Cruiser (2 page)

The Second World War was the greatest of all the wars at sea, a global struggle for mastery contested by thousands of ships on every one of the world's oceans.

This is the story of one of those ships and the sailors who took her to that war. The ship bore no great name steeped in history. Some of her crew had chosen to follow the sea for their profession or their livelihood, but most were young men in uniform only for the hostilities. They were not supermen but reluctant warriors. Their chief desire was to get the job done and return home to live in peace.

Yet no ship was more loved in the Royal Australian Navy, and no ship's company saw more of the horrors of war or endured them with such courage. Whatever ships they might have sailed in before or since, the men of HMAS
Perth
belonged to her first and foremost, and she to them. Many of them kept diaries and wrote letters home, and some who returned from the war recorded their memories so that future generations of their families, and the country they had served, would know what they had done and how it had been.

So this is their story of life and death, love and duty, war and remembrance.

Leaving Home

Sydney Harbour, Saturday 13 May 1939. Not long after dawn, as an autumn sun rose above the great sandstone headlands that guard the entrance to Port Jackson, the steamship
Autolycus
began making ready for sea.

Firemen of the black gang sweated in her Stokehold, heaving shovelfuls of coal into the furnace to raise steam in her boiler. A smudge of brown smoke began to rise from her funnel, drifting past the Blue Peter flag, flying to show she was preparing to sail. The Red Duster, ensign of the British Merchant Marine, hung limply from the staff at her stern.

A seaman's eye would have recognised the
Autolycus
as a vessel of the venerable Alfred Holt and Company, shipowners of Liverpool, England. Launched in 1923, now beaten and well worn, but tough enough with it, she was a small, purposeful freighter of not quite 8000 tons, with a rust-marked black hull, salt-stained white upperworks, buff-painted masts and derricks, and, amidships, Holt's distinctive royal-blue funnel topped with a wide black stripe. Vessels like her could be seen plodding in and out of all the ports of the world, from the Pool of London to Hong Kong, Auckland and Bombay. Workhorses of the sea, they carried the trade of Empire wherever they might.

That seaman's eye, though, would have noted that the
Autolycus
lay in an unusual berth for a ship of her lowly status. Her last cargo had been a consignment of horses. Normally, she would have docked further into the inner harbour, to
discharge the contents of her holds and to take on a new lading in the bustling anonymity of the finger wharves of Walsh Bay or Pyrmont. But, today, she was in a much grander position, among the passenger wharves at Circular Quay, at the gateway to the city itself, almost within the shadow of the Harbour Bridge, opened only seven years earlier.

There was good reason for this unaccustomed prominence. Her cargo on this next voyage would be human: sailors of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
The Sydney Morning Herald
reported a small item of news that morning:

His Majesty's Australian Ship
Perth
would be the latest acquisition for the navy, a cruiser to be proud of. She was modern and powerful, if not exactly new from her builders. At this moment, as her crew prepared to board the
Autolycus
for the voyage across the world to collect her, she was still a British ship of the Royal Navy, HMS
Amphion
. Commissioned in 1936, she had spent almost three years in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans as the flagship of the imposingly named Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Loftus Tottenham KCB RN, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy's African Station. She had steamed nearly 60,000 nautical miles, from port to port of the Empire's African colonies. Second-hand or not, as the winds of a coming war began to blow more strongly in Europe and in north-east Asia, the Australian Government and the navy were eager to be getting her.

In the twenty-first century, the cruiser is almost an extinct species of warship. The United States Navy has about 20 of them in service at any one moment, bristling with a variety of the latest guided missiles. What is left of the Russian fleet maintains a handful of cruisers as well. Other navies, including the British, the French and the Australian, phased them out long ago. Smaller or very different warships – destroyers, frigates and submarines – have assumed the roles that made the cruisers of the seafaring nations a familiar sight on the world's oceans in the first half of the twentieth century.

At the height of her swagger and influence, the cruiser's primary purpose was to prey on enemy merchant shipping and to protect the trade that sailed under her own flag. She would be a lone wolf, prowling the sea lanes over long distances to bring her victims under her guns and devour them where she might.

And cruisers were fast. Most could carve through a moderate sea at over 30 knots, or more than 55 km/h. Some 10,000 tons or so of steely menace heading from over the horizon towards you at that speed, guns trained, was an awesome apparition. Of merchant shipping, only the crack transatlantic passenger liners might have the legs to make an
escape. In the days before radar, most cruisers carried a small spotter seaplane, or sometimes two of them, that could be launched from a catapult or lowered over the side by crane to act as airborne eyes, usefully extending the ship's horizon. For many a lonely freighter or tanker, helpless in an empty ocean, the masts of an enemy cruiser rising above the horizon or emerging from a foggy rain squall would spell destruction. There was a name for it: ‘cruiser warfare' it was called in English; ‘
Kreuzerkrieg
' in German.

When she was not commerce hunting or protecting her own, a cruiser might find herself patrolling with others of her kind in a squadron, or in company with the more ponderous battleships of a larger fleet. In troubled times, she could deliver a pointed exercise in traditional gunboat diplomacy; a lean, grey warship suddenly arriving in some ramshackle colonial port to send a party of bluejackets or marines ashore with fixed bayonets could have a sobering effect on the most turbulent tribal chieftain. If a show of force was not required, a party might do the trick: there would be festoons of coloured flags, the ship's band playing nautical airs, and sparkling white uniforms at a cocktail reception for His Britannic Majesty's consul on the quarterdeck.

The new
Perth
, now being refitted for her Australian ship's company at Portsmouth, Britain's ancient naval base in Hampshire, was a classic of the cruiser breed. The RAN had already commissioned her two sister ships of what was known as the modified Leander class. HMS
Phaeton
had become HMAS
Sydney
in 1935, followed by HMS
Apollo
, renamed HMAS
Hobart
, in 1938.
Perth
would be the first of her name. And the last cruiser ever ordered by the RAN.
²

For most of Sydney, this 13 May was just another Saturday.
The Daily Telegraph
's rugby-league expert Viv Thicknesse told his readers that, after four rounds of the 1939 premiership, ‘the probable winner was still well disguised; today's match between Balmain and Eastern Suburbs would depend on the outcome of the forward struggle'.
³

Tattersalls Club would be conducting racing at Randwick, where, said the sports pages of the
Herald
, ‘the prospects of Tel Asur in the colts' and geldings' division of the Two-Year-Old Handicap appear particularly bright'. In the women's section, David Jones was celebrating its hundred and first birthday as the city's most fashionable department store with the offer of a face-moulding home treatment ‘through the courtesy and co-operation of Miss Elizabeth Arden'. And tomorrow, Sunday, would be Mother's Day. You could take your mum ice skating at the Glaciarium or on a delightful harbour trip by ferry for just one shilling. From the water at Rose Bay, you might catch a glimpse of a well-advertised gentleman's modern Spanish bungalow, commanding perpetual harbour views, with three lovely bedrooms, for sale at £2150.

Sydney being Sydney, the beach also got a mention. People wearing bathing costumes were henceforth forbidden to travel on trams, trackless trolleys or motor omnibuses, the
Herald
reported sternly. If necessary, they would be forcibly removed at a penalty of not more than £2. There had been a worrying recent outbreak of this lewd behaviour. ‘Women passengers had protested against the presence of half-naked men in trams at busy times of the day,' the paper sniffed.

Down at No. 2 Circular Quay, a crowd was gathering. Mothers and fathers, wives and sweethearts, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and mates had come to farewell these sailors on a passage to that small island on the other side of the world that many of them, without affectation, knew as the Mother Country or, more simply, home.

This was an era when women wore hat and gloves to go to town, and their menfolk were, for the most part, smart, in woollen suits and felt hats. They had turned out in their best today. The crew for the new ship were uniformed in blues, ‘square rig' they called it, with flaring, bell-bottomed trousers pressed – never ironed, but pressed – into the regulation knife-edged vertical creases down the side seam and five or seven horizontal creases across the leg, depending on the height of
the wearer. You could really swagger in those strides, especially if you'd given them to a handy shipmate or a waterfront tailor to have them not-so-subtly taken in around the backside and crotch, as many a likely lad would do; some perfectionists had ball bearings sewn into the bottom seams to add to the roll and swing. The square blue sailors' collar was draped neatly over each pair of shoulders, edged with the parallel white stripes that, according to tradition, commemorate Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson's three great victories: the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. White-topped caps were cocked at a jaunty angle. The brass buttons and gold badges of the officers and petty officers shone on navy-blue jackets. The whole effect was tiddly: navy slang for smart or sharp.

‘See you at Christmas.'

‘Good luck, mate.'

‘Say hello to the Poms for me.'

Young Elmo Gee was saying his goodbyes. His parents, God-fearing Salvation Army officers, Captains Napier and Alice Gee, had christened him Allan after his birth – the fifth of their six children – at Beechworth, the fabled gold-mining town in Victoria's Ned Kelly country. But somehow ‘Elmo' had come along as a navy nickname and it had stuck.

His childhood had been a bush idyll among the old workings at Silver Creek, a hamlet a short ride out of Beechworth, not far from Chinaman's Flat and Madman's Gully. It was beautiful country, a landscape of ragged purple hills, forests of pine and gum, the low valleys crossed by creeks and waterfalls and swimming holes to take the sting out of burning summers. Kangaroos and wallabies and wombats roamed the grasslands. In winter, hard frosts settled on the paddocks. Elmo would cherish the glow of these early memories all his days:

A Salvo family lived hand to mouth, never quite knowing where the next few shillings might come from. Captain Napier turned his hand to farming his few acres and following the bush tracks in his sulky to sell Griffiths Bros tea to bring in a little extra. When the Depression hit as the twenties turned into the thirties, there was back-breaking work for him in the timber camps, clearing gum trees for a forestry company planting pines. Captain Alice took in boarders and washing. But somehow the Good Lord provided, even if it meant shooting or trapping some of His creatures. Rabbits made a good meal, baked or boiled with the potatoes and pumpkins stored in the shed, and Alice was a dab hand at preserving apples and pears for the pies she made year round.

Young Allan had his reading, writing and arithmetic drummed into him at the local state school, walking barefoot there and back. There were Bible readings at home each evening, and Sundays were given to the Lord in hymns, prayer and fire-breathing sermons. The Salvos taught him to play the cornet, a skill he would bring aboard the
Autolycus
. The navy could always use a bugler.

Like many a country boy before and after him, Allan discovered a world beyond the bush at the local picture show.
One film he saw clattering through the projector in the smoky dark would stay with him all his life.
Brown on Resolution
,
⁵
a grainy black-and-white swashbuckler made in 1935, starred John Mills as a bold British Jack Tar who more or less single-handedly took on the Kaiser's navy of the First World War before dying a heroic death on a remote Pacific island. Thrilled by the deeds of derring-do, Allan Gee decided there and then that he would join up and go to sea. The navy accepted him on 9 March 1937. He was just 17.