Chapter 6 Which Way, Joe?; To My Wife; Coral Sea; Cape Gloucester; Smoke

CAPE GLOUCESTER IMPRESSIONS

THE landing at Cape Gloucester on Boxing Day, 1943, was, as a combined operation, almost classic. Clear and complete, like a well played chess game, it set the standard for all such operations in the South-west Pacific area, because it was perfectly co-ordinated and quite successful.

Not a single American marine was lost in the initial landing, and the whole operation was planned and perfected with unruffled efficiency.

For many of us it was something more than a successful operation; it was a series of colourful and contrasted impressions-the sort of impressions that light up the imagination and last in the memory.

It came as a satisfying relief after months of monotony and routine. It was the climax to a long period of anti-climax.

As December leafed over to close the chapter of 1943, a year of uncertain confidence, most of us had a feeling that the uneasy inactivity would soon end. Outwardly there was no evidence of a dramatic naval offensive in the South-west Pacific. But there was an air of expectation, a vague sensation that cannot be labelled.

This premonition materialized on Christmas Eve when the commanding officers of His Majesty's four Australian ships, Australia, Shropshire, Arunta and Warramunga, unfolded the predicted details of the operation to the men of their command.

In Australia, the Captain's voice sounded casual and unemotional as he chatted to the groups of excited sailors who gathered round the amplifiers. He reminded one of Neville Cardus predicting the next day's play in a pre-war test match.

"We have every reason to expect this operation to be successful," he said. "The opposition may be a little stiffer than it was at Guadalcanal, but we coped with it there, so we can manage it here. Good luck to you all."

As the four Australian men-o'-war cut northward through the languid tropic sea that Christmas Eve, there was something humanly enthusiastic and purposeful about them. Christmas Day, austere and uneventful, was simply another day of sweat, grease and hard work. But with it there was the thought that tomorrow might be something more than "just another day".

That evening the sun set in a serene and tranquil sea, and the sky faded to a dark velvet. Men stood to action stations as the ships carved open the quiet phosphorescent waters. Those on the upper deck slept fitfully at their guns, or sat quietly watching the sea and sky. In turrets and below decks they just sat and sweated.

There was little conversation. The seductive peace of that warm tropic night was something almost sacred. It seemed to soothe .the sensation of uneasy apprehension, as the soft affectionate fingers of a mother's hand move gently across the brow of her sleeping child.

Before midnight an alarm came. Taloned orange tracers probing the dark distance, the hot rush of excited blood through tautening veins, the nervous sensation of nausea!

A false alarm, and breathing relaxes to normal.

Through the night comes the steady thrub thrub pulse of the turbines as the task forces drive on among the dim and ominous land clusters. Lookouts' eyes are fixed in a nightstare, control officers and communication numbers keep the guns' crews informed with communiqué's on the ship's approximate position and progress.

Nearby a muffled voice maintains that a cigarette would be adjectivally acceptable. A grunt in the darkness is the only answer.

Two o'clock-"kai" and a sandwich.

Alert and waiting, the crews closed up tight at action stations at four o'clock. Minutes drag, and hours linger. A facetious remark comes from a nervous voice, "If that's Christmas, we've had it."

Darkness lingers hesitantly. With the first suspicion of dawn, Cape Gloucester, grimly grey, rises in mistiness. There is electricity in the air. The angry lightning that lashes the horizon seems symbolic.

The dark forms creep westward, to poise in position. A husky voice through the amplifiers cautions, "We will open fire in ten minutes' time."

There is the impression of time inestimable. Time and nothing else. No movement. No thought.

"Two minutes to go."

Breathing quickens, the skin draws tight over the face.

"One minute."

A pause, a bell, then the gigantic sensation of expanding power, a head filled with great sonorous sound and an orange-green film across the eyes!

The white head and rounded helmet of a gunner is a sudden silhouette. Guns belch on either side. The misty greyness is stabbed with savage light. Explosive glows spot the foreshore, and flare into occasional brilliance. The bombardment settles into a monotony of time pause and power pulse. An hour passes Eke a minute or a day.

American bombers roar overhead, blast the beach and airstrips and leave the sky to the covering fighters.

The first wave of barges moves shoreward, and out to sea is the dotted promise of more to come.

With the marines ashore and consolidated, the ships, now silent, swing southward in the blue brightness of daylight, a hoist of flags at their yards. The blue waters blur by; sweat dries on sticky grimy skins, and the long white waters stretch out and away, as Cape Gloucester, in chaos, diminishes on the horizon.

The task force speeds home, full-bellied and satisfied.

ABLE SEAMAN C. L. B., P-M-4677

TWELVE MONTHS

IT is twelve months now since our party arrived in New Guinea. It has been an eventful period - even to one who has spent all that time ashore, in various port directorates-but, looking back over the year, it is, strangely enough, the little, seemingly unimportant, things that you remember more easily and even with some sort of, misplaced perhaps, affection.

Out of a jumble of memories you extract a picture of a tent built on stilts, on a beach; of having beans again for breakfast; jeeping along a muddy jungle track, over a rickety bridge, to a picture show (and the comments that came with the clinches!). Of thunder, without warning, like the crack of a whip; a boong singing a song with Japanese words; seeing the simultaneous splash of four enemy planes, far out at sea, during their disastrous, morning raid....

You remember that the night before there had been a red alert and, as usual, the intelligence officer was taking the commentary on the direct line from Fighter Sector. "Plot of ten enemy planes-course 03o-moving in twelve miles out . . ." went the slow, unconcerned voice at the other end of the line; he was all right; he was miles away-for at that exact moment, the "I" bloke heard the rising, falling hum of enemy planes right overhead. "Twelve miles out, be --," he yelled as he flew out to join us in the slit trench, to the long, heavy breathing of the first bombs falling.

Then there was the case of the Port Director's bed. Due to a senior officer's foresight, we found, when we arrived at a newly occupied port, that the Navy had been allocated what remained of the best building in the area. The previous occupant, and a rather untidy one, had been a high-ranking Japanese officer. We found his three-quarter bed, complete with mattress and net, in a back room. The Port Director, of course, exercised his prerogative and took possession of the bed. It must be said that he had endurance. He slept in that bed for three nights. It wasn't the squeaks so much as the recurring nightmare about a Jap general being in bed with him, that was the final straw. On the fourth night he retired to a less exalted, but less tiring, stretcher.

You remember, too, people you met passers-through mostly-ranging from generals and N.O.I.Cs to war correspondents and "visiting firemen". There was a young, frail looking Army officer who had been caught unawares-and in shorts-by a Japanese patrol in a native village and had made his escape, swimming down a river by night and, by day, lying low in the jungle, caked in mud and leaves; this, for four days and nights. And a Yank friend, reading fairy stories in atrocious pidgin English to a bunch of giggling boongs. One morning we saw a pilot parachute from his burning plane into the sea and an hour later he was telling us his story as if it were the most ordinary thing to happen to a fellow. I remember the "visiting fireman" who brightly remarked at breakfast, "You know, I quite like bully-beef!"-and the heavy silence that followed!

But I think my most vivid memory is of Christmas night, 1943. Late in the day, a party of twenty or so native boys came down from a nearby village to wish us a happy Christmas and ask if we had any rice. We had, so the boys danced for us on the beach dark figures against a darkening background of sea and sky. When it was quite dark and the ships at anchor were only hazy outlines, we all sat on the beach, listening to the boys singing carols in perfect harmony. Last Christmas there was blood on this same beach. When they finally sang "Silent Night" we all joined in-we, that is, Australians, Americans, sailors, soldiers-and I think our voices, as one great voice, may have gone out across the water to where those ships were assembled, waiting for the New Britain show.

B.F.J.

SMOKE

THE telegraph in the double boiler-room of H.M.A.S. Waterhen moved with a clang from "Steady" to "Increase".

The stoker petty officer reached for the fan-control valve, and the speed of the fans increased. The two stokers stood by the boilers watching him. He nodded, and his lips formed the words "Up one". They spun the little wheels of the battery valves and flapped the air flaps, and the red glow in the boiler room increased slightly as the sprayers ignited. The leading stoker narrowed his eyes to peer upwards at the water-level gauges. The stoker petty officer glanced at the smoke mirrors and then at the pressure gauges trembling just below the red marks.

"O.K.," he said, "and now, as I was saying about smoke. Smoke is the important thing. If you don't make smoke you don't get any 'bottles', but if you do make smoke you deserve all you get, because on this Tobruk run there's always a few bombers-88s and 87s hanging about, and a puff of smoke can be seen for ruddy miles....

The telegraph clanged again, and the pointer came to rest at "Voice pipe". He jammed his right ear into the mouthpiece and his forefinger into his left ear. He listened for a moment, then shouted, "Aye aye, sir," and slammed down the copper lid of the voice pipe.

As he turned to meet three pairs of inquiring eyes ~ he pointed upwards and made a downward swooping gesture with one hand. The leading stoker nodded and switched on the emergency lights. The stoker petty officer beckoned to the two stokers.

"Now, my sons," he said, "you're going to get a bit of practice."

"What is it, chief?"

"Air action. A few of those blasted bombers I was telling you about."

"How many, chief?" The stoker's voice sounded thin.

The stoker petty officer looked at him. "First time?"

The stoker nodded and tried to grin. The stoker petty officer's firm hand grasped his arm for an instant.

"Don't say it, my son," he said. "I know how you feel. Sort of shut-in down here, isn't it? Like to be up on one of the guns, having a crack at 'em, wouldn't you? Well, listen to me. Those guns never hit a damn thing yet. This is the main armament of this crate-speed. We can't hit the cows but we can dodge 'em; so watch me for signals and smack it about with your sprayers. They'll be dragging the guts out of your boiler one minute and stopping the next, without warning; so watch your steam-and if you blow off I'll crown you both with this wheel spanner. O.K.- Right. Here it comes-and don't forget-no smoke"'

As he finished speaking, the ship slowly listed over to starboard, and the telegraph clanged to "Full Speed".

With boots sliding on the sloping plates and hands clutching at hot, shining rails, the stokers clung to their boilers. The rushing air from the fans pressed in on their eardrums and beat down on their heads. "Up two." . . . "Up two more." The pressure gauge needles sagged back-230-220-200.

Through the rising throb of the fans the clang of the telegraph sounded muffled-"More Steam".

"All Sprayers! " Spin the little wheels. Flap the air flaps. Peer through half-closed eyes into the white-hot furnace.

"More Air." The floor plates shook under their feet as the fans worked up to full speed. Drainpipes, copper red in the glow of the furnaces, vibrated like bowstrings. Above the roar of the racing fans and the sprayers the sound of guns came faint and muffled-bump, bump, bump. They could feel the ship flinch at the recoil, and bits of asbestos floated down from the steam pipes.

"Hang on," shouted the leading stoker, as the ship heaved upright and then heeled wildly over to port. A moment later the whole boiler room seemed to contract and expand again and move bodily sideways as two heavy explosions shook the ship.

"Cripes! " gasped one of the stokers. "That was close."

"Watch yer bloody sprayers!" shouted the stoker petty officer as the telegraph clanged to "Stop Smoke". "Look at yer - got a sprayer on here with the flaps shut. How do you expect the Old Man to see 'em if you fill the sky with blasted smoke?"

"Sorry, chief," said the stoker.

Again the ship heeled and shuddered as the force of heavy explosions smacked like giant hands against the thin hull-plating. The lights went out and a gauge glass burst with a hissing crack. More explosions. Steam pipes jerked in their mountings, showering down dust and asbestos. Spanners, jerked from their racks, clattered across the sloping floor plates. The faces of the stokers shone wet and glistening as they faced their furnaces, peering through sweat-blinded eyes at the gauges. The leading stoker picked up a careering oilcan, wiped it with a sweat rag and replaced it in its rack.

The stoker petty officer, hanging with one hand from the fan-control valve, flashed his torch around the boiler-room, the white circle of light moving slowly over smoothly plunging pumps and picking out dusty gauges one by one.

"Watch your steam!" he snapped suddenly as the beam showed pointers quivering over red marks. The stokers sprang to their valves -the roar of the fans subsided-the vibration lessened.

"Easing down," said the stoker petty officer, reaching for a can of water which swayed from a hook above his head. He drank deeply, letting the water run down his chest. As he replaced the can, his practised ears detected a slight irregularity in the subdued roar of the sprayers. He walked swiftly to the furnace front, and as he did so one sprayer spluttered and went out.

"Water in the oil!" he shouted. "Bill. Nip up and open up the suction on the peace tanks. I think there's a drop of oil in them."

The leading stoker sprang up the ladder as two more sprayers spluttered and died. The stoker petty officer worked quickly, almost automatically, in the flickering light of the furnaces, and as he worked he lectured his stokers:

"Water in the oil; that's the bombs - started a rivet or two in the tanks. When you get water you get smoke - white smoke - tons of it Look in the furnace, see it' , White smoke and steam-pouring out of the funnels like cotton wool. I'll bet the old man's putting on a turn on the bridge. So what do we do? We go on a good tank and drain off the water as quick as we can - Gimme that spanner - we disconnect this union here and then we - what's that? "

"Somebody shouting down the fans from on deck," said one of the stokers.

They listened. A voice, curiously chopped up by the whirling fan blades, floated down from above.

"What's he say?" said the stoker.

"Don't know," said the stoker petty officer, probably telling us we are making white smoke - as if we didn't know."

"All right, all right!" he bellowed angrily, and futilely, knowing his words would be instantly blown into the furnaces and lost all right, blast yer-I know!"

Suddenly the airlock door opened and a head peered down into the boiler-room and a voice called: "Hi, 'stokes', come on up, we're leavin'."

"What's that?" shouted the stoker petty officer, busy with his spanner.

"Come on up out of it, yer fat'eads - Abandon ship - We're sinking - Engine-room's full of water! "

"Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?" said the stoker petty officer, putting his spanner back in the rack.

The stokers started towards the ladder but his voice halted them. "All right, my sons, shut down. Ease the fans, Bill. You two, off all sprayers and shut down the oil-fuel pumps. Leave the feed pumps jogging and the main stop valve open. . . ."

The searching beam of his torch surveyed the boiler-room for the last time; shining pump rods, gleaming handrails, white-hot bricks in the furnaces fading to red. The feed pumps groaned and the fans turned slowly -flip, flip, flip - as they used up the last of the steam.

"Right-ho, my sons," he said. "Let's go."

They collected their lifebelts from the rail and one after the other went up the hot steel ladder into the sunshine.

"You know," said the stoker petty officer to the young stoker as they climbed through the hatch, "you know, you left the exhaust valve open on that oil-fuel pump when you shut it down. Always close all the valves, remember me telling you?"

"KAMLOOPS."

MINESWEEPING INCIDENT

STRANGE things happen at sea, and even stranger tales are evolved from such happenings. However, the following incident actually occurred, and, although of a minor nature, caused much interest and some amusement.

Our ship, a trawler, was minesweeping off the Australian coast. During dan-laying exercises one day, a buoy-mooring, sinker weighing one and three-quarter hundredweight was lost owing to the mooring wire parting as it was being hauled aboard. On returning to base it was written off as "Stores lost by accident". A new sinker was obtained from the Naval Store, the whole matter being promptly forgotten.

About a week later on our next trip we were steaming from an anchorage to the sweeping area, when the officer of the watch heard a peculiar thumping noise. It seemed to come from below waterline, port side. The captain was called, and after various theories, had been discussed, he decided to anchor and investigate.

Our telegraphist, an amateur diving champion, volunteered to go over the side. He discovered the lost dan-buoy sinker suspended from the port bilge-keel on a short length of mooring wire. The wire had jammed in between the keel and the ship's side nearly a foot from the end of the keel before parting. Bending a wire to the remaining short end, the sinker was hauled out and recovered.

The remarkable fact was that we had steamed several hundred miles with nearly two hundredweight of iron suspended from our bilge-keel, without suspecting its presence. A touch of humour was provided on our return. The naval officer-in-charge asked how we would account for the recovered sinker. Our Captain promptly replied, "As an 'arising', of course, Sir!"

"ULYSSES."