http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/11
00:22 | I was born in Toowoomba Queensland. |
00:30 | My father was journalist and his brother was a journalist too they were both employed by the Toowoomba Chronicle and he died when I was one of tuberculosis, a common complaint in those days and my mother which is indicative of the lack of social security of those days there was no widows’ pension there was no assistance what so ever, |
01:00 | so she had to bail out of the country town, of Toowoomba and go down to Brisbane to see if she could get work and the only work that girls could do in those times was domestic service. So fortunately she was working for the wife of a big company in Brisbane who, the society women of those days they did a lot of charity stuff. This woman was the |
01:30 | chairman of a children’s home, so I and my elder brother who was two years older than me we were both placed in there for five years and oh not for a specific time but until she eventually she remarried and once she remarried we left. So that was during the twenties, the 1920s |
02:00 | and then in 1930 we, well lets get a picture of the ex-service image of those days. It was very very important the Australian effort in World War One was tremendously important to this country and as you know we lost sixty thousand men killed in World War One and in virtually every home |
02:30 | the icon was a son or son’s portrait of their dead son or sons with a little plaque on it. So that created a great impression on me, which eventually led me to joining the armed services. I used to live near a big army camp called Enoggera near Brisbane and we’d go and watch their parades and things like that. |
03:00 | But any how that was through our early childhood and then in 1930 the great economic depression struck, which was one of the worst, there was three. We’ve had three great economic depressions in Australia, one in and 1840, one in 1890s and 1930s and gold saved Australia in the 1840 and two world wars saved |
03:30 | Australia in the 1890s and the 1930s. Well nobody could get any work. I was in Queensland. Queensland had no secondary industry and of course a third of the population were unemployed and so there was only one way that everybody went, my brother and I both went up into the country and did rural work and did for about a |
04:00 | three or four years in various parts of Queensland and then I came back and in 1938 I joined the navy, permanent navy and I could see Hitler was about to start a war there was no risk of that the world was ruled by dictators at the time in Mussolini and Hitler and the various Japanese |
04:30 | and of course Stalin in Russia and we could see war was coming and so the community was sort of attuned to this and so they increased recruiting in the armed services and so I joined the navy and the reason I joined the navy, probably was because my step-father had been in the English Navy during World War One |
05:00 | and so the input obviously came from that angle and so the, in 1938 though we had a tremendous international problem called the Munich Crisis when the British Prime Minister went over |
05:30 | and sort of sued for peace with Hitler and it didn’t accept but in the meantime the Australian Navy mobilised the fleet and I was sent to a destroyer by the name of [HMAS] Stuart and we fully prepared this is in October 1938, we fully prepared the ship for war and every ship was done the same, we armed |
06:00 | it, we provisioned it, we manned it, we took it to sea and did its trials and tests etcetera in other words we were fully prepared for war. Any way it all blew over the British Prime Minister accepted the signed document that there would be peace in our time and we all reverted back. I went back to training I was doing nine months training at a big naval depot in Victoria called, it’s HMAS |
06:30 | Service today, it used to be called the Flinders Naval Depot about forty-five miles from Melbourne. So we all went back there and completed our training and then in February 1939 I was posted to the cruiser HMAS Hobart, I picked her up in Hobart. |
07:00 | So when I walked on board I saw the most peculiar sight. The Australian Navy was very dominated by the Brits at the time and it was a miniature form of the British Royal Navy, they followed their customs and its habits closely. I walked on board and there was the officer on watch was a sub lieutenant, a very good-looking chap he was, he later became Chief of Naval Staff many years later, |
07:30 | but he was in the same uniform as Admiral Nelson, with a cocked hat, a dress coat, Wellington boots, most peculiar, I couldn’t believe it, I stood there and there was four other chaps with me and I was opened mouthed and they dropped that. They dropped that uniform as soon as war broke out all that rubbish went by the board So what we did |
08:00 | on [HMAS] Hobart for a time we were preparing for war but then of course they hadn’t fully mobilised so the ship was three quarter manned and I remember going from Hobart, I picked her up in Hobart, from Hobart we went over to Melbourne and they dressed the ship overall and we were putting on displays and I remember saying to a very smart |
08:30 | leading seaman, “What are they doing buster? What’s all this?” There were big crowds Melbourne people they turn out for everything Melbourne people, big crowds of Melbourne people on the wharf. He said, “They are preparing the nation for war”. I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “Before the year’s out we will have war”, and he said “This is what the government is doing; just preparing the community to |
09:00 | see these sort of characteristics”. So anyway in August 1939 they started mobilising fully even though war wasn’t going to be declared for another month and I can remember on Hobart we got seventy five to hundred Adelaide naval reservists joined to build the ships company up to war complement and we got other reservists elsewhere |
09:30 | and all the other ships did the same too and then I was off Point Perpendicular in Jervis Bay when I, Jervis pick that up. That’s the British influence you see, it was named after an English Admiral called Sir John Jervis but of course in Australia terms it is Jarvis Bay, we old navy men sort of |
10:00 | pick up the British intonation. So I was off Point Perpendicular, which is a very erect piece of, a very bluff at the entrance to Jervis Bay and when I heard Menzies [Australian Prime Minister] say that |
10:30 | he was very sorry but the nation had to go to war. So anyway we immediately we upped anchor and went back to Sydney at full speed and we were anchored by Garden Island, this is a bit of a joke, and there was a German ship lying over near Taronga Park Zoo, or Chowder Bay it really was and it was a four masted thing, merchant ship. |
11:00 | The captain says, now we are expecting,war to be broken out. No, war had broken out. No war had broken out. We were expecting, no I’ve lost my track there for a day or two, I’ve lost a day or two there. That’s perfectly fine. This was just before we went down to Point Perpendicular when Menzies declared war. The captain says “We are on the point of declaring war, we’re gonna |
11:30 | watch that German ship and we will arrest it if war is declared.”. Now he says, “Right I want an armed boarding boats crew to sleep on the upper deck of Hobart which is a nice wooden deck, they were quite comfortable to sleep on these teak decks and he warned his officer of the watch to watch from the quarterdeck and so it had all these people watching it and in the morning the German |
12:00 | ship up anchored and went out Sydney Heads but no one spotted it, so there was all hell to pay on the morning. The captain came down, “Who didn’t see, where’s that ship gone, why didn’t people watch it, see it and what have you?” So we immediately slipped from the buoy and chased it and we chased it all down the east coast of Australia |
12:30 | round Tasmania but never saw it or any other German ship and post-war I found out that it had gone to the mid Tasman Sea and then proceeded straight down to the Antarctic and went round Chile and anchored in a South American port which was just interned there you know. So anyway we went down to Melbourne and |
13:00 | we cleared us, Hobart and another ships we cleared the Australian coast of German shipping and for that matter we wanted to see if there was any Italian ships because we knew that they would eventually come in and there was none. So we putting through anti aircraft and aircraft spotting drills in Port Phillip Bay and |
13:30 | there were plenty of planes flying over from Essendon Airport and so it was the most boring exercise but it had to be done sort a business and then the British Admiralty decided they wanted some our ships overseas, so we went back to Sydney in the beginning of October which was about a month after war broke out we were ordered to join the |
14:00 | British Eastern Fleet or the East Indies which was based on Ceylon or Sri Lanka today, Ceylon in those days, so we were on the east coast and our destroyers which ended up in the Mediterranean they left at the same time, these are the five old V & W destroyers and they joined the Mediterranean Fleet based in Malta. So anyway, |
14:30 | we went straight up to Singapore and then we were promptly black listed because we had mumps, yeah we had mumps I think it was and we had this all over the world with native third world countries they can't withstand mumps or chicken pox or anything like that. So we were isolated in a naval dockyard without any leave because we might infect the local community |
15:00 | and so we did, we oiled and fuelled and stored ships and then we went over to Ceylon and joined up with the British East Indies Fleet there and what they were doing they were scouring the huge Indian Ocean for German ships enemy, potential enemy ships and so we this is quite |
15:30 | a boring episode actually. This monotonous patrolling and these huge seas like the Pacific or the Indian and we intercepted quite a few ships, put boarding parties on them, checked their cargo, we didn’t have to arrest any, the object of arresting was to send them into a nearby port and put a |
16:00 | prize party on board, a sailing party and just steam the ship to one of our ports where the defence people would check them. We could see Italy was going to come into the war so we were detached to Aden to join the Red Sea Force. Now the Italians had, there had been |
16:30 | a big international episode in the mid 30s in Ethiopia and the Italians had invaded it they beaten the Abyssinians and the Ethiopians and they occupied the country, half way up they have one port called Nassawa |
17:00 | and in there they had eight submarines and five destroyers. Five destroyers and eight submarines which Allied aircraft of course had identified and we were there to make certain that our convoys went up to the Middle East, up to Egypt to where the battle field was going to be. So were involved there, we had few episodes but |
17:30 | the Italians came into the war on the 10th June 1940 and they also occupied a place called Somaliland - Italian Somaliland after World War One the Versailles Peace Treaty gave land to a lot of countries who were fighting with the Allies |
18:00 | the French got a bit of Somaliland, the Italians got a bit of Somaliland and the British got a bit of Somaliland, British, French, Italian Somalilands Italians had the coast. And so that was quite near Aden, Italian Somaliland and they had armed forces there and we thought that if war to break out |
18:30 | they would attempt to take over either French or the Italians or the British Somalilands. So we had a bit of. On the as I said, on the 10th June they declared war on Britain and then at about 2 o’clock the next morning we got our first air raid in Aden, an Italian aircraft came over and |
19:00 | dropped bombs so that was our first introduction to war and then the first hostile action, could I stop for a second? Yeah absolutely. Just take a break. I have to just glance at my notes. |
19:30 | One interesting episode. Before war broke out with the Italians they wanted to cement diplomatic relations with the Arabs, where Yemen is today was a variety of countries, Arabian states so we payed a |
20:00 | visit to three of them the and British Consul put the beer on for the sailors at these various places and I remember they, one of the Emir’s gave the captain a deer and so amongst great |
20:30 | hilarity its legs were tied and it was brought into the boat, and we carried it up to the butcher and we had a proper butcher on board and a butcher shop and he said,” I’ve never killed one of these bloody things before or any bloody animal before.” Well they says, so what happened, I think somebody shot it. They got one of the gunners up and he shot it and then the butcher to work and skinned and cut it up and the meat was awful I can tell you that, |
21:00 | and very gamish. But that was an interlude before the Red Sea and of course it was extremely hot up there, before we left the station, before I left the station five stokers had died from heat exhaustion and we never had air conditioning on the ships you know in those days and that |
21:30 | and yes the heat was quite extraordinary. So they died on the ship? Yes they died on the ship from heat exhaustion, it didn’t stop us, we used to work, when we were in harbour we only worked for a half-day because of the heat and so in the afternoon us athletic people like myself we would exercise you know |
22:00 | the more sensible people would be lying on the deck reading a book or something and thinking fools. I used to do a lot of boxing in those days and I should have mentioned this before actually. One of the contributing reasons for my joining the navy was I had taken professional boxing in Brisbane, boxing was a major sport in Australia at the time |
22:30 | every capital city had its stadium, Sydney and Melbourne they both had two or three and big crowds used to attend and because as I say the Depression was on and anybody was anything for a quid. So I progressed very well Yeah I went up to ten rounder, I’d be a main event fighter of today I know that and but there were so many good fighters about |
23:00 | but any way I got because Brisbane only had the one stadium fights were few and far between so that was another contributing factor to my joining the navy. I thought well if I get down to Melbourne they had two or three stadiums down there I might have some decent fights you know with a bit of money attached but that wasn’t the main point, that was one of the reasons for my joining the navy. |
23:30 | So we are now back on Hobart and exercising of an afternoon we had awnings, we used to have awnings up so all these activities went on underneath, underneath the shade of the awnings and so we had quite a big team of boxers would take part in that and I might have a photograph somewhere of that, I don’t know. |
24:00 | And then we would and people would be skipping and they’d be boxing they would be doing all sorts of exercises because Australians are generally athletic minded and we were all young strong men of course and then of course the Italians came into the war and we were put on a specific war based watch keeping procedure |
24:30 | then which was went you went to sea you worked two watches of a night time, we used to watch a three watch of a day time and at night time for example the people who worked on the first watch which was the 8pm till midnight, they had to get up again for the morning watch at four o’clock from four till eight |
25:00 | and then the other watch from they handled the middle watch from midnight until four o’clock in the morning you can imagine, it just became very fatiguing of course as the years rolled by. So any way we were on this full war time fitting, of a day time we had three watches, two at night, they were called defence watches, daytime they were called cruising watches. |
25:30 | We occasionally had Italian air raids coming over from either Italian Somaliland or Abyssinia but they weren’t like the Germans who were very determined, the Germans used to dive bomb like the Japanese and but the Italians were very high flying right up in the sky and they had very accurate |
26:00 | sighting, aiming procedures but they never hit us at any time. So any way they decided to move against British and French Somali. Wait a minute, I’ll just go back to French Somali they didn’t have to take French Somaliland because by this time of the war the French had surrendered, the French had surrendered so there was only the Brits there |
26:30 | so they the French Somaliland wasn’t any good to the Italians or the Brits for that matter because as a neutral port we couldn’t go in there, the Brits couldn’t go in there. So they the Italians decided to move on British Somaliland and that’s when we had first taste of action. May I have a look? Ken just remember that we are going to come back |
27:00 | to a lot of your stories in detail so if you can just take us briefly through your stories and campaign history because we are going to come back. So you don’t have to worry too much about all the details right now. Oh I see. The first Italian air raid. Then we had a series of air raids |
27:30 | and then on the 19th June, which is nine days after the Italian’s declared war , we used to carry an amphibian aircraft onboard, which we catapulted off, and we had a very dashing aircrew. |
28:00 | The aircrews in the navy at that time, they didn’t have a fleet air arm but the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] used to man these aircraft that the navy had, but they always naval observers, that’s a naval officer observers and a naval wireless air gunner who handled the gun at the back. They catapulted this off and they said, “Oh we’re going up to bomb the Italians.” and away they went and they dive-bombed with this funny little aircraft |
28:30 | we used to call it the puss’s duck, the terminology for the navy by sailors is they called the navy pusses and after a variation of the word purser. So that was our first war time activity and then the Italians moved into British Somaliland and a full scale war was on and |
29:00 | the Brits had Well they had British officers, they had native troops there as their soldiers and they were being pushed back quite rapidly and they had to be reinforced, so we were taking, we took Indian troops over there the Punjab to reinforce them and then we had a, they were short of artillery so |
29:30 | we had a what we termed a saluting gun which is only a three pounder a small gun and the captain sent it ashore with three of our sailors and to man it, with some ammunition and they went up to the front line and operated and they became prisoners of war in a couple a days time and the poor unfortunates and it was needless sacrifice |
30:00 | they were volunteered, he called for volunteers, I volunteered, they just picked these three and away they went into POW [Prisoner of War] camp after a few days. Any way there was a full-scale war going on in British Somaliland and the port there was a place called Berbera, and our captain was placed in charge of it, placed in charge of the defence of this and so he landed troops and we bombarded with our big guns |
30:30 | we had Hobart had six-inch guns and this only lasted for I should say no more than a couple of weeks, I think we all had to get out, the Punjabi’s |
31:00 | Can you move us through your experiences from the Red Sea going to port in London and then up into the North Atlantic? Yes all right then. Again just briefly tell us We went to in October 1940 the Royal Australian Navy was commissioning five new |
31:30 | destroyers in England, Scotland actually, well Scotland and England and a number of sailors and officers were drafted from Hobart and I was one of them and so we picked up a British Indian Line ship and we sailed from Colombo through Durban around the Cape of Good Hope and |
32:00 | up through the Atlantic and landed in Glasgow or up the River Clyde at Glasgow in December 1940 and there my ship was commissioned on the 19th December I had a weeks leave in London and do you want to know anything about that? Absolutely. Yes |
32:30 | So anyway They to get to well, there was just a couple of delays in the ships commissioning and the captain sent us all on a weeks leave and he said, “Go down to Portsmouth Naval Depot in the south of England and you can get your seven days leave from there.” So my mate and I, we said, “Oh well we’ll go up to London.” |
33:00 | it wasn’t far from Portsmouth and the Blitz was on at the time, there was wrecked buildings and burning buildings everywhere it didn’t concern us. We walked into a hotel at Bayswater and we just went on the prowl for girls we didn’t care about the bombs and it certainly didn’t clear the streets. Of a night time the air raid wardens would clear “Get off the streets,” they’d say, or the police you know “Get off the streets,” and we’d say |
33:30 | yes if we had our arms around a girl we’d either get to some place and go up to our own room or her room off the street there that way. It was quite eye opening actually to see the Brits they had a very high morale and in spite of the devastation caused by German bombing. Down on their underground rail stations |
34:00 | tubes everyone, all the locals men women and children would sleep there of a night time, it was an air raid shelter and it was quite amusing and everybody was tolerant, they just spread some blankets on the floor on the ground and they would sleep with their, they would all lie on them with their heads to the wall, and there’d just be a space between the edge of the platform |
34:30 | and their feet which everybody would walk past no trouble, nobody objected, nobody kicked anybody. Yeah it was quite eye opening. We were there when St. Paul’s Cathedral was set on fire at that particular time. So anyway after seven of the most interesting days there I wasn’t, we went to some of the overseas service clubs there |
35:00 | I remember bumping into an Australian girl there and I said, “What are you doing over here?” and she said, “Oh we’re over here.” the way Australians have always been to England except they didn’t fly there in those days, they used to go in the beautiful passenger ships that they had, they would go steerage you know, cheapest, oh she says, “I’m looking around England the same as many other Australians,” and I said “When are you going back to Sydney?” |
35:30 | and she said, “That’ place, I’d never go.” No. I said, “When are you going back to Australia?” She says, “That place, I wouldn’t go back to that dead and a die place.” Any way when our leave was finished we went back to Glasgow the ship commissioned and then we did all our trials and tests and trials, went up to Scapa Flow, which is the main British naval base and the Orkneys north of Scotland |
36:00 | and then we did the Atlantic convoys and things like that and the weather is everything they speak about you know very ferocious weather and clouds, low lying clouds, and anyway that lasted, well after you did all these trials you take the ship for practical trips, like escorting convoys |
36:30 | or taking part in the war in general and then you go back to the dock yard and fix defects and so that was in February then they signed off the ship was fighting fit ready for war in all respects. So just before we left we lost our first man, a chap he was just touching up the ship’s side |
37:00 | and he overbalanced and I was standing near by actually, and he overbalanced off the propeller guard and fell into the Clyde River which is a very fast flowing river and it was, although it was March it was still very cold and a boat’s crew went after him immediately but they never found him and he obviously hypothermia would grab him. So we left the next day |
37:30 | or shortly after that anyway, the destination the Mediterranean, the Mediterranean battle fleet so we took a convoy down to Gibraltar. Excuse me Ken, our first tape is about to run out so we’ll just pause it there. |
00:04 | OK we’re going. Alright, leaving the Mediterranean. It was the fiercest naval theatre of war operations in Europe in the Mediterranean it is a land locked stretch of water of course with the Italians and Germans within easy flying distance. But any way we |
00:30 | were in Gib, the sailors called Gibraltar Gib for short, I can remember quite beside the inevitable the fight between the British and Australian sailors after a few beers you know that was common all over the world actually the Australian servicemen and the Brits and the Americans, Australians are very pugnacious people |
01:00 | when they got a few beers in but anyway oh no we were coming back to the girls weren’t we? Well we left Gibraltar, oh yes the outstanding thing at Gibraltar were the Spanish onions, there were no onions available in England and so it was quite incredible sailors were buying Spanish onions which is rather sweet you know and they were |
01:30 | they were peeling them and eating them like apples. Ridiculous I know but it was noteworthy. So anyway we left there, when every warship went to sea they were placed in a convoy, you know take charge of a convoy, we provided anti submarine protection quite besides German surface ships and then we went down the west coast of Africa |
02:00 | and we had one diversion there. We went into the island of St. Helena a British island where Napoleon was, eventually died, he was imprisoned and died there and unfortunately I didn’t get ashore there were only a few of us allowed to go ashore it is just a |
02:30 | valley with two steeps sides on it that’s all and the township is in this valley. But any way we went there. We were only there for about eighteen hours and then we went down to South Africa and when we got to Durban the battle of Greece was on at the time which the 6th Australian Division was fighting in and |
03:00 | things were going badly, the Germans were in full force because they just swept down through the Balkans and they were going to push everybody out of Greece. So we realised that we had to get up there quickly because we would be required, we were a brand new state of the art modern fleet destroyer |
03:30 | and the Admiral, the Commander in Chief wanted us quickly. So we dropped all our convoys other people did them and we went off at high speed and we went through, it was the beginning of May when we went through the Suez Canal into Alexandria and we were no sooner there and we started firing at Italian aircraft attacking us at anchor there |
04:00 | and now for the next, we were there for seven months and we were as heavily involved in warfare as what 9th Div [Division] was in Tobruk. They were there for seven months, we were doing exactly the same at sea, we spent just about every day at sea, if we were in harbour we went in harbour to fuel or re ammunition and when ever we sent to sea there was the Italian |
04:30 | fleet an enormous fleet and there was German and Italian aircraft attacking us and of course German and Italian submarines. So the very first, the second day after we left we went through to Malta with the battle fleet and we’d never been with a battle fleet before an aircraft carrier, a huge aircraft carrier and three |
05:00 | battleships and huge numbers of cruisers and destroyers and a convoy was coming through from Gibraltar, Greece had fallen, it had fallen on the 25th of April Anzac Day and so 6th Division and those who could escape went to Crete, the island of Crete and the Germans captured a lot |
05:30 | as prisoners of war but they lost all their guns and their tanks and their equipment so this convoy that we brought through it was very risky but it was loaded with replacement stuff. Before I leave Greece I had better mention my brother, he was with the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] fighting in Greece and he was |
06:00 | one of the very last to be picked up. They were hiding of a day time, and the reason I know about this is not so much from what he told me, but from a friend in Sydney who tracked me down one Anzac Day and he showed me a little pocket note book and he said this is what happened the day that Merv my brothers name was Merv, that Merv and I were picked up and he had scribbled in pencil you know |
06:30 | air attacks you know, they were hiding under bushes to hide from the German aircraft. The German fighters were just going over, if they saw any movement down they went firing their rockets or machine guns. Anyway he was able to attract the attention of a passing boat and it was the last British destroyer leaving but for that he would have spent four years as a prisoner of war in a German prison. Anyway to go back to the navy |
07:00 | so this was the atmosphere, we were at sea fighting, in harbour fighting with air attacks and do you want to know any details. Well you tell us a little about the Tobruk Ferry, cause you were Ferrying from Alexandria weren’t you? Oh Tobruk, I think we made about fourteen trips to Tobruk. |
07:30 | Yeah, and of course the 9th Division, they provided all the infantry component of the Tobruk garrison and they were three hundred miles west of the nearest British lines, nearest Allied lines, so they were completely isolated and the only way they could be sustained was from the water, from the sea |
08:00 | and so in the main it was done by war ships. So to give you an example of a trip to Tobruk do you want the details? We will save the details until after we’ve got your whole story Ken and then we will come back? So we get to Tobruk about eleven. We would leave Alexandria about |
08:30 | 7 o’clock in the morning and we’d get to Tobruk at about eleven o’clock at night, 23:00. Protecting the harbour Tobruk harbour was a boom which the Brits had made out of an old Italian torpedo net and there would be a British, the navy had some British sailors there and they’d be there in their, they have a launch and they would just open it up |
09:00 | for ships to come in. To identify where the gate was there were two tiny little blue lights. So naturally it was full, it was completely black because only sailed on, we never sailed on moon light nights it was only non-moon light nights that we went up. We were identified at the gate with these two little blue lights and then the launch would open up and we’d go in and |
09:30 | they’d closed it immediately after to stop submarines getting in and once we got in there it was full of wrecks and they had a wharf there and it was full of wrecks and there used to be a series of little green lights which would guide the captain and the navigator to where ever they wanted us, and when we got to a wreck, or a lighter, or alongside the wharf |
10:00 | the object was we had to complete discharging and embarking personnel and then get out of Tobruk and then proceed at full speed east to get away from a possible enemy air attack at dawn the next morning. But to get back to the unloading, so we’d go through Tobruk Harbour following these little green lights |
10:30 | and they were only observable at eye sight level and we’d get alongside what ever we were going to discharge to and on one side of the [HMAS] Nizam I’ll get used to speaking about my ships names, Nizam we used to carry a table which we’d take from Alexandria and we’d slide whatever, we had about seventy or a hundred tons with the stores, we’d slide it down |
11:00 | into a lighter or a wreck or wherever or to what ever the Tobruk people were prepared to receive it with, on the other side of the, on the opposite side there would be another lighter or a wreck or the wharf, we always took troops up and they would disembark there |
11:30 | and the poor fellows I used to feel sorry for them, they’d be pitch black there’d be probably anti aircraft guns exploding and they’d and it would be black as pitch and they had this narrow plank to walk over to the wharf, say the wharf, and there would be bomb holes in the wharf , guns firing and this was there introduction to Tobruk at midnight. So after we had disembarked the troops |
12:00 | we then brought on board the wounded, we bought them on on stretchers and they were just secured up on the upper deck you couldn’t get them down the hatches down the ladders you see and we sort of protected them if the weather was rough or rainy or things like that and we just tied the stretches to a deck fitting so they couldn’t move around and then after them came the walking wounded and after that come |
12:30 | whatever troops were being relived for what ever reason, for courses or for they had spent enough time there and we then would put every thing together and the captain would back out and away we’d go, through the boom again and that was at one o’ clock. Normally at one o’clock we would wait for, there was always either or two or three ships |
13:00 | went up and we would wait for our chummy ship and the two of us or three of us together and then we would go flat out in a general easterly direction to Alexandria. That was a typical nights effort, of course at dawn enemy aircraft would invariably be over and because dawn, dawn and dusk were the critical times. We had a |
13:30 | standard defence procedure throughout the navy, for every day of the war when we were at sea we used to go to dawn and dusk action stations, this lasted for sixty to seventy minutes and the armourment was completely manned and it doesn’t matter how long you had been working before, dawn and dusk action stations, everyone went to their armament and cleared away everything ready for action |
14:00 | because it was a possible time for enemy attacks whether from the sea from the submarine or from the air and then after that time the captain would say, “Alright secure.” secure is is the navy’s term for finishing, secure dusk action stations or dawn action stations, and just revert to normal routine. |
14:30 | By that time the cruising watch would take over the guns or the armament and the rest of the crowd would go down and have some breakfast or have a sleep or whatever, it was the same at dusk, dawn and dusk. This was particularly tiring I can tell you that. My most distinguishing thought of the war was how tired we were, young men |
15:00 | need sleep they need rest and we weren’t getting it you know, this continual tiredness and of course when you got to harbour it was the last thing you wanted to do was to sleep and recuperate you wanted to get ashore. Ok now. Your boat the Nizam that was hit wasn’t it? Nizam. The Nizam sorry, that was hit wasn’t it at one point? |
15:30 | Yeah we got damaged in Crete, twice from Crete and once from Tobruk yes, but we never lost anybody killed in action but ships were damaged yeah that was it. Where did you go from Tobruk? |
16:00 | You don’t want to know about Crete? Yes I do? Oh well before we went to Tobruk the battle for Crete was on you see. We went to Crete six times, Crete was about twelve hours steaming north from Alexandria, the big British naval base and I can remember the first |
16:30 | time we went up we were loaded with commandos and we had extra boats hung from the davits or what ever way we could hang it, and it was very the Mediterranean normally the water is like this floor weather can be very rough and it was rough this night, these poor commandos, big tough British commandos they were all violently sea sick and they were to land and start fighting |
17:00 | and the boats were washed away and in the toilets, the heads we called them in the navy, it was awash it was a ghastly mess, awash with vomit you know. It was impossible for these people to, had we been able to get them ashore they would have gone ashore whether they were seasick, they might a been glad to get off. But anyway the senior officer |
17:30 | says, “Abandon everything and go back to Alexandria.” and we took them up the next day and we landed in the main port of Crete a place called Suda Bay and I can remember the difficulty in getting along side and the captain was a very poor ship handler and I can remember a Bondi life saver and I was up in the fo’c’sle |
18:00 | he was trying to get the bows alongside. What they did to get along side is that you poke your nose in, they put a heavy line over, hold the nose and then they swing, they go astern on that head rope and it swings the back of the ship the stern of the ship in. The captain couldn’t get in and this Bondi life saver said, “I’ll bloody well swim over,” and he sang out to the senior officer |
18:30 | “I’ll take a line,” and this is midnight you know, “I’ll take a line and take it ashore,” and “you will do nothing of the kind,” he said, anyway he eventually got there and we disembarked our commandos and it was two other ships there and they disembarked theirs, two other destroyers, and we picked on one hundred and forty walking wounded on Nizam and then we |
19:00 | got out, we got out about three o’clock I think it could have been four o’clock and at seven o’clock the Germans captured the wharf and so these walking wounded, some of them had walked four miles from various caves where they’d been hiding and they’d stumbled all that distances in the dark to the wharf and they got there and fortunately otherwise they would have been POWs. |
19:30 | And the next patrol we did we went to a place called Scarpanto which is east of Crete and this was one of my highlights of the war actually and there were three destroyers detailed to bombard a dive bombers aerodrome that was on this island Scarpanto. We went down |
20:00 | a passage between two islands called Kaysos Strait [?] and it was a nice clear night and about midnight I was standing on the starboard side of B gun deck and I looked over and two hundred yards away I saw a torpedo approaching a long silver unmistakable shape of a torpedo and I bellowed out to the bridge and the bridge is about, “Torpedo |
20:30 | approaching green!” except I said it much stronger than that and the guns crew were alerted too you know and nothing happened and the next about five minutes later three explosions, I don’t know how three came about but it had exploded on an island. He’d set it, it was an Italian submarine and they had set it too deep but…. |
21:00 | Very fortunate. a mate of mine was down in the very bottom of the ship just above the keel where the ammunition is stowed and when we, at dawn, I went down when we changed watches I went down for a cup of tea, I said to him, “You know you nearly weren't here,” I said, “The torpedo passed under the ship,” and I said, “They were aiming straight for you.” |
21:30 | he says, “I heard it,” he said, “It was right under my feet,” a torpedo of course is like a miniature submarine, it’s got its own engine and propellers, he said, “I heard the bloody thing pass right under my feet.” Well that’s one of the rare occasions you will ever hear that report made because very few people do report because the torpedo explodes |
22:00 | and that’s the end of him he was the nearest one to it and it would have been the end of me too. There was one significant thing that I can recall about that, after I gave the warning I dropped to the deck because when we had picked up survivors from sinking ships it was quite frequent well let’s put it this was it was not infrequent for them to have broken ankles. What would happen was |
22:30 | your feet anchor you to the deck and the torpedo explodes and its like a whip lash effect, the upper part of the body from the ankles moves like that and those fine bones in the ankle snap and of course so I dropped to the deck, I’d known this, I dropped to the deck after I gave the warning because I didn’t want my ankles to snap.. |
23:00 | But anyway nothing happened. But anyway we carried on and we bombarded this aerodrome, hit it with everything. It was light armourment was we carried six twin four point seven inch guns and the other two destroyers did too, so we were able to hit the |
23:30 | aerodrome which was apparently full of dive bombers Stuka dive bombers and all they were there for was to defend the Germans in Crete which was only a few miles away and then on our way back we called into the northern side of Scarpanto Island there was an E Boat base there and we fired star |
24:00 | shells which illuminate the area and fortunately for the Italians the E Boats which are very fast, big, very fast torpedo boats armed with torpedoes, they were at sea somewhere so they weren't there and with that we then just came back to Alexandria at high speed you know and then we did, oh we did a couple of another |
24:30 | big parol up there off the east coast in which every time we went there of course we were attacked by German aircraft and the Germans, they were dinky die they weren’t like Italians when they came into attack you, they did you know, their dive bombers would come just above the ceiling you know and then they, they would aim the nose of the aircraft at you the ship |
25:00 | as they straighten up to dive up they always carried a thousand pound bomb, the bomb would drop, they’d release the bomb, so it just carried down on its trajectory and of course they hit it,if it hit it it would take the ship apart and the captain. All the captains they became very adept at dodging they’d just they would all be looking up like this |
25:30 | and giving orders to their helmsmen to starboard or port and they’d go in the direction that the aircraft was going and so the bomb would drop down there along side the ship And then we did the two big evacuations and by this time the battle was over the Germans had virtually won. They used paratroops. Do you want to know anything about the paratroops? |
26:00 | What did you see of the paratroops? We didn’t see anything of the paratroops but the German paratroops are the people captured the islands. Yes I’m aware of that. But we are actually generally more interested in your personal experiences? Oh I see. So anyway when we got to the evacuation beach was a placed called Sfakia on the south coast. It was just a fishing |
26:30 | village above a very steep goat’s track and this tiny little beach where the men were, we had our boats in there and one of our officers was there as the, he was embarking the troops there is a specific name for it and |
27:00 | so we got, we picked up thousands of troops, Nizam picked up eight hundred alone on the very first trip and there were as you can imagine eight hundred on a small destroyer they were everywhere. There were a lot of New Zealanders there, lot a New Zealanders, Maoris and of course we were being attacked by aircraft the next morning the I can remember the |
27:30 | diggers the Maori they rigged their machine guns up against the stanchions and were firing at the attacking aircraft. Well we got near miss and we go hit and they used to call it a near miss when the bomb dropped along side and the tremendous concussion from the bomb exploding in the water would damage the ship in some |
28:00 | structure, in the ship’s side or some of the fitting inside. We missed twice because the captain dodged the bombs you know and so we came out of the battle, the battle of Crete damaged to a certain extent not as bad as a lot of the others. Ok so we brought them back and then we |
28:30 | immediately the Admiral, the Commander in Chief says right up again and cause the navy would never leave soldiers. It was always a standard thing with the navy we never leave soldiers abandoned. So four ships out and two of them broke down and had to go back and there was just the two Australian destroyers went on and we went back to Sfakia where we picked up six hundred that night |
29:00 | and again we went through the same procedure from dawn right through all the fourteen hours we were under air attack all the while but we weren’t damaged but our sister ship was damaged. A bomb went through we have what was called the guard rails and we have three rails, three steel wire ropes |
29:30 | which run around the ship as guard rails and a thousand pound bomb went through the rails exploded alongside and shattered the anchors of our sister ship. It’ s the engine fittings the fittings that the engine sits on and fortunately the engineer was able to get one side going so he crawled into Alexandria without. So anyway that was over |
30:00 | that was the end of the battle of Crete, the Commander in Chief said no more, we can't risk anymore. There a cruiser [HMAS] Perth passed us on the way back and she had been hit by a bomb and thirteen men were killed. That’s the Australian cruiser Perth of course British ships were hit right left and centre. So anyway after Crete that’s when the battle of Syria started, |
30:30 | no we did the first trip to Tobruk and from there we went up Syria. Now the French when the French were defeated by the Germans, a puppet Government took over which was termed the Vichy Government |
31:00 | and their overseas possessions, in the main they obeyed the orders of the Vichy Government they said it was the separate and it happened in New Caledonia and Madagascar, Syria, in French West Africa and they stuck by em. So we the Allies we had to hit our one time allies, the French ships |
31:30 | we had to attack them because we didn’t want the Germans getting hold of them or them being talked into fighting on the Germans behalf. So now this was a glorious holiday for us Syria.. The 7th Australian Division were fighting ashore and so we were based in Haifa |
32:00 | Haifa is the Mediterranean was at its peak the very best part of the year, this was in May 1941. May, June, July that’s all the great summer months in the Mediterranean and Haifa is quite a big harbour of course it’s Israel today it was in Palestine then and we used to, the ships sort of took it in turn and we would go out |
32:30 | and we would bombard and we would support the diggers they’d be fighting up the coast and we’d be hitting the French positions, possessions, they had some, the French fought very fiercely they had the French Foreign Legion fighting the Australians there and so this went on as I say it was a real holiday one where about every second day we would go out and do this |
33:00 | and the rest of the time we’d be swimming or going ashore in Haifa. Can I tell you some amusing stories? Yes. Along side at Haifa and one sharp eyed bloke saw a digger standing by a big lighter alongside with a canvas cover over it |
33:30 | and he said, “What are you doing here Dig?” and he said, “See that lighter, its full of Australian beer.” and this was just ahead of Nizam and , so he came back to the ship and he said, “There is a lighter full of Australian beer there, let’s organise something.” So that night we had plenty of good swimmers on board |
34:00 | and they went over the side and unbeknown to the officers of course they were down that end, the quarter deck side of the ship. These chaps went over the bows swam up to the outboard side of the lighter and cut the securing lines and they had life jackets there, cork life jackets which they tied together as rafts. |
34:30 | Now the beer then in those days the beer was in bottles and it was very heavy and used to be in four dozen, a big wooden case carrying four dozen which was quite heavy and how they did it and this Australian Army sentry didn’t see I don’t know, he probably closed his eyes, anyway they lowered it down and this went on and there must have been half a dozen rafts |
35:00 | and they got down to the stokers’ mess deck and we used to have, because there was no air conditioning, the ships don’t have ports these days but then they did. So they just pass the beer in through there and of course it was warm and they put it in the nearest fridge to try and cool it down a bit. Well there was a glorious party and it went on till dawn, the officers couldn’t work out what was the matter. |
35:30 | Why all these empty bottles were floating down past the ship. Any way that was one night time episode which went on all night in the stokers’ mess deck and then we went up the French had, what did they have? Three submarines and |
36:00 | a three light cruisers there, British aircraft were able to sink one of the light cruisers and they thought it was too dangerous for the submarines to be there with all these destroyers about and destroyers are the enemy of submarines, they’re the killers. So they the French sent the submarines back to France |
36:30 | back to Marseilles so we made a night attack on these cruisers in Beirut Harbour that was quite a thrilling little episode. We were firing out from open sights too. Normally the navy guns are controlled from a central position it’s called a director so that when six four seven inch guns fired they all fired as one and a specialist director |
37:00 | would point the gun, his director sitting right up on the highest point of the ship, at the enemy you know and so they could, and rarely missed hopefully. But this night because it was after midnight he couldn’t get a sight on them he couldn’t see them and we were firing out of open sights, this was great stuff, firing a big fifty four pound shell over open sights at two o’clock in the morning |
37:30 | good fun. and so that and then apart from firing the guns and helping out our brothers in arms the 7th Div ashore and eventually after about nineteen days the 7th Div beat the French and they surrendered. There was and they eventually the French Commander, |
38:00 | the Governor who was also the Commander in Chief he signed an armistice. There’s a little amusing tale. Go for it Ken. Apparently he came into, in Beirut they signed in Beirut, into a room in Beirut and now Australians are great souvenir artists we’ve been renowned in both world wars |
38:30 | we must be born thieves, if there’s something to pick up they’ll pick it up. So when the governor came in to sign the armistice with the Australian Commander in Chief he put his cap down on the nearest table and after the armistice was signed and everybody got up and he was going back to his palace and the army were going back to their quarters |
39:00 | he says, he was saying in French, “Where’s my bloody cap?” the cap had been souvenired by a digger. The French are a very uptight race. They believe in they’re very punctilious in their dress and their appearance. Well didn’t he rant and rave but the cap was missing and of course the Australian officer said “We will conduct a search |
39:30 | throughout all our camps,” never found it. Alright, just hold it there Ken we’re actually about to run out on tape number two. |
00:31 | Ken we left off with the battle of Syria where did you go after that? Look before we leave that there were two important events happened. One concerns the present country Iraq. I wasn’t personally concerned but Australian ships were and at that time |
01:00 | Iraq has always caused problem to the Brits, it used to be called Mesopotamia and the Brits changed its name to Iraq and put a puppet government in and at this time the German Embassy financed a political party there and they took control of the government so the navy went in and just took, our navy went in and took charge and resumed |
01:30 | British control and the other important thing was Germany declared war on Russia which changed the whole course of war and that was just a completely enormous war and that and that took a lot of the pressure of the Brits because the Germans then had to exert all their power |
02:00 | against the Russians. We now, you really have to have a look at the map of the Mediterranean, you’ll find that the next big island to Crete was Cyprus and the Brits knew, British Intelligence knew that the Germans intended taking that |
02:30 | and from there they were going to jump over and help the French in Syria. So we, they pulled all ships off other duties and escorted a division of troops from Port Said to defend Cyprus and.. |
03:00 | And so what was involved in defending Cyprus? I beg your pardon? What was involved in defending Cypress, what were you doing? Well they were all land troops there and of course they thought that the German paratroops would take it as they took Crete and they were going to fly them over but the Germans were that badly mauled |
03:30 | at Crete, they lost that many men that they just couldn’t, Hitler refused to allow them to conduct another expedition and so these troops lay there, just as a sort of a garrison and with that over we went back to Alexandria there |
04:00 | and of course we were into properly then, there were air raids every where and we resumed the runs to Tobruk, it was colloquially known as the Tobruk Ferry and so we did, what was that the month of July, we did another three trips to Tobruk in July and then we did some |
04:30 | air attacks everywhere a course. Oh yes, we had been damaged in Tobruk so we went into dock, we had a floating dock in Alexandria and we went in there for a few days for repairs and there was an amusing incident occurred coming back from Tobruk on one of these trips. |
05:00 | We’d been bring some British troops back, they had been relieved by Poles I think, but we picked them up in Tobruk the procedure was when ever they came on board, we’d give them a packet of cigarettes, everybody smoked in those days and as they went down to the mess deck, they’d give them a packet of cigarettes and a cup of cocoa |
05:30 | and so the soldiers, unwittingly, of course there is no smoking on the upper deck of a ship at sea, under war conditions and they just lit up their cigarettes you know, and the purser said it was up on the bridge and he bellowed out over the loud speaker to, “Put those bloody lights out, put those cigarettes out!” and nothing happened somebody says, “They can't understand you |
06:00 | number one,” number one is the first lieutenant number one, “They can't understand you,number one,” they were Geordies from the North of England, and so he said, get Geordie up, we had one North English sailors and he shoved the microphone in front of him and said, “Now tell those bloody countrymen of yours to put those bloody cigarettes out.” So blah, blah, blah, in his dialect and all the lights went out then. |
06:30 | Does that mean Ken you were smoking below the decks? Oh yes you could smoke, once we got through the doorways leading into the mess decks there was canvas covers, we turned darkened ships screens and the port holes for example the glass portholes, dead lights went over them, we termed them dead lights and |
07:00 | then over every passageway was this double layer of canvas, so the light couldn’t escape, but you could do whatever you liked, read, smoke what ever you liked below decks yes. Did it make it very stuffy with the…. ? Yes absolutely. No air conditioning and oh it was dreadful, people hated sleeping there and if the weather was good they slept on the upper deck and otherwise they had to survive I guess |
07:30 | It’s amazing what you can do to survive. And then when did you get to, you were in the Battle of Sirte is that correct? Sirte. Yeah well that didn’t come about until September.In September we got damaged again in Tobruk and we had a big hole about twenty foot hole |
08:00 | in our fo’c’sle on the port side of our fo’c’sle and when we got back to harbour the Commander in Chief was waiting on the wharf for us and he said to he captain, “What happened Nobby?” Nobby Clark was the captain, he say’s “Well I’m I sorry to say Sir but it wasn’t, the mice didn’t eat it.” |
08:30 | Oh we had another Tobruk there , we’d loaded wounded, we’d discharged our cargo, discharged our personnel, loaded our wounded and we were to take some Australian soldiers back, weren’t there and |
09:00 | so the captain says, “Right, we can't waste any time,” it was around one o’clock and “We’ll just secure everything and leave harbour,” and just then a centurion Australian voice roared out through the darkness, “You Pommy bastards, you are going to leave us here,” So a few chuckles later the captain nosed the ship along side a wreck and picked up a couple of hundred diggers and we went back to |
09:30 | Alexandria. So the fo’c’sle was repaired at Alexandria and then we come to another tragic and important part of the Tobruk experience. At that time the |
10:00 | Australian Commander in Chief, General Blamey had organised over great British opposition to relieve the 9th Australian Division from Tobruk and we so were relieving them, we would take them in, the destroyers would take British and Polish troops in and we’d bring out the Australians. On this particular trip in October it was gonna be one of the last trips for the Australians |
10:30 | we picked up three hundred members of the 2/24th Infantry Battalion from Victoria and coming back from after about ten o’clock in the morning it was, so in other words we were about half way to Alexandria anyway and we had a stern sea running |
11:00 | we were proceeding at about thirty knots which is high speed and we had a stern sea running, that is the stern the seas were breaking over the stern of the ship, the ship was zigzagging that is proceeding five degrees one way then five degrees the other the object being to disturb the submarine’s point of aim and at one moment around about ten the other ship who was with us, the wash from her and with the zigzag |
11:30 | and the stern sea and a huge sea swung up over our starboard quarter and washed the entire starboard side of the iron deck, it was just an iron deck you see, washed it clear and we lose twenty diggers over the side |
12:00 | no twenty-one. We lost twenty-one diggers over the side. Were they ships crew or were they soldiers that you had picked up? No. 2/24th Infantry Battalion, the people we had picked up they had just come from seven months in Tobruk and were going back to rest and recreation. Well of course we weren’t going to leave our brothers in arms there so the captain done a circle and come up abreast of them and when we got there |
12:30 | about eleven of our best swimmers dived over the side, I think it was the water polo team, they dived over the side and they rescued all but six. So we lost six of the diggers after seven months in Tobruk it was pitiful, absolutely pitiful but there is little you could do. The army they was just sitting about the upper deck |
13:00 | they had the steel studs in their boots and its just like being on a skating rink, a sailor, if we get sudden ship movements we automatically like a monkey grab hold of the nearest fitting but of course the diggers they don’t understand that. But the two sailors got they washed through the guardrails |
13:30 | as the ship recovered they were hangin’ onto the top guardrail and they swung back in board, and we lost. There was a soldier sitting on the quarterdeck and when the roll came his leg got caught in the three guardrails and the next sea came along and picked his body up, his leg was locked |
14:00 | and threw him inboard on the iron deck and cut his leg off just below the knee, we got him down to the wardroom table, which was used as an operating theatre, and the distended blood vessels sealed and stopped him from dying Yeah. We lost a cook, he was just near |
14:30 | this soldier that lost his leg and he was washed off his feet and his head hit the deck fitting and then he was washed overboard, he was rescued and he died the next day, we buried him, he was the only one we lost, the only sailor we lost. So we lost six diggers and one sailor. That was a very pitiful and tragic end to those diggers. |
15:00 | Was the Mediterranean rough? Only in winter conditions, most of it is perfect holiday conditions it’s as if you were like Sydney Harbour, like Sydney harbour in good conditions, that’s what it’s like most of the time holiday atmosphere. After you finished the Tobruk Ferry runs where did you head to then? Well we went to… |
15:30 | Oh yes we went out and done a big bombardment in support of the British Army who were then pushing west in one of those, what was happening in the Western Desert the British had pushed the German and Italians back and then they’d regroup and they’d pushed the British back and so at this time in November ‘41 |
16:00 | they’d pushed the Germans back and the last battalion of Australians fought their way out of Tobruk and they came back by road and the ship that they were due to go out on which was the chummy ship of ours it was sunk and so they had to fight their way out to come back and they come back by road. The entire fleet went out |
16:30 | and we hit the German and Italian positions with our guns and helped the army in general and then we had another trip back to good old Haifa, they got all the destroyers together and said, right we are going to get this British Division of troops out of Cyprus and we’ll change them with Indians and so this is what we did |
17:00 | there was twenty thousand men in each group so we just operated non stop for four or five days. Interesting thing about the Indians, they had different religions and different cultural habits what to do in Tobruk. There was an Indian unit in Tobruk with 9th Div the Brits and they had to kill their own sheep |
17:30 | or goats for religious purposes so we would bring goats in. So they gave them the quietest section in Tobruk, which is right to the west and there was never any fighting there and it was almost a holiday so the Australians tell me so they had to considered at all times, the Indians, because of their cultural |
18:00 | and religious differences. So that was the reason that they changed these British soldiers with the Indians, they could stop there, they probably stopped there for the rest of the war. Did the Australian troops get along well with the Indian troops when they were on board the ships? Oh yes, the Indians, oh yes we got along well with them cause |
18:30 | we more or less been, we knew something about India you know yes, the Indians can be very good looking people I can remember going to a ball in, well I wasn’t invited to a ball but I looked into a ball in Bombay and they wear these saris you know beautiful dresses and they were whizzing around doing the old ball room dancing, and these good looking men and beautiful women |
19:00 | so they are not ugly like our Abos [Aborigines]. Yes, oh yes we go on all right you know treated them with respect. Then we went to Tobruk one more time and on the way back we had another drama. |
19:30 | The battle fleet was at sea and again I was standing up on B gun deck looked over and I saw the British battle ship Barham, HMS Barham, torpedoed, she was hit with three torpedoes I was the first bloke to see it, I must have very good eye sight, I saw the first puff of smoke and I says “By God Barham’s been hit,” she was in line ahead |
20:00 | with the battle ships and all the destroyers in arrow head formation providing anti-submarine escorts in front, and within three minutes she was you couldn’t see her, one of the gun turrets blew above the smoke, the grey smoke and when the smoke subsided there was nothing there and so we were detailed and I was |
20:30 | able to detail to pick up the survivors, us with another destroyer and the rest of the fleet went on back to got out of this submarine territory. The Germans consider it the greatest attack of the war today, they still consider it, to be able to sink a battleship in a battle fleet at sea. What did we get? We rescued four hundred and fifty survivors and eight hundred and sixty two men were killed |
21:00 | An interesting point about the difference about the people that can be killed on a war ship at sea during war compared to soldiers, soldiers fight virtually individually now 9th Australian Division lost seven hundred and forty nine men killed in Tobruk and heres one ship in three minutes she lost eight hundred and sixty two |
21:30 | but yes that was a terrific experience. Yes the Germans still consider that the finest submarine activity of the war. Did you have procedures to follow in case of attack did you know |
22:00 | did you have a plan of what you would do if…? A submarine attacked us? Well of course we would attack them you see, they would never attack us because destroyers are a very fast ships, only about two thousand tons and they are very fast and they were designed for that purpose, got plenty of quick firing guns and above all |
22:30 | we’ve got depth charges and, they are the bombs that go below the water and they shatter the submarine’s hull and once you crack a submarines hull that’s the end of it you know and oh yes we were prepared, very few destroyers were ever torpedoed, but they were, some were we had. But in December ’41 we went into dock and |
23:00 | in Alexandria again and we were there for about a week anyway and the captain said, “I’ll give five days leave each watch,” and the Australian Consul arranged for these luxurious British house boats on the River Nile up at Cairo. The Brits of course as you know they’re immensely, lots a |
23:30 | them were in those days immensely wealthy people. So the British expats [expatriates] there, they had these huge, they were like floating hotels up the Nile and they had beds and canteens, not canteens, bars you name it and we were there for a holiday. So we went up there and then of course at day time we would go on into Cairo and up to the Pyramids and |
24:00 | this was great now I’m getting back to another important point. The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor while we were on the house boat. In Egypt you can see a long way because there are no hills or mountains and we could see the cruiser Hobart, the Australian cruiser Hobart, and the Australian sloop the Yarra we could see them leaving |
24:30 | the Mediterranean because they were going down the Suez Canal and they had, no I’m ahead of meself there, they hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor then. So we were recalled because something was going to happen, so we were recalled to the ship and the ship was undocked |
25:00 | and I was with a mate and we came down from Cairo to Alexandria and we got there to Alexandria rail station about two o’clock in the morning and three excited Arabs Egyptians rushed up to me and my mate and we were either going to get a gary, horse-drawn sulky back to the ship |
25:30 | or walk back, we didn’t care which it wasn’t that far, and these three Arabs came rushing up to us very excited and I said, “Now quieten down, quieten down, what’s the problem?” “The Japanese have bombed the Americans in Pearl Harbor,” it was one of my dramatic moments in the war, I said to my mate ‘Blue’ we’ve won the war,” and I punched the sky. “We’ve won the war,” Was that because the Americans would be involved now? |
26:00 | Well yes that bought the Americans in, with their immense industrial strength and their population we couldn’t lose, which we didn’t in the end. It was the worst thing that the Japs ever did. Were you anxious when you heard that, did you want to get back to Australia and the Pacific? Well yes absolutely, so what happened immediately the then Prime Minister John Curtin had wanted |
26:30 | he was never fussy about Australians fighting overseas and he said, “I want them back here in Australian in the Pacific fighting those Japs,” well of course Winston Churchill had a different opinion the British Prime Minister so he had a tremendous job getting the 6th and 7th Division back the 9th Division was left and he said |
27:00 | Churchill said we are going to hang onto one division and that’d be the 9th Division who rested and recuperated from Tobruk by this time and I was anxious to get back to Australia. So anyway Curtin insisted and the British Admiralty |
27:30 | were very always very good with the Australian Naval Board they were very co operative and they said we want our ships back and so they we were detailed, I’m ahead of myself again. Ok we can come back to that Ken. If we just, You were speaking about the Battle of Sirte. |
28:00 | Yes well just before that between the 1st December, no it wasn’t, it was the 16th December was the Sirte, a third of our destroyers our sister ship called the [HMAS] Nestor who was eventually sunk in the Mediterranean, she come through the Mediterranean and we fought a convoy |
28:30 | from Gibraltar to Alexandria and she was with them. So she joined up with our flotilla and we were called the 7th Destroyer Flotilla and so she operated with us and we, unless of course we the Japs, the Americans had come into the war and then after that we continued supporting |
29:00 | the army in the Western Desert and with bombardments and we picked up, another cruiser was sunk just outside Alexandria Harbour, they lost four hundred and seventy two men and we picked up one hundred and seventy eight and I remember a, I was in the Fleet Club later and I asked a |
29:30 | one of the British sailors what was the effect, we’d dropped depth charges amongst them I said, “What is effect the depth charge has on the human body?” and he said, “Well its like a bomb going off in your stomach, It hits the soft tissues of the body and you think your stomachs going to tear open.” And now we come to the 16th December we did a major job |
30:00 | with to assist Malta. Malta was they had Hurricane , Spitfire aircraft and of course they had to be fuelled so we took a fast tanker called Breconshire with a very big defensive unit war ship unit protecting it to Malta and this is when the first battle Sirte came about. |
30:30 | The second one was even more dramatic except we weren't there, we’d left the Med by then. So anyway the Italian fleet came out and the admiral being a great fighting admiral he detached the tanker and a couple of destroyers to protect it, he sent them to the south out of the way and then the rest of us |
31:00 | we were only cruisers and destroyers we went for the Italian Battle Fleet and they were firing their fifteen inch shells and they were landing everyone would drop near us and beside us and the captain would steer the ship into it and this is the system of the control of gunnery is you correct your last fall of shot. So if it fell there you wouldn’t fire from the same shot, you would make a correction |
31:30 | and so the captain would steer the ship into there and so this huge things higher than the mast the splash of water would be going up. and then wwe covered all ships with smoke and you wouldn’t believe it, but the Italian battle fleet turned and ran, they turned and went. Incredible, they could a blown us out a the water and then we went back and took |
32:00 | the tanker in and just as she was entering Valetta Harbour which is the main harbour in Malta, an Italian torpedo boat, they had a torpedo boat, torpedoed her and she was sunk. Was that common for the Italians to run like that? Yes they had I’m afraid the old Roman Legionnaires who conquered the world |
32:30 | they weren’t replicated with the soldiers of World War Two, they were always well equipped and there were some very very good, very brave fighters, they had aircraft and the sailors. But yes it was quite common they, when the 6th Australian Division fought in the Western Desert in January 1941 |
33:00 | they surrendered in their thousands cause a lot of them came out here and lived the life of Riley for the rest a the war, helping farmers. So when did you move out of the Mediterranean? Well I've got another dramatic episode. On the 19th December which is a couple of days after Sirte |
33:30 | no it was the Sirte destroyers. As we came into Alexandria we were the junior ship and the navy works in seniority, so the senior captain always goes in first and the next thing and they all know each others seniority until the junior one is last, Nizam was last. So as we went through |
34:00 | the boom three Italian torpedos boats, not torpedo boats, torpedos, midget submarine type of things followed us in and the gate keepers of the boom didn’t see them, now we didn’t see them because once you start coming through the boom like that, you prepare for harbour you know |
34:30 | prepare wires and hoses to come along side is the order give and people fall out from their action stations, their guns and what have you and so you resume a harbour routine. Well these three, what they were, they were torpedoes, they had two men in there an officer and a petty officer sitting behind him and they could just sort of go below the |
35:00 | surface they had face masks on, well they followed us in and then presumably after a certain time the gates closed the boom gates closed so everything was secure. So we went right down the harbour to a tanker, mind you that is the first priority of a ship coming in a warship coming in from sea was to refuel |
35:30 | and re ammunition if you’d used your ammunition. So we were by the two battle ships the Queen Elizabeth and the Valiant and they were right by the shore and they were protected by an anti submarine net and they had a sort of a little floating bridge to allow the sailors to walk ashore they were that near to it, the water was that deep |
36:00 | and so we were along side this tanker, they were just from here to over in the road way and I was walking around the upper deck just checking all the wires and hoses were correct and the engineers the stokers were refuelling with those huge black oil hoses and all of a sudden they were disconnecting and we had only been fuelling for about half hour or so |
36:30 | and I said to the chief stoker, I said, “What's up Chief, what's the problem?” and he said,”There’s a bloody bomb about somewhere,” he said “We gotta get out of here.” So we disconnected and slipped our wires and hoses and we went out to the destroyers where we normally anchored and while we were going out there, a great explosion, these torpedo boats |
37:00 | had suction mines and they had blown up the Queen Elizabeth that was the flag ship, the admiral’s flagship and they put another one on the Valiant , they blow holes, I went and inspected the holes later and you could drive a truck through them. When they, the only reason they knew is because the frogman swam to |
37:30 | the nearest buoy and a sentry saw, “There’s somebody on the buoy,” he reported, so they sent a boat over and they picked up this Italian and they immediately knew, the Admiralty immediately knew what had happened so they said “Right you are going down to the magazine,” which is right at the bottom of the ship, “And there you will stop and if the ship blows up, you will blow up too.” |
38:00 | and of course as I say the Italians aren’t that heroic. So he was about five minutes before it was due to explode he told the sentry he would speak to the captain, and he said “In five minutes time the ship is going to blow up.” so they cleared everybody off the ship |
38:30 | and rushed off over these land bridges that are there and the admiral stopped there and his officers stopped with him and sure enough up she went, but it was only, she settled down on the mud underneath. The second battle ship lying just by it, the same thing happened there. They put the suction mines on and set the timing and away they went, |
39:00 | she blew up. Now the amusing thing as we found out later, so we caught the two frogmen who blew up the Queen Elizabeth but they never got the other four, two of them got ashore on the wharf and dropped their frogmen suits behind some shed or other |
39:30 | and just walked out in like overalls they were wearing and walked past us, past the police and the security at the gate and how did the other people got out, and the other two got out in a similar manner anyway . And the four of them got up to Cairo and then they went down to the mouth of the Nile and stopped at a hotel |
40:00 | and they were trying to get a word through to the Germans, no not the Germans one of the neutral Embassies up in the Cairo but they were there and then the Italians could sent a submarine to pick them up. Yes so that happened. Eventually they were caught. So what they did they, they made them. We might leave it there if that’s OK Ken, we’re just about to run out of tape. |
00:30 | Well if we go back 1942 and I left Nizam on Boxing Day 1942. I had a job getting home and it had been three and half years since I had seen my mother and I wasn’t married, I got married, so I had to do a bit of battling before I |
01:00 | got a movement, a draft the navy calls a movement , so I got a draft to Australia and I was put on a cargo ship and we left South Africa and I arrived in Sydney and I was given twenty eight days foreign service leave was the term. When you were away fighting overseas when you did eventually get back you go twenty eight days foreign service leave. |
01:30 | That’s when I went up to Brisbane for that. When that was over I went down to the big naval depot in Victoria, Flinders Naval Depot at HMAS Cerberus and I did a course a gunnery course down there and when I graduated I, which I had done in the May, March, April, May, yeah May something like that, I |
02:00 | was drafted to an escort ship called [HMAS] Moresby, she was a survey ship and she was doing, the Japanese submarine menace was at it worst at that time down the east coast of Australia, they had sunk quite a few ships. So they pulled in ship from everywhere and they pulled in Moresby from specialist surveying duties and just put her escorting convoys down |
02:30 | the east coast of Australia. I am now in the Pacific you see. That went on, I had one dramatic moment that was…One of the merchant ships had a chap who was either dying or dead and they wanted the |
03:00 | doctor to certify or to check him and to certify him one way or the other the captain of the ship, they didn’t carry a doctor but we did. So there was a ferocious sea running, enormous, and the only way to get over of course was by boat you see and so the senior seaman he is called the chief bosun’s mate he said, “Organise |
03:30 | a boat”, I was in charge of all the boats, “Organise a boat to take the doctor over.” and just as he, I did that and organised a crew and he was just about to go and he said “I’m not happy about that bloke the Coxswain,” he says, “You’re going.” Ah Christ, so I had to have a completely review of my crew and check that I did have absolute confidence in them. |
04:00 | Anyway down we went and it’s quite difficult getting away from the ship, as well as coming back and the seas, the seas were all right because the navy boats were pretty good sea boats no matter how big the seas are, its just this leaving the ship and coming back to it. So any way we got along side the tanker, the merchant ship and sent the doctor up a big ladder and I think he certified the chap dead |
04:30 | he kept the minimum time and he was back in my boat in no time and back we went to the ship and I was talking on Anzac Day about people we have lost overboard from my group of destroyers, I think we lost about sixteen, something like that, and some of them they just watched them drown. The captain said the sea was |
05:00 | too rough and I created this case of mind you know, you can do it, if you’ve got to do it, you can do it. So anyway the submarine menace eased and the submarines went over ... the Yanks. there was a famous battle in Guadalcanal in the Solomons and the American |
05:30 | Marines were fighting the Japs at a very particular point and so these submarines went over, off the Australian coast, they went over the help their um, sink some of the American ships and so they though that things would ease so they reverted Moresby to a survey ship and so I had never been with a survey crowd before |
06:00 | I was most unimpressed at this, I was a fighting man and she then reverted to a non fighting ship, even though we went up around all the invasion beaches around New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands they had never been surveyed properly, so we went up and we resurveyed or surveyed them in depth, Samurai , Oro Bay, Finschhafen, |
06:30 | Madang, Manus Island of the Admiralties, these all had to be done. But anyway so I was very heavily involved in that because I was in charge of all the boats and they were, they do a lot a boat working surveying but it was a technical business and I was, as I said, I was used to being a fighting man being in the front |
07:00 | being the primary fighter and the survey people worked around the surveyors and you worked from daylight to dark. At day light the surveyors would be out in their boats while the ship would be running, at dark they would come in, they’d have their shower, have their dinner and then they would go up in the chart room and plot all their work for the day and of course us mugs, we just ran the ship, kept the ship running for these. |
07:30 | I was most unhappy. I had two interesting experiences there. One of my duties was that I used to have buoys about as big as that light, about that wide and that thick which they would put a flag pole a huge flag pole up from the top of, and the ships and the boats would be surveying as a sight to run a straight line |
08:00 | and when we having done a section we would pick that buoy up and start another one. Bring it inboard and I’d have a derrick to pick it up. So the captain would make a mistake now and again in bringing the ship along side and I’d either have hook and hang the flag pole in some way but |
08:30 | on these two occasions he was making such a mess of it, I reached out and I grabbed this flag pole and I wasn’t going to let this bloody thing go and the captain come round again I hung on to it and the further I hung onto it the further I went over the side, the next minute I’m in the drink, in the drink as we called the water, I was in the drink and the ship had to go, she had to make a circle and pick me up again you see. Shark infested waters and you wouldn’t believe it |
09:00 | about three weeks later I did exactly the same thing, again I went over the side, I wasn’t going to let the captain go around again I was gonna hang onto this damned buoy. Anyway we done all this section and we went, in the next May I think it was, that’d be May ’44. |
09:30 | I was drafted to the corvette [HMAS] Pirie at Thursday Island. So I was that overjoyed to get, to leave Moresby I jumped, and they said to me, I said, they said, “You can't have any leave, you just have to go straight up there, you’ve got an urgent job waiting.” and I says, “You beaut I don’t mind forget about leave.” So it took me by the time I got to Pirie on Thursday Island |
10:00 | it took me eleven days oh it was a dreadful trip. But in the meantime as I passed through Brisbane by train I was able to call out and see my mother. But the troop trains had changed from earlier in the war, they had realised that the servicemen, they weren’t getting their proper rest on the trains, they were very slow. So they ripped out all the seating on the inside |
10:30 | and put bunks in, put three tiered bunks in and so you travelled from Sydney to Brisbane, lying down and it’s surprising how tired you get when you’re lying down, there was no place to get up and walk around you see because it was all bunked and any way we got up to Townsville and I organised a DC-3 transport aircraft and it flew |
11:00 | me the six hours to the tip of Cape York Peninsula a place called, at an airstrip there called Jacky Jacky and the Americans had just run through the surf with an invasion boat and put a bulldozer ashore, bulldozed the jungle and laid some steel wire netting down and brought the bulldozer back and that was Jacky Jacky air strip and they put forty four gallon drums there and the RAAF run it. So I got a boat and went |
11:30 | over to Thursday Island and then I started this highly dangerous operation of minesweeping, we swept up six hundred mines. The object being the British were told. No they weren’t, the Americans didn’t want the Brits in the Pacific at all. They wanted all the glory, they would do the fighting and they wanted all the glory themselves. But Churchill was determined that he was going to sit at that peace table |
12:00 | so he said, “Well prepare a passage up through Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies and we’ll send an invasion fleet up through there.” So that was our job, we didn’t know at the time, so we swept up all the mines from Endeavour Strait which is just north of Cairns in the Barrier Reef, all though all the islands, right up to and around Thursday Island |
12:30 | and this took us two or three months to do this. We’d cut the mines and it was a very very dangerous operation, cut the mines with serrated wire which we’d tow behind us at an angle and when they got to the surface we’d sink the mine with rifle fire punch a hole in them. To give an idea of the danger, one day I was on the quarterdeck I looked |
13:00 | over the side and there was a mine and the water was crystal clear, there was a mine just under the ship, I said to the chap on the telephone, I said, “Tell the captain we got a mine on the port quarter.” walked over to the other side of the ship, I says, “And tell the captain there is one on the starboard quarter.,” and the captain crept the ship out and the reason I was on this ship incidentally was because of my expertise with buoys. I used to drop |
13:30 | buoys to mark as they swept the line, the line for the mines and so we crept out and didn’t disturb it. That was the type of thing you had. They were prepared to lose, There was another corvette and us, the [HMAS] Kalgoorlie operated with us and they were prepared to lose one of the two ships. But any way we cleaned the fields up and then we went and |
14:00 | where did we go? We went and did a dockey in Brisbane and after we did the this is on corvette Pirie we were down there for a month, we all got leave the ship’s company got leave and we went into Sydney, after that, we were going to go around Fremantle and I called into the Shipeon hotel |
14:30 | and I was talking to a chap off the minelayer the [HMAS] Bungaree and I says “God,” I says, “We had some trouble sweeping out some of your mines.” and he laughed, he says, “Oh God.” he says, “I remember laying those mines, I laid them in 1941, ’42, and ’43, particularly after the Japs came in.” and he said, “We poked the stern of Bungaree in and we would drop a mine down |
15:00 | in some little crevasse and then we’d steam out.” and it was all very secret service when they laid mines and because they were defensive and “We said at the time pity the poor bastards who have got to sweep these up.” and I said, “Well that’s us, it was us doing your mongrel job.” Yes so any way Pirie went down to |
15:30 | we having completed the mine sweeping business they says “Right, you can go over to back to Ceylon and join up with the British Eastern Fleet and operate with them.” So we went all the way, we called in at Melbourne and I had an episode in Melbourne, a mate of mine said, “Come home with me and Mum and Dad’ll put on a party.” So Mum and Dad put on a huge party and we didn’t get back that night |
16:00 | it was only, leave was up at midnight, we got back at about six the next morning when the ship was sailing. So that cost me a days pay of leave. So around we go around to the west and we passed the Great Australian Bight, enormous seas coming up from the Antarctic you know and the ship just about turned over. Any way we got to Fremantle they changed their mind, the |
16:30 | British Pacific Fleet were coming out to Australia and they wanted escort vessels so they said all right you will be one of the escort vessels Pirie, you and [HMAS] Launceston can go back, you can go to the east coast and you can help out the British Pacific Fleet in a new function called the fleet train, which is protecting the supply ships |
17:00 | which fed the fleet in the war against the Japs. So as our mine sweeping was finished we called in at Sydney and they removed all the mine sweeping equipment and put five tons of lead to counterweight and then we went up to Manus Island which is four thousand miles away and that’s where the British Pacific Fleet was |
17:30 | a huge fleet, and while we didn’t operate with the fighting ships in the fleet, we provided the escort for all these merchant ships that went right up to the fighting ships and gave them, at sea, they didn’t come into harbour at sea, they just transferred the ammunition and food and personnel by crane you know, they did it that way at sea. |
18:00 | marvellous the Yanks worked it out. And so the war was great I enjoyed that immensely it was, cause we were operating right up there, see that photograph on that book, I wrote that book, that photograph was taken on the quarter deck just outside, just off the Japanese coast yes before the surrender yes. We might just stop there for a minute Ken if that’s ok. |
18:43 | So we were operating around the Philippines with the fleet train, the base was shifted from Manus to the Philippines, General MacArthur had taken the United States up and was recapturing the Philippines and it was too far for the fleet to operate |
19:00 | from their main base on Manus Island. Manus Island is worth mentioning, the Americans made it their base for the south west Pacific area which was where General MacArthur was in charge of, and in typical American fashion they just put bulldozers ashore and they bulldozed, within a few weeks they could create a town ship |
19:30 | streets, gutters, drainage you name it. They had a marvellous system, their what did they used to call them, sailor engineers used to do this land work. So any way they made this huge base and they had these Quonset huts, these portable huts which were big enough to take aircraft and they could erect them all in a matter of days and that’s where people were living. |
20:00 | So this huge base carried food, ammunition, and every comfort that the Americans wanted, you know ice cream machine and beer and recreation spots, unbelievable, they looked after their men wonderfully well. They beat it, they went up to the Philippines and handed it over to the British this huge base at Manus and then we went up |
20:30 | everybody went up to round the Philippines, we operated from American bases up there and what was something interesting there. May be just moving on how did you end up in Tokyo Harbour at the end of the war? Yes Toyko. Well we were at |
21:00 | just before the end of the war, we had been engaged in one of the most furious battles of the war, the Japanese war in the Pacific was the battle of Okinawa and there were tens of thousand of Japs killed there and thousands Americans, fortunately no Australians and so that was to be the base. General MacArthur |
21:30 | had been appointed the Commander in Chief of the Invasion Forces to take the Japanese home islands and Okinawa which had to captured, irrespectively of casualties, was to be MacArthur’s base. He was gonna, all his troops from wherever were to be there and then we’d ship them from there to the two Japanese home islands and lo and behold on the 6th August 1945 |
22:00 | the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. A couple a days later the second one hit Nagasaki and the Japs set the surrender. on the 15th August and of course the surrender was declared. We were just east of Mindanao, which is one of the big islands in the Philippines at the time. Another little story |
22:30 | I was in charge of all the sailors. When the surrender the first surrender was announced the senior radio bloke spotted me on the upper deck of Pirie we were by ourselves, and said, “Not a word to anybody but the Japs have surrendered.” |
23:00 | he said, “Let the captain tell the ship’s company.” Well here I was bursting with this great news, went down for breakfast in the mess, couldn’t say a word you know and the hours went by, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock and I was absolutely boiling by this time |
23:30 | and I went down to the first lieutenant, the second in command and he was working in his cabin doing some paper work and I said, “A little bird has told me, Sir that the Japs have surrendered. Have you heard anything about it?” and a course knowing full well that he did you know. And well I said, “The bloody sailors up on the fo’c’sle don’t know a word about it, how about telling them?” he said, “I’m terriby sorry, terribly sorry.” So he |
24:00 | he raced up and they piped it over the loudspeaker system, “The Japanese have surrendered.” But you were asking about Tokyo Bay, the surrender. So what were we doing then?, We went up to the north of, it was self providing escorts cause we were warned by the admirals |
24:30 | that the Japanese had this ridiculous kamikaze suicide mission you see, they just couldn’t care if they were dead, if they were dying they would just get in a plane and the plane would armed with a huge bomb or a big naval shell with an instanteous fuse, they would just fly the plane at you |
25:00 | and the friends on Shropshire another one of our cruisers, he said, “I shot this bastards wings off and he just kept o.,” he just dived, he dropped down in front of the ship. But that was how determined they were, they didn’t care about the loss of their life. So I took an escort right up to Japan |
25:30 | and they went into various harbours where they were taking charge, acting as policemen and lo and behold I couldn’t believe it, we were invited in to witness the surrender. I could not believe it, this insignificant little Australian ship, four of us went, four Australian of our size ship, we were only about eight hundred and thirty three tons something like that |
26:00 | and there were other Australian ships in there, destroyers real fighting ships, destroyers and cruisers, but for us this was just incredible. So there we were, in we trotted and anchored near the [USS] Missouri where the ceremony was and next to other Australian ships and we watched the boatloads of the Jap Prime Minister had a top hat on |
26:30 | a little chap with a top hat on and a wooden leg, went back in the bottom of a barge to the Missouri and so we spliced the main brace then, except that we didn’t splice it and the Australian Navy didn’t have rum, so they gave us a bottle of beer and the only other significant thing there, we went the next day |
27:00 | the first of the Australian prisoners of war left. It was both the Brits and Americans had light fleet carriers which they used to call escort carriers, the aircraft carriers that operated with a fleet were called fleet carriers and they carried huge numbers of aircraft armoured and they could withstand the planes bombing and crashing on them |
27:30 | but the escort carriers were just virtually converted merchant ships but they carried about a dozen aircraft and they’d look after convoys. Whenever we took, with the fleet train we would take for example three tankers, an escort carrier, and four to half dozen ships like us, providing anti-submarine escort protection |
28:00 | and these tankers would carry personnel and mail and food and ammunition and so that’s what we were doing. Oh yes the Speaker was this escort carrier and the very next day they got the first Australian prisoners of war out and they passed us, they sailed right down our side |
28:30 | matter of fact they sailed through the Australian ships were all more or less together and the POWs were all dressed in nondescript, they had given them clothing, they weren’t in their ‘g’ strings like they were in Singapore, but the Allied troops ashore the Americans or the Brits had give them nondescript clothing and for some reason they had |
29:00 | the slouch hats, where they got them I don’t know. So as they went by there was a very emotional moment, everybody cheered them as they passed and we all sang Waltzing Matilda. Yes that was a very emotional moment |
29:30 | and they gave us three cheers back and then they were. So that was the first POW ship going back to Australia the very next day, so that was the 3rd September we signed the surrender on the 2nd September. So the war had been over, I had fought the war for six years bar for one day and it was my most satisfying moment of the war. There it was, I had fought the war for six years and |
30:00 | I was there on day one and I was there on the last day, right in the enemy’s main harbour. Wonderful, ecstatic experience, nobody could, it was just like a football team winning the grand final. That was it, that was my feeling. Was everyone feeling the same on your ship? Yes everybody was feeling the same. Yes they had stamps, well there was naturally no stamps |
30:30 | but they had made a postal stamp you know Tokyo Bay 2nd September 1945 and everybody of course you wrote home and this stamp was on everyone’s envelope and everybody got everybody else to sign the envelope and God knows where mine went. But most people hung on to them, they’re family souvenirs you know. |
31:00 | So I never got ashore there I wasn’t worried about that as Tokyo was virtually obliterated. I went up there later but the Americans hit it with their Super Fortress bombers and incendiaries and just about burnt the place down but yep so that was the end of there. My involvement didn’t quite finish there |
31:30 | we went over to Hong Kong all the Australian ships except the destroyers and cruisers, we went over there and some of the corvettes were involved in mine sweeping around there. We weren't we went in and we had a social occasion in at Hong Kong, there was nothing there the Japs had left it and it had been bombed and everything was, as we know |
32:00 | it’s a great selling spot but there was nothing to sell but we enjoyed it. So what did you do in Hong Kong when you went ashore? Oh I had a look around the place, the Brits of course they look after their fleet canteens, they loaded the fleet canteen up with beer and there was something that happened there… what’s that what it was? |
32:30 | No I can’t think a what that. Any way the war was over and the Government attitude to the fighting forces changed, they instead of an open cheque to maintain the armed services whatever they wanted to spend |
33:00 | it was spent, the treasure clamped, put the screws on immediately and so they, as far as the navy was concerned the troops were being discharged this was for the army. But as far I was concerned they sent the ships back to Australia and discharged them, paid them off and put them in reserve, so we got down to Morotai which is the main |
33:30 | Philippines base for the Allied troops for where they jumped off further north and for Australian troops going over to Borneo and we pulled in there and men were being discharged on a point system, the longer they served in the war, they built up a point and so they were discharged first. But I was permanent navy see |
34:00 | so they just drafted me to the corvette Pirie sorry to the corvette [HMAS] Cessnock and we went over to the Dutch East Indies and policed that, picked up there were Japanese, thousands of islands there, there were Jap soldiers every where and we sort of brought them into central spot, central holding camps for onward movement back to Japan and arrogant little bastards they were too. |
34:30 | Hadn’t been defeated, they said they weren’t defeated cause they had been sitting on their backsides in Indonesia. Yes. Did they know the war was over at that stage? No. None of them were told of the 15th August and they had to fly pamphlets over and drop them, the senior officers did, |
35:00 | senior officers did, they had their particular Commander in Chief had advised them all and eventually. They didn’t want to surrender you see the individual troops. But anyway the message got through and so they surrendered and so we had it was a picnic. So starkly I can remember, we organised a dance and the Dutch lived very very comfortably |
35:30 | they had magnificent homes and we got a Dutch, Indonesian orchestra, but Dutch trained you know had a dance with what ever nurses whatever females were about, yes it was good. Oh yes it was the real. But it was good to be seen there showing the flag and policing the place and going from one way to the other and the . |
36:00 | Which division was that? There was, we had a Premier here called Bob Askin and Bob was a sergeant in the 2/31st Infantry Battalion and they landed at a place called Banja Basin |
36:30 | and took, they policed it and this was the capital of Borneo and I don’t know if you know anything about Bob but, Bob was a bit of dubious character and he and his colonel who later became a Liberal Member of Parliament for this local area here, the local gold disappeared |
37:00 | Askin was the starting price book maker for the battalion, the gold and the colonel and Askin were involved, the blokes told me there and anyway Askin ended up as Premier of New South Wales, a character. So anyway we so that was the end of my Cessnock career all ships had to come back and pay off, the Japs |
37:30 | were in holding centres so we came down and we came down at the end of January ’46, so that was October I left Pirie, three months after the surrender we sailed into Sydney Harbour. I had one last pleasant duty to perform, the |
38:00 | we had fifty-six of these corvettes and they were all named after country towns, [HMAS] Bathurst was the very first one, yeah Bathurst was the very first one and so mine was Cessnock. So as a public relations exercise the Naval Board said we would like every ship if possible to go to the nearest port |
38:30 | and say hello and thank their host named city or named town and that’s what happened. So we went up to Newcastle and the city of Cessnock put on a train and took us up there and gave us a civic reception. It was great it was absolutely terrific. It wasn’t so much the Cessnock girls |
39:00 | as the Newcastle girls it was great. So we come back and it was finished paid off. The ship was sent into reserve and that was the end of six years. Thank you for that Ken. I think we’ll stop there as well So that was the end of six years. It’s just fascinating Ken. |
00:31 | Ok Ken so what we would like to do now is go all the way back to the beginning perhaps and we can go through some of the events in more detail and we’ll do that for the rest of the day and into tomorrow as well. Ok. There are some things that are very interesting to us that someone like yourself has got particular experience with for example |
01:00 | the training depot at Flinders, the Flinders Training Depot, I mean it would be good to hear a little more about that, you first impressions what was it like on the first day, that kind of thing? Lets give you a clear sailors’ expression it was an arsehole of a place. They |
01:30 | the story goes back to founding of the Royal Australian Navy, they the Brits sent an admiral out to advise the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board the ACNB how to lay out a future navy and where their establishment should be. Now he said that the Naval College for young officers should be at Jervis Bay |
02:00 | Jarvis Bay, and with the square miles of the unoccupied land there it should have been the entire training bases for sailors and officers but it wasn’t. For some reason he recommend this place in Flinders Naval Depot in Victoria in Western Port Bay. Now it’s the water access to this huge establishment |
02:30 | is called Hands Inlet, it’s an inlet from western Port Bay and this inlet had to be dredged if any war ships wanted to use it, it had to be dredged. Well it was pointless as a fighting navy you know but any way it went ahead and the Naval Board accepted this admiral’s recommendation so there were three huge swamps there they went ahead and |
03:00 | during World War One and said we’ll build at naval depot there. So they employed people til 1917 before the first building was completed and they filled in these swamps and then they started to build up those they’ve got an enormous number of buildings there. It’s a magnificent situation, the centre piece is huge playing fields oh they’d be |
03:30 | a mile long by about a couple of hundred yards wide and they’re surrounded by buildings, messes, officers messes, and gymnasium and sailors quarters and the new recruits would come in |
04:00 | as I was in 1938, would come into the local railway station always at night time and we’d be put in the back of a truck, a milk truck or something and trundled down and we’d come in past this and we’d pass sentries everything was painted and the gutters were painted white and oh it was staggering displays |
04:30 | from out of this, in the midst of all these farmers’ paddocks with this huge organization you know big buildings, three storey buildings and of course no lifts, you walked up in those days, three storey buildings and buildings everywhere and asphalt parade grounds and it was quite and a course everything was done at the double you know |
05:00 | the strictest discipline, particularly for youngsters like us. It wasn’t just for the recruits, all the older sailors they would come back there for courses from the fleet. They would be sent back from the fleet for courses of various description, torpedoes, gunnery, communications, signals and yeah it was a big organization. So what made it such an arsehole of a place? |
05:30 | The weather, absolute weather, this dreadful weather and in winter you could just about touch the sky it was that close and always raining and Melbourne weather duplicated, misty rain and extremely cold in winter and then there was |
06:00 | well they were always short of hot water and stuff like that oh yes it was a rugged place. Were they any ships there that you actually got to….? One of the old World War One destroyers used to come in about seven hundred tons and they could dredge enough for her to come in and they used to take the young sailors like me out on |
06:30 | for five, six, seven days, about a week outside and make ‘em seasick out in Bass Strait you know and take them up to Melbourne and yes they got sea training that way. . When the brilliant admiral who started the Australian Navy, not this British one, his name was Creswell, he’d been part of a South Australian Navy |
07:00 | and when at Federation they created a Commonwealth Navy the same as they did with the army and he was made the senior officer the commandant they called him. He had the right idea he said how a modern navy should be organised, everything was perfect with the exception of this training exercise down there at Flinders |
07:30 | he got a training ship for blokes like me in Sydney Harbour, it was called Tangara and it was a wonderful training establishment. So it used to lie over here near Rose Bay and they had hundreds of boys they had boys in from fourteen and half to sixteen. At that time every boy in Australian did compulsory military |
08:00 | or naval training that was until 1929 and so these boys they would volunteer from this for Tangara and so they did about twelve months there and there was schooling and they were wonderful young sailors. The first graduates came out in and they went to HMAS Australia a battle in World War One, wonderful sailors they were, they could do |
08:30 | anything, wonderful athletes Did you know many of them, ? Yeah I knew one of em, of course they are dead now. But he used to live up here at Balgowlah. But any way they’d working on this from 1917, building this Flinders Naval Depot and they put a lot of bricks and mortar in there |
09:00 | they’d already had some elder sailor there and so they says, it was costing a bit to keep this, it was a sailing ship this Tangara and the boys used to be, as an exercise they used to be sent over the mast. They would go up a ladder which is called raplins on the side, right up the ship’s shrouds, up to the yard and the objective |
09:30 | at eight o ‘clock every morning, there were two masts, the boys would line up and they’d all run over, up one side and down the other and the last one down got a whack over the backside with a rope a sand, a stoliky[?] they called it. Now this was the centre piece of Rose Bay’s entertainment, people would stand in the Rose Bay |
10:00 | Park and watch these marvellous young sailors, all bare feet of course, bare feet and dressed in white and up over they’d go, like monkeys they were like monkeys. And did you have to do that at Flinders? No in 1926 they said it was too dear to run Tangara so we’ll shift all down to Flinders Naval Depot and I had an instructor when I was there, who was a recruit himself in |
10:30 | 1926 when they came in. Anybody in the navy who was called an old sailor, an old salt is called a Jack Strop, naval terminology for a show off and he said, “We they sent the last year of the Tangara boys down.” he says “And they had tailored uniforms and they were all great sailors |
11:00 | they could take a boat away and sail it, they could pull an oar, there was nothing that they couldn’t do, they could tie knots.” which the Flinders Naval Depot boys couldn’t and he said, “They come in complete Jack Strops swaggering about, we’re old sailors you know.” they had been in the navy about nine to twelve months yes so that was 1926. They carried on training down there and they still do even today |
11:30 | So they kept you pretty busy? Yeah. they kept you. As you’ve got to get boys teenage boys, they have got to be run around and kept occupied. So quite beside you did everything at the double and you and then in the dogwatches as they termed the non-working hours, from four o’clock, the navy day finishes at four o’clock and then |
12:00 | you go into the, from four till six is the first dog watch and then they go to tea and then there is the last dog watch from l six till eight and we’d play sport you know get out on the playing fields and there’s huge, it didn’t matter if it was raining or not you had to be out there, running, you name it, a sport, there was every imaginable form of sport, down the gymnasium cause I’d be down there boxing. |
12:30 | How did you go in the boxing ring in the navy? Oh good I could handle all the navy chaps my size but my initial impression I was living so near Melbourne I’d get a job fighting in Melbourne nowhere. The only leave was only granted once a fortnight and that was only from, if you were under eighteen it was only |
13:00 | you had to get someone to vouch for you up in Melbourne and so. So what would you do with that little bit of time? Oh well chase girls, drink beer, swagger round, be a nuisance. Oh yes there on weekend leave there would be a special train would take people up, at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon and they’d stop at the |
13:30 | Royal Naval, at the YMCA [Young Mens’ Christian Association] in Melbourne, they used to accommodate them for some cheap amount of money and then they used to go back on Sunday night, I forget now if they used to go back on Sunday night, no they went back on Monday morning |
14:00 | and in wartime they went back on Sunday night. So yes Monday morning you’d come back and then the train would deposit you. they had their own railway depot Flinders Railway Depot had railway lines there and you’d double up to your dormitory and get changed and “Fall in.” they had pipes and bugles and you |
14:30 | know they’d be back in discipline immediately. And you trained specifically as a gunner on? Yeah well we all started as seaman and then I specialised in, some people specialised as torpedo men and I specialised in guns and I did that course on the Hobart. They couldn’t, during war time they couldn’t spare time to send people down to Flinders |
15:00 | to train, so they organised training courses on the cruisers, the big ships. They had the room you know, we could just use a bit of spare space on the upper deck you know and they had the guns practical experience, torpedoes practical experience and yep oh yes. So ok and so at the naval depot there |
15:30 | I had leave and I told you about the Munich crises October ’39 October ’38. Do you remember exactly where you were when war was declared? Yeah I was at Jervis Bay just by Point Perpendicular |
16:00 | looked out the porthole and there it was and I could hear the Prime Minister was speaking from the radio in his pommy accents And what went through your mind? Well excitement, you beaut. You see I’d been brought up as I was saying earlier, I had been brought up with the emphasis on World War One, the first AIF come back |
16:30 | with a tremendous reputation, tremendous reputation they were, probably about the best troops that fought in World War One and virtually every family in Australia had been affected by someone who had been in the AIF, not the navy, the navy only lost about a hundred and ninety men in World War one |
17:00 | of course we lost many more in World War Two. All of the sixty thousand who were killed were virtually all soldiers and of course the air force at the time were part of the army. Yes so anyway I had this big World War One influence. Oh I could be like the World War One diggers; we can fight them all like the World War One diggers did, |
17:30 | all their famous battles you know you see them on Anzac Day with the banners with all the great battles, they were all young men marching then a course and the old contemptibles, the Brits who were a famous group the Brits first used in 1914, about 1915 and for some reason the Germans called them the contemptible little army and they picked up that nick name |
18:00 | and so they used to carry the banner The Old Contemptibles, these are the British migrants to Australia. And Yeah well all these things stimulated and the Anzac Days in those time and Remembrance Day or Armistice Day as they called it, every thing would stop, trams, trains, buses, for two minutes on 11th November and so that was the reverence that was held |
18:30 | and so this was significance on me and of course we were only a couple of miles from the big Angora army camp where so many of these diggers had been trained during World War One, and we’d go up for their Sunday morning parades of the militia of the day so the influence there was strong. So yes I says you beaut I can |
19:00 | be like the diggers. I understand you had heard quite a few gruesome stories from World War One as well, you’d heard quite a few tales from World War One. ? Oh yeah in my book yeah they were absolutely. I can remember when I was a teenager and bloke up in Brisbane |
19:30 | a truck driver was telling me. I said to him a big good looking bloke he was cause everybody was young you see, about forty I suppose from about forty on and don’t forget forty percent of World War One diggers were dead by 1930. Oh yes they had a hell of a war, That’s a tough time. Gas, |
20:00 | wounds, psychological disturbances, huge percentage and I says, “Well look in those western front battlefields how did you pick up dead a body?” He says “Well,” he said “Everybody was identified.” We all carried name tag, dog tags the Americans used to call them, |
20:30 | I think I’ve still got mine somewhere I don’t know if I still have. Ours in World War Two was just an aluminium strip about as big as a fifty cent piece and it had my name, number, rank, I don’t think it had the rank in, waited for you to die for that, but everybody’s an official number |
21:00 | which is, its never duplicated and your religion, that’s right, your religion, your name and your number. So what they’d do they’d, the army had two, they’d leave one with the body and the other one they’d cut off with a knife or pull or and they would put a little wooden cross by that shell hole and they’d tie the dog tag there and |
21:30 | then when they come along to, when the burial parties come along, burial parties generally used to operate at the end of a days fighting and in, like when dusk was falling, just take New Guinea there, as dusk was falling if there was no enemy directly in front of you, you’d bury the dead, the padre would be there and there was a section |
22:00 | of each unit with the burial parties. They were generally somebody who was either a bit older or a bit infirmed for some reason, but he was strong enough to dig a grave, they never went down six foot or no way. But in France in World War One the bodies were lying in these shell holes mud and water everywhere, and so he’d dig a, |
22:30 | they had a pickaxe. They used to have pickaxes to dig trenches and the body and just drag it to a shell hole or wherever, generally a shell hole was where they buried them, and then they had a shovel, they’d shovel. And would throw quick lime over them to help the body to decompose then they would cover the body and they’d leave a little |
23:00 | and leave a little cross, they’ve got some in the War Memorial in Canberra now a little white cross, cause that would be blown over by the next bombardment, bodies would be blown up oh yes. Did that add to your sense of wanting to join to defend Australia given the threat that was around? Well it had to be done you see. The |
23:30 | human body, a decomposing human body is, has a dreadful smell and they have got to be buried, they’ve got to put out of. This is one of the trouble on Gallipoli, the Turks they didn’t bury their dead and they had to declare an armistice at one stage so they could bury their dead |
24:00 | and of course the revolting smell you know. Oh yes then they had rats as big as cats running over the dead bodies and some of the old diggers told me the, at times water there, see water was always a problem, not rain from above, drinking water you know supplies of like hold on, he said well |
24:30 | if you were wounded you had to drink out of a shell hole you know and there could be a decomposing body there oh yes. One of the Australian Army in World War One they used to have puttees, say a sort of a bandage wrapped around their leg and the old boys told me post war that they swore by them cause they kept their legs warm, kept their legs warm yeah |
25:00 | and dry. Warm and dry you know. Very important in the trenches. Oh yes they’d be, people would drown in shell holes, I remember old George telling me, they’d drown in shell holes and there was nothing you could do, you could see them from the parapet of your trench |
25:30 | and you could see, and the principle of all Australians of all services is this that you must bring your dead in or your wounded, particularly the wounded in and that’s carried out religiously in all our wars, go back to the Boer War, we have always looked after our dead or wounded and so they’d go out after night and bring they’d bring, if they were Australians, they’d bring . |
26:00 | them in. And of course On the western front there was many armistice there with the Germans, they’d say there would be a white flag go up and they’d say, we’ll bury our dead for, its twenty to one now and at twenty to two we’ll start firing again. Do you think that was done out of just a mutual compassion or it was because of something practical or the smell and hygiene? Hygiene yes and also from morale purposes, there is nothing worse than seeing dead bodies, |
26:30 | particularly young men, and don’t forget a lot a people are, the younger men kept flooding in into the trenches because there were so many being killed, so they would be trained in Australia and then they would go straight out, they used to be trained in England, before they were allowed on the western front they would go to the Salisbury Plain |
27:00 | and there the Australian Army had a big training camp and they sort of licked them into shape. We did the same thing in World War Two with the Canungra jungle training camp and that training camp was so professional that a mate of mine an ex police sergeant who was on Bougainville he said to me, “These blokes from Canungra young chaps |
27:30 | they were that good, they were that well trained that we could put them on the front line against the Japs straight away,” they were that good and they had old soldiers instructing at Canungra and many had had actually battle experience Yeah. So did you take many of those stories with you or think much about them as you were leaving after war was declared after you had boarded? |
28:00 | Well you don’t forget these things that you are told, but they never worried me, I was a single man and I did the war on my ear, yeah no trouble at all. I had a great war. And you had an older brother as well in the services? An older brother? Yeah? Yeah Merv was in the 1st Australian Corp Sigs [Signals] and they went up to, they did the |
28:30 | Greek Campaign , the Syrian Campaign and up at Buna and Gona, there was a tremendous battle at Buna and Gona. Buna, Gona that was the Battle of Papua, they’d come over the Kokoda Trail and then on the waterfront were the three villages Sanananda, Buna and Gona and that’s where the Japs landed, they’d come over |
29:00 | from Rabaul and they created a tremendous defence position there and Merv told me about he said, “The Japs were great diggers, where ever the Japs went, they dug or had the local natives dig tunnels for them.” They went underground, they were like rats and so what they did there was they dug |
29:30 | trenches, communicated by tunnels and then they chopped palm trees down, big palm trees and they used the pill box principle that the Germans ratified in, utilised in World War One but a course the Germans in the typical methodical German style, they would have reinforced |
30:00 | concrete about, anything up to a meter wide. So a shell could land on top of the pillbox and it would sort of bounce off, they’d still be safe inside. The Germans looked after their men very well, much better than the Japs, the Japs weren’t particularly looking after their men they didn’t care if they died or lived. But they made this into a defensive position and the only way they could get them out, I’m quoting my brother now, was |
30:30 | the Americans came in and they used to use the flamethrowers and this was fuel a high-pressure fuel , a flammable fuel put it under high pressure. They’d shoot it down in a tunnel and it would eat up the oxygen, and unless there was an opening the other end, they would be asphyxiated; either that or they’d get burnt alive. |
31:00 | Can you tell us a little bit about just going back…. Before we left Buna, Gona and Merv, we used to write to each other and the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, we’d been in this house what about 24 years now or so, we lived a couple miles further up I’d kept all his letters, they’d all been mutilated by the censor |
31:30 | and his unit censor and when you shift from one place to another you get rid of a lot of rubbish you know I had these letter in a small compendium which is no weight at all, I say “Ah we won't need these any more.” and I threw them in the rubbish bin sheer waste you know. And you wrote to each other during the whole war? Yeah. We didn’t write every week we just wrote periodically you know |
32:00 | and so you know we had a picture of what each of us were doing and so he wrote and he said, “Oh I can tell you that the Japs are cannibals. “he said, “They liked the inside of the thigh.” that was their choice cut. They used to eat each other too. They found that the boys, when the 6th Div was |
32:30 | fighting in New Guinea in ’45 they came across Japs, mutilated Jap soldiers, clearly the Japanese Army had instruction in their system, you know if you are going to starve don’t forget there is human flesh, of course that is revolting to us you know barbaric and oh. Yeah so he wrote, that was the first and then of course I follow up on |
33:00 | that and my ex policeman mate said, “Oh they were doing it in bloody Bougainville too.“ What they did on Bougainville, the army was very shrewd the Australian Army very, very clever, great soldiers, the Japs on Bougainville hadn’t been affected, apart from a few American air raids but they never had to fight a land war until the Australian Army landed in |
33:30 | ’44 early ’45 and they had huge farms on the fertile part of the island which kept them fed you know they had about fifteen thousand soldiers there and so what the Australian Army did they cut those farms off, they cut off that part where they grew it, they did this wherever they did you know isolated it |
34:00 | New Guinea was the same, the 6th Div did the same there, they cut off from their farms, their food. What was food like on board the ships that took you to Syria, did they look after you well on the passage when you got on board the Hobart? The food was very poor, Nizam had utilised the British system amongst small |
34:30 | ships in the navy, it was a catering system they called it. ,Each mess was allocated so much per head to feed and two and six or something like that, you went to the, you had a stores office there and he would allocate you food and debit your mess account, I had generally had about fifteen men in my mess and |
35:00 | you could get dry food like sugar, salt and stuff like that and that was the basic account. But having got the food down to your mess then one member who was commonly known as the caterer had to prepare it. So instead of going to work, he would cook a stew or something like that and if there was baking had to be done, a roast or something like that you took all this up to the galley, once you’d prepared it |
35:30 | that catering member and they took it in months, took it in turns monthly, and then you take it up to the galley and they would prepare it, with your number, you’d put your number of your mess there . I was when I became a leading hand I was in charge of the mess you know, I did the catering business too before I became in charge of the mess and you had to keep an eye on |
36:00 | them and then what they used to do is, at the end of the month, the British Navy did this invariably, they declared a dividend, we saved ex amount of money for the month and we would all get five shillings each which was ridiculous Was that because they were so poor? The Australian Navy wouldn’t do that, we’d just, we believed in a decent feed |
36:30 | they used the Brits would have cheese and something for tea because they’d have breakfast have a mid day meal and they’d save on the evening meal and they’d use cheese and biscuits that was their evening meal. So but no we, it was a general we reverted then we |
37:00 | when we, we reverted to what was called a general national principle the American principle of the food was cooked by a team of cooks in the galley and the men picked up a tray like you get in a cafeteria and you’d walk through the galley and they the cooks would put it on |
37:30 | on your tray, the American system and then you would go down to you mess, walk down the ladder if you weren’t, that’s if the ship wasn’t rolling, many a meal had been lost as the ship, you’d go down to your mess and eat it and you would be responsible for washing up. So if you had spent your rations and lost it because of the rolling seas that was it? Oh yes that was it. But because you’d |
38:00 | if it was your mate there, you’d give him some of yours and of course there was always bread there, the cooks would make the bread and some of them were awful. Some of the cooks were awful, these days they live like a five star hotel, the cooks army navy and air force are trained in food trade schools and they come out with a certificate proper cooks, chefs almost officers used to have a |
38:30 | different cook to sailors and that was abolished and they’re all common chefs. So in other words the officers cooks used to get special training and That’s a bit unfair isn’t it? So they were all together. I was telling you before about, when Nizam was coming back from Tobruk and we lost soldiers over the side and we also lost a cook. Do you recall that? |
39:00 | I do remember it, but Ken we’ll have to wrap up there and we’ll come back to all those stories tomorrow cause we’ve actually run out of tape. It concerns the cook. |
00:33 | Ok Ken so yesterday we sort of ended up with you talking a little about your whole navy experience and some of the stories that you had heard from World War One veterans and things like that. What I'd like to do today is to hear generally a bunch of information about your personal experiences. I'd like to |
01:00 | start with your role on a lot of the ships that you worked on, now you were a gunner specifically. Yes I was a gunner. Basically I was a seaman and gunnery was my action station. I was so that if the action was on of course I went, but the ship had to be operated you see and so the seaman look after everything that’s on the |
01:30 | upper deck of the ship and like they anchor it, the more it, they use wires and hoses, they keep the ship clean the upper deck clean, and there’s various branches in the navy look after various sections, stokers down below excreta. Is that what you would do if you weren’t in action as a gunner? Oh yes it had to be looked after, domestic the housekeeping of it, |
02:00 | you had to be kept , the ship had to be kept clean and hygienic you know. So specifically what things would you do while you were in between battle and campaigns to keep the ship, what things would you actually do particularly to keep the ship clean? I started off as an Able seaman that’s doing, just one of the working hands around the ship and then I became a leading seaman then a petty officer and eventually a chief |
02:30 | petty officer and of course as the ranks went up so more, I got more responsibility and in charge of various numbers of men. But yes there was anything that a seaman was required to do regarding looking after a ship, well I could do, I could do it, whether it was splicing wire, |
03:00 | ropes, bringing ship alongside, steering, handling motorboats, handling a boat under oars, the only thing I wasn’t particularly good at was sailing. Which is what sorry? Sailing. Sailing. Where they any jobs that you preferred doing? I preferred doing, it was well of course when I got more responsibility |
03:30 | I liked supervising and making certain that sailors did their job properly you know because I had a certain amount of expertise to see that they could, so I had that sense of responsibility early on. And with being a gunner say on the Hobart, can you just talk us through say your gun crew, did you have a gun crew? |
04:00 | Yes guns crew. I was on Hobart I was the youngest member of a superb twin four inch dual purpose, anti aircraft or low angle gun and for some reason they selected me as the second in command, I don’t know why, there was about sixteen men in the guns crew and so I |
04:30 | operated that whenever there was any enemy aircraft over we fired these guns and they carried a shell of about forty-five pounds and so I always had some sort of responsibility with the guns and then I went into the six-inch turrets and they were quite an eye opener and |
05:00 | unlike the larger guns as I eventually went to the eighteen-inch cruisers on the Australia, you had to ram the rounds and the ammunition into the six-inch guns, they were rather an old fashioned gun but very effective, very effective. Can you tell me generally, say on the Hobart how many |
05:30 | people were in your crew as a gun crew and what each person did? Well lets take the four-inch guns. There was the two senior people, they were called breech workers, the captain of the gun was always the right hand side and I was on the left hand side, I was the left breech worker, very difficult to close the breech they had an immensely powerful spring and then we had, in front of the gun |
06:00 | one was a gun layer and one was a gun trainer and so you could move the gun left or right, the gun layer moved the gun barrels up or down, always a communication number and kept in touch with central control and then we had the loading numbers and behind the guns were big ammunition lockers and the loading numbers |
06:30 | would go from that ammunition lockers to the guns. Behind the guns would be a big ,what they called a shock mat, a rope mat of about two inches thickness because the cartridges were ejected, they were brass cartridges about two foot six long and they were ejected with great force. One hit me on the ankle |
07:00 | one day and just about hospitalised me. That just about, yes that covered the crew that’s the four-inch guns crew. Whereas in the turrets they had, the gun layer trainer couldn’t look out although he had ports but he just followed the gun director, as I was saying, in the highest point in the ship |
07:30 | was some equipment called a gun director, which there was a master sight which specialist people were there who could, they pointed at the enemy, they laid the guns and all this information was transmitted through from the gun director, down to a central spot in the base of a ship called the transmitting station which was always manned by |
08:00 | a bandsman that was their fighting job and in turn they transmitted that information to the turrets, not the four-inch guns but to the turrets and they just followed pointers, the layer and the trainer followed pointers because this chap up there had perfect vision and then you had the breech workers again |
08:30 | as we had on the four-inch and the loading all the ammunition came up a chute a hydraulic chute, right in the bowels of the ship was a shell ring and the magazine and there would be a crew down there and they would put it through a vertical door and as it went in the door would close and a hydraulic gun lifter would take it up to the gun house, when it got to the guns |
09:00 | their guns would pick the top one up and it’d circle, it’d come around in a circle and just load the six-inch guns yep. That’s fantastic. Once you are in a gun crew on board a ship are you part of that crew and you stick with that gun crew or do you move around? No not necessarily we can interact, they can shift very flexible, you could move from one job to another. For example I was a trainer |
09:30 | at one time there. Speaking about we were bombarding, we were fighting a French destroyer in Beirut and I was looking over the open sights I was the gun trainer then. But yes that was, you could interchange it was very flexible, everybody was trained to do everybody else’s job. Senior people they were a bit better trained than the average |
10:00 | member of the guns crew. The junior member was always the communication number, the phone number and he just sat there with a pair of phones and transmitted information comingfrom the director or the transmitting station to the captain of the gun. He was called the captain of the gunand the chap in charge who was next in charge was called the second captain. They used this term in the navy generally, in charge of a part of ship you were captain. I was captain of |
10:30 | forecastle, captain of the quarterdeck, captain of the guns, second of the gun just terminology that’s all. No it’s very important. You mentioned then about firing on the French battle ship in Beirut just then, was it a surprise to you that you were going into battle on French ships at all? We didn’t like it. We were in Alexandria |
11:00 | Harbour it was there would be about eight or nine French ships which were there when France surrendered to the Germans and the Commander in Chief he could do one, thing he could fight them in the harbour, so he come to an arrangement with the French Admiral, he says , “Look, if you will disarm your guns, |
11:30 | give us the gun locks which control them, we will treat you as honoured guests and we will pay you the same pay as our sailors are getting or officers are getting and we will allow you to go on leave.” which these bludgers did every day, while we went to sea and fought the war, so they just lay in harbour, and that was the arrangement that this brilliant Commander in Chief we had whose name incidentally was Cunningham |
12:00 | Admiral Cunningham, no relation. But he come to that arrangement and as such he immobilised. But in the western Mediterranean the British battle ships from based in Gibraltar they fired on French battle ships and sunk them at a place called Oran in Algeria and they used to be our allies you know |
12:30 | nobody liked firing at allies. But our brothers in arms the 7th Australian Division were fighting these characters, brothers in arms ashore, so we had no compunction at all in firing at them, no no the French being French they would kill you at the drop of a hat, so we had no compunction firing at them no not in the least. |
13:00 | When you were talking yesterday about Tobruk and that whole Mediterranean area I was I have done a bit of reading about Tobruk and just knowing the amount of ships around the harbour there because the Ferry run was so dangerous, it would be amazing to hear a story of yours just navigating into Tobruk harbour, I mean how the just moment to moment |
13:30 | how you would navigate through a bay of wrecks? I never saw Tobruk in daytime, my knowledge of it was always night time. So we did was, do you want me to go about how we entered the harbour? Yes. Well we would proceed we always operated at high speed going to and from because there was |
14:00 | submarines they can't, they find it very difficult to attack ships proceeding at high speed and the German subs they would, for example they sank one of our Australian ship the [HMAS]Parramatta a sloop, and this unfortunately, they lost one hundred and forty three men, this unfortunate ship who had it was at night time |
14:30 | about one o’clock in the morning, it had gone up to a merchant ship that they were bringing and carrying full of petrol, petrol and ammunition and he told the captain and the captain of the Parramatta told the captain that he’d have to speed up, he was going too slow and so this German submarine took advantage of the slow speed and fired two torpedoes into Parramatta |
15:00 | and sunk her. And that was the reason that you would be going at high speed was to avoid the U-boats..? Yes high speed. The submarines couldn’t, you would sail past them you know unless they happened to get you at the psychological spot. So was there any I mean you did most of your runs to Tobruk at night, was there any raids at all by U-boats or an air force on you at that time? We were always being attacked by aircraft, |
15:30 | it was either the dive bombers or the medium range bombers like the Junkers 88s and then the high level Italian bombers oh Yeah. We’d leave Alexandria at seven am and once we got outside the boom there could either be submarines there waiting for us or we could be under air attack from there for |
16:00 | what was it, three hundred and ten miles to Tobruk and you were capable of being bombed or attacked, machine gunned, or bombed at any time there. We weren’t, we never had surface engagement from the Italian fleet and we were a bit far east for them to come, They weren't particularly heroic sailors to |
16:30 | go to sea and tackle us. Were you expecting them to be a bit of a tougher fight with the Italians? Oh yes the Italians yes. They had beautiful ships, well trained men, they just didn’t have the spirit to tackle us it’s as simple as that. There were individuals, but in the main no. They had the great ships. Mussolini had created a great navy he though that they would knock the British Navy out of the Mediterranean |
17:00 | quickly but he didn’t. But getting back to Tobruk so we got up there just outside Tobruk Harbour about twenty three hundred, eleven pm and as we approached we’d see a couple of low level green lights and that indicated the gate way entrance and they make the necessary signals to |
17:30 | by a light to the British launch that was there which opened it and they just towed the net open and then the destroyers would sail through and the launch would close it again once we got in. Was that an anxious moment because you had to slow down for the gate? Ah no we weren’t worried no we were just thinkin’ of the wounded ahead and I mentioned that one |
18:00 | one day my captain ran over the boom. We had the anti submarine equipment was called an ASDIC [Anti Submarine Detection Investigation Commission or sub detector] dome, it was a dome shaped object when went under the keel of the ship, there was a hole in the keel of the ship, went down there and the operator sat above it in an compartment and they transmitted like hitting a |
18:30 | empty drum with a hammer and this noise, noise travels in water, and it would go out and what ever it struck it would rebound and they’d pick it up and they would pick it up in their ear phones and they would become very expert at that, they could pick up the difference between a shoal of fish, a submarine or a sunken ship and things like that and anyway this night I could say |
19:00 | I was leaning over the forecastle of the ship and the captain made a blue and he run over the net, wire supporting the net and I says, “there goes our astic dome,” which meant that we couldn’t defend ourselves against submarines. But he pulled up in time, and just reversed slid off and put his wheel to port and went through the gate. So once inside |
19:30 | the harbour was full of wrecked ships, warships mainly Italian ships, there was British ships there too, and everybody was alert particularly up in the forecastle because it was the eyes of the ship and the bridge staff of course were be watching through their binoculars and they pick up these little blue lights and there was |
20:00 | it was sort of a road way leading, wherever the harbourmaster wanted us to berth for the night to disembark our personnel, the personnel that we brought up or to pick up people who were wounded people from Tobruk. So they actually created a bit of a runway of the safe shipping passage with the blue lights? Yes so we could manoeuvre though. But it wasn’t always like that, there was one time there or several times we were right up on the beach |
20:30 | and so the beach was directly in front of the bows of the ship and another few feet and we would have been running ashore, running aground. What we, when we got close to shore we had great difficulty with off shore winds blowing the ship, so we had to go along side a wreck to embark or disembark people and if the wind is blowing |
21:00 | and quite a strong wind coming in off the desert could blow the ship away and very difficult for the captain to hold the ship along side. Once we got that line over a wire rope, hawser over once we got that secure we could pin it by the nose and we could swing the ship in. But we had great difficulty at time and don’t forget we were operating against time, we went in at eleven and we had to be out at one, that gave us time to, |
21:30 | we had dawn about five or six o’clock or something like that and we had to proceed at high speed because the enemy aircraft would be over at dawn to attack us. You were talking before about that at times there were air raids at night on your boats, can you, I mean that sounds an incredible event |
22:00 | to me never having experienced anything like that, can you tell me what that sounded like can you describe an actual air raid on one of your ships, An actual air raid? Yes. What it was like, what you saw, what you heard perhaps, how it was? Oh yes it was, this is you speak about day time of course? You didn’t get air raided at night time? No at night time going to Tobruk |
22:30 | the Germans could pick up the wake, when a ship was proceeding at high speed there’s a boiling white wake comes up which is as high as that light and its very identifiable its like fluorescent light particularly air craft they can see everything, they can see for miles a pilot an Australian pilot told me. |
23:00 | They’d cruise around, see the wake and they would follow it up, they’d follow it up and just hit the ship with a bomb as it went over. Now they had to stop that because there was too many ships being sunk. But of a day time a typical bombing attack in daytime was the. Let’s take the dive-bomber, which is the most frightening |
23:30 | it was, they’d cruise around in a circle until they got, they aimed at a particular ship, let’s assume they were aiming at Nizam they’d come down in line they would follow the way a ships running and so they got the line of the ship to aim at and they are up to about one or two thousand feet |
24:00 | and they’re carrying a thousand pound bomb, then having got their aiming not like other bombers who have got instruments to aim their bombs at, they were aiming with the nose of their aircraft. So they would come down screaming it was a tremendous noise and then just as they got above the ship they would let the bomb go and then they |
24:30 | wheel away and of course we would be blasting them with whatever we could. It wasn’t so much as hitting the aircraft which if we could we would, but if we put our armament up in front of their eyes, the pilot quite frequently they became disturbed and they became either disorientated and they decided that discretion was the better part of valour |
25:00 | and they went left or right out of the way, you would see these guns belching fire and smoke and ammunition going up all round them So it was like a game of.. And so the bomb would land because the captain had the ability to steer the ship away as the aircraft would come down and just before the bombs dropped he would move to the right starboard or to port and the bomb would go just exactly where we were, of course |
25:30 | that didn’t happen, there was as ships were hit you know a thousand pound bomb hitting metal and it creates an enormous mess you know, it just tears the ship apart, metal on metal and tears the human beings apart. I mean did this actually happen on any of the ships that you were on? No it wasn’t. We had damage from those bombs dropping along side |
26:00 | but no and nobody was ever injured on the ship that I was on, well they were hurt from its like a repercussion but no one was hurt by shrapnel from a bomb or anything like that. No no I was quite lucky. Did you ever see any other ships go down that way? Oh yes many ships many. Oh yes in those photographs you’ll see |
26:30 | some, the first thing you see either hit by a bomb or enemy shells was smoke, there would be a big cloud of smoke and you would say, “Oh Nestor’s been hit!” or something like that. But don’t forget that we were completely occupied with fighting our own ship, the term when you’re defending a your ship |
27:00 | and so you just had a cursory glance, someone might say, “Oh Nestor’s been hit.” and the next chap would say, “What with?” you know shells or bombs or something like that and then you might look up and see it sinking. Ships rarely went down straight away; they generally capsized either left or right, port or starboard. |
27:30 | So what went through your mind when you’d see something like that? Oh well it was a pity, I remember saying a prayer for when Barham, the battleship Barham sank, it was three minutes later it went and I said a prayer then for the numbers, it was eight hundred and sixty two died were killed and yep. |
28:00 | But in the main I was too occupied doing the reason I watched Barham being sunk was because weren't engaged, it was a submarine that torpedoed Barham, So I wasn’t engaged in actual personal action. How many in campaigns like that how many bombs or torpedoes would it take to actually sink a ship or cripple it? Oh well it would |
28:30 | our sister ship Nestor was sunk, she had a thousand bomb, three feet from the port side and about ten feet on the starboard side and that broke her back and so she was finished then. Once a ship’s back is broken she can't the hull is fractured and water pouring in you know yeah but |
29:00 | that’s the immediate effect of, once the hull, if the hull isn’t altered, they will do everything to save a ship, if they can get a ship towed back to harbour it can always be repaired, but once the hull has been fractured it is impossible water is pouring in. Where there every any time where time was taken out to kind of have a ritual for Allied |
29:30 | ships that went down in battle at all? No No, you just No, you just accepted it, it was they’re gone, you might say. I can remember passing where Parramatta was sunk and you’d say, “Well poor old Parramatta went down over there.” But no we never had |
30:00 | a valedictory service or a ritual or anything like that. We had, I can remember we passed a few rafts going to Tobruk there, there was one raft carrying three German aircraft, airman, the Junkers 88 had been shot down and they apparently they dropped their life |
30:30 | saving raft, they got in it and as we were passing cause don’t forget we were travelling at high speed, they were singing out you know, too bloody bad mate can't stop! And so we just sailed past them and they failed to survive. Oh yes we couldn’t. On the way back we would keep an eye out for incidents like that because it could be our own |
31:00 | people and if it was our own people of course we would stop and pick them up. But we would have stopped and picked up the Germans too on the way back, but not on the way up, cause time was a factor, we had to be there by twenty three hundred and oh yes there was always, well it wasn’t all ways but periodically you’d see people on rafts or boats who |
31:30 | their ship had sunk or their aircraft had been shot down yeah sure. But your main operation during that time was to ferry supplies and….? Yes all the destroyers were doing, were maintaining the soldiers in Tobruk and they had twenty two thousand men there, which is they have a lot of food, |
32:00 | eat a lot of food and they had to be provided with ammunition and new guns, new personnel because people were getting wounded and being removed. So it was a very intensive job, very intensive job and we did that for seven months and indeed 9th Div wouldn’t have, they wouldn’t have held Tobruk |
32:30 | without the navy. No way. They could not have held Tobruk. So was there a strong sense of obligation or strong sense of mission on your part in terms of supporting? Oh yes particularly brothers in arms, Australians are very close to airman and soldiers, particularly the army and the navy get on very, very well together. There was a big |
33:00 | the airman, not our RAAF people because there wasn’t many in the Middle East, there was a famous fighter squadron, number 3 fighter squadron, which incidentally I lost my brother in law with, a pilot and he was shot down quite early in the war and they never recovered his body. But…. What battle was that? He was, he went out |
33:30 | on a patrol, they met some Italian apparently Italian aircraft and he was shot down and that was the end of him you know and he never returned and so we got his, my sister in law got the telegram, Jack McDonald his name was. |
34:00 | Did you find out when you were in the service? No no I didn’t know him then, I didn’t know him, Dulcie knew him , but no no this was just when I come back. Yes it was a general conversation at the end of the war was who survived and who went, particularly who went you know and. Did you mix with many of the army blokes when you came back? |
34:30 | Oh yes we were, cause my elder brother was in the AIF and rough and ready people, they were no where as well looked after as sailors, nowhere near as clean because we, they I remember a digger saying I was up at Caloundra one time, “I’ve never seen anyone as clean as you Australian sailors.” But oh yeah we mixed in canteens or whever |
35:00 | But the airmen because they were always short of aircraft and our ships were always short of aircraft, there was a bias against them they, for example in Crete and Tobruk rarely saw supporting air craft you see and so the navy and the army we, if we came across some RAF people ashore there, we would get stuck into them you know verbally wouldn’t not |
35:30 | fisticuffs or any think like that, but sling off at em, you know, “Where’s ya bloody air craft?” you know, and we’d lost so many ships you know or so many men the diggers and it wasn’t until the last couple of years of the war that they started to get, they were still, the enemy was still dominating the skies as late as 1943 so it was only ’44 and ’45 that the |
36:00 | Allies were dominating the sky. So you put the pressure on the air force boys to do a good job? Oh absolutely yeah cause they were humiliated, they knew quite well and they were humiliated they would sort of put their tail between their legs and drink their beer and go. They wouldn’t associate with us in a canteen because they’d know that they would get this, it never failed particularly with people had a few beers under their tail |
36:30 | and they’d start speaking about lack of air support you know. What would the RAAF boys say in response if they got a chance? Well it wasn’t our RAAF boys because there wasn’t that many there, there was just the one squadron and there was a lot of RAAF people with British and British crews you know there might be a navigator or air gunner or things like that |
37:00 | but as an organised group Number 3 Fighter Squadron was the only one and so all these RAAF they’d try to defend them selves you know and they’d try and denigrate the army and the navy in turn you know and they’d say, “Well we won the air war for you blokes and you should be able to beat the Italian Navy |
37:30 | or the German Afrika Korps.” things like that. They would all be defensive you know be defensive yeah .. You would give them a bit of trouble? Oh yes. The RAAF particularly was called the Blue Orchids, they had a nice shade of blue for the uniform, and “There goes the bloody Blue Orchids!” we’d say as we’d pass em in the street |
38:00 | you know going up to meet their girlfriends. The RAAF it was a very young service and it come with modern ideas. It was only the RAAF started in 1921 and of course the navy and the army had been running for centuries. And to give you an example of one of the things they were castigated for, the bulk of the RAAF were in depots |
38:30 | they were in huts, they didn’t live in tents, they lived in huts and their planes who where the real fighting men they were in a forward area and then they’d just fly back to their base and be serviced and I can remember my brother going into a RAAF camp and he said he come out to me and he says, |
39:00 | “You wouldn’t believe it but these bastards have got sheets and pillow slips and we’re sleeping on grass palliasses.” and a course we never had sheets in the navy, we just slept between blankets. That was the kind of thing the RAAF did, they were very modern. Their officers they had a new idea about the armed services. |
39:30 | So do you think because the air force had mixed crews that you were chucking off at the Brits as well, it was a lot to do with chucking off at the British? Oh well yeah to a degree it was their lack, we didn’t care how they were dressed or how they were treated but we never got the aircraft, our support aircraft. We did our job, we weren't frightened to go right up and fight the Italian Fleet or the German |
40:00 | Navy and neither were the diggers, they were prepared to fight the Afrika Korps the great Afrika Korps. But when these people couldn’t, their aircraft weren't defending us you know doing their part. We were doing our part they weren't doing theirs. We never forgot it, never forgot it. Do you think it still exists a little bit today? You still get it |
40:30 | at the RSL Is that right? Absolutely yeah, bloody Blue Orchids. Alright Ken, we’ll just |
00:31 | Ken if I can I'd like to take you right back to the beginning again sorry to keep jumping Yesterday you told us some stories of what you knew of the army in World War One what did you know of the navy from World War One? They had a most boring war, World War Two that I was in was the most active war we were |
01:00 | operated, there was always something of interest or excitement happening at all times. But in World War One they didn’t, I’m speaking about the Australian Navy they, the Australian Navy had as big a fleet in World War One as they had in World War Two but they were under the control of the British Admiralty so they directed them |
01:30 | to go to British bases in England and so the flag ship the battle cruiser HMAS Australia went up to Scapa Flow which was the main British naval base for their grand fleet and there they stopped for four years. They would go out to the North Sea looking for the Germans and the Germans never came out |
02:00 | On the one occasion when the German Fleet did come out at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, there is quite an amusing story about that, of course the Kiwis and the Australians always have a shot at each other. There was two battle cruisers, in those days the wily Brits used to get the colonies as we were termed to pay |
02:30 | for ships that bore their name. So Australia paid for HMAS Australia and New Zealand paid for HMS New Zealand and they were both operating with the same battle squadron, now just before the Battle of Jutland which was the biggest battle of World War One; thousands of men’s lives were lost and many ships were sunk |
03:00 | they were manoeuvring in the North Sea when New Zealand went past Australia and she had a wire, there was a wire being towed and it got caught and it tore the side of Australia’s ship side and in result Australia had to go back to the dock yard to be repaired |
03:30 | and New Zealand the ship New Zealand just sailed on you see with the rest of her unit and of course just after that as Australia went down to the repair yard the Battle of Jutland took place and when it was finished and Australia went back to this boring monotonous job. So they were there for four years, four years those poor fellows and |
04:00 | did nothing, never fired an angry shot, this huge battle cruiser never fired an angry shot all war and but they had other ships as well and they were operating in the Atlantic and in the rough seas there, escorting again never fighting. In the Mediterranean we had, we used to have, at the time the Australian Navy had |
04:30 | tiny little, seven hundred ton destroyers, the British Admiralty said they wanted them. So they had a boring war running up and down the east coast of Australia until 1916 and then they sailed for the Middle East the same as Nizam did in World War Two and they had quite an interesting war. There was |
05:00 | no there, the Italians were on our side then, the Austrians were next to Germany they were our enemy. So they had quite a bit of engagement there, the Turks, the Austrians to the north the Turks to the east and so it was quite a nice involvement. Was your stepfather involved in any of that, cause he had been in the navy hadn’t he, did he tell stories about that? |
05:30 | Step father was. Yeah he’d been in the Battle of Jutland. Did he tell stories about that? Only about ships being sunk you know, it was dreadful, even though it was the greatest navy in the world, it was a dreadfully inefficient navy. The German shells were just blowing up the British ships like and they had to learn the lesson of making certain to make sure their magazines were spark proof, flame proof. |
06:00 | That didn’t happen till after the war though. Yes it was he saw many ships go down. My unit the N Class Destroyers we had all ships of our name in World War One, they fought at Jutland and again the destroyer Nestor just as she was in World War Two, the World War One |
06:30 | destroyer Nestor was sunk too, both ships. Was there any superstition about having a name that had been sunk in World War One? No no Australian sailors aren’t superstitious. The Brits they of course they have been operating for centuries, but no the Australians no we are far from superstitious we’re far too pragmatic Yeah. Growing up in Brisbane had you been on the ocean before you joined the navy? |
07:00 | No went down the Brisbane River, on the ferry, the Doomber and the Copper was the extent of my, oddly enough I had a very sensitive stomach as a child and I could get car sick without any trouble but all the time I was in the navy I was only ever seas sick about four or five times something like that. Yeah no trouble at all for some reason. Were most sailors seasick |
07:30 | quite often, was seasickness common? No initially they may have been but they all, their sense of, you get sea sick because your ears become unbalanced, the little spirit level in your ears and but of course there is people who are psychologically sea sick, Admiral Nelson the greatest of all admirals he was perpetually sea sick throughout his naval career. There wasn’t a ship that I was on |
08:00 | that i didn’t have ship mates who weren’t sea sick. When we’d go to sea, a bugler or the bosun’s call a pipe, a whistle would be to sounded prepare for sea you know sailing orders and I’ve seen these people get their bucket out and they’d put it where ever they were going to work |
08:30 | it was just a psychological upset you know. Where ever they were going to work the bucket would go and that lasted, that could last right throughout the war. Psychologically upset. They just couldn’t handle it. Did you find when you came back to land did you have the sea legs? |
09:00 | The only time I ever felt the ground roll was in 1938, I can remember coming back from, I’d commissioned the HMAS Stuart for a month, we only had it for a month and then decommissioned. I can remember going ashore there at Man of War steps the footpath was, I was |
09:30 | sort of walking on the side of it. Yeah but never again, no it didn’t affect me. I'd love to talk to you about when you were London when you made your way there, you had leave? Yeah had seven days leave and my mate and I went up and we didn’t book into any of the services establishments, we |
10:00 | rented a room in a hotel in Bayswater in London and we were there for seven days we wanted a bit of privacy when we could get our girls somewhere to take our girls. Were the girls impressed by the Australian sailors? Absolutely yeah see we were so highly paid we always had money in our pockets and of course |
10:30 | that was always a great attraction you know, if you were in a restaurant or a hotel, they had great hotels in England you know and the British sailors mightn’t be able to survive and keep going, where the Australians sailors could stop there, drinking and spending money on the girls where necessary. Oh yes they liked the look of us, they liked our attitude. Oh yes we got on very well and |
11:00 | they had a bit of difficulty in picking up our dialect at times.” What’d you say?” And yeah but we got on well, great. They weren't as good looking as Australian girls and they didn’t have the figures of Australian girls but they had other attributes they were very obliging. They could, Australians |
11:30 | society at that time was very straight laced and your girls they were looked after by their parents and they didn’t deviate, they did, but they didn’t do it all the while. But when you went to the United Kingdom the girls had a and the Europeans in general, completely different attitude. So they would be quite happy to |
12:00 | visit your room or you could visit theirs, even at their homes my word. Let me give you an example of the Australian attitude and the British girls. There was a mate of mine, a big blond huge young man he was, blue eyes and big smile and very jovial manner |
12:30 | and what was quite common in England and Scotland was that they didn’t have the barracks to accommodate everybody, so if you were doing a course you went to what they termed digs, which is like bed and breakfast type of thing or board or lodging. So this particular bloke went to a place where they were told the |
13:00 | occupants of the house would tell the navy that they were prepared to accept one sailor or what have you. In this particular chap where he was going there was a woman, her sister and the woman’s daughter who was about eighteen and so before he joined Nizam he had bedded or be bedded by |
13:30 | the three women. Their men were at the war in the Middle East or somewhere else. Oh yes and the girls were, the navy has a good reputation, it was their primary defence arm and of course when we were there they were very frightened of the |
14:00 | of the Germans, that Hitler would be invading and they had to look to us for the first line of defence you know. We had to knock the Germans over, they had barges there and we could have ... oh yes they were good. We enjoyed them. Was there much social activity in London given that it was the Blitz? Oh yes absolutely the Brits are great ballroom dancers, much better than what Australians are and there was dances |
14:30 | everywhere. I can remember going to a dance hall in Glasgow and they had two orchestras and a revolving stage and the dance floor holding about five hundred or plus couples you know. Oh yes there was all these, a very noisy, very singing crowd the Brits and you know in a bar they’d or a hotel they |
15:00 | don’t have bars, their hotels which is like, it was like our social clubs, like our RSL clubs and people break out singing and things like that and they would all join in. We’d look one eyed at this we weren’t used to that, Australians were deadly serious, we didn’t come into a hotel or a bar to bloody well sing, they go in there to drink beer or to socialise with the girls |
15:30 | and all these people there bellowing out their songs and it didn’t, it never clicked with us you know. The Australians never took part? No we, oh some people might but in the main no. Australians that did take part just as the RAAF aircrew were seconded into British RAF squadrons and they were go out on social occasions with their |
16:00 | British mates and they would sort of act like them. Well we had the same thing in the navy over at Rushcutter’s Bay there we had an anti submarine detection school and we provided hundreds of sailors for the Royal Navy, half the ships of the Royal Navy had Australian anti submarine operators and |
16:30 | they socialised with their British mates you know and they’d led the life of Riley because they were paid, in Australians rates of pay, twice the rate of pay as their mess mates and they had another advantage too which they used to gloat about whenever they met us, the Australia Navy refused to introduce rum into the Australian Navy and the New Zealand Navy did |
17:00 | and of course the Royal Navy has had it for centuries. These Australians serving there they used to get an issue of a tot of rum, they loved that, me tot with its rituals. What were the rituals that accompanied the rum? If they owed you something, a favour or something at eleven o’clock |
17:30 | they’d issue rum you see, and say you were a British ship was along side me and I done something for them oh they’d say, “Come over and have sippers.” in their English accent you know, so I’d go over to the mess there and sippers was a very regulated past time, you brought the rum to your lips |
18:00 | it was rum and water you see, to your lips and then you took it away, that was sippers. And I remember one place there and I said, “Oh thanks very much.” “Hey I didn’t say gulpers!” So you had sippers or gulpers. And of course they would play a debt where they’d sell their tot of rum for some favour. “You do a night’s |
18:30 | duty for me and you can have my rum.” That type of thing. It was a bargaining chip and I can tell you this, that it caused that much trouble, there was men that would go to cells, they would loose their good conduct badges because they were drunk, see in every armed services a lot of people don’t drink so the non drinkers |
19:00 | get that. We had in the Australian Navy a lot of people there, when they were issuing beer they’d pass the bottle of beer over to you. So were you regularly issued beer on Nizam? Never. The only time we were issued beer, sailors weren’t, they do today they’ve got their own bars, but the wardroom did, the United States wardrooms never did, they used to envy our wardrooms. |
19:30 | But no they didn’t and so, but that didn’t stop the Australians. Australians sailors were never given any, we used to pinch the officers’ grog [alcohol] and some of the most, as I have said before, Australians will souvenir every thing. I can remember grog coming on board and |
20:00 | it was being loaded by hand from one chain of sailors, so it went down a hatch into safe custody and there would be an officer periodically checking it off, yes, yes, yes, and one day this particular time there was a case missing, they turned the ship upside down and never found it. I spoke to the perpetrators later they had put it in a hammock bin . |
20:30 | The bedding, our bedding was in hammocks which are lashed up as we termed it, or tied up and then you put them in a container called a hammock netting and so you might have about four dozen in a place as big as that, very neat a course and they’d pull the hammocks out and dropped |
21:00 | a case of grog in there and put the hammocks back on it. Oh yes Australia’s army and navy I don’t know about the air force, it might be too nasty for them to do but the sailors and the soldiers they would do things like that at a blink of an eye. What were the hammocks like to sleep in? Wonderful, much better than bunks, the bunks could roll you out |
21:30 | in a sea way, heavy weather , the hammocks were the most comfortable, you slung fore and aft, that is they had steel bars welded to the deck head of every mess, it was over your mess so you slept and ate in the same area and then you’d sling you hammock of a night time |
22:00 | and they had at the end there, it was quite an art to do it. For example I would take mine and I would sling a bar taught and I’d put a spreader, we used to have twine to hold it to the connecting ring which held it to the bars and I would have a wooden spreader about as wide as my shoulders at the foot end and the head end |
22:30 | and you had a narrow mattress which had a mattress cover and then what ever blankets you wanted, two or three blankets and a pillow, a small pillow and then to get I,n you got hold of the these hammock bars which are as high as that light you swung in just like that, a bit of gymnastic work |
23:00 | you just swung up like that and grabbed that and just swingup and into the hammock and I’d get out of the hammock exactly the same way, I would grab the bars and just swing out. The next morning you folded everything up neatly your blankets, your pillow, put it in there, your pyjamas, and generally it’d just underpants in tropical weather was the average |
23:30 | sailors’ bedding and then we put a rope around called a lashing, lashed them up bar taut like a sausage and tucked everything away and then just put it in the netting. Very neat. Were did you sleep during the day if you were working at night? On the deck particularly if it was, not so much the destroyers they had steel decks but the |
24:00 | cruisers like Hobart had teak decks and they were just a bit of resistance in them you know they were beautiful to sleep on. Yes you could just lie down there and go to sleep behind your gun if you were there you know . I guess when you were on any of the seas or oceans |
24:30 | what's it like in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night when there is nothing around? Is it … Well you don’t take much notice, you notice the weather you know especially if the weather’s like this, like Sydney Harbour, you would come out from your mess deck and go up either on the steering wheel or to your guns or wherever |
25:00 | and the first thing you do when you come out the other end, you check the conditions of the sea and if its calm or its rough and it was rough of course you had to battle your way, I was the captain of X-mounting right down the far end of the ship and to get down there in rough weather, I had this crew of sixteen under me and we used to have |
25:30 | a life lines rigged up on the upper deck, because steel decks are very dangerous, from the steel life line there would be ropes hanging down and we would hang onto them and just they would slide with you you know and so you would look at the weather, that was the first thing you would do when you’d come out and you’d prepare yourself, if it was cold or hot or |
26:00 | Ken we were talking about sailors and the ocean, did you see amazing natural things in the water? We would see plenty of whales and well the sea had flying fish of course once you got up in the tropics you know. I can remember |
26:30 | on Nizam they ate them, not raw, they took them to the galley once they had enough and had a meal, yes the flying fish and whales the biggest we. Now and again we’d hit a whale you would feel its bump Yeah the whale was hit and that was probably the end of the whale too. Sometimes, I can remember one being cut but in the main |
27:00 | they avoided us and we avoided them. We didn’t avoid them we just sailed on you know. Fishing was nowhere near as good as what you think it might, you had to get up around by the reef or some place like that in shore. Did the sailors fish in their spare time? Oh yes when every, say we anchored |
27:30 | wherever, we would the fishing lines would go over and I remember when I was on Pirie there we went up to Shark Bay in Western Australia and it’s a snapper haven, millions of them, they caught that many they couldn’t eat em, they couldn’t cook ‘em you know, |
28:00 | but a line would go in and a big snapper on the end of it. There was nobody outside, I doubt if there is today because they’ve probably got commercial fishermen there. And we when we were up on the, anywhere up on reef, the Barrier Reef there, we’d lets say we anchored somewhere, a boat would go away with a chipping hammers that we used to cut roasts off the ship they would chip they oysters off |
28:30 | and come back with a huge billy of oysters. But in the main we never caught as many fish as you might think you know. What else could you do for recreation on the ship? Oh well there was what ever sports there were available, on the ship as distinct from going ashore we’d |
29:00 | we on the destroyer there wasn’t much room. But say on the cruiser Hobart we could play almost any form of sports there. We had a very rough sport called deck hockey and they used a round rope, a puck they called it and oh yes the blokes with cut arms and hands and legs |
29:30 | what have you, as you can imagine typical young men going flat out during a game. Were there any rules? Balls? Any rules to the ? Oh yes there were rules, they had a referee there and he’d penalise you. Yes there was rules there. That was the roughest game we played on board. But on small ships like Nizam we could box on just a little bit of open deck by the forecastle |
30:00 | and I remember the first lieutenant and another chap they had what do you call sword fighting, they had swords out anyway, but in the main the deck was a steel deck and there was no room for |
30:30 | really for playing any sport on a small ship, you went ashore. Could you get into the water at all, could you swim? Oh yes. When we went to harbour and if there were sharks about, shark infested there was, somebody would be posted with a rifle, a sentry would be posted with a rifle, we used to say, “Don’t you shoot that bloody rifle at me!” |
31:00 | It’s a wonder I didn’t see somebody shot. I can’t recall the rifle ever having to be fired, not while guarding swimmers. But yes, if it was in the Mediterranean there was no sharks so you could go over in mid ocean if the ship had stopped and it’d be perfectly safe you know. But well certain Australian waters |
31:30 | there’s always sharks you know you had to watch them. They’d drop the boat and they might go around there and just, someone might, the boats could, the noise seems to frighten the sharks away. Oh yes they go swimming and a course Australians being great swimmers and they were water polo enthusiasts. That was our normal sport certainly on Nizam. We had a champion water polo team |
32:00 | team and indeed they were the people when we lost those Australian soldiers over the side, it was the water polo team basically that went over and saved them. When they went overboard did they have ropes on or did they just dive in and grab the men? In the incident where the soldiers went overboard, |
32:30 | did the water polo team have ropes attached to them or did they just dive in to save them? Oh no they just went straight over the side. They stripped to their, they just, they dropped their pants, they went over in their underpants and they went straight over and |
33:00 | rescued them or carried out the rescue effort. Don’t forget we had the other ship was circling us, protecting us against aircraft and submarine attacks and it was a rough sea running and it was quite an effort. The Commander in Chief sent commendations down for all of them for saving life at sea you know. |
33:30 | It was an amazing act of bravery. Oh yeah lets put it this way, they knew quite well that once they went over if the existency of the service demanded, that is if air craft were coming over to attack or enemy war ship come up, the ship would straight away steam away from them, just leave them in the water, if possible they would come back later you know when the engagement was over. But they understood that. |
34:00 | the sailors understood that. Yes, I watched a digger drown there, he was wearing a greatcoat, it was a bit chilly coming from Tobruk and he was face down arms and legs out like that, he floated past, the skipper was with us but and of course they were all in uniform you see. Well the rugged uniform they came out |
34:30 | of Tobruk with What were the sailors thinking standing on the deck seeing that? Well where I was I am the great observer you know and I says, “Well all right,Nobby what are you going to do now?” Nobby was the captain, Lieutenant Commander Clark and I saw the incident happen. Now the normal thing in the navy is that the |
35:00 | the ship’s captain asks the senior officer which was on the other ship, permission to pick up these men and he was an Australian captain, this Clark, he just turned the ship hard to port and just circled around come up against them, didn’t ask permission, but that is the normal thing, you can't leave your position with out asking the senior ship, they’ve got to know what you’re doing you know |
35:30 | see another ship. But of course as he’s turning, he signalled him and let him know what was happening, well he could see what was happening you know cause he was on our starboard side, right close together and over they went, yes it was quite a dramatic episode. Did that really bring down the morale of the ship? No not in the least. If any thing it built it up |
36:00 | some heroics like that you know. I saw Gus Taylor he dived from up on the flag deck, swallow dived from high on the flag deck, stripped down to his underpants and swallow dived from just up on the bridge and straight in and he was the first chap to pick up a soldier and we dropped the nets down the side, what we call |
36:30 | scrambling nets they’re to pick up survivors at sea, they’re like rope nets that they use on invasion ships and every ship carries them, they’re just tied to the guard rails. We just cut the strops, they dropped down and the bottom part is in the water, it’s a beam of wood and so all he did, all Gus did was to drag him over and said, “Right get up there.” and there was sailors |
37:00 | on top bending down helping them up and he went back for other people. No the morale was far from that if anywhere, even the diggers their morale was, cause they were going, they were used to death, see they had over seven hundred men die from 9 Div in Tobruk |
37:30 | and this was an infantry battalion, it wasn’t one of the base wallahs [clerks] . So they were front line fighters and even though they lost six men, the rest were rescued and they were quite, they were going to rest and recreation you see, they were going up to Syria. So when we got into Alexandria they had trucks there to |
38:00 | take em to the railway station and then they got on it, through Palestine to Syria. Did they tell you as sailors what to do if the ship was sinking, or if you were thrown overboard, did they tell you to take off shoes or pants or..? Well you had to get rid of, Yes they did tell you that. they didn’t not on the |
38:30 | I can never recall being told in great detail. It was just common sense told people what to do, but depending where you were you see, for example the Mediterranean in cold weather or the North Sea on the Russian convoys going across the north of Scandinavia you could survive for five minutes and hypothermia gripped you and that was the end of you. |
39:00 | No it was I can't ever recall specific life saving, we had it in our manuals but about the only thing they taught us was to kick off your shoes you know. Well that’s the end of that tape Ken. |
00:32 | Ken yesterday you were talking about tiredness, general tiredness in the navy and fatigue which I was really curious about. Did you remember any, I was curious if you could tell us maybe some memories of what, a key moment you had to battle that tiredness when you |
01:00 | were out on the water perhaps during a campaign, how did you actually deal with that, with that kind of fatigue? Oh well we had this sense of fatigue at all times at sea because of this watch system we operated, we manned the armament or kept the ship running by and it meant that you could sleep at the drop of a |
01:30 | hat, particularly young men they go to sleep very quickly. You’d come down from watch, for example if you we come off at midnight and have to get up again at four o’clock, we’d just jump straight into our hammock and asleep instantly you know and we they had, they used to wake us with a call you know morning watch and |
02:00 | morning watch you know, show a leg the way it’d come back, or your mates would give you a shake and say c’mon the morning watch is here, four o’clock, you never got up to your watch late, you always got up there at the correct time cause if you did you got abused. Was that the most you’d get, just a bit of abuse? |
02:30 | Yes. A joke about the captain of a ship who was the Yarra it was, the captain of Yarra and he eventually became the Chief of Naval Staff and the bridge look out hadn’t been relieved and this is again at about four o’clock in the morning and finally a figure started to climb |
03:00 | the ladder, there’s vertical ladders to get up to the bridge and as they got to the top there, this lookout hit him on top of the head like that, “It’s about bloody time you got here too, you’re five minutes late!” It was the captain! This bloke was a strict disciplinarian, but he didn’t say any thing, he just straightened his cap and went onto the bridge and took command on of the ship. |
03:30 | Yeah bout bloody time you got here too, you’re five minutes late! So Yeah everybody always got there on time you know no matter how tired you were. No matter how tied, you got there. So sleep was always the last priority? See what you had to do, when you went to a gun there, the captain of the gun would make a report a communication report to the bridge |
04:00 | that B mounting crew has closed up or X mounting crew has closed up and you couldn’t report one adrift you know cause the senior officer on the bridge, the officer of the watch or whatever would want to know why, you know. “Why haven’t you reported,?”you know? “Where’s your missing men, go and get him, do something about it.” Yeah so everybody got there. What was the longest time you remember going with out any sleep? |
04:30 | Twenty-four hours oh yes that would be the longest, twenty four hours. The Japanese fleet were trying to track us down the Indian Ocean. this is on Nizam and so we stood too at the armament for twenty for hours yeah, we were going to make a night torpedo attack and |
05:00 | Yeah twenty-four hours is the longest. Did you end up going through with he attack? No they didn’t thank heaven because the Japanese turned away, the Japanese couldn’t find us. If they’d have found us, they’d have sunk us I wouldn’t be sittin’ here, there’s no risk about that, no risk in the world. They had three hundred combat aircraft there and three battle ships and five |
05:30 | aircraft carriers, oh no it was a huge, they would have sunk any fleet in the world. Did you know that going in, when you were actually in that region? We didn’t know the size of the fleet, all we knew was the Jap fleet was at sea and like the captain didn’t tell us that the Japanese had, there was a Japanese battle fleet at sea was all they said and we were going to make a |
06:00 | night attack and torpedo them and the British fleet was split up into two sections, A and B, the B was the old wobbly arse, the old World War One battle ships and they were too slow because these Japanese ships could go at twenty six knots, ours could go only go at twenty one knots if everything was operational. So we were in that section the A fleet |
06:30 | and we were the ones who were gonna be the sacrificial lambs. The captain of the Napier says, “Go and have a Goffa at the canteen boys, it might be the last one you’ll have.” Did you believe him? Goffa is a soft drink. Oh no, you’re indestructible at that age. See in a war, you are never going to get killed, it’s that bloke |
07:00 | next door, he might but you won't. Is that what got you through at times do you think? Oh yes it always is, it is exactly the same with the AIF, they weren’t going to get killed, that was their mate might or somebody else, but not them. Oh yes you’re always optimistic, always philosophical but you’ll never get killed, you’re indestructible |
07:30 | What was the mood on board the ship finding out that the Japanese had entered the war? Well they were, everybody was extremely excited and a bit apprehensive, particularly when we knew about what had happened at Pearl Harbor, when that news come through and because they, we all |
08:00 | knew the British fleet had been very heavily battered, particularly, the most powerful fleet which was the fleet I was with, the Mediterranean battle fleet. But we knew that the United States navy had a very big navy but of course it was only when we knew what happened at Pearl Harbor they had sunk five battle ships you know, fortunately they didn’t get their aircraft carriers and of course within a few months |
08:30 | they six months, seven months they were beaten at the Battle of Midway when the United States aircraft carriers sunk four of the seven Japanese aircraft carriers, that was the end of the Japs. We won the Pacific war then. Won the war general. Were you anxious to get back closer to Australian territory? Always. Always yeah. |
09:00 | I immediately put in to see the captain to get a transfer to Australia and he calmed me and another chap, but he calmed us all down by saying, “We are defending Australia, you are defending the west coast that’s still part of Australia you know.”and he said, “All our fleet is on this side, we are protecting Western Australia, we’re defending Australia.” |
09:30 | We thought well that’s not where our families are; they are over there on the east coast. But as I was saying the Prime Minister wasn’t happy about it, he wanted all Australians home. But he couldn’t get them, he had to fight like billyo to get ‘em. But yes we would’ve wanted to get home and |
10:00 | and protect our families cause things we were getting, we weren't getting much news at all. Censorship was very heavy and the main news we got would come from our families, they would send papers and they would send the newspapers and we could pick it up from there you know, they were heavily censored too. For example |
10:30 | when Darwin was bombed there was, I think there were two thirty people killed there, Dulcie said that, I can remember when I first met her, she say’s “There was no bombing and nobody killed, no bombing up there.” and we had a ding dong row, I said “There were bloody hundreds of people killed.” and I says, “That’s the trouble with you people you didn’t even know what was going on.” It was just kept out of the, the government said censorship |
11:00 | and then they let out there was only a few killed, and there were two hundred and thirty I think. But even then so day to day news the communications, the radio people, they would pick up news from the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] and they’d type that out and they had those old radio machines and they’d run off a few copies and |
11:30 | copies and they’d put them on the ship’s notice boards so we got to hear that way you know. It was only rudimentary stuff it was no details no heavily details. Was there anything else that anybody tried to get real news of what was going on? Yes, The radio boys they were the best cause they could, when they weren't taking messages |
12:00 | they were sitting on watch taking messages, but they had so much radio equipment and they’d always had the BBC on and they could pass on information. Would they ever get into trouble for doing things like that? No, no, no. I always had a chip on my shoulder about the lack of knowledge |
12:30 | that our captains passed on to us ships at sea. The Americans didn’t and their captains used to tell them and they’d say, we’re going to do this that and the other, they kept them fully informed, the army used to keep their men fully informed but they had this stupid business of, they would say, the captain would say, we are going to sea to |
13:00 | take a convoy to New Guinea or there maybe enemy ships about that’s about the limit they’d get and it really got under my, cause I am pro at finding out information whether from the radio boys or where ever I could always get some information. So you’d end up getting more information from the radio than from your superior officers? Oh yes and I’d make an assessment |
13:30 | from the daily news sheets or what have you, I knew how the war was going all the while. You mentioned yesterday about giving us a seaman’s impression of commanding officers or a seaman’s view of commanding officers but we actually didn’t get a chance to elaborate? About? About your commanding officers or? |
14:00 | Oh God yes. I have got some notes here about the leaders, our wartime leaders, God yes. There are only one line notes. A World War Two sailor’s view of his wartime leaders. Churchill the true leader of the war inspirational orator. Oh Ken I’m more interested |
14:30 | on your opinion of the officers that you had a relationship with, that you actually: Oh my own officers, the RAN [Royal Australian Navy] officers were just imitation Brits, sailors were genuine Australians great men, but not the officers. No., no they were, they imitated their, they took a pick up of the British accent and they spoke like Royal |
15:00 | naval officers like British naval officers and they adopted their attitudes and the class distinction attitude you know which is, in our egalitarian society it just didn’t wash. But what I noticed during the war, as war went on particularly on destroyers on smaller ship where the men and the officers were mingled to a greater extent |
15:30 | is that this attitude was disappearing, this attitude, this British Royal Naval attitude was disappearing. They were still officers and they still had some of it, but they were no where as near as democratic or egalitarian as what the oh well the AIF officers were for example. Now the AIF they would speak to their crew, |
16:00 | in action they would, say, they’d use the Christian name of the platoon commander. The discipline was such that once they got out on the parade ground, he was sir again you know, they could do that, that’s the way they operated. It was sir all the while with us wherever we saw them. If you didn’t salute them you were in trouble and things like that. So they expected to be very formal and things like that? Oh absolutely |
16:30 | yeah absolutely. Of course we didn’t salute them at sea and you might, if the captain passed you might stand to attention, instead of sitting down you would stand up, not on the smaller ships but on the cruiser Hobart you would, you’d stand up when the captain passed. Oh yes they made that, there was that distinction all the while in everything they did. And you were saying that it |
17:00 | relaxed a bit as war went on? Certainly it did. Why was that do you think? Now one of the reasons for that, for example take the cruisers, is that there would an officer say on the turret which is the enclosed gun house and they are all in they’re together, it’s like the internal organisation of a ship, there would be an officer there, only a young chap, might be a sub lieutenant or a lieutenant |
17:30 | well he has got to speak to someone, so he has got to speak to the gun crew you know the turrets crew and the more you speak, the more easy going you are, well you know what each other is thinking you know, a joke or something like that, Yeah that was very good you know. I have seen blokes come back and they might be drunk from the shore they might’ve |
18:00 | swam in their underpants from the shore, been on the booze and they have come on board and the officer of the watch has said, “Get forward, get forward to your hammock”. But in earlier days they wouldn’t, they would charge that chap, improperly dressed when he’d arrived at buoy, the whole rules and regulations. Were you ever one of those fellas? |
18:30 | No, no I was a law abiding bloke. Oh no I rarely got into trouble, I never got into trouble, no way. Was that because you were….? Nobody rubbed me up the wrong way, I can tell you I don’t care, officers or anything they knew they had a prickly operator with Cunningham. My very word How did you give them that impression? |
19:00 | Just by my attitude and the curt tone of my voice when I’d speak to them and if there is anything that Australians hate and this is what the naval officers, particularly the ones involved with the Brits were, was being addressed by your surname. They’d say “Cunningham,” and I wouldn’t answer you know, they could address me by my Christian name or by my |
19:30 | rank and this happened right throughout, Australians hate being called by their surname, but the Brits they are used to it, it’s their class distinction you know. But yeah they had a porcupine if they dealt was me. And of course you see lot of the time I was in charge of people, I always treated my men, I won't say they loved me but they always |
20:00 | they always respected me and they told me post-war, a bloke who knew his job, always treated everybody with courtesy and stood no nonsense you know and nice statements like that. And the men would have appreciated that? Oh yes I looked after them and they, I would never speak to them like a dog, I would say “Oh Chris |
20:30 | would you do….?” something like that, wouldn’t make give it a deliberate order, unless it was an emergency you know and I’d snap it out then. But that was the way I went on I would ask them please and thank you and yeah, that’s all they need courteous, a bit of courtesy and they’ll do anything, the sailors will do anything Do you think part of the reason that Australians hated being address by their surnames was because it was a British thing to do? |
21:00 | Because it was? Because it was a British thing to do? Yes, they were trained you see, our regular officers were trained in the Royal Navy for two or three years and so they’d come out with this idea and that was the way the Brits treated you, they just addressed everybody by their surname |
21:30 | even their junior officers, they were always, it wasn’t sub lieutenant so and so, it was just Smith or Jones what have you. That was the way the system, the British system most probably for hundreds of years you know. But it doesn’t go over with Australians. They’re generally, there’s a resentful attitude straight away it goes right back to the convict days I guess. |
22:00 | Ken I’d like to go back to a story you were telling me yesterday in between tapes or maybe at a break and it was to do with preparing a body for burial. I was just wondering if you could describe that, what you actually did because I found it quite fascinating? Well the canvas |
22:30 | is, you get enough canvas for a shroud Sorry. This is somebody that has died and the medical staff have prepared them? Yes a heart attack or something like that. Yes not in battle. In battle exactly the same, once the battle was over they were all buried the same way and sewn up in a shroud and they were put on be |
23:00 | a stretcher and there would be a firing party, they would fire a volley of three shots and they’d be over the guard rail and either over the guard rail or they would remove the guard rail and then a sailor either side of the stretcher would, at the given signal by the officer in charge, they’d lift it up and the body would just slide off the stretcher into the water. So can you take me through the detail of actually |
23:30 | preparing the body? Well they, through the preparing? Yes. You would have the dead body they’d have the canvas spread on the deck the dead body would be placed on it and you had to stitch a shell, there was generally well we would use a four inch shell |
24:00 | about forty five pounds below the feet and we’d just to secure it because it is a round conical object and you have to, to get it to stop there, it has to be sewn in. So you stitched the canvas, you would over lap the canvas and stitch it together with a sail makers stitch all the way up from the you’d work from the feet up |
24:30 | So you’d have pass the stitch through the legs so that the shell doesn’t move cause it’s got to pull the body down and then as you work your way up to the head and then you would stitch, you would put the canvas over the head and just stitch the top of the shroud and you end up with the final |
25:00 | stitch through the nose and that keeps, that’s the head part of the shroud, and the shell is the weight part of the shroud by the feet, so when the body is, they’re feet first when they go over the side from the stretcher and that shell just pulls them down, their feet pulls them down. Now there is a classic case I didn’t |
25:30 | see it, this captain that I was speaking about who the look out hit on top of the head, well he died post war when he was Chief of Naval Staff, yeah I think he had just retired or was about to retire and so they decided they were going to |
26:00 | deposit him at sea from one of our ships. So they went outside Sydney Heads and they had it exactly the same as I have described, except they hadn’t secured the shell at the bottom, so she went the other way you know, the body floated, they had to send a boat crew away and put an additional weight round it |
26:30 | for the body to sink, Yeah this is an admiral. So that stitching the weight into the feet was quite important and don’t forget it was a conical thing and you couldn’t just tie it on it had to be stitched in. Was that something that you did often? No I only did it once that’s all. What they looked for was, for somebody to do it |
27:00 | was someone that was stable minded you know, wasn’t perturbed by handling a dead body you know. See the sick berth attendants, they would prepare the body in the normal manner, they’d prepare, of course they were trained to do that, but they weren't they knew nothing about sail maker stitching. So the seaman had |
27:30 | to do that and I was a seaman. They were the people that had the equipment; I’ve got some down in the garage now, sail maker’s palmer needles yep. Were there any instances or any burials at sea of people that you knew or that you fought alongside? Yes of course you would have everybody on the ship, oh yes you knew everybody on the ship Yeah. Yes they’ve got |
28:00 | And they’d always be buried about the same time unless you were engaged in battle. But generally just by sunset you know and they’d assemble, they’d issue some rifles and assemble a firing party and they’d fire off three volleys and he would read the captain or whichever seaman, it wouldn’t be the captain, the captain would be up on the bridge |
28:30 | But generally his second in command and the first lieutenant would read the burial service. exactly the same as you are ashore and commit the body to the deep would be the term he used and then he would give the signal and the people holding the, see one end would be the, the bottom end would be balanced either on the guard rail, the top guard rail and the other two chaps would be holding it inboard, the stretcher and they’d just |
29:00 | at the given signal, up and the guns would fire and yep. They made it as ceremonious as possible, so that the bodies went down with great dignity you know people, the assembled sailors they could be dressed in any rig because they’d come from their guns or what have you and they wouldn’t clear a whole lot, they’d just be the nearest guns crew, “Alright X-mounting, |
29:30 | can you send your X-mountings crew down there.” I’d have sixteen blokes there, they would be lined up. Bit a dignity and that’s good for moral too, say well, “If I go, at least I go with a bit of dignity.” Be committed to the deep with a bit a dignity yeah. So did that give cause for anybody to sort of, I mean you were saying then that it actually sort of |
30:00 | helped with morale? Well it helped with morale in the sense that they knew if they were killed, that they would go over in exactly the same way. Did that ever cause you…, Now when they had multiple bodies they didn’t the rifles didn’t fire a volley for each one, they just fired the volleys and then they put them and of course the bodies would be on stretchers. |
30:30 | Did that ever give you a moment to pause to sort of think about Australian, to think about getting home? Oh yes it gives you a sense of mortality when you watch a funeral at sea, a burial at sea. Oh yes you know quite well that could be you but |
31:00 | it makes you think when you go back to your mess you know. What they always did with a dead body, all his, that man’s gear the coxswain the senior sailor, he’d he’d pick up a couple of his mess mates and they’d get all his gear together in a kit bag |
31:30 | and then at a suitable moment at harbour he would auction that and it was the accepted thing to deliberately for something worth say a shilling, you would pay a pound for you know and then the money would be sent home to the widow oh yeah that was the accepted thing, so unless he was a single man, a single |
32:00 | man they wouldn’t bother about That’s a beautiful thing to do, that’s a good gesture? an auction. No they wouldn’t have an auction for the, they always thought a the family. That’s a beautiful gesture. Yeah good gesture yeah it’s a good gesture. And all the gear would be stamped DD - deceased dead – yeah so that |
32:30 | there’s no, you can't steal, every man’s clothing was always stamped with their name and if you were caught, if someone was caught wearing somebody else’s clothing, he could be punished for that, so to justify wearing that dead man’s clothing they put a, with paint they just stamped the DD on it and all his papers were sent back to Australian with that |
33:00 | DD on it yeah. What would happen with the items that were actually auctioned? I mean obviously the point was to get money back to the widow but...? Well it was only if anything worth while they’d, well it couldn’t fit them, you know it could’ve been a big chap or something, but it didn’t matter, they were just making a gesture and they would just throw it over the side you know or give it to someone, “Anybody want Pop’s overalls?” or something like that you would say and |
33:30 | nobody wanted it, it went over the side yeah. Oh yes I saw a few auctions in the navy. Yesterday you mentioned, sorry. |
34:00 | I just wanted to ask your relations with the sea after the war finished? Relationship with? The sea after the war had finished? Well I stopped in the navy. I did twenty-six years in the navy and yeah I stopped in the navy and alternated between shore depots and ships you know oh yes. You mentioned |
34:30 | yesterday that, you told us a little bit about going to port in London and meeting up with some girls there but you also mentioned Cessnock girls and Newcastle girls and the Dutch girls, is it true that sailors have a girl in every port? Well let’s assume this, certainly married sailors haven’t because they can't afford it, they can’t afford it. But single men of |
35:00 | well yeah naturally they would make the acquaintance of a girl and have a social occasion with her in what ever way oh yes that was, I mean to say you’re going to a function in Newcastle and then you’d go up to Brisbane and a function in Brisbane, a dance or a social or what ever |
35:30 | and you’d meet a girl. Yes I’m unattached, course I’m unattached, I’m not married, look I’ve got no wedding rings. Would you see many of the married fellows doing that at all? Oh occasionally, but financially they couldn’t afford it you know, you had to allocate a certain |
36:00 | proportion to your wife and she would go to the Post Office and collect that allotment they called it, and that was a certain percentage of your pay and a significant part, about five eighth’s of the pay I think, so they didn’t have the money. A lot of them did extra jobs, some of the would become barbers and they would become barbers for a price, some of them had a |
36:30 | little sewing machine and stitched up clothing for a price, they did things like that. Just to make, that would be the married men you see to get a bit of go ashore money as they called it. Did you ever stay in touch with any of the girls you met? |
37:00 | No I saw some. No I saw quite a few actually, but oh I’d speak to them yeah it’d just be a courteous call you know. But did I renew personal acquaintances, one or two but nobody else no. |
37:30 | In the main no. I’d ask them how they were going and I might give them a cup of coffee, ask them for a cup of coffee and I don’t think I ever met a girl who didn’t accept the offer of a cup of coffee, and oh, coffee and girls I know I see it with my daughter exactly the same, and knows every coffee shop in Sydney. Ken we just a few minutes left, is there anything you would like to say |
38:00 | on reflecting back on your experiences in the war or your personal experiences of the war, your feelings about it looking back on it? Pardon me. Well I enjoyed the war. |
38:30 | I was a single man, unattached, I was doing what I liked doing on a ship and I enjoyed fighting the enemy and I’d detested the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini and I did of Stalin too but |
39:00 | they were Allies but, and so I had a aim you know, if I could do anything to defeat the Germans and the Italians I’d do it you know, and above all Australians are very patriotic and , we were doing all this for Australia, weren’t doing it for me personally, weren’t doing it for my family, but we were doing it for Australia. Not for King no way. You didn’t feel that at all? Nooo way! |
39:30 | No Australian did. Officers did I suppose but in the main, no, all the Australians I knew were doing it for Australia, my word, they never carried a Union Jack on their sleeve. Not even before the war, not going into it? Oh yes there, right up to going into the war, they were very British, very patriotic |
40:00 | but that gradually dropped, that gradually dropped and particularly when the Japs came into the war you know and there was no illusions then, you know Because of Singapore? We weren't fighting for bloody Britain, we were fighting for Australia you know, oh yeah. Australians are very patriotic for their country. That was because of Singapore all the illusions dropped after Singapore? |
40:30 | Absolutely. There we were the pre world war defence of Australia and New Zealand was Singapore and the battle fleet that should have been there. That was the thing that I criticized when the war came to Australia, as I said I was interviewed for an hour up at the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] studios and they picked up thirty seconds, the thirty seconds that they picked up was my |
41:00 | criticising the Brits for letting Australian and New Zealand down. They didn’t have a battle fleet there, every man woman and child in Australia and New Zealand paid with the Brits per capita it was, you paid so much per head. built that huge naval base and no ships there. When the time come everything was. The Japanese were the original, they weren’t the original yellow peril, the original |
41:30 | yellow peril to Australians going back to our earliest days were the Chinese and then towards the beginning of the Twentieth Century it transferred to the Japs, they were the yellow peril and we could see we weren’t going to get any, the Chinese were all right, they were if they weren’t friends, at least they weren’t our enemies. |