Cruiser (21 page)

Roy Norris and a few mates managed a run ashore after lunch. George Hatfield found the Fleet Club, where an Australian Army concert party put on a show called ‘Aussies on Parade'. Even on Christmas Day, Alexandria hummed with life. The city was an exotic stew of Araby and Europe, a profusion of elegant palaces and hotels, teeming souks and stinking slums. In the old quarter beyond the harbour corniche, mosques jostled for space with bars and brothels. Broad boulevards and twisting lanes were choked with donkey carts and ancient, wheezing French and American cars. Heavy-lidded men with thick moustaches sat drinking coffee at footpath cafes. The women waddled past, swathed in black.

The
Perth
men eventually found their way to the Australian Club – a services canteen set up for soldiers on leave and sailors
ashore. They had a wet, a couple of bottles of beer, before moving on again, as sailors do, to see what the night would bring.

Like any ancient seaport, Alexandria knew how to cater for sailors ashore. The red-light district spilled along the Rue des Soeurs, or Sister Street, as everyone called it. It was life on the wild side. From bar to bar, the street throbbed to the sound of guitars and pianos, and songs in English, French, Arabic and Italian, and the night air carried a heady odour of Egyptian cooking, garbage and horse manure. Semi-naked whores beckoned and crooned from windows and doorways. Every man was a Johnny, as in ‘You wanna girl, Johnny?' Or, for a few piastres, you could just drink at a table with the bar girls, ice-cold beer for yourself and coloured water for them. A fondle or a blow job under the table cost extra. Sometimes, the street would erupt in a swift and sudden knife fight, the blades expertly wielded. British Army military police, the Redcaps, patrolled Sister Street, and there were local cops on horses as well. Roy Norris was no shrinking violet, but this was very different to back home:

He yielded soon enough. A few days later, in a more salubrious outing, he joined a group of about five dozen
Perth
sailors who hired a convoy of cars to see the ancient sights of the city. They marvelled at the tall, red granite shaft of Pompey's Pillar and the catacombs built by the Romans. They snapped photos and bought souvenirs to send back home. These were deceptively tranquil moments, a brief respite before the storm of war broke upon them.

On 28 December,
Perth
's crew was over the side with the
paint pots and brushes again. It had been decided, on high, that the ship's pale grey paint should be replaced by a dazzling camouflage pattern to confuse enemy lookouts. In the days before radar – the Italian Navy had none at all – the theory was that an observer would have difficulty telling whether the ship was coming or going.

There had already been an attempt in this direction. Some genius had got the idea of breaking up the cruiser's distinctive silhouette by adding odd-shaped sheets of metal to her two tall funnels. There was no science to back this up, just a rather vague hope that it might have some effect. No one ever found out if it did or not.

And there was not much more science in the camouflage. Everyone on board was asked to come up with ideas for a pattern. Ordinary Seaman Ross Birbeck, a young bloke who had been a hairdresser at Victor Harbor, in South Australia, won two bottles of beer with a design of big arcs of paint swooping along the ship's sides and superstructure in contrasting shades of grey. They thought that, from a distance, it made
Perth
look like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which ought to be more than enough to fool the dopey Eye-ties.

On 31 December, Bill Bracht celebrated both his birthday and the passing of his exam for promotion to petty officer.

At four o'clock on that last afternoon of 1940,
Perth
sailed from Alexandria in company with HMS
Ajax
, a Leander class cruiser like herself, although of the unmodified, single-funnelled variety.
Ajax
was one of those ships that had so famously hunted down the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
at the opening of the war. She and
Perth
were to become part of the Mediterranean Fleet's 7th Cruiser Squadron, under the command of a Royal Navy officer designated Vice-Admiral Light Forces, Henry Pridham-Wippell. Heading out past the Ras el-Tin, they turned north-west across the Mediterranean
towards Crete, bows dipping into a moderately heavy sea, closing up to evening action stations as the sun sank away to port. It was a sombre New Year's Eve. James Cooper thought of his wife again:

The only celebratory drink to toast the New Year was a steaming mug of kye, the navy's nickname for the thick and villainous brew of cocoa that sustained men at sea in the long watches of the night. Kye wasn't
proper
kye unless you could stand your spoon in it. The galley kept a pot of it ready to hand, always. It warmed both the stomach and the spirit.

On the north-west coast of Crete, there lay a long, almost landlocked harbour – Suda Bay – a forward base and refuelling point for the fleet. It was within easy striking distance of Piraeus, the port for Athens, and it commanded the approaches to the Aegean Sea, that beautiful and ancient body of water, sprinkled with sun-dried islands, that separates Greece and Turkey.

They fetched Suda on a cool but sunny New Year's morning, a Wednesday. It was a truly lovely sight, with picture-postcard tranquillity. The entrance to the harbour was framed by snow-capped mountains. Gentle green hills rose from the shore, dotted with small farm buildings, olive groves and – a happy sight for Australian eyes – straggling flocks of sheep. The waters were a deep blue, barely ruffled by a light breeze that carried the scent of native thyme growing wild in the hills.
As ever, Ray Parkin found time to whip out his paintbox. Jim Nelson admired a little white Greek Orthodox church with a red roof and a belltower topped by a cross.

Bowyer-Smyth took the ship in a careful curve alongside a tanker, the
Olna
, to take on fuel. The Seagull aircraft – or the Walrus, as her crew mostly called her – was flown ashore and kept there for reconnaissance work in the coming months. At moments like this, the war seemed far away.

But not for long. The air-raid alarms shattered the peace about halfway through the afternoon watch. While an Alarm Yellow warned of an imminent air raid, an Alarm Red was not just a warning but an alert of aircraft in sight and about to attack. This was an Alarm Red. A lone Italian bomber suddenly roared over the hills towards them at a height of perhaps 5000 feet. By the measure of what was to unfold in the months ahead, it was not much, but this was
Perth
's first experience of a real threat from the sky. As the alarm rattles clattered, the men raced from the mess decks and pounded to their action stations, hearts beating, nerves and muscles bracing for their first shots in anger.

Perth
's anti-aircraft armament, her four sets of twin 4-inch guns, thundered into life, the shells arcing into the air, glowing red tracer exploding in sharp puffs of woolly black smoke. The heavy brass shell cases clattered to the deck. Across the bay,
Ajax
joined in. So did some anti-aircraft batteries ashore. The bomber jinked and circled around the hills, now closer, now further away. On deck with one of the damage control parties, the First Lieutenant, Pricky Reid, was shaking his fist in the air and shouting ‘Come here, you dirty Dago bastard'. But for all the sound and fury, not one shell from either ship got anywhere near making a hit.

The trouble was that the anti-aircraft gunnery system just didn't work. In the Leander cruisers, it involved a lot of machinery and a lot of manpower, but it was almost entirely useless. The raw truth was that if enemy aircraft were shot down, it was more by good luck than good management.

Perth
's air defence began on the ship's bridge. Searching the skies back and forth through an arc assigned to him, a keen-eyed lookout with binoculars would spot and report an attacker, or a swarm of them, which might be only a speck on the horizon.

‘Aircraft bearing green nine-oh, range two miles, sir!'

Green nine-oh meant a sighting on the starboard or right-hand side, at an angle of 90 degrees. The Captain or the Officer of the Watch would sound action stations. The ship's air-defence officer, a lieutenant, would select the aircraft to be targeted. This was a split-second call. He would bark that information to a compartment situated well above the height of the bridge and before the foremast: the High Angle Director Tower. This could rotate in a full circle; it was open to the sky above, and its sights could elevate through 90 degrees. It had a crew of four men who kept their sights trained on the incoming enemy to estimate distance, speed, height and bearing.

The Director Captain, generally a sub-lieutenant or midshipman, transmitted that data to another compartment deep below the waterline in the guts of the ship: the High Angle Control Position. That contained a top-secret piece of equipment: the Admiralty High Angle Fire Control Table. In effect, this was a primitive analog computer. It looked a bit like a car engine tipped on its side. Bending over this contraption was a small team of trained ratings – usually the ship's bandsmen – who, by turning wheels, dials and pointers, could work out where the anti-aircraft weapons on either side of the ship should be aimed.

Other number-crunching took into account the pitch and roll of the ship if it was at sea, along with variables such as air temperature and wind speed and direction. These mathematics were essential for deciding at what height the anti-aircraft shells should be fused to explode.

The result was then transmitted to the guns themselves, where the gunlayers and trainers followed the movements of electrical pointers that gave them the height and direction of
the incoming aircraft. Each pair of the guns required small variations to compensate for their position on the ship – port and starboard, fore and aft. The shells were fused for the correct height, and the guns were then loaded and fired. At an elevation of 80 degrees, the guns had a range of around 18,000 metres. A trained crew could fire about 15 to 20 shells a minute.

That, anyway, was the theory. In a well worked-up ship, it happened smoothly and quickly. But in practice it rarely delivered. No matter how skilled the men involved, the High Angle Fire Control Table was simply not up to the job. It was never quick or accurate enough. The navy's technology had not kept pace with the development of modern aircraft. The table could track a plane flying towards the ship in a straight line, at a constant height and speed, but that was about it. Few enemy pilots were ever so obliging – especially the veterans of Fliegerkorps X. After a while, the Mediterranean Fleet developed a technique called hosepiping, which was just what it sounded like: spraying shells all over the place in the hope of hitting something.

Bill Bracht was up in the High Angle Director that day in Suda Bay, as Director Trainer. His diary glumly records ‘no score'. Roy Norris, often an acid observer, was more scathing: