Cruiser (38 page)
Authors: Mike Carlton
So the bets were on the table. But it would not be, as Churchill airily characterised it, a small-scale risk. Bruce was on the money with his prediction of a great risk. As in Greece and Crete, once again Australian troops would be assigned the leading role. This time, it would be the 7th Division of the AIF, commanded by Major-General John Lavarack. His superior would be, inevitably, a British officer â the all-too-familiar figure of Jumbo Wilson.
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Syria was to be invaded in strength, and Damascus and Beirut captured. The date was set: 8 June 1941.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. The Germans lost interest. Absorbed by BARBAROSSA, Hitler decided that Syria was no longer worth the trouble. The paratroops who had captured Crete had been so badly mauled in the process that there was no possibility of them moving on to Syria, and no other German forces were available. The Luftwaffe â now depleted in the Mediterranean by the demands of Russia â would mount the occasional air raid, but any fighting on land, if it came to that, would be left to Dentz and his Vichy Army.
As quickly as it had arisen, the German threat in the Levant melted away. If anyone in the Allied High Command had obtained any inkling of this, the sensible thing would have been to call off the whole show. Nobody did. Lavarack and the 7th Division now found themselves in the absurd situation of being ordered to fight a reluctant French colonial army that posed no threat to them, nor to Australian interests, and nor, indeed, to anybody else. But attack they did, in company with Free French
forces loyal to the exiled General Charles de Gaulle. They were joined by a division of the colonial Indian Army, which had even less at stake in the result, and, belatedly, by a British division that turned up at the close of play.
The advance began on the appointed date. Jumbo Wilson had divided his forces into three groups â a foolhardy deployment, although luckily, as it turned out, not a fatal military blunder on this occasion. A more astute commander would have hit hard in one strong, united assault, but there it was. Wilson believed that French resistance would quickly crumble, especially if, according to one dizzy theory doing the rounds, the men could somehow be separated from their officers and given copious amounts of wine.
The Australians were assigned two objectives. The 7th Division's 21st Brigade would move north from Palestine, along Lebanon's coastal road, to take the Vichy headquarters at Beirut. The 25th Brigade would head for an inland airfield. The Indians and the Free French were to march on Damascus, the Syrian capital. At first, the Allies encountered little resistance, but the Vichy forces quickly regrouped and, inflamed by martial pride, began to put up a spirited fight with the Australians at the Litani River, just north of modern Israel. The battle was on.
It was here that the Mediterranean Fleet could provide weight, with bombardment from the sea. On 26 June,
Perth
arrived at the port city of Haifa â then in Palestine, now in Israel â in company with the cruiser HMS
Carlisle
, her big guns ready again for action. There was time that evening to give the crew a run ashore. After the cauldron of Alexandria, the relative calm of Haifa seemed like paradise regained. âAppears to be a nice city,' wrote Brian Sheedy. âMany fine buildings, clean, population mainly Jewish. Best of all: real cow's milk and fresh fruit â including navel oranges. All of these things are unobtainable elsewhere in the Eastern Med.'
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Jim Nelson, not a religious man but conscious of a spiritual side to life after the terrors he had known, attended a church
service at a monastery on Mount Carmel.
On the 28th,
Perth
mounted her first ship-to-shore bombardment. She sailed from Haifa with a flotilla of destroyers to a position off Damour â a town on a coastal hillside some 20 kilometres south of Beirut, where the Australian diggers were locked in heavy combat with the French. It was a textbook exercise in the art of naval gunnery, a pleasant day at sea compared with all they had been through in the months before. Nelson made careful notes:
Our target is Saida, the coastal fort of the Wadi Damour area where the Vichy batteries have our advancing AIF troops held up. The Wadi Damour opens out into the sea through a valley, thickly wooded on the north side and occupied by Vichy batteries and troops. Our troops are on the south side and are being prevented from crossing the valley floor and river by assault craft, the existing bridge having been demolished by the retreating enemy. The AIF has requested naval assistance to silence the batteries and the radio tower about six miles north near Beirut.
The destroyers are close inshore steaming line ahead in a northerly direction and have commenced firing 4-inch salvoes as they file past the target. Explosions are seen in the woods clearly indicating they are well on target. We are cruising a few miles further out and have commenced firing our 6-inch salvos of hundreds of tons of high explosive over the tops of our destroyers. We have an army observation post directing our fire and they advise us that we are well on target also. Together with the destroyers we are now changing our targets and raking the valley searching for concealed targets. The O. P. reports that we are doing fine, with the northern hill virtually demolished.
We have altered course to the north now, with our attention focused on the tower. Our 6-inch turret captains were ordered to âIndependent fire, select your own target, six rounds per turret, commence firing, bring down that radio tower!' The first salvo, the tower came down, magnificent firing.
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It was indeed very good shooting, to the approval of the entire crew. The radio mast crumpled in a most satisfying way, its operators scrambling like ants up the hillside, to rousing cheers from the men on
Perth
's deck. But there was more. This was also a red-letter day in the story of the Australian nation at war, recorded by the journalist Ian Fitchett,
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who was on board
Perth
to report for the official army newspaper in the Middle East,
The AIF News
.
CRUISER PERTH SHELLS VICHY DEFENCES WHILE RAAF COVERS LAND ADVANCE
By Ian G. Fitchett, Official AIF War Correspondent
Haifa, 28 June. This afternoon, for the first time in history, three branches of the Australian services were in co-operated action together.
The cruiser
Perth
, together with British destroyers â one manned by Australians â carried out a bombardment of Vichy troops in the Wadi Damour area. AIF troops faced the enemy here. Overhead circled American fighters of an RAAF squadron.
It was on the eve of
Perth
's second anniversary of commission as an Australian ship. I stood on the
Perth
's after control bridge while her 6-inch guns poured some tons of high explosives onto enemy positions.
Fitchett got one small detail wrong. It was not a British destroyer manned by Australians; it was HMAS
Nizam
, one of the brand-new destroyers loaned to the RAN for the duration of the war, and therefore a properly commissioned Australian ship. The error might be explained by the fact that
Perth
's crew, for a joke, had not warned him they were about to open fire. Deafened by the noise and buffeted by the blast of the first salvo from X-turret, he fell to the deck like a stunned mullet.
But the substance was correct. The 21st Brigade was
fighting ashore.
Perth
and
Nizam
did their stuff by sea. And providing air cover in the clear blue skies above them and strafing the huddled French below were P40 Tomahawk fighters of the RAAF's 3 Squadron. Among the pilots was Flying Officer Robert âBobby' Gibbes,
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a nuggety 25-year-old former salesman who would go on to become one of the most highly decorated Australian fighter aces and survive the war as a wing commander. Another redoubtable warrior there was a young army officer, Lieutenant Roden Cutler, from Manly, in Sydney. A few weeks later, he would defend an exposed outpost, lie wounded and alone for 26 hours under enemy fire, lose a leg and gain the Victoria Cross.
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It was, in every way, a signal occasion for Australian khaki and blue.
For the next fortnight, the routine stayed much the same. There would be a sortie from Haifa north along the Lebanese coast for a bombardment requested by the army ashore. This would be followed by a return to harbour. There were air raids both at sea and in port every so often, some by the Germans and a few by the Vichy French Air Force, but these were now such a commonplace that they were shrugged off. They happened. You fired back with everything you had. Then you returned to whatever you had been doing.
On a couple of occasions, something out of the ordinary caused everyone to sit up and take notice. Once,
Perth
went a little too close inshore near the Litani River. The crew, sunbaking on deck at action stations, were startled to hear the whistle of incoming shells fired at them by French artillery, and Bowyer-Smyth withdrew rapidly out of range. And once, returning from a sweep, they were mistakenly attacked by friendly aircraft, fortunately with no damage done on either side.
But there was also plenty of time for leave ashore in the hot summer weather, and the ship's company made the most of it. Haifa welcomed them with open arms. There were the rare pleasures of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables â a happy relief from the monotony of bully beef and tinned navy rations. You could take a run ashore for swimming and tennis outings
â there was a keenly fought tennis competition with
Nizam
â and trips to the storied sites of the Holy Land. Even in wartime, Roy Norris was an enthusiastic tourist:
Sunday 29 June I visited, in company with a couple of hundred other sailors the town of Nazareth where Christ spent his boyhood. The trip by car or bus, depending of course upon the state of one's pocket, takes about 3/4 to 1 hour and winds in and out, over and round hills skirting the wonderful plains of Armageddon. One passes a veritable kitchen garden of the world here, it seems. The countryside is very reminiscent of Australia â gum trees have been imported to lend itself further to the illusion. The Jewish villages are very clean, contrasting vividly with the squalor of the Bedouin camps which remind one of a troglodyte community, the mud huts so closely resembling caves.
The Jews are making Palestine really worthwhile to live in â mostly they are university degree men applying modern-day science to the job. Bible history comes to life again in the names of the various landmarks, such as the traditional Mount of the Precipitation where the Jews intended to throw Christ to death on the rocks below â¦
Nazareth is just a little Palestinian village with all its holy and historical associations grossly commercialised. Bibles of the cheapest variety are covered with a piece of olive wood and sold at exorbitant prices. Crudely carved camels, crucifixes and pressed flowers are hawked by everyone. We saw the Well of Mary and the Carpenter's Shop where dwelt the Holy Family. If one were deeply religious one's spiritual sense would be deeply hurt. It is just a racket.
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The men loaded themselves up with souvenirs and the gifts they called ârabbits': filigree brooches and jewellery, shell necklaces, lace blouses, carvings of olive wood. Ray Parkin was kept busy painting his watercolours of the ship and the sights they had seen, and selling them to his shipmates â a nice little money
spinner. The buzzes about a return to Australia were getting stronger: someone had seen a signal; a wardroom steward had overheard two officers talking;
Hobart
had reached the Red Sea and Suez. They were convinced now that their deliverance from the Mediterranean was at hand, and with that came both the joy of anticipation and the fear of not making it â emotions common to every warrior far from home. Please, God, don't let me die now. Spare me for just two more weeks, one more week, one more day.
Towards the end of June, they heard the sobering news that HMAS
Waterhen
had been sunk off Sollum on the coast of Egypt. The gallant little destroyer â a relic of the First World War and a stalwart of the Scrap Iron Flotilla â had been holed in her ageing plates below the waterline and brought to a standstill by a near miss from a Stuka. No one was killed, and her crew were taken off by a British destroyer, but the old Chook, as everyone in the navy affectionately knew her, rolled over and went down. She was the first Australian ship to be lost to enemy action in the war. That was a special sadness.
Thankfully, the Syrian campaign was drawing to its muddled end. Damascus fell on 21 June. By 10 July, with the Australian 7th Division closing in on Beirut, General Dentz sued for peace. A forlorn figure, wracked by dengue fever, he was arrested at his villa and taken before General Lavarack, who accepted his surrender and paid him the compliment of a guard of honour as he was driven away again. The battle was over, but it had been a hard fight. The 7th Division lost 416 men killed and more than a thousand wounded, plus a surprising number of men who had taken sick, 350 of them with malaria.
Was it worth it? Almost certainly not. Syria was undoubtedly an Allied victory, but no great strategic advantage had been gained. The result had been almost inevitable from the start, after the Germans had decided they no longer had a substantial interest in the matter. Jumbo Wilson's decision to divide his forces had only prolonged the battle, at the cost of many lives. For political and propaganda reasons, British
censorship of war correspondents' despatches had downplayed the fighting to give the misleading impression that the Vichy Army had put up little resistance, which was a crass insult to the living and the dead of both sides. Only after the war, when memoirs and history were written, was the truth revealed and justice done.