Cruiser (51 page)

Their next assignment was to sail on 13 February with a convoy of tankers to the port of Oosthaven (now modern Panjang) in southern Sumatra, where they would take on oil from the refineries at Palembang. This was not good. The 13th was a Friday, and sailors are a superstitious lot. To put to sea on a Black Friday would be courting disaster, and, as if that wasn't enough, there was another worry to contend with:
Perth
now had two chaplains. Her original padre, Ron Bevington, had been joined by the Reverend Keith Mathieson, a Methodist from Victoria, who had turned up to take passage to Batavia, where he was to transfer to
Hobart
. Two God-botherers in a ship was a very bad omen indeed. The gloom deepened. In a moment of solitude on that Black Friday, Reg Whiting wrote a longing letter to his wife, Allie, back in Sydney, in his neat copperplate hand. The strain was beginning to prey upon him. He had applied for a transfer out of the ship, but it seemed not to be happening:

It was the last letter Allie would ever get from him. Decades later, when he found the faded notepaper in his mother's old red cedar box, Brendan Whiting came to believe that his father
had knowingly written a final farewell. Perhaps there had been some premonition. Reg, like so many of his shipmates, like Hec Waller himself, was about to leave Australian shores for the final time.

But not on Black Friday. Aware of the crew's disquiet, the Captain contrived to delay their departure until after midnight. The lines were cast off when Saturday the 14th was just 30 minutes old. A few more bodies had joined at the last minute, including Lieutenant-Commander Philipp ‘Polo' Owen, an old friend of Waller who was also taking passage, like Mathieson, to meet up with
Hobart
.

Perth
found her tankers off Cape Leeuwin the next day and, with the old cruiser
Adelaide
in company, began the slow haul towards Sumatra. Then they heard on the radio that Singapore had fallen and with that the dithering descended into dark farce. Everybody was making decisions, nobody was making decisions. The Palembang refineries had also been taken by the Japanese. There would be no oil for the tankers in Oosthaven, so again
Perth
was ordered back to Fremantle to refuel before heading north once more, for a third time, with a regrouped convoy.

And this was on the back of perhaps the worst news of all. On 19 January, the carriers of Admiral Yamamoto's Kido Butai had penetrated south into the Timor Sea and bombed Darwin. Eight ships in the port were sunk – including the American destroyer USS
Peary
– many more were damaged and an estimated 243 people were killed. Darwin, in those days little more than a ramshackle tropical outpost, was devastated, a tableau of smoking rubble, sunken and burning ships, and charred bodies floating in the harbour. There was panic and looting and cowardice. Anxious to minimise the psychological damage, the Curtin government dishonestly claimed that only 17 people had been killed, but it could not conceal the horrifying truth: that at last the war had arrived on Australian soil.

At his ABDACOM headquarters outside Bandung – a pleasant hilltop town in Java some five hours' drive to the south-east of Batavia – Archibald Wavell was considering his options. The Dutch, still resentful that they were not in command, constantly urged him to fight to the last. A similar stirring message had arrived from the American and British chiefs in Washington:

But Wavell was by now a past master at playing a losing hand, and he realised that yet again he had been dealt one. ABDA was plainly disintegrating before his eyes. Its naval command, ABDAFLOAT, had fought some hapless battles in the seas surrounding Java – dispiriting affairs that had seen ships and men lost but had done nothing to stem the Japanese thrust. The ABDAFLOAT Commander, Admiral Thomas C. Hart of the United States Navy, quit his post on 16 February, ostensibly for health reasons but in fact because Washington did not want a high-ranking American officer seen to preside over yet another major defeat.
²⁸
Wavell's resources in the air were a few struggling squadrons of bombers and reconnaissance planes, with no fighter aircraft to speak of. His ground forces, apart from a handful of British and Australian troops, consisted largely of the KNIL, the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, commanded by a resolute Dutch officer, Lieutenant-General Hein Ter Poorten, but made up of Indonesian conscripts with no love for their colonial overlords. Batavia and its port of Tanjung Priok, and the naval base at Surabaya, were being bombed virtually around the clock. Wavell recognised that the party was over. On 21 February, he cabled Churchill to tell him so:

By this time, Churchill had also decided to abandon Java and the Dutch. His restless energies had turned to Burma, the last bulwark between the expanding Japanese Empire and the jewel in the British imperial crown, India. Burma would be saved, he thought, by diverting the Australian Army's 7th Division, now on its way home from the Middle East, to the Burmese capital, Rangoon. This was a ludicrous proposition. Most of the division's heavy stores had been loaded in separate ships. The Australians would have arrived with little more than rifles and their officers' pistols to confront the IJA. Politically and, indeed, emotionally, Australians wanted their diggers back to defend the homeland, not floundering around in yet another distant foreign expedition. In an exchange of cables with John Curtin, Churchill attempted first some honeyed blandishments and then the mailed fist:

Curtin resolutely stood his ground and Churchill had to back down. The 7th Division, or most of it, returned to Australia. But the British Prime Minister had now lost interest in holding what everyone had once so boldly referred to as ‘the Malay Barrier' protecting Australia's northern approaches, and he gave Wavell permission to quit. ABDA collapsed. Tasting yet again the ashes of failure, Wavell flew back to India on 25 February.

‘Stand to the dawn!' The familiar pipe marked the beginning of each new day for
Perth
as she continued north with her convoy, the sun rising on her starboard quarter, the weather growing ever more close and hot. If it was uncomfortable for the men at action stations above decks in their protective anti-flash clothing and steel helmets, it was far worse for those in the engine spaces and boiler rooms, where temperatures went well over 120 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. The ship's veterans, such as Commander Gray or Jack Lewis, took it in their stride, but for the younger stokers just joined it was hard labour in a blast furnace. Drenched in sweat, bodies quivering, they vomited or collapsed from sheer exhaustion, to be revived with a bucket of water.

After a quick breakfast for Jock McDonough and the aircrew, the Pusser's Duck roared off the catapult to scan the sea and sky ahead. They did it again in the evening, at the start of the second dog watch. These were dangerous waters now, and Hec Waller was taking no chances. ‘We shoot first and ask questions afterwards,' he told his officers.
³¹
A small island trader that appeared on the western horizon was startled to hear a 6-inch shell whistling across its bows when it failed to identify itself quickly enough.

To people who knew him well, Waller's mood seemed to have changed. He seemed a little tired, preoccupied, which concerned Polo Owen:

Then the game changed again, with more dithering on high. On 21 February, the very day that Wavell was conceding defeat to Churchill, the Naval Board again ordered Waller to reverse course and return to Fremantle. Hardly had that message been decoded when yet another signal arrived, instructing
Perth
to press on once more for Tanjung Priok, leaving the convoy to make its own way home. The confusion was infuriating, but at least they could now get a move on. The Captain rang down for a much more gratifying 28 knots.

The order to proceed to Priok came from John Collins, who had sunk the
Colleoni
in 1940 and who now, with a broad gold stripe on his sleeve, was Commodore Commanding China Force. In the tangled mess of ABDA, it went without saying that China Force had nothing to do with China. The name was a relic of better days. Collins was based at Batavia, in charge of a motley collection of British and Australian cruisers and destroyers covering the chaotic exodus from Singapore and protecting the seas off the western end of Java. Some controversy still surrounds his summons to
Perth
. With Wavell's cable to Churchill in mind – ‘Anything put into Java now can do little to prolong struggle; it is more a question of what you choose to save' – historians have asked, and rightly, why the ship was despatched to prop up a lost cause.