The first I can recall of a place to live was a suburb called Lockleys where my father was a baker, pastry cook, and ran a business there. I was always an adventurous child as I hesitate to say, but I used to wander off and get lost fairly often and be found miles away from home at various police stations
and the like, and during the Depression years, obviously my father ran into financial problems, but at that time we moved into the city and lived in the eastern part of Adelaide itself in a place called Angas Street. When I was old enough I went to primary school at Flinders Street in Adelaide.
Went through the whole of primary school there. For secondary school, and high schools were very short in those days, I went to Unley High School, stayed there until I got my Leaving Certificate. When I got my Leaving Certificate at the end of ’39, I then went to, or during the holidays waiting for the results I took a job with a firm called
Harrison Ramsey. I think they were tea and coffee importers. I had a friend whose father was the accountant in the Shell Company and when my results came out and I’d passed my leaving certificate, he took me on at the Shell Company as a trainee. I stayed there until I joined the navy and I enrolled to enlist at the end of ‘41, and enlisted and
was mobilised in March 1942. I went to Flinders Naval Depot to the recruit school there; did the basic training. Whilst there, and remember this was just the start of the Japanese war, they decided to train some of us as officers. I went to the officers’ training school, graduated from there in about November 1942. Came here to Sydney to Rushcutters
Bay then as a midshipman, went to the anti-submarine officers’ training course at Rushcutters Bay, qualified there early in ‘43. From there I went to a ship called the [HMAS] Kybra but I was only there a few months before I was drafted to the e-Dutch submarine, which was commissioned to the Australian Navy as HMAS K9. K9
had all sorts of problems. She was an old boat and one tends to forget how old she really was, but in 1944 in the beginning we had a battery explosion on board and we decided not to run that boat anymore. The admiral was worried about our safety and the like. Anyway, then what to do with me and as I wasn’t in fact a
trained submariner, my captain organised for me to go to England and do a proper submarine course. So I travelled to England via the States [United States of America] in the first part of ‘44. I arrived in UK [United Kingdom – Great Britain] just after D Day [June 6, 1944]. There was a hold-up, which I’ll probably have to explain to you later.
Yeah. You were held up in the United States or in Canada?
Yes, yes. I went to a ship called HMS Western Isles, which was training escort groups up in the northern part of Scotland in the Hebrides there, and these ships were usually new commissioned ships put through their paces. They were very hard paces, but I was put on the staff there because I’d had some anti-submarine training.
And then I went to the next available submarine course, which was at Blythe in the north east of England. I qualified there as a submariner and was drafted to a new submarine called the HMS Varne. I was fortunate. I passed out at the head of the course, which you’d expect me to do with having had some experience, and that was an operation boat at that
time. I only did one patrol in the Varne. I had other interesting adventures but I stayed in the Varne until I became the first lieutenant there. I was a sub-lieutenant still and in June ‘45 I was ordered to fly out to join a submarine squadron
in Fremantle. So I was put aboard air force transports and again a marvellous adventure flying from there to Colombo by the air force and then from Colombo non-stop to Fremantle in Qantas. Got to Fremantle to find that my submarine squadron had been replaced by another submarine squadron and my squadron had gone on to Manila Bay, to Manila
in the Philippines. So once more into aeroplanes, I went all around Australia, Kalgoorlie, Adelaide, only an overnight stop at Adelaide. I saw my family there fortunately, and then on to Melbourne overnight, Sydney two nights. Then flew to Brisbane and Townsville, overnight in Townsville. Townsville to Momote in New Guinea, New Guinea
through to Manus [Admiralty Islands] and then American aircraft from Manus to Samal in the south-eastern side of the Philippines. From there to, I had two nights there, and then onto Manila and then by boat to Subic Bay, where the depot ship was, and I got there just in time for VJ [Victory over Japan] Day pretty nearly. The captain of the [HMS] Maidstone, which
was the depot ship for the 8th Submarine Flotilla, he decided to dash off to Hong Kong before the Americans could go and relieve the place, but we got there and it was a bit strange, a depot ship with its submarines and a minesweeping squadron and there the British admiral ordered us to stop because there was danger going into Hong Kong. They thought we might
have suicide attacks by the Japanese. We had to wait for a couple of battleships and aircraft carriers and all that to arrive, so we went through as part of the big occupying fleet. After a couple of weeks in Hong Kong, I was transferred to the submarine [HMS] Supreme and went on Supreme to Subic Bay,
no, not Subic Bay, from Hong Kong to Ceylon to Trincomalee. Trincomalee I was taken out of the submarine because the captain submarines, that submarine squadron was the [HMS] Wolf, the depot ship, he had a signal to say I’d been repatriated to Australia.
I told him I wasn’t too keen to do that at this stage and so he did the Nelsonian thing [turned a blind eye]. He didn’t see the signal, tore it up and threw it in the waste paper basket, but Supreme had sailed by this time so I missed her. So I went back to England in the Wolf, that was an interesting passage, got back to England in December ‘45. After a few days there, I was transferred to
an English carrier, the [HMS] Ranee [British Ruler class aircraft carrier], which incidentally was the same ship that took me to America back in ‘44, and I came back to Australia in the Ranee to arrive just after New Year ‘46.
I went on leave in Adelaide, saw the family and all that sort of stuff. I also developed tropical ear [otitis externa] somewhere and they put me in a repat [repatriation] hospital in Adelaide there for a while, treated that, and while I was there in the hospital I got orders to go and join a ship called HMAS Air View. Well,
not having had too much time in Australia at that time, I didn’t know what the heck the Air View was or where it was, and she was up in Brisbane and it was an air-sea rescue launch, 63-foot twin-haul Scott engines, tons of oomph [power], and from there I was told to sail to Thursday Island, which was a great adventure. I had a small crew of half a dozen or so and off we
set up the coast of Queensland to Thursday Island. We were supposed to do air-sea rescue duty up there only to find typical inter-service fashion, one service not talking to the other, the air base up at Cape York had closed down. There was only a care and maintenance party there. So there was no work for me. I was supposed to be up there in case ships coming back from Japan and so on didn’t make it. So after spending I think six months
on that tour, I had to come all the way back down the coast again. That was again an enjoyable trip, peacetime you remember. Daydream Island was just opening up and so we stopped there for a couple of days and when I got back to Brisbane, I’ve forgotten whether we actually paid the Air View off at that stage. I think I did, and I got orders to go to the HMAS
Manoora, which was then engaged on trooping duties to Japan mostly. I was 12 months in the Manoora during which time we did several trooping runs to Japan, but more interestingly we did two runs to Java repatriating Dutch and Indonesian troops of the Dutch Army, and we
also did a run to India to Bombay where we were - this was at the time of the end of the British Raj and they thought people might be massacred there - and strangely enough the people we brought back, very few of them were English. They were nearly all middle Europeans who’d settled there or other people who wanted to get out of India for one reason or another.
And after Manoora, I then converted to the RAN interim navy as a lieutenant with two straight stripes instead of wavy stripes. I went to, I think it was HMAS Gladstone as executive officer.
I must’ve done six months or so there and then I was transferred to the RAN permanent navy and underwent some training courses including Rushcutter again, which I hadn’t see for years and from there I went to the [HMSA] Quickmatch and [HMAS] Quiberon, which were
two ships tied up alongside here at Garden Island. They were both in immediate reserve, I think that was at a fortnight’s notice for steam, and they didn’t have full crew, they had one crew between the two. After being there for a while, I was there while the [HMAS] Tarakan blew up. Had some mates of mine so we fiddled around with that.
Then I was sent to join HMAS Tobruk, a brand new destroyer building at Cockatoo Island, and joined her for the commissioning. I spent some months working up Tobruk down at Jervis Bay and then I was given orders to proceed to the United Kingdom and do a long torpedo anti-submarine specialist course which I did.
The course lasted just over 15 months. I then went on the staff at HMS Vernon, which was the main torpedo anti-submarine base in Portsmouth. I was there during the coronation of the Queen [Queen Elizabeth II]; I was able to go to her famous coronation day drive through the city. I also
was second-in-command of the Vernon Battalion when she came down to Portsmouth and we marched past and had a parade at South Sea Common, and all those things, which was pretty good stuff. Then I went to an English corvette or frigate, [HMS] Dorchester Castle. I was the executive officer of the Dorchester Castle
for 12 months during which time the Spithead Review took place and unfortunately my ship was in dry dock in Devonport at that time, but I did get to the Spithead Review as a passenger in one of the sister ships. So I had a good look at that. After
Dorchester Castle, I was repatriated to Australia. I was married at this time and had my first son in England. We came back to Australia, I was given a job in Melbourne at the navy offices in the Directorate of Underwater Weapons and whilst
there, after about - we got back in ‘54, in ‘55, I think it was - ‘55 I got orders to join Tobruk again, which was then up in Singapore, because the ship’s torpedo anti-submarine officer had been invalided out.
So I went up there and was both the squadron torpedo anti-submarine officer and the ship’s anti-submarine officer. I spent 12 months in Tobruk, most of which was spent in the Far East [East Asia]. Came back south in Tobruk with orders to join the [HMAS] Melbourne, which had not been long in Australia, and so I joined her as the fleet torpedo anti-submarine officer. I had 12
months or so in her, during which time we did cruises around Australia and New Zealand and the Far East again, and after the Melbourne, after about 12 months there, I was posted to Navy Office again, this time on the Directorate of Training and Staff Requirements.
That would’ve been at the end of ‘57, ‘58, yes. During that time, Navy Office transferred to Canberra so I had to pack up the house and go to a house in Canberra. I was, New Year ’58 it would have been,
selected for promotion to commander. Before I was promoted to commander, I was sent to England again to the Joint Service Staff College. From there, I went to command the destroyer Quickmatch. She was a fast frigate known as that then. I was there for two years and then I went to
Singapore on loan to the Royal Navy as a joint planning staff member in Singapore. Stayed with that outfit for two and a half years, then came back to Australia. I went to Navy Office Canberra as part of the Directorate of Naval Intelligence.
From there, we’re talking now about 1965 I guess, I came, while I was in the Directorate of Naval Intelligence, I went to Honolulu for some tripartite or quadripartite intelligence discussions. I then went to
the torpedo anti-submarine school out here at South Head, where I was the officer in charge there. I went from there to Rushcutter as the captain, which was then the diving school, and from there I was posted to Darwin as the naval officer in charge and given an acting fourth stripe. I was confirmed in that rank while I was up in Darwin.
We’re now up to ‘71. I came back from there to Canberra again to Navy Office to be Director of Naval Reserves and Cadets. From there, I went to the Balmoral Naval Depot, HMAS Penguin and from there I went to the apprentice training school out at Quakers
Hill as the captain, and from there I went to join HMAS Supply [logistic support ship] at the end of ‘75. Took Supply to America for their bicentenary, went to San Francisco and then up to Vancouver and then back to Australia. On leaving the
Supply, I was promoted to commodore and became chief of staff to the flag officer commanding the local area here, and on the 20th of June 1979 I retired, compulsory retirement then, and in my last few years I’d been reading law by remote control
if you like, correspondence, started with the Queensland University and then didn’t do so good there. I was up in Darwin and then when I came to Sydney to live, I decided to transfer to the Barrister Admission Board here in Sydney and eventually qualified there at the end of
‘79, beginning of ‘80. I was admitted to the Bar here in Sydney in 1980, I think it was, but I went straight then on a tour of Europe with my second wife and we were away for about six months,
and we came back to Sydney, started practising from chambers, Chalfont Chambers. I practised for about 10 years. During that time, I’d been invited to be a member of the Queen Elizabeth Trust for Young Australians. I stayed there until
they made me one of the vice-presidents for Sydney Legacy [Club]. I thought, “Well, it’s going to lead to more work, I won’t do both.” So I resigned from the Queen Elizabeth Trust, became president of Sydney Legacy in ’73-‘74 and that’s where I still am in a way. Did I say ’73-‘74?
went down the railway line with the dog and of course the train didn’t run me over, it had to stop, and then when they tried to clear me off the line the dog wouldn’t let them, and it was only my grandfather who’d been alerted that I was missing at home. He’d come visiting. He rode his bike along the side of the track there somewhere or other and found all this commotion going on and saved the day.
And I used to do other things like climb ladders. The painters were painting around the guttering or something or other and they’d go stop for a smoko [a break, eg, morning tea] or something and I’d be up the ladder on the roof and all these things and terrifying people around the place. Anyway, when we moved to Adelaide itself to this place in Angas Street, it was a huge place,
big house, shop front, bakery at the back, covered courtyard, stables at the side of that ‘cause there was a lot of horse-drawn stuff in those days. That’s where I lost the top of that finger, again being adventurous. I had some playmates in, I was then about four and a half, maybe five. I stuck that finger in a mincing machine that was going around
grinding up cake to make cakes. I forget what they used to call them. They came out as a sort of, what was ground up came out as the filling between two slabs of pastry or something. I can’t remember their name now. Anyway the tip of my finger’s in there somewhere. So my father who was working just the other
side, obviously because he’d set this machine going, he saw me, grabbed me and Sunday afternoon, took me to the local GP’s [General Practitioner, doctor], which is on the corner of Angas Street. He wasn’t home, so he ran along to the next doctor. He wasn’t at home and finished up at the Adelaide Hospital with me, and he was hold me up here like this all the time in his arms,
and this finger spurting blood and it was going all around his neck and people passing by thinking, oh, look at that horrible man, he’s chopped his boy’s hand off and cut his own throat. Anyway they fixed this in the hospital by cauterising it. I don’t think they do it these days, but which meant sticking it in an open Bunsen burner. I remember that. Anyway I soon forgot that.
get threatened rather than more often used the razor strop [leather sharpening strap], which tended to be the favourite weapon, and I can remember the worst incident. I was a bit older then, It must’ve been the end of primary school sort of period and I must’ve been bad, but I can’t remember what I did wrong, but after several threats to, apparently
over time, not to do things, eventually I could stand it no longer and when he came home from work my mother gave him a full report. So right, he went out the back and drove three nails through a plank of wood off a fruit box, showed me these and said, “Now, bend over”, and gave me a couple of whacks across the backside with this and I felt every nail go in. Of course he used the flat side
and no nail penetrated through, but I felt every one of them and when I dropped my tweeds to see where all the blood was coming out I was astonished that there was nothing coming out. He was that sort of disciplinarian, very good. Looking back in hindsight certainly I was never brutalised or anything of that sort. My mother was always attentive but she was a fairly stern disciplinarian.
If my sister started wailing for any reason at all, I was immediately at fault, even if it wasn’t my fault. In fact, we had a neighbour used to stick her head over the fence and say, “He didn’t do it, she did it. It was her fault.” Yeah, it was all good fun.
birth date because we always celebrated on the 26th of February but of course it was the 25th of February in the USA, and so there was always that confusion, so other than that, nothing. She went back to England after her father decided to get out of America. When I say decided to get out, I don’t know whether it was just pressure to go home or not
from my grandmother, but they went back to England for a few years. She had a few years being brought up in, not Lancashire, I’ve forgotten the name of the county now. However, it doesn’t matter. Then they decided to come out to South Africa and my
grandmother got to Cape Town and saw all these black people on the jetty and said she wasn’t getting off there and they went on to Australia and got off in Adelaide. That’s how they settled down there. My grandfather had two boys and three girls. The last girl was born in Adelaide, but the others had all been born in England except my mother
who was born in America, and they were always supportive of me. I was the senior grandchild, used to go and stay with them regularly if my mother was ill or indisposed for any reason at all. I’d finish up at my grandmother’s place down at Semaphore, which suited me because it was down near the sea and near the ships.
I could go off to Port Adelaide or Outer Harbour and I used to play among the sand hills when I’d go out with my grandfather. He was a line inspector for the power company in Adelaide, Adelaide Electrical Company, or whatever, and part of that used to take him over the sand hills from the
powerhouse through to the city grid, and that was great fun. I used to play foreign legions up and down the sand hills, around the old fort at Fort Largs. I was a real Beau Geste [story of the French Foreign Legion] type of fellow.
European war started, I resolved if it was still on when I was of age that I’d join the navy and just fortunate that the navy took people in younger than the army and the air force did. So they’d take you in at 17 and a half, and so the moment I was 17 and a half I signed up and,
as I say, I got called up in March. I got impatient I suppose that I couldn’t join up before 17 and a half. When the Japanese were looking as though they might be a bit difficult, I joined the army cadets. I didn’t even know that they were running cadets, but someone told me about this
place. They were engineers in Adelaide, they had a training depot somewhere out on the railway line to, I’ve forgotten the name of the suburb, Hilton I think, no, no. Anyway I went down there one day and they signed me up and I got an army uniform and boots and all that sort of stuff, but it was a pretty useless
organization, I can tell you. I used to turn up there for parades and the sergeant was a lazy bloke. I think he was dodging the war as a member of the CMF [Citizen Military Forces – the militia in those days] and they hadn’t been called into action in those days, but they were after the Japanese came in. Anyhow, I was glad to return all that kit when the navy decided to take an interest and
recruit me. But I was determined to go to the war, there was no doubt about that, however I went.
Always the hope for a serious relationship. We were very, when I say we I think we all were, very circumspect towards girls. I know my father always stressed on me, and I think other fathers did too on other kids, always treat girls as you’d expect your sister to be treated, and that seemed
to be the model, and there was no way you’d go and kiss your sister so it kept you out of mischief I think going out with other girls, but there was always the will I think to seek perhaps a kiss but to go further than that, not on your nelly [no way], no.
I can remember at the winter of ’39, I went to Mount Buffalo with a school end of term ski party. Well that was a great adventure, of course, an Adelaide kid going to Melbourne and then Melbourne by train up to Porepunkah and off to Mount Buffalo, and various schools had their parties
there, and I remember there was a girl from a local private school, which was only around the corner from where I lived in Glenunga, and I thought she was a good sort and we’d had a couple of very public, never private, no petting parties or any of that sort of thing, but maybe a dance or something or other or an adventure out on the snow during the normal
skiing lesson. Anyway, I tried writing to her when we got back to Adelaide. Of course, in those days censorship of letters apparently was pretty high in these girls’ schools. Anyway I got a letter returned by a form teacher or something or other. So I dropped any thought of that. I thought, “Good try but bad luck.”
still able to do these training jobs. They were good, a term that was used to describe those fellows was ‘good sea daddies’, and I can remember the first divisional officer I had, Lieutenant Collins. He was always known as ‘Pusser’ [supply officer, pronounced ‘pus-a’, from ‘Purser’] Collins because he was a straight-striper [permanent navy, identified by straight stripes on his uniform] whereas we were all reservists [wavy stripes] and we didn’t know at that stage
that in fact he’d left the naval college fairly early in the piece and invalided out, and he’d come back for the war and really he didn’t know much more about it than we did, except that he’d been trained properly at the naval college as a kid, but the Purser came from the fact that he had straight stripes and therefore was a real pukka [genuine] officer as opposed to a make-you-learn officer.
Remember him? I always remember his first lecture was trying to cut out the use of foul language and he used to use the analogy of, “Now, you wouldn’t write home to your mother saying F this, S that or anything of the sort”, and everyone would say, “No, no, I wouldn’t do that,” and go outside and swear like troopers probably. Swearing was pretty heavy
in those young days. I don’t know that I engaged in it a lot, but it’s astonishing how some people could not speak more than five words without including some sort of obscene word with it. You know the type yourself. They’re still doing it today.
ship, and she used to take ships teams and training classes to sea to practise that stuff, but the trouble is there were no targets in terms of real submarines. There were a few static targets that they tried to rig up, which were never highly successful, and it wasn’t until the K9 came into the picture that she had a
reasonable target. So this is how I came to go to the K9 really, while I was in Kybra, and the crew of the K9, the officer crew, had just come to Sydney and we decided to give them a welcoming cocktail party on board, and so they came on board and while they were on board, there was only three of them, the captain was a lieutenant
ex-merchant navy, the first lieutenant was a lieutenant ex-merchant navy and their third hand was a sub-lieutenant RN. He and I got to talking quite a lot, and he was talking about the submarine and how badly they needed a fourth officer and I’d by then had enough beer to say, “I
wouldn’t mind that job, see what it’s like.” The next morning I was peer-headed [head hunted]. He’d spoken to his captain and his captain said, “Good, we’ll grab him,” and there I was, gone. So I joined K9 as a midshipman.
about 30 percent of the AS staff in the Battle of the Atlantic were Australian trained. They had a huge reputation and all done without a live submarine target. So when the Dutch Navy came here after the fall of Java, what happened there, the submarine squadron that they had in Surabaya, half were
sent to Colombo to Trincomalee to join up with a British depot ship there and the remainder were told to, after completing their patrols trying to catch Japanese people, to beat it down to Fremantle. Well, K9 was one of the older submarines there. K9, K12 both came down to Fremantle.
I’ve forgotten whether K8 was, I think she was immobilised in Surabaya. When they got to Fremantle after much consideration, the K12 was kept with the American squadron
and K9 was sailed around to Sydney to fulfil this role of training vessel. The Dutch in the meantime of course were trying to build up their own submarine force into a modern submarine fleet and some of the British submarines that were building at the time were handed over to the Dutch and so they needed their own trained crews to man these new British
boats. So the K9 came here, was in Sydney at the time of the midget attack, and in fact K9 was lying alongside the [HMAS] Kuttabul when the Kuttabul went up. That same explosion that sank the Kuttabul also affected the K9. She got blown out of the water, her hatches got twisted and that sort of thing,
and she still had a Dutch crew. So she went into dry dock to be repaired. The crew were taken out and they went off to wherever to man other Dutch submarines and the Dutch Navy offered it to Australia provided the Australians
could arrange to man it because the Dutch crew wouldn’t be available. The Naval Board asked the Admiralty, and the Admiralty sent out these three officers plus I think about half a dozen, maybe more, sailors who qualified modern submariners and the numbers were to be made up by Australian submariners and by that I
mean old permanent navy people who’d served in either the Oxley and the Otway, and there were quite a number of those, or one block, the coxswain even served as far back as the J-boats immediately after World War I, and so they got this crew together and after the ship came out of dry dock there she
was available for training operations. That’s how we acquired it anyway.
part RN, part RAN crew and the four of us in the wardroom. We were all accommodated ashore at Potts Point in the Admiral’s Mess, which was the old Bushell house, which was known as ‘Kismet’. It wasn’t HMAS Kuttabul in those days, and the sailors, they lived, I’m not quite sure where they lived.
Those that lived on board and those that didn’t live on board, I think a lot of them were married in Sydney, the old RAN ones, and the RN ones, they found their accommodation where they could, I think. So there was very little shore accommodation in the navy in those days and people used to get paid allowances to go. Of course that was another great factor, which didn’t persuade me
to go, but I was delighted to get there and find out. My pay almost doubled. My pay as a midshipman, (UNCLEAR) ship, I think was something like 12 and six a day, and after submarine service I got three bob a day submarine pay and three bob a day hard living allowance,
so there’s another six bob straight away. Made me richer than dreams of avarice for a young midshipman, and of course when I was a sub-lieutenant it went up as well because I got promoted there after six months. Captain had me promoted to acting sub-lieutenant. It didn’t matter to me, the pay was the same and I could wear a stripe.
wasn’t going to sea unless he’d done this and we went to Rose Bay. We had the Kybra standing by in attendance. We were connected at the end of a long grass line. A grass rope is a rope that floats on the surface but as the submarine goes down, hauling grass of course, obviously, it goes down but the surface bit still floats.
So it’s like leaving a towel behind. Anyway, we couldn’t get the submarine to dive. We filled all the tanks that we could and even had all the crew mustered up forward [pronounced ‘forrard’] to try and put weight on the bows to push it down. She wouldn’t go down at all so we eventually had to give up and come back to port, and they found out that during the dockyard
refit at Cockatoo, the submarine was equipped with a thing called a drop keel, which was virtually lead inside another metal casing, and it was called a drop keel because it was attached to the bottom of the submarine with screws that in an emergency if you’d gone down and couldn’t come up, you’d drop the drop keel and hope to
be a bit lighter and get up that way. Well, they’d forgotten to put the drop keel back on and we couldn’t get down. So they put it back on and off we went to repeat the run in Rose Bay. This time we went down alright, but Rose Bay being fairly shallow, we only had to just prove a principle that she’d go down and tested all the water tightness except the conning
tower was still above water but the hull was underneath, and that was alright, watertight. So I thought all this was a big joke same as everyone else did, but then when we went to sea to do our first operation out there, we dived and the water poured through the conning tower hatch, came belting down inside. I thought this was a bit
strange. I didn’t like the look of this but we kept on going down and as soon as we got far enough below the surface the sea pressure jammed the conning tower hatch so it was watertight once again, but what had happened was that the hatch had been distorted during this torpedo attack from the Japanese midgets, and so once we got used to this business that the first part of the dive would get a bit wet, the first lieutenant used to carry an umbrella because he was
stationed at the bottom of the conning tower hatch watching the trimming instruments. I can remember a young Australian engineer sailor who was also new to submarines standing alongside me. He went a very peculiar shade of green when all this water came in, I can tell you. I won’t mention his name. I just have, but I won’t mention it again.
She sounds like she was a quirky boat.
Oh she was, she was old, 1921. When you’ve got to think that the first operational submarine in the navy went to sea in 1900, in the Royal Navy, 1900, now, we’re talking about the late ‘40s or mid ‘40s, sorry, mid ‘40s, we’re talking about a whole service that’s only 40 years
old and K9 was built in the first half of that 40 years. She was an old boat, no doubt about it, and the Dutch knew she’d reached the end of her life. We bent her a bit in the Japanese midget attack, which didn’t make her any more seaworthy, but I’ll just give you the history of the accidents that befell her while I was
on board. We had two high-pressure air explosions. The second one, the first one shocked me and the sub-lieutenant a bit, but we got used to that. What happened was the metal into these high-pressure air bottles, which are stationed all around the side of the submarine, and the part we were using,
they were all connected to pipelines. The pipelines were made of manganese bronze. Now, the manganese bronze wears apparently and crystallises and is not as strong as say the more modern boats with the steel piping, and what had happened is the air in the bottle had blown out and
fractured the manganese bronze thing which then whipped around the space like a big snake. So we were lucky we didn’t get decapitated. The sub-lieutenant and I were just sitting down enjoying a glass of beer or whatever we were doing alongside at Garden Island. So we fixed that one up and then still went to sea again and had another one of those HP [high pressure] explosions
a month or two later, but we could live with those because we could soon shut off the system with a bit of slick drill. But eventually, while the boat was just being manoeuvred out from Garden Island, it was changing births in fact, and just moving, it was backing out from the birth at Garden Island, the forward battery
exploded and that of course wrecked the inside of the boat. Fortunately everyone except the radio operator were up on the upper deck. There was not the full crew on board; it was only part of the crew. Everyone was up on the upper deck. The sub-lieutenant was driving the boat and I wasn’t on board. I was in my bunk ashore at Kuttabul, at Potts
Point, and after that she just became a write-off. After the Board of Inquiry into it, the admiral wrote to the navy that he was reluctant to send the sailors to sea in this thing under such a grave risk as they were constantly experiencing. So that was
the sort of start and finish of the thing. What had caused the battery explosion was that in a submarine you’ve got these huge batteries, they’re 2.2-volt batteries. Now you say that’s only little batteries, but these are huge great things about ten times the size of a car battery, and you’d have a battery bank of 110 of these cells,
which gave you your 240 volts or 220 volts, and then another battery in another compartment the same size. So they’d be connected in parallel whereas the cells were connected in series to build up the voltage. To charge them had a diesel generator pushing the charge into the battery when they
were flat, and each cell had an exhaust pipe to allow the hydrogen gas to come off. Well, the Dutch boats had the old original single-cell ventilation. Each battery had a pipe, which joined up with the others. Now, the other submarine services and the Dutch
realised that this was dangerous because it was a dead easy cause for a battery explosion. You’ve got all this hydrogen gas trapped around the top of a battery. Sparks are likely at any time in this operation. It’s all being fed away into a central exhaust pipe which you can imagine one spark and, “Bang!” and that’s what happened. The modern submarine, well, what was modern then, not now,
they had mass ventilation rather than single cell. They’d just make sure the flooring over the top of the batteries was gas type and then just suck the air off the whole lot and out, and that made it much safe. So that was the start and the finish of the K9.
were quite peculiar when I found later British standards. They had a toilet on the upper deck and in harbour they used to have a little canvas screen around it. Well, that was pretty primitive. The crew members had to go squat on this toilet down in the after end of the boat on the upper deck to
use in harbour. Below decks, the toilet was situated down aft between the propeller shafts. Well that was alright, that was similar to a more modern submarine for use when you dived. I can’t remember how they operated. I suspect they
had holding tanks. I can’t really remember that now. A more modern British boat you had compressed air injection system in the toilet. It was always a barrel of fun for people that couldn’t use it properly. You’d get a blow back, you’d know all about it. But I can’t really recall how the Dutch ones worked.
We had Dutch torpedoes on board, the tubes were loaded, and we had spare torpedoes that we used to maintain as though they were British boats. They were smaller diameter torpedoes than the ones I got used to having in other submarines. The captain was always very keen that we should
be in a position to attack anything that came our way. Thank God they didn’t, I suppose, and he even brought out from England with him some attack disks which would fit over the compass and they had the strange name of ‘Is-was’ [system for correctly aiming off a torpedo (literal meaning)]. This was
some numerical system on which you could base your attack, dimensions on what the direction and speed was, and what it is between observations and get a point on which to aim off your torpedoes. I never understood how the hell it worked and I still don’t know how that sort of system worked because I went to more modern
torpedo attack systems in my time.
We did have the great fortune of while I was in the K9 there was a fellow who was a British naval liaison officer with the American submarine force in Honolulu. He came out to Australia partly to see the K9, see if we were being treated properly,
and also he did some war bond rallies because he was a highly decorated hero, VC [Victoria Cross] and two DSOs [Distinguished Service Order] and God knows what. He got all this in a submarine called the Torbay [British T class] Anyway, Commander Anthony C. C. Miers, he came out to the K9 and I didn’t know it at the time but I soon learned that he
had quite a reputation with young officers. I don’t mean in a sexual sense either, but he was a big boy and he was a pugilist, he’d been Far East boxing champion and God knows what else, and the RN sub-lieutenant and I shared a room at ‘Kismet’ and after he’d been to a war
bond rally, this commander fellow with his VC and all that sort of stuff resplendent on his chest came thundering in our door to our room. I thought, “God, what the hell’s this fellow up to?” He said, “Come on, you young fellows.” We were sort of still shaking in
our tracks, virtually. He said, “If I was to break into any good officer’s cabin like this, they’d beat the hell out of me. Come on.” So we had a good three-way scuffle then, which he seemed to enjoy. I must’ve landed a few good punches because he then virtually disappeared into the wild blue yonder back to Honolulu I suppose.
But he never forgot me. I’d not taken too much notice of it, but he was the reason why I got to Fremantle flying out from England to join this depot ship, was his submarine squadron, was his by then, so that when I got to Fremantle, the three or four
other fellows that had flown out with me as submarine replacements, they were kept by the submarine depot ship that was in Fremantle, the Adamant, and captain of submarines there said, “And you, Cleary, you’ve got to go and join, Commander Miers demands your presence.” He says, “You’ve had long enough in Australia,” and the funny thing is when I eventually got to the Maidstone up in
Subic Bay, he’d been landed sick. He was flown out of there on an emergency medical evacuation. I don’t know where he went to so our paths didn’t cross at all, so that was that, but he was responsible for getting me there otherwise I could’ve been happy in Fremantle manning a submarine there.
they were a great bunch. The RN chief engineer, if you like, he was an engineering artificer was Taffy Williams, I remember his name. He was a good fellow. The torpedo gunner’s mate strangely enough, although he’d come straight from the UK with the RN crew, was an Australian,
Gus Fisher. He got a DCM [Distinguished Conduct Medal] in some British submarine. A couple of seamen, Baxter I remember. He was an RN sailor. I’ve forgotten what his mate’s name was. He was a real Cockney, Baxter, couldn’t swim and there he is serving his time in submarines and I thought that was a very peculiar thing.
The Australian sailors; Petty Officer Tindall was a stoker petty officer. I remember him well; he was a kindly sort of fellow. Ray Green was the fellow that went green when we dived when the water came in. He was a new boy. Fellow called Churchill was the
ASDIC operator or sonar operator. I still see him from time to time, Anzac Day and the like. Who else? They’re the ones I can remember mostly, but good crew all around I thought. The RN people and the Australian people mixed well.
The great thing about submarine crews is that every man tries to do the next man’s job. You can imagine the great specialisation with engineers, torpedomen, signalmen and what have you, but rather than just dwell on their own specialisation they all tried to meld in a cohesive whole as a submarine crew which I
always thought was admirable. Enjoyed that very much.
we were very popular with the dockyard people for some reason or other, probably because our wardroom was always open to them. There was a well-known old bosun, he was the ‘bosun of the yard’ was his title. He actually had a house on Garden Island. He was a plump man, had a bit of trouble fitting down the conning tower hatches, but when he got down there he was
always reluctant to leave, and he’d always come down at stand-easy time, which was around about 10.30 in the morning. We got used to old Bungy Williams coming down and we always had a jug of milk and a bottle of rum sitting on the wardroom table when he arrived. No questions asked or anything else, he’d help himself, but he had a reputation as a drinker,
and he was good fun. He never caused anyone - caused his wife trouble I think - but never caused us. I always remember one night when I must’ve been the duty boy down there, the dockyard police came down to see if I’d seen Bungy, the first lieutenant of the yard. No, I hadn’t seen him that night and so they searched the island for him. They eventually found him; he was fast asleep in his own cabbage
patch up outside, his garden outside the cottage on the island. He hadn’t quite made it home. Where he’d been, I don’t know, but that was the sort of bloke he was. So that gave a young man some excitement, I suppose. I remember I got sent for by the admiral for a ticking off and my captain wouldn’t let me go to see him. He said, “I’ll go.” The reason for this was that
the wardroom officers weren’t allowed to pay cash for their drinks or anything else. It had to be entered up in the wine book as we called it, and normally in a ship the captain inspects the wine book every month. The admiral for some reason chose to inspect our wine book every month taking the place of
the captain or the senior officer of the flotilla or whatever, and in those days a midshipman was allowed a wine bill. I think it was 15 shillings a month. He wasn’t allowed to drink spirits, he could only drink beer or wine. In those days wine
You can have just an ordinary conversation as we’re having now, but that’s about it. So there was that limitation. I think I explained also that not only was the toilet system pretty primitive, but to go to the toilet in the modern submarine with an air blow-out system, what basically happened
is you had two valves on the toilet itself. There was a valve at the bottom shall we say that went out to the sea and there was a valve at the top where you could blow the stuff out, and so it needed a lid so that it didn’t blow back. Of course, you couldn’t blow out from the…
with the top one shut and the bottom one shut. You had to open the bottom one before you could blow from the top. Play a joke on perhaps a visiting soldier or something or other, if he asked to go to the toilet you’d say, “Oh yes, make sure you work the valve.” You’d only tell him about the upper one you see. Of course it would all blow back, so not a very nice joke. But
that was all very well in principle, but of course you couldn’t use the toilet when you were out on patrol. You didn’t want to leave a trail of toilet paper and stuff on the surface when there’s no other indication a submarine’s in the area. So there were pretty controlled circumstances whenever you did any of those things. Recognition signals, which we had in the K9 as well, they’re things called smoke candles
and you could put those into an underwater signalling gun. It was virtually the same principle, you would undo a valve at the top, fire the candle, the candle would go up to the surface and then burst into smoke. You could have white smoke ones and red smoke ones. You’d have a green thing that fired a grenade and a few green stars would go up in the sky. That
was to represent you’d fire torpedoes in practice at a certain ship. So that was handy, and always of course there was the Davis escape apparatus, which was different to the surface ship. If for some reason or other you got stuck on the bottom, you had to come up by Davis escape equipment, there was always a buoy you could release which would show where
you are. That’s in the more modern type, but otherwise you just went into a watertight compartment. Again, it’s just the top hatch, bottom hatch principle. Open the top hatch with the bottom hatch shut and the compartment flooded, pressure equalised, out you go. To stop you going to the surface too quickly and therefore skewering your innards, you had a skirt that you could hold out
and the water resisting against that as you were rising, you got this skirt that just held you out at a nice slow pace. What more can I tell you?
You open the watertight bow door having first flooded up the torpedo tube. The rear door is shut and you get the compressed air and push the torpedo out. Sometimes the torpedo wouldn’t go out maybe. It didn’t happen to me. The other thing is to make sure the bow door was
shut because sometimes, you know, these systems can go awry. It could be open or part open when it should be shut. They had the little vent in the rear door, which was called the ‘Thetis tube’ after the submarine Thetis [British T class, sunk on maiden voyage, 1939] that went down for this reason. You had to push a reamer through that hole
to make sure it was clear. Then if the bow door was still open, water would stream through, so it shut off, and do whatever had to happen next. Maybe you’d never shut that door again until you got back to port, but if it came out clear you knew the tube was dry, you could open the rear door and load another torpedo in or haul back the one that was already there for maintenance.
So that was another little special submarine trick. Other than that, I never served in a submarine with a snort tube [snort induction mast], which was the British name for snorkel, but the engineering staff had to be pretty sharp because when you dived you went onto electrical power, or the moment of
diving you went onto electrical power. When you surfaced, you would want to go the other way and so there was a question of shutting off exhaust valves, opening exhaust valves, depending on which way you were going, and that could be dicey [chancy] if you weren’t smart about doing it, and it was really like throwing the clutch in a car in a way, coming off the main motors
going onto a diesel drive. You had to isolate one from the other.
You’ve gone through a few of the crew members on the K9, but could you tell us a little bit about the main different roles the crew had on board that ship? There were engineers…?
Well, basically the driving team would be seated in the conning tower. The forward hydroplane control, the after hydroplane control were side by side on the port-hand side of the control room and the helmsman would be facing forward just in front of them,
and they would be working the hydroplanes with a depth gauge before each of them, separate depth gauges, and the first lieutenant or the officer of the watch would be standing behind them directing them to keep the boat at whatever angle they’d ordered. If it was zero angle they’d call it ‘zero bubble’, and so an ordinary chronometer was graduated
in degrees around and so they kept the bubble where required. Behind the officer of the watch, he was adjacent to the periscope well. There were two periscope wells on the older boats. One was the search periscope and the other was the attack periscope. The difference being that the search periscope had more powerful lenses
and including sun visors and all that sort of stuff, because you’d be looking up in the sky for aeroplanes, and that was a fairly large head, and the attack periscope had a very small head so it didn’t make too much of a plume going through the water, but that of course limited the amount of magnification and so on you could get.
And so there were the two periscopes and behind the officer of the watch would be standing the engineering staff controlling the high-pressure and low-pressure air channels. The ballast tanks run from forward to aft through the boat. Usually the forward one and the after one are free flood and
each tank’s got the same principle, top valve and a bottom valve. Now the top valve’s called a ‘vent’ and the bottom valve is called a ‘kingston’. The two forward, the forward tank and the after tank had no kingstons. They were free flooding, as they say, but all the others had the two valves, and those valve controls were where the high-pressure
air panel was so that the engineer on watch was able to open the kingstons to flood the boat, open the vents as well, or to surface, leave the kingstons open, shut the vents and then put the compressed air into those tanks. Now it’s quite easy to see that
there can be some tricks in that trade. You must have the kingstons open most of the time, and that’s what usually happened. You’d get to sea and then you’d open the kingston and then you can dive as quickly as possible just by opening the vents and driving the boat forward on the motors or engines. Besides that major
up or down trim, they also had trimming tanks, and they were tanks that were connected not with kingstons and vents but by pipes for air, pipes which would vent back into the boat so there was breathing air, valuable breathing air, while the water flooded in. Now the idea, you’d have virtually a simple system, you’d have a trimming tank
forward, a trimming tank aft, and you could fill those to change the angle of the boat, one in the middle where you could do minor adjustments to depth. There was also a Q valve or Q tank, which is a quick flooding trim tank, and the idea was if you wanted to go deep in a hurry
you flooded the Q and that gave you the weight quickly to go down. Now, so the engineer did all of this work, played it like a harp, if you like.
The earlier bit about taking the submarine to sea, that happened because we had only one anchor chain and one anchor in the V class, and the anchor chain was secured to a buoy and we were quite content to let out a fair bit of anchor chain when this gale blew up, and it was really a mad, mad gale in Wales where we were.
This trawler, which was a navy trawler, which dragged its anchor chain and came across our bow and pinched our cable against the stem and cut it like a cheese knife, and there we are drifting with no means of tying up again, or I couldn’t get her tied up again with the few sailors I had aboard, to get the wire rope out, get to the buoy,
reeve it around, do all those things without any sort of boat assistance, and in any case with this gale blowing I wasn’t by any means sure that the wire would keep us there. So I tried manoeuvring up and down, back and forth. Eventually decided by next day I’d probably be too exhausted and making big errors of judgement,
I’d go to sea, so off to sea I went in St Brides Bay, and not far out to sea there was action going on. You could see star shells bursting and the escorts were cleaning up submarines and vice versa. Fortunately none of them knew that I was around. That’s always a submariner’s worry, that if people don’t know or expect you to be in a certain place,
they’ll attack a submarine no matter what. The weather was really too rough to allow any inshore patrols or air patrols around our way so we were lucky there, and then we rode out this storm all night and then first light we came back into harbour. There waiting in the boat was all the rest of the crew so they leapt aboard and took over from
where we left off. Manoeuvred the submarine, got her secured to the buoy, but the gale was blowing out by that stage and that was that.
taking this submarine to sea. That’s enough of that. Anyway, that’s what got me on the way to England and I was ordered to go in HMS Ranee, which I found was a Woolworth carrier [i.e., ferrying aircraft not operational], was engaged in freighting aircraft from the United States out to India for use in the Burma theatre, and
I joined her in Melbourne and set sail. Because she was, the job she was doing, she didn’t have her own active flying squadrons or anything like that. She was purely a plain carrier. She went to the United States and Canada by going deep around the bottom of New Zealand across the
South Pacific and then up the coast, dodging Honolulu and all that sort of stuff, and then going up the California coast until we got to the Juan de Fuca Strait, which separates the United States from Canada or Vancouver Island, and put into the port of Esquimalt there.
From there, the Ranee offloaded us before she sailed down to Seattle to pick up more aeroplanes, and we were booked to go on Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada to Halifax [Nova Scotia, east coast of Canada], and get a ship from Halifax. There were about half a dozen of us from Australia in this batch. We
got down to the ferry to take us from Vancouver Island to catch the train and there was a Canadian Naval Patrol [naval police] with orders to stop any naval people travelling on this ferry. We argued a bit with him, but no, there was no way they were going to let us board. So we went back to the hotel we were staying in. Next
morning, we demanded to see the commodore, Canadian Navy commodore in charge of Esquimalt, and went and complained bitterly about how we’d been prevented, you know, we upright Australian sailors prevented by Canadians from travelling in their train.
black lady to get aboard the bus ahead of me and some nice black gentleman said, “No, no, no, can’t do that. You’ve got to go in that door, we go in this door.” So I was glad to get out of Virginia and went by rail to New York. We were in New York for a couple of days and got a trip strangely enough in a ship called the Arawa, which
had previously been a Commonwealth Bay line ship, which had been sold. I think it was at Esperance Bay when it was one of our ships. Anyway, she was the Arawa. Then we sailed in convoy across to Liverpool, got out at Liverpool, went down to London where I eventually reported to Australia House and then to the admiralty manning people
who directed me to, and appointed me to do the next available submarine course, which didn’t start until I think it was August. By then it was July, and D Day was underway for a month. I went up to a place called Tobermory. I’d never been there before in my life, by train
through Glasgow all the way up to the outer islands, and Tobermory is on the Isle of Mull, Macquarie’s [Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales 1809-21] birthplace. I went to the ship Western Isles, and because I’d qualified as an anti-submarine control officer I was made part of the entourage that went around to these brand new ships with brand new crews to assess their training standards and what have you.
we carried no doctors you see - if sailors got a distended tummy [stomach], you’d plunge a thing like knitting needle into their gut and let the gas out. Oh, good primitive medicine it was. I did stitch up a sailor in the Varne. It was the second coxswain while he was spreading out these lithium hydroxide trays, probably why I remember him so well. The
periscope well was just behind where he’d put it down. The periscope well had about a four-inch lip around the edge to stop water or anything going down the periscope tube. Anyway, he took a step back from the tray, his leg went down the hole because the periscope was up. That rim caught him in the groin
between his testicles and his leg and left a nasty gash there and he was bleeding. So I was the ship’s doctor and so I had to try to stitch him up. With the coxswain’s help we managed this. The anaesthetic from the petty officer was a couple of tots of rum.
I think it was five stitches we put in there, fairly widely spaced, but his left testicle was showing so it was fairly urgent, and the follow up to that was after we got back to port and all went on leave, post patrol, he chose to get married and he sent a telegram during his honeymoon saying, “It works”, because he was being ribbed that it was probably guaranteed not to
work after I’d had a go at it. So that was one of the more enlightening experiences being a submariner. But going back to Blythe, they were the sorts of tricks that they used to try to teach us we never thought we’d have to use, like stitch a bloke up or do things like that, inject morphine, of course, which is dead easy.
navy never really had too much trouble dealing with any sort of psychopaths or any of that sort. We had a marvellous stretcher called the Neil Robertson stretcher, which was designed especially to transfer sailors from one ship to another, say a hospital ship, in storms at sea, and the Neil Robertson stretcher was virtually a ribbed caned device about the size of
your screen behind me, which wrapped around the body, arms inside or outside depending on the need, and around the legs. The little bit in the middle was left free, but the stiff back and sort of grommet at the head end. You’d put a hook in that and winch him over the
side and the receiving people could hold the thing, un-winch, unhook him and this was to get rid of injured people, but it was absolutely handy to get rid of unhinged people. Not that we ever had to use it in the submarine that I was in, but I have heard of the Neil Robertson stretcher being used for that. I put an airman into one after the war
when I was in Air View who got paralytically drunk and he was a bad drinker. All the rest of the crew could recover from a few boozes but he went berserk. So for the safety of the boat and himself, I did him up in a Neil Robertson stretcher for 48 hours or so, 24 hours. That was the nearest I’ve ever got to using a Neil Robertson stretcher.
But no, I didn’t have that experience in the submarine. The only disciplinary problem that I can remember was a sailor that played up a bit. We went to a port in the Shetland Islands en route to get to the Norwegian coast and we’d wait there until
we had safe passage or a safe route across the North Sea and we’d go at night time. So we were there for four or five days before going on patrol and this seaman, Leading Seaman Baker, if I remember, he was my gunnery yeoman of all people, a bloke, a gun layer who was supposed to be controlling and sighting the gun if we had to fire it. He played up in the
sailors’ canteen, which was full of resident Norwegian sailors. They had a patrol boat squadron or a torpedo boat squadron; they used to nip across the North Sea to Norway, do all sorts of magical things. This sailor when he got booze got on top of the table and did something and dropped his tweeds [trousers] and all that sort of thing and this disgusted the Norwegian sailors who demanded that something be done about him. Anyway, captain
sentenced him to 14 days detention for this misconduct so he had to get landed and go. That was the only time that I can ever remember of a bad disciplinary problem and I don’t think that disciplinary problem warranted the punishment it got except the Norwegians were upset. That took me off the main story.
probably it was about January 1945, yeah, more likely to be about January ‘45 than before. We’d been sent down there to do secret trials with the air force Sunderlands [flying boat], which were based at Milford Haven and had some boffins [scientists] on board who fixed us up with
this special gear. I never really knew how it worked. The boffins kept it all to themselves, we in the submarine were merely a taxi. But basically what they were doing is they’d always been impressed with the German ‘wolf pack’ tactics attacking the convoys in the Atlantic, and these boffins came up with an idea to use a similar sort of thing for British submarines, and the idea is that the Sunderlands
would detect whatever the target was to be for our submarine and our submarine could then home in on the aeroplane’s locating signal. We had some sort of transponder system that meant that we didn’t have to make a noise, that this transponder
box would somehow interpret the signals coming from the aeroplane, be translated somehow on board, and we never saw that side because it was the boffins’ work, and we’d get a course in speed out of this to go and close the distance, because obviously we couldn’t transmit anything because that would be giving away the show right from the start. So how the aeroplane
knew anyone was responding I don’t know, but we were doing these trials, of course, much too late in the war to ever have been used. Whether they had satisfactory trials I know not, but it took a month of our valuable sea life.
up to the Shetlands to a port called Lerwick, waited there for a few days until our submarine went on patrol, went down safe channels, so-called safe channels was a stretch of water demarcated by longitude and latitude at various turning points
of a certain width. Then the surface fleets were inclined to put on another few miles either side of that width to make sure that the submarine was safer, and the air force was supposed to add a bit more, but the air force navigators were pretty terrible at times. Many’s the time they attacked some of our submarines going on patrol that way, through the so-called safety zone.
Anyway we went through our zone down to the Norwegian port of Stavanger, which was about the southern most port on the North Sea side of the Norwegian peninsula, and there we patrolled up and down, observed the lighthouse going on and off every now and then.
The lighthouses weren’t burning all the time. They’d just switch them on when they were expecting some ships to use them, but they never produced anything for us. We were always delighted to see the lighthouse on because it got so close at times you could even seen the German sentries outside the lighthouse. We had a couple of
alarms. I sighted one night a flash of light way down in the, still daylight, down to the south of us. Nothing was in sight there; nothing could be heard down there. I’d obviously caught an odd variation of the lights or something or other. Anyway, eventually much later after dark,
this Swedish ship all illuminated, lights galore, was repatriating prisoners of war back to Europe, so it was under hospital ship guise. So what I had seen had been this ship and I must’ve just been lucky and got this glimpse at the time I just happened to be looking south. They probably switched on their lighting
for testing much earlier in the day, ‘cause we used to test navigation lights at about 4 o’clock or something in the afternoon in case they had to be fixed. And then the Prince Eugene was reported to have come out of its base in the Kiel Canal and was heading up, and we thought it was coming up the Norwegian coast so we were looking forward to that arriving. She went
into Oslo Fiord instead, so we didn’t get that one either, but they were about the only things, and then of course the war was over, VE [Victory in Europe] Day as soon as we got back. Then there were submarines popping up all around the place surrendering.
After all, it was in mid-winter when we were going down. We rolled the submarine while I was on watch on one occasion, struck by a beam sea [side on] and pushed over to around about 50 degrees, I’d reckon. I thought we were never coming up because we were literally hanging on to stay onto the conning tower, but she uprighted herself. Never went over that far again,
but unbeknown to us the submarine was never expected to go quite that far. (UNCLEAR) I think it was a wave that helped push us back up again, but we spilled a lot of the battery acid which went into the bottom of the tanks, and the tanks were all lined with stuff called rosbonite, which was a sort of bitumastic type thing [protective coating from water penetration, made from coal tars],
fairly thick, but there were little porous holes in this bitumastic covering and the acid got down and started to eat out the bottom of the tank, which is not very nice for a submarine to suddenly get acid holes in. After we’d done the Fishguard assignment and we came back we began to realise that, because we know how much we lost because the crew goes around topping up with distilled water,
not acid, and so when we got back we were directed to go back into dry dock in a little town called Ardrossan, which is also on the Clyde side, but on the south side in Ayrshire, where they opened us up, took the batteries out of the tanks and resealed all the tanks after neutralising them with soda
and that sort of stuff. Then when they put the batteries back together, then we went on patrol.
the grease would be protecting the metal, you could come straight up and bang, shoot the gun straight off and that was always fun because the gun’s crew, when surfacing for gun action, the order would go out, “Stand by, diving stations, stand by for gun action”. The gun’s crew would all muster around a special exit
hatch, two of them actually, just forward of the conning tower and just behind the gun, and then the captain ordered surface. The gunnery officer was the first up, not the captain. He was usually the first up the conning tower, but on this occasion the gunnery officer would be first up closely followed by the captain.
The boat’s still rising at this stage and is likely to be a foot or two above the conning tower when the hatch opens, so you’d get hit in the face with a great sheaf of water and get in there. In the meantime, the crew are pouring through the gun hatches. You’ve gone up there before them because their hatches are lower. They’re pouring through their own, manning their gun. You’ve stabilised yourself up in the conning tower, sighted the target
and start shouting down to the gun’s crew the range, angle, sight and all this sort of stuff, and then when the engaged signal is given, open fire, “bang, bang, bang”, usually at short range, the shorter the better from submarine gunnery, because it wasn’t the most precise gunnery in the world.
and then with the four hours off, I’d be looking for my pit [bunk, bed]. Maybe a little refreshment if there was a snack available or it was lunchtime or whatever, but the main activity off watch other than to go and check your own department, make sure that the torpedoes were in fact
ready for firing, that sort of stuff, deciphering signals was the main thing. I didn’t explain to you that what happened is that whereas most naval radio stations are broadcasting just ordinary high frequency sound to various ships around the world, submarine radio stations are low frequency so
that they do penetrate the water but they don’t penetrate very far. So we used to have schedules on which to listen out for signals. Let’s say it was on the hour every hour. It didn’t necessarily have to be that. It could be 20 past the hour, but whatever the schedule was, you’d have to come to periscope depth,
put up a radio aerial. Later on, they had a buoy system. They could have a trailing aerial and a buoy up on the surface and then you’d haul the buoy back again. But put up the aerial and train the submarine roughly in the direction of the radio station. The radio station in England
was at Rugby, so you know, a little place like England, you’d know where Rugby roughly was. I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen one of these low frequency radio stations. They’ve got these huge great masts, they occupy acres and acres of land, and I don’t know how they’re connected up there. I think they’ve got wire aerials between them and
they make a noise. Anyway, so you listen in on the submarine traffic. You take down the opening address of all the messages to make sure you haven’t missed one, and there’s a numbered sequence for your particular submarine, and when your own call sign happens to pop up, you copy that signal out in full
and then it’s got to be deciphered. Well, that was a duty when coming off watch, deciphering, and the codes change every day, so you had to be up to changing the code to decipher these things.
I must’ve been, I never had any reports to say contrary. Never had any reports that say good either. I don’t know why I missed out. I must apply for some of those reports sometime. But the fact that the captain was prepared to have me as his first lieutenant says something. I don’t know what quite, but there was I as first lieutenant while we were up in Tobermory. We had a
system, which I didn’t explain to you earlier, of the officers used to get a driving licence. All officers in the navy get watch-keeping certificates to say they’re capable in all respects of keeping a watch at sea, but in submarines particularly the junior officers were given driving licences because submarines alongside depot ships are moving constantly. They’ve got to move away from the depot ship to let another one get
closer to the ship to get some repairs done or stores or whatever, and quite often when there are movements going on, the officer of the day had got to take the submarine quite some distance away from the depot ship whilst things go on, and then he gets called up alongside maybe an hour later. And to get a driving licence, you’ve got to have an independent
submarine commanding officer standing on the bridge all the time while you’re making these decisions about which way you’ll go and all the rest of it, and I had some very notable commanding officers riding with me, and I remember one day I had two of them. I think they’d made a mistake, both had been asked to go to the same submarine. Anyway, they both appeared
on board and I can remember them both looking at each other and one of them saying, “I think he deserves it, don’t you?” And the other one said, “Yeah.” So I got my so-called driving licence and that enabled me to drive a submarine around the harbour without supervision and that’s why I felt competent going to sea at Fishguard.
and I was left again virtually in command of the submarine in harbour. So I used to do these harbour manoeuvres, try my hand out at that in fairly isolated anchorage. I had to really apply the tricks of the trade in manoeuvring the submarine
in heavy weather and so on to get alongside the ship without bruising it or yourself. So I learned a bit doing that. Then I got these orders to go to Australia when I turned 21. I remember it was my birthday and I had a shore in Tobermory, had a pretty wild night there in the company
of some Wrens [WRNS: Women’s Royal Naval Service], Wrens officers and so on, one of whom was engaged to a New Zealand fellow that I knew. Anyway, then I set off down to London, by rail all the way, Australia House, and then off to this air force station - I’ve forgotten where it was, but it was somewhere in the home
counties - got put aboard a York aircraft, which is a converted Lancaster [Avro Lancaster bomber], flew from there to Malta where we landed. They had a bubonic plague on there at the time so the health authorities insisted on putting anti-flea bugs into our socks and all the rest of it up to your knees. Apparently that was the only
precaution against the plague. We didn’t stay overnight there but flew off to Cairo and then spent the night near the pyramids somewhere or other, under canvas. Next morning, flew from there to Shu’aiba [near Basra, southern Iraq] in what is now Iraq and Shu’aiba being down the river from Baghdad somewhere. I didn’t see any civilisation while I was
there. From there to Calcutta, no, from there to Karachi, overnight in Karachi, again under canvas. Next day Karachi to Colombo, and there was a wait of a couple of days in Colombo. It was in the same York the whole way. The York only had passenger benches, the same ones you see in these films with
parachutists, and all sitting along the side, and in the middle between the two sides of the aeroplane were piles and piles of postal bags. This was mail and stuff for the troops in Burma and if you wanted to have a quiet sleep you’d sleep on top of the mail bags with cake tins poking into your ribs and God knows what else. Anyway, we had a couple of days in Colombo where we were put up at
a rather famous hotel whose name I forget, was a beachside hotel.
RN submarine based here by then, just a few training submarines based and working with Rushcutter, I believe. I didn’t have time to go and see any of them, but anyway I finished up in Manila and had a night living in an accommodation ship. I didn’t like the Americans at all (UNCLEAR). In Samal, going back one flight, there was a huge mess of
US Navy airmen and stuff and a huge officers’ mess and I was dressed in whites then, as the RN did, white shorts and shirt and stuff, and I went to the bar to get a drink and the next thing I know I got a bloody great big kick up the backside. So I whirled around and there’s a US Navy commander had done this. He was boozed [drunk] of course.
He was, I suspect, an Irish American because he was in the Seabees [CBs: Construction Battalion], you know, they were building the air station and I think he was there for that reason. Anyway, sitting right in the corner there were four US Air Force people and the pilot, who was a major I think, came over and rescued me. He could see that
something was likely to happen and escorted me over to their table and I spent the rest of the time with them, went out to their aircraft. They’d landed on this place as a badly shot up aeroplane. The navy had just pushed them right up into the scrub and got on with the navy’s business and let these poor blokes rot. Anyway, I went to their aeroplane with them and had a few sherbets [drinks] there and
then next morning I shipped out of there in another aeroplane, but that gets me back to Manila where I spent the night in the cavity thing, in an accommodation hulk. Again, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the Americans who put me into just an ordinary open mess deck full of American sailors, most of them Negro, no rank at all, which I didn’t think was very kind treatment to an allied officer.
Anyway, I got a boat from there to Subic Bay, joined the Maidstone, only there for a couple of days and we were up anchor and off to Hong Kong. Get to Hong Kong, can’t enter harbour because there was a submarine and its flotilla and it’s escorting minesweepers, but no real protection in a submarine depot ship, they’ve only got a few guns and so on. We had to wait anchored off Hong Kong
for the arrival of a fleet, which came up from Manus because the rest of the British Pacific Fleet were going to Tokyo, and so we went in with the main fleet of cruisers and aircraft carriers and God knows what. While in Hong Kong, I must’ve been there for the best part of a week, I did a thorough look around the dockyard
while I was there, which was very illuminating, the way the Japanese had been running the place. I got to the front gate and there was a great crowd of Chinese outside who I took to be the workers that used to work at the dockyard under the bridge, they’d all come to sign on again. Amongst these, there was a little white boy
aged about 10 or 12, so I had the marines on the gate open up and got the boy inside and decided he needed a meal, took him back to the depot ship, sat him down in the officers’ mess and fed him and then didn’t find out much about him, nor was I asking too much about him
except where he lived and why he was by himself. He was living in a nunnery with his sister, who I don’t think was a nun, but this led me to think that he was probably Jewish, probably from Shanghai originally, and I don’t know where his parents were and he didn’t know. Anyway, I escorted him back to the nunnery and rang the bell and the nun came to the door
and yes, she recognised the boy straightaway and took him in. I discharged my duty, I never saw or heard of him again. I don’t know what happened to him. I should’ve said that the first day we got to Hong Kong, Commander Submarines who’d taken Commander Miers’ place had the duty to go down to the Stanley Prison,
which was a British, not a British, a Japanese internment camp and that’s where all the British civilians and so on from Hong Kong, including the deputy-governor’s or lieutenant-governor’s family and he had been, and I was to be his driver, this commander, to go down and
liberate the Stanley Prison mob. I said, “Yes,” I could drive, but I’d never driven in my life in fact. So after making a few aborted attempts to drive this jeep, he took over the driving and I sat as the passenger and we went down to the Stanley Camp and the Japanese were still sentries down there, but the
lieutenant-governor had already moved up to the main part of Hong Kong and was in command of the situation of taking over from the Japanese. There was a big Japanese headquarters on Hong Kong including a huge monument on the top of the peak at Hong Kong, which the prisoners of war had to build. It got knocked down soon afterwards
and the peak reverted to its normal style, but in Stanley Camp I met the lieutenant-governor’s wife and two daughters. The two daughters, aged I’d say 17 and 15, very straightforward girls. I was asking them about
the life they had to lead. They told related stories like how they’d stopped menstruating. You know, telling some strange fellow, this struck me as very odd from a couple of proper English girls. Anyway, they told me this was one of the side effects of malnutrition and what have you. So we were pleased to find they were in reasonable health and
that civil aid would come to them sooner rather than later. There was nothing we could do and so we went back to the ship. Then I was given a navy motor pinnace to go and do a cruise around the northeastern part of Hong Kong
Harbour up towards the Pearl River to find out if there were any activities up there that we should know about. I went aboard a couple of Japanese motorised junks and hauled their flags down. There was not a soul on board any of them. Both junks were crammed full of medical stores all neatly shelved down in the hold.
They were obviously Red Cross stores and I don’t think they were meant for the use of the prisoners of war or anything. I think the Japanese were using this as a mobile pharmacy, if you like. It’s quite astonishing to see the stuff they did have there. Went into a Japanese camp way around the coast there. There was only one officer and about a dozen soldiers
there. They enjoyed it because we landed from the water side. These soldiers pouring out of their barracks getting formed up into a line and presenting a guard of honour, virtually.
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