World War II: The Autobiography (40 page)

F.D.R.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched a southern offensive attacking Hong Kong, three American-held islands in the Pacific (Midway, Guam, Wake), Thailand, the American air force bases in the Philippines and the British colony of Malaya.

THE LOSS OF THE
REPULSE
AND
PRINCE OF WALES,
OFF THE COAST OF MALAYA, 10 DECEMBER 1941

O.D. Gallagher, war correspondent

To protect its Far East naval base of Singapore, at the tip of the Malayan Peninsula the British dispatched a surface fleet to intercept approaching Japanese invasion forces. In the event, the British were spotted first and were attacked by swarms of Japanese fighter-bombers. The British fleet had no air protection. The brand new battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Repulse
were sunk in two hours. “In all the war,” wrote Churchill, “I never received a more direct shock.”

The sky was luminous as pearl. We saw from the flag deck a string of black objects on the port bow. They turned out to be a line of landing barges, “like railway trucks”, as a young signaller said. At 6.30 a.m. the loud-speaker voice announced: “Just received message saying enemy is making landing north of Singapore. We’re going in.”

We all rushed off to breakfast, which consisted of coffee, cold ham, bread, and marmalade. Back at action stations all the ship’s company kept a look-out. We cruised in line-ahead formation,
Prince of Wales
leading, the
Repulse
second, and with our destroyer screen out.

Down the Malayan coast, examining with the help of terrier-like destroyers all coves for enemy landing parties.

At 7.55 a.m.
Prince of Wales
catapulted one of her planes on reconnaissance, with instructions not to return to the ship, but to land ashore after making a report to us on what she found.

We watched her become midget-size and drop out of sight behind two hummock-back islands, behind which was a beach invisible to us. We all thought that was where the enemy lay. But it reappeared and went on, still searching.

Meanwhile all the ship’s company on deck had put on anti-flash helmets, elbow-length asbestos gloves, goggles and tin hats.

Prince of Wales
looked magnificent. White-tipped waves rippled over her plunging bows. The waves shrouded them with watery lace, then they rose high again and once again dipped. She rose and fell so methodically that the effect of staring at her was hypnotic. The fresh breeze blew her White Ensign out stiff as a board.

I felt a surge of excited anticipation rise within me at the prospect of her and the rest of the force sailing into enemy landing parties and their escorting warships.

A young Royal Marines lieutenant who was my escort when first I went aboard the
Repulse
told me: “We’ve not had any action but we’re a perfect team – the whole twelve hundred and sixty of us. We’ve been working together so long. We claim to have the Navy’s best gunners.”

My anticipatory reverie was broken by the voice from the loudspeakers again: “Hello, there. Well, we’ve sighted nothing yet, but we’ll go down the coast having a look for them.”

More exclamations of disappointment. The yeoman of signals said: “Don’t say this one’s off, too.”

As we sped down Malaya’s changing coastline the wag of the flag-deck said travel-talkwise: “On the starboard beam, dear listeners, you see the beauty spots of Malaya, land of the orangoutang.”

Again the loud-speaker announces: “Nothing sighted.”

The
Repulse
sends off one of her aircraft. The pilot is not the ginger-bearded New Zealander, as he tossed a coin with another pilot and lost the toss, which means that he stays behind.

We drift to the wardroom again until 10.20 a.m. We are spotted again by a twin-engined snooper of the same type as attacked Singapore the first night of this new war.

We can do nothing about it, as she keeps well beyond range while her crew presumably studies our outlines and compares them with silhouettes in the Jap equivalent of
Jane’s Fighting Ships.

At 11 a.m. a twin-masted single funnel ship is sighted on the starboard bow. The force goes to investigate her. She carries no flag.

I was looking at her through my telescope when the shock of an explosion made me jump so that I nearly poked my right eye out. It was 11.15 a.m. The explosion came from the
Prince of Wales
’s portside secondary armament. She was firing at a single aircraft.

We open fire. There are about six aircraft.

A three-quarter-inch screw falls on my tin hat from the bridge deck above from the shock of explosion of the guns. “The old tub’s falling to bits,” observes the yeoman of signals.

That was the beginning of a superb air attack by the Japanese, whose air force was an unknown quantity.

Officers in the
Prince of Wales
whom I met in their wardroom when she arrived here last week said they expected some unorthodox flying from the Japs. “The great danger will be the possibility of these chaps flying their whole aircraft into a ship and committing hara-kiri.”

It was nothing like that. It was most orthodox. They even came at us in formation, flying low and close.

Aboard the
Repulse
, I found observers as qualified as anyone to estimate Jap flying abilities. They know from first-hand experience what the RAF and the Luftwaffe are like. Their verdict was: “The Germans have never done anything like this in the North Sea, Atlantic or anywhere else we have been.”

They concentrated on the two capital ships, taking the
Prince of Wales
first and the
Repulse
second. The destroyer screen they left completely alone except for damaged planes forced to fly low over them when they dropped bombs defensively.

At 11.18 the
Prince of Wales
opened a shattering barrage with all her multiple pom-poms, or Chicago Pianos as they call them. Red and blue flames poured from the eight-gun muzzles of each battery. I saw glowing tracer shells describe shallow curves as they went soaring skyward surrounding the enemy planes. Our Chicago Pianos opened fire; also our triple-gun four-inch high-angle turrets. The uproar was so tremendous I seemed to feel it.

From the starboard side of the flag-deck I could see two torpedo planes. No, they were bombers. Flying straight at us.

All our guns pour high-explosives at them, including shells so delicately fused that they explode if they merely graze cloth fabric.

But they swing away, carrying out a high-powered evasive action without dropping anything at all. I realize now what the purpose of the action was. It was a diversion to occupy all our guns and observers on the air defence platform at the summit of the main-mast.

There is a heavy explosion and the
Repulse
rocks. Great patches of paint fall from the funnel on to the flag-deck. We all gaze above our heads to see planes which during the action against the low fliers were unnoticed.

They are high-level bombers. Seventeen thousand feet. The first bomb, the one that rocked us a moment ago, scored a direct hit on the catapult deck through the one hangar on the port side.

I am standing behind a multiple Vickers gun, one which fires 2,000 half-inch bullets per minute. It is at the after end of the flag-deck.

I see a cloud of smoke rising from the place where the final bomb hit. Another comes down bang again from 17,000 feet. It explodes in the sea, making a creamy blue and green patch ten feet across. The
Repulse
rocks again. It was three fathoms from the port side. It was a miss, so no one bothers.

Cooling fluid is spouting from one of the barrels of a Chicago Piano. I can see black paint on the funnel-shaped covers at the muzzles of the eight barrels actually rising in blisters big as fists.

The boys manning them – there are ten to each – are sweating, saturating their asbestos anti-flash helmets. The whole gun swings this way and that as spotters pick planes to be fired at.

Two planes can be seen coming at us. A spotter sees another at a different angle, but much closer.

He leans forward, his face tight with excitement, urgently pounding the back of the gun swiveller in front of him. He hits that back with his right hand and points with the left a stabbing forefinger at a single sneaker plane. Still blazing two-pounders the whole gun platform turns in a hail of death at the single plane. It is some 1,000 yards away.

I saw tracers rip into its fuselage dead in the centre. Its fabric opened up like a rapidly spreading sore with red edges. Fire . . .

It swept to the tail, and in a moment stabilizer and rudder became a framework skeleton. Her nose dipped down and she went waterward.

We cheered like madmen. I felt my larynx tearing in the effort to make myself heard above the hellish uproar of guns.

A plane smacked the sea on its belly and was immediately transformed into a gigantic shapeless mass of fire which shot over the waves fast as a snake’s tongue. The
Repulse
had got the first raider.

For the first time since the action began we can hear a sound from the loud-speakers, which are on every deck at every action station. It is the sound of a bugle.

Its first notes are somewhat tortured. The young bugler’s lips and throat are obviously dry with excitement. It is that most sinister alarm of all for seamen: “Fire!”

Smoke from our catapult deck is thick now. Men in overalls, their faces hidden by a coat of soot, man-handle hoses along decks. Water fountains delicately from a rough patch made in one section by binding it with a white shirt.

It sprays on the Vickers gunners, who, in a momentary lull, lift faces, open mouths and put out tongues to catch the cooling jets. They quickly avert faces to spit – the water is salt and it is warm. It is sea water.

The Chicago Piano opens up again with a suddenness that I am unable to refrain from flinching at, though once they get going with their erratic shell-pumping it is most reassuring.

All aboard have said the safest place in any battleship or cruiser or destroyer is behind a Chicago Piano. I believe them.

Empty brass cordite cases are tumbling out of the gun’s scuttle-like exit so fast and so excitedly it reminds me of the forbidden fruit machine in Gibraltar on which I once played. It went amok on one occasion and ejected £8 in shillings in a frantic rush.

The cases bounce off the steel C deck, roll and dance down the sloping base into a channel for easy picking up later.

At 11.25 we see an enormous splash on the very edge of the horizon. The splash vanishes and a whitish cloud takes its place.

A damaged enemy plane jettisoning its bombs or another enemy destroyed? A rapid Gallup poll on the flag deck says: “Another duck down.” Duck is a word they have rapidly taken from the Aussie Navy. It means enemy plane.

Hopping about the flag-deck from port to starboard, whichever side is being attacked, is the plump figure of the naval photographer named Tubby Abrahams.

He was a Fleet Street agency pictureman now in the Navy. But all his pictures are lost. He had to throw them into the sea with his camera. He was saved. So was United States broadcaster Cecil Brown, of Columbia System.

Fire parties are still fighting the hangar outbreak, oblivious of any air attack used so far. Bomb splinters have torn three holes in the starboard side of the funnel on our flag-deck.

Gazing impotently with no more than fountain pen and notebook in my hands while gunners, signallers, surgeons and range-finders worked, I found emotional release in shouting rather stupidly, I suppose, at the Japanese.

I discovered depths of obscenity previously unknown, even to me.

One young signaller keeps passing me pieces of information in between running up flats. He has just said: “A couple of blokes are caught in the lift from galley to servery. They’re trying to get them out.”

The yeoman of signals interjected: “How the bloody hell they got there, God knows.”

There is a short lull. The boys dig inside their overalls and pull out cigarettes. Then the loud-speaker voice: “Enemy aircraft ahead.” Lighted ends are nipped off cigarettes. The ship’s company goes into action again. “Twelve of them.” The flag-deck boys whistle. Someone counts them aloud: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine – yes, nine.” The flag-deck wag, as he levels a signalling lamp at the
Prince of Wales
: “Any advance on nine? Anybody? No? Well, here they come.”

It is 12.10 p.m. They are all concentrating on the
Prince of Wales.
They are after the big ships all right. A mass of water and smoke rises in a tree-like column from the
Prince of Wales
’s stern. They’ve got her with a torpedo.

A ragged-edged mass of flame from her Chicago Piano does not stop them, nor the heavy instant flashes from her high-angle secondary armament.

She is listing to port – a bad list. We are about six cables from her.

A snottie, or midshipman, runs past, calls as he goes: “
Prince of Wales
’s steering gear gone.” It doesn’t seem possible that those slight-looking planes could do that to her.

The planes leave us, having apparently dropped all their bombs and torpedoes. I don’t believe it is over, though. “Look, look!” shouts someone, “there’s a line in the water right under our bows, growing longer on the starboard side. A torpedo that missed us. Wonder where it’ll stop.”

The
Prince of Wales
signals us again asking if we’ve been torpedoed. Our Captain Tennant replies: “Not yet. We’ve dodged nineteen.”

Six stokers arrive on the flag-deck. They are black with smoke and oil and are in need of first aid. They are ushered down to the armoured citadel at the base of the mainmast.

The
Prince of Wales
’s list is increasing. There is a great rattle of empty two-pounder cordite cases as Chicago Piano boys gather up the empties and stow them away and clear for further action.