I was born in England, actually. I was born a Pom I suppose you would say. My father had been British Army all his life, and he thought with the Australians right through the World War 1. So after the war, first of all he got married, as a
retired general, wives were a bit of a nuisance in the services before that. He had three children, and decided, as he retired from the army after World War 1, that he wanted to come to Australia. So I became a migrant, at the age of one. I came out from England in 1925. I was born in 1923. He settled on a sheep station in the Western District of Victoria, where I grew up,
as a youngster. I went to the local state school. When I was too old for that, ten or eleven, I went to one of the big schools down in Geelong. Geelong Grammar. At the age of thirteen, I tried for the navy, still before the war, this was, in 1936. I didn’t get in because I had flat feet. I wasn’t brave enough to tell my interviewers that my feet were flat because I hadn’t worn shoes up until then. My feet had
taken on the shape of the land on which they walked, in the bush. Anyway, I failed in that. I wanted to go into the navy because I was brought up very service-minded, by my father. Two or three years later, war broke out. I was almost finished in school, so in 1940 I joined the navy. That was what they called a special entry, matriculation, having finished my schooling. Which I think was a much better way to join
than the little kids who were going in at thirteen. They had their futures mapped out far too early for them. At any rate, I joined the navy in 1940. I went to sea only six months later, after purely naval training, not academic like the others had been doing. I went to sea in Australia’s flagship. I served right through World War 11. I stayed in the navy afterwards, because I had joined the permanent navy and had a chance to stay in. Then I served
in due course in the Korean War and eventually, in a smaller way, in the Vietnam War. Finally I retired after nearly 40 years in the navy, in 1978, since which I have been enjoying my retirement and becoming an artist. That’s my life story.
I joined the HMAS Australia. A month or so around Sydney, New Zealand, then we took the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth and Aquitania, the three biggest ships in the British Merchant Fleet, we escorted them from Sydney, right round the south of Australia, across the Indian Ocean, and they were taking troops to the Middle East. We then stayed around Aden, up and down the East Coast of Africa, Durban, East London,
Capetown, doing convoys, searching for German raiders. Interesting incidents that I will mention later. Then we hurried back to Australia when the Japs came into the war. We immediately took convoys up to New Guinea, of troops, reinforcing the very troops we had up there. We served around there, the Coral Sea, culminating in the Coral Sea Battle,
which was the first time, of course, that the Japs were beaten at sea. Left the ship not long after that, went by merchant ship over to England, where I did courses. They were still very much concerned then with the British training system. Nowadays we are much more concerned with the Americans. But then we were doing exchange service, we were doing courses and so forth, with the groups. I did courses there, for a few months. After which
there was no quick trip home, so I asked whether I could get into something smaller than the big cruiser that I had been in. And I had an interesting month or so in the Coastal Forces, in motor gunboats, on the East Coast of Great Britain, in the [English] Channel. Then I came back and rejoined the HMAS Australia. While I had been away, the Guadalcanal actions had been taking place,
and we had lost our sister ship, the Canberra, in the Battle of Savo Island. We were up around those waters for a bit. I was with the Hobart when she was torpedoed. I was in the Australia and happened to be on watch and was looking at her when she was torpedoed. But she survived. Not long after that I left the ship again and went across back to the Indian Ocean, joined a British cruiser, took passage incidentally on a
small aircraft carrier, from England to India, and joined this cruiser. We went up the Persian Gulf for actions there a bit. And gradually realised that the main task that we were going to do was back in England. We went back through the Med [Mediterranean], one or two incidents in the Med, then we worked for the Normandy landings. I was one of the few Australians probably in the Normandy landings, because we were very with the Japanese,
back here, in those days. But I happened to be the only Australian in this British cruiser and we did the landings, bombarding Sword Beach in Normandy. Then after that became a sort of a mother ship for all the small craft there, during which I spent quite a bit of time ashore with the army, helping them out, because I had been gunnery control officer of the ship, and we had become a mother ship, rather than a bombarding ship. Left the
ship again to come back. But again, passengers were a bit remote, so I had an interesting time. At that time I decided would like to see what the air force did and I joined an Australian Beaufighter Squadron in Norfolk who were attacking German shipping, off the Dutch Coast. It was interesting to see the other side of life. What is was like to be shot at by a ship rather than being in the ship shooting at the aeroplane.
When I finished that I got passage in another naval ship back through the Med to Ceylon where I joined an Australian destroyer, the Norman. I served in her up and down the Burmese Coast, doing the final Arrakan advance down the coast of Burma. With Bill Slim [General Sir William Slim], the general, doing his famous victory procedure down the coast.
When we’d successfully done that, we rushed back around the south of Australia, rejoined other N Class in Sydney, and joined the British Pacific Fleet, went up north with them, operated with the British aircraft carriers who were operating with the American carriers, in an enormous collection of ships by then. We did the Okinawa landings, the Sakashima landings. We were preparing to do the landings
in Japan, which was a worry for us all, because we realised how fanatical the Japanese were. And fortunately, I think still, the atom bombs put an end to the war before the millions that would have been killed in the final struggle. We actually were off the coast of Japan and saw the sunset on the night of what we, the next morning, found out was the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Which was quite an interesting
experience. And that was the end of the war. We then had all the post-war business of running down and returning to Australia. I stayed in the navy then, and it was only a few years later we found ourselves starting the Korean War.
seventeen years earlier. The General Bridges [Major General William Throsby Bridges, KCB, CMG], who you may remember was the head of the Australian forces at Gallipoli. He was killed early in May, and one of the brigadiers was promoted to take his place, as the divisional commander, and they didn’t want to promote the colonel under him up to brigadier, apparently, he was too junior at the time, and they looked
around quickly for someone to take over, and there were various other British officers with the Australian forces then, and they grabbed my father from Khartoum, and they rushed him up, at very short notice, and he took over the First Brigade of the Australians on Gallipoli. Where he had a very active time, including, I think, the only battle we really won in Gallipoli, was the Battle of Lone Pine, and he was the commander of
the brigade that fought the Battle of Lone Pine. I’ve always been rather proud of that. Then he stayed with the Australians. He went to France with them, after the evacuation of Gallipoli. In 1916 he was promoted from brigadier general to major general, and he then took over the 2nd Division, right through Posieres, Passchendaele, all the nasty battles on the French
and Belgium area. By halfway through that, he was given the Commander of the Order of the Bath, and he was given the French Partiguere [parte le guerre] [Croix de Guerre] and the Belgian decoration. At the end of the war he was knighted. He left the Australian forces early in 1918, when they finally Australianised, completely, the commands. He was the last
of the British officers to lead. I think he was…. Well, I like to think he was, the most popular of the British officers amongst the Aussies. Partly because he had a VC and they knew that he was a fighting general, and not of these generals who hid behind the lines and ordered everybody in to be slaughtered. And he was so fond of the people he served with. As I say, there was no question in his mind that when he retired, a year or so after the war, he had been
writing to his Australian friends and he finally came out. He came out first by himself, had a look around…. I know your head office is in Orange, and the first place he decided to settle was Orange. I found that out when I went there, not long after World War 11. I was the ADC [Aide de Camp] to the Governor-General and I visited Orange, and the very first person I met, he said, “I knew your father. He came here in 1924 and he wanted to settle here.”
He decided, in the end, to settle in Victoria, instead. At any rate he decided to settle in Victoria, then he came back and got us and brought us out in 1925.
How big was your sheep station and where was it?
It was a place called Balmoral, north of Hamilton, south of Horsham. The Western District. It had been a very big station, I suppose about twenty or thirty thousand acres. It was taken over, after World War 1, for the Closer Settlement of returned men. As a matter of fact, Indian army officers were, for some reason, allocated to that particular area. Not Indians, but British people who’d been in the Indian army. So the
main homestead was reduced to a thousand acres, and lots of other one thousand acre blocks were set up and houses were built on them. And all these Indian army officers were settled in there. The people who had owned the main homestead, Congul as it was called, were so disgusted at being reduced, compulsorily to a thousand acres that they sold the place, to my father, who had found it for sale when he came out. So we started off
with only a thousand acres. The Indian army officers were partly not on really…. blocks of land that were big enough. Secondly they didn’t know very much about running a sheep station. They hardly knew what a sheep was. So by the time that the next war came along, only fifteen years later, they’d all failed and moved to the city and disappeared.
All except one family, I think. And my father, who had gradually brought up two or three of the other ones…. I think we finished with about four or five thousand acres, running merino sheep. Lovely rolling red gum country. One of the nicest parts of Victoria. It’s not flat and dull, or bush, it’s just big red gum spread park-like, over nice rolling hills with beautiful white merino sheep. My wife
never forgave me for not going back to the farm after World War 11, when I could have gone…. My father had died early in World War 11, but I decided to stay in the navy. I often regret it myself to a certain extent, that I didn’t go back. My mother had kept the farm going during World War 11, for me or my brother. We both said, “No.” I said I wanted to stay in the navy. My brother had been invalided out of the Welsh Guards after being wounded in Italy during the war,
and he had become a diplomat. And he said, “No, I want to be a diplomat.” So the place was sold and we rather regretted it, ever since.
had fought with my father. Good genuine Australians. A chap called Gus Oakes, a chap called Bill Winter Cooke, who had been with my father with my father. And that might have led him to Balmoral. He probably knew they were living there, and tracked them down when he came back out in 1924. They were all great people. At the time, they just seemed friends of my father. I have since learnt of their own…. Gus Oakes
had a Military Cross. I didn’t know much about medals as a boy, I just thought that everybody had medals. But he had a Military Cross, which he got fighting under my father in France. Bill Winter Cooke, his son’s still running Murndal, which was about thirty miles away from us, he was the one that brought back…. Not the Lone Pine,
that’s a different story. You probably heard about how the lone pine was brought back? The lone pine itself was sitting on top of a little mountain. A single lone pine. A lonesome pine, they called it originally. And my father, the night before the battle, sketched it and that’s the only known picture of the original known pine. But after the battle, it had been blown to bits, by gunfire.
And somebody picked up a pine cone from it, sent it home to his aunt in Australia, who some years later remembered it was sitting on the mantle piece, gave it to some experts who were able to grow a lone pine from it. And that’s the Lone Pine at the Shrine of Remembrance here in Melbourne. There are now lots of grandsons of lone pine. I planted one down at one of the schools in Melbourne, only two or three years ago.
The headmaster knew I was the son of the general who fought the Lone Pine Battle, and we planted this lone pine, which has now grown up. Bill Winter Cooke, who I mentioned, he at Gallipoli picked up some acorns from the Gallipoli oaks. They’re not really oak trees as you and I know, like the English oaks. They’re very spiny.
They’re more like a holly. In fact, I call them a Gallipoli Holly Oak. He brought a handful of them home, and he planted them in the grounds of Murndal, one little Gallipoli oak. And the other one in the grounds of Geelong Grammar School, because he had been at Geelong Grammar. And recently
because my wife’s father had been second in command of the submarine AE2, which forced the Dardanelles, on the original Anzac Day…. I was in charge of the grounds around the shrine here where we’ve got about four hundred trees. About two hundred of them are dedicated to a particular ship or unit or squadron. We didn’t have the AE2 commemorated there,
so I was able to get one of the Gallipoli oaks, which had been again the grandson of the original one brought back, at Murndal and at Geelong Grammar, and I planted that and it’s now taller than me. I do digress rather, don’t I?
No, English tench brought out by somebody. And English perch of course, the red fin, it was imported, too. The dams wouldn’t have had any natives. The creeks and the rivers had natives, but again, mainly the English perch seemed to have taken over. The Greenalge River we did a lot of fishing in. We went shooting. Jack Whistler, our overseer, ran a lot of bees. And I used to
go with him and we’d move the apiary from one spot to another. We’d do all the getting of the honey out of the combs. The extractors. You’d whirl it around. It was sliced off the outer covering of beeswax and then you’d whirl it around so it all flung
out into a sort of forty four gallon drum, extractor thing. And then you’d take it off. So there were all sorts of country things like that that we used to do. We used to go on picnics up into the Grampians. I remember one Christmas…We normally had a fairly traditional Christmas at home, but for one reason or another we went on a picnic to somewhere in the Grampians.
We were almost attacked by what we thought were wild cattle, while we were having the picnic. But I don’t think they were really wild and I don’t think they ever really attacked us. But those are the sort of little memories you have. Very much a country upbringing, and finding your own fun on your own farm, with all sorts of…. Every tree on the home paddock, my brother, particularly, gave it a name. There was one which was the Elephant Tree, because it looked rather like
an elephant’s foot. And we had an elephant foot in the house, which my father had shot in Africa at some stage. Then we found somewhere else, at some stage, that the original settlers of the house, two of them, the two Mailer brothers, one of them had gone out to the far paddock and spent a couple of nights out there, looking after the sheep. While he was away, the other
brother cut down a tree, it fell the wrong way, it pinned him to the ground, he couldn’t get out. He tried to chop his way out, it was an enormous tree, and when his brother came back he found him dead there, with his face eaten off by wild dogs. So we found a place that we thought was his grave, so we dug it up, but he wasn’t there. These were the sort of excitements and stories…The homestead that we were living in
wasn’t terribly old, it had been built about 1900. So it was only then thirty years old. But the old homestead had been built in the 1840s, and it still there today. It was a lovely old homestead. The overseer used to live in it. So it, itself, was something to explore. And then of course there was the shearing time and the cutting of the crops in the summer. Once we
went away to school, we still…. Whenever we came home on holidays we were flat-out all the time, doing the farm work. I remember all the cutting of the crops, particularly when the war came. The bush fires that we used to have to fight in the summer and the dwindling number of men to do the work, whether it was cutting the crops or putting out the scrub fires or the grass fires. It was a country life that
one remembers, more and more, as one gets older, really, as the greatest way to be brought up.
I had hardly seen the sea, actually, but as I think I mentioned earlier on, I must have realised that if I had gone into the army I would have had a hard load to bear, because my father had done so well, people would tend to say, “Smyth can hardly keep up with his father’s reputation, can he?” So the navy, perhaps,
that was perhaps I went more for the navy. I liked the idea of it, and everything I had read about it. Inevitably, once I failed, I still wanted to try again. It was still peacetime then, of course. When the war came, there was no question about it. They had this special entry that they had just introduced to build up their numbers a little bit in the permanent navy. My father,
obviously, kept his ear to the ground and knew about it. There was no question. I thought it was a great idea to apply. Two or three other friends at school had gone in, just ahead of me. Ian Mackintosh, who died the other day. Tony Sennett, who also died the other day. They had gone into the navy. So even in peacetime, and even as war started, it was the obvious thing to do. Inevitability?
I would have had to do something in the war, there was no question in my mind about that. My brother and sister were over in England. They had gone over, just before the war. My brother had a scholarship at Cambridge; my sister went to be finished in France or something. They were both caught up in the war there. She joined the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force], the air force. He joined the Welsh Guards because of my mother’s Welsh upbringing,
and he fought right through the war. So it sort of fitted in nicely, that we had the navy, army, air force amongst the three of us. So off we went to the war. My father had already had one heart attack by then. He was fairly old, he was seventy something by then. In those days, that was old. He became a bit of an armchair strategist, I think. I didn’t see much of him once I went away to the war. Within a year of my going
away he died of a second heart attack. And in a way, I think, just as well. He was too busy saying, “These young generals don’t know what they’re doing these days.” He was frustrated. He would have loved to have been there, but he was too old to do it. He was probably best off this Earth.
for. I think I had a lovely time reading up all the books that I had always wanted to read. Studying heraldry amongst other things, I seem to remember. At any rate, the exam finally came. Two other people from Geelong Grammar sat for the navy with me. We all got through the initial exam. It was the same process, except that we were four years older. The medical exam I got through. As I say, they hardly looked at my feet.
and they were looking for…. Only a few, but I think the number they finally took in our entry was only seven. Then the interview. The interview I do remember. Not having done the interview the first time, in 1936. It had all the typical questions. “Do you remember the number of the bus you came to the interview in?” No, sir, I came in the tram.” “What number was it?” “One, two,
three, four.” “Was it really?” “Yes, sir.” Because you had been told you had to invent something quickly to give an answer. I do remember they said, “Oh your father…” And they asked about my father and I proudly said, “Yes, he got a Victoria Cross.” And they said, “Ahh, what colour is the ribbon of the Victoria Cross?” Well, I had been seeing it all my life…. You saw it just a little while ago. What colour would you call it? I said, “It’s a sort of a deep purple.” And they said, “No,
no, no. It’s crimson.” And I said, “No, that doesn’t sound right to me. It’s a deep purple to me.” And I think that almost lost me my chance of getting in. But that is the only thing I can really remember they asked me. Then we had to wait a couple of weeks, then finally I got a letter saying “Yes, you are being appointed as a cadet midshipman, etc.” And I rushed around to the other chap, Haslop, his name was, I remember now. I said, “Have you had your letter?”
And he said, “No.” And two days later I left school and he still hadn’t got a letter, then he rang up another friend and said, “I’ve got a letter saying no, I’ve missed it.” He joined the air force and was killed.
who’s still around. I’ve known him all my life, since then. He took us down in a bus, all seven of us. And we were there about three days ahead of the normal returning…. It was like a school, them being away for September holidays, I suppose. It was September, 1940, then, and we had about three days in getting our uniform, and learning to double everywhere in formation.
And being told by him and the term officer, who was a Reserve officer, who had been in permanent navy way back, and had gone out and become a chemist, I think. I can’t remember his name. But he was our sort of term officer. And Guy Griffiths was telling us all about being a cadet midshipman and how we behaved. And then of course the main group came back and eyed us over
and tried to treat us like first year. First year, you’d get a pretty fair time. Not quite as bad as the army has tended to do, over the years, when you’ve heard about bastardisation and things. But they were doing initiations and things, for the first year. And the senior year got us and said, “Now, you are going to be initiated.” And we all said, “Wait a minute…” And one of our chaps had been at university for a year or two. I think he was
twenty one. I was only seventeen. I was the youngest of the group. And he said, “Now, wait a minute. I think I’m older than you. I think I’m bigger than you, if you try anything like that…” They hadn’t quite figured out that we were more of a senior group of new entries than the poor little thirteen year olds who would join each year in January. So we avoided all that. We were embraced almost,
although suspiciously. They never really liked it. Even now, those thirteen-year-old entries look on us as, “You were the specials. You didn’t go through the four years that we did.” We on the other hand, as I say, got out of any initiation. And we didn’t do any academic work, really. I think we had a Naval History and Trigonometry. Spherical trigonometry, because you
needed that for navigation work. But mainly we were doing gunnery and torpedoes and physical training. All the sort of naval things, the naval drill, whereas they were still being treated as schoolboys, really. So we only did two terms. We did September to December, and then the January to March. Then we went off to sea, about March, 1941.
Our age group graduated, then we took part in the graduation parade at the end of 1940. They went off to sea ahead of us. Then to rub salt into their annoyance, later on, because we had had this twenty one year old, and a couple of nineteens, the navy worked out that we were older. So they gave us an extra six months seniority,
and we all finished up senior to the ones who had done their four years training and that again, they never quite forgave us. Right through the navy…. .Guy Griffiths actually, I think he got promoted to captain just ahead of him. But he made admiral and I didn’t. So at any rate, it was a very pleasant time. I was used to all the…. .I had a been a sergeant major in the school cadet corps, so I knew about drill,
although the naval drill was a bit different. I knew how to be boarder at school, for many years. There was no homesickness or anything like that, it was just excitement to actually be in the navy and doing proper navy things, and looking forward to getting away to sea, which we did. Pretty quickly.
and lots of actual learning the theory of gunnery, then doing gun drill on the six inch and four inch guns they had there. Lifting a six-inch projectile is pretty heavy. One poor chap dropped one on his toe. He was in hospital for a little while. I did finish up in hospital at one stage. I got a sort of boil on my foot, if I remember it was, and they had to put me in hospital, because I
had fainted on parade but I had refused to actually fall over. I suddenly realised everything was going around and around and I turned right and I marched off the parade and collapsed on the corner of the drill hall, and was taken to hospital. But at least I hadn’t fallen flat on my face, so I felt rather proud of that. We went through all the usual boat drill. Pulling whalers…. pulling being the word ‘rowing’ in the navy. Cutters and whalers.
Sailing, learning to sail. I had never learned anything like that. So all the very naval things plus, as I say, talks on history, talks on seamanship, which covers nearly everything you might find on the ship to do. All the ropes and rigging of an old ship, and the rigging and equipment of a new ship. How you handle a ship. How you handle boats. We learned not only the pulling and sailing, but also the motor
boats they had down there. Because as soon as you got to sea, as a midshipman, you find yourself, virtually on your first command, you were given command of one of the ship’s boats. That was your boat and you had your crew and they had to keep smart and clean, and you had to drive it, and you had to drive it so that you didn’t crash into things when you had admirals and captains on board. So it was all a whole new experience for a country boy, really, but somehow it seemed all right and proper. And we knew we were going off
to do something in a war. Not just in the peacetime navy. So it was an exciting time, there’s no doubt about it. We did lots of physical training. Swimming, I had to pass the swimming test of course, get the bronze medallions. Everybody in our navy had to learn to swim. Fascinating later on that in the Royal navy they didn’t have to learn to swim. A lot of my sailors could not swim. And I remember
asking them, and they said, “No, sir, we’d much rather not. If you’re going to be sunk in the North Sea, it’s better to die quickly than to swim for half an hour, then die.” That was their outlook.
ship that carries the admiral, commanding the fleet. I think the admiral was then in the Canberra, who was the sister ship to the Australia. They were both eight inch heavy cruisers, over ten thousand tons. Built in 1928 in England, and been in our navy for the twelve years since. The Australia, then had an RN captain by the name of Stuart on board, but he was replaced two months later
by Australians, then we had Australians right through. I joined her in Sydney; she was in dry dock at Cockatoo Dock. In fact, I had a few days leave at home when I joined, and they found that one of her propeller shafts had worn more than they expected, so they found that she was going to be in dock for an extra week, so they said, “Right, go back on leave.” And I said,
“But I’ve just left home and they’ve given me a farewell in the Balmoral Mechanics Institute Hall. I don’t want to go back home on leave. I’m here to fight the war.” So I went off with my of my term-mates Ken Bryant, who lived in Bathurst, so I had a week’s leave there with him, where I met a couple of attractive Bathurst girls and had a very pleasant week’s leave, and then back on board and we sailed two or three days later, when we got out of dock. So it was an
anti-climax, almost, at first joining. Then we joined again. It had given us time to settle in, see where the gun room was, where all the midshipman lived. Find out how to sling a hammock, which we’d been taught, but had not actually done. We lived in the hammock for the next year or so. We sailed. The very first job that we did was to escort about four ships across to New Zealand.
And amongst them was a ship called the Thermistocles, painted grey and it was looking like all the other ships in wartime, but I immediately realised that it was the ship that I had come out from England in, in 1925. Which was rather a nice sort of reminder of my early days. The ship, I think, survived the war. I never saw her again.
We finished that trip, and then we picked up the big ships. The Queen Mary, and The Queen Elizabeth, which we had hardly heard of. She had only just been completed as war came. I’m not sure that she had ever been painted black and white. She had been painted grey as commissioned, because the war was over. Queen Elizabeth loaded first in Sydney with, I don’t know, ten thousand troops.
They fitted an awful lot of people in. She then had to sail out of Sydney Harbour and go down and wait in Jervis Bay, because there wasn’t room in Sydney Harbour for both the Queens together, they were so big. The second one then came in from somewhere and loaded. And Aquitania, I think, was quite a lot smaller. She had been around in the First War . Big four funnelled woodbine appearance.
Packet of Woodbines, they used to call her. Woodbine cigarettes, with the four funnels. And we sailed, I think, with the Queen Mary and Aquitania, and picked up the other one off Jervis Bay. I don’t know how much we were told in those days, but it was obvious where we were going to take them. They were going to the Middle East and at some stage the captain would have said, “We are now on our way to the Middle East.” I think we went through Bass Strait. Certainly I can remember going across the Bight. The Great Australian Bight at that time, I think, was the roughest I had ever seen it,
in all the years since. When we got to Fremantle, the big ships were all anchored out in Gage Roads, which is the area outside of Fremantle. Between Fremantle and the island there. We went in alongside, but I, in one of the motor boats, had the job of going out and running around the three ships. I remember one of them saying,
“What ship are you from?” And I said, “We’re in the Australia.” And they said, “Is that that submarine that was escorting us across the Bight?” I said, “We’re not a submarine.” They said, “You looked like it, you were under water half the time.” So it had been quite a rough trip. We were transferring people across from one Queen to the other. A very heavy swell. Not much fun, I hadn’t really learned how to handle boats, but I learned quickly.
At one stage we were picking up three or four nurses, from the Queen Mary to take to the Queen Elizabeth. And moving up and down, you’ve got to be pretty quick as you come down the Jacob’s Ladder on the side of the ship, to know when to jump into the boat and one of the nurses, unfortunately, miss-timed it and went crash, and broke her leg. So she went back with a broken leg. I don’t know what happened to her. But we didn’t take her across to the other ship.
So it was quite an interesting…. I had been driving boats in Sydney Harbour the first few days, which were nice and quite. But driving those boats in Gauge Roads was quite an interesting introduction to my life as a midshipman. Remembering that in the First War , those were the midshipmen who took in all the troops at Anzac and that, I was thinking, “Well, yes, I’m really into this now.”
He would be a lieutenant commander in charge of the armament, and have it ready at any time, in case you’d find yourself in action. The officer of the watch was maintaining the safety of the ship and controlling the ship, and the zigzag, and everything that needs to be done on the bridge. And the midshipman watch, under him, was sort of a dogsbody. He was watching what he was doing. Sometimes the officer of the watch would say, “Okay, you take over the zigzag, mid [midshipman].”
So you would have to watch your clock and turn at the same time as all the other ships, because if you turned at the wrong time it could be awkward. The night watch in particularly, halfway through the officer of the watch would say, “Right, go around and do rounds.” And you would go down and you would walk right through the ship. The mess decks where everyone was sleeping in their hammocks, and everywhere else. Just making sure that the whole ship seemed tight and secure and safe and that nothing was going on that shouldn’t be.
I think I once found a group of sailors playing a card game in a corner, and said, “Stop that, you can’t do that. Get into your hammocks.” But nothing really much to do. That was at sea. In the day you would be doing instruction. The officer in charge would get you all together, if you weren’t on watch, and talk to you about something you needed to be told about. You would be sent down to the engine room and do a course in the engine room for
three or four weeks, solidly, in between your watch-keeping. In harbour, similarly you always had an officer of the watch on deck. And you would have a midshipman under him, and a midshipman running boats. So you would have two duties in harbour, which you’d share, depending on the routine that they had worked out for. And a lot of instructions, still, all the time, on the things that you needed to know. The action station one had and the cruising station were different.
As a midshipman, after I had been on the bridge a little while, I became the operator of the plot. The Plot is now what you would now call the Operations Room. It was just behind the bridge, and it was where we would plot the ship’s course, that’s why it was called a plotting room. And you would also be responsible for all the knowledge about merchant shipping. And if they,
on the bridge, sighted a ship and they said, “There’s a two-masted, two-funnelled ship on the horizon. We’ve asked it who it is and it said it’s the Strait Malaka. Should the Strait Malaka be here?” And you’d have to immediately know what ships were in the area from the signals that had been coming in. And if you said, “No, there is no Strait Malaka in this area. I think it could be an enemy,” then you’d go to action stations and you’d go in a bit closer. Like the Sydney went in too close, and
got sunk by the Kormoran the next year. So there were varying degrees of interest like that. My action station happened to be down in the operations room, which we called the TS. The Transmitting Station. It was inside the armour belt, that the heavy cruisers had,
below the waterline. Small compartment, not as big as this room even, with a big fire control table, around which about twelve of us stood, with phones. I was talking to the people up in the main director, and they were setting the enemy ship or the enemy aircraft, and I was setting it on the table. And from that the information would go away electronically to the guns, which were trained off the amount
you allowed for enemy movement and those sort of things. So I was part of the main eight-inch gun control system, and that was action station I had nearly all my time as a midshipman, and particularly when we got into action and things were happening. So for the first few months after we dropped the ships off Aden, they went on up to Suez.
We stayed in Aden for a few days, then we operated up and down the West Coast of Africa for the next six months really. Mainly ships coming from England to supplement the forces in the Middle East and in the desert, they could come through the Med. If they did, they were sunk. There were a lot of convoys coming through from Gibraltar were pretty dicey. So ships coming
to bring troops around would come around the bottom, around the Cape of Good Hope, Capetown, up the East Coast, up as far as Suez and unload there, then the troops would cross by land to where they were needed. So we were doing quite a lot of escorting, to and fro, between Aden and Durban, and Durban and Capetown. Going out into the Indian Ocean every now and then. German raiders, both the big pocket battleships and the
disguised merchants like the Kormoran were known to be operating all around the world in those days. There was a particular pocket battleship somewhere in our area. We looked for them several times, but we never actually came across them. One of the more interesting exercises we did was
or Simonstown, rather. One interesting operation we had, there was a Vichy French convoy…. I’m not sure where it had come from. Presumably out in the Far East, Vietnam or somewhere like that. Indo-China. And it was crossing the Indian Ocean and we went out and intercepted it. Operation Kedgery they called it,
for some reason. And we took them into East London. Of course, they weren’t really enemy, the Vichy French. We had been on the same side as them, but they were still on the German side. We couldn’t really lock them up. Certainly South Africa, at that stage, were a bit ambivalent themselves. They almost came in on the German side, at the beginning of the war, if you’d read that bit of history.
But Smuts [General Smuts, South African Leader] sort of persuaded them to come in on our side. So they weren’t locked up, they were billeted at a hotel in East London. And one day all of our sailors were going ashore, for a run ashore, and I happened to be going ashore about the same time as the sailors. And outside this hotel, all these Vichy French were sitting around, presumably drinking wine and smoking cheroots, and slinging off at the Aussies, and the Aussies were slinging off at them. And it turned into a fight. And the only time
I was ever really wounded in the war, was when I got a French knife across my tummy. Fortunately I was in my uniform, and our thick serge uniforms prevented it from being anything more than a scratch. But that was an interesting little episode amongst the other things that we were doing. Then we were suddenly ordered to Colombo again. We didn’t know, the captain presumably knew, but we weren’t told what was happening,
and we went in there, and we loaded a lot of long wooden boxes. The sort of boxes that you can imagine a torpedo would sit in. And they were labelled ‘Senior Naval Stores Offices, Singapore’. And we said, “Ahh, we know where we’re going. We’re going to Singapore for some reason.” This was before the Japs came in and Singapore was still ours. We sailed, and we didn’t head for Singapore, we headed due south, and we went through the Tropics, past the equator,
kept going south, further and further south, getting colder and colder and finally the captain got on the broadcast and said, “Where we’re going is a place called Kurzwellen.” Kurzwellen Island, or Kurzwellen Land. It’s in the middle of the Indian Ocean, almost down in the Antarctic. “And those boxes we have on deck haven’t got torpedoes in them. And the SNO [Senior Naval Offices stores] labelled Singapore was just to fool you all, because
that’s not where we’re going. And those are magnetic mines. We’ve heard that Kurzwellen is being used by German raiders as a base…”
At any rate, we got there. There were no German raiders there at the time, but sure enough they had been using it. There was one ship that they had captured and taken in and sunk. It was still showing its upper works above the water. That proved that they had been using it. Then the operation came into being that the magnetic mines we had. They were going to be laid in case the German raiders came back. And I was in charge of what they called the ship’s pinnace,
which was a big open boat, quite long. About fifty feet long. And ideally suited to be fitted with wooden racks on the upper deck, or across the open boat, on which we could put these magnetic mines. So I found myself in charge of the…. My first command, really, laying these mines all around the different two or three harbours. And we had a lieutenant on board, who was actually playing around with a sexton,
taking fixtures off the point of land, saying “Right, let one go.” And I would feel very important and say, “Lay a mine,” and they’d throw a mine over the side. So we went on laying mines all around. I don’t know whether the Germans ever went back there. As far as I know they didn’t get sunk, anyhow. I tell that story because about four years after the war someone came along to me and said, “Smyth, is that right you’ve been telling people rather proudly that your first command was when you were laying mines in Kurzwellen?”
And I’d say, “Yes sir, that’s right.” “Ahh,” they said, “we want you tell us exactly where you laid them?” I swallowed a bit and said, “I don’t really know.” And they said, “Well, you’ve been saying you were in charge. You must know.” And I said, “No, no, no. There was a lieutenant on board and he would have a record somewhere.” And they said, “Yes, we know who you mean. That was Lieutenant Commander Denny, as he later was, but he died last year. You’re the only the one who can tell us.” And I tell this story, sometimes,
when I’m talking to Probus Clubs and others, because I hear now that some of these cruise ships are taking cruises down to Kurzwellen. And I say, “If you’re offered a cruise there, don’t go. Because those mines are still there.” I’d hope, in fact, by now that they have rotted away, or rusted away. But that was a very interesting thing for a young midshipman to be doing. I did a lot of sketches around Kurzwellen, and wrote it all up in my midshipman’s journal. That particular one,
they said, was so secret that they immediately destroyed it. So I have no record of my actions at the time.
water-line. Enormous sea elephants all around the beach. A fascinating place to see and draw pictures of, but completely uninhabited. Still, I think, uninhabited as far as I know. It’s so far down…. It’s a pretty uninhabitable sort of climate down there. We were there in the early summer. In winter, I should think, it would be as bad as the Antarctic. They might have a settlement there now, if there was any good reason for it.
Not long after that, we were doing another hunt for an alleged German raider, we weren’t finding it, and suddenly Pearl Harbour happened, the Japs came into the war. We were hurriedly called home. We got back to Fremantle as fast as we could. We refuelled there and came around to Sydney at our top speed of thirty two knots. Which was quite impressive. I remember going through Bass Strait, which happened to be flat-calm at the time. And the little coasting
ships that we were passing, they were doing about eight knots. And to see us going past at thirty two knots must have been quite a sight for them to see. We got to Sydney…. .Actually, we did spend Christmas either at Sydney or at home. And almost immediately afterwards, Boxing Day, we sailed for New Guinea, with the old Aquitania, again, a ship that had been on that big three ship convoy I mentioned earlier, to the Middle East.
She and a few cargo ships, and we were taking troops up to reinforce the very few soldiers who were in New Guinea, because we really hadn’t been expecting the Japs to come in like that. We got into Port Moresby harbour. Again, not a bad harbour, with a tiny little jetty. A wharf, really. No chance of Aquitania getting alongside it. So once again, I and my pinnace, and all the other ships’ boats, and even one or two small Corvettes, I think,
were ferrying the troops ashore from the Aquitania. There were a lot of baby faced boys, I thought. I was all of eighteen, by then, so I was feeling very old and important and experienced, having had a year at sea. And one of them said, “Excuse me, sir?” I think it was about the first time that anyone had called me ‘Sir’. I said, “Yes son, what can I do for you?” He said, “Excuse me, where are we?” I said, “You’re in Port Moresby harbour.” “Where’s that?” he said.
I said, “It’s in New Guinea.” “New Guinea? That’s not part of Australia. We’re only the Militia forces. We’re only signed up to fight in Australia. What are they doing to us? We can’t be allowed to come outside Australia.” I like telling that story, because those same kids, who were so raw and frightened then, were the same ones who, a couple of months later, down at Milne Bay, were the first army unit to stop the Japs. The Japs had come down through the Malay
Peninsula, right across into New Guinea. Almost untroubled. They had captured Singapore, before people even realised it was happening. They were winning everywhere, and those kids, so frightened at being sent out of Australia, were the first to stop them at Milne Bay, and then on the Kokoda Track, later. And it wasn’t very long after that, that we were operating in the Coral Sea. We were then, of course, the first to stop the Japs at sea, in the Battle
of the Coral Sea, which was the first time that they were beaten. Only just. Tactically they won the Battle of the Coral Sea, but strategically we did. That stopped their movement south. The Battle of the Coral Sea…. Fortunately, the intelligence had been listening in. By that time, we could break the Japanese codes, and they’d listened in and they’d heard that there was something afoot. Sailing from Rabaul, in New
Britain, which they’d captured….
in that area, and further down, we had been sending strikes across, from the carriers. But we hadn’t actually been in any action, except just helping to protect and sail with the carriers. But for the Coral Sea, we were suddenly…. We had been back in Sydney for a few days. We were all told to get up there, because of this intelligence report. Congregate in the Coral Sea, I think, was all we were told. We met up with
the two carriers again, [USS] Lexington and [USS] York Town. Lexington was the biggest aircraft carrier in the world, then. Enormous, by then standards, and even by modern ones. And we realised that they had sailed from Rabaul. They were sending a convoy down to go through the islands, which lay off the Eastern End of New Guinea, that’s known as the Louisiade Archipelago. And there’s only one passage through it, and that’s the Jomard Passage. And
they were obviously heading for that. The carriers kept well away, looking after themselves I suppose, and they sent us to guard the lower entrance of Jomard Passage. Us being the Australian and the Hobart, both Australian ships, the Chicago, an American cruiser, and about half a dozen American destroyers, who were guarding us. We weren’t very keen on this, because by that stage of the war it was fairly obvious that you didn’t
go into action in the navy if you could, without air cover. Because it was the air that was sinking ships all over the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. And here, suddenly, although we had two carriers with lots of nice aeroplanes, we had been sent away from them without any air cover. And the attacks that place on us, mainly on the 7th of May, the second or third day of the operation, we found out after the war were by the same sort of size of numbers,
and the same squadron, and the same actual units, as had sunk the HMS Prince Of Wales and HMS Repulse off the Malayan Peninsula a few months earlier. So we were very lucky to survive, actually. I think our captains were experienced by then. Although I was down in my battle station, down in the guts of the ship, I’m told that our captains, who were pretty bright about things, as the torpedo bombers came in, for instance, they would
watch them and see when the torpedoes were dropped and then they would turn and comb the torpedoes. I still swear to this day, although I think I might be inventing it now, that I could hear the torpedoes going past, in my spot down below. And with the high level bombers that came over then, the captain would watch them, he’d see them actually drop their bombs, he would calculate where he thought they were coming, and he would go, “Hard of starboard, full ahead port. Half a turn starboard.” And he would
turn the ship and the bombs would drop in our wake. There was one photograph taken from the Hobart of us, where you can’t see us at all. We were completely surrounded by the tall bomb bursts in the water. Somewhere in the middle was the Australia. They were quite sure we had been sunk. But they just made everything on the upper deck very wet. There were one or two people wounded by gunfire from the torpedo bombers as they went pass, but completely unscathed.
And the whole force, of three cruisers and six destroyers, escaped with only two or three casualties. So we were very lucky. And that was the Battle of the Coral Sea. Meanwhile, of course, the first battle ever was going on between ships that never saw one another. It was all aircraft. The Yanks sank one small Japanese carrier, damaged another. The Japs sank the Lexington, the biggest aircraft
aircraft carrier in the world and a destroyer and a tanker. So tactically, as I say, they won the battle. But it was enough to stop them. They knew were waiting for them, they turned the convoy back and they never tried to come through again. We were never sure whether they were coming for Port Moresby in New Guinea, or for Australia. We now know it was only Port Moresby, at that stage, but if that had all been successful, or even if they had got over the Kokoda Track and got Port Moresby, they probably
would have then headed for Australia. So it was a fairly important battle, the Battle of the Coral Sea, which we still celebrate here each year, in the first part of May, as the turning point in the war, really.
helping control the guns, we had shot down two or three. One story I tell there, is that in this little transmitting station, into which we had to come down through an armoured hatch, down a little a short ladder and then we were crouched in there all the time. And I had noticed during the attack that hanging on the ladder was a wooden mallet. And it looked so out of place amongst everything that was so metallic and electronic.
And I finally, during a lull in the proceedings, I asked the officer in charge, I said, “Excuse me, sir? What is that mallet for?” He said, “I’m glad you asked. You better all listen to this, so everybody stopped and listened. He said, “When we’re sunk, we’ll be locked in here, because they can only let us in and out from the compartment above, which of course will be flooded, and all the people will be dead up there. But we’ll have enough air in this compartment to last two or three hours, and during that time some of you may get
a little bit mentally disturbed. You might even go around the bend. And if you do, that’s for me to knock you out with so you won’t be a nuisance to your fellows.” I used to look at that mallet with renewed respect, thereafter. Anyway, we finally left the area. We knew the Japs had gone back, the aircraft carriers… The one remaining retreated, and we went back. I think we went into the Barrier Reef first, then down to Brisbane
and finally to Sydney. About that time in Sydney, Sydney was attacked by the midget submarines and then the following week, I was sound asleep in my bunk on the Australia, alongside Garden Island, and in the morning they said, “Oh, didn’t you wake up during the attack?” And I said, “What attack?” And they said, “Sydney was being shelled during the night by submarines.” And I’d slept right through. At any rate, there weren’t very many shells and they didn’t do much damage. I then left the ship.
We had our final seamanship exams, as midshipmen, which was part of our training program. Then our job was to go over to England and do courses over there, with the Royal Navy. Advanced courses, for the rank of lieutenant, I think they called them, even though we were still only acting sub-lieutenants, in gunnery, torpedoes, signals, the things that we had done a certain amount of both before we went to sea, and at sea. So we took passage
in a merchant ship over to England, and we did these courses all around Portsmouth. Mainly in Portsmouth. It was after the main Blitz. We were talking earlier about that. The Blitz was really in ’41. This was late ’42, by now, or mid ’42. There were a lot of sneak raids going on in Portsmouth. We were billeted in hotels, mainly. One of our number happened to be in the hotel one day
when it was bombed, and he was killed. But we were lucky. We avoided that. One of the schools had been badly bombed, one of the naval schools I mean. So they moved it. I think it was to Brighton further along the coast. And they took over a girls school there, called Roden, a posh girls’ school. The girls had been evacuated up to the north of England for safety, and we took over this school, both for our accommodation and for the instruction. I think it was the signals school it became.
We enjoyed that. They were very comfortable quarters. The girls were all in two-bedroom rooms. And on the top of each bed on the wall there was a little bell push, with a notice under it saying ‘If you require a mistress during the night, ring the bell’. Well, you can imagine a bunch of sub-lieutenants who had come in from a couple of years at sea, thinking this is a wonderful idea.
“If we ring a bell, we get a mistress.” But it never worked. We finished those courses. I reported to…. It must have been about Christmas ’42, by then, I reported to Australia House and said I was ready to go back to whatever posting they want me for in Australia. They said, “There’s no ship going for a month or so, you better go off on leave again.” And rather like I had earlier in Australia, I said, “Well, I’ve just said goodbye to all relations and
friends in England. Can I go and join something a bit smaller and a bit more exciting?” And so they sent me off to Lowestoft, in Norfolk, where they had a Coastal Forces base. Motor gun boasts, motor torpedo boats. Seventy foot long, quite small, very fast. They go about fifty knots, which is about a hundred kilometres an hour. They really got up in the water and flew through the air above the water.
I was in motor gunboats, the same sized craft, but we had instead of torpedoes, we had an Oerlikon gun, twenty millimetre, a couple of five inch turrets, one on either side of the bridge. And at one stage we had another funny weapon called a Blacker Bombard on the fo’c’sle. And our job was to either protect the British convoys going up and down the East Coast of England, Norfolk and Suffolk, or to go across and attack the German convoys
going up and down the Dutch coast. And so we had some quite interesting operations there. We were rather like the air force, really. We lived ashore in a hotel which we had taken over. We would board our craft, like airmen would board their aeroplanes. We’d get on board about three or four in the afternoon, and we’d sail so that by nightfall we were where we should be all night, and then we would come back the next morning and we would hand the craft over to the RNs [Royal Navy], who were doing a wonderful job.
There were armourers and shipwrights and mechanics, and if there was any damage they would fix all that. And we would go off in a truck taking us back to the hotel, where would have a nice breakfast and go to sleep until we had to get up and go into the next operation. One story I tell is that we were coming back one morning from the Dutch Coast and we had almost got in sight of our base. The captain, I think, had gone below….
I was only a sort of spare officer on board, there were two officers, plus me, but I was on watch. It was a misty morning, still only half light, and I saw to my horror, about three hundred yards away to the north, on a parallel course, what looked like a German E-Boat [enemy boat]. I thought, “Oops, he’s coming across to catch us as we go into our home port of Lowestoft.” So I quietly called the captain and we called everybody and we closed up action stations and we trained our guns on him. We weren’t quite sure and we waited,
and the dawn came up a bit more, and the mist lifted and to our relief we saw that it wasn’t an E-Boat, it was one of our own motor torpedo boats from Lowestoft. And our signal from our captain went across to him and it said, “You are very lucky, motor torpedo boat. We have been training our guns on you for the last half hour.” And he came back and said, “You are an even luckier, motor gunboat. I fired two torpedoes at you.” Anyway,
it was an interesting change from my big ship time. And even more valuable, because when I did get back to Australia…. I took passage in a merchant ship, when I did get back I found out I was posted again to the Australia. And I had been wanting to get into something smaller, like a destroyer. I had that coastal forces time in between. Incidentally, on the trip home, I was showing you both the George Cross, in our dining room
that Hugh Syme [Hugh Randall Syme, George Cross, George medal and bar] had. He was one of the fellow passengers in the ship that brought me home. That is where I first met him. He was given the George Cross by a signal from the admiralty while we were sailing home around Cape Horn, from England to Australia. All by ourselves because we were a cargo passenger ship, full of ammunition. They didn’t like sending a ship like that in convoy because if we had blown up, we would have sunk the other ships as well. Which didn’t make us very
very cheerful. But we had a nice quiet trip. And as I say, around the bottom of the Horn the captain came down one night and said, “Champagne all around. Lieutenant Syme has just been given the George Cross.” Which made him the most highly decorated person in the Australian Navy at that time. So back home I got, rejoined the Australia, went up north. While I had been away, the Guadalcanal landings by the American forces, and the Japanese, they were both on the island then.
They were both, by then, trying to replenish their forces by bringing in destroyers or other ships at night, with extra troops on board. And we were operating up the slot, in the area between there and Rabaul, going through the Solomons [Islands]. The original landing, our sister ship the Canberra had been sunk, along with three American heavy cruisers. It was the biggest disaster of the war for
our navies, really. The Japs came down and caught them quite unprepared the night after the landings. Sank the three heavy cruisers in about twenty minutes flat. They didn’t go on to the landing place, where they would have had a clear run to sink all the landing ships. The Australia was around at the landing place itself, and avoided being sunk, or even brought into the action. At any rate, we were operating then again with our old friend the Hobart. By that I was
an officer of the watch, as a sub-lieutenant on the bridge, alone. It was after dark one night, and I was looking out through my binoculars at the Hobart, when there was a tremendous explosion in the Hobart. Through the binoculars it seemed as though it was happening at our immediate stern. She’d been torpedoed. And all the drill that I had had…. By that I was a fairly experienced young naval officer….
A ship in the company torpedoed, what do you do? You turn away, you increase to twenty knots, you close up action stations, you close all watertight doors and scuttles. You call the captain and you call the admiral and you leave most of the ships in company, protecting the ships being torpedoed, you take one destroyer with you and you get out of it, otherwise you are going to be torpedoed, too, if you are not careful. So I did all that. Everybody was on the bridge and we were steaming away.
The Hobart actually did survive. She was badly hurt and killed a few people we knew well, on board. But she did get back to port. I suppose about ten minutes later, I was rehearsing again in my mind, have I done all the right things? I’ve called the captain, action stations, everything. I had turned away, I had gone on to twenty knots…. Wait a minute, Smyth, you silly clod. You were doing twenty five knots, you haven’t gone on in speed, you’ve reduced speed. So I went quietly across and called down the voice pipe
to put the right revolutions on, back to twenty five knots. And the captain heard me and said, “What are you doing there, sub-lieutenant?” I said, “I’m just checking, sir, that I’ve got the right revolutions on the engines.” I don’t think he believed me, but at any rate he left it at that. But he did arrange about a month later to get rid of me. I was then arranged to go over and join a British cruiser on exchange service. I think it was probably my mistake with the speed that got me thrown
off the Aussie, but got me a very interesting time in a British cruiser. Due to join her in Colombo, sailed from Melbourne after a little bit of leave. She was one of the wartime small carriers, what they called an escort carrier. HMS Patroller. A merchant ship that had been turned into a carrier. Not operating, but full of aircraft, ferrying them to Southern
India, Cochin, in the south-west corner of India. Then they were going to be flown across to the Burma campaign. So we then disembarked at Cochin, I had to take a lot of sailors across Southern India, in a train. Which was quite an interesting trip in itself, stopping every night because our engine driver seemed to have a girlfriend in every little town through which we passed. And he’d stop for the night and say
“We’ll leave again at eight in the morning.” We finally somehow got across. How would we have got across to Ceylon, then? By ship, I think. There wasn’t a bridge of any sort. Was there a bridge across from India to Ceylon?
Mediterranean, and she was undergoing repairs in Malta. And there was a little old World War 1 cruiser called the HMS Danae. I think it’s a Greek goddess’ name. Single six-inch guns, not proper turrets or anything. Only about six thousand tons. A very happy ship, I liked it. But at first sight I thought, “My God! Where am I going?” After my big heavy eight inch gun cruiser. And I found myself the only Australian on board.
I was replacing the first lieutenant, who was much older than me. I had only just put my second stripe up, as a lieutenant. And the captain said, “Right, you are the first lieutenant, you will be doing this and that.” And I said, “Excuse me, sir. I’ve only got seniority of six weeks as a lieutenant.” He said, “Oh? Why have they sent you to me?” Which wasn’t a very good start, but at any rate, I fitted in and I did most of the first lieutenant’s jobs, although the actual title went to somebody else. I found
myself the gunnery control officer, on top of the mast, in a special little control tower there. And off we went around the Indian Ocean again, a little bit. Up the Persian Gulf that time, quite interesting. We went right up to where Marva, the fighting in the Gulf. You’d read all about the places. We went up the Tigres Euphrates River, the mouth where they joined and it’s called the Chattel Arab. And we went right up to Abadan, and into Basra, which you have read about
recently, where the British Forces are fighting the Second Iraq War. Had no particular action, but quite a lot of interesting times. Then we were suddenly ordered home to England. Incidentally, a memory I have on the way across to the Persian Gulf from Colombo, we came across one of those sights that one so often met during the war, of a lifeboat bobbing in the water. And this was off a
ship that had been torpedoed about a week before, and in fact, about half the people in the boat had since died. It’s all right for you dark skin people in the Tropics, but you get a pale white Geordie stoker coming up from down below, in the Tropics, and sitting with just his underpants on and he gets cooked to death, literally. And they lost a lot like that. I took one particular wizened-looking grey-haired fellow down to
my cabin and gave him a cup of coffee and he went to sleep. When he came awake an hour later I was there waiting to chat to him. He said, “Where am I?” I said, “You are in the British cruiser Danae.” “Oh my God,” he said and passed out again. I thought, “Oh dear, what have I done here?” So I got hold of one of our doctors and he had dealt with the others by then, and he came along and we waited, and when he came awake again we had a bit of food him, and another cup of coffee, and he was looking a bit better and he said, “Where did you say I was?”
And I said, “You’re in the British cruiser Danae.” And he said, “What year is it?” And I said, “It’s 1943.” “Thank God,” he said. “I thought I had gone through some sort of a time warp. Do you know that the last time I was torpedoed in 1917, I was picked up by the British cruiser Danae.” So there he was, two wars apart and the same ship had picked him up again. Anyway, that was just in passing. We went back through the Mediterranean,
stopped off at Tobruk and Naples, interesting, things were still going on there, but didn’t stop for long. Got through, went up and went almost straight away up to Scapa Flow, [Orkney Islands] north of Scotland, because we were going to be part of the bombarding force for the invasion, which we all knew was coming soon, somewhere. We had an interesting visit there by the King himself, who was very much a sailor. He had been through naval training himself, in his youth. This was King George VI,
this was. Very well respected fellow, but with an embarrassing stammer, which I think he finally managed to beat a bit. At any rate, he inspected the fleet. We weren’t big enough to warrant him visiting us, but I took a contingent of our sailors across, with my captain, to one of the bigger cruisers. And I had them all fallen in and the captain obviously met the King, when he came on the quarter deck, and when they came along the
captain said, “And this is my crew from the Danae, your majesty, and this is Lieutenant Smyth, Royal Australian Navy.” And the King said, “Oh, an…. n…n…another c…c…c…. colonial.” And I drew myself up to my full height, and he was quite a small chap, the King, and I said, “Sir, you should know better than that. We’re no longer one of your colonies.” And the captain looked horrified and moved the King on and shook his fist at me, and got me later and said,
“You do not speak to your monarch like that.” And I said, “I’m terribly sir, but he did get it wrong.” And I forgot it. We went on working up, we went down to Greenock, near Glasgow on the West Coast of Scotland. We did a bit more working up there. All the time I, as the gunnery control officer, was probably the most important person in a way, because it was bombardment. Apart from anti-aircraft, which you’ve always got to be ready for, which we were going to do, off Normandy. And
it was then, too, that I learned it was going to be Normandy. We were getting lots and lots of secret orders, books of plans and orders on board. And somebody had to keep correcting those, as the corrections came in. The captain said, “Right Smyth, you’re an Australian. You don’t need to go ashore in Glasgow. Your leave is stopped, because from now on you’ve got to sit and correct all the things. And you will be the first to know after me to know where we are going and
I don’t want that getting out. We’ve got to keep it a secret.” So my poor girlfriend in Glasgow never did see me again. I never heard from her. I was going to go and see her that night. But at any rate, I corrected it all and I knew exactly what we were doing, then finally, after a few more exercises we sailed. And I kept a diary of that, from the day we sailed, roughly, to after the landings. Which I recorded in a book of mine. And we sailed down the west coast,
down through the Bristol Channel. An enormous number of ships already at sea. We were in a force of about five cruisers and destroyers. Mine sweepers ahead of us, battleships astern of us. Merchant ships, all moving at different speeds. So we were moving through, one group moving through another, all the way down the coast. How we didn’t collide a few times, I don’t know. But we did by then have a bit or radar. The first part of the war we’d done without radar. It all had to be
eye-balling. So we got down safely. We rounded Land’s End and we were heading along the south coast of England, heading eventually for Normandy, when to our horror we were told to stop, twenty four hour delay, turn back. So we all turned back, all going back at different speeds. We went back through all the ships we passed before, we rounded Land’s End, we right up to almost the coast of Wales. And the order was
you did that for twelve hours, then you turned again, so twenty fours later you were where you had been. And it was all the weather that was causing this delay. And by that time the weather was even worse. And we thought. ‘Oh God, we’re all ready for this, and it looks like they’re going to have to cancel it. If we can’t do it now, it’s at least another month before they get the right tide and the right moon. And therefore it might even be cancelled. We’ll have to just cross our fingers.’ That was the time, of course, when [General] Eisenhower in his
headquarters had the decision to make. He delayed it twenty four hours, he was about to delay it another twenty four hours, and I think only one of his experts said, “No sir, there is only one window of opportunity. Dawn on the 6th. I think it will ease off for a few hours. I think you can do it.” And so he had this tremendous decision to make and he said, “Go.” So we heaved a sigh of relief and we kept going.
So there we are. We’ve sailed along the south coast of England. Around about Portsmouth we turn south and head for Normandy. From that moment on, we were at action stations. I was up in the spotting top, where I
controlled the guns from. And we were at the far eastern end of the whole operation. Sword Beach, which was under the guns when we got there, the Omaha Peninsula, and also of course the guns ashore. To the east we were looking all the time to see if there were any German E-Boats or anything coming along. But to the west…. All that night, we were passing literally thousands of ships. We could see them spread right across into the distance.
We were going fairly fast, so we were passing the slower ones, the landing craft, the landing ship infantry, rocket ships, LC [Landing Craft] vehicle landing…. the things. Including great big things like the PLUTO, the pipeline under the ocean, almost like enormous cotton reels being towed along, and as they went they were laying on the bottom of the sea
a big petrol pipe, so they could petrol straight across, and presumably diesel and things they wanted. So you saw this multiplicity of very peculiar looking ships, plus all the big…. We had two battleships, four cruisers I think, and our own escorting. The minesweepers went ahead of us and they were sweeping in toward. So my memory of that night, from my lofty perch, the best view anybody had of the whole channel,
probably was me, because I could see to the west, the whole congregation of ships in the moonlight. I think six thousand ships was a figure that somebody quoted, plus small craft. So you know it could have been ten thousand. Then we edged down through our channel, behind our minesweepers. Then we parted at the top of a sort of pear-shaped arrangement, then met again at the bottom
with the other cruisers, and got there at five o’clock, roughly. I think it was 5.25, I can be precise. There we sat, trying to keep our position. We didn’t anchor or anything, but we tried to keep our position as well as we could. And at 5.25 we started our bombardment. That’s when I started getting really busy. We had pre-arranged targets on the
shore. Weastrem and into towards Dovell and further in, Caen, out of our range. But the battleships were ranging on that. And in between, the guns of Lahar Peninsula were firing at us. And my memory of that was…. We never got hit, I was lucky again. I was lucky right through the war. But my memory is one particular shell coming over and missing us and hitting a landing craft tank,
which was quite a big vessel about one hundred yards from us, and it just disappeared, in a swirl of oil and water and as all the water subsided, nothing. And another one coming alongside us that had been hit. I remember looking down and seeing the captain, with blood all over his face, still driving his ship alongside. So one was really feeling that one was in the war, then. Probably more than I had in the Coral Sea Battle, because
there I had been hidden down below. And we spent the whole day bombarding. The landing itself finally came at seven, after we had been bombarding. First of all the destroyers went in and did what they called beach drenching, and I was watching all this again. They went in shore of us and just blew the beaches, as much as they could, to hell. And then in with the landing crafts rockets, which had, I think…. I seem to remember the figure of a hundred and forty four rockets.
They’d go in even closer than the destroyers, press a button, then the whole of the hundred and forty four rockets would go off one after another in about ten seconds. And you’d see them all in the air together, going in, then all landing and whoompf. Hopefully all hitting something useful because sure enough at seven, whatever it was, we saw the soldiers beginning to land from their landing craft, and stream up the beaches. You could see the odd one…. I had moments in between
firing when you could watch, and you could see the odd ones falling and thinking ‘I’m glad I’m a sailor and not a soldier, in these circumstances.’ We had Spitfires spotting for us, for our inland firings, our bombardments inland. And I learnt later, actually, my sister had just married an air force officer and he had been put in charge of seven squadrons of Spitfires to provide
cover and spotting for the fleet at Normandy. I didn’t know this at the time. And he knew that I was the gunnery control officer of the Danae, and so he told off a particular friend of his to be the ex-Fleet Air Arm pilot, I think it was. And he said, “You will be working with my brother-in-law Dacre Smyth, in the Danae.” And sure enough, he said, “That Smyth?” I said, “Yes” and he said,
“Right, I’m your man.” He spotted for us for a little while, then suddenly he went off the air. I thought ‘Oops, it’s happened to him.’ And we never did get in contact again. But in fact, he was shot down. He did plane [fly] back over the beaches, land in the water, near one of the other ships and the ship picked him up. And the ship that picked him up happened to be the one he had left only two weeks before, and he had been operating their reconnaissance aircraft. So that
was a happy ending, as I later learnt. At any rate, we went on firing direct at whatever we could see, and they eventually gave us another Spitfire. So it was quite an interesting day. By the end of it, we were still unscathed. We were ordered back to Portsmouth at high speed, presumably, we thought, because we had almost run out of ammunition, and they would re-ammunition us. But as we got to Portsmouth they said, “No, all your
ammunition…” Or the main armament, the six inch. “Fill your magazines with the stores from the lighters that are now coming alongside you. And you are going back there. You’ve finished your job as a bombarding ship. You were one of the ones that we expected would be sunk and you haven’t been, so now you’ve got a more valuable job. You are going to be the mother ship for the Sword area, for all the little craft over there. They all want someone to come over and look after them.” The landing craft, the motor torpedo boats. And that’s what we did for the next
five or six weeks, I think. You need a mother if you are a little craft over there. You need stores, you need a rest occasionally, you need to be able to tie your boat alongside. And I realised, as we got back to off Sword Beach, as the gunnery control officer of a six inch gun ship, which didn’t any longer have any six inch gun ammunition, I really no longer have got myself an action station. And the captain realised
at the same time and he said, “Smyth, you will still do all your watch-keeping duties and everything, as normal, but as you haven’t got an action station, I suggest you take a couple of your guns’ crews. We’ll get you a duck [DUWK], one of those amphibious trucks to take you ashore. You can report to Brigadier So-and-so on Sword Beach, who is the beach master, and you can see what you can do to help the army.” And I thought, “This is great.” I’d always wanted to play soldiers a bit. So I took one of my Royal Marines guns crews. I had become the
captain of Royal Marines at that stage, because our captain of Royal Marines, who had been sunk a couple of times before, he had gone around the bend and we’d shipped him off in a straight-jacket. And the captain said, “Smyth, take over the Royal Marines.” So I had to learn to salute this way instead of that way, and I became a Royal Marine officer. I took my guns crews ashore, reported to the brigadier, cleared up the beaches all morning, bodies and wreckage and things, which was a grisly job….
So what was different in the set up at Sword Beach? The German defences…. You were actually inspecting, cleaning up bodies and so forth.
The houses that were right down on the beach, they had almost been all blown to bits. And in amongst them were the concrete gun emplacements. Some of them still pretty good, because they had four or five feet on concrete on them. That was the trouble right along. In many places we thought we could bomb them to smithereens and we couldn’t. They were just so thick.
But our people got ashore, through that initial part fairly well. My brigadier then said, “Look, if you would like to go inland a little bit, there is a particular group of soldiers in a paddock over there, who are being held up by sniper fire from the village. They are in a trench and they want to advance across the field to get into the village. It would be useful if they could have a trench on the other side of the field to which they could hop, as a first stage
in going into the village. We’d like you to take your sailors up there and dig a trench for them.” And I said, “But what about the snipers you mentioned in the village?” He said, “Oh, I don’t think there are really that many. I don’t think you’d need worry. It would be a great help if you could.” So off I went to my Royal Marines and my sailors and we dug a trench for the army, and we weren’t sniped at, fortunately, and the army advanced into it and then into the village, and they found the village was virtually deserted by both Germans and French.
And I then led my boys into the village. I thought I’d have a look around. And I remembered that before I left the ship the captain said, “By the way, if you get anywhere near the village, or a shop, see if you can get a camembert cheese.” I said, “A what?” He said, “A camembert cheese. It’s a short of French cheese that is made in Normandy.” So I said, “All right.” When we got into the village we found a deserted shop and we went into it, and we souvenired
one or two things, including two camembert cheeses that I slipped into my pocket. And when we returned that night, in our duck to the ship, the captain was standing on the quarter deck, and almost before I got alongside the gangway, he said, “Have you got one?” And I said, “Yes, sir.” So by the time I got to the top of the gangway, he had called a motor torpedo boat alongside, that had been lying off, and he threw one of these cheeses down to the chap and said, “You know what to do?”
And the fellow said, “Yes, sir.” And off he went at fifty knots, heading back to England. I must, understandably, looked a little bemused, so he said, “Come down to my cabin, I think I owe you an explanation.” So I got down there. He said, “Sit down, Smyth. Have a gin.” And I said, “Oh, thanks very much sir, I would like a gin.” So I had a gin. Then he said, “Smyth, you remember when you insulted the King by accusing him of not knowing
that you were no longer a colonial?” So I rose to my feet, I put the gin down and I stood to attention and said, “Yes sir, I do remember.” And he said, “Well, I’ll forgive you for that, but I want to tell you now that the King is a particular friend of mine. We did our training together at Osmond Naval College, back in the early part of the century. And I called on him again at Buckingham Palace, before we sailed and we chatted about old times. And he said, ‘Captain Holmes, if there
is one thing I would like you to do, if you can there is nothing I won’t do for you, if you can get me a camembert cheese when you land in Normandy, because it’s my favourite cheese and for five years I haven’t been able to get it.’ So that cheese,” says my captain to me, “is on its way back to Portsmouth. There will be a Buckingham Palace car waiting at Portsmouth to take the cheese up to the palace and the King will have his cheese for breakfast.” And the King kept his promise. Three weeks later
my captain was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his work at Normandy. And I didn’t even get to taste the other cheese.
but time and again when our people would try and move in, out would come the Germans from the cellars. You can make a city look as if it is completely destroyed, and yet there are still people underneath who will come out and defend it. And that’s been proved time and again in many wars, I think. Caen was the one straight in from us, beyond Westrem,
which was the little village that we landed on. One of memories from that time, the Germans…. We only saw a few aircraft the first day. We saw some E-Boats, they came out through a smokescreen that they had laid. They were met with so many shots and shells from all of us that they turned back. So things were not terribly…. It was mainly the artillery that was attacking us
those first few days. Then they brought in the manned torpedoes. There was a torpedo with a man sitting in it that had been specially…. with a plastic lid, and underneath his torpedo he hung another torpedo, and he would drive this thing in quietly through the water, with just his head showing, then he would fire his lower torpedo…. Either that
or a magnetic mine, we don’t know which, got the Dragon, which was the sister ship of ours. She was run by the Polish navy and she was only a few hundred yards from us, and she went up. And the captain very cleverly manoeuvred her in as she was sinking, and put her alongside the gooseberries. You’ve heard of the Mulberry? The Mulberry was the harbour, the Gooseberries were actually the ships that they had sunk, old freighters mainly,
to form the breakwater. And the Mulberry was the harbour inside. And he took his cruiser in and put it as an extension to the Gooseberry Harbour, and there it sank. And later, we went back after about six weeks to Portsmouth and we were told to pay off. We had done our job, we hadn’t been sunk, we weren’t needed, we were too old fashioned and suddenly they realised that the crew of the Dragon was still around, because they hadn’t had many casualties, without
a cruiser, so they decided to give us to the Polish navy. And I happened to be the last officer on board when we handed over. So I handed over the cruiser to the Polish Navy, which was quite nice. After the war they gave me their Gold Cross of Honour for giving them a cruiser, which I still wear with my medals.
Polish navy, and I went back to Australia House and said, “Right, where am I going? I think I’m going to an Australian destroyer in the Indian Ocean again.” They said, “Yes, that’s quite true. There is a destroyer depot ship sailing for the Pacific via Colombo, in about a month’s time. You better go on leave again.” So once again I said, “I’ve had my leave. I had a few days. I said goodbye to everybody. Can I see what the air force does?”
So they sent me up to an air force station in Norfolk, not far from where I had been with the little coastal command people at Lowestock. And there, there were two Beaufighter squadrons. One was the Australian 455 Squadron, who were rocket firing Beaufighters, and the other one was a New Zealand torpedo dropping Beaufighter squadron. They were coastal command. Basically their main job was
to attack the German convoys. The same as I had been doing in motor gunboats, a couple of years earlier. So I flew with them for a few weeks, attacking German flack ships protecting the German convoys. Which was quite frightening, I’d rather much be in the navy, where you can fire up at an aeroplane, rather than being in an aeroplane being fired at by the ships. It was an interesting experience. Part of the broadening of my experiences as a young officer.
When I finished that I came back and boarded this ship the Tyne, which we went through the Med. We worked our way as it was a naval ship, I was officer of the watch. I finally got to Colombo where I got off and had to train up to Trincomalee where I joined the Norman. The Norman was one of five M Class destroyers, very modern destroyers, which were given to us during the war. Originally to replace the First World War scrap-iron
flotilla, which were the V&W [class] destroyers. But in fact, they were doing such a good job, the V&Ws, the scrap-irons, that they kept them going. Those that survived, to the end of the war and we were somehow able to man the ends as well. One of the them had been lost in the Med, the Nesta. She had been sunk on the Tobruk run taking stores and soldiers into Tobruk. She had been sunk. But there were still four left.
The Napier, Nysan, the Norman, my ship and the Nepal. So I joined her in Trincomalee. Mainly we were going to be fighting the Burma campaign, but in fact, we shot down, this was on Christmas, 1944, we went down to Durban, I think, to give us a break. They had been fairly busy until I joined, so we went down and we spent Christmas in Durban. Christmas and New Year,
so we must have been there a week. I know New Year’s night, we were due to sail on New Year’s morning, and all the officers were at a night-club called the Stardust night-club. We always referred to it as the Sawdust night-club, but it was quite a nice night-club. But our captain was Lieutenant Commander Plunkett Cole, and the signal came through that night, which is always the day that you have promotions, that he had been promoted to commander.
So we immediately, instead of going back to the ship as we had expected to do, went on celebrating. So by the time we got back to the ship, we were probably all a little bit happy, shall we say, celebrating our captain’s promotion. And we sailed an hour later. We somehow got out of the harbour, and we found ourselves escorting an aircraft carrier back toward Trincomalee, and everybody left the bridge. I found myself all alone there, not being quite sure what I was meant to be doing with this aircraft carrier, but
they all gradually sobered up, so we all got safely to Trincomalee. From then on we went across and did the landings all down the Arrakan Coast of Burma. Akyab, Ramree, Shadoobah, various landings. Fairly quiet. The Japs seemed to usually get out ahead of us. We’d go in quite close and bombard like mad and then we’d land and find there was no-one there. We had been blowing trees to bits. So it wasn’t terribly exciting, but
you never know. It was always interesting. We had one small aircraft carrier with us. We did all those landings down the coast, until they were heading for, well, the main capital I suppose. Chittagong. We had finished our job, really. Bill [Sir William] Slim and his forces were coming around and down and taking over. Re-taking Burma. We then shot
back, fuelled in Perth, came around the bottom, up to Sydney, where we then joined the British Pacific, which had been forming up, by that time, for a couple of months. Four aircraft carriers, four battleships, about twenty cruisers and about forty destroyers, to go up and do the same thing as the Yanks had been doing. The Yanks had probably twenty aircraft carriers and twenty…. Much bigger than
the British. The Yanks didn’t really want the British there, but the British insisted on playing their part in the Pacific war. Which the Americans could have won without them, I must admit. But they were polite enough to say, “Okay, you can help us land at Okinawa, and help us land at Sakashima and you will be doing the main Japanese landing.” And our main job was to escort these carriers. A lot
of running around, acting as a messenger ship between ships, taking mail to all the other ships in the force, transferring the odd person from here to there, for some reason. Quite an interesting seamanship time. Kamikazes started coming in and attacking us. We were never attacked again, we saw various other ships did. One morning we were quite close in to Japan. It was foggy and we had been sailing away
during the night, and we turned at dawn, almost a hundred and eighty degrees and we headed back towards Japan for that day’s strike. As six o’clock, or whatever time it was occurred, we automatically altered course, took up a new position, the kamikaze destroyers took position one astern of each carrier, four carriers…. They were there to add firepower to protect the carrier, and we all started
zigzagging. We had done that several times before, but this day it was thick fog. Doing all that in thick fog, it can get a bit dicey. We were all right, we were out on the screen. The HMS Quilliam, which was the kamikaze destroyer detailed off to go astern of the HMS Indomitable, suddenly came up on the air and said, “I have collided with the Indomitable. They had been careening in at high speed meaning to do that but in fact they did that. And we were detailed off
to look after them. We crept forward in the fog and found the poor old Quilliam with its bow down. There was nobody hurt. There were always action stations, fortunately, so they weren’t down in the mess deck, which had been obliterated almost. The only casualty was the captain, who had broken a couple of ribs when he was flung against the front of the bridge. We had to take her in tow. We towed her back out of the action, which was a bit difficult because her bow was bent around at angle,
so we were trying to tow her stern first. She kept trying to…. This was acting as an enormous rudder. We’d tow her and she’d swing around to starboard and we’d part the tow. So at any rate we finally got her moving at about two knots and we spent about a day doing that before a big ocean-going tug came and took her away from us, and then we rejoined the force. That was just one interesting little episode in amongst it.
All right, so what was the next thing to happen for you after Okinawa?
Well, we continued doing the same things. I think we might have done a quick run back to Manus, then up again and rejoined the fleet. We were then attacking Japan. When I say ‘we’ the fleet was, we weren’t. I think one of our destroyers did somehow get close, HMS Quiberon, one of our semi-sister ships in Q Class, did get in close enough to Japan to fire a few rounds.
I don’t think they were meant to, but they always claimed that they were the only ones that fired at Japan itself. But mainly we were again covering the aircraft carriers as they did their attacks. And one particular evening, things were fairly quiet, we had been not within sight of Japan, but close in. Probably twenty or thirty miles, something like that, while they had been doing their attacks. And the doctor came down. I was sitting in my cabin, things were quiet, it was just on sunset. He said, “Dacre? Come up
and look at the sunset.” I thought that it was a bit peculiar that one of my fellow officers should invite me to look at the sunset. It was really romantic and all that, but not quite my cup of tea. So at any rate, I said, “All right, I’ll come up.” And it was an amazing sight. Because a sunset, if you think about it, depends on clouds. If it’s a cloudless sky, all you get is an orange sky and the sun disappears. But if you’ve got clouds, you get all
these interesting pink lights, and orange and yellow lights, reflecting off the clouds. And yet this was a night when there were no clouds in the sky and yet you were getting a magnificent, almost an Aurora Borealis, or Aurora Australis effect in the sky, as the daylight died. And we looked at it for some time and we couldn’t work out why it was like that. And I went below and we thought about it. And I wrote a poem the next morning, and
the poem…. Can I quote the poem to you? “The blood ran sun sank in a scarlet sky, amid folds of multi-coloured tapestry/No cloud was there to see the daylight die, nor see the heaven’s crimson majesty/No cloud I say, but yet the sun did light on towering columns/All unreal, yet huge, which waved and shuddered in grotesque delight/Far out beyond our silent sliding
ships, the realm of Nippon lay beyond our sight/To westward/Where the rows of crimson tips reflected back/The sun’s satanic might/A mighty carrier’s hull, all black and vast, obscured the scene with sharp-edged silhouette/And in that fleeting moment as she passed, the sun in stately silence sank and set/With startling speed the heaven’s colours died,
A sombre blue envelopes sea and sky and darkness rushed from every side to hide/Or tried to hide, for memories do not die/We did not understand that sunset there/Tomorrow’s dawn brought us the knowledge first, the mystic sight we saw had come from where the atom bomb on Hiroshima burst.” So that was the end of the war, really. A few days later the war ended and that was the end of my World War II.
were sort of small, diminutive, wizened, half-starved…. .We didn’t know if they were real criminals or just people that had been left behind. There was a certain amount of sympathy, I think. The odd sailor going past would swear at them or stick with a stick or something. But in general I think we felt pretty sorry for them. Not knowing…. Some of them might have finished up
being shot as war criminals, others were probably just sent home as prisoners who had survived the war. There was an immediate feeling, after the war, that the war was over. Up in Japan, where I was quite a lot over the next few years, you had a sort of sympathy. You didn’t like them very much, naturally, because they had been the enemy. And they were quite different. I remember in one ship we were alongside
in Kure, and one of our Bofors [machine] guns was due to be off-loaded and taken up for some sort of repairs, to the dockyards we were using, the Japanese dockyards. And they hoisted this up and swung it out with a crane, then it slipped out of its wire slings and fell onto the wharf and onto one of the Japanese labourers. It broke his leg, very messily, there was blood spurting and bones showing. And his mates stood around and roared with laughter.
“Look at old Bill! Have you ever seen anything so funny.” We thought, “Really, these are the people that we had been fighting.” And yet, a couple of days later I was doing some re-rigging on the upper deck of the lower boom, and I was saying to the chief purser’s mate, “I think it would be better if we put the boat rope outboard of the Jacob’s Ladder and the two lizards inboard.” And he was saying, “Yes sir, but perhaps one
lizard out and one in…. “ Terribly seamanship sort of stuff. And a little voice behind me said, “If I were you I would put both the lizards outboard, and the boat rope inboard of the Jacob’s Ladder.” And here was this little Japanese. He said, “I’m sorry, sir, I shouldn’t be interfering.” Perfect English. I said, “I think you’re probably right. What do you know about it.” He said, “I was the first lieutenant of the destroyer so-and so up until the other day, and now I’m part of your working party. And
he spoke perfect English. He had been trained in England before the war. So you know you had a mixture. These were all the people that we had been fighting and you had to come to terms with the fact that they were no, not friends, but no longer your enemy. They were a subjugated race sort of thing.
Oh yes, we gave them the same food as the sailors. As much as it was. One trip we did around, a place called Tinati [?], and there was a person called the Sultan of Tinati, an Indonesian. A magnificent little fellow. And we went into his wharf and we called on him and he said, “I would like to do a trip around my islands, which I haven’t seen during the war.” And we said, “That’s what we’re here to do, to go around and see
what’s going on, picking up dead bodies and prisoners and so forth.” So we did this cruise with him, and he became quite a firm friend. He spoke good English and we got along well with him. And when we got back we said, “Right, thanks very much. We’re off.” And he said, “No, no. I want to give a party in my palace.” So we said, “Right.” There was a fancy palace up the hill, within walking distance of the ship. So we left a small duty watch on board and most of the officers and a lot of the sailors went up,
and we had a wonderful party there. All his harem was there and all his hangers-on and beautiful girls here and there. The local wine was a thing called choptikis, which our navigator nicknamed ‘Top Secret’ because it sounded like that. The navigator had a couple of bottles of gin which he poured into this big of wine, so it was quite a good drink that we were drinking.
At one stage our captain was approached by a tall, beautiful Dutch lady, married to a tall handsome Indonesian major. And she said, “Captain, we have been discussing things, my husband and I, and we do not want to bring a half-caste child into the post-war world. Would you oblige me by giving me a white child?” And the captain said, “Oh.
First lieutenant?” And he sent for me, and I came over and he said, “Mrs So-and-so wants to speak with you.” So we went into the corner and she put the same delightful proposition to me. And I thought, “Well…” “Gunnery officer?” So I sent for the gunnery officer…. I never found out how far down the line it went. But come two in the morning we finally decided that we had better sail and we went down on the wharf, and my job as first lieutenant was to
make sure that when the captain was ready to go that all the lines were let go.” And I said, “Let go of the head rope, let go of the stern rope, let go of the for’ard back spring.” And I forgot to say, “Let go of the aft forward spring.” Which meant the wire that was leading frontwards from the back was still there. And we slipped, and we thought we had slipped, and off we went at half speed, and this wire gradually dripped in the water and finally came up taut, after we had gone a whole ship’s length
and by that time we were probably doing about ten knots. And to our horror, too late I realised that I had forgotten to take it off, while at ashore, and we pulled the bollard right out of the wharf, and the sultan and all his harem were on the corner of the wharf waving goodbye to us, and the last thing we saw was the wharf disappearing into the water as we sailed into the night. And we thought, “Well, we’ll just keep going.” I never did find out if there were any casualties.
But we were having fun by then, you see, the war was over. It was a lovely evening and we were all probably a bit worse for wear, which we should never have been, of course, if we were sailing. Things were a bit different in those days.
that the movement had started, we knew that we had about a day’s grace. We all refuelled from the American tanker. We learned…. The British hadn’t at that stage really learned how to refuel at sea. The Yanks had it down to a fine art, and we quickly learned it. The very first time we tried, we tried the British method, where we would steam alongside, keeping about
twenty yards out from the tanker, and we would actually put a hawser across and we would allow ourselves to be towed along by the tanker, although we would be towing alongside. Then the hoses would go across. We rapidly realised that the towing line was quite unnecessary and only confused things. If it came taut it would drag you in. So all we were doing was keeping station, very carefully. The job of the officer of the watch would always be “Up two turns,
down two turns. Steer one degree out, up two turns.” And gradually getting it settled and finally we would only have to move every little while. But we all fuelled from the USS Neosho, which was the name of the big American tanker. It took all day to do the whole force. And then she was sent out of harm’s way, in theory, with one destroyer to take her safely back
back down to the Spirit of Santo or somewhere. The Sims was the destroyer. When, two days later, the main battle started, the Japs came over. They missed the main fleet, the Lexington and Yorktown. Kept going, then suddenly came across the poor old Neosho, which was allegedly out of harm’s way down there. They thought they had come across the carrier force, misreported her in fact as a carrier,
with a cruiser. In fact, she was a big tanker and destroyer and they sank them both. They were the first losses of the Coral Sea. The Neosho did float for about twelve hours, I think, then finally went down. The Sims was blown out of the water. So that was bad luck if ever there was. The poor old tanker, who was going out of harm’s way and went right into it. Having done that, it was after we had all fuelled up to capacity, that we were sent off
to go west and cover the bottom, the exit from Jomard Passage, in the Louisiade Archipelago, and that’s when we separated from the carriers. I think it might have been the next morning, then, before we finally had the attacks on the 7th of May, I think it was. It was always a difficult battle to commemorate. Because you don’t know whether to commemorate the 5th, 6th, 7th or 8th of May. The 5th was actually my 19th birthday.
So I was fighting the Battle of the Coral Sea on my 19th birthday. It was a fairly quiet day for us, that day. That was the day we were refuelling. But we never rejoined the carriers that time. They went back and I never saw them We never rejoined the carriers that time. We went back and I never saw them again. We left the ship down in Sydney and went over to England.
“Where are the carriers?” And we said, more or less, “We don’t know.” I think that’s what we said, or “They’re somewhere to the east.” And off he went. And in fact, as he went off, two minutes later in came the Japanese torpedo bombers, in at about the same level, down almost on the water, and there was a theory going around at the time that
he wasn’t a genuine American plane, he was a Japanese who had come in to…. One theory was that you had the recognition signals, and if you flashed a Q at the aeroplane and he flashed back a J, they were the signals for the day and you knew he was friendly. And these were put up on large blackboards on the back of the bridge, so all the ship’s
gunners could see them. So if they saw a plane coming in flashing J or M, or whatever was the signal for the day, you knew it was one of ours. And the supposition was that perhaps it had been a Japanese that had come in and actually seen…. “Ahh, yes. The answer is J, quadrant A.” And he had gone off. Because as they came in they were flashing something at us. I think they were probably
just pretending to give a friendly signal, which probably did delay our firing for a little while. So these were all the stories that were going around the ship. How much was true and how much was not. But I think it was a genuine American Devastator, I don’t think it ever found its carrier and I think it ditched, so we were never able to find out the true story. But there were aeroplanes like that. There was a long-range flying boat, flying right around us, one day.
Obviously reporting us back to headquarters or the fleet, and that was Japanese Mavis, I think they called them. They all had their nicknames. The Zero was the Zeek, the Mavis was the…. The Betty [Mitsubishi G4M Betty – Japanese naval heavy bomber and long-range torpedo-aircraft] was the torpedo bomber that came in and tried to torpedo us. So there were planes around. But mainly, once we had left the main force we didn’t see what we had seen many times, in the future.
They sent ninety eight aeroplanes off from the two ships. Ninety eight aeroplanes from two aircraft carriers. They fitted them in to those American carriers. The British carriers only carried about twenty or thirty, but they were sending fifty from the carrier, and still keeping their own cap overhead. The defensive fighters of their own. They were big.
Sailors don’t normally scream and they were rather bloodthirsty screams, then everything seemed to happen at once. A couple of people came up and said, “So-and-so, somebody’s been attacking him and we’ve taken him down to the sick bay.” It was all in the dark, and we couldn’t really work out what it was. But what had happened was, two people had attacked another one and knifed him, I think thirty seven times, and he was being pushed through the guard rails and he was
hanging on the guard rails. And enough other people came along when the screams went on to stop them pushing him out, and to get him in and get him down to the sick bay. And for about two days, we were still steaming around in the dark and every time one went up on watch, I thought, “I wonder who the murderer is?” Because the chap finally died and we all wondered what it was all about. And what it had been was actually a homosexual triangle, which was something that us
innocent midshipman didn’t know anything about in those days. And one of the three decided he didn’t like that any more and he said he wanted to stop and they said, “You can’t do that,” and he said, “If you won’t let me get out of it, I’ll report you.” And they said, “Come on up deck and we’ll talk about it.” And when they got him on deck one held him and the other stabbed him, with the idea of pushing him over the side. It became a very interesting case, and this is what I like to tell people about,
particularly my lawyer friends. So we heard the screams…. One person on the bridge, who was on the signalman, who had been on the watch for two hours and had very good night vision, looked over as soon as the screams began and saw three figures. He saw two of them obviously attacking the third, and then the screams went on and gradually a little group of three people came from for’ard and then two people from aft.
He couldn’t recognise anybody. That’s all his evidence was. At the court martial that took place, and I listened in to it all, our captain, Captain Farncomb, prosecuted. And he said, “Right, we know that much, but we don’t know who they were.” Then he called the two people who had come from for’ard. Their evidence was that they had heard the screams, they had come down and there they found Stoker Elias and Leading Stoker Gordon with Stoker So-and-so,
and they said, “Somebody has been attacking our friend, let’s get him out and get him down to sick bay.” And they recognised the two figures. Then somebody came from aft who also recognised the two people. The combination of the person from the bridge who had seen the figures, but not recognised them, but knew that they were doing the murder, and the others who came from for’ard and recognised the other two, was enough to convict them of murder. It was a very interesting court martial, the first I had ever attended.
I listened in to it all. A chap called Trevor Ratki had come down from Darwin, he was a young lieutenant in the naval Reserve and he finished up a judge here in Victoria, a criminal lawyer, and he was brought down to defend them. And he lost against the captain, who in his spare time had been a student of law, and won the case. It was very interesting. That was just an interlude before
the Coral Sea. But I can remember walking along the upper deck, going on watch at midnight and thinking, “I wonder who the murderer is?” We didn’t know for two days. And although the chap lived for two days…. He did become conscious, the doctor did say, “Who did it?” And he said, “How am I, doc?” And the doctor said, “You’ll be all right. Who did it?” And he had said Gordon and Elias did it, and this wasn’t accepted at
evidence because the doctor had told him he would be all right. If he had said, “You are dying,” it would have been accepted as a dying deposition. But at least it came out. The captain grabbed them and he put them in the lock-up and from there all the process proceeded.
being part of the Occupational Force and going around to the different ports. Interesting time, getting to see the Japanese in their home country, then back to Australia. We did a certain amount of training, out of Sydney. Then I was appointed to my first command, which was a Corvette called the HMAS Latrobe, down here at Flinders Naval Depot. It was a training ship. I would load up with new recruits, or ordinary seamen, or even junior
officers and go out for a week’s cruising around Bass Strait, coming around to Melbourne, going around Port Philip, back the western port. I had a year doing that, very interesting. One’s first command is always very exciting. I had sort of temporary commands during the war, of the little boats I mentioned. And also for a moment or two, the motor gun boats. But this was my first proper command. A corvette. Very enjoyable.
After a year of that, very much peacetime navy, I went as an ADC to the Governor-General, who was then a chap called Mackell [William Mackell, originally a boilermaker at Eveleigh, who became Premier of New South Wales in 1941 and Governor-General of Australia in 1947], who had been a Labor politician. It was an unpopular posting, or appointment, but once he got there he did a very good job, I think. He had been there a year when I got there, and the services had given him, I think, rather
bad officers. Partly because they thought he shouldn’t be the Governor-General, “We’ll send him so-and-so.” And they’d all left by the time I got there. They’d either resigned from the job or been sacked by him. So I hinted in a rather sort of feeling, and it took us both, I think, a couple of months to understand one another and for him to accept him. There was also an air force ADC
and an army ADC. And one day he sent for the air force ADC, and he came out white-faced of the Governor-General’s office and he said, “I’ve been sacked. And he wants to see you,” to the army aide. So the army aide goes in, he comes out and says “I’ve been sacked, too. And he wants to see you, too, Dacre.” So Dacre goes in all trembling, and Mackell says “Dacre, I’ve just got rid of so and so, and so and so. I don’t think they’ve been doing their job, I don’t think they’ve been loyal to me.
I want you to do the job alone from now on. Is that all right?” So I had an interesting six months in my time there. I was the only aide. We took him all around Australia. Fascinating trips by old fashioned aeroplanes, the DC4s we had then, up to Darwin and right down to the centre, by road. And generally a very interesting time being an aide to the Governor-General. And then I virtually
asked the navy…. Mackell wanted me to stay on for two years, and I said, “I think I want to get back.” And the navy said the same, “We want him back in the navy.” And they appointed me to a nice, fairly modern destroyer called the HMAS Battan, and I went up in her as the second in command. Did one tour of Japan, came back, changed the captain and I was still the first lieutenant. We went on up.
We were in Hong Kong, where I had seen my brother there. He had been in China as a diplomat. We sailed from Hong Kong, and that very day the Korean War broke out. So we were in the Korean War two or three days after it began. We went straight in and we were escorting troops across from Japan to Pusan, in the southern end of Korea. And that began the Korean War for us.
And the first six months of the Korean War for the navy, particularly, and the army…. That’s when the North Koreans pushed the South Koreans, right down, almost into Pusan. We were operating on the west coast, which at first was friendly country, and then was suddenly enemy country as they pushed their way down. We had some interesting engagements with shore batteries, which the North Koreans were setting up. And they were sending junks down ahead….
They didn’t have much navy. They were sending were sending junks down and we were going inshore trying to stop the junks and find ourselves being taken on by shore batteries. So it was quite an interesting time. Then we did the landing in Inch’on, which was a brilliant move by [General] MacArthur, to land well behind the enemy lines. He was still in danger of being pushed out of the bottom of South Korean, at Pusan, he bravely
took this decision to go into Inch’on and that really changed the course of the war. By that time, more and more soldiers were getting into the country, they had very few to being with. They had hoped to win it in the first place, just by the air. I think that the air was unable to do much. And they gradually pushed back over the border, went on pushing, if you remember the story, right up towards the Chinese border. And that’s really where he made his mistake, because that, finally, prompted the Chinese
to come in. So they came in over the border at the Yalu River, and they pushed everybody back again to the original line. Then it became a sort of a stalemate for another two years, before the Korean War finally finished. I just had those very interesting first six months, when we were doing landings, bombardments. I re-reading my letters home, only yesterday. And I note with interest, we never met very many
air attacks in the navy. I think I only saw one plane in the distance once, attacking another destroyer. We never saw a submarine. But I re-read there, that in August, ’50, that we spent an hour attacking a submarine, which got away. I said in my letter, “Of course, we know the North Koreans haven’t got any submarines. And I’m sure that the Russians wouldn’t have a submarine here. Or if so they would tell us
it was here.” In other words, I was being sarcastic. And it was obviously, I think, a Russian submarine that got in the way. We might have even got it, I don’t know, but they wouldn’t have dared admit it, because they would have been in the war. So that was my Korean War.
We weren’t air-conditioned in those days, but we had lots of fans and scuttles, which you could open in breeze time and it was very pleasant. And then as winter set in, it was bitterly cold. None of us had ever experience weather like that. We were pushing the ship through flow-ice, in the sea. The sea-water won’t normally freeze at all, it’s just the ice that flows down the rivers.
I had to have all my sailors chipping the ice of the super-structure, to stop it making us top heavy and making us turn over. If you touched any metal on the upper deck, your skin would stay behind on the metal, the temperature was so low. When we were waiting for the Chinampo evacuation that day, things got a bit tense. We could hear the Chinese coming, we were still not being able to do anything.
We were sitting there with an anchor ready to slip, and the sailors were getting a bit edgy. And my captain and suddenly said to me “Number one, paint ship.” I said, “Sir? We’re at action stations.” He said, “Make sure they keep to where they are, around their own guns, in the super-structure, but to get their minds off worrying, give them something to do.” So I said, “All hands, go down and get paint pots from the paint shop. Up on deck. Paint your own guns and the super structure.”
So this all was done, and it had a lovely coat of paint, and we were looking a bit rusty by then. We had been operating for some months, and this was fine. We did our bombardment and we got off down river safely. And about three weeks later we were off Inch’on, the port to the south of the Seoul, the capital. And expecting to do the same thing, and it was a bit tricky. It was actually Christmas Day by then, and Christmas Day we were expecting
something to happen. I was on the bridge all day. But down below they were having their plum pudding and everything. And suddenly, to my horror…. It was a lovely sunny day, all my ship seemed to be falling to bits. The paint was falling off the gun turrets and off the super structure. I couldn’t work out what was happening. Finally I realised. When we had painted ship the temperature had been about minus twenty.
There was a thin layer of ice. Dry ice, because of the temperature, on all of the gun and the super structure. And we painted over that. Finally, three weeks later, the temperature had risen to zero and all the paint was dropping off in flakes, in strips of paint. So that was an interesting example of what the weather was like in Korea, during the winter. And the army ashore, of course, was having it tougher than us. A ship can be colder than a dug-out,
but at least we were in a ship. You didn’t have any heating or anything. You had no cold weather clothing, at first. We had to borrow that, or pinch it. So it was an interesting time, Korea.
were allegedly Protestant or Church of England. Whenever we had our church parades on a Sunday in harbour, they used to say, “Fall out the Roman Catholics.” And a lot of people would fall out, some of them whom I suspected were not Roman Catholics, but they just wanted to get away from saying prayers. There were only about two Jews that I knew of on board, who were nice people. I can’t remember any… besides the funniness of saying, “Oh, you’re a bloody Catholic. You got out of it again.” But nothing more than that.
I’m interested that you asked that. Colin [interviewer] asked something similar, earlier. He was asking whether my parents were religious or anything. Religion has somehow never worried me. But now…. I’ve always said that I think the final battle that will ruin this world will be religion, rather than race. Race you can get along with, but sometimes…. Look at Northern Ireland; they’re the same race,
but they just can’t sort themselves out between Catholics and Protestant. Look at all the Muslim world… But these people who are fighting the wars that are going on now, they are all absolutely fanatical.
And that is my fear and it’s been proved. I’ve been saying this for years and in the last couple of years it has been proved more than ever. But no, I never struck anything in our service. When I had my last command, which was a big fleet tanker called the HMAS Supply, which I vaguely had in the Vietnam War. We sailed for a trip up north, and a very nice Catholic padre in the navy, called Tiger Lyons,
who is still around, he came with me. We don’t normally have a padre on board, but he said he would like to do a trip up north. And the very first Sunday I said, “Let’s have a sort of combined service, up on the flag deck.” And he said, “What will we do?” And I said, “I will say a few words to the boys and then I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer and then you will say something and we will
pray and pray about.” And he said, “Fine.” And I got up and I said, “Well, we are going to be away for about six months. We’ve got a padre, my old friend Tiger here. About every three weeks, if it’s convenient, I will probably call you together on a Sunday here, so we can all say something to the Good Lord and say, ‘I hope that the folks back are safe, and that we’re safe,’ but I don’t want to make it compulsory. So anyone who doesn’t want to do that
in future, they can fall out now.” And not one moved. And we had our combined prayer…. We had our little service every few weeks or so. And he was a great fellow to have on board, because he was a help down on the mess decks, when fellows had particular problems. And that personified the navy as I’ve known it
And when the first Americans saw it when they came into the war, one of them is reported as having said, “Gawd, Orville Wright himself.” Because it looked so ancient. At any rate, we use to catapult ours off, to do various reconnaissance jobs and then when landing, because we were just a cruiser, it had to land in the water, alongside the ship. The ship would often turn across the wind and make what they called a slick in the water so they could land safely.
Then it would taxi up and be hoisted on board with one of the cranes. Normally the port side. Whenever we were operating it, we would man one of the whalers, one of the rowing boats, as a crash boat in case something happened. Sure enough one day, three or four weeks I think it was before the Coral Sea Battle, we were operating in the Coral Sea and our aircraft came in, after doing a reconnaissance flight, of no
great consequence, the flight. I don’t remember what it was. And it landed and there had been a bit more swell than normal, and it had bounced off the swell, even though we had made a slick by turning to port, and it crashed into the stern of the ship, folded up in flames with the engines crashing down on the cockpit, and very quickly went down. I was the midshipman in charge of the whaler, the crash boat. So we quickly lowered ourselves, trying to remember all the things that one should do.
When you were lowered in you had a boat rope which was still towing you along, once you’ve been slipped and dropped in, and finally you let go of the tow rope. And up until then your tiller has been tied over with a piece of spungen [?] to keep the boat turning away from the ship, and the one thing I couldn’t do was break the spungen, so I said to somebody, “Cut it!” And they made a swipe with their knife and cut the end of my thumb off. The second swipe they cut the spungen all right
and we got away and we went back to where the Walrus had gone down. An American ship had launched their gasoline gig astern of us, and they got their first, and they picked up the observer and the air gunner, and transferred them to me. The pilot had gone down with the plane, unfortunately. Anyway we went back on board, we were hoisted
on board. They both had a couple of broken limbs so they weren’t too well off. And there we were without an aeroplane. We were in Noumea, about a week later, and they had arranged, obviously at headquarters, for a new Walrus to be flown out from Sydney. And it came flapping over the horizon, looking rather like a duck, or something. In those days, we didn’t have a Fleet Air Arm. Our pilots were all air force. And the observer
was actually a chap on loan from the Royal Navy, who did have a Fleet Air Arm. So there we were in harbour, and being hoisted on board was the new Walrus. I was leaning on the gunnel, looking over the side. The chap at the guard rail beside me, I said to him, “I can’t see an observer, there’s just a pilot. I wonder who the new observer will be.” And at that stage someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Smyth, Captain wants to see you.” So I doubled up to
quarter deck and he said, “We’ve just been told we won’t have a new observer for about three weeks. You are the new observer until then.” “Aye aye, sir,” I said and went away, with my tail between my legs and wondered what on earth I had to do. The observer in a naval aircraft is always the captain of the aircraft. In the air force the pilot is the captain. But because navigation was so important,
when you were squirted off a ship and the ship moves around while you were away, you need somebody really on the ball. So I did a few trips. We were catapulted off and I would have to work out where we were, and we would go off looking for any Japanese ships or aircraft around, then we would go back. And one day we came back to where the ship was meant to be and no ship. Because there had been a air-raid alarm while we were away. And of course with wireless silence the ship couldn’t tell us. I thought ‘Oh my God, we’ve had it.’
The Americans had recently lost two of their similar sort of aircraft. They were more of a flying sea plane, rather than a flying boat. But they had lost them for the same reason, because they had moved away. I looked around the horizon and thank God I saw a little patch in the distance, and it turned out to be the Aussie. The job of the poor old observer as we landed alongside was always to climb up onto the upper wing, with the engine still rotating about two feet away behind you.
This pusher engine. And my job was to grab the hook when it came down from the crane, hook it onto this sling which was built into the upper wing, then get off to one side quickly while they hoisted us out of the water. I’m glad I only had to do that about three times before the proper observer arrived and I was able to hand over to him. But I’ve always been able to tell the Fleet Air Arm people in the navy, “We didn’t start our Fleet Air Arm until 1947–48.”
That I was in the Fleet Air Arm, in a rather half-hearted way, long before them. And when I tell them I was an observer on a Walrus, they say, “Gee, did you really fly those things?” Later on, after the war, I went to England and found myself on exchange duty in 1959–60, running an air station in Scotland, much to my surprise. As the executive
officer I decided it was time I learnt to fly properly, and I learnt to fly from our Commander Air, flying supersonic jets, Sea Vixens they were at the time. I never actually soloed, because we had a nasty prang, killing one of our chief test pilots, and my wife said, “I’ve been watching you take off every day. You don’t really have to, do you?” And I said, “All right, I don’t have to.” So I didn’t solo. But again when I came home my Fleet Air Arm pilots were saying “Oh,
we’ve really modernised over here now. We’ve got Sea Hornets and Sea Venoms and things.” And I said, “I’ve been joining the Bangers Club.” “You’ve been through the sound barrier?” they said. “Yes,” I said. “Many times in the Sea Vixen.” “Oh, really?” they said. So I am still an honorary member of the Fleet Air Arm Association in Australia.
I spent about two years there. Interesting job, being a schoolmaster, really. And teaching them all the young new cadets needed to know. That took me through to…I got married during that time to my wife, who I’d met. Her father had been navy,
way back before she was born. But so she had that acceptance of the fact that the navy was a pretty peculiar life to marry into. But she always followed me everywhere I went, from then on. The first place we went after that, I went off to sea again, and she moved into a little flat in Melbourne. I went back to the Australia for the third time. By then, she was pretty old. 1953….
She had been launched in ’28, so that’s twenty five years. I spent about six months in her, by then I was a lieutenant commander and from there I was appointed to command a frigate. The HMAS Hawkesbury. And that was a very good job. I loved doing that. I spent a lot of time up around New Guinea as the only ship up in New Guinea waters, which was still Australian territory then, showing the flag, in all sorts of places. I think I went to 67 different ports or harbours.
Some of them completely uncharted. Some of them hadn’t seen a white man since the war. Some hadn’t even seen a white man. So I had great time learning a bit of pidgin English and showing the flag, and every time I left a port or harbour I would open fire with all my guns to frighten the natives and impress them with how important we were. And I had a lot of fun. Every now and then the fleet would come up and have an exercise and I would have to join in, but mostly it was a very nice independent time
in the Hawkesbury. Of interest, only three years ago, somebody at navy office had remembered that I had been the last captain of the Hawkesbury, because she paid off, as I left her. And that was fifty years before. They had remembered that I had been the last captain fifty years earlier. And they asked my wife to launch the new Hawkesbury, which is one of the new mine hunters built in Newcastle, two or three years ago. And she was both the launching lady
and the commissioning lady of the ship, and the ship’s been in Port Phillip a couple of times since. And one day the captain took us out and said to my wife, “Madam, it’s your ship. There’s the captain’s chair, it’s yours for the day.” So she sat there, grinning and saying, “Hard to starboard,” and, “Open fire,” but not actually doing so. So that was rather fun that we had been carried on in perpetuity… At any rate, the Hawkesbury was great fun. I left her in
’54, went in to do a shore job…. The first real shore job apart from the college. I was the operations officer of the Fleet Headquarters in Sydney, for a couple of years. Then I came down in ’56 to Melbourne, where the navy office still was in those days. I was a director at the navy office. A rather obscure title, I was Director of Training and Staff Requirements. I never quite found out what I was meant to do, but I did lots of things. Including being
the naval liaison officer for the Olympic Games, and the naval liaison officer for Prince Phillip’s visit to open the games. The Queen didn’t come. He opened it, so I was on board with him on the Britannia quite a bit. So that was quite fun. And the navy, for those games, provided all the ushers in the various venues. The fleet was in so we borrowed a lot of sailors from them, a lot from Flinders Naval Depot, and being the
naval liaison for the games, it was up to me to make sure they were doing their job well. So well in advance I went through the program and picked the eyes out of it and said, “I want two tickets for that, and two tickets for this and two tickets for the opening and two tickets for the mile…. .” And I had the absolute pick. My wife couldn’t come to all of them because she had a new baby, but I had the absolute pick of the games, and as the liaison officer had probably the best time of anybody in Melbourne at the time.
I finished that, went over to do a course in America, taking my family with me. Norfolk, Virginia [USA]. A staff course, mainly American, but they had a few overseas people like us. Quite fun. Because my family were with me, and they were only with me because I was going on afterwards for exchange in the UK. Because they were with me we were able to rent a house and live the American way of life. Had I been alone I would have been
living in bachelor officer quarters [BOQ] and I wouldn’t have got that nice feel for the American way of life. Which we thoroughly enjoyed. The people in our street were nearly all service-minded, or knew the area well, and they were all very nice to us. Our opinion of the Yanks, who we had always liked, went up quite a lot. And I was proud to be able to boast that I was a member of the first family of Virginia. Because we claim in the family that Captain John Smith who founded Virginia,
and had an affair with Pocahontas, the Red Indian princess, he was my great-great-great-great grandfather, so we were accepted by the Americans even more. From there we went on to England, where to my surprise they said, “We want you to go to…. “ I didn’t know what my job would be, I thought it would probably be a shore job, and they said, “Yes, you’re going to be the second in command and the executive officer of an air station in Scotland,
at a place called Abbotsinch . I couldn’t even find Abbotsinch on the maps. Finally we found it. It was just outside Glasgow, on the west coast of Scotland. Got there in mid-winter, didn’t really see where we were for about a month, because it was thick fog. About the first time it looked like being suitable weather to operate aircraft, we hadn’t for the first week or so, someone rang up about seven in the morning or so
and in a very broad Scottish brogue said, “Och, what do we do? Wegunsnowaway?” And I said, “We’ve got what?” And I finally realised that he was saying “We’ve got snow on the runway.” Well I had never seen snow, really, and I knew nothing about runaways or aeroplanes, so I said, “Well, sweep it off.” So away they went and they obviously said, “The new commander, he says to sweep it off. He must mean those new street sweeping machines we’ve just
been given for use in the summer for getting the grit off the runaways. Don’t think they’ll work with snow, but he says so, we better do it.” Fortunately for me the snow was still very dry and granular and lying very thin, and they brought out the street sweepers and it worked. So by the time I got to my office at nine o’clock in the morning, having only been there about a week, they were all saying “That new commander, he knows what he’s doing.” To this day I really don’t know what I should have said.
One thing I shouldn’t have said was to sweep it off. I think they should have scraped it with scrapers or something. Anyway, that was the introduction to Naval Air Station. And it was a testing station, really. It was getting the new aeroplanes from the factories, test flying them and turning them into war planes by fitting them with all the nasty things like guns and bomb racks and things. The very latest fighter bomber Sea Vixen was coming in just as I got there, and that’s
what I did quite a lot of flying, with my friendly Commander Air, who was quite willing to teach me to fly in one of the smaller aeroplanes. I had a very pleasant time there with the Scots. The Scots were very accommodating and hospitable to us. They didn’t really like the English. The English tended to stay on the airfield and say, “We’re the English, running an English air field in Scotland.” Whereas we got outside and met all sorts of nice Scots and had a lovely time. It was an interesting
comparison off the feeling between the Scots and the Saxon action down below. We finished that job, it would have taken me…Yes, up until then…. They done a terrible thing to the navy a few years earlier where they had decided that all senior officers, because there was so few jobs at sea, would be divided into sea-going and non-sea going lists. And when they promoted me to commander, which had happened quite early,
and I had had my two commands, they said, “You are on what we’ve nicknamed ‘The Dry List’ as opposed to the ‘Wet List’.” I said, “Do you mean I’ll never go to sea again?” And they said, “I’m sorry.” And one or two of my friends, including David Hamer, resigned on the spot when they did that to him. I said, “Well, no, I might as well stick it out. I still like the navy.” And I accepted the fact that I never did get a destroyer command, during those years. But as I was coming back from Scotland, the Chief of
Navy wrote to me and said, “We’ve decided to do away with the two lists and to re-immerse you, Dacre, I’m giving you command of the Supply.” And the Supply was the big fleet tanker, that I later took up off Vietnam. It was the biggest ship in the navy. Bigger than the aircraft carriers Melbourne or Sydney, and it was a nice challenge. It only had a single screw, and it varied in its draught and windage
because if you were full of fuel you were carrying sixteen thousand tons of fuel, and if you were empty, you were flying along like a kite, above the water. So the ship handling was a nice challenge, which I enjoyed. I enjoy driving ships and trying to get them safely alongside, and so forth. And they have in the navy a thing called the Gloucester Cup, which the Duke of Gloucester presented when he was Governor-General back in 1946. And that is given each year to the most efficient
ship in the navy, and it was always being given to the latest destroyer or the aircraft carrier or one of the fighting frigates, and finally, the second year I was commanding the Supply, they gave me the Gloucester Cup. They never thought it would be given to a tanker. A fleet oiler. So I was able to boast that I was not only the captain of the biggest ship in the navy, but also the best ship in the navy. And that was my last command and
it was a lovely way to finish. I had actually left the ship, gone on leave in Canberra where my family was living, and a week after I left, my former second in command, the commander, dropped in and said, “What’s it like having been captain of the best ship in the navy?” I said, “What are you talking about?” “He said it is the best ship. But they’ve really made it official now, sir.” So we opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated. After that I was in shore jobs more
and more, both in Canberra, and down here. I had three years as the NOIC [Naval Officer in Charge]of Victoria, went back to Canberra for two years, as sort of head of the personnel world in the navy, or nearly the head, hoping to be made an admiral, but I think I insulted one or two admirals, so they never made me better than commodore. I came back here for another three years as the commodore and finally retired twenty five years ago now and stayed put.
We’d lived in twenty five different houses during our time in the navy, in twenty five years. Which is not bad going. Here we’ve stayed for twenty eight years now. My wife keeps saying, “Aren’t we due for a posting soon?” I said, “No, we’re no longer in the navy, we can stay here now.” But that finishes my life story, more or less.
we didn’t get even within sight of Vietnam. We were operating, briefly, once or twice out of the Philippines. We were fuelling the destroyer, the Brisbane I think was the one that was there, at the particular time we were there. She had come back out of the firing line, in the South China Sea, and we refuelled her. The Sydney was running troops up and down. She ceased to be an aircraft carrier then.
She was a troop ship and supply ship. And we would meet her either up there, or once or twice I met in New Guinea waters to fuel her on the way. That was my job, it was fairly dull, but great fun. When we were in big Fleet exercises, you would have perhaps in three weeks, you would have had two occasions of fuelling ships, and providing things to them. Minimum stores, not ammunition. The modern ones have ammunition, too,
we didn’t. We were mainly fuel, water, stores, mail and every time we had to keep a steady course, and a ship would come alongside us, unless it was a bigger tanker that we would sometimes fill up from. An American or British tanker. A lot of very good seamanship. You had to be right on the ball for the other ship and you to be stationary while you sent the hoses across, which were in great hanging loops.
So if you did move out, you still didn’t part the hose. Once or twice you did part hoses in heavy seas, and it made an awful mess of both the destroyer and us. Black fuel oil being sprayed everywhere. That was one of the risks you took. No, it was great fun. A big ship, for ship handling. The small ship’s company, not quite two hundred men, frigate size, and that’s what I liked because you knew everyone by
the end of your time in the ship. If you were in an aircraft carrier with a thousand men, you couldn’t possibly get to know them all. You were a captain hidden away up on the bridge. But with a small ship, or a ship with a small ship’s company, you got to know them all and I like to think they got to know me and I had great fun.
And a week later the first Melbourne collision took place, on my doorstep. The Voyager was sunk, with the loss of 82 people. I was the Naval Officer in Charge of Jervis Bay, so I had a lot of things to do that night and thereafter. And then later on, in the Supply back to Vietnam, we were operating in a big exercise out from Manila Bay, in the Philippines, off the Vietnam Coast. And to
my horror, one night I was in charge of twelve ships in the Logistic Support Group, we had an American tanker, we had New Zealand ships, Australian ships, Thai ships, Pakistani ships, all getting in one another’s way, and I very nearly had collisions going on all night. Avoiding them by telling ships to buck up and steer somewhere else. And then in the middle of it all, came through the signal that Melbourne had collected the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans
twenty miles ahead of us. So that kept me busy up there for a bit, sorting that out. I was flown across to the be on the preliminary enquiry into that one. Again, the captains of Melbourne each time were good friends of mine, and I felt so sorry for them. Because there but for the grace of God could any of us have gone. I had close calls in my career, but I was always lucky, but they were just unlucky. Both of them left the navy afterwards, both
of them would have been admirals, had they not had bad luck. In each case, the other fellow’s fault, really. So it was only that sort of period and just before that I had been fuelling the Brisbane, that I went down. The whole fleet was meant to go to Hong Kong, but Melbourne limped down to Singapore. And I went in and represented the Fleet all by myself, with a Hong Kong visit, that was quite pleasant. So there are lots of bits of my career that I’ve
half forgotten as I went along. The Naval College was great fun, too. Captain of what was virtually a boy’s boarding school, seven days a week. We used to get people in to lecture on other things, because they were academically studying all the week, then on weekend we would send them out sailing, send them up mountains, trying to get the navy adventurous feeling. And on Friday nights we would have the lecturers come in to talk about something quite different.
Farming or yachting. Somebody said, “Where’s a local artist? Let’s bring him in.” I got him in, he gave a lecture, I was so impressed with the painting he did I brought it. And I borrowed some paints the next day, and I started painting and I’ve been painting ever since.
Menzies was then the leader of the opposition. And there were rumours around for a few weeks that the new Governor-General taking over…I think taking over from the Duke of Gloucester was going to be Mackell. And he was then Labor Premier for New South Wales. So it would have been a very definite political appointment, by a Labor Prime Minister of a Labor Premier. And Menzies as leader of the opposition was saying, “It would be the most disgraceful thing
if such an appointment was made.” And then it was announced and it was him. And in all the papers the next day, there was a photograph of Menzies shaking Mackell’s hand and bowing slightly and saying, “Congratulations, your excellency.” But if he hadn’t done that there would have almost been a mutiny, I believe. But he immediately switched and said, “No, he is now the Governor-General. We will pay him due homage.” And I give Menzies full marks or that. And I saw quite a lot of both Chifley and
Menzies. They were both excellent people. Menzies finally took over from Chifley. And it was an interesting thing. I would like to think… If I can refer back to my murder on board the Australia. Whilst I was with the Governor-General, the Minister for the Navy came out one day, Reardon [Minister for the Navy, Mr WJ Reardon – 1945] was his name, and he gave bits of paper to the Governor-General to sign. And finally he got to one of them and he said, “What’s this?”
And Reardon said, “Oh, it’s a pardon for two naval people who were found guilty of murder during the war. That’s some years ago now, sir. 1942, it’s now six years ago. We think it’s time to let them out.” Mackell had been a self-taught lawman. He was QC, or KC as it was in those days. And he said, “I want to see the file.” And Reardon said, “Oh sir, you don’t need to see the file. I’m your adviser, I’m telling you to sign it.”
Mackell said, “You’re telling me to sign? Bring me the file.” And off Reardon went. Mackell sent for me, and he said, “Do you know anything about a murder that took place on the Australia in 1942?” And I said, “Well, sir, let me tell you about it.” So I told him the whole story and the file came out the next day and he studied it, and he said to Reardon, “I’m not going to sign it. I don’t see why they should get out. It was cold-blooded murder. I’ve heard
from somebody else the real reason for it.” Because the homosexual thing never came out in the trial, it couldn’t, but I told Mackell about it. Mackell said, “No, I don’t see why they should be let out. Let them stay in, for another few years.” Anyhow, they all got out eventually. And that was the first time that Mackell, or any Governor-General, had turned against his advisors. Because he’s really just a copy book. He does what the Prime Minister or one of the ministers tell him. And that gave him the feeling that he
could do it. Three years later, double dissolution was granted, against Chifley’s wishes, and Menzies got into government. And so that was the second occasion against the Prime Minister’s wishes that the Governor-General had done something. And you could throw forward a few more years, to when Kerr sacked Whitlam, again, that was the third time. And the first time was with
my doing. So I like to think that I changed the course of Australian history a little bit.
When we did a visit all the way around Australia, really, flying all the way up the Queensland Coast, across to Darwin, down by road almost to Alice [Springs], then from Alice flying to Adelaide. All the time, we had to have the program worked out in advance. There was an official secretary, Murray Tirrell, who did a lot of it, too. That particular trip he did come, but mainly I would go, or the army or the air force when they were still with us. Even if it was going to…I remember going to a trotting meeting
in Melbourne. Mackell, he loved being with the people. He didn’t like pomp and ceremony. I always dressed in uniform, always, with a walking stick, trying to look important. But he’d be in a dark suit and Homburg hat and walking through the betting ring at the trots, people tend to sort of push your Governor-General around, not knowing who he is. So I was acting as a body guard half the time, making sure the drunks didn’t push him over. We went to Darwin,
he was still in his dark suit and Homburg. I was in full white tropical uniform with medals and swords and everything. And the first official welcome, a little girl was sent forward with a bunch of flowers to present to the Governor-General. And I could see her coming, and she came up and she looked at him and she looked at me and she looked at him and she gave it to me. She couldn’t believe that I wasn’t the Governor-General, and this fellow in the dark suit and the Homburg couldn’t be.
So all that was part of the life one led. Back in Canberra, all sorts of interesting episodes. I remember the Russian ambassador came to present his credentials one day. A photo opportunity and everything. I picked him up in the official Rolls Royce, and after the photographs were over and he had presented his credentials as the new ambassador, I and the
secretary of the Foreign Affairs Department, External Affairs it was called then, a chap called John Burton, we got in the Rolls Royce with him to take him back to his embassy, which we did. He was a chap called Defarnel, pleasant fellow. And as we got out of the car to say goodbye, he said, “Would it be within the grounds of diplomacy if you were to come in and have a drink?” And I looked at John Burton and he looked at me and I said, “Do you think so, sir?” And John Burton said,
“Oh, I think so.” So we said, “Yes, sir.” We went in and we sat down at the table and in came some lackeys, and they put one of those triple decanter silver holders, with three silver crystal decanters in it in front of the ambassador with a lot of little glasses. One was a plain colourless liquid, one was a purple liquid and one was a red liquid. And he filled our glasses, one of each.
And we each got these three glasses in front of us. And he said, “Well, Prozit!” or whatever they say in Russia [Za vashe zdorovye! toast]. And we watched him and he picked up the first colourless one, which was a neat vodka. Down it went, and before it hit the table he was picking up the red one, then down it went, then he was picking up the purple one…. So we had three of these things inside us in twenty seconds, and we thought, ‘That was nice, we better go now.’ And he said, “No, no, no, you must have three drinks.” We said, “We just had three drinks.” He said, “No, no, no, three rounds.”
So he filled our glasses again two more times, by which time we were getting garrulous and talkative and it was very pleasant and he finally let us go. I said goodbye to John Burton, I think I dropped him off and I drove out to the government house, still feeling pretty right, it was fun, I enjoyed that. I walked into the front door, I walked into the ADC’s room and I collapsed flat on my face and I can’t remember anything for the next six hours. I was out like a light apparently.
the discipline breaks down, then punishment has to be administered. I didn’t always agree with some of the rather strict rules that we’d inherited. And the strict outlook that we had inherited from the British navy. There was too much of them and us. I know when I got to the British cruiser that I mentioned earlier, that I joined for the Normandy landings, I was the divisional officer to the fo’c’sle division. All the sailors in the front end of the ship,
and we were in harbour, out somewhere, it might have been in Colombo, and I was leaning on the guard rail on the fo’c’sle, talking to one of my able seaman, and I was saying, “Where do you come from?” “Oh, that part of the world. Have you got a wife, any children?” I was getting to know him. Because the job of a divisional officer, as we called them in the navy, is to know the people under them, if they have any problems. From then on I would know. Yes, he’s got a wife at home. I better remember that next time I see him and say,
“How’s your wife?” If he has to say, “She has left me for another man I will be able to sympathise with him.” And in the middle of this somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, “The commander wants to see you, sir.” So I went along to the quarterdeck and saluted the commander. He said, “Smyth, you were talking to a rating, leaning on the guard rail.” I said, “Yes sir, he’s one of my sailors. I’m getting to know him.” “You don’t hob-knob with the sailors like that in this ship.” I said, “Well, I’m sorry. Any ship that I’ve ever
been in, my job is to get to know my sailors. And the more human I can be in the process…. “ I can’t remember exactly what I said, but that’s what I felt. And he said, “Oh, no, you do not hob-knob with the sailors here.” It was them and us, more or less. And that was the RN, and we had inherited a lot of that in our navy, because of all the training that we had one. And I think that was the hardest thing I had to overcome in my early days. Realising that Old Joe Blow who I was at
school with, and who was up in the fo’c’sle, I wasn’t really meant to talk to him because he was a lower deck and I was an upper deck, sort of thing. It’s got much better since. I’ve been delighted when I go out on any ships now to find that they virtually use Christian names to the captain, but they still treat him like the captain. And it’s a very subtle change in those sixty years between the harsh discipline and the human discipline of the day.
what one remembers. I mentioned earlier going across the Bight, which was one of my first trips, it was very rough. And you get very rough water down south of Australia, around Tasmania, even in Bass Strait. But the typhoon, or the tropical storm, like the hurricanes they have up north, like the one that flattened Darwin in 1975, up in the northern hemisphere they were called typhoons. And we were right in amongst them during those last few months of the war.
And they were quite frightening. They were enormous waves and enormous winds. We were in about three different ones. There was one when we were by ourselves, we were virtually stopped. The revolutions were about ten knots, but not making any way through the water, facing into the sea. And if we tried to move one way or the other, we might well have rolled over. And we received a signal from a
poor little American cargo ship and it said, “We are in the apparent centre of the typhoon. We are abandoning ship.” And we couldn’t do anything about it. Had we turned to go over to them, we would have probably rolled over. That was the last we ever heard of them. There were no survivors and the ship went down. We were caught in Tokyo Bay just after the war, by a typhoon. The bay was full of ships.
We had all gathered there for the victory celebrations, really, and we were all told to get to sea. I was up on the fo’c’sle, trying to weigh the anchor and it was out almost lying straight ahead of us, and the winch just wouldn’t work. So we dragged backwards, through the ships for about half an hour. The captain was seeing the ships coming up astern, and going, “Full ahead port and half astern starboard,”
and somehow trying to miss them. And then finally he somehow was able to steam ahead enough for me to get the anchor up and we steamed out of Tokyo Bay, somehow avoiding collisions and things. But standing on the fo’c’sle, I was on an angle like that into the wind, into the wind, because if you tried to stand up, you just blew over. Two hundred kilometre an hour winds, sort of thing, which really flattened you completely. So those seas were
tremendous. On the way south from Tokyo Bay, we called into Okinawa for fuel. The typhoon was still some distance away, but the swell had already arrived. So while we were alongside this tanker in the harbour, we were crashing into it every time the ship rolled on the swell. We got enough fuel, but we came away with all our guard rail and a lot of our sea boats stowed in, just from trying to get some fuel in harbour. So yes,
storms like that. The Atlantic gales, of course, were well known. I didn’t get much time in the Atlantic. We were up in Scapa Flow, and for the D-Day landings and things. And the channel where I was in motor gun boats, we got rough weather, but nothing like the big storms. You asked about animals, I never saw a sea serpent. Saw lots of whales and sea-snakes…. .Sea-snakes, up in the Tropics
the sea-snakes, at any one time, you could probably see three or four of the big yellow thick sea-snakes. Which are very poisonous, I’m told. And the Coral snakes which have the different colours in bands down them. You get them more in the harbours. Manus harbour and Port Moresby, places like that. Nasty things like we were in the [Great] Barrier Reef at one stage during the war, having a bit of
rest and recreation, I suppose you would call it now. We were in for a few days, and we landed a lot of sailors on the beach of one of the islands there. And the boat, not the boat that I was in, but just close to us, they all hopped out into the water, when the water was shallow enough for them to walk ashore, and one of them hopped straight onto a Portuguese Man of War and he screamed and said, “My God, something’s got me.” They put him back in the boat, took him straight back to the ship and he was dead by the time they got him back on board.
These nasty Portuguese Man of War’s are not much fun. When I was in my ship up in Darwin, the frigate Hawkesbury where we were looking after the Japanese pearl fleet. I was going out for a week or so, or ten days, making sure that…. They were allowed to pearl but they weren’t allowed to land on the Australian shores.
The dreams that I have, and I often find myself dreaming that I am back in a ship, I’m either the captain in it or the second in command, told by the captain to do something, and it’s never actually firing guns, it’s more avoiding reefs. Remembering the one I nearly landed the ship on in Indigo Harbour [Solomons], in 1954 or something. More so than during the war, when I wasn’t captain on my own ships,
in any of the wars, except Vietnam, and I wasn’t really in that war so much. I think it was the time in command, when your responsibility is so supreme, far more probably than in any other service or situation. You’ve got a ship and the safety of the ship is in your hands, but you’ve also got two hundred men and their safety and their well being is in your hands. And it is the most complete responsibility I can imagine.
You can be the chairman of BHP [Broken Hill Proprietary], but you’ve always got dozens of people to straighten you out if you are going wrong. But if you are captain of a ship, you are the captain. You are alone. You’ve got nobody to refer to, really. You can be friendly with your first lieutenant and your officers, but you never say, “What would you do now?” You’ve got to decide it yourself. Will you go into this harbour, even when you’ve got no chance? I remember going through a channel in the Solomon’s in 1954, in my frigate,
Booker Passage it’s called. And we knew the Japanese destroyers had gone through their during the war. They also had command of that island. So I said, “Well, if they can go through, I’ll go through.” And I was quite a big ship, two or three thousand tons, and I drew twelve feet of water, and we got hold of a Japanese chart and I said, “Now I’ve got a chart, I should be able to get through.” Halfway through I realised that the soundings under my bottom, which I thought would have been about six or eight feet
were two feet and one foot. I was skimming on top of the bottom, and suddenly in front of me I saw a horse, standing on the water. I thought, it looked like it. As I got closer I edged around to the left of him and he was standing on a platform of coral that had come right out from the shore, and he was standing in about three inches of water, and just beside it, it went straight down. And I went past and I was looking down at this horse, and he was looking up at me.
By this time my nerves weren’t very good, and my soundings were still telling me I still only had a foot of water under me. I got through the far end, I didn’t hit the bottom. I stopped the ship and I said, “Let’s sort this out,” with my navigator and we looked at the chart. I suddenly said, “What would Japanese soundings be in?” He said, “Probably metres.” I said, “We’ve been assuming that when it says three, it means three fathoms.”
A fathom is six feet, a metre is three feet. I thought I was in…. .eighteen feet of water. In fact, I was in twelve feet of water. And that is the sort of thing that I still dream about. Not quite a nightmare, but that sort of thing. I’m suddenly driving through that place again and
I realise that I am putting my ship and my sailors at risk. So they’re the things that you remember…. When you’re in command, those are the things that you remember, I think. Jobs ashore again, you’ve always got somebody to turn to. But in command of a ship is a unique situation, I still think… Probably driving an aeroplane, but so much is automatic these days. You don’t have to make those sorts of decisions as much, and you’re always within cooee of the ground. I would be away…. I sailed from Darwin at one stage
and came across a Japanese ship, and it was asking permission to land someone who was sick. I didn’t think he should. I made a signal to Navy Office in Melbourne, more or less, requesting instructions, which was silly of me because the signal didn’t get through for about three hours, and by the time the signal came back saying, “It is up to you to decide” and I had had to decide anyhow. And I didn’t let him land and I made him go away and I
kept going. So in other words, perhaps today you can pick up the phone and talk to the Prime Minister. Like when children are overboard or something, but certainly in my day communications were so doubtful that you had to make decisions yourself, completely, about anything that came up.
You were fighting the sea half the time, not your enemy. And any time you met up…. I met a lot after the war. I know that when I was in London I was our Naval Attaché, and the German Naval Attaché, and the Italian Naval Attaché, were amongst my best friends, amongst the attaches union, and we talked over the war and we once or twice realised that we had been pretty close to one another, and possibly almost shooting at one another. But they were
all… They were naval people, and naval people are peculiar in a way. Not only navy, but merchant navy, too. We’ve drawn away from the merchant navy in peace time. A lot of the young naval officers I meet now haven’t really got to know people in the merchant navy, which is a pity because that brotherhood of the sea cemented us all together during the war. We were convoying them, they were being sunk, even more than we were, and the people you met you knew were facing the
same dangers, and there was a tremendous brotherhood. And whether they were German survivors that you picked up, which we never did, actually, but if you had, you would have treated them the same as your own survivors. Because they were facing the same dangers. Some of the films brought that out quite well, I think. There’s that famous one, The Cruel Sea. Have you ever seen that? It came out ten years after the war and it was
Nicholas Monserrat [author] and there’s the awful picture where he has attacked a submarine, the submarine has sunk a ship, then he has picked up the submarine echo again and he’s coming in to attack it, and he realises that right over the submarine are all the survivors in the water from the ship, a merchant ship that has been sunk by the submarine. And he has to decide…. They think he is coming into save them, he knows he’s
coming into depth charge the submarine and kill them. And this would have been a terrible decision for anyone to make, and it’s made in the film. He does goes in and he drops his depth charges and his sailors almost disown him on the spot. But those are the sort of decisions, because friend or foe, however you play it, they’re all men of the sea, and how you cope with decisions like that.
We'd had some leave, seen our loved ones and then we were sailing again for similar duties in Japan. We'd been in Hong Kong on the way for a couple of days and in fact, the day we sailed from Hong Kong to go to Japan the Korean War broke out. We certainly hadn't had any advance notice that there was any danger of such a thing happening. I don't think anyone else really knew either that it was an imminent as it proved to be. The North Koreans,
who had been building up against their southern brothers and cousins, suddenly walked over the border, the 38th Parallel where the artificial delineation line had been made at the end of World War II - they suddenly invaded South Korea. Our immediate reaction on board was to say, 'Oh I hope it lasts long enough for us to get into it!' because when you're in the navy, you expect if there's a war that you should
be in it with feelings of terror sometimes, but feelings that we're doing our job. And our feelings as I say was it'll all be over in a couple of days, the Americans will move in and the North Koreans will be pushed back and we'd better get there quickly. So we hurried north from Hong Kong. Sure enough we were put straight into the line as it were. The ship that we were about to relieve on Japanese occupational duties, the [HMAS] Shoalhaven stayed there
and the two of us immediately, the first job we had I think was to escort some ships across from Japan into Pusan, the southern port, still saying I hope it keeps going long enough for us to see some action. In fact as we let the ships enter Pusan we were told, "Your job is finished, you can go back to Japan for the next job." and my captain said, "No, we're going into the harbour." and I said, "Oh Sir, but we don't have to."
He said, "I know these things of old, Dacre, if we go into the harbour it might just make the difference between somebody getting a medal for this war because we'd been into the harbour, as opposed to if we haven't been into the harbour they'll say you never took part in the war." Looking back it's ridiculous now because the war went on for three years and we had plenty of action and plenty of occasions to win that peculiar medal. Medals are something that mean something to the services.
They give too many of them these days but it was still something that was in our minds, 'Will it last long enough?' The Americans were just saying at first, 'We'll finish this using the air force, send in the air force, navy escort a few ships across, army won't be needed.'they said in those first few days. How wrong they were. Within two weeks the North Koreans were at the outskirts of Pusan, that city port in the southern part of Korea
and the whole of South Korea had been taken over by the North Koreans in two weeks. It was the fastest invasion probably in history almost, and then the Americans and the Australian Army started coming into the equation I suppose is the word, and they were finally sent into the southern part of South Korea in time to stop the final invasion of
Pusan, which would have meant the war was over in two or three weeks if they hadn't stopped them just on the outskirts of Pusan.
enemies had always been aircraft of the enemy, submarines, surface ships occasionally. None of those really eventuated in Korea but we didn't know that at the beginning. I think we were the only ship that ever attacked a submarine in the Korean War. I don't know to this day whether there was really a submarine there. We thought there was, we got all the signals from our sonar and we attacked it.
I suspect to this day it might well have been a Russian submarine that was there having a look at what was going on. We didn't know whether the North Koreans had submarines. We didn't know whether the Russians were going to come in with their submarines. So we probably had that one and only experience with submarines. For the rest of the war no submarine ever appeared on the enemy side. Similarly with aircraft. One of our chummy ships, a British destroyer [HMS] Comus was actually attacked by aircraft, but
nearly every ship avoided - or not avoided - was not attacked by aircraft during the whole war. There were a lot of aircraft ashore of course, bombing the armies of both sides but the navy didn't have to so we had a much easier time of the war than we had in World War II shall we say. Surface ships, certainly almost nothing, one or two small North Korean surface vessels
made forays down into the southern waters. We never actually met a surface ship. So our main warfare was against the shore batteries which were very efficient. Within days of getting into South Korea the North Koreans had set up very efficient shore batteries, radar guided. The first action by the Australian Navy of the whole war was on 1st August which after all was only a month after the war began.
We were off the South Korean west coast and we were going in to examine a couple of junks who were suspected of running supplies down to help the North Koreans, who by that time were right down the whole west coast and they had already obviously, we didn't know this, set up this very efficient shore battery which opened up on us, straddled us immediately at the range of six or eight miles and
we had a very hot blooded exchange of fire with them. We fired I think, a hundred and fifty rounds from our four point seven inch and they kept straddling us. We were very lucky not to be hit. So they were very efficient with their shore batteries, but that continued right through the war to be the main threat, if ships were silly enough to go within range of North Korean shore batteries, they would sure enough be shot at and most captains learnt to stay out of range.
Mines were the other danger. So that right through the whole three years of war I only experienced the first six months of it, the busiest six months of it, but right through the whole three years of war mines and shore batteries were really the navy's only enemy, apart from the natural elements because the weather in winter was beastly. We'd never struck anything quite as cold as that anywhere I had been in the whole world in World War II.
By about October, November 1950, there was still tremendous movement to and fro on the South Korean and all of the Korean peninsula. The North Koreans had still occupied
most of South Korea and [General Douglas] MacArthur who had taken over the supreme command of the whole war. He, having been in Japan since the end of the war organising the peace, he was suddenly given the war to run, and I'm told against the advice of all his staff, he said, "We will land an amphibious landing behind the enemy lines and we'll do it at Inchon on
the west coast of Korea." which is the port of Seoul, the capital of South Korea. And I'm told his staff said, "You can't possibly do it." and he said, "We'll not only do it, we'll do it in three weeks time." And he somehow put together sufficient forces to do a landing there which completely caught the North Koreans by surprise. We, by that time, the Australian Navy had been augmented by another ship of the same
class as my ship, the Bataan, the [HMAS] Warramunga had joined us. We were both tribal class destroyers, we were working as a pair. Our job in the Inchon landing was fairly annoyingly dull because we were escorting a British aircraft carrier on the outer perimeter of the waters of Inchon, so we didn't actually get in close and fire our
guns or take any part in the landing. Nonetheless we were very much part of the whole naval force - American, British, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian that covered the landing at Inchon, which was enormously successful. It was of course, behind the enemy lines and that was the beginning of the whole push back into North Korea of the North Korean forces which started
down near Pusan with the army pushing up. But the fact that we'd landed behind their lines meant that we were able to cut across, and generally it's an army description that you should be getting rather than from me, but that was the moment of everything turning and going in the right direction at last. And MacArthur himself almost single-handedly had said, 'That's the way we'll do it.' So I had great admiration for him. We'd all heard of MacArthur a
lot during the war. I'd met him after the war in Japan. I'd gone up and met him and his wife, because his wife had actually launched our ship, the Bataan. Mrs. MacArthur had launched that ship during the war in Australia and we'd named Bataan as a gesture to the battle that MacArthur himself had fought as he got out of the Philippines when the Japs came into World War II. So that's all past history
but, so I knew MacArthur, I knew a lot of him but I had not actually experienced his brilliance, I think, in making those sort of decisions.
By December 1950 two things had happened. Firstly, winter had arrived and we hadn't really been ready for it and it was a terribly bitter winter as every Korean winter proved to be from then on and secondly, the Chinese had come into the war on North Korea's side. We were in the waters right up river at
Chinnampo which is the port for Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. We were very cold. We had been in pancake ice outside in the Yellow Sea before we went up river. It was so cold, ice actually on the sea, that we were pushing our way through. Our superstructure was covered with icicles and everything had ice, all the guard rails, and we were up there trying to cover the evacuation
ahead of the Chinese advance of a lot of our friendly troops. We were at action stations. We were there all day waiting. The boys began to get a bit nervous and fidgety. You do, when you can hear the Chinese advancing over the nearby hills and the guns and see the smoke going up. My captain suddenly turned to me and said, "First Lieutenant, paint superstructure." I said, "Sir?" And then I
realised I shouldn't be questioning him and I said, "Aye aye Sir." and I realised what he was up to. He knew that idle hands made worried minds and that idle hands were best occupied with something. So I said, "Right, one man from every gun crew, go down below to the paint shop. Get a pot of paint, bring it up. Hands - paint gun mountings and superstructure, but make quite sure that you don't leave your action stations.
Use rags to wash off or to wipe off as much of the ice and snow as you can and then put the paint on." So by the time we carried out our final duties that night of bombarding the shore after all the troops had come out, the ship was looking like a new pin. It was probably the most handsome looking ship in the whole of the Korean waters and off we sailed after the operation was successfully carried out, down river again and down to
Inchon which was the port for the South Korean capital, where we were expecting much the same thing to happen a couple of weeks later. In fact on Christmas Day we were anchored off Inchon. I was on the bridge. The captain was down below enjoying Christmas dinner with the troops and the weather had improved a little. The temperature had gone from minus twenty which it had been at for some weeks by then up to zero
and as I looked I suddenly, to my horror, saw that all the lovely paint that I'd put on the guns and superstructure two weeks earlier, was falling off in bedraggled strips and I couldn't work out what was happening until suddenly it occurred to me, of course the temperature had risen. We had painted without knowing it over a thin layer of nice dry cold ice, and that ice was now melting and all the paint
was dripping off. By the end of that little episode we were looking the ugliest and untidiest ship in all the Korean waters.
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