Joining the navy
Joined the navy at seventeen. 11 March 1942.
After about two weeks of training I was appointed to HMAS Castlemaine which now is a museum ship at Williamstown. It's a ship that survived and was taken over by a very interested group.
They love me because the occasions I've gone down there, I'm the only survivor of the original crew.
Drafted to HMAS Napier
I had a good job I'd come up a little bit when I felt sick. I went to the sick berth attendant who sent me ashore to hospital with chicken pox. Could you imagine? I was stuck there and when I came back to join my ship it had gone.
The next ship I went to, I went to another corvette. Bunbury, HMAS Bunbury We did a stint north in that and then out of the blue, somehow, I knew what happened, I got a draft to go south all the way from the north of New Guinea to cover a ship that was undergoing refit at Williamstown, the destroyer Napier.
I'd gone from corvette which was the lowest sort of warship to a crack destroyer and from there we did a stint off India and Ceylon bound at Trincomalee which was north of Ceylon, Sri Lanka.
Then we went through the Burma campaign successfully carrying troops and then supporting with our gunships, ship's guns. That was continued successfully, then we made a hurried trip home to make a few alterations to the ship and then joined up with the British Pacific Fleet which was operating off the coast of Japan.
Slow convoy work
We were based on Darwin and escorting ships across the Arufua Sea and also doing supply runs to places along the coast such as Milingimbi and Wyndham and a few other places.
And slow 5 knot convoys, oh, you see they were using old supply ships that were outdated. They'd belonged to previous…and their speed was about 5 knots. On one occasion one of the ships was bombed by a Japanese plane and our captain was trying to speed them up.
I can remember Castlemaine turning and coming up very slowly alongside. The James Cook was this old coal burning slow thing and I could see the great big screw in the water turning like that and as we came up alongside her the bridge captain, Captain O'Sullivan, called out "What is your best speed Mister?"
The answer came back, "Five knots. We're doing it". That's what it was like backwards and forwards across the Arufua Sea.
Loss of HMAS Armidale
We were also with that sad supply job that sank the Armidale. We were in company with her. She was to deliver troops and goods and we were to pick up 70 refugees. We managed to get our refugees, I won't go into that story other than the fact that we got them on board, but we'd been chased by the Japanese all the way and we were miles away and when we got to the place, the bay where we were to meet and unload, there was no sign of anything. We then turned to come back to Australia.
The Armidale was unable to finish her job or do her job, but we needed to get away. About mid-morning - and we'd been attacked by Japanese planes – a signal came from Darwin for the Armidale to turn around and go back and deliver their job. No hope.
A signal came through at one stage "You are only experiencing second rate warfare". By that time, the Armidale was on the bottom…Corvettes should never have been used, 10 knot and 12 knot ships, to go up unarmed, virtually unarmed because the Japanese planes always came from astern to bomb the ships and their guns were on the foc's'le. That's not much good.
Darwin bombing aftermath
Darwin was a mess. There was not a single undamaged building in the place. It was just a mess. We tied up to the remains of the long pier and the only thing linking the two broken halves of it was a railway line which was still there, the rest of it was broken away with the Neptune, a 10,000-ton ship lying on its side alongside the wharf where it had been bombed but I didn't experience the initial bombing of Darwin but we did, every time it was a moonlight night the Jap planes would come over to do some bombing, mainly to the airport. There was nothing left in the harbour. The harbour was left fairly untouched but the first bombing, of course, that was disastrous.
Finding a friend
When I joined the Castlemaine, I joined it on my own and that was the pattern that was set for every ship I was sent to. Always sent to go on my own and not knowing anyone in this case and I was a boy, of course, scared, never been to sea, didn't know a thing but I went aboard this ship and I found there was no locker.
There were more crew members than lockers so as it is, we had a kit bag, just an ordinary bag and the only stowing place for that was in the hammock bins so it had to stay in the hammock bins, could only be accessed just after 10 o'clock at night. It was hopeless and couldn't even have a toothbrush ‘cause if you left anything out it was immediately taken, and it was put into the scran bag. If you talk to your father, he'll know what a scran bag was.
There was one seasoned sailor who'd been in the navy since the beginning of the war and he'd served on the flagship Australia, but he was drafted off the flagship to the Castlemaine. Unusual it was for a seasoned seaman to have anything to do with a useless recruit.
He offered me a corner of his locker for the little bit of stuff for shaving gear, combs, toothbrush and so on and that started a, now he was an orphan and he didn't have anything ashore. All his worldly possessions were in that locker and yet he allowed me a corner of it, and I developed a friendship and he went to a different ship and so did I but we met up through the war.
Supply runs in Northern Australia
Crew members would unload, for instance, drums of food and fuel were tied together with long string and pulled ashore by a motorboat as far as you could go and then, you know what the tide situation was in Northern Australia, huge variation.
Then at low tide those wretched petrol drums had to be rolled through the mud till they got to high ground. At the time, part of the time, I was captain of the motorboat. That was a good job, you got away from the ship a bit. Our motorboat was used in pulling these rafts and also, we also carried landing boats, things that could sort of, semi-collapsible things and they were loaded with various goods and towed as far as they could go and then the contents had to be lugged. Usually they were taken in at high tide so you could get to the sand without all the mud.
Exchanging rags
The longer a ship served at sea, the food ran out. Now, until we got some refrigeration in the Castlemaine, we had tinned butter. That was okay until you opened it. It was liquid. Could you try that? Always …short of something. If you had enough tea there'd be no sugar to go with it. If you had plenty of sugar it was because you'd run out of tea.
Clothing was the same situation. People, it might have changed, the army and the air force were supplied with clothing and when a shirt or shorts wore out and developed a hole they were passed in for a new pair. Not the navy. In the navy the sailors had to supply their own. They could buy them from stores ashore where they had them and from big ships, which carried stores but you could never, small ships could never get supplies and your clothing wore out, particularly Darwin.
I can remember on one occasion the engine room and boiler room people needed cleaning rags and they would get ex-army and ex-air force torn clothing, would come ashore in a wool bale, right, and they would have plentiful supply. I can remember one bale coming on board and dumped on the after deck of the Castlemaine and the sailors descended on it like crows around a carcass.
To the dismay of the engine room and boiler room staff, the sailors got in pulling this stuff. A pair of shorts that needed stitching, a shirt with half a sleeve. That was okay for a sailor who badly needed a pair of shorts….
As it was, I got a bit of stuff out of it but I wasn't too badly off but I watched some of the sailors and they'd get something and say "Oh, this might do?" and they'd retire out behind the crowd, drop off the shorts, drop off the ragged ones, put on these replacement ones, throw their dirty old ones back in the wool bag.
So you reckon the engine room staff got back what they were supposed to, so a good exchange. That gives you some idea of the supply conditions and the food wasn't much different. It was ordinary all the way along.
A helping hand
I was friendly with a WRAN when I was in Flinders Naval Depot for a course. She was a relative of mine and I met her two or three times. I kept telling her I was sick of these 10 knot convoy leads, corvettes, they were the lowest form of naval power.
I kept telling her I wanted to go to a destroyer. Months later, as I explained before, I received that change from the north of New Guinea all the way down to Victoria to join up with a destroyer.
When I met up with her again, I said to her, she worked in the drafting office, I said, "Did you have anything to do with that draft of me from New Guinea aboard the Napier?"
No comment except "You wanted to go to a destroyer, didn't you?"
Attached to the British Pacific Fleet
That was an interesting time. We met up with weather in the typhoon period. I loved rough weather. It felt like the ship was living and I was living too even though it was dangerous.
It had to be very bad weather, you were kept off the main deck because you could be swept overboard and on one occasion, I nearly was but that was on the way home.
The job was completed and we came home escorting the aircraft carrier Formidable which was joining the British fleet and the big wigs didn't want N class destroyers because they were short range, designed for around England but because of their war record and their captain, Captain Buchanan, who was captain of the flotilla, we got sent up north with the British Pacific Fleet. It was the most powerful fleet that England had put to sea.
Kamikaze attack on HMS Formidable
Then for the next few months we operated off the coast of Japan or the home islands of Japan and putting up with kamikazes and I'll you a photograph of the Formidable after she'd had a rather bad attack from kamikazes.
The ship was 800 feet long and I watched with absolute amazement as the ship virtually exploded with flames, flames 100 feet high for the whole 800-foot length of the ship and she turned into the wind to keep the flames away from the lower and all you could see was black smoke which after a few minutes that seemed to mostly disappear.
Then we could watch cranes dumping the planes. Kamikaze planes had come down and ignited all the planes on the flight deck in one monstrous bonfire, but the ships had some of the planes in the air and they had nowhere to go, did they? Within half an hour they had cleared all the rubbish off the flight deck, and they were loading their aircraft. It was just amazing.
The Fleet Train
The fleet was ringed with 24 destroyers of which two of them were N class destroyers, the Nizam and the Napier and the other N class destroyers plus others were with the Fleet Train which was a system devised by the Americans to cover the distances because they had hospital ships, fuel ships, supply ships, all hundreds of miles out into the ocean and surrounded by its own fleet.
When the actual fleet needed provision we moved out towards and met up with the fleet train and took on supplies and an ingenious method of shifting people from ship to ship if necessary, never stopping. That last cruise was 49 days in which time the engine didn't stop even with the church service, the thanksgiving service, which was put on board the Napier, it was still travelling.
Tokyo Bay
There was one big Japanese battleship right in the middle of Tokyo Bay. Unbelievable. On close inspection it was a burnt out, no crew left aboard, battleship, the only one that was still afloat, and it was only afloat because they'd rammed it on to a sand bank before it sunk. So I looked at the ships.
It was hopeless trying to make a count of them. They were everywhere. A few days later I got the official record because I thought there must have been 300 or so ships. There were 370 warships in Tokyo Bay.
Surrender in Tokyo Bay
Captain Buchanan with part of the ship's crew went ahead to Yokosuka Navy Base which was part of Tokyo Bay and he was given the job of representing the combined British and Australian forces and he took surrender of the base. After that we moved our ship out and anchored about a 100-metres away from the battleship Missouri and we watched the signing of the peace which is a long-drawn-out process.
I got sick of watching it. It was rather boring. It was quite interesting and a point of discussion among the ship's crew that was we knew the big wigs from Canberra wanted desperately to get up there and they would take the case of the surrender but they were too far away, they didn't have aircraft to fly the distance. They did have the repaired cruiser Hobart and they came rushing up in the Hobart, but they were too late. Captain Buchanan had done the job.
The signing of the Instrument of Surrender
We moved out and anchored a few days before the signing of the peace. It might have been a couple of days, I don't know. As I say, we were fortunate enough to anchor within a short distance to see all the goings on on the battleship Missouri but after a while, the toing and froing of every representative of every nation including Russia, every nation that could had their representative there, the big wheelers and dealers making a name for themselves, I wasn't very interested in that. It was interesting.
See, there were 2,000 crew members on the Missouri, and they were sitting on the great guns. How they sat there for hours straddling those guns, I don't know. I lost interest. You couldn't hear what was going on, of course, but you could see every so often some big wig would walk up to the table where they sign, sign the thing, then walk away again with a great show of pomp and so on.
Living in a ship
Take a 24 hour or a week or a month. Five per cent was danger, five per cent was interesting, five more per cent was day and night watches. As you know, with your father being in the navy, that you had the night watch, the middle watch, the morning watch, and so on and that went round and round the clock.
You never wound the watches, so a sailor developed an ability to go to sleep on the ordinary steel deck because it was too hot to sling a hammock. Used to sleep on tables or the floor on the deck underneath those tables as I explained before or started to explain, we lived over the oil tanks.
Just forward of it was the engine room, boiler room, right just through a thin bulkhead just a little bit further down below was the ship's magazines which could have blown to pieces and just behind us was the main engine room that propelled the ship, right, so you were living in, as I explained to you, you were living in batteries!
It was mostly boredom. You read everything you could. Fortunately, I didn't, in any of the ships I served in, experience anywhere where there was upheaval and fighting. If there was any I wasn't aware of it. We had to respect one another but lived very quietly. For example you did not admit to having a birthday or anything foolish like that and I had my 18th and 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd birthdays in the navy and I'm always amused at how much fuss people put on every birthday but I never experienced any. And I'm no worse off for it.
Overcrowded conditions
The problem was the ships were designed before World War Two. They were designed when there was virtually no anti-aircraft armament, machine guns and every time an extra gun or whatever was put on the ship it required extra sailors. Radar came into view and it was put on ships.
That required extra servicemen and the normal peace complement for those ships was a 180 men, because we were flotilla leader, they carried more people as part of the deal.
Roast meat and vegetables
Now, in the Napier, the galley, the kitchen, was about the size of, no it'd be less than in size than that. It was a great big oil fuelled range that they started cooking the roast early, early in the morning for lunchtime and as soon as the meat was burnt on the outside, it was taken out and put in a hot locker and another lot put in the stove because that stove was preparing food for nearly 300 men, right, conditions weren't too good.
At the back of this big stove there was a big water tank and that was used for receptacle, heating up the vegetable tins. So, the tinned vegetables were hung in there in string bags in the hot water and when they were taken out and opened up, they had hot vegetables. We also had dehydrated potatoes and that was the start of dehydration of that sort of food and it tasted like nothing on earth. It sure didn't taste like potatoes. And back to the Napier, you got your supply of meat.
You got your supply, couple of cans of vegetables. You took them back to the mess deck and if you were on duty you put on the food and you cut the roast. The first two slices were burnt. The next two slices or so were alright. The next ones or the rest of it was raw because they had to cook it in such a short time. The cooks did a marvellous job.
A lonely life
I had a fairly lonely life in the navy because I had a resistance to alcohol in as much as in hot weather, I could take a glass of beer and that's fantastic, right, I couldn't drink a second one. It was like drinking lemonade. I could no more drink alcohol than I could lemonade or water with the result that I usually went ashore by myself because if I went ashore with a group of shipmates they'd want to stay in a hotel, drink there until it was time to go back to the ship again because you've got to understand the conditions that sailors lived under, they wanted a bit of release, a bit of freedom.
Occasionally in a place like Melbourne one of the crew members would say, "Are you going ashore tonight Andy?" "Yes" "Well, can I come ashore with you?"
"Sure as long as you don't expect me to get stuck in a hotel somewhere because I won't go"
"No, no. I met a lovely girl and I want to meet her about 8 o'clock and don't want her to think that I've been drinking".
So I kept a few blokes sober. But it was a lonely time because they'd go ashore, and they'd release all that pent-up energy in the nearest hotel where I didn't have any use for that.
Reflections on a life at sea
It was an experience that I was very glad to get but it's not one I would try and force on someone else. I experienced the service in the navy in every condition you could imagine because we lost two sailors in Bass Strait, spilled overboard…
We found that the sea was as pleasant as a lake when something thrown over the side would cause ripples along. We also experienced when the ships bows would go under the sea in fierce weather and the spray would go over, right over the ship and crust the mast in salt. The sea taught me a lot of things. It taught me the natural curve of the earth. That was interesting.
I tried to be interested in everything that was going on to learn but as I said, I was very grateful to see other places and learn how other people live and even though the five years was largely boredom I experienced a lot and sailed on ships under dangerous conditions when you went down in the mess deck, when you were on duty and you lay down on that steel deck, on top of the oil tanks, next door to the magazine and the steam in the engine and boiler room and you went to sleep accepting the fact that your shipmates on duty would be watchful and be prepared to help you survive and in all that time, as I said to you before, I never experienced any fighting or any arguments because they were very private. You had to be private and you had your own particular friends because when this fellow I spoke about who offered me a corner of his locker, we'd meet up at every opportunity when our ships were in the same place.
There wasn't many occasions but then you were free to talk about your own personal feelings but otherwise you kept it to yourself. So it was a case of lots of your thoughts and ideas being compressed inside because you had to live with these people in very very tight conditions. You'd have to experience it but that was what it was like. When we, on the Burma campaign, we'd pick up 400 British soldiers with all their equipment and they would be shoved in various parts of the ship.
We would have to leave our mess decks and live on the ship, not in the ship. I've always referred to; a true sailor refers to living in a ship. When people say what was it like living on board a ship, we didn't live on the ship. You don't live on houses, do you? You live in a ship. Sometimes there's such a variation and you would have something of it and that is in, a way of life at sea is totally different to a way of life on land.
It always has been and it always will be and that needs to be accepted if the two come together. Like Rudyard Kipling wrote when he said, he stated "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet".
