Cruiser Read online

  Mike Carlton is one of Australia’s best-known broadcasters and journalists. In a media career of more than 40 years, he has been a radio and television news and current-affairs reporter, foreign correspondent, talk-radio host and newspaper columnist.

  He was an ABC war correspondent in Vietnam in 1967 and 1970, and for three years was the ABC’s bureau chief in Indonesia. Now happily retired from radio, he has returned to writing a column of comment and opinion for the Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald.

  Mike has had a lifelong passion for naval history. Cruiser is the book he has always wanted to write.

  To Morag, with love

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Cruiser: The Life and Loss of HMAS Perth

  ePub ISBN 9781742740928

  A William Heinemann book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by William Heinemann in 2010

  This edition published in 2011

  Copyright © Mike Carlton 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

  www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

  Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher, and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Carlton, Michael.

  Cruiser: the life and loss of HMAS Perth / Mike Carlton.

  ISBN 978 1 86471 133 2 (pbk)

  Perth (Cruiser)

  World War, 1939–1945 – Naval operations, Australian.

  World War, 1939–1945 – Prisoners and prisons, Japanese.

  940.545994

  Cover photograph courtesy of the Australian Department of Defence

  Cover design by Richard Shailer

  Maps and diagram by James Carlton

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Diagram of HMAS Perth, 1941

  Maps

  Note on Terminology

  Foreword

  Part 1: Leaving Home

  Chapter 1: The Autolycus Sails

  Chapter 2: Gathering Clouds

  Chapter 3: To the World Beyond

  Chapter 4: Portsmouth

  Chapter 5: Welcome in New York

  Chapter 6: Rum with Shanghai Lil

  Chapter 7: First Homecoming

  Part 2: War in the Mediterranean

  Chapter 8: To the Mediterranean

  Chapter 9: Disaster in Greece

  Chapter 10: Fleet Action

  Chapter 11: Prelude to Crete

  Chapter 12: Aegean Tragedy

  Chapter 13: The Starboard Slaughterhouse

  Part 3: To the Sunda Strait

  Chapter 14: Change of Command

  Chapter 15: The Time of Infamy

  Chapter 16: The Fall of Fortress Singapore

  Chapter 17: Defeat in the Java Sea

  Chapter 18: Abandon Ship

  Part 4: Prisoners and Survivors

  Chapter 19: Fight for Survival

  Chapter 20: In Enemy Hands

  Chapter 21: The Railway of Death

  Chapter 22: Miracle in the South China Sea

  Chapter 23: Slaves of Nippon

  Chapter 24: The Day of Liberation

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Appendix 1: Report by Commanding Officer, HMAS Perth

  Appendix 2: Crew of HMAS Perth at the Date of Her Loss, 1 March

  Acknowledgements

  References

  Bibliography

  List of Search Terms

  HMAS Perth in the Mediterranean, 1941

  The Battles of the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, 1942

  The Battle of the Sunda Strait, 1942

  The Burma–Siam Railway, 1943

  NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

  Many place names and spellings have changed since 1945, particularly in North Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia. It was impossible to fix a rule for which to use, the old or the new, so I have settled for those that I think will be most familiar.

  Generally, this means employing the words that Perth’s sailors would have recognised. So, for example, modern-day Cilacap in Indonesia keeps its old, Netherlands East Indies colonial spelling of Tjilatjap. Yet even this rule is not hard and fast, for I think Surabaya reads rather better than Soerabaja, Bandung better than Bandoeng.

  Naval sailors – not officers – used to be known as ‘ratings’, which was an indication of their rate or rank. Thus, a man might be rated able seaman or petty officer. The British still use the word ‘ratings’, but the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) now prefers the simpler and more egalitarian term ‘sailor’.

  A knot is a measure of speed at sea: one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is 1.852 kilometres. So a ship travelling at 30 knots is doing a speed of 55.56 km/h.

  Another problem arose with gun calibres, which were measured by inches. Thus, a 6-inch gun fired a shell six inches in diameter, or 152 millimetres. It seemed sensible to keep the old units.

  During the war, the RAN sailed under the White Ensign of the British Royal Navy – a Union flag in the top left-hand corner of the red cross of St George. The RAN adopted its own White Ensign, similar to the Australian national flag but with blue stars on a white background, in 1967.

  I have done everything possible to track down and gain permission from holders of copyright. Where I have been unsuccessful, I would be happy to make amends in any future edition.

  FOREWORD

  The Second World War was the greatest of all the wars at sea, a global struggle for mastery contested by thousands of ships on every one of the world’s oceans.

  This is the story of one of those ships and the sailors who took her to that war. The ship bore no great name steeped in history. Some of her crew had chosen to follow the sea for their profession or their livelihood, but most were young men in uniform only for the hostilities. They were not supermen but reluctant warriors. Their chief desire was to get the job done and return home to live in peace.

  Yet no ship was more loved in the Royal Australian Navy, and no ship’s company saw more of the horrors of war or endured them with such courage. Whatever ships they might have sailed in before or since, the men of HMAS Perth belonged to her first and foremost, and she to them. Many of them kept diaries and wrote letters home
, and some who returned from the war recorded their memories so that future generations of their families, and the country they had served, would know what they had done and how it had been.

  So this is their story of life and death, love and duty, war and remembrance.

  PART 1

  Leaving Home

  CHAPTER 1

  THE AUTOLYCUS SAILS

  Sydney Harbour, Saturday 13 May 1939. Not long after dawn, as an autumn sun rose above the great sandstone headlands that guard the entrance to Port Jackson, the steamship Autolycus began making ready for sea.

  Firemen of the black gang sweated in her Stokehold, heaving shovelfuls of coal into the furnace to raise steam in her boiler. A smudge of brown smoke began to rise from her funnel, drifting past the Blue Peter flag, flying to show she was preparing to sail. The Red Duster, ensign of the British Merchant Marine, hung limply from the staff at her stern.

  A seaman’s eye would have recognised the Autolycus as a vessel of the venerable Alfred Holt and Company, shipowners of Liverpool, England. Launched in 1923, now beaten and well worn, but tough enough with it, she was a small, purposeful freighter of not quite 8000 tons, with a rust-marked black hull, salt-stained white upperworks, buff-painted masts and derricks, and, amidships, Holt’s distinctive royal-blue funnel topped with a wide black stripe. Vessels like her could be seen plodding in and out of all the ports of the world, from the Pool of London to Hong Kong, Auckland and Bombay. Workhorses of the sea, they carried the trade of Empire wherever they might.

  That seaman’s eye, though, would have noted that the Autolycus lay in an unusual berth for a ship of her lowly status. Her last cargo had been a consignment of horses. Normally, she would have docked further into the inner harbour, to discharge the contents of her holds and to take on a new lading in the bustling anonymity of the finger wharves of Walsh Bay or Pyrmont. But, today, she was in a much grander position, among the passenger wharves at Circular Quay, at the gateway to the city itself, almost within the shadow of the Harbour Bridge, opened only seven years earlier.

  There was good reason for this unaccustomed prominence. Her cargo on this next voyage would be human: sailors of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). The Sydney Morning Herald reported a small item of news that morning:

  NAVAL MEN FOR ENGLAND

  Hammocks in Cargo Steamer

  Return by Cruiser

  More than 200 naval ratings will leave Sydney at 11 am today in the steamer Autolycus for England, where they will form part of the crew that will bring the cruiser Perth to Australia. Two hundred more ratings will embark at Hobart and Melbourne.

  The Sydney ratings will assemble at 8 am in HMAS Penguin, the depot ship at Garden Island, and will be ferried in naval tenders to No. 2 Wharf Circular Quay, where the Autolycus lies.

  The men’s kitbags and hammocks were placed on board the Autolycus yesterday afternoon. They had been stowed at Garden Island while the men enjoyed leave before sailing.

  The Autolycus will travel to England by the Cape Route. The Perth will come to Australia by way of New York, where she will officially represent Australia at the World’s Fair.

  In the Autolycus, which is normally a cargo vessel, the New South Wales draft will be housed in the ’tween decks of No. 1 hold which, before the ship left England, was fitted with wooden mess tables and forms, hooks for hammocks, and shelves for the men’s dunnage.

  Quarters have been provided for chief petty officers and petty officers in small rooms on the starboard side of the ship, the fittings being as Spartan as those of the ratings.1

  His Majesty’s Australian Ship Perth would be the latest acquisition for the navy, a cruiser to be proud of. She was modern and powerful, if not exactly new from her builders. At this moment, as her crew prepared to board the Autolycus for the voyage across the world to collect her, she was still a British ship of the Royal Navy, HMS Amphion. Commissioned in 1936, she had spent almost three years in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans as the flagship of the imposingly named Vice-Admiral Sir Francis Loftus Tottenham KCB RN, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy’s African Station. She had steamed nearly 60,000 nautical miles, from port to port of the Empire’s African colonies. Second-hand or not, as the winds of a coming war began to blow more strongly in Europe and in north-east Asia, the Australian Government and the navy were eager to be getting her.

  In the twenty-first century, the cruiser is almost an extinct species of warship. The United States Navy has about 20 of them in service at any one moment, bristling with a variety of the latest guided missiles. What is left of the Russian fleet maintains a handful of cruisers as well. Other navies, including the British, the French and the Australian, phased them out long ago. Smaller or very different warships – destroyers, frigates and submarines – have assumed the roles that made the cruisers of the seafaring nations a familiar sight on the world’s oceans in the first half of the twentieth century.

  At the height of her swagger and influence, the cruiser’s primary purpose was to prey on enemy merchant shipping and to protect the trade that sailed under her own flag. She would be a lone wolf, prowling the sea lanes over long distances to bring her victims under her guns and devour them where she might.

  And cruisers were fast. Most could carve through a moderate sea at over 30 knots, or more than 55 km/h. Some 10,000 tons or so of steely menace heading from over the horizon towards you at that speed, guns trained, was an awesome apparition. Of merchant shipping, only the crack transatlantic passenger liners might have the legs to make an escape. In the days before radar, most cruisers carried a small spotter seaplane, or sometimes two of them, that could be launched from a catapult or lowered over the side by crane to act as airborne eyes, usefully extending the ship’s horizon. For many a lonely freighter or tanker, helpless in an empty ocean, the masts of an enemy cruiser rising above the horizon or emerging from a foggy rain squall would spell destruction. There was a name for it: ‘cruiser warfare’ it was called in English; ‘Kreuzerkrieg’ in German.

  When she was not commerce hunting or protecting her own, a cruiser might find herself patrolling with others of her kind in a squadron, or in company with the more ponderous battleships of a larger fleet. In troubled times, she could deliver a pointed exercise in traditional gunboat diplomacy; a lean, grey warship suddenly arriving in some ramshackle colonial port to send a party of bluejackets or marines ashore with fixed bayonets could have a sobering effect on the most turbulent tribal chieftain. If a show of force was not required, a party might do the trick: there would be festoons of coloured flags, the ship’s band playing nautical airs, and sparkling white uniforms at a cocktail reception for His Britannic Majesty’s consul on the quarterdeck.

  The new Perth, now being refitted for her Australian ship’s company at Portsmouth, Britain’s ancient naval base in Hampshire, was a classic of the cruiser breed. The RAN had already commissioned her two sister ships of what was known as the modified Leander class. HMS Phaeton had become HMAS Sydney in 1935, followed by HMS Apollo, renamed HMAS Hobart, in 1938. Perth would be the first of her name. And the last cruiser ever ordered by the RAN.2

  For most of Sydney, this 13 May was just another Saturday. The Daily Telegraph’s rugby-league expert Viv Thicknesse told his readers that, after four rounds of the 1939 premiership, ‘the probable winner was still well disguised; today’s match between Balmain and Eastern Suburbs would depend on the outcome of the forward struggle’.3

  Tattersalls Club would be conducting racing at Randwick, where, said the sports pages of the Herald, ‘the prospects of Tel Asur in the colts’ and geldings’ division of the Two-Year-Old Handicap appear particularly bright’. In the women’s section, David Jones was celebrating its hundred and first birthday as the city’s most fashionable department store with the offer of a face-moulding home treatment ‘through the courtesy and co-operation of Miss Elizabeth Arden’. And tomorrow, Sunday, would be Mother’s Day. You could take your mum ice skating at the Glaciarium or on a delightful harbo
ur trip by ferry for just one shilling. From the water at Rose Bay, you might catch a glimpse of a well-advertised gentleman’s modern Spanish bungalow, commanding perpetual harbour views, with three lovely bedrooms, for sale at £2150.

  Sydney being Sydney, the beach also got a mention. People wearing bathing costumes were henceforth forbidden to travel on trams, trackless trolleys or motor omnibuses, the Herald reported sternly. If necessary, they would be forcibly removed at a penalty of not more than £2. There had been a worrying recent outbreak of this lewd behaviour. ‘Women passengers had protested against the presence of half-naked men in trams at busy times of the day,’ the paper sniffed.

  Down at No. 2 Circular Quay, a crowd was gathering. Mothers and fathers, wives and sweethearts, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and mates had come to farewell these sailors on a passage to that small island on the other side of the world that many of them, without affectation, knew as the Mother Country or, more simply, home.

  This was an era when women wore hat and gloves to go to town, and their menfolk were, for the most part, smart, in woollen suits and felt hats. They had turned out in their best today. The crew for the new ship were uniformed in blues, ‘square rig’ they called it, with flaring, bell-bottomed trousers pressed – never ironed, but pressed – into the regulation knife-edged vertical creases down the side seam and five or seven horizontal creases across the leg, depending on the height of the wearer. You could really swagger in those strides, especially if you’d given them to a handy shipmate or a waterfront tailor to have them not-so-subtly taken in around the backside and crotch, as many a likely lad would do; some perfectionists had ball bearings sewn into the bottom seams to add to the roll and swing. The square blue sailors’ collar was draped neatly over each pair of shoulders, edged with the parallel white stripes that, according to tradition, commemorate Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson’s three great victories: the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. White-topped caps were cocked at a jaunty angle. The brass buttons and gold badges of the officers and petty officers shone on navy-blue jackets. The whole effect was tiddly: navy slang for smart or sharp.