Cruiser (30 page)

On board
Calcutta
, Roy Norris had curled up inside a whaler with his cap for a pillow and a tattered oilskin for a blanket. The explosion threw him out of the boat and onto the deck, knocking him briefly unconscious:

The dawn revealed a ghastly panorama, a charnel house on a stunning scale. Hajo Herrmann had quite literally destroyed Piraeus. There was barely a building left standing around the harbour. Smoke and flame curled from blackened ruins. The sun was hidden behind a shroud of grey. Thousands of civilians had been killed. People wandered through the wreckage dazed
and weeping, calling for friends or family. The
Perth
sailors on
Calcutta
fell in on the dockside and began to plod wearily back towards a usable pier where they could rejoin the ship. And then something magnificent happened. The Greeks began to clap them and to shout encouragement. These people, whose small nation had that terrible night been plunged into war with Nazi Germany, whose homes and lives had been devastated, somehow found it in their hearts to cheer on a ragged band of Australian sailors. Shoulders back, heads high, the
Perth
men marched on as if all the admirals in the world were watching.

Bracegirdle and Power were taken to a Greek naval hospital, where doctors swabbed the fuel oil from their bodies and a medical orderly plied them with welcome tots of Metaxa brandy. Remarkably, their only injuries were some spectacular bruises. They, too, returned to the ship the next morning, marvelling that they were alive to tell the story. Luck was still with HMAS
Perth
. The Captain's decision to take her out into the bay had saved her yet again. No one had been killed or even seriously injured.
Ajax
and
Calcutta
had both lost men. The three cruisers sailed for Suda that afternoon.

As the days ticked by, April, which had begun with such promise after Matapan, now saw the war in the Mediterranean and the Middle East turn in Germany's favour with alarming speed. It was as if white had turned to black, positive to negative. In the Balkans, the Germans swept all before them. Yugoslavia was overrun in a matter of days, as mercilessly as Hitler had demanded. Von Weich's Second Army then lunged south through Macedonia and down through the Monastir Gap in the mountains that were the gateway to northern Greece.

The Greek armies fought with tenacity. One Greek battalion, poised high above a mountain pass, hurled stones upon the German tanks advancing below. Frightfully brave British public-school chaps with hyphenated surnames and Oxbridge degrees in classical history dashed about, blowing up bridges and railway locomotives and strangling German sentries.

But the inevitable happened. The sledgehammer cracked the nut. Within three days, by 9 April, the German 2nd Panzer Division had captured Salonica, and the Greek 2nd Army had surrendered. The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler – a crack division of the Waffen-SS commanded by Josef ‘Sepp' Dietrich, a former butcher who had been Hitler's personal bodyguard – swept through the Monastir Gap and pressed south. The hammer would now fall upon the outnumbered Australians and New Zealanders hunkered down in muddy mountain passes in weather that had turned to sleet and snow. On 12 April, General Blamey announced that they would be known, from then on, as the Anzac Corps, united under his command. It was an attempt to ignite the Gallipoli spirit. He said:

Blamey had chosen an odd moment to remind his men that Gallipoli had ended in failure. Even as he spoke of ‘success', the orders went out for withdrawal. The new Anzacs were to pull back or be overrun. Considering his misgivings at the beginning of Operation LUSTRE, Blamey must have recognised that disaster was imminent. It was a bitter retreat through razor-backed mountain passes and across icy, fast-flowing rivers – hungry and exhausted men labouring beneath whatever ammunition and equipment they could carry.

With overwhelming superiority in the air, the Luftwaffe hounded them all the way. The RAF had about 80 operational aircraft in Greece. The Germans could call on 800. In just one brief air attack, lasting not more than a few minutes, two Australian battalions lost 17 killed and 35 wounded. But by 20 April they and the New Zealanders had regrouped at
Thermopylae, the storied mountain pass where the Spartans had defied a Persian army 2500 years before.

If the situation was dire in the Balkans, it was equally so in North Africa. On 24 March, Rommel and the nucleus of his Afrikakorps had begun an advance along the curving Mediterranean coastline of Cyrenaica – modern-day Libya. This, too, would become a disaster for the British. Rommel's instructions from Berlin had ordered him to launch only a limited offensive to stop the Italian rout, and that at first is what he did. But the folly of Churchill's strategic fantasies was being laid naked. With the Australian 6th Division and the Kiwis in Greece out of his way, Rommel found himself pushing at an open door. Ambitious, impatient, but not quite believing his luck, he kept his tanks and motorised infantry thrusting eastwards to send the Allies tumbling back across the vast expanse of desert they had gained from the Italians in 1940. By 3 April, he had captured Benghazi, which the Australians had taken so easily just months before. He was now moving so fast that the diggers gave his onslaught a horse-racing nickname, the Benghazi Handicap. In a letter home to his wife that night, Rommel wrote:

This was no idle boast. The next day, a German spearhead sent three companies of the 2/13th Australian Infantry Battalion tumbling in retreat from a place called Er Regima in the desert well to the east of Benghazi – the first encounter between an Australian Imperial Force and German troops since 1918.

Early on the morning of 7 April, a small squad of Germans
on a reconnaissance patrol stopped a British staff car near the port of Derna, on the Libyan coast, and found, to the astonishment of all concerned, that they had captured the two senior British commanders in the field: Lieutenant-Generals Philip Neame and Sir Richard O'Connor. The loss of Neame was perhaps unlamented by the Australians. A general whose ability was no match for his delusions of grandeur, he had once complained furiously about a brigade of the Australian 9th Division: a drunken mob, he thought, ‘who have not learnt the elements of soldiering, among the most important of which are discipline, obedience of orders, and soberness. And their officers are equally to blame, as they show themselves incapable of commanding their men if they cannot enforce these things.'
¹⁰

A day later, another British commander fell into Axis hands when Major-General Michael Gambier Parry surrendered his inexperienced 2nd Armoured Division to the Italians about halfway between Benghazi and Tobruk. By 10 April, racing still further east, Rommel was poised to devour Tobruk itself.

Here, at last, he would be checked. Tobruk was a fortress, protected not by walls but by the surrounding desert – flat and featureless ground that gave no cover to an attacker. The Australian 9th Division – Neame's drunken rabble – and the British gunners with them had their backs to the sea, but they were well dug in behind anti-tank ditches and barbed wire. And that day their commander, the resolute Lieutenant-General Leslie Morshead, issued an iron-clad order:

It was Easter. On Good Friday, 11 April, and throughout that holy weekend, the Afrikakorps used all the unholy force they could summon to break Tobruk's defences. It was clash after bloody clash of tanks and rifles, bombs and artillery, and man upon man in a ballet of death. Time and again, the Germans were repulsed. Tobruk held and held again. The 9th Division
would be a poisoned thorn in Rommel's side for the rest of the year. They stayed as Morshead had ordered them to stay, the immortal Rats of Tobruk, supplied and supported, and their sick and wounded carried away, by the battered but unbeaten small ships of the Mediterranean Fleet.

Perth
had shed her Walrus amphibious aircraft when she first arrived at Suda Bay in January 1941. Though a useful asset in peacetime, the wartime reality was that the stumpy little Pusser's Duck, No. A2-17, was more a hindrance than a help. Poised precariously on the midships catapult between the ship's two funnels, she sat right in the path of the tremendous shock waves from the main 6-inch armament, and she blocked some of the arcs of fire of the high-angle anti-aircraft guns. The blast from a full broadside would quite probably wreck her thin metal – something that had apparently not occurred to the Admiralty designers. Still more of a concern, her supply of aviation fuel, stored nearby on the upper deck, was a fire hazard that could endanger the entire ship if hit by an enemy bomb or shell.

The nine men who flew and serviced her were landed on Crete as well. They were a mixed, knockabout bunch of navy and air force. The plane nominally belonged to the RAAF's No. 9 Squadron, and her pilot was an air-force officer, Flight Lieutenant Ernest ‘Beau' Beaumont, just 23 years old, of Bexley North in Sydney. His Observer and Navigator, Sub-Lieutenant Gerald Brian, 22, was a Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm officer on loan to the RAN. The third member of the aircrew, Petty Officer Telegraphist Daniel Bowden, of Black Rock in bayside Melbourne, had joined the navy as a teenage boy in the
Tingira
in 1925. The oldest of the trio at 31, he was the aircraft's wireless operator, who also doubled as an air gunner. The others included riggers and an armourer.

It was a funny set-up ashore at Suda – rough and ready after the naval discipline and routine of the ship. The Duck
was tethered to a buoy in the bay and refuelled from 40-gallon drums ferried out in a barge from shore. Beaumont and Brian lived in a house in a local village, while Bowden and some other sailors camped in tents in an olive grove. They cooked for themselves with navy stores, or sometimes with meat and vegetables bought from local farmers. Each dawn and dusk, they flew anti-submarine patrols, and by day they carried messages, delivered mail and carried senior officers about.

Things livened up when the air raids began. Often, the first hint of trouble would be the sight of the locals running for cover, even before the sirens opened up and the Air Raid Red flag was hoisted. That meant a scramble for shelter in slit trenches they had dug in the olive grove, where they watched the black puffs of anti-aircraft fire bursting around the attackers. The Italian high-level bombing didn't give much trouble, but when the Luftwaffe started coming over the surrounding hills at low level there was a real danger that the Walrus could be bombed or strafed at its buoy, so they made a rough runway out of rocks, where they could taxi the aircraft ashore under the protection of a steep hillside.