Cruiser (71 page)

Most of the British were herded onto the
Kachidoki Maru
, an old American-built freighter, and all the Australians were forced into the no. 2 hold of the
Rakuyo Maru
, another single-funnelled rust bucket of some 9500 tons. The senior Australian officer was Brigadier Arthur Varley, who had been with them since the railway. Trooping on board, they saw painted on the side of each ship a ‘meatball' ensign, the red rising sun on its white background. ‘It's to help the submarines find the target,' they joked. Again, there was nothing to indicate that the ships were carrying prisoners. But another sight amused them. Lining a rail above them was a bunch of Japanese or Korean ‘comfort women', who, having done their sacred duty by the Emperor, were heading home. Some of them spat at the Australians and got some unfriendly sexual advice in return.

There was pandemonium in the dark hold of the
Rakuyo Maru
, with men literally forced on top of each other until the mass of them began to overflow back out onto the deck again like seething worker ants. This panicked the guards. Brigadier Varley convinced the ship's Captain that seriously ill men should be allowed to stay on deck and that others should be rotated out of the hold and into the fresh air in groups of about 400 each.

They waited in Keppel Harbour for another day, stewing in the heat, while a convoy came together. Two tankers and two passenger vessels joined them, with an escort of three small frigates and a fleet destroyer,
Shikinami
, and at seven o'clock in the morning of 6 September, a glorious sunny day with calm seas, the convoy sailed. Two seaplanes circled overhead,
searching for Allied submarines in the clear waters below. For five days, they ploughed north-east on a course midway between the Chinese island of Hainan to the west and the Philippines to the east, directly into Convoy College. Another six ships, including three more frigates, merged into the convoy. On board the
Rakuyo Maru
, Vic Duncan, the senior Australian sailor, was asked by Varley to devise an abandon-ship routine in case they were torpedoed. Duncan found wooden rafts stacked on deck, and some kapok life vests, and explained what to do if the ship began to sink.

It was a wise precaution. ‘Ben's Busters' were waiting for them. As the convoy left Singapore, Commander Benjamin Oakley Jnr, skipper of the American fleet submarine USS
Growler
, was on patrol to the north of the Philippines, leading a wolf pack of his own boat and two others, the USS
Sealion
and the USS
Pampanito
. These packs, usually of three or four boats, were known by their commander's Christian name – hence Ben's Busters. On the night of 9 September, they surfaced to meet their regular radio schedule and were instructed by Pacific Fleet Headquarters to form a patrol line at a position in the middle of the South China Sea at 10 pm on the night of 11 September. The Americans had known before the convoy left Singapore exactly where to expect it. The listeners in Pearl Harbor had picked up a Japanese signal giving dates, times, course, speed, strength of the escort, the lot. The only thing the Americans did not know was that two of the transports were packed with prisoners.

Oakley ordered his boat to four engine speed. Commander Eli Reich, the skipper of
Sealion
, and Commander Pete Summers in
Pampanito
did the same, and by 9.30 pm on the 11th they were at their rendezvous, in a scouting line on the surface some 25 kilometres wide, radar aerials scanning beyond the horizon. They headed slowly south-west, on the reciprocal to the convoy's north-easterly course, in calm seas under a sky dark with thunderclouds occasionally shading a quarter moon. Perfect submarine-attack conditions. Further to the north,
another wolf pack of two boats,
Barb
and
Queenfish
, was moving to back them up.

Growler
made the first contact a few minutes after one o'clock the next morning. Her radar operator reported a cluster of pips at a distance of about 17 kilometres, heading towards them at approximately nine knots, and
Sealion
and
Pampanito
quickly confirmed the contact. Each boat went to battle stations night attack, still on the surface but ready to dive in a hurry.

On
Growler
's bridge, Oakley peered through the target-bearing transmitter – a set of powerful binoculars connected to a gyro-compass repeater that would show him where his quarry lay. That information would be fed below to the torpedo-data computer, a set of dials and knobs and switches looking rather like a jukebox, which would do the calculations needed to aim and fire his torpedoes. Shortly before two o'clock, he picked out a tanker in the centre of the convoy and was about to fire when, to his alarm, he noticed another dark shape heading straight towards him at speed, white bow wave gleaming in the moonlight. Jesus Christ, a destroyer! There was no time to dive. He would have to try a shot ‘down the throat', which meant aiming at the impossibly narrow target of a destroyer's bows coming at him straight on. Miss, and he would be dead meat.

Three torpedoes burst from
Growler
's bow tubes. Then, Oakley flung the boat hard to port to gain some distance and to bring his stern tubes to bear if his first shots failed. Miraculously, they did not fail. One torpedo sent the destroyer heeling almost on her beam ends in a ball of fire. Yet still she charged on until, just 180 metres away, so close that the men on
Growler
's bridge could feel the fierce heat of her fires, she plunged bow first and disappeared in a boiling sea. It was an act of historical symmetry: this was
Shikinami
, the ship that had fired the last torpedo into the sinking
Houston
at the Sunda Strait two and a half years before.

On the
Rakuyo Maru
, the men asleep on deck woke to see the fiery glare of the destroyer sinking in the distance. The Japanese guards panicked, trying to force everyone back into
the hold, but when no further attack came things quietened down again as the convoy sailed on. The calm would not last long, only a few hours. Ben's Busters were still on their tail.
⁷

At 5 am, Eli Reich took
Sealion
to radar depth, which left his hull submerged but his radar aerial above water. He had four ships in sight on both his screen and his attack periscope, freighters or transports, not even zigzagging, perfectly positioned like ducks in a row.

‘Make ready the bow tubes!'

Sealion
, a Balao-class submarine of 1500 tons, less than two years old, had six tubes forward and four aft, each loaded with 21-inch torpedoes with an effective range of 4115 metres at 46 knots and a warhead of 300 kilograms of Torpex, an advanced form of TNT.

‘Set gyro angles ten degrees!'

‘Set spread angle 20 degrees!'

Closing to a range of 2286 metres, he fired three of his bow torpedoes into the second ship in the line, a tanker. As those were running, he edged slightly to port and fired tubes four, five and six at the second-last ship, which was even closer at just 1005 metres. The first three torpedoes hit the tanker, which exploded like a blast furnace. There was a tense pause as the second salvo ran on, and then it, too, struck home: two of
Sealion
's torpedoes slammed into the
Rakuyo Maru
.

The first one blew apart her engine room and all in it, and the second landed for'ard in her no. 1 hold, which was packed not with prisoners but those rubber ingots. The ship slumped and dug her bow in, sending a huge geyser of water and chunks of debris thundering over Frank McGovern, the army doctor Rowley Richards and other prisoners out on the fo'c'sle. A solid wave of green water washed down onto the men below, causing panic. They clambered, clawing and shouting, onto the upper deck. But the
Rakuyo Maru
did not sink. The rubber seemed to be keeping her afloat. Had that torpedo hit the no. 2 hold a little further aft, hundreds of prisoners would have been killed.

Many Japanese did die. Others, in mounting hysteria,
struggled to lower the lifeboats or jumped overboard. A few Australians took the chance for some long-awaited revenge. A beefy corporal in the 2/2nd Pioneers, Frank McGrath from Melbourne, snatched up a piece of timber and bashed a line of cowering Japanese as they struggled out of a doorway onto the deck. Other blokes tossed them overboard. Vic Duncan, calm and measured, got his abandon-ship drill working, ordering men to find anything that might float and throw it over the side. As it became clear that the
Rakuyo Maru
was not in any hurry to sink, the panic subsided. Some men began to jump into the sea, but Duncan, Frank McGovern, and Frank's mate John ‘Jerry' Parks were in no hurry to leave, as Frank described:

As daylight came, the
Rakuyo Maru
was still afloat but gradually foundering. A tanker was burning in the distance. The sea was
covered in oil and floating debris and dotted with lifeboats – mostly full of Japanese – with hundreds of prisoners clinging to whatever flotsam they could find. Bodies bobbed face downwards in the swell, Japanese and Allied. There was still the intermittent shock of depth charges as the convoy escort searched for the submarines. As the morning wore on, a couple of frigates began to move through the mass of bodies alive and dead. Blood Bancroft thought he was about to be picked up:

Frank McGovern also thought he was about to go back into captivity:

Nobody ever discovered what happened to Varley and the men in those boats. They disappeared over the horizon. Not long afterwards, the Vic Duncan group heard gunfire coming from that direction and they recognised the sound of naval pom-poms – the sort you would have on a destroyer or a frigate. They assumed, with dread, that Varley's people had been massacred in the water. Arthur Varley, the Victoria Cross winner, had been a fine leader in the fighting in Malaya and on the Railway of Death. Able Seaman Danny Maher was the bloke who had stuck with the crippled Gavin Campbell in their agonising trek down the Java coast after
Perth
's sinking at Sunda. Duncan's group, hungry and parched, continued to head west, hoping to reach the Chinese coast. Frank McGovern recalled: