Cruiser (37 page)

The next few weeks were a time of rest and recovery for
Perth
's ship's company. They could afford to relax a little as dockyard workers swarmed over their cruiser yet again to patch up what they could. The damage was heavy. A-boiler room was a wreck, as were the main galley, the Blacksmith's Shop and the incinerator room where the bomb had passed through. There
was a yawning black hole in the starboard deck, and various electrical systems had been knocked out. The 4-inch Fire Control Table was unworkable. More serious still, leaks had opened up in her hull again and the starboard inner shaft had been bent out of alignment. Later at sea, they found out that this would cause a heavy vibration at full speed. Oxyacetylene torches flared as the twisted steel was cut away and piled in a heap on the jetty. Meals and hot water were supplied from a maintenance ship. Yet the guns had to be manned and fired day and night, for Alexandria was still under unceasing attack from the air.

Bowyer-Smyth did what he could to give his men leave. They went to the pictures and drank in the bars. Some got away to an army rest camp for a few days. Roy Norris and a mate trekked across the desert for a look at the River Nile. Jim Nelson and three of his mates – ‘the Quiet Four', they now called themselves – had a couple of swims at Stanley Beach, and Jim took the opportunity to get an Egyptian driver's licence as a souvenir. On 7 June, there was an unexpected thrill when the ABC war correspondent Chester Wilmot arrived on board lugging his recording equipment – an imposing contraption of dials, wires, needles and wax discs, to do interviews with the men for broadcast back home.

The script – heavily stamped with the words of the censor: ‘NO NAVAL OBJECTION' – began with some opening words from the Captain:

Bowyer-Smyth can be forgiven for gilding the lily. And the ship's choir did its bit for the show with a stirring rendition of an old shanty, ‘Sons of the Sea':

Every few days, inevitably, the buzz would go around that they were bound for home. Their sister ship
Hobart
was rumoured to be on the way to replace them. In the mess decks, men talked longingly of comforting things: family, mates, sweethearts, a cold beer, a surf at Bondi. And then the rumours, unfulfilled, died as quickly as they sprang up. But there was some truth in them. Back in Canberra, the government had begun to plan
Perth
's withdrawal, in a note stamped ‘MOST SECRET', from the Navy Office to the Department of Defence Coordination on 4 June:

Relief was on the way. But there would be a seismic shift in the direction of the war before they sailed through Sydney Heads again.
Perth
had more fighting to do in the Mediterranean.

In the second week of May, Hitler had been at first flabbergasted and then enraged by the defection of one of his closest henchmen, his deputy as Nazi party chief, Rudolf Hess. Driven by some mad idea of brokering a peace with Britain that would see both countries turn on the Soviet Union, Hess, a trained pilot, flew secretly to Scotland by night in a Messerschmitt Bf110 fighter and parachuted from its cockpit just south of Glasgow. There, he asked to see the friend of a friend, the Duke of Hamilton, who, he believed, would help him achieve his diplomatic masterstroke. Hamilton, a serving RAF officer, contacted Churchill personally. Hess was swiftly despatched behind the bars of a military hospital. The Führer, given the news at Berchtesgaden, turned white with fury. Hess was one of the
alte kameraden
– the old comrades from the early years – and the cellmate in Landsberg Prison who had taken
down the dictation for
Mein Kampf
, no less. Hitler feared his plans to conquer Russia would be laid bare.

In fact, the interrogators found that Hess, a mystic who fed on the lunar extremes of Nazi fads and fantasies, carried little worthwhile information. The British, through ULTRA intercepts and other intelligence sources, were already well aware of Hitler's intentions. They knew, in considerable detail, of the massive build-up of German forces on what would become the eastern front for Operation BARBAROSSA. Churchill cast about for subtle diplomatic ways to inform Joseph Stalin of the mounting threat without revealing the ULTRA secret. In essence, he failed. Suspicious to the point of paranoia, and despite corroborating evidence from Soviet intelligence agents, one of whom had penetrated the German Embassy in Japan, Stalin refused to accept that Hitler would attack him.

On the summer morning of Sunday 22 June, he was rudely disabused. Four hours before dawn, on a line winding nearly 2000 miles from the Black Sea to the Baltic, 6000 German field guns opened up to begin the most mighty invasion, and the greatest strategic miscalculation, in all the history of warfare. It was a titanic clash between the world's two greatest armies and two absolute dictators. Three German Army groups, each commanded by a field marshal – a staggering total of about 4.5 million men – lunged forward ferociously. Their objective, like that of Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armée before them, was nothing less than the capture of Moscow and the subjugation of the entire Russian people. The Greater German Reich would have
lebensraum
, living space, in the east. ‘When the attack starts, the world will hold its breath,' Hitler bragged to his generals. ‘We have only to kick in the front door and the whole rotten Russian edifice will come tumbling down.'

In the beginning, it seemed that boast was coming true. The Red Army, more than three million men, reeled back in bloody disarray as the German panzer tank divisions smashed through. In the air, the Luftwaffe destroyed nearly 4000
Russian aircraft on the ground in just the opening three days. At seven o'clock on the first morning, with the invasion already four hours old, Goebbels went on national radio to read the Führer's proclamation:

Winston Churchill, too, saw the apocalypse. On the BBC that night, he addressed the British people and the world in inspired flights of oratory that also invoked God:

Perth
was still at her buoy in Alexandria when the dramatic news of Russia's torment came through. Her repair job was almost done – makeshift, but enough to see her fit for action. Three days later, on 25 June, she raised steam and left harbour once again. The vast battle in Europe now dwarfed the contest in the Mediterranean and North African theatre, but there was still a war there to be fought.

Cunningham and the remains of his fleet had a new front to contend with. In addition to denying Rommel his supplies in North Africa and the hazardous business of sustaining the besieged Australian 9th Division holding out bravely in Tobruk, the navy was now required to join a battle that had
opened up to the north and east of Egypt in Syria – a territory that included what is now modern Lebanon.

To all intents and purposes, Syria was a French colony, granted as a mandate under the League of Nations. The fall of France in 1940 had brought Syria under the control of the Vichy Government, which was nominally neutral but in practice a German puppet to the point where many of its senior ministers were traitorously pro-Nazi. In 1941, as the war in the Mediterranean grew hotter, the Vichy High Commissioner in Beirut, the elderly General Henri Dentz, commanding some 45,000 men of the French colonial Armée du Levant, was pressured from both Paris and Berlin to throw in his lot with Germany.

Dentz was not keen. But the possibility that he might succumb worried the British, who controlled the rich oilfields of neighbouring Iraq, where there had been a pro-German uprising. A turbulent German presence in Syria could disrupt British access to that Iraqi oil. And the Commonwealth forces locked in battle with Rommel to the west of Egypt feared that Syria would be used by the Germans as a platform to harass them from the east.

Towards the end of May, British intelligence discovered that around a hundred Luftwaffe aircraft, some of them painted in Iraqi colours, had landed in Syria with Dentz's permission. These planes began bombing the British forces that were putting down the Iraqi uprising. And the Germans had inserted a political agent into Syria, a certain Rudolph Rahn, who was equipped with money and propaganda to stir up anti-British and anti-Semitic feeling among receptive local Arabs. In the view of London, something had to be done.

But what? In Cairo, General Wavell, with the disasters of Greece and Crete on his mind and his record, was less than enthusiastic about a Syrian adventure. He made this view plain to his masters in London, only to receive a clip across the ear from Churchill in a cable that contained a silken threat of dismissal:

Wavell reluctantly submitted and laid his plans. The Australian Government was as gung-ho as Churchill, with the High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, cabling Prime Minister Menzies in Canberra on 24 May:

Menzies agreed, and on 29 May he replied to Bruce with a cable that he was instructed to take to Churchill: