Cruiser (6 page)

But as the '20s gave way to the '30s, the Great Depression turned Australian dreams of a better post-war world to the stuff of nightmares. The nation was devastated by a financial apocalypse, with its outriders of unemployment, poverty, hunger and illness, and the brittle post-war gaiety shattered like glass, to be replaced by the pervading misery of millions.

Wrestling with the budget, the federal Labor government of Prime Minister James Scullin slashed defence spending by 21 per cent in 1930, with a cut of another 17 per cent a year later. The navy, the most expensive of all the services to maintain, was dealt the heaviest blows. Ships were laid up in mothballs or scrapped entirely. Officers and men were sacked by the hundreds. Those lucky enough to keep their jobs were forced to accept heavy pay cuts. With but 340 officers and 2776 ratings on the books, the RAN could send just three ships to sea: two relatively modern heavy cruisers,
Canberra
and the new HMAS
Australia
(II), and a plodding and largely useless seaplane carrier, the aptly named HMAS
Albatross
. The men who stayed on were disillusioned and despairing of promotion but glad to keep their jobs. They could not know it, but many of them would form the experienced backbone needed by the navy for another war. Some would find their way to the new cruiser
Perth
.

The Mother Country, too, was beating swords into ploughshares. Multilateral disarmament was the way to keep the peace, and there was always the newly formed League of
Nations to solve disputes that might arise between states. A few far-seeing minds in both Britain and Australia regarded Japan as a possible menace for the future, but they were largely ignored, for, as every sensible person knew, the Japanese were an inferior Asiatic race of peasants with narrow eyes that were unable to see clearly at night. They were technically backward and militarily a bit of a joke. If the Imperial Japanese Navy was rash enough to make any hostile move against Britain's colonies in Asia or towards Australia and New Zealand, its path would be barred by that great jewel of the Crown in the Far East, the island stronghold of Singapore. Blithely ignoring the lesson of the Russian defeat at Tsushima, the Royal Navy was convinced it would have more than enough time to despatch its main fleet down from the northern hemisphere to deal with any upstart Japanese unpleasantness. Main Fleet to Singapore! That would be the watch cry. With a constant flow of soothing assurances from Britain that the defences of the island were being strengthened for just this eventuality, Australian governments of the early 1930s had little option but to let the RAN get along as best it could with what it had.

In the Great War, Japan had been, like Italy, an ally against the Kaiser. The powerful Japanese battlecruiser
Ibuki
had been one of the escorts guarding the first convoy of Anzac troops sent from Melbourne through the Indian Ocean to the Middle East in 1914. More or less unnoticed by the other belligerent nations preoccupied with the slaughter in Europe, Japan had seized the opportunity to flex its muscles. Quickly, and at little cost, the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army had snapped up German territorial possessions in China and occupied the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands in the Pacific. At the peace table at Versailles, over the protests of Australia, it was agreed that Japan – a responsible global citizen, a member in good faith of the League of Nations – should continue to administer those territories. In 1921, the young-ish Crown Prince Hirohito embarked in a battleship on a visit to Europe, amusing his royal hosts in Britain with an unexpected enthusiasm for golf,
horse racing and, most surprising of all, the traditional English breakfast of bacon and eggs. That had gone off so swimmingly that the Prince of Wales returned the visit in 1922.

It was all a facade. Militarism and ultra-nationalism were boiling away in Japan, fuelled by a poisonous xenophobia and the notion that the Japanese race, its history and culture, were uniquely and infinitely superior to whatever else the world might offer. The Emperor, a direct descendant of the sun itself, bore the mandate of heaven. Having successfully lifted themselves from centuries of feudalism and isolation, the Japanese people had developed a burning desire for economic progress and prosperity. If that meant aggression and colonial conquest, so be it.

For a Western onlooker at this distance of years, it is hard to make sense of the interwoven and competing ultra-nationalist and militarist groups that fought for power and influence in Japan between the two World Wars. Murder was a common political tool. Junior army officers, lieutenants and captains, thought nothing of assassinating more senior officers, colonels and generals, if their warrior spirit or devotion to the God Emperor was thought to be insufficiently ardent. This violence would not have mattered a great deal to the rest of the world, perhaps, had it been confined to the Japanese islands. But it was not confined. It would spread like a plague throughout what the British, and Australians too, called the Far East.

China and Japan had been at each other's throats since the latter part of the nineteenth century, at first warring for control of the Korean peninsula. The Chinese – corrupt, politically divided, militarily ill-equipped and incompetent – were no match for the sons of Nippon, who swarmed from Korea through their northern province of Manchuria. In the 1930s, the IJA began a bloody rampage across China, taking the great coastal city of Shanghai after three months of blood-drenched warfare. Worse was to come at Nanking, then the capital of China, on the Yangtze River inland from Shanghai.

The Rape of Nanking was an atrocity – barbarism that
set a new benchmark for the twentieth century. The accepted estimate is that 200,000 Chinese were massacred in the six weeks over Christmas 1937.
¹⁴
Women were literally raped to death, sometimes by the penises of gangs of drunken Japanese troops, sometimes by a sword rammed into the vagina. Babies were spitted on bayonets. Leering soldiers forced farmers, at gunpoint, to rape their children or their animals. Tens of thousands more civilians were shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death, their corpses thrown into the Yangtze River, which ran with blood and guts to the sea at Shanghai.

At home, successive Japanese civilian governments found themselves increasingly enmeshed in the iron net of militarism and ultra-nationalism. Cabinets came and went. The army was out of control. In 1936, there was a coup attempt from a renegade army faction that, ominously, included elements of the Imperial Guard. In an uprising designed to assassinate the usual targets of ministers and palace chamberlains, tanks rumbled through the streets of Tokyo, artillery pieces took up positions and battalions were deployed. Hirohito, who had become emperor in 1926, roused himself from the pleasing diversions of his study of marine biology and appointed a new prime minister, a former admiral and nobleman, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who helpfully arranged to have 19 of the coup leaders shot for treason. This plunged a fierce rivalry between the army and the navy to a new low.

Two more naval treaties, both drawn up in London, had placed further limits on the size and construction of warships by the major powers, including battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines, and limits on the weapons they carried. The United States, Britain and France signed the second London Treaty in 1936, agreeing that capital ships should be no larger than 35,000 tons, with guns no bigger than a calibre of 14 inches. Italy and Japan walked out, refusing to sign.

The Japanese delegation was led by one Isoroku Yamamoto, then a vice-admiral, but a rising star, having been Harvard educated and twice Japan's naval attaché to the United
States. His genius was to recognise the future of naval aviation, thinking far ahead of his counterparts in Western navies, especially the British. Freed from the inconvenience of international treaties, at Yamamoto's urging the Imperial Japanese Navy began a swift program of expansion that would include a new fleet of fast aircraft carriers and two great battleships, the
Yamato
and the
Musashi.
At 72,000 tons, and armed with enormous 18-inch guns, these leviathans would be the biggest battleships ever built, dwarfing the best that any other navy could range against them.

Japanese naval pilots were trained in large numbers and imbued with a Samurai-warrior thirst for conquest. Scientists and engineers worked to perfect one of the most effective naval weapons of the era. The Type 93 torpedo, or the Long Lance, as it came to be known, would have such range, speed and power that Allied ships' captains in the opening months of the Second World War would quite literally not know what had hit them.

As these acts and actors passed in tremendous parade across the world stage, Australia was no more than a spear-carrier in the back row of the chorus. Although nominally an independent nation, the hard fact was that, in foreign and defence policy, Australia was a client of the politicians of Westminster and the patricians of the Foreign Office in Whitehall, and therefore largely ignored by everyone else. If some Australian politicians chafed at this impotence – and at times they did, both conservative and Labor – there was nothing they could do about it but fret in public and complain in private.

In turn, the British Establishment – statesmen, archbishops, newspaper editors – would profess concern and affection for their kin down under. Quite often, they meant it. They had a sentimental, if condescending, vision of a vigorous young nation sprung from Britannia's loins, bathed in a rosy glow of loyalty to King and Empire, populated by sun-bronzed sheep farmers
and sinewy cricketers ready at any moment to answer the Mother Country's call.

Australians believed, emphatically, in the same red, white and blue pantomime. They were of the British race, manning an outpost of the realm, far-flung bearers of the white man's burden, superior by blood and birth to Rudyard Kipling's ‘lesser breeds without the law'. Occasionally, they might snub their noses at English arrogance or pretension, sometimes rightly, sometimes merely in a two-finger gesture of touchy adolescence. Every so often, there would be a grand imperial conference in London, at which the prime ministers of the Dominions would be invited to put their views to the current occupant of No. 10 Downing Street and hear what wisdom he and his ministers might choose to impart. Business done, there would be the delights of the London season: a glittering dinner with the King and Queen at Windsor, a Test at Lord's or The Oval, racing at Ascot and then a leisurely voyage home again in an elegant stateroom of a liner of the P&O. At times of crisis, Canberra might send a respectful telegram to London proposing a slightly tougher line with the Japanese on something or other, or suggesting that another polite appeal to the good offices of Signor Mussolini might do the trick, but that was about it. In history's page, we made barely a mark.

As Australia slowly began to drag itself free from the coils of the Depression, the federal election of 1931 saw the conservatives take power in Canberra under the banner of the newly formed United Australia Party, led by a former Labor minister, the Tasmanian Joe Lyons. For a few brief years, some degree of domestic political and economic stability, if not tranquillity, began to emerge. Conscious of the ominous noises-off emanating from the Japanese, and from Germany and Italy, Lyons began the job of restoring Australia's defences as best the nation's finances would permit.

It was a modest start, but it was something. In 1933, Britain offered the RAN the loan of five destroyers of Great War vintage. HMAS
Stuart
was a destroyer-flotilla leader, launched
in December 1918. The other four were ships of the even older but equally sturdy V & W class (so called because their names all began with a ‘V' or a ‘W'),
Vampire
,
Vendetta
,
Voyager
and
Waterhen.
In a rational world, they would have gone quietly to the breakers' yard years before, their passing mourned only by those who had sailed in them. Instead, these five would become the storied Scrap Iron Flotilla of ships and men whose exploits in the far-off Mediterranean would write an indelible page in Australian naval legend.

The next year, 1934, things got better again. The government announced a three-year building program for the navy, which would include much-needed improvements to the dockyard at Sydney's Garden Island and, most encouraging of all, the acquisition of those three modern light cruisers from the Royal Navy:
Sydney
,
Hobart
and
Perth
. Recruiting was fired up again, and young men were encouraged to join the naval reserves, where they could learn a seaman's skills at weekly drill nights, row a whaler around on weekends and pick up a few extra bob into the bargain. Should there ever be another war, they could be quickly mobilised.

As the '30s wore on, the spectre of a belligerent Japan began to loom larger. The trade-union movement feared that iron exported to Japan would be turned into steel for weapons of war that one day might be aimed at Australia. The crunch came in November 1938, when waterside workers at the New South Wales steel town of Port Kembla refused to load a British tramp ship, the
Dalfram
, with a cargo of pig iron from the BHP mill destined for the Mitsui steelworks in Kobe. Over the next few weeks and into Christmas, the dispute spread to other ports, with ships blacked and wharfies locked out from their jobs. In reply, the Lyons government threatened to use the sweeping powers of the Transport Workers Act, popularly reviled as the Dog-Collar Act, to send in strike-breakers if necessary and to deprive the wharfies of their licences to work on the waterfront.