Cruiser (40 page)

The boats were away seconds later for that most joyous event in a sailor's life: the homecoming reunion. Names spoken and savoured. Tears and laughter. Passionate embraces. A wife's kiss. A sweetheart's perfume. Dad beaming, lost for words. Good ol' Mum flushed with happiness. Sister proud. Younger kids standing shyly by their mothers' skirts, unsure who or what this sudden apparition might be. Older children hurling themselves into a father's arms. A mate's firm handshake. We're back. Safe. For the men from other states, this would come later. But for all of them, in this delirious moment the war was far away.

On her Mediterranean tour,
Perth
had steamed more than 80,000 kilometres. And someone had counted the number of air attacks she had survived in those distant waters: 257 of them. The cruiser was battle-worn, in urgent need of a refit. Of her ship's company, it seemed a miracle that only five men had died. Those who had survived were now seasoned warriors, bound together in the unique mateship of dangers shared and surmounted. The last word can best be left to Roy Norris as he closed his diary:

To the Sunda Strait

‘Help win the war in your kitchen. Serve more lamb,' urged a breezy newspaper advertisement put out by the Department of Commerce in 1941. ‘So that ships may be freed to send munitions and supplies to our troops abroad, lamb usually exported must be consumed in Australia. Serve it often to your family.'

Perth
's returning sailors found the tempo of life in wartime quickening around the nation. In the cities, there were air-raid drills and lessons in how to use a gas mask, along with public appeals for scrap metal, waste paper and rags, which would somehow go to help the war effort. The authorities had dug bomb shelters in the Sydney Domain as a helpful guide to what you could do with a shovel and some corrugated iron in your own backyard. Building supplies and newsprint were rationed. Families and businesses with cars were limited to a petrol allowance of 20 gallons a month, prompting an advertisement for something called the Pederick Gas Producer, a charcoal-burning contraption that powered your engine by gas stored, perilously, in an enormous balloon-like bag on the vehicle's roof or a steel tank attached to the boot.
¹

Most startling of all, Australian women were lining up to do their patriotic bit. Unbidden, women's organisations had sprouted like daffodils. The Red Cross set up Voluntary Aid Detachments to teach nursing. In Melbourne, the Australian Women's Legion – officered by steely Toorak matrons sporting
jodhpurs and mirror-polished jackboots – held target practice at the Hawthorn Rifle Range. Another outfit, calling itself the Militors, attired in crisply starched khaki shorts and berets, marched around to the bellowed commands of a retired army drill sergeant. Other women trained as volunteer motorcycle messengers, signallers and telegraphists, canteen cooks and ambulance drivers.

Their menfolk met this female flurry of patriotism with a mixture of puzzled hilarity and outright condescension. They had to be kidding. Women doing men's work? Girls in uniform? At first, even the War Cabinet thought they were more of a nuisance than anything, archly deciding that while they could parade about to their hearts' content, no public money should be spent on them and that no men's jobs should be displaced.

Eventually, the weight of numbers prevailed. On 30 June 1941, there were officially 400,000 men in the army, navy and air force, or about a quarter of the male population between the ages of 18 and 40. These men had to be replaced in their civilian jobs. Women began to work in the munitions factories. And the service chiefs were cautiously coming to accept the radical notion that uniformed women might replace men in non-combat roles. In February 1941, Federal Cabinet had reluctantly rubber-stamped the formation of the Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force. The RAN had followed suit: two months later, the Navy Minister, Billy Hughes, had approved the employment of 14 women – 12 telegraphists and two stewards – on two-thirds of the pay for men, with the firm instruction that there must be no publicity. The Women's Royal Australian Naval Service was born. By mid 1941, the army counted just over 1000 women in its ranks, most of them in the Australian Army Nursing Service.

Emptied of her ammunition,
Perth
was despatched to the Cockatoo Island Dockyard west of the Harbour Bridge to
have her war wounds bound up and made good. A searching inspection, from masthead to keel, found that her defects and damage were more extensive than anyone had realised.

Commander Gray and the engineers had become accustomed to the vibration and heavy smoke she made at full speed and knew that major repairs were needed in her engine room. But all over the ship there was work that had to be done, and in a hurry. Both starboard propellor shafts were taken out and re-aligned, and A-boiler room, wrecked by the bomb off Crete, was virtually rebuilt. Buckled plates in her stern were removed, leaks were stopped and much of her electrical wiring was renewed. The rackety 4-inch Fire Control Table was replaced, along with her main gyro compass, and the primitive Type 286 radar was also taken out of her. There was talk of refitting her with a more modern radar set, but, despite a blizzard of paperwork, that never happened. She would go to war again without radar eyes. But at least her anti-aircraft armament was beefed up, with two sets of quadruple .5-inch machine-gun mounts bolted to the quarterdeck. And she was given a new coat of camouflage – a peculiar arrangement with the starboard side painted in two shades of grey zigzags and to port a pattern of grey and dark blue.

None of this concerned her crew too much. All they wanted was to get out of uniform for a while and forget the war. The navy made good on Bowyer-Smyth's promise of a long leave, and the ship's company scattered to the winds, some of them never to return. It was good to be back in civvy clothes again, absorbed in family routines and pleasures. For a while, the war seemed far away.

Every so often, there were sad lists in the newspapers of young men killed or wounded in distant battles, or perhaps taken prisoner, but the daily numbers were still small, in sixes and sevens. Few families knew the ache of bereavement. For most, life went on. Dances and the picture shows were the big night out. Brisbane's
Courier-Mail
reported approvingly that £2000 had been lavished on refurbishing the city's Theatre
Royal. In Sydney,
Citizen Kane
was showing at Hoyts, and the Victory Theatre had
Gone With the Wind
, in amazing colour. The weekend before
Perth
came home, Sydney rugby league fans had been stunned by the news that the Balmain captain, Frank Hyde, had broken a leg and would be out for the rest of the season. ‘I feel like turning up football,' said Hyde to
The Daily Telegraph
. ‘I must be the unluckiest player in the game.'
The Age
in Melbourne recorded that Scotch, by a length, beat Melbourne Grammar and Wesley in the head-of-the-river boat race rowed over the Henley-on-Yarra course. Clinging to the comfortable rituals of peacetime, Australians fervently hoped the war could be kept from their shores.

In the Indian Ocean on the way home, Jim Nelson had read a signal on a mess deck noticeboard seeking volunteers ‘for dangerous and hazardous missions in small boats', and he put his hand up. He was posted away to HMAS
Lolita
– a pleasure cruiser taken over by the navy as a harbour-defence vessel in Sydney – and was in her as coxswain when she dropped two depth charges on one of the Japanese midget submarines, I-27, that attacked the harbour in 1942. Later again, his war became indeed hazardous when he joined the top-secret Services Reconnaissance Division of the now famous Z Special Unit, manning fast motor launches to run commandos through Japanese waters around the South East Asian islands.

Another of the diarists, Roy Norris, never went to sea again. He spent the rest of his time as a cook ashore in Sydney and in Melbourne, finally retiring from the navy in 1961 as a commissioned officer, a supply lieutenant at the grand old age of 57 with 24 years of service under his belt. Jim Cooper, Bill Bracht and Rowley Roberts also left – Cooper discharged from the navy with chronic bronchitis in 1944, Bracht and Roberts transferred to other RAN ships until war's end. And more of
Perth
's officers went, too. The popular Warwick Bracegirdle, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) for his exploits after the bombing of the
Clan Fraser
in Athens, became Gunnery Officer in another cruiser, HMAS
Shropshire
, and
fought in her at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, where he won a bar to his DSC. The RAN, expanding furiously as the war widened, was in desperate need of experienced men for the new ships that were rolling from the slipways.
Perth
saw about half her Mediterranean ship's company leave forever in that winter of 1941.

There was another departure, much lamented when the men got word of it. Their captain was ordered back to the Royal Navy. Sir Philip Bowyer-Smyth, the British aristocrat who had won the loyalty of his Australian crew, left on 1 September, taking with him a prized possession, one of Ray Parkin's watercolours of the ship. He went without ceremony but with much regret. An officer and gentleman to the last, he wrote a personal farewell to every man who had served under him, an elegant letter that many would treasure all their days:

Sir Philip sailed for Britain in the liner
Empire Star
and took a staff job at the Admiralty. He never gained another seagoing command after
Perth
, some saying that his career had been derailed by Cunningham after that ‘unfortunate' failure at the evacuation of Kalamata. He finished the war ashore in London but perhaps found some consolation in being appointed an honorary aide-de-camp to King George VI in 1946. Eventually, he retired in the English countryside, where he welcomed the occasional visit from Australians who had served with him.

Commander Reid, the Executive Officer, took over the ship until another captain could be appointed. Other men found they, too, were staying on. The luck of the draw would see them returning to
Perth
after their leave. Ray Parkin went home to Melbourne, to Thelma, whose loving letters had sustained him through the Mediterranean, and his two children, Jill, now five years old, and John, just three. In six months, they seemed to have sprouted like new shoots. In Sydney, Reg Whiting returned to his brick cottage in suburban Chatswood and to Alice and John, now a young man of 13, and Brendan, newly turned six. There were lawns to mow and the vegetable garden to be tended – domestic tasks that he went to with pleasure. Jack Lewis, the book-loving Engine Room Artificer, was reunited in Sydney with his wife, Joan. They played the piano together again, went to the pictures and spent a quiet few days up at the shack at Dark Corner, relishing the solitude of Broken Bay. But Joan could see that a change had come over her husband. He
was quieter now, more introspective. He shielded her from the inexplicable ordeal he had endured, as most of
Perth
's returned sailors did with their families, but she realised that terrible things had happened.

‘If the ship goes down, it will be my job to let steam off the boilers so they won't blow up,' he told her in one quiet moment of candour. She knew exactly what that meant: her man would be deep below decks with little chance of escape. Joan never forgot that remark, but she was not alone with her burden. Other women found their men would jump like cats at a sudden noise or cry out in bed in the grip of sweaty nightmares. Some were angry and moody, drinking heavily to dull the memories.

Elmo Gee travelled back to northern Victoria, to his homely bush roots in Ned Kelly country. As ever, the winter at Silver Creek was crisp and cold. In the mornings, frost lay on the paddocks and fence posts, the stillness occasionally disturbed by the shadow of a fox darting for cover or a startled flight of wild ducks. By night, the sky was a myriad of stars sparkling above the Mopoke Ranges and the tracery of gum trees. Napier and Alice Gee welcomed their son back to the old weatherboard cottage with its fire blazing in the kitchen, and he knew again the delight of simple things: Mum's cooking, five brothers and sisters, the dogs and the farm animals, the Roman Beauty apple tree he had climbed as a kid. The district also hailed the hero home, with a formal welcome at Zwar Bros Tannery, where he had once worked for a bit. ‘Patriotic airs were broadcast through Pastor Fullarton's address system during the proceedings,' reported
The Ovens and Murray Advertiser
.