J. E. MacDonnell - 028, page 9
Imagine "walking" for twenty-five days, more than three weeks, from handhold to handhold, every muscle in your body strained by the constant exercise which a lively ship enforces; no changing of clothes, no bathing in case you are caught down in the bathroom when the torpedo hits.
The other day in a pub ashore we met a fellow who insisted on interrupting our drinking by a reiterated question as to what the "Imperialists"-by whom I presume he meant England-had done to help Australia in her hour of need, when Australia in her turn had been pouring men and supplies into the Middle East.
We'd just completed a brilliant operation with the British Battle Fleet, coursing to within a few miles of the Australian mainland. We looked at each other then picked up the long-haired nuisance and passed him outside.
In the next bar were British sailors who'd fought their guts out in Prince of Wales and Repulse, and four from Electra. For his own sake we didn't want them to hear.
Electra was a later class than Duncan, of much the same speed and armament as us. I had her story from a man who'd fought aboard her. I first saw him while we were waiting to carry out a practice shoot at the Pattern VI target barely visible across the sea.
He was standing beside my twin guns, shading his eyes against the tropic sun. A little Englishman, with a brown seamed face, on his arm the badges of a stoker petty-officer. He stepped up to me, smiling, smacking the big steel breech with a gloved hand.
"She's a beaut, eh, china?"
"The latest." Seemed not all stokers were blackhearted bollardheads...
"Wish we'd had a couple more like `em aboard my last packet," he went on, looking them over. "We'd have given them slimy little bastards something to write home about!"
From that I'd gathered he'd been sunk, but as a fair percentage of the crew have blessed a carley raft at some time or other, I was more interested in the approaching target, and merely asked the conventional:
"What ship, cobs?"
"Electra."
"Electra!"
I was interested now.
So was the gunnery-officer and the director-in something on the starb'd beam. The pattern VI target was now in position.
"Look-would you like to stay here and watch the shoot?"
The little stoker petty-officer grinned companionably and nodded. He stationed himself back against the ready-use lockers, well clear of the panic and ejected cartridges. The target sailed past on its long towline, was duly plastered, and the mounting shook with the last broadside and the smoking guns trained fore and aft.
Firing them had now become automatic; all we wanted to know now was when we would be shooting them in anger. So that throughout this practice shoot my mind had been busy on what it shouldn't have been-Electra.
She had been another modern Grenville and the Revenge; for Spaniards read Japs. We knew the facts of her fight and her end, but none of the details we could wish for. Some of my crew had not been in serious action yet. This would tell them more than all the lectures and drill-books. I hurried with the sponging-out of the barrels. It was afternoon, and though we were on-watch at B-gun, work packed up for the day in the tropics after lunch, so they were entitled to gather round.
I walked over to him.
"Like to talk about it? Or is it still a bit too close...?"
"Hell, no. Ah-you've got a pretty young crew there."
He recognised it too. But then in his own domain he had the same authority and responsibility as I had in mine. Understanding was between us. I called the sixteen men of the crew over.
In company with a squadron of cruisers and destroyers, including the Australian Perth and American Houston, Electra was ordered to intercept a large invasion force of Japanese battleships, cruisers, destroyers and troop transports headed for Java.
The British squadron proceeded to sea that hot morning and swept the seas off Java for the enemy Fleet. During the day they were subjected to continuous high-level bombing attacks. These were tactically ineffective. But the barring British force had been pinpointed, its composition, strength, course and position signalled back to the enemy. No one was surprised when, at ten minutes to four that afternoon, a line of bumps was sighted breaking up the horizon ahead. The squadron increased to full speed and cleared for action.
Electra formed one of the spearheads of the attack, and at 1600 opened fire with her 4.7's. Within five minutes of the engagement opening a sudden blasting roar to port heralded the end of a Dutch destroyer. She went up in a great climbing column of dirty-white water and black smoke.
From the enemy line, consisting of battleships, heavy and light cruisers and sixteen destroyers, could be seen the sparkling flashes of answering guns. Exeter, hero of the Plate and Graf Spee, and Houston caught a heavy cruiser in a cross-fire with full broadsides. The Jap blew to pieces.
The order was passed to destroyers to make smoke and retire. This they did, the whole squadron regrouping behind its protection. Ready again, and a flickering light from the flagship spelt out its terse message:
"Squadron will attack."
This time Electra sped in and, heeling over to the pressure of her rudder, fired all her torpedoes. Turning at full power, she came round in time to see a salvo bore into Exeter amidships, then, racing past the British cruiser's stern, Electra disappeared into the slowly rolling smoke screen.
That was the last the squadron saw of her.
Steaming still at more than thirty knots she burst clean through the other side of the stinking smoke. They were waiting; a Jap heavy cruiser and four destroyers. Range, four thousand yards, point-black for eight-inch guns. No time to wonder how the Japs had got there. There was a little enough wonder about it-the enemy was so many that it would have been surprising if he hadn't sneaked some of his strength round to wait behind the smoke screen. Now Electra, one thin-sided destroyer, had found it.
The first enemy salvo caught her bridge. That bridge was protected-by copper plating so as not to affect the compasses- against wind and spray only. The Jap shells found only sufficient resistance to their entry to jar their fuses into action. The compass-platform was laid flat. Every man was killed except the captain. One shell went in a little lower, into the wheelhouse. Its fierce explosion jammed the steering gear.
This was where her months of monotonous, cursed training and drill paid off. The captain despatched an order and the engineers got to work. In a matter of minutes they had extemporised repairs. Now she was steering again, now she was under control.
Now she was also in the middle of her snarling enemies. And she was snarling back, one mounting trained to port, the other to starb'd, fighting both sides at once.
No narrative could do full justice to the intensity and the fierceness of the action that was now joined, or give full coherence to the events of the utmost violence and confusion crowding in on each other from all sides at once.
"Half-choked with cordite fumes and the stench of high explosive, slipping on hot cartridge cases, ears and minds dazed and deafened by the furious uproar, the sweating crews strove to keep her firing.
Only guts and the will to fight, and the strength of their incomparable training, kept them there. A thumping roar from aft, another hit. This time No. 2 boiler. A few seconds later a single salvo from the cruiser exploding forrard started a fire and isolated the magazine from A and B-guns.
Drill, training, told. Ammunition was hurried along the upper-deck from aft. Also down in that inferno between decks were the first wounded, placed there previously, and now cut off completely from help.
The thin steel decks began to heat up, paint began to blister and then pop in burst balloons as the roaring fire below licked up and scorched the deck-heads. Steel began to glow, softly at first, then a bright cherry red; a novel, frightening sight.
The Japs were all around her, swarming like sharks. Pounding her, a close-range and merciless hammering. They couldn't kill her, not yet. Her red, white and blue ensign still snapped at the gaff, some of her guns still fired back into the snarling face of that appalling deluge of shells.
The third boiler blew up with a shattering roar and complementary scream of escaping steam. At almost precisely the same moment Electra's broadside ripped into a big Jap destroyer which had come in to within a few yards to port. Like the Dutchman before her, the Jap blew up into a mushroom of smoke.
Electra was dead in the water now, all power gone, mechanically and electrically lifeless, a sitting shot for her merciless enemies. King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions, the Navy's Bible, provide for every possible contingency the Navy may encounter, from piracy on the high seas and smuggling and mutiny to the extent of long leave and the growth of beards. There was no provision made for the form of surrender of a British ship. Electra's ensign still flew, split now into tatters, and her guns were still firing. Those of them left. A and B-guns had been blown, with their crews, clean over the side. X and Y-guns aft were still in action. The captain of Y-gun, his crew dead or wounded around him, had one ordinary-seaman left. Between them, loading, then training, then running back to lay the gun, they kept the mounting firing.
Y-gun was on the quarterdeck. A broadside plunged into the water beside the stricken hull. White-hot splinters rose in a vicious scythe and lashed the mounting. Y-gun fell silent.
Now there was X-gun, above the quiet Y-mounting. In all the ship, only X-gun. The little stoker petty-officer had come off watch in the boiler-room five minutes before the action had commenced. Now he was assisting with the ammunition supply at X-gun.
For another incredible half-hour, with the ship dead about them, those reduced few on X-gun kept the vultures off. Until a shell bursting in the after lobby directly below the mounting started a fire which cut off their ammunition supply.
Ready-use lockers. Provided for precisely this emergency. They lurched to the lockers, the stoker with them, fumbling with blistered fingers at the clips. Brains bemused, shocked, energised solely by training-and something else. The gun was whole, the ammunition was waiting, the enemy was in sight.
They clawed the locker doors open and there stood the big yellow brass cordite cartridges. Staggering, they dragged out the fresh food for the waiting gun. A heavy shell burst in the water close overside.
The blast reached up and took hold of the stoker and flung him clean across the deck, over the guard-rails and into the sea the other side. Shocked, face bloody from splinter cuts, he struggled to a carley raft adrift in the water.
Spitting out fuel oil, knowing it would sear his stomach and intestines if he swallowed, he dragged himself slowly up over the side of the empty raft. From there, eyes scummed with oil, exhausted, he watched the end.
X-gun was still in action. It was ridiculous, it was beyond all the possibilities of all the odds, it should not be. The broken ship was the target for the concentrated and close-range fire of forty guns. Nothing should be still alive, still fighting back, on that pounded target. X-gun was still in action.
It was a scene, a feeling, an experience, seared into the stoker's memory with stark indelibility. Compounded of what the eye sees and the heart feels. Seeing the terrible courage of those gunners, slithering on the tilted deck, handling themselves back to that incredible gun, forcing with exhausted arms the next shell, the next cordite charge, up into the smoking breech: feeling nothing of his own hurts or exhaustion, feeling a fierce pride, inarticulate, choking...
A feeling close to love, man-love for man, a feeling whose pinnacle of purity of essence he would never reach again.
The bow was up, right up, clear of the water as far back as the bridge. An impossible angle. She was still in the water, no forward way on her ripped-open length. Then, slowly, she began to slide, backwards, an alien movement.
The quarter-deck disappeared, then Y-gun. A salvo burst into her bridge structure. She shuddered under the explosive impact. A shrug. Nothing could stop her now, nothing could hurt her more.
Further, slowly, inexorably, the enormous weight of water in her engine-rooms and boiler-rooms tugging her down, away from torture, down to deep rest and surcease.
X-gun was still in action.
They would not let her go. So the sea took her. The sea reached up, not malevolent, kind, and its beckoning hands moved around the base of X-mounting. Higher, moving into the open breech, quiet at last.
The sea took them too. Exhausted, unable to swim away from the suction, struggling only a little as the water, impatient, now rose swiftly and covered the gun.
Out of a total of one hundred and seventy five, fifty-four were left alive, clinging to wreckage and floats. She sank at 18:15, having been continuously in action for more than two hours.
Ten hours later, with the triumphant Japs gone off after the rest of the squadron, an American submarine surfaced fifty yards off and took them aboard. There, one of the wounded died.
The submarine, on offensive patrol, dived with her bloodied and oil-scummed load. And was almost at once attacked by destroyers. Seventeen depth-charges they sent down to her, and Electra's men listened to the slamming concussions and reeled in their bunks as the boat reeled.
But she dived deep, right down to her maximum depth. The sea looks after its own. The sea was pitiful, satiated. She slipped the hunting destroyers and brought her charges safely into Sourabaya. As the city was being blitzed by Jap aircraft... Thirteen badly wounded were left behind in Sourabaya. The rest of them made their painful way across the island and found an old tramp steamer. They loaded her with filched Army rations and steamed from Java, bound for Fremantle.
Four hours out from land, daring to hope, to relax, a periscope eye slithered up and laid them in its reticulated sight. Two torpedoes were fired, and both torpedoes passed ahead of her ancient bones, the phosphorescent trails plainly visible.
The Jap had no torpedoes left; he wanted what he had for better and bigger targets. He left them alone, let them pass.
Days later, weary, grimy, the forty-three survivors of a valiant ship landed in Australia.
Now, here, one of them was back for more.
I first saw H.M.A. Destroyer Arunta on the slips at a Sydney dockyard. The next I heard of her was when Australia's newest and most powerful Tribal-class destroyer sneaked a detachment of commandos away from Jap-occupied Timor under the eye of enemy reconnaissance and land-based aircraft.
But the censored news despatch said nothing of how this dicey operation had been accomplished.
Arunta had been on convoy work round the coast of New Guinea and adjacent islands, mainly between Moresby and Milne Bay. She came into Moresby one bright morning and let go anchor off the white-painted headquarters of the naval officer in charge.
Signalmen on her bridge watched anxiously for a flickering light to give them her next sailing orders. The buzz-originating in the heads, or the galley, or some suchlike unlikely place-had got around to the effect that if their orders came by light from NOIC, it would be Sydney and a spot of easy-to-take long leave. She had been up here for six months, and could do with a rest.
But the signal tower obstinately remained mute, and when a fast motor-boat came creaming round the end of the jetty they knew the Sydney buzz had had the snorker.
The boat slid alongside and a brown sealed envelope, marked Hand message. Secret and Confidential, was passed inboard. Only important orders came that way.
Half an hour later she eased her length out through the gap in the reef, increased speed and turned her sharp nose westward for Darwin. She had one more job before Sydney.
About four o'clock of a sultry afternoon the destroyer threaded her careful way up Darwin harbour between the wrecks and secured alongside the bomb-twisted remnants of what had been a jetty.
Shortly, watched by many curious eyes, a dark, sunburned Merchant Navy officer came aboard. He had spent most of his seafaring life coasting Timor and the Indies, and knew them like the mirrored reflection of his own competent face.
Eight collapsible landing barges were waiting on the pier, and these also came aboard.
For the rest of that afternoon specially-selected crews, of which my old go-ashore oppo Keith McCormick was a member, trained in handling the rafts, swinging them outboard, lowering, then recovering them until the evolution was completed in a few seconds.
The rafts were flat-bottomed, propelled by four oars and steered by a sweep over the stern, all-same surf life saving boat. The sailors soon mastered their awkward gyrations, and by nightfall felt confident enough of handling them efficiently in the dark.
Unfortunately, there is no surf at Darwin, and lack of practice in those conditions was later to jeopardise the whole expedition.
She left Darwin next morning at 11 o'clock, heading from Timor at a fast clip of thirty knots.
The commandos were in wireless touch with military headquarters in Darwin, and this plan had been evolved and agreed upon.
