec Waller's last battle was comparable to at least two British actions at sea in 1940: Captain Fogarty Fegen's fight to the death in the armed merchant cruiser HMS
Jervis Bay
against the pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
, and Lieutenant-Commander Gerard Roope's ramming of the cruiser
Admiral Hipper
in his tiny destroyer HMS
Glowworm.
Both men were awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Waller's conduct against insuperable odds was no less gallant, but he was given only second prize, a Mention in Despatches. In 1948, the Dutch Government offered a decoration in the Militaire Willemsorde, but this was declined by the Australian Government in a haughty paragraph explaining that ‘the rules governing consideration of proposals for foreign honours preclude the acceptance of posthumous awards'. The navy, making some amends, named one of its six Collins-class submarines HMAS
Waller
. Hec's daughter-in-law Diana broke the champagne over the bow when the boat was launched in 1997.

There it rests. It is a sad injustice that of 97 Australian recipients of the Victoria Cross at the time of writing, not one has been a member of the RAN, despite there being no shortage of naval valour. Retrospective awards for a war so long ago would now require an act of parliament.

And then there was Chief Petty Officer Ray Parkin. Of the thousand or more men who sailed in
Perth
over her short life, none served her better or told her story with more love and grace.

The young sea scout who had messed about in boats on the Yarra spent his life acquiring knowledge for its own sake. Captive in Java, on the railway in Siam, and at the mines in Japan, his enquiring mind had transcended barbarism to roam through botany and biology, literature and philosophy, inspired first by a fellow prisoner in Bandung – an RAF aircraftsman who had been a Cambridge professor of Classical Greek – and then by a friendship with the South African journalist, philosopher and explorer Laurens van der Post. One stormy jungle day, Ray had watched entranced as a mosquito sheltered from the rain beneath a quivering leaf – an epiphany in
which he recognised the fragility of the insect and its survival in a hostile world as a metaphor for his own existence. This transformed him.

Weary Dunlop had faithfully concealed the filmy manuscripts Parkin had given him for safe-keeping before leaving for Japan. He returned them after the war and from them came three books:
Out of the Smoke
,
Into the Smother
and
The Sword and the Blossom.
They tell a remarkable story of
Perth
's life and loss, and of the Japanese oppression of her surviving crew; it is no exaggeration to say that they are classics of Australian literature. The Melbourne University Press has reprinted them as
Ray Parkin's Wartime Trilogy
, with a foreword by the writer and humorist John Clarke, who says, rightly, that they are ‘wise, tolerant books and reveal a man not thrown from his purpose by hatred and not blinded to beauty and good sense by great catastrophe'.