How we won the war

Having gone to sea as a Deck Cadet on TSS "Marella" on 10th January 19411 settled into the shipboard routine and made probably 5 regular voyages to Singapore, commencing at Melbourne and proceeding via Sydney, Brisbane, Townsville, Thursday Island, Sourabaya, Semarang and Batavia, all the last three in Java and finally Singapore.

During this period the war was raging in North Africa and over Britain but out here things were still pretty quiet. There had been some incidents, the sinking of the "Niagra" off the coast of the North Island of New Zealand near the Bay of Islands, by a mine laid by a German raider, which had also sunk some ships off the island of Nauru which had been waiting to load phosphate.

All this changed on 7 December 2023 when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbour. We had departed Melbourne on 28 November 2023 on a regular voyage carrying the usual cargo of flour and other foods plus frozen meat and other frozen goods plus some army equipment and armaments. We also had the usual complement of civilian passengers and a small contingent of service personnel. We arrived Darwin on 14 December, where we were halted in our tracks. All civilian personnel were off loaded, what happened to them I don't know. We discharged cargo and equipment consigned to Darwin and then had to take bunkers, which we would not normally have done.

Bunkering a coal burning ship was an unpleasant dirty job, the whole ship becomes coated in coal dust inside and out. In Darwin the bunkering was done by wharfies, the coal was contained in a hulk an old sailing ship hull. The mate came down to our quarters and said the wharfie gang was two men short," would any of you boys like a job, you'll be paid at the wharfies rate". I and one of the others volunteered. We went down into the hulk and were allocated a place, they didn't split us up but made us a team of two. The coal was loaded by filling big wicker baskets from the stockpile and when filled lifting them to the deck of the ship and tipping the coal through bunkering holes in the deck to the ships bunkers. I think there were 16 of us in the gang, two to a basket. We couldn't work out why, as soon our basket was full the hook was waiting to lift it up to the ship, whereas the wharfies seemed to have time for a rest or a smoke between baskets. We had been standing the basket up and lifting the coal in our shovels into the basket. I said to the other cadet "we're doing something wrong here'.f We managed to have enough time to see how the wharfies did it, we realized how dumb we were. They were lying the basket down against the coal face, nearly filling it then standing it up then topping it up with a few shovel fulls. So much for intelligent! future ships officers. We did get paid eventually, 5 pounds, two and a half months pay for an eight hour shift. I must say however we were pretty sore and sorry for a couple of days.

After bunkering we were sent to anchor in the harbour. We had xmas at anchor, then on 26th embarked 630 men of the 2/4 Machine Gun Battalion from W.A. We departed Darwin on New Years eve for Port Moresby. There we tied up alongside the "Aquitania" which was anchored in the harbour and transferred the troops to her. The "Aquitania" departed before us headed south for Singapore via Fremantle, we followed her, but were much slower. We arrived in Fremantle some time after the "Aquitania" had departed. From the time we left Port Moresby I have no idea of the correct dates that events occurred.

After a day or two in Fremantle we picked up over a hundred troops who had been left behind by "Aquitania", either deserters or maybe they got on the grog and unintentionally missed the ship. We departed the harbour and formed a 12 ship convoy in Gage Roads.

I don't think anyone on "Marella" had ever been in convoy before. We were the leading ship of the right hand column. We were escorted by ships of the Australian navy, I know one of them was the 8 inch gun cruiser "Australia", I can't remember who the other escorts were but they were quite formidable. As a 10 knot convoy we set off for Singapore.

"Marella" was not really suited to this sort of exercise. We had no telephone communication with the engine room, there was a voice pipe but this had long ago become blocked, so the only way of passing orders to the duty engineer was by way of a chit conveyed by one the cadets. This became necessary when our speed failed to match that of the convoy. Our chief engineer was a scotsman who hated wasting steam so if our speed had increased because of rising steam pressure he would only reduce speed by letting the steam pressure decrease by limiting the amount of coal fed to the fires. These tactics resulted in, as the steam pressure increased our speed increasing proportionately so that after a while we would be well ahead of the front line of the convoy and getting mixed up with the cruiser which was zig zagging in front of the convoy. Down would go the chit to reduce speed, accordingly the engineer would gradually reduce steam pressure and our speed would fall off and we would slowly drop back through the column creating very real collision situations much to the consternation of the other ships and eventually tangling with the cruiser covering the convoy's rear. Another order to increase speed and up we'd go again through the convoy to resume our rightful position, for a short time. After this occurred a couple of times we received a terse message from the convoy's Commodore "maintain station or proceed alone". At this stage the captain imposed his authority, and I believe he told the chief engineer to use the throttle to control the ships speed, if some steam was blown off so be it.

From then on we proceeded without incident until we received orders for the convoy to proceed to Batavia [now Jakarta], presumably Singapore had fallen or was about to fa11.We were approaching Sunda Strait, which separates Sumatra from Java when we saw what appeared to be a squadron of war ships approaching at high speed. It was quite a sight but we didn't know whether they were ours or the enemy, presumably our escort did. They turned out to be three British destroyers, "Electra", "Javelin" and "Jupiter" they escorted us into Tandjong Priok where we anchored. The troops were disembarked and we waited.

And we waited and we waited. Each day a Dutch official would come out in the port's examination vessel and yell through a megaphone “vot ship? vere you from? vot you want?". We could answer the first two questions but not the third apart from saying sotto voce "to get the hell out of here". Every day we waited, formations of Japanese medium bombers flew high over the port. They didn't bomb, obviously they wanted to keep the facilities intact so they would be able to use them, undamaged, in the near future.

After about ten days we went alongside and embarked refugees, some civilians, some military personnel [N.Z. air force construction engineers who had been building landing

strips in Malaya and were now of no further use], they were lucky, also some merchant seaman who had lost their ships , due to enemy action, and I think, some deserters.

The night before we sailed we went ashore for a walk. There was very little evidence of troops and almost no security. We met a Dutch resident and discussed the situation with him, he said" they will never take this place we will be too strong", who was he kidding? I would imagine he was either dead or in a prisoner of war camp within a matter of days, or at least weeks.

We sailed in convoy the next day escorted by a very strong force of British and Australian warships. We negotiated Sunda Straits in broad daylight at six Knots. The Japs had an airfield only 30 miles north in Sumatra but didn't attack. After we cleared the Straits the convoy, apart from us, proceeded to Colombo, we were on our own and set off at full speed for Fremantle, the Chief engineer didn't have to worry about the throttle just as long as we didn't run out of coal. I believe we were the second last convoy to escape before the Java sea battle in which the allies lost almost their entire fleet stationed in the area , including some of those who had escorted us, the RAN "Perth" and the USS"Houston" plus all the Dutch Naval vessels in the area.

We arrived in Fremantle sometime later and then Melbourne about 20 March 2024 from whence we had departed nearly four months earlier. We still had most of our original cargo, our crew was intact, all we had done was ferry a few troops around and evacuate a few people.

On arrival in Melbourne we met our first American serviceman, he was on the wharf when we berthed at Victoria Dock. Somebody sang out to him "what do you think of Australia", he said "its fine but twenty five years behind the times".

On the 25 March 2024 1 signed off "Marella" in Sydney-3.