Australians in the Merchant Navy during World War II

Role of the Merchant Navy

The merchant marine is a nation's commercial shipping and crews. Merchant ships were run by commercial firms. Allied, Axis and other countries all had merchant ships.

Most merchant ships remained cargo ships. Some were requisitioned and converted into naval ships or hospital ships, or used for other functions. Hospital ships were crewed by merchant marine sailors. The great luxury ocean liners of the time, including the Queen Mary, were commandeered as troop carriers.

Australian merchant mariners played an important role in World War II, as they did in World War I. They worked moving cargo on ships all around the world. They worked in bleak Atlantic convoys and small ships on the eastern coast of Australia and across South-East Asia.

Merchant mariners worked with the constant threat of attack. They were vulnerable to enemy submarines, surface raiders, aircraft and sea mines. They were at just as much risk as Royal Australian Navy (RAN) warships.

Merchant navy ships carried heavy, sometimes explosive or combustible cargoes. They were generally smaller, slower and less manoeuvrable than naval ships. The ships were usually unarmed and exposed to attack. At the beginning of the war, merchant ships often travelled alone, which made them easy targets.

In the Atlantic and along other major shipping routes, a convoy system was introduced. Merchant ships travelled in large convoys, escorted by naval vessels or armed merchant ships for protection.

Some merchant ships had naval gun crews onboard for defence. Losses of ships and life, particularly in the Atlantic, were shockingly high in the early war years.

John Cummins, an apprentice officer, recalled a German air attack while dodging through the islands of Scotland:

And we were attacked by the German aircraft. We were in columns, maybe five columns of ships with say five ships in each column. Yes, we were just going along doing our business, and some German aircraft came down the centre of the columns and attacked us that way ... It was pretty frightening. I think once you're in it, you forget the fright, you're determined on keeping them away.

Listen to John Cummins's story.

By mid-1943, changes in tactics developed by the RN Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), better naval intelligence, including the ability to decode Enigma messages and increased knowledge of U-boat tactics had improved the survival rates of convoy ships.

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Shipping in Australian Waters

More than 40 merchant ships were sunk in Australian waters during the war. The Naval Board introduced a coastal convoy system to try to stop Japanese attacks on Australian shipping off the east coast.

The Kalingo, the Lydia M Childs, the Wollongbar, the Fingal and the Limerick were all sunk off the east coast of Australia. All had been sunk, some with great loss of life, by Japanese submarines.

Armed merchant cruisers

Some coastal liners and cruisers were requisitioned by the RAN and converted into armed merchant cruisers, an auxiliary warship type.

The HMAS Manoora, HMS Kanimbla and HMAS Westralia were all passenger ships converted into armed merchant cruisers. All were used heavily during the war. The 3 ships were converted into Landing Ships Infantry (LSI) for the RAN in 1943. They took part in most of the landings in the South-West Pacific, including the Philippines, Borneo, Morotai and Leyte.

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Defensively equipped merchant ships

Merchant ships equipped with guns were called defensively equipped merchant ships (DEMs).

Thirty-seven RAN officers and around 1,000 ratings (ordinary sailors) served on DEMs during the war. Naval reserve personnel (RANVR) also served.

Australian personnel served on around 250 Imperial and Allied merchant ships and about 120 Australian merchant ships.

The size of a ship's crew depended on the type of vessel, the crew's skills and the type of guns it carried. For example, the Duntroon, a passenger liner requisitioned as a troop carrier, was well-armed with various small and large guns. The ship's complement was one lieutenant as gunnery officer, 2 petty officers as gunlayers, 16 ratings and 8 Maritime Royal Artillery as Bofors gun crew.

Eighteen Australians were taken prisoner by the Germans and 2 by the Japanese when their ships were damaged or sunk. In total, around 38 Australians were killed serving on DEMs.

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Battle of the Atlantic

Wartime mariner Donald Kennedy recalled transporting refined oil from Aruba in the southern Caribbean to New Zealand and Australia:

But the ship that I was on did not go up into the North Atlantic where the convoys were. To that extent, it was probably less dangerous waters than some of the people here went into. There were many, many, many, many hundreds of ships sunk. Many thousands of seaman, Navy and Merchant Navy, lost. Many, many lost up there. But they never got us. The Japanese would have loved to have got us, but they missed. They fired once a torpedo at our ship, but they missed.

The Battle of the Atlantic lasted almost the entire duration of World War II. It started with the Allied naval blockade of Germany from 1939 and Germany's subsequent counter-blockade.

During the war, the United Kingdom (UK) depended on vital supplies from North America and the British Empire. Supplies were transported in merchant ship convoys across the Atlantic Ocean. This was the most dangerous shipping lane in the world at the time.

Naval vessels and Allied air forces protected the ships, but their operations were dangerous because the convoys were slow-moving. A convoy could only travel at the speed of the slowest ship.

From August 1944 to the end of the war, RAAF gunner Peter Munro flew in Sunderland flying-boats on anti-submarine and convoy escort missions in the Atlantic. Attached to RAF Coastal Command, Munro remembered:

The people who suffered most in the Battle of the Atlantic were those poor unfortunate wretches in the freighters. They were carrying vital supplies from America mostly, across to Britain ... That's where so many of these unfortunate people in the merchant marine, they were just downed over and over and over.

Sinking of the Centaur

Before the war, the Centaur was a motor passenger ship that carried a mixed cargo of passengers and freight. It regularly operated between Fremantle, Western Australia, and Singapore.

The ship came under the Australian Government's wartime control in September 1939. In January 1943, it was converted into the 2/3rd Australian Hospital Ship (AHS) Centaur. This included being painted with a white hull, red crosses and a wide green band so it was clearly marked as a hospital ship.

On 12 May 1943, the Centaur left Sydney bound for Port Moresby in New Guinea. It was collecting casualties from the Buna and Gona beachhead battles.

On board the Centaur were:

• 75 crew members of the Allied Merchant Navy
• 64 medical staff, including 12 nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service
• 149 men of the 2/12th Field Ambulance, with 44 attached personnel heading for a tour in New Guinea.
   

In the pre-dawn hours of 14 May, off the coast of Queensland, explosions woke the crew and passengers. A torpedo from a Japanese submarine had hit the Centaur.

The ship sank so quickly that the crew did not have a chance to send an SOS signal.

Survivors spent the daylight hours of 14 May huddled together on a large raft, which had been part of the Centaur's wheelhouse.

On the afternoon of 15 May, the Naval Officer in Charge at Brisbane, Captain Eden Penry Thomas, received a message from USS Mugford. The destroyer was picking up survivors from the Centaur. This was the first time Australia knew of the nation's worst loss from a submarine attack during the war.

Of the 332 people who left from Sydney, only 64 survived, clinging to rafts and debris. Sister Ellen Savage was the only nurse to survive.

It was not until 20 December 2009 that the Centaur’s wreck was found about 30 nautical miles (56 km) off the southern tip of Moreton Island.

Although the Japanese never acknowledged responsibility, the official Japanese history states that the submarine was under the command of Lieutenant Commander Nakagawa. He was later tried as a B Class war criminal and spent 4 years in prison for other attacks.

Read more about the Sinking of the Centaur.

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US Army Small Ships Section

The US Army Small Ships (USASS) Section was a unique fleet formed in response to advancing Japanese forces in the South Pacific. It was established by John Sheridan Fahnestock, an experienced sailor who, along with his brother Bruce, wanted to help supply besieged US troops in the Philippines.

The USASS Section employed more than 3,000 Australian civilians alongside US Army personnel. There were many merchant seamen and civilians from around the world. The Australian Government allowed the section to recruit boys as young as 15 and men who were medically unfit or too old for the Australian military service.

Known initially as Mission X, it was later formalised as an official section of the Transportation Service. This fleet of wooden sailing ships, trawlers, and tugboats, and its crews, played a notable role in the Allied campaigns in New Guinea and the Philippines.

The USASS Section supported amphibious landings and conducted reconnaissance, troop transport, rescue and supply operations.

Australians were killed and injured when serving in the USASS Section. Their service was important, but it wasn’t until 2009 that ex-members received Imperial Campaign Awards.

The success of the USASS Section is evidence of the cooperation and ingenuity needed to achieve the Allied victory in the Pacific. There is a commemorative plaque at the site of the section headquarters in the Grace Building in Sydney.

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Stories from merchant mariners

U-boat attack

Tom Kirkham joined the Merchant Navy in 1941, aged 15.

Kirkham first worked on the HMT Aquitania, transporting troops from Wellington, New Zealand, to the Middle East via Fremantle, Colombo and the Suez Canal. The ship returned with Italian prisoners of war.

Kirkham later transferred to SS Ulysses and sailed for England via Auckland and Panama.

The Ulysses collided with a tanker near the Panama Canal. Then, on its way to Newport in the United States for repairs, Ulysses was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sunk off Cape Hatteras. Fortunately, all crew members survived and were rescued quite soon after the incident.

We were on our way up to Newport News for repairs and then a sub come along. U-Boat 160. Captain Georg Lassen. He was one of the last of the aces. He sank 28 ships and he died last year. I've been keeping tabs on him and then we got three torpedoes. We got picked up about 4 hours later by an American destroyer.

Listen to Tom Kirkham's story.

Rescuing surviving seamen

Phil Orchard joined the Merchant Navy in November 1941 as an anti-aircraft gunner, then a radio operator.

Orchard served on MV Tienza and MV Ettrick in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean. Often, he was the only Australian on board among a crew of other nationalities.

Orchard's first trip was from Australia to Egypt and Lebanon, carrying 9,000 tons of wheat for the Australian Imperial Force.

He later took part in several large Atlantic convoys from Halifax in Canada to Liverpool in England.

Phil remembered picking up seamen from sunken ships:

You hear a ship going down and their Morse starts to slow down. The water's coming in and the machinery stopped and it's an awful feeling.

Listen to Phil Orchard's story.

Commemoration

Wartime prime minister, John Curtin, acknowledged the risks faced by merchant seamen and the value of their work:

The merchant navies of the United Nations are constantly in the fighting line. Silently, efficiently and without fuss they carry on the unending task of keeping the fighting men and supplies moving. The men of our merchant navy have established a high tradition and the Australian Government warmly acknowledges the great part they are playing in the war effort.

['MERCHANT NAVY APPEAL TODAY', The Daily Telegraph, 16 October 1942, p 4.]

The exact number of Australians who served or died while in the Merchant Navy will always be unknown. Estimated figures change as more research is done.

The Australian War Memorial estimates that more than 800 Australian merchant mariners died serving the Allied cause during both world wars.

The overall fatality rate among seamen members of the Seamen's Union of Australia during the war was 8.5%, which was higher than that of Australia’s armed services.

The Australian War Memorial's Commemorative Roll includes the names of 386 civilians who died during or as a result of World War II. But many more Australians served, and died, on Allied merchant ships.

The Survivors memorial outside the Australian War Memorial commemorates the service and sacrifice of Australian civilian seamen on merchant ships in all parts of the world during both world wars.

The Merchant Navy Memorial on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra commemorates the contributions of the Australian Merchant Navy during both world wars.

The Northern Territory Memorial stands in Adelaide River War Cemetery and commemorates the men of the Australian Army, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Australian Merchant Navy who lost their lives in the south-west Pacific region during World War II who have no known grave.

In Australia, Merchant Navy Day is commemorated on 3 September. On this date in 1939, only 10 hours after the UK declared war on Germany, a German U-boat, U-30, torpedoed the British liner SS Athenia. It was the first Allied merchant marine sinking of World War II.

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