Cruiser (12 page)

Perth
's departure was delayed by a day after a last-minute hitch with another piece of machinery. Finally, at 9.35 am on Wednesday 26 July, she made her farewell to England, slipping her last stern wire as a tug eased her away from the dock. With the crew lining the upper deck in white uniforms, Farncomb took her out into the stream towards the Solent, moving at a slow, stately speed past the ancient pile of Fort Blockhouse over to starboard on the Gosport shore and out beyond the great lumps of the three Spithead forts built almost a century before to guard Portsmouth from bombardment by sea.

Then she turned west in the Channel around the Isle of Wight, to head towards the Atlantic for the crossing to America.

At that hideous monument to Nazi architectural vanity, the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, on the day after the signing of the Pact of Steel with Italy, Hitler summoned his top military commanders to a conference where he would reveal to them his plans for war on Poland. It was Tuesday 23 May. As usual, the Führer delivered one of his rambling monologues, a performance that his audience knew had to be endured in a respectful silence. Beneath the bombast, the intention was clear. Hitler believed that Poland would fall to him without a struggle, as had the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Once again, feeble and decadent Britain and France would protest loudly but do nothing, despite their guarantees of Polish territorial integrity.

But – and this was the big but – if the Western democracies somehow found the spine to stand by the government in Warsaw, then Germany would have to make war on them as well. This was the Führer's unshakable will and Germany's destiny. He instructed the toadying General Wilhelm Keitel from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the Armed Forces High Command, to establish a planning staff to prepare for a war against England. As devious as ever, he gave no clue to his commanders that he was avid for that war to begin within months. They left the Chancellery believing it might not happen until as late as 1944.

In Manchuria, or, as it now had become, the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, Japan and the Soviet Union found themselves fighting an undeclared war that had exploded after a border clash that had been provoked, yet again, by the renegade hotheads of the IJA.

On 11 May 1939, Japanese cavalry had attacked a Mongolian force that had wandered into disputed territory, sparking off a skirmish, then a battle and finally a full-scale war. At first, it was little noticed in Western Europe, but it would eventually have profound repercussions around the globe.

Initially, the Russian forces fell back, but soon the tide turned. The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, sent one of his most senior commanders, General Georgy Zhukov, to clean up the mess. Zhukov, the son of a poverty-stricken peasant, would eventually become one of the towering figures of the Second World War, the Red Army marshal whose legions took Berlin in 1945. Against the Japanese in Mongolia, still perfecting his trade, he combined carefully crafted strategies of deception with an overwhelming tactical thrust of armour and motorised artillery at critical moments. For all their arrogance and vaunted combat experience, the Japanese had no answer. They were comprehensively defeated in a series of bloody encounters. It was a triumph for Zhukov that won him the first of his four awards as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

In Tokyo, this unexpected and embarrassing reverse gave pause for painful thought. There could be no doubt, of course, that the Japanese Empire must continue to expand to obtain the resources needed to feed its factories and furnaces, but it was now glumly apparent to the Imperial General Staff that this could no longer be the so-called northern strike towards Soviet Siberia long favoured by the army.

The navy had always wanted a thrust in exactly the opposite direction, to the south. This now came into official
favour. Japanese military and economic planners began to look towards the wealth of South East Asia and beyond, as far as Papua New Guinea and Australia. A policy known as Nanshinron, the Southern Expansion Doctrine, was given the divine sanction of the Emperor. This would inevitably involve a clash with the empires of both Britain and the Netherlands, but that could be managed with relative ease. The trick for Japanese diplomacy would be to keep the United States from becoming involved.

Britain, in the first months of 1939, had begun steadily if belatedly to re-arm. Winston Churchill persisted with his volcanic rumblings from his backbench seat in the House of Commons. But, despite the gathering evidence to the contrary, Chamberlain and the appeasers who advised him could not bring themselves to believe that Germany would risk an outright war with the Western democracies and possibly the Soviet Union as well.

British foreign policy lurched and dithered. At one stage, Chamberlain and his foreign secretary, the exquisitely superior Lord Halifax, visited Mussolini in Rome in the pious hope that Il Duce, vulgar upstart though he was, might be persuaded to exercise a restraining influence upon Hitler. Exactly nothing happened, but Chamberlain, ever the optimist, felt able to write to his sister Hilda that it had been ‘a very wonderful visit … I am satisfied that the journey has definitely strengthened the chances of peace'.
¹

Britain and France also flirted with the prospect of some sort of alliance with the Soviet Union – an idea that Stalin was keen enough to encourage as a bulwark against Nazi expansion. Churchill had been urging this course of action for months, and even so obtuse an arch-conservative as Halifax gradually began to think that a British agreement with the Russians might be to their mutual benefit in containing Berlin.

In August 1939, Britain and France sent a joint military mission to Moscow. Incredibly, given the urgency of the moment, it was despatched on a leisurely journey by ship. The chief British envoy, Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunket-Ernle-Erle-Drax, actually arrived without the customary written credentials – another piece of stupidity from the Foreign Office. The Russians, at first amused by this incompetence but then increasingly affronted as the talks meandered on, decided that the British and French were not serious and called the whole thing off. The Kremlin decided that a non-aggression pact with the Nazi regime might suffice, at least for a time, to keep the peace in Eastern Europe. Hitler and his foreign minister, the oily Ribbentrop, saw an opportunity. Secretly, Moscow and Berlin began to talk.

At the Admiralty in Whitehall, there were also misgivings about an agreement with the Russians, not for fear of wicked communism but rather from concern that it might stiffen Japanese hostility in the Far East. As tensions grew in Europe, with a rising threat in Britain's home waters, so the naval planners felt growing doubts about the strategy of Main Fleet to Singapore. Periodic attempts were made to draw the United States into a commitment to the defence of the Malay Barrier, that chain of islands to Australia's north, stretching from the Malayan Peninsula and Singapore in the west, across through the Netherlands East Indies to New Guinea in the east.

In May 1939, the Admiralty had quietly informed the United States Navy Department that if Britain was at war with Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to send British naval reinforcements to Singapore. Perhaps the US Navy could fill the breach to forestall any hostile Japanese move. The Americans were not attracted to what they saw as a commitment to defend Britain's colonial possessions, and politely declined to be drawn in.

The Royal Navy was beginning to realise that it could not fight two simultaneous naval wars on either side of the
globe – in which case, the conflict closest to home would be paramount. By July, the Admiralty was estimating that it might take up to three months for the Main Fleet to be sent south. This intimation of a potential betrayal was not conveyed to the governments of Australia or New Zealand.

As the months of 1939 ticked by, the Cabinet in Canberra and the Naval Board in Melbourne looked north with increasing concern. It was accepted that war was most likely to break out in Europe, and that Australia would therefore automatically be involved as a loyal member of the Empire. This view was put succinctly enough by the new Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, in his first radio broadcast after taking office on 26 April:

Which was all very well, but
how much
Australian cooperation? And where? Back in 1914, these questions had not arisen. With Japan an ally, there had been no danger from that direction, and therefore there was every patriotic good reason for sending the flower of Australian manhood off to defend the Empire in Europe and the Middle East.

The landscape in 1939 was very different. The Japanese threat was apparent and real. Much fret and worry went into assessing where Australia's defence forces could best be deployed if war erupted, and in what shape and strength.
In July, HMAS
Perth
sailed into the frame. The Australian Cabinet loyally decided that, if the shooting started, she should become, for all intents and purposes, a British warship for as long as might be needed. The Governor General signed an Order-in-Council in which
Perth
, effective from that date, could be ‘attached to the said Naval forces of the King' in the event of war. This would place her under the direct orders of the Admiralty in London, to be deployed as their Lordships saw fit. This was eventually expressed in a telegram to Whitehall:

The telegram was a qualified offer: you can have our ships, but – please – only if we say so. Even before war broke out, and in a Cabinet as devoted to the concept of Empire as were the Menzies conservatives of 1939, there was a concern that Britain might seek to employ Australian forces without Australian consent. It had happened often enough in the Great War. In this coming conflict, it was a theme that would every so often send a chill through relations between London and Canberra, as Menzies and his eventual successor, Labor's John Curtin, would discover soon enough.