Chapter 11 Tough Job; Knighthood on the Quarter-Deck; Carriers...; Learn it..

TOUGH JOB

Jimmy scrambled up the side of the big boiler, one cord of the heavy crane-sling hooked through his ann. He straddled the huge cylinder and glanced for a moment across the yard. Somehow today everything had a familiar air. The hive of activity, the shouts of the men, the bright, cloudless sky. And then, down against the far side of the boiler, where it had fallen in the long grass by the fence and been forgotten, he saw the old Digger hat. Probably worn for a while by one of the boys in the yard.

But for a moment Jimmy travelled back over the four years and this was the 55-nim. ack-ack gun. It was just such a day as this hot, cloudless, a bustle of activity. Now he knew why he had had that mental flash-back. He squinted his eyes, and-yes there, over to the right, was the American work crew, mostly Negroes, levelling an airstrip with bulldozers. The jungle was opening out. Palms and undergrowth were falling to the machines. Then those three shimmery specks in the blue. Japs! The old brake-drum on its bent wire began its metallic screech. Almost like clockwork men dropped tools, cases, equipment where they stood and dived for cover. Jimmy had smiled as the nearby Negroes tore helter skelter, one flying from his bulldozer without even waiting to stop it, so that the driverless machine lumbered on until it hit a tree.

It wasn't much of a raid. Nuisance value. The Japs had nearly had it. But there was a direct hit on a tent, where three men, having a sleep, had not heard the alarm, or had just not bothered. It was unpleasant seeing them gather up the pieces.

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders, hooked up the crane-sling and slithered down from the boiler. Thompson the foreman was standing there, hands on hips, a sarcastic smile on his face. "Finished day-dreaming, Kelly?" he sneered. "Maybe we can move that ruddy boiler if you're sure you're ready."

Jimmy looked at him, uninterested.

"Yeah," went on Thompson, his voice acid. "Youse ex-army blokes are all the blanky same. Sat on your backsides, had it soft for four or five years and called yourselves engineers. Never knew what a tough job of work was. Well, you're going to learn here, boy. You're going to learn here."

Jimmy looked up at the pig-eyes and beetling brows of the foreman and smiled, just smiled.

E. G. LITTLETON, A.M.F.

KNIGHTHOOD ON THE QUARTER-DECK

0N 4 April 1581 Queen Elizabeth went down to Deptford whither the Golden Hind had been taken and, after a magnificent banquet on board with Drake as host, she made him kneel before her in full view of the people.

She told him that the King of Spain had demanded his head and continued, "I have a gilded sword with which to strike it off."

Instead, the Admiral received the flat of the blade on his shoulder and rose Sir Francis Drake, Knight.

Though it has long been the custom for distinguished naval officers to have conferred upon them the high honour of knighthood, either at an investiture at Buckingham Palace by His Majesty the King, or abroad by His Majesty's representative at an investiture on shore, it is not in present times without precedent for the ceremony to take place on board one of His Majesty's ships. It is a rare distinction, however, to receive the accolade on the quarter-deck.

It was more than three hundred years before a British Admiral was again to kneel on the quarter-deck before his Sovereign. This historic occasion is one of peculiar interest to the Royal Australian Navy because the rare ceremony took place on the quarter-deck of the battle cruiser Australia in the presence of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Right Honourable Sir George Reid, High Commissioner for Australia, and the ship's company.

On 30 June 1913, His late Majesty King George V honoured the Commonwealth by visiting the first flagship of the then newly constituted Australian Fleet. Australia had shortly before commissioned at Portsmouth and was preparing to sail for Australia with the first H.M.A.S. Sydney. His Majesty was received on board with a royal salute, the officers were presented to him and, after inspecting the ship's company at divisions, His Majesty proceeded between decks to inspect closely the living quarters and internal arrangements of the battle cruiser.

On return to the quarter-deck the King was photographed with the officers and then His Majesty, in the presence of the officers and crew, commanded Rear-Admiral Patey, the first commander of the Australian Fleet, to kneel before him. An equerry handed His Majesty a sword, Admiral Patey received the accolade and rose Sir George Patey, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.

As the commander of the Australian fleet, Admiral Patey is remembered chiefly for his part in the occupation of German New Guinea and in the events leading to the destruction of von Spee's squadron at the battle of Falkland Islands in December 1914. In September of the same year he received the intelligence that the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had appeared at Samoa. Australia, with Montcalm, was charged with covering Encounter and the New Guinea Expeditionary Force from probable attack by the enemy cruisers, and it was not until this and subsequent tasks had been accomplished that Patey was free to consider the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst his immediate quarry. He made his base at Suva, but when finally he was released to pursue the enemy ships it was too late for, fearing the approach of the battle cruiser, they decided to run for their home port.

Passing through the Straits of Magellan they ran into the trap that had been set by the Royal Navy and were destroyed.

Admiral Patey remained in command of the Australian Fleet until 1915. He died in 1935.

J. D. JACKSON, R.A.N.

CARRIERS AS SEEN FROM A DESTROYER

WHEN the British Pacific Fleet first sailed from Sydney in early 1945 to add its weight to that of the American forces about to carry out the assault on Okinawa, there were in the task force four destroyers that took part in almost every operation the fleet carried out from then until the end of the war. Two were Australian, H.M.A.S.s Quickmatch and Quiberon; the others British, H.M.S.s Quality and Quadrant.

The crews of these four ships during the six months that followed were afforded a great opportunity of watching the British Fleet Air Arm in action, for not long after the Okinawa campaign began they were given an unusual job.

They became K.K. destroyers. The K.K. stood for Kounter Kamikaze, their task being, when "action stations" was sounded, to close to within a hundred yards or so from the stern of the carrier to which they had been assigned, and from there to ward off any attack made by Japanese suicide planes on the carrier.

It was a permanent job. So permanent, in fact, that on one occasion when Quickmatch was taking up her position astern of Victorious, the skipper of Quickmatch noticing a short length of rope trailing in the water from the stern of the carrier signalled to her, "I see you still have your leash there."

Each destroyer trailed its carrier all day and night, only on odd occasions going into the screen at dark. Their crews had a bird's-eye view of all that went on aboard the flat tops.

And it was a fascinating sight. Even now it is easy to visualize them preparing for the

strikes against the Sakishima Group, for strikes against Formosa, and finally for attacks on the Japanese home islands.

The bombers came up from the hangar deck first and were wheeled back as far as possible to give them the longest run on the flight deck. The fighters were next. The pilots could be clearly seen as they climbed into their planes; the roar of the engines was deafening.

Then the whole fleet turned into the wind and away they went. The nifty little Seafires and Corsairs needed a run of only half the flight deck to take off; the more cumbersome bombers required every foot of the flight deck to get safely away.

Often a plane dropped sharply as it left the carrier. The wheels almost touched the sea. Sometimes they did, and the pilot would just manage to raise them in time to clear the water. Many sighs of relief were breathed over that. On one occasion the wings instead of the wheels of a plane that had just cleared the flight deck folded up and it dropped like a stone into the ocean.

Taking off had other hazards. On days when the sea had a long swell and the bows of the carrier were dipping in and out of the ocean, the pilots had to judge their take-off in order to arrive at the end of the flight deck as it lifted out clear of the sea. A few crashed like that. They misjudged their run and went straight off into the water without a chance; the pilots must have known they were going in during those last seconds they were still on the carrier.

Watching them returning from the strikes, too, was fascinating. And somewhat saddening.

The fighters flew in fours, the bombers usually in groups of six, and as they circled around the fleet waiting their turn to land it was easy to see how many were missing. The formations often appeared uneven with a nasty-looking gap in the middle of them.

They came back in all conditions. Some with no wheels, some with one wheel, some with their controls damaged, and others with the pilots wounded. Those minus their wheels usually ditched in the sea close by a destroyer, while many, not being able to make the carrier, crashed into the edge of the flight deck, hung there for a second or two and then fell with a splash into the sea.

The K.K. destroyers were quick off the mark, however, one of these four destroyers holding the record of more than thirty airmen saved.

The pilots, too, gave invaluable practice to the gunners on board the supporting warships. They carried out mock suicide attacks and often put on a far better show than the Nips themselves.

When the end of the war came the work of one of the carriers, H.M.S. Indefatigable, was still not completed. Her pilots again did a fine job in conjunction with airmen from the American carriers of the United States Third Fleet by carrying out aerial searches over Japan for unknown prisoner-of-war camps, and supplying those they located with food.

One prisoner tells a story of a fellow in the camp who was without boots. They signaled the fact to an American plane. The following day five hundred pairs were dropped.

But flying planes on and off a carrier was dangerous work, and remembering now those last six months of the war spent with the British Pacific Fleet I believe all who saw those pilots in action would say, "Well, that's one job I wouldn't like." Would you?

Russel M Caro RAN

YOU DON'T LEARN IT ALL IN SCHOOL

S0 here I stand, like God or a brigadier, before the class of knee-high men and it is the geography lesson.

They had geography for homework last night and I am supposed to hear them say what they know about a country that none of them has ever seen except on a map.

I am supposed to feel fine about my class: about the words they have learned from books ... I glance around the room and I nod to one boy. He stands up by his desk and after a tough little sniff begins to speak.

But, even before the lad can speak, in just a brief moment, my thoughts spin away like a Catherine wheel far more quickly than I could ever write them down.

I am leaning against the red wall near the blackboard and, from this position, I can see out of the long windows of the schoolroom. I can see the bell over the wire gate near the coprosma bush and I notice that the rope is wearing. That is not surprising because the rope has been there for a long time - the same rope was there when I sat in this room no closer to the ceiling than the kids here now. Behind the bell-rope the sky is a blue wall splashed with white kalsomine in the north and under the sky the grass wears a uniform of bright green brass-buttoned with dandelions. The dandelions are the reason for the inning of my thoughts. For dandelions make me think of Eddie - of something Eddie used to say:

"You don't learn nothin' in school-nothin' good like fishin' and rowin' and . . ."

Of all the things Eddie ever said I remember him saying that most of all. I guess that is cause I grew up listening to him say it. He used to say it most often around this time the year, mid-winter, when the dandelions arrive.

Dandelion time meant bream-time around the river-shoe and trout-time in the river-mouth where the river meets the bucking Gulf water. Eddie used to cheat in school at this time of the year so he could get away in time to make the king-tide - in time to go fishing.

I can remember those late afternoons with Eddie in the dinghy, sliding a running-sinker along the tea-stained gut line; or baiting a No. 3 with reed shrimp; or shooting the fast tide down river to the mouth and sitting over a ton of hungry trout.

"Eddie, I'd say sometimes, "you'll never learn anything, cheating like that."

To which Eddie's lip line would break open like a bursting apple and he'd laugh. "Heck, you don't learn nothin' in school, Adam. Would they teach me how to play a salmon on a number seven until he's tired and I can lift him without breakin' my gear? Would I learn in school how t'fish? Do books teach me fishin'?"

Fishing? I tell you Eddie could out-fish anyone, man or boy, on this coast when be was ten. At eighteen he had his own craft and he was making money. Good money-because he fished the winters when the sea bares its, savage teeth and bits the shore like an invasion. I've seen Eddie come from a grey wall of sweeping rain, standing up in the dinghy with his arms working like machines, throwing his craft down the wave hills with a well full of jack-salmon that he chased from around the Point, as though the sea was a duckpond.

On such a day-wintertime-when I'd come home from the Teachers' College for the weekend, I stood on the wet, hard sand with Stella. Stella - she was Eddie's girl - shouted above the hissing of the surf, "He'll go on fighting the sea until either he or the sea gives in, Adam."

Stella loved that roughneck like you don't read or write about in books, and I guess Eddie loved her. She was the only one who ever made him wear a tie and that happened when they were married in the blue-and-gold summer of 1936

But, as I said, all this has passed through my mind very quickly and, without warning, I am conscious of the lad's voice over there.

and the most important towns of Greece," he recites as if to prove that he did his homework well, "are Athens which . . ."

Athens! No, Athens is not like it says in the geography hooks. Athens is the cool, green, ripe spring Of '41 with the air sweet and smoky and yet sinister in memory. Athens is Eddie and I and a nut-faced, foal-eyed Greek whom Eddie had met; a Greek who was, like us, in the Army, hut who had been a fisherman once at Peloponnesus. Athens is Eddie and the fisherman and me drinking ouzo and Eddie telling the fisherman how to lure a shark with shag eggs and feathered hooks. Athens is Eddie and I with the desert behind us and me remembering that the desert had taught us things we didn't learn in school and ...

". . . Edessa, in the north of . . ."

Edessa! What do they say of it in the geography books? For what is it famous? Is it a lovely place surrounded by the unutterable beauty of mountains? But Edessa is not a beautiful place. Edessa is part of a 75-mile front of poorly armed men meeting the Hun for the first time and it is Eddie and I somewhere. Edessa is red snow and men without stomachs and .

". . and Veve . . ."

.......is a ripped-open night of tommy guns. Veve is dawn on the mountain steeples. Veve is weariness and death and the beginning of the Big Retreat down Greece, Eddie and I, do-am roads that were thoroughfares of bell, over mountains that tried to claw and spear the formations of Hun bombers and almost did, through valleys that sandwiched the diving Stukas and . . ."

"Larissa ...

God, Larissa! Rubble, burning trees, crumpled homes, humble faces of farmers suddenly violent ... Larissa is Eddie and I meeting the Greek again who had been a fisherman and the three of us heading towards the coat where we were too late to catch the Navy . . .

"Pel-Pelop--" the lad is stumbling with the name.

"Peloponnesus," I correct him.

For it was Peloponnesus where the Greek who had been a fisherman led us to a dinghy. It was Peloponnesus where I saw the untamed, fierce look come hack to Eddie's face. It was Peloponnesus where Eddie and I shoved off at night towards Crete out there somewhere. To Crete in a 12-foot dinghy ... and we would have done just that if the Dornier hadn't been around in that rose-coloured, morning sky, out hunting.

We both saw the kite together and Eddie said, Go overboard, Adam. It'll make her lighter. I'll show you something we didn't learn in school!"

I could tell you about treading water-about Eddie rowing and dipping and swinging that boat around the sea like a drunk - about Eddie standing up in the dinghy, waiting for the Dornier to set itself into a dive, then bending on the oars with his chest brown and heady. But if I say that a Dornier is a Dornier and a dinghy is no more than just that, I think you will know what I mean.

The sea took Eddie but the sea needed a war to help it.

The bell will ring any minute now so I turn to the lad who is speaking . I listen to his voice more closely. He is talking like a parrot. I watch his face as he talks. Every now and then his eyes drop to the desk of the lad in front. I think I smile. I'm not sure. I know that the lad in front has a book open on his desk and the boy standing up is reading from it. I know because, before any of these kids were born, I was doing the same thing for Eddie.

The lad will get nowhere like that - no where in school, I mean. I ought to keep him in afterwards. I know and, believe me, he, the kid, knows too that it's dandelion-time and bream-time and trout-time. Now it is the bell ringing. I know that this kid won't learn anything from a geography book about Greece; anything that is to replace what he lost there.

"All right," I say, "'that was fine..fine. . . . Well, there goes the bell, class. You know what that means."

In a moment they stand up. They move to the side of their desks. I watch them file out. I watch the lad who was reading about Greece from the book on another's desk and I wait until he is almost at the door. Then I say, "Clarkson! "

He turns. Slowly. His face is eroded with doubt. He thinks I'm going to reprimand him for something. He is used to that. But he is wrong.

"The dandelions are plentiful this year?"

"Yes."

I glance at his well-tailored chin and tousled paddock of hair.

"They tell me someone landed a four-pound bream at the Shoe around daybreak this morning? "

He smiles at that. He feels more comfortable now.

"No, sir, you're wrong." He corrects me, kindly, the way I correct backward children sometimes.

"Wrong, Eddie?

The smile grows into a laugh and his lips split open like a burst apple.

"Four-and-a-quarter, sir."

DICK WORDLEY, R.A.A.F.