The declaration of war
I recall my father coming in and waking me up and saying that Australia was at war. War had been declared against Germany. My life at that stage, I was just sixteen, so I think war was a distant thought at that stage in light of the sixteen-year-old and yes it was something that happened.
We knew something of the background to it, but I'd have to say at that age I didn't feel that we had an involvement. It wasn't until later that that sense of involvement developed through to the stage that I decided I would enlist.
Family attitudes to the war
My mother particularly was opposed to it. I think having spent all those years in Scotland during the First World War she rather thought war in the finish was futile, cost the country the cream of its youth which undoubtedly it did.
My father was less so antagonistic towards it even though the privations that he had experienced during the war and there were many of them although he never talked much about them and it wasn't until I turned eighteen and became aware of what was taking place, the loss of the Hood, the epic role of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, those things seemed to capture the public's attention and mine with it. I then started, at that stage, to have a greater interest in what was taking place in the war.
Joining the navy
I finished up in the navy by default. I'd always been keen to join the air force so when I turned eighteen my offsider and I went off down to the recruiting office in Creek Street. In those days that was the air force recruiting office. He was accepted but I was declined. They rejected me. When I was a young fellow, I had an operation on my right foot that left it badly scared and I lost some bone. They said "No". They couldn't take me into the air force with that sort of a wound. I was a bit upset by that.
The offsider I went with to enlist with, he finished up as a navigator and had a great record of service in the Pacific area. Anyway, thinking on my rejection, I'd heard that the navy was less stringent so off I went to the recruiting office in Alice Street and medicals and what have you, they decided that yes, I would be accepted by the navy in their communications branch and so by the early part of December 1939 I had enlisted in the navy against my mother's wishes I might say, she didn't like the sea.
So I spent the next four and a half years approximately in the navy. Before actually going into the navy, after I had enlisted in the navy, I got a call up from the Citizens Municipal [sic] Forces and I went down to the recruiting establishment and explained the position, I was awaiting a call up from the navy. They said "That doesn't matter. You've got your call up and you're heading for the army."
So I was in the army for approximately 31 days I think it was and in that 31-day period my call up actually came from the navy and my mother, in her reasoning, thought "What a wonderful opportunity this is. I'll be able to go down to the Navy office and say to them 'My son Jimmy has got a call up from the army, so you won't want him any longer in the navy'."
The navy said "Just let me have that notice, would you? We'll look after that from here." And I think within 48 hours I was out of the army and headed for the navy and with no regrets I might say.
Being a signalman
We were what you would call lay signalmen with the emphasis on cypher coding with all messages in code to ships in code. We had to decode to and from the ship any message that was coded was put into straight English for distribution amongst those who had to get ... and we had cypher books that set out the cypher and the method for converting written English into cypher code, so that was part of our work and another part of our work was helping signalmen doing their particular job, getting flags in order, keeping their records up to date and about halfway through our service on Ipswich we were trained in trying to track the movement of submarines from information that we were given by the ASDIC people.
They would report movements and directions and the courses of the ships. This was an early experiment and we were taught on reports we would get from ASDIC to get, from those items I mentioned, a possible track that the submarines being detected by the ASDIC, we would give an approximate course and an approximate speed. We had some instances where we had to use that.
I don't know that I could really say they were accurate. It was only a program in its infancy, and I think that it had to be streamlined to be better effective. There were other duties that we had to perform in the framework of the signal branch of the navy but in the main they were things we did. We had a very close relationship with the wireless people and the radio telegraphists on the ship and we had four of them and also a very good relationship with the signal crew and we had four of them, so that's the four radio telegraphists, the four signalmen, and the two coders.
We were in our mess deck towards the front of the ship and almost on the waterline. We did have more people come into our mess deck, and I know I am digressing here a little bit, and people who controlled our radar, we got four people to control that and we also had specialists in the ASDIC, submarine detection, and they came into our mess deck as well, so it was one crowded space we had which was probably designed for about ten. It must have accommodated 13 or 14 and that was small for ten.
The Sicily landing
The biggest involvement we had was the landing at Sicily. Our spot was to land at the South West point of Sicily and having done what our job was there, we were to go back and bring more ships, which we did.
It was often quipped that we were, our skipper was in charge of this particular flotilla and we had to sweep a channel from five miles out to sea to the beachhead for ships and the like, to get as close as they could to shore, so it was said that we were actually leading the landing at Sicily.
The whole period there we were bombed, lots of German aircraft and in sweeping to the shore, this channel, the British big ships were out at sea about three or four miles at sea and they were firing their big guns and you could hear the shells going across. It was like a train going past and that was the bombing and other things that became involved and sort of, in warfare, became quite strained.
Convoy attacked by aircraft
Off the south-west corner of Spain, with Gibraltar almost in sight, our convoy was attacked by about fifty planes. There were 40 torpedo planes and about 10 dive bombers. Well we got through that very well and I know the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet was pretty pleased according to the messages he sent us after the operation and we only lost, we didn’t lose, we had two ships damaged.
I think the escorts of the convoy and the convoy itself shot, actually shot down probably 10 of those planes and I think there may have been others that probably would not have reached home. One of my action stations was a machine gun. There were two such machine guns on the ship.
They had been captured from the Italians in North Africa and the skipper got a hold of them, two additional small-arms machine guns mounted on either side of the ship. Now I was assigned to one of those and my duty was to operate that if needs be during action. Well during this raid I promptly assembled with my offsider at this gun, but I didn’t have to fire a shot.
They were so busy sending up the ammunition for our main gun, the 18-pounder, and our full size Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns that they didn’t worry about us, so I wasn’t called to press the button to discharge the guns. Whether I would have been any good or not I don’t know.
That was actually an eye opener as the convoy made smoke. That was the signal, make smoke. If you’re going to be attacked like that, they do certain things in the engine room that cause smoke to billow from the engine.
By the time the planes left, the ones remaining, left to go back from where they had come from you could hardly see the convoy and that is still vivid in my mind. This great layer of smoke lay over the convoy after the action had taken place and it wasn’t until we got another couple of miles ahead that we could see that our convoy was by and large intact.
That was probably, and I know I shouldn’t perhaps use this word, but that was a thrilling episode in I felt we had really done something to aid the effort, the war effort. Certainly not false pride but proud that you were able to be part of that sort of action.
Ammunition ship blown up
Some of the most intense areas of our operation, we were assigned to the Levant in the Mediterranean, that's down Israel, Beirut, Syria, down that end and the generals were trying to retake some of the islands in the Dodecanese.
The Germans had occupied them some time before they'd lost them and now, they were endeavouring to try and take them back and we were taking convoys from Famagusta in Cyprus and Tripoli in Syria into the Dodecanese.
That was scary because we knew there had been very high naval losses in that theatre of the war, and we were pretty exposed going into that territory. Everything was okay as it turned out. We went to an island called Costa de Rosso and we left an ammunition ship there.
We would try and get away in the early hours of the morning so we could get some distance between us and the island, but it was bombed and blown to bits. They were still quite accurate in that area.
15 knots
Our ship was registered to do 15 knots which was a reasonable speed but certainly not fast and at 15 knots you knew the ship was doing 15 knots. There'd be vibrations right through the ship. They gave us an assignment to escort a troopship from Aden to Bombay, straight across.
They wanted to travel at 18 knots, but we could only travel at 15. It was loaded with troops so we came to the arrangement that we wouldn't zig zag in front of this particular ship. The troopship would do the zig zagging behind us, but we would just go straight. By that he was able to do his 18 knots and we could do our 15.
Sinking a Japanese submarine
We lost one ship just near the top of Ceylon, Sri Lanka as it is today. It was the SS Peshawar I think it was, P-E-S-H-A-W-A-R. It was a ship from Australia, and it was carrying Australian butter because all floating on the water were these boxes of Australian butter and another ship up there, outside a place called ...
That's not what they call it today, it's got the old traditional Indian name, one of our convoy was torpedoed. Now out of that event, we and two other escorts actually sunk the U-Boat. No, it wasn't a U-Boat it was a Japanese submarine. R101 [RO-110] and we were credited. The navy had a peculiar way of doing things. It would allot percentages where there was some sinking involved. As a ship we were allotted 55 per cent.
The HMAS Launceston was allotted 35 per cent and the Indian sloop that was with us was allotted the balance. Probably that, I still reflect on that episode, how delighted we were that we'd done this bit, how sorry that to think that all those human beings in the ship under the water were going to die that sort of death. You've got to be a bit human in war.
Those fellows were only doing their duty for their country and probably if they had their way, they wouldn't have been there but that's the way it goes. Every time we went back up that way, we'd come across the site with our depth sounder and we could actually see on the graph produced from the soundings the shape of the submarine sitting on the bottom. So it was confirmation.
The value of service
I think for me personally, the navy, the war, for all it did and brought to the nation and to individuals would ... was a service I treasured in the finish because in those days, I think we mentioned this before, a lad at that age was still a younger person and I felt that I, not that I was in short pants but the saying went for young people, if you go into the navy in short pants you come out in long pants.
The experience gained in the navy and the courses down at Flinders, the introductory courses and the service on the water and service on land at Darwin towards the end of the war was great teaching areas if you were prepared to keep your eyes open and your ears open and I think I'm a better person as a result of the experience I had in the navy. That's why I say I think I got into the navy by default rather than actually wanting to but with no regrets whatever.
