Cruiser (50 page)

The collapse of Malaya and Singapore was the greatest defeat of the war for Britain and Australia, and a catastrophe for the local population of Chinese, Malays and Indians. In all, 1789 Australians were killed, with 1306 wounded. The Japanese took more than 130,000 Commonwealth prisoners of war, military and civilian, including almost 18,000 Australians. Locals, especially prominent Chinese, were tortured and raped. On a larger scale, it was the death knell of the British Empire. Churchill was stunned by the destruction of the fortress – the vaunted citadel, the impregnable Far Eastern redoubt – which had fallen so easily and so quickly to an inferior number of troops. It was, he said later, the ‘worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history'.

For Australians, it was indeed the inexcusable betrayal that many had feared but had hoped could never happen. The promise of Main Fleet to Singapore had been no more than the soothing swindle of statesmen down the decades. ‘Mr Churchill might be the world's greatest spellbinder, but he has proved himself the world's worst campaigner,' barked
The Bulletin
magazine on 23 February. ‘The direction of strategy and the disposition of forces, weapons and munitions must, once and for all, be taken from his guilty and incapable hands.'

Curtin told the Australian people the day after the surrender that:

Actually, it was worse than Dunkirk. There, a British army had been saved. In Singapore, an entire Australian division was lost, almost one-quarter of the army's front-line fighting strength. On the urgent recommendation of the government's military
advisers, Curtin and the Cabinet resolved to request the return home of the Australian divisions serving in the Middle East – a decision that would provoke the most furious row of all with Churchill.

From the Australian perspective, there was no choice. Even before the fall of Singapore, the Japanese octopus had begun to extend other tentacles into the islands of the Netherlands East Indies, sending invasion forces into Borneo and the Celebes and quickly capturing the oil refineries at Palembang in southern Sumatra. On the island of Ambon, the local Dutch defenders and an expanded Australian battalion known as Gull Force were overwhelmed in early February. Beyond the East Indies, the port of Rabaul in New Britain, a gateway to Papua New Guinea, had been taken from Lark Force – a brave but hopelessly outnumbered Australian garrison. Port Moresby, Batavia and the Dutch naval base at Surabaya in East Java were being bombed regularly. Looking north in the summer of 1942, Australians saw peril advancing upon them, a new barbarism that was insatiable and apparently unstoppable.

Perth
had spent the first weeks of the New Year plodding here, there and everywhere on the humdrum routine of convoy duty off the Australian east coast. First, it was escorting troopships to Port Moresby, then trips to Noumea and Fiji – tedious work that meant keeping to the speed of the slowest ship in company. Waller relieved the monotony by exercising the ship in drill after drill and by dropping the occasional depth charge to shake up submarines real or imagined. Several whales met their end this way – victims of a suspect Asdic echo – but no enemy submariners. And he delighted in playing with his new toy, the Walrus, honing the skills of her crew and his own as a ship handler.

Recovering the boxy little Pusser's Duck could be tricky. The theory was that the aircraft should land in the slick of
calmer water made by the cruiser's wake as she turned in a slow arc, but it rarely worked out that simply in practice. The job required skill and luck in about equal proportions, for both ship and aircraft had to keep moving. Just one wave bigger than expected could swamp the Duck's fragile fuselage or send a wing tip crunching into the ship's side. The toughest part fell to Tag Wallace, who had to worm his way out of the small hatch above the cockpit and clamber past the engine nacelle onto the upper wing to seize the heavy hook swinging from the ship's crane that would hoist the Duck on board. The first time they'd tried a recovery had been in the calm of Port Phillip Bay, and it had been a near-disaster. Hec hadn't slowed the ship enough and Jock McDonough practically had to chase him to catch up, the Walrus bouncing across the swell like a ping-pong ball.

Eventually, he perfected it.
Perth
would ease back to ten knots. McDonough, judging his landing nicely, would taxi alongside as the Observer, David McWilliam, grabbed the towing line from the cruiser to keep the two moving at the same speed. Wallace, balancing like a circus artist, joined the hook to the inbuilt sling on the wing, and the Duck would rise neatly from the water, to be lowered back onto the catapult and held in position by the locking lugs. There was something very satisfying about getting this right.

Hec Waller enjoyed using the Walrus – something he had never had in destroyers. It was a luxury that gave him eyes beyond the horizon; not as good as the replacement radar set that the navy was still declining to provide despite his repeated requests, but far better than nothing at all.

Everyone knew that, sooner or later, they would be heading north. Paul Doneley, the young footballer from Queensland, was granted a brief leave and made a point of snatching some time with an older sister, Merle, who was in the WAAAF at Point Piper in Sydney. They took in the sights of Kings Cross, and he popped back again the next day to say goodbye. It was 20 January, his 18th birthday. She watched, with a catch in her heart, as he gave a final wave and walked away down Wolseley
Road, bell-bottom trousers swinging and his cap with the
Perth
tally band set at a jaunty angle.
²³

On the last day of January, a Saturday,
Perth
sailed from Sydney with the flagship
Australia
and the New Zealand cruiser
Leander
for another spell of convoy escorting in the Pacific. Next day, out of the blue, she was ordered to Melbourne. The change of course had been dictated by no less than the British and American Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Contemplating the disasters unfolding off Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, the Chiefs specifically asked that
Perth
be sent to stiffen the naval forces of ABDACOM, the ABDA command. Confronted by such a formidable request, the Curtin War Cabinet could only agree, however reluctantly. From Melbourne,
Perth
was to head west to Fremantle, then north through the Indian Ocean to Batavia to join
Hobart
in the battle to stem the oncoming Japanese tide.

Not everyone thought this was a good idea – least of all Rear-Admiral John Crace, the officer commanding the Australian Squadron. Crace constantly fumed at the way ships were snatched from him every so often by the government or the Naval Board without, he thought, any good reason. The despatch of
Perth
was particularly galling because it meant a further stripping of the defence of Australian waters in favour of a hazardous and quite possibly fruitless foray to the north. Crace confided his anger to his diary, which now rests at the Imperial War Museum in London:

The Admiral's concerns were well founded. ABDACOM was a shambles. Impossibly, its boundaries stretched thousands of kilometres, from the Burmese frontier with India in the west, to the Philippines and as far as Taiwan in the north, south to Darwin, and east from Malaya across the sprawling archipelago of the Netherlands East Indies to New Guinea. It was a theatre of war vastly bigger and more populous than Continental Western Europe – a concept that evidently escaped the fine minds of Washington and Whitehall. ABDACOM's army, naval and air forces were a jumble of whatever could be scraped together in the panicky months after Pearl Harbor and Singapore, commanded by generals, admirals and air marshals of four nationalities who, in most cases, had never met each other, let alone formed any common strategy to confront an experienced and cohesive enemy. Headquarters were hastily set up in various ports and cities in Java, creating a tangle of red tape exacerbated by the need to translate orders from English into Dutch and vice versa.

It would not be fair to blame General Wavell for the mess. He had been handed the job by Churchill, with Roosevelt's concurrence, and told to get on with it, which he did. ‘Talk about being left holding the baby,' he had remarked drily to his staff. ‘They've given me twins.'
²⁵
They were twins stillborn.

Perth
and Hec Waller had more immediate matters to deal with. On the way to Melbourne, there was a report of a German raider off Wilsons Promontory, the southernmost point of the Australian mainland. With the loss of
Sydney
still fresh in mind, they went to full speed and the Duck was scrambled to take a look, although the seas only just qualified
for a safe take-off and recovery. Happily for Jock McDonough and his aircrew, the report turned out to be false.

Happier still for most of the ship's company was the news when they reached Melbourne that Pricky Reid was to be replaced as
Perth
's Executive Officer. As ever, the Naval Board gave no public reason for the change, but the buzz was that he had been made the scapegoat for the fire in Sydney before Christmas, even though he had been ashore when the alarm was raised. Privately, he was officially informed that he had ‘incurred the Naval Board's displeasure' – a serious censure. Charles Reid had been an unfortunate figure but he was by no means an incompetent officer. He had performed his duties conscientiously under Captains Farncomb, Bowyer-Smyth and, briefly, Waller. But his manner had grated. The nickname said it all. Starchy, however well he meant, he had not been a good manager of men. He had got the sailors' backs up – a failing quite possibly recognised by Waller, who, presumably, could have pulled strings to retain Reid as his second-in-command had he wanted to. His career was blighted. He was never to be confirmed in his acting rank of commander and never served at sea again. The scapegoating was an injustice, but there it was.

The new XO who marched up the gangway at Williamstown was Commander William Harold Martin, known as ‘Pincher', the nickname inevitably bestowed upon Martins in the navy, like it or not. Born in 1903 at suburban Drummoyne in Sydney, Pincher passed out from the naval college as a midshipman in 1921 and, after the usual Snotty spell in two battleships of the Royal Navy, he set about making a career as a hydrographer, or marine surveyor. Before his posting to
Perth
, he had commanded the RAN's sole survey vessel, the elderly sloop HMAS
Moresby
, which led to some raised eyebrows in
Perth
's wardroom. Hydrographers were a rare breed, regarded as slightly dotty by more conventional officers, whose household gods were guns, signals and navigation. Commander Martin had not served in a cruiser
since a short stint in HMAS
Canberra
as a young lieutenant in 1930 and, so far in this war, he had not heard a shot fired in anger. But he and Hec Waller had known each other from their days at the Admiralty in London and were good friends. Their young sons had played together. Pincher, though, would be on a steep learning curve as Waller's second-in-command.

By 8 February,
Perth
was in Fremantle, where the confusion of ABDACOM descended upon her. The next day, she was ordered to Batavia, but hardly had she steamed out of Gage Roads and into the Indian Ocean when that was countermanded and it was back to Fremantle again. This was fine by the Western Australians in the crew, who found themselves with a spot of unexpected home leave. Bill Bee went back to Howick Street in Victoria Park to see his father, who had served in the First AIF and was now joining the Second at the age of 53, and he paid his respects to the Whitton family across the road, who had lost their son Bert, a telegraphist in
Sydney
. But the uncertainty added to the unease among the ship's company and there was more dither to come.