Cruiser (47 page)

At Chequers, the country home of Britain's prime ministers, Winston Churchill was at ease with cognac and cigars after a Sunday-evening dinner with the US Ambassador, John G. Winant, and the American diplomat Averell Harriman. The butler, Frank Sawyers, entered the room to say he had heard a report of the attack on the BBC 9 pm news. Churchill put a call through to Roosevelt, who replied, ‘It's quite true … we are all in the same boat now.'

Australians woke on Monday morning to hear that the spectre they had long dreaded was now reality. White civilisation – the British Empire, of which they were so proudly a part,
and
the United States
–
had been violated by the Yellow Peril. John Curtin was asleep at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Melbourne when he was aroused by his press secretary, Don Rodgers.

‘Well, it has come,' Curtin said. He called the War Cabinet together – a meeting that produced a small but remarkable step forward in Australian constitutional history. In 1939, Menzies had declared war on Germany ‘as a result' of Britain's declaration. In 1941, Australia beat the British to the punch by several hours. King George VI found himself at war with Japan by the decision of his Australian Government, not his ministers at Westminster. That evening, Curtin broadcast on radio to the nation, sounding a call to arms:

Remarkably – we will not hear its like again – he concluded with lines from the poet Algernon Swinburne:

Perth
was in Sydney when the news of Pearl Harbor and the Malayan landings came through, refuelling after bringing the
Mariposa
into port. Some of her men were ashore on a brief liberty. Others heard Curtin's speech broadcast over the PA system. They rolled into their bunks and hammocks that night tense and sombre, nerves on edge. It had finally happened. War with Japan. Everyone knew they would be in the front line of the nation's defences.

The next morning, with all the other warships in the harbour, Waller sent the crew to air-defence stations, the men manning the 4-inch guns in case of yet another surprise Japanese air attack. A day later, they were at sea again for
gunnery practice, firing both the anti-aircraft weapons and the main armament at targets towed for them, and that evening they did night exercises with a Free French destroyer,
Le Triomphant
.

In the coming weeks, the news would grow ever more grave. Far to the north, great and terrible events were unfolding. Once again, decisions taken in faraway places, London and Tokyo, would touch off a chain of events that would shape the destiny of
Perth
and her crew.

It is an axiom of warfare that the best laid plans do not survive the first encounter with the enemy. This now proceeded to come true across the Pacific and South East Asia. The Royal Navy's Force Z –
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
and a handful of elderly cruisers and destroyers, which included HMAS
Vampire
, a Scrap Iron Flotilla veteran – were at Singapore when the air-raid sirens sounded and the first Japanese bombs began to fall upon the island. After a round of hurried meetings, the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Fleet, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, decided that he must take his ships to sea to forestall more Japanese landings to the north.

Far from meeting the time-honoured British promise of Main Fleet to Singapore, however, Force Z was barely a squadron. Without the carrier
Indomitable
, still absent under repair, it was unbalanced. Air cover would have to be provided by land-based aircraft of the RAF and RAAF, if and when they were available.

And Phillips himself was the wrong choice for the job. Pint-sized at just 1.6 metres – he was known throughout the service as Tom Thumb – he was as feisty as a gamecock, but his entire war so far had been spent behind a desk at the Admiralty as Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff. Nor did he have an impressive record of pre-war command at sea. Clever and political, he had been a protégé of Churchill until they clashed over the disaster
of Greece, when, it was said, their relationship cooled. Some of his fellow admirals, vastly experienced men of the calibre of Andrew Cunningham, were appalled that he had been chosen for Singapore.
⁹
He was known as a ‘big gun' man, one of those who still believed the bomber was no match for the battleship.

At sunset on that Monday 8 December,
Prince of Wales
, flying Phillips's flag, slipped out of the great naval base with
Repulse
, formed up with the screen of four destroyers –
Vampire
and
Tenedos
,
Electra
and
Express
– and, in squalls of heavy tropical rain, took a dog-leg course north towards the Gulf of Siam.

Captain William Tennant of
Repulse
addressed his crew. ‘We are off to look for trouble,' he said. ‘I expect we shall find it …'

The next morning, Phillips was informed from Singapore that the land-based air cover he had requested before sailing was not available. He could only press on, hoping that the monsoon weather might conceal his presence. In fact, he was spotted by a Japanese submarine that afternoon, which accurately reported his course and speed. Later that evening, as the clouds suddenly cleared, the bridge lookouts discovered that they were being shadowed at a distance by at least two Japanese planes. For Force Z, all surprise was lost. At bases in Indochina, the 22nd Japanese Air Flotilla of long-range bombers was loading armour-piercing bombs and torpedoes designed to attack shipping.

Phillips now fell into confusion. He decided to return to Singapore, and, under cover of night, he headed back south. Then, shortly after midnight – it was now 10 December – he received a signal to tell him the Japanese were making new landings on the Malayan coast at Kuantan, far to the south of their original thrust at Kota Bharu. The Admiral decided he might now take this enemy force by surprise, and he changed course again. Muddle piled upon indecision. A Walrus aircraft from
Prince of Wales
flew over Kuantan and reported a false alarm; there was no sign there of any landing. So, once again, Phillips turned towards Singapore, still without air cover. With effortless efficiency, the Japanese closed the trap.

Alarm starboard! At eleven o'clock that morning, nine Japanese bombers in tight formation were sighted heading for Force Z out of a sunlit sky. The big ships opened fire, hurling a blizzard of steel towards the attackers, but the Japanese pressed on untouched to straddle
Repulse
with an impressively accurate stick of bombs, one of which scored a direct hit and exploded below her catapult deck. Once again, the navy's anti-aircraft-gunnery-control systems were simply not up to the job. Next came the torpedo bombers – Mitsubishi G4-M1 ‘Bettys',
¹⁰
a make the British never knew existed, capable of 400 km/h.

Force Z writhed beneath the onslaught, but Phillips, who had not once in his career been under air attack, neglected to order a smokescreen, which might have helped shield his ships from their tormentors. The Japanese airmen ignored the destroyers. They wanted the big ships.
Prince of Wales
was hit by two torpedoes on her port side – one amidships and another one aft. The aft torpedo blasted a huge hole in her hull, killed dozens of men below, crippled her two port propellors and sent thousands of tons of seawater flooding into her stern. Circling helplessly at 15 knots, with her pumps making no headway against the inrushing water but her guns still firing, she began to settle. The sea surged over her quarterdeck. It was the beginning of the end.

Captain Tennant of
Repulse
now took it on himself to signal Singapore requesting urgent air cover. Phillips should have done this when the first Japanese planes were sighted but, inexplicably again, he had not. Tennant's signal was too late to save his ship. The bombers rounded upon
Repulse
as she nobly closed the flagship to see if she could assist. Manoeuvring skilfully, Tennant managed to comb the tracks of at least nine torpedoes, perhaps more, but the enemy split up for a second attack, coming from two different directions, and no fewer than four torpedoes found their mark. Mortally wounded,
Repulse
began to list. She landed some blows of her own, shooting down two aircraft, but the list turned into a slow roll and her captain, realising that all was lost, gave the order to abandon ship. Men
scrambled like ants down the starboard side, or jumped into the water to strike out for
Vampire
and
Electra
, which, ignoring the danger, had come to save them.

Five young midshipmen of the RAN were serving in
Repulse
, a carefree bunch who had joined ‘The Old Lady', as they called her, on the River Clyde in Scotland the previous March. At his action station below decks in the High Angle Control Position – a prison of four steel walls – Midshipman Guy Griffiths, an 18-year-old from Annandale in Sydney, recalls that he felt the torpedoes slam home and, not long afterwards, heard the order to leave:

Griffiths was lucky to make it. He would see out the war fighting in some of the great Pacific battles to roll back the Japanese, and he ended his career as an admiral.

But one of his Australian mates was not so fortunate. Robert ‘Bob' Davies, a slight, fair-haired boy, had turned 18 just three weeks before Force Z left Singapore. He ignored the order to leave, strapped himself to a 20 mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft gun and was last seen still firing at the diving enemy as the ship went down. He ‘seemed as happy as a sand-boy', said a lieutenant who saw him go.
¹²
A year later, his grieving parents, Tom and Mabel Davies, of suburban Greenwich in Sydney, learned that their only son had been awarded a Mention in Despatches and were paid a ‘war gratuity' of £93 and 15 shillings. It should have been a Victoria Cross.

Prince of Wales
now had only minutes to live. As
Repulse
laboured in her death throes, the flagship took another spread of torpedoes and then one last bomb, which left her little more than a wreck marked by a soaring plume of black smoke. She too began to capsize. Those of her crew still alive jumped from her, stick figures struggling in the sunlight. Phillips and
Prince of Wales
's Captain, John Leach, went down with the ship.

Mission accomplished, with the loss of only three of their own, the Japanese aircraft wheeled off back towards Saigon, mercifully making no attempt to interfere with the destroyers rescuing the survivors.
Vampire
alone picked up 225 men, including Captain Tennant, many of them shaking from shock and exhaustion, some unrecognisable from cruel burns, four to die of their wounds. Yet, in the final act of the tragedy, there was one more scene to play. Eleven Brewster Buffalo fighters of the RAF appeared on the horizon as
Prince of Wales
slipped below the surface. They had answered Tennant's call for help, the one Phillips should have made two hours earlier. By the time they got there, the enemy had vanished. A week later, one of the Japanese pilots, Lieutenant Haruki Iki, flew his Betty bomber back over the scene and dropped two wreaths onto the water, one for his fallen comrades and one for the British.