Cruiser (4 page)

Music brightened their lives. Tom was a Welshman, a big and muscular boatbuilder, with the love of singing common to so many of his tribe. Jack played the piano. And so did Joan:

Eventually, it happened. The naval engine room rating who could play ragtime piano, a young man who relished the rich banquet of Honoré de Balzac's nineteenth-century
Comédie Humaine
, made his move.

And so, finally, came the order to board. Last embraces. Then a line of blue uniforms mounted the gangway from the quayside and spread out along the
Autolycus
's upper deck. On the ship's bridge, her master, Captain Henry Hetherington, gave the orders that would detach her from the dock, to a jangle of the engine room telegraph and three sharp blasts of her whistle to indicate to all and sundry that she was going astern. With her single screw churning the grey-green waters beneath her counter and a harbour tug fussing by her side, the
Autolycus
began, imperceptibly at first, and then gathering stern way, to take her leave. Her last link to the land, a rainbow of paper streamers hand held from ship to shore, slowly parted. Rowley Roberts made a note for his diary:

‘Auld Lang Syne' was still echoing as the ship turned into the eastern channel to go down harbour, with the rocky bulk of Fort Denison to port and the purposeful grey shape of the three-funnelled heavy cruiser HMAS
Australia
, the fleet flagship and the second and last to bear the name, berthed off to starboard at the naval base at Garden Island. Cheers rang out from both ships. Then, to the watchers at the quay, the
Autolycus
was gone.

Her next stop would be Hobart. Her owners, the Blue Funnel Line, had cannily taken the opportunity to load a cargo of Tasmanian apples to add to the profits of the voyage. And, from there, Melbourne.

Rowland Roberts was out in one detail. Only 200 men had sailed from Sydney. Another draft for
Perth
would be waiting at Melbourne's Station Pier to join the ship for the voyage westwards across the Great Australian Bight, on to Cape Town in South Africa, and then the long, slow plod northwards across the latitudes to an England most of them had never seen.

At Circular Quay, the crowd began to disperse. Some to the football, perhaps, or to the races at Randwick. Or to the pictures: on this very day, the newsreel at the State Theatre in Market Street was promising its patrons the latest filmed report of ‘German Fleet Manoeuvres'.

Adolf Hitler's navy was readying for war.

For half a century, proud German nationalists, millions of them, had dreamed of building a fleet that would match and one day perhaps challenge Britain's Royal Navy for control of the seas. Britannia had ruled the waves since Nelson's annihilation of a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. In the golden-sunset years, as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, Germans, envious of what they saw as arrogant English swagger, thirsted to do some swaggering of their own.

A naval arms race began. Two grandchildren of Queen Victoria, the choleric and impulsive Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and the dull but dogged British King George V, found themselves wrestling for naval supremacy – a drive to build bigger and better battleships and more of them. Guardians of a far-flung empire on which the sun never set, British governments and the Admiralty in Whitehall held to the Two Power Standard: that the Royal Navy should be always equal in size and strength to the combined forces of the next two biggest navies in the world, whatever nationality they might be. As the new battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the Kaiser's navy, the Kaiserliche Marine, rumbled from slipways in Kiel and Hamburg, so shipyards in Glasgow, Liverpool and Belfast rang to the sound of hammering and riveting as they strove to maintain and extend British superiority. In both countries, the race was whipped along by politicians and the newspapers, and avidly followed by the public as if it was a sporting contest, a
football grand final. National honour was at stake. War became inevitable.

The great clash came almost halfway through the First World War, at the end of the northern spring of 1916. On two pleasant, sunny days – 31 May and 1 June – the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet met, almost by accident, in the calm waters of the North Sea off the coast of Denmark's Jutland Peninsula. The encounter was epic, the last and greatest clash of ironclads the world would ever see, and the stakes were enormous. The British Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was, in the words of Winston Churchill, ‘the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon'. Long lines of ponderous battleships and their faster, more lightly armoured sisters, the battlecruisers, wheeled and ploughed in formation beneath roiling clouds of coal smoke so dense that at times each side could barely see the orange flashes from the gun muzzles of the other. Squadrons of smaller ships, light cruisers and destroyers, darted in and out of the melee, firing furiously in the confusion.

When the clouds cleared, the Germans had won a narrow tactical victory that meant, in the simple arithmetic of war at sea, they had destroyed more British ships and killed more British sailors than they had lost themselves.
¹
The news, trumpeted by an exultant Kaiser and the German press, stunned all of Britain and her empire, which had demanded and expected another Trafalgar.

But the German triumph was an illusion. Strategically, the High Seas Fleet had been beaten. Unnerved by how close it had come to disaster, the cream of the Kaiserliche Marine fled home from Jutland and stayed there. For all his public bluster, Wilhelm himself, in a rare fit of common sense, quietly ordered his admirals never again to leave port to challenge the Royal Navy in any strength. In stark contrast, the British, buttressed by centuries of naval tradition in all its ebbs and flows, bound up their wounds and stood defiantly ready to fight another day. They prevailed.

As the war on land and at sea dragged to its exhausted end in 1918, German sailors, aroused by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, rose in mutiny against their officers and their imperial master. The ashes of defeat were cold and sour. After the Armistice of 11 November, the remnants of the Kaiser's thrust for naval glory – ships rusting and broken, crews sullen and wretched – steamed into humiliating internment under the guns of the Grand Fleet in its far-northern anchorage at Scapa Flow in Scotland. In June the next year, in a sad last act of defiance, they scuttled themselves at their moorings.

Germany itself lay crushed beneath the punitive peace treaty dictated by the victors at Versailles in 1919. Successive governments tottered through the grim Depression years of the late '20s and '30s with soaring unemployment and inflation fomenting popular unrest. As the nation fell more deeply into economic chaos, so its people looked to an unlikely figure for salvation. A shabby Austrian war veteran who had been scratching a living on the streets of the Bavarian capital, Munich, selling postcards he had painted,
²
had found a gift for oratory and beer-hall politics. The Fatherland, he ranted, must rise again to avenge ‘the stab in the back' from the Western democracies, from Bolshevism and, above all, from the Jewish capitalist conspiracy.

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party – the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – attained supreme, untrammelled power in 1933.
³
His poisoned mind a ferment of hatred, for six years the Führer tightened the bonds that bent the German people to his will. As he planned the rape of Europe, orchestrating a program of re-armament at first secretly and then more boldly, Britain and France stood weakly by on the treacherous sands of appeasement.

The army was the apple of his eye. Hitler had been gassed in the trenches, had twice won the Iron Cross for bravery and, by 1918, had risen to the rank of lance-corporal. Eventually, he would come to believe he had an intuitive mastery of grand military strategy far superior to that of the aristocratic army
officer class he despised. The instruments of his thrust for world domination would be the new panzer tanks, field guns and modern infantry weapons that began to roll from the armaments factories at an astonishing rate. General military conscription was introduced in 1935, and that same year, the First World War fighter ace Hermann Goering, now an ardent Nazi and one of Hitler's closest henchmen, announced the formation of an air force, the Luftwaffe, in defiance of Versailles. For years, hand-picked young men had been taking flying lessons in what the world was told were civil-aviation schools and sporting clubs. It would not be a great leap for them to mount the cockpits of the advanced fighter and bomber aircraft already moving along the production lines of the great aircraft factories.

Like that other European tyrant before him, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler never grasped either the possibilities or the limitations of war at sea and would not listen to those who did. But his navy, now known as the Kriegsmarine, also burned to cleanse the stain of 1918. The Kriegsmarine Commander-in-Chief, Generaladmiral Erich Raeder, viewed the Nazis with silent distaste, but he had been chief of staff in the battlecruiser fleet at Jutland and had old scores to settle. And a young
Kapitän zur See
(captain) named Karl Dönitz, who had commanded a U-boat in the First World War and been taken prisoner by the British, began to agitate for the building of a submarine fleet designed to cripple the maritime trade that was Britain's lifeline.

Again in 1935, Germany and Britain signed a naval treaty in London. The German negotiators demanded that the Kriegsmarine should be allowed to grow to a strength of 35 per cent of the Royal Navy, a figure at first rejected by the British but then suddenly accepted in a diplomatic backdown on the extraordinary grounds that any figure was better than no figure at all. More astonishing still, Germany obtained the right to parity in submarines. It was as if Britain's politicians, admirals and diplomats had learned nothing from German
successes with U-boats in the First World War. Nazi bluff won the day. With the ink still wet on the treaty signatures, the Kriegsmarine admirals forged ahead with Plan Z, a blueprint for the rapid construction of a modern navy balanced between powerful surface vessels and a large U-boat fleet.

Three large diesel-powered cruisers had already been launched:
Deutschland
,
⁴
Admiral Scheer
and
Admiral Graf Spee
, each of 12,000 tons and with a main armament of six 11-inch guns – ships far bigger and more powerful than any British cruiser. When it heard about them, the Royal Navy called them pocket battleships – a name that stuck. Their mission would be to roam the world's oceans, attacking enemy commerce wherever it might be found. But they were just the beginning. Again, German shipyards echoed to the roar of naval construction. The keels for two powerful new battlecruisers,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, were laid down in the same year of the Anglo-German Agreement, and the battleships
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz
were moving from the drawing board to the slipway. At 41,000 tons each, the battleships were in secret breach of the size limits imposed by the naval treaty and also superior to any individual ship the Royal Navy could send against them. They would be supported by squadrons of powerful heavy cruisers. More crucial still, the U-boats that would one day come so close to bringing Britain to her knees began rolling from the stocks in their tens, then their hundreds.

Raeder believed that Plan Z would see the Kriegsmarine ready for war by 1945. Hitler alone knew it would come sooner. By 1939, in a series of stunning coups, he had annexed his Austrian homeland to be part of the greater German Reich and had dismembered neighbouring Czechoslovakia over the feeble protests of the British Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Hitler's next victim would be defenceless Poland. As the war clouds swelled and grew darker yet again, he cast around for allies and found one in his fellow dictator, the Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini.

On 22 May 1939, just nine days after the
Autolycus
had
sailed from Sydney, the Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was Mussolini's son-in-law, signed a formal treaty of friendship and alliance. Publicly known as the Pact of Steel, it was sealed at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin in a ceremony that was a glittering Nazi parody of imperial splendour. Tricked out with the usual diplomatic froth about friendship and economic cooperation, it also obliged each country to come to the aid of the other in the case of conflict with a third power. Ciano, who had not bothered to read the fine print, remained blithely unaware that this could plunge his country into war at any minute on Germany's say-so.

The Kingdom of Italy had fought on the Allied side against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the old Italian arch-enemy, in the First World War. Victory, though, had brought only political chaos, as a succession of governments teetered and fell. In the 1920s, a new political force emerged from the mess. While Hitler was still a virtual unknown brawling in Munich streets, Mussolini, a former soldier and self-styled journalist, had created Fascism,
⁵
at first a cult and then an ideology that blended frenzied nationalism with a scorn for democracy and a paranoid loathing of socialism and communism. In 1922, with a bellowed command to his black-shirted storm troopers to ‘believe, obey, fight', Mussolini seized power in Italy in a virtually bloodless coup, the so-called March on Rome. After a measure of success in restoring the nation's battered economy – he famously made the trains run on time – he began to indulge a soaring ambition for a new Roman empire that would again dominate Mediterranean Europe and Africa. The Mediterranean itself would become Mare Nostrum, ‘Our Sea'.

In the 1930s, he, too, launched a building program for new capital ships and cruisers for the Regia Marina, the Italian Royal Navy, including two of the most elegant battleships ever built, the 45,000-ton sister ships
Vittorio Veneto
and
Littorio
. There would also be an impressive fleet of destroyers
and submarines. But still the Marina would be outnumbered and outclassed by the two navies it would have to contest for supremacy, the French and the British. War on land might offer riper fruit to pluck.

Italy had imposed a chaotic colonial rule on what is now the North African state of Libya after expelling the Turks in 1911. In 1922, Mussolini mounted a brutal assault to crush the remnants of Libyan resistance, slaughtering tens of thousands of ‘rebels' and imprisoning perhaps 100,000 more in concentration camps. Libya became the first outpost of his new Rome.

Emboldened by that contemptuously easy success and the tinsel glory it brought him, in 1935 he invaded another pitifully backward North African state: Abyssinia, or modern Ethiopia. It was a war that hurled the modern technology of the Italian Army, the Regio Esercito, and the Air Force, the Regia Aeronautica, against a disorganised rabble of tribal warriors armed with a few antique artillery pieces and three ancient biplanes.

At the League of Nations in Geneva, statesmen and diplomats spouted fine phrases dripping with good intentions, but the League proved powerless to act. Mussolini flung defiance in its face, and conquest in North Africa did not sate his appetite; it whetted it. The League's failure to move against Italy over Abyssinia was the green light for yet another lunge for territory. On 7 April 1939, Mussolini turned his gaze east across the Adriatic Sea to invade the small Balkan kingdom of Albania. Again, victory was easily won. It was over in less than a month. Bestriding the eternal city of Rome like a new colossus, Il Duce beheld a world, he thought, that lay supine at his polished jackboots. Italy had an army of
otto millioni di baionette
, of eight million bayonets, he boasted.

The partnership forged by Hitler and Mussolini, the Axis, would change forever the lives of the young men who had sailed to bring HMAS
Perth
home to Australia.

In the Tasman Sea, the
Autolycus
wallowed south towards
Hobart. So far, the weather had been kind enough, which was a mercy, for life on board the old freighter was rough and ready. the for'ard hold and 'tween decks, where the men ate at wooden tables and slung their hammocks at night, still reeked of the horses that had been there before them, despite attempts to scrub away the smell. Senior ratings – the chief petty officers and petty officers – did a little better, in temporary accommodation knocked together on the upper deck, where there were also some extra heads (toilets) and showers. The six RAN officers taking passage on board shared the few cabins the ship could offer and ate in the saloon apart from the men. Three of those officers – one of them a doctor, Surgeon Commander Charles Downward – were also on their way to commission HMAS
Perth
.