Cruiser (44 page)

On Friday 5 December, Curtin abruptly cancelled his plans to return to Canberra by train and retired to his room at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Melbourne. There, in his shabby suite with its potted palms and aspidistras, the air blue with cigarette smoke, he spent the weekend awaiting developments. The storm he had long feared was about to engulf him and the nation. And the world.

The Emperor Hirohito maintained a court protocol around the ancient Chrysanthemum Throne so stiff that it verged on the catatonic. To the ministers, generals and admirals summoned to grovel before him in audience at the Kyuden – his Tokyo palace – he spoke not a word. He gave no sign that he had even seen them. Clad in a black silk tail coat and striped trousers, the godly descendant of the sun itself stared impassively ahead from a raised dais as the president of his privy council barked questions and instructions. There was no debate. The most powerful figures in Japan sat immobile at a long table, stated their positions, parroted their answers and lapsed into silence again to await the imperial decision – if, indeed, there was one.

Such a conference was held at the palace on 16 September 1941. The Cabinet had prepared the ground. Negotiations were continuing with the United States, but the Americans were making impossibly insulting demands. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was insisting that Japan must abandon the Axis pact with Germany and that Italy should withdraw its forces from China and Indochina and call a halt to Nanshinron. Japan could never accept such humiliation. Yet she was being bled dry by the embargo imposed by President Roosevelt back in July. There was little likelihood of diplomacy succeeding. War with the United States was therefore almost certain, as the Cabinet briefing paper argued:

At the end of the presentation, to the amazement of the grandees assembled before him, Hirohito flung off centuries of imperial tradition. He spoke. It was not much, just two lines of a poem composed by his Meiji grandfather:

Such piercing insight. What exalted moral tone. There were gasps of wonder. Everyone knew immediately the import of this divine wisdom. Or thought they knew. The moderates, so-called, believed their emperor's words to mean that war was probable but that diplomacy should continue. The militarists took it that there should be a fig leaf of diplomacy while the Great East Asia War was whipped along. Audience over, everyone scraped out of the antechamber and Hirohito returned to his leisurely study of aquatic organisms. Japanese politics threw itself into another of its convulsive fits of rumour, revolt and assassination plots. In mid-October, Prince Konoye resigned the prime ministership and was replaced by the Army Minister, General Hideki Tojo – one of the hotheads who had rampaged through China. Critical mass was now very close.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Japanese plan for war was a work of military genius. That it was duplicitous at its
outset, barbarous in its execution and ultimately a lunatic act of national suicide does not detract from its audacity and its theatrical grandeur. Its object was to seize, in months, the sort of sprawling empire the European powers had built over painstaking centuries. It envisaged no less than the conquest of the entire western Pacific, in separate but synchronised hammer blows that would cripple the United States Navy, rout the British and Dutch from their colonial domains in South East Asia, and yoke almost half the world's peoples to the economic engine of Greater Nippon. The Home Islands would then prosper behind a vast land and sea frontier.

In an age before computers, the logistical challenge alone was breathtaking. The festering rivalry between the army and navy, and their respective air arms, would have to be submerged for the common good. Some two million soldiers, sailors and airmen were to be trained and equipped and marshalled into position. Thousands of warships, aircraft and land vehicles had to be fuelled, ammunitioned and deployed to strike, then maintained and repaired afterwards. There had to be military headquarters, military bases, military airfields, military hospitals, military post offices, military brothels. Intelligence was gathered from Hawaii to Hong Kong, New Guinea to Singapore, Java to Thailand; Japanese spies posing as waiters, barbers, taxi drivers, tourists, fed information back to Tokyo. Orders were drawn up with scrupulous attention to detail, to be transmitted across two hemispheres and a dozen different time zones. And there had to be the utmost secrecy, to catch the enemy off guard.

The paradox that was Hirohito's Japan, in all its seething contradictions, was personified in one of its most familiar public figures. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, from a minor samurai family, was the negotiator who had walked out of the London naval conference in 1936 and thrown himself into convincing the Imperial Navy that air power was the future of war at sea. A diminutive 1.6 metres tall, but barrel-chested with it, he had fought the Russians as a young ensign at Tsushima in
1905, where he had lost two fingers to a stray piece of shrapnel. He was a chronic gambler, fond of Scotch whisky and geisha girls. By 1941, 57 years old, he was Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, and a favourite of the Emperor's, to whom he was unswervingly devoted.

Yamamoto was the strategist who created Operation Z, the plan to smash the US Navy by a surprise air attack on its Pacific base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He had refined its details over long months, with the assistance of a brilliant young naval flyer, Commander Minoru Genda. But therein lay his personal turmoil. He was an opponent of the Axis pact, so outspoken that he had been posted to the fleet to remove him from the reach of fanatics in the army who wanted him murdered. And although he believed passionately in Japan's pre-eminence among nations, he did not think that could be realised by war with the United States. As a young officer, he had studied at Harvard and had twice served as a naval attaché at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, which had left him fluent in English, with an understanding of the world far beyond the insular prejudices of most of his countrymen. Aware of American industrial might and the character of the American people, Yamamoto feared that war with the arsenal of democracy across the Pacific would end only in disaster for Japan. But he recognised also that he was powerless to stop his country's headlong rush to the precipice, and would therefore do his duty to his nation and Emperor. ‘If I am told to fight regardless of the consequences, I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year,' he told Prince Konoye in 1940. ‘But I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years …I hope you will endeavour to avoid an American–Japanese war.'
²

The September imperial conference left him no choice. The sword of the samurai was to be unsheathed. On 5 November, Yamamoto activated Combined Fleet Top Secret Operation Order No. 1, the plan for the Imperial Japanese Navy's descent upon the Pacific and South East Asia. Two weeks later, the
Pearl Harbor Carrier Strike Force – the Kido Butai – began to assemble at a remote bay in the snowy Kurile Islands, 1600 kilometres north-east of Tokyo.

Like actors waiting for the curtain call, other fleets and squadrons also took their places for the assault on the Philippines and the American islands of Wake, Midway and Guam. At Hainan Island, off the southernmost tip of China, the Malaya Invasion Force of seven cruisers and 13 destroyers gathered around a convoy of 19 transport ships, whose holds and decks were jam-packed with some 26,000 soldiers. This would be the sword pointed at the British and Dutch colonial Empires and, ultimately, towards Australia. In Indochina, squadron upon squadron of land-based reconnaissance, fighter and bomber aircraft stood ready. And in China itself, the army prepared to roll into the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

Yamamoto had set the time and date for X-Day, when war would begin. West of the International Dateline, which cleaved the Pacific, it would be Monday 8 December. East of the line, in Hawaii, it would be early Sunday morning, 7 December. There would be a full moon to help the carriers launch their aircraft before dawn. Spies had reported that the US Pacific Fleet spent its weekends relaxing in Pearl: American admirals and captains enjoyed their Sunday routine of morning church, golf and lunch at the officers' clubs.

In the Kuriles, Wednesday 26 November brought a clear dawn and the promise of a cold but sunny day. There had been a big sake party and stirring speeches in the ships of the Kido Butai the night before. Now, a string of signal flags broke out on the flagship, the carrier
Akagi
(
Red Castle
). The silence of the bay was broken by the rumble of anchor chains through hawse-pipes as the ships weighed for sea.
Akagi
led out, with the carriers
Kaga
(
Increased Joy
),
Soryu
(
Green Dragon
),
Hiryu
(
Flying Dragon
),
Zuikaku
(
Happy Crane
) and
Shokaku
(
Soaring Crane
) forming two columns, flanked by their escorts of two battleships, two cruisers and a screen of destroyers. There were 360 strike aircraft aboard these six carriers – fighters, high-level bombers,
dive-bombers and torpedo bombers – their crews inspired by the vision of the glory they would attain in the name of the Emperor. A light mist began to form as the Kido Butai bent to the open sea to begin its long journey first east then south-east across the Pacific, through gathering fog, purple storms and high ocean rollers. There was one last proviso. If, by some miracle in the next few days, the negotiations under way between Tokyo and Washington produced a result satisfactory to Japan, the entire enterprise would be called off and the fleets and men returned to their bases. Yamamoto hoped for that miracle but knew that it would not happen.

Many of the new faces joining
Perth
hailed from Western Australia. The navy had decided it would help morale if men were posted to ships named for their state capital cities or home towns. Fred Skeels was 19 when he boarded the ship in Sydney in October. He and his mate Wally Johnston had mucked around together at Inglewood Primary School in suburban Perth. They shared the same birthday. Now – happy coincidence – they found themselves together again in
Perth
's mess decks.

Fred's memoirs,
Java Rabble
, paint a picture of a blissful childhood. Inglewood was a new suburb poking tentative fingers into the bush. Home was a brick cottage, where Fred and his two sisters slept out on the verandah – food for the mozzies in summer – protected by a canvas blind and a sheet of asbestos when the weather turned cold. There were bushwalks with his father, Horry, around what is now the sprawling Morley Shopping Centre, gathering spider orchids and kangaroo paws to take home to his mother, Dot. Horry was lucky to keep his job as a manager at Boan's Department Store during the Depression, so there was always something to eat on the table, and out in the backyard there was room for a tennis court. In summer, the family would go on fishing trips to
the beach at Safety Bay in Rockingham, where the kids would splash along the shoreline, or out to nearby Penguin Island, squishing stranded jellyfish between their bare toes.

Fred wasn't too big on school. He and Wally once got six of the best for wagging classes to caddy at a nearby golf course. At 13, Fred left the classroom forever, got a couple of jobs running messages and then worked as an office boy with a car dealer. But a military life had always attracted him. At 16, he joined an army militia battalion as a cadet. In 1941, when he turned 18, he met a mate who'd enlisted in the navy and who talked him into doing the same thing. It was a big decision. Young Skeels was in love. Bonnie Pettit was the sister of a good friend, about 16 months younger than Fred, working as an apprentice tailor:

Dates were a show at Her Majesty's Theatre in Perth or dancing at the Maylands Town Hall on a Friday or Saturday night. The day before Fred left to go east for training at the Flinders Naval Depot, he took Bonnie for a walk in King's Park and gave her a heart-shaped gold locket with a naval emblem engraved on it. No commitments, but they promised to write. Now, in
Perth
, Ordinary Seaman Fred Skeels, strong and wiry, was assigned as a loader on the S1 4-inch, the first of the twin-barrelled anti-aircraft mountings on the ship's starboard side.