Cruiser (20 page)

Norris's hopes of home leave at Christmas were dashed. It would be many long months before
Perth
would see Sydney again.

A few days later, in Melbourne, the convoy collected a third great liner turned troopship, the
Mauretania
, and
Perth
escorted them across the Indian Ocean as far as the Cocos Islands, shepherding a precious cargo of 14,000 men on a long passage to the Middle East.

The dangers were real: the war was coming to Australia's doorstep. Two German auxiliary cruisers,
Komet
and
Orion
,
both disguised as merchant ships, were active in the Pacific Ocean. In November, they sank the liner
Rangitane
off New Zealand, and then
Komet
headed north to destroy no fewer than six helpless merchant ships waiting to load cargoes of phosphate at Nauru. More menacing still, another German raider,
Pinguin
, laid mines on shipping lanes around Australia's eastern and southern coasts, at one stage brazenly coming close enough inshore to see the lights of Sydney Harbour and the lighthouse at Barrenjoey, north of Sydney. Slipping back westwards below the Great Australian Bight, she then went on a rampage in the Indian Ocean, attacking and sinking unguarded merchant ships almost at will.

The RAN was powerless to stop the carnage.
Perth
was one of just a handful of ships available to hunt for an enemy that had the advantage of surprise and the empty wastes of two great oceans in which to hide. It was an unequal game, played on German terms.
Perth
and whatever other ships the navy could scrape together were despatched here and there as reports of sinkings came in, but they had no luck. It was one wild goose chase after another.

Unknown to the navy at the time, the saving grace was that the Kriegsmarine had instructed the raider captains they should not seek battle with Allied warships. There was no need to. There were rich pickings to be had without risk. The troop convoys sailed unmolested.

In late November,
Perth
headed out again from Fremantle with the cruiser
Canberra
, escorting yet another convoy to the Middle East. This time, she would be going all the way. The Navy Board and the Cabinet had decided that
Sydney
should be brought home from her Mediterranean deployment and that
Perth
should replace her. After a stop at Colombo and a stretch of more routine convoy duty back and forth in the Red Sea,
Perth
cleared the Suez Canal – cheered on her way by Australian soldiers camped on the canal banks – and entered the Mediterranean at exactly 7.30 on the morning of 24 December.

Turning west, Bowyer-Smyth steamed at a brisk 28 knots along the Egyptian coast towards Alexandria. They arrived that evening, Christmas Eve. With the ship bathed in the glow of a brilliant sunset, they moved slowly past the Ras el-Tin lighthouse with its distinctive black and white stripes and in through the boom defence net, going alongside an oiling wharf to refuel.

The harbour was packed with the ships of the Mediterranean Fleet, from the majestic bulk of the battleship
Warspite
to flocks of cruisers and destroyers swinging off buoys in the stream. As luck would have it,
Perth
drew the short straw and was nominated as guard ship for the night, which meant attending to any and all of the bits of housekeeping required by a fleet at anchor. Not far away, they could see the remnants of the French squadron that had been disarmed back in July, and
Perth
was ordered to keep her 6-inch turrets trained on the forlorn silhouette of the battleship
Lorraine
for the night, just in case of any funny business. Being guard ship meant that her bugler would sound the traditional ‘lights out' for the fleet at 9 pm. Jim Nelson got the job. He stepped onto the quarterdeck, his mind racing:

War in the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean Sea, the sea of Middle Earth, was the nursery of civilisation. Down the centuries from antiquity, kingdoms, empires, republics and caliphates have risen and fallen in contest for the mastery of its shores and waters. Arts and sciences have flourished in its palaces and libraries, commerce in the ports and marketplaces. But no part of the planet has seen more war, death and destruction. Greeks and Romans, Venetians and Phoenicians, Egyptians and Persians, Assyrians and Spaniards, Turks and Russians, Americans and Germans, Britons and Frenchmen have all come and gone, leaving behind the bones of their ships and sailors on the Mediterranean sea floor.

From the Straits of Gibraltar in the west to Syria and Lebanon in the east, the Mediterranean spans nearly 4000 kilometres. Between its northern and southern shores, the distances are shorter – no more than 1400 kilometres, and in some parts very much less. Its waters cover 2.5 million square kilometres of the planet. The coastline, from Spain eastwards across southern France and around Italy, on through the Balkans and down to Turkey, to the Middle East and across westwards through North Africa to Morocco, runs for 46,000 kilometres. The weather can be benign, with warm, sunlit summers, but the winters in the northern Mediterranean are often icy. The cold Mistral winds howling down from the Alps-Pyrenees can whip up a nasty, short-pitched sea in next to no
time. From Africa, the burning gales they call the Sirocco or the Khamsin or the Ghibli are laden with sand and dust – a misery to sailors.

For the British, the Med, as they called it, was the highway to Empire. Britain won Gibraltar and its famous rock from Spain in 1713 and for centuries maintained an impregnable naval base there, dominating the gateway to and from the Atlantic. Nelson guaranteed Britain the command of the Mediterranean for a hundred years when he destroyed a French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and then a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. In Victorian times, the Royal Navy was a familiar sight in all the great ports, equally admired and resented for its pomp and swagger. The Suez Canal became the road to India, the Far East and Australia.

Australians, too, had fought in these waters before.
Perth
's men knew the story of their fathers and uncles who had sailed there in 1915 to plant the roots of the Anzac legend on the beaches and the heights of Gallipoli. In 1917, Harry Chauvel, the outstanding Australian General of the First World War, sent the immortal 4th Light Horse to crush the Turks in history's last great cavalry charge at Beersheba in Palestine. Now, in this war, Australia would make its mark here again.

As the year 1940 drew to a close, there was some cause for optimism in the Mediterranean theatre. Wherever he turned, Mussolini saw his grand fantasies of empire collapsing with embarrassing speed. His invasion of Greece in the northern autumn of 1940 had turned into an unmitigated disaster. In North Africa, Operation COMPASS, the westward thrust by the British Army's Western Desert Force, had Il Duce's legions either in scattered retreat or, more humiliating still, staying put to surrender at the first opportunity.

The Australian Army's 6th Division played a signal role in the stunning British successes. On 4 January 1941, in the army's first major battle of the war, the men of the 6th routed the Italians at Bardia in Cyrenaica, or modern Libya.
¹
They
lost 130 killed, but captured some 40,000 Italian prisoners and staggeringly large dumps of weapons, food and alcohol. Three weeks later, they smashed through the defences of the strategically important port of Tobruk. The RAN's Scrap Iron destroyers under Captain Hec Waller took part in bombarding the Italians from the sea, in guarding the supply lines for the troops ashore, and in ferrying some of the tens of thousands of wretched prisoners back to Alexandria. This was the encouraging landscape in which
Perth
began her Mediterranean service.

At sea, the Royal Navy held the upper hand. The French fleet had been neutered. HMAS
Sydney
's destruction of the
Colleoni
and the air attack on Taranto had left the Regia Marina with little more enthusiasm for the fight than the Italian Army. The Kriegsmarine was concentrating on the war on British trade in the Atlantic. In London, Winston Churchill was convinced that his Blue Water Strategy, British command of the Mediterranean, would be key to taking the fight to the Axis powers.

His instrument would be the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Fleet. Ever the romantic, Churchill believed that Nelsonian boldness in the Mediterranean and the Middle East would bring Italy to her knees and turn the tide of war against Germany. With his customary combination of charm and bullying, he forced that view upon his admirals, generals and air marshals.

To guard the approaches to the western Mediterranean, the navy had Force H at Gibraltar: the battlecruiser
Renown
, the battleship
Barham
and the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
, with their attendant cruisers and destroyers. Force H might range into the Atlantic, but its principal task was to pass Britain's convoys of men, weapons, fuel and food eastwards into the Mediterranean and to take the war to the Italians where it might find them.

The Mediterranean Fleet operated at the other end of the line. From Alexandria, its role was to command the sea itself, to deliver those supply convoys safely to the army in North
Africa, to keep open the Suez Canal, and, again, to oppose and destroy Mussolini's navy. At the beginning of 1941, it comprised four battleships (
Warspite, Malaya, Ramillies
and
Valiant
), two aircraft carriers (the brand-new
Illustrious
and the older
Eagle
), together with squadrons of cruisers (including HMAS
Sydney
and then
Perth
) and the smaller but faster destroyers (including five of Waller's Australians). There was also a force of 15 submarines.

Alexandria existed in a peculiar limbo. Egypt owned it; Britain controlled it. In 1936, with a well-judged combination of threats and bribery, the British had forced the Egyptian monarch, the dissolute young King Farouk, to sign a treaty of alliance, which permitted Britain to treat the place as just another outpost of Empire. The Admiralty quickly set about building up a dockyard and headquarters that could become the Royal Navy's principal base in the event of war in the Mediterranean.

Central to the entire British strategy was the island fortress of Malta. For centuries, he who occupied Malta dominated the whole Mediterranean. Lying 100 kilometres to the south-east of Sicily, midway between Gibraltar and Alexandria and therefore more or less in the centre of the Mediterranean, Malta was the lynchpin. It had been a British colony since 1800, and the Grand Harbour of the capital, Valletta, was the Royal Navy's principal Mediterranean base in peacetime.

The scandal was that Malta's defences had been grievously neglected. When war with Italy broke out in 1940, the island had only a handful of anti-aircraft guns. The RAF maintained exactly three ancient Gloster Gladiator biplane fighters, which the cynics had nicknamed Faith, Hope and Charity. And for all the grandeur of its ancient forts and ramparts, Malta was no longer tenable as a permanent home for warships for it lay within easy range of Italian bomber bases. This was what had forced the Mediterranean Fleet to relocate further east to Alexandria. The Battle for Malta would become one of the epic struggles of the war, stretching the Royal Navy to breaking point.

After committing to the Mediterranean option in 1940, much against the misgivings of his professional naval advisers, Churchill sought to soothe the concerns of the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand, writing to them that:

He smoothly assured the Dominions down under that the Japanese would also be hesitant to risk taking on the might of the Americans in the Pacific, and went on that if there were somehow to be an Anglo-Japanese war:

This was Churchill at his most difficult – the impetuous amateur meddling again in grand designs, as he had done so disastrously at Gallipoli. The Blue Water Strategy would prove to be a grievous error that would cost tens of thousands of
Allied lives in both the Middle East and the Pacific. Many of the dead would be Australian.

As the Italians simultaneously succumbed to the British onslaught in North Africa and lay bogged in a stalemate with the Greeks, Hitler was planning his next move. Preoccupied with a possible invasion of the British Isles and, deeper in the recesses of his mind, with the destruction of the Soviet Union, he was nonetheless alive to the threats and opportunities of the Mediterranean. As a matter of both diplomatic and military prestige, he was willing to help out his Axis partner in Rome.

By December 1940, British intelligence was aware that Germany had begun a substantial build-up of land and air forces in the Balkans. In the intelligence coup known as ULTRA, Britain's code-breakers had begun to decipher signals coded and sent on Germany's top-secret Enigma machines. Enigma messages transmitted by both the Luftwaffe and the German railway system, combined with reports from agents in the field, left no doubt that as many as 23 divisions of the German Army had been sent south through Hungary and into Romania. This secured Romanian oilfields for Germany. But those divisions might well be deployed to Greece, or perhaps to the Middle East. Or possibly both.

More ominous still, there were other ULTRA intercepts that made it plain the Luftwaffe was readying to join the battle. A few weeks before Christmas 1940, an entire Luftwaffe air wing known as Fliegerkorps X was transferred from Norway to bases in Sicily and mainland southern Italy. It comprised squadrons of heavy bombers, the lighter and slower but much feared Stuka dive-bombers, and substantial numbers of fighters. Fliegerkorps X and its Commander, Generalmajor Hans Geissler, were experts in anti-shipping warfare. By January, they were ready for action. They would put the skills and tactics they had gained in the Norwegian campaign to devastating effect against the British in the Med.

Christmas 1940 went off well. In the absence of anything like a traditional Christmas tree, the ships in harbour at Alexandria had hoisted festive palm fronds to their mastheads. The Italians, presumably in the spirit of goodwill, refrained from any bombing raids.
Perth
, the newcomer swinging at her buoy, was roused on Christmas morning, as she had been the year before in the Caribbean, by the ship's bandmaster bawling ‘Christians Awake' over the speaker system. The cooks sweated all morning in her galleys and Captain Bowyer-Smyth strolled informally through the messes, chatting to the ship's company – all much to the approval of young Jim Nelson:

Other men were not so happy. James Cooper, an able bodied seaman from Largs Bay, in South Australia, was older than most of his shipmates. He was 33, with a bushy black beard. He had joined the navy in 1928 – the same year that he married his wife Henrietta, or Etty, as he called her. But maturity and long service were no hedge against a longing for home, as he recorded in his diary:

Elmo Gee sent home a Christmas card, with a rhyming message he had composed himself and written in a careful hand, the first letter of each verse inked in red: