Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  How naval ships operate also contributes to the relative paucity of naval history and its understanding. Simply put, not many people know what goes on in the different parts of ships and how each contributes to the effectiveness of the vessel over-all; and very few of those who do have recorded their experiences. While it is self-evident that naval, army and air force units are quite different, these differences have a real impact on the ease of transmission of history. Aircraft and air bases are quite similar to their commercial counterparts and are relatively accessible; army units, battlefields and bases are to varying degrees readily accessible and can be observed by both contemporary and later visitors. In combination with the twentieth-century Australian Navy’s relatively parsimonious approach to the award of medals, the simple difficulty for a naval officer to observe bravery by a sailor in a different part of a ship goes a long way to explaining the relative lack of official acknowledgement and publicity regarding meritorious service by many naval personnel. Indeed, the Commanding Officer of HMAS Murchison during the Korean War (a subject to which this chapter will return) observed in later years that he wished he had pushed harder for greater recognition of bravery for his crew.6 It is not unreasonable that the broader public does not seek to know more about actions that the Navy itself has hardly acknowledged.

  How navies view the relationship between a ship and the vessel’s commanding officer is another factor that reinforces the relative invisibility of the remainder of the crew. While the ‘great men’ of the Navy are undoubtedly worth studying, it is not possible to fully appreciate their accomplishments, decisions and failings, without also understanding the roles of those who served under them. The World War II losses of the cruisers Sydney and Perth, and the Voyager–Melbourne collisions are all examples where the responsibility for the loss of the ship, which resides with the commanding officer, can be confused with explaining and understanding how and why these ships were lost. In all three cases, to understand the reason for the loss it is necessary (although not always sufficient) to understand the operation of the ships’ bridge watchkeeping teams. The actions of the German ship Kormoran probably deceived not only Captain J. Burnett, but some or all of the other officers and sailors on Sydney’s bridge before that engagement began. While the decision-making process in this case will never be known with certainty, it is possible to construct hypotheses about how it occurred by understanding how the ship operated.7 But this is seldom done. How many know, for instance, who else was on the bridge with Burnett?

  The fact that ships are discrete units also tends to act against a well-rounded understanding of events when they are lost, as the unit records are often destroyed or lost with the sinking of the vessel. As a result, significant parts of an account of a vessel’s final hours, days and weeks are based on incomplete, circumstantial and inferred evidence. In the absence of specific information it is easy for others to assume the worst, whether justified or not.

  Importantly, while understanding of Australian naval history is patchy, it is not always for a lack of source material. A quick examination of the number of records available to anyone who is interested shows that Navy source material is voluminous and increasingly easily available, even online. The number of records available is in roughly equal proportion to the relative size of each of the armed services. In the National Archives of Australia in January 2011, there were about 19 151 records brought up by a search for ‘navy’; 19 692 for ‘air force’ and almost 400 000 for ‘army’, the last figure reflecting the number and method of storage of individual service records. A similar broad catalogue search at the Australian War Memorial returned 12 987 ‘navy’ records, 41 908 ‘army’ records and 22 558 ‘air force’ records: numbers that are broadly consistent with the sizes of each service referred to earlier. Similar proportional search results are returned from sources such as Wikipedia (5587 from ‘Australian naval history’, 8281 ‘Australian air force history’, and 11 330 ‘Australian army history’).8

  The situation is not all bad news. Since the late 1980s, Australian naval history has received greater sustained attention than at any other stage in its existence. Starting with the work of some eminent naval historians, the Navy has put an increasing effort into the research and publication of its history. In large part this has been achieved through the work of authors such as Tom Frame, James Goldrick, David Stevens, Ian Pfennigwerth and others who have been associated with the Navy’s historical studies. The appointment of Dr John Reeve as the Osborne Fellow in Naval History at the University of New South Wales campus at the Australian Defence Force Academy, supported by the Navy, has reinforced this work. This is an appropriate level of support by the Navy, because no other organisation has the level of motivation or the depth of institutional knowledge to be able to promote this field of study. Yet the Navy also needs to assimilate the idea that to fight and win at sea requires an intimate understanding of all the facets that create naval capability. Not everything of importance occurs on the water, and those things that do occur at sea need careful patient explanation to the public. These are considerations that the Navy has over its long history generally failed to grasp and they contribute directly to the current state of naval history.

  Despite this greater recent attention by the Navy and an undoubted increase in the number and quality of publications on Australian naval history, there remains an undercurrent of disquiet amongst naval historians. Often this is expressed as a wish for greater attention to navy history, yet quantity is not really the issue. Our concern arises because those events that are traditionally taken as defining moments in naval affairs often attract a generally negative tone: they become stories of loss without understanding why. The contrast with army history is stark. At Gallipoli, the Australian army took part in a long, drawn out defeat; but it is remembered positively as the exemplification of so many positive attributes of Australia and Australians. When the World War II losses of Sydney, Perth or Canberra are remembered, the tone is much different.

  So what is to be done? More resources for the study of naval history alone are not enough, although they would not hurt. Nor will greater attention from the broader public be garnered simply by decrying its lack. The single most important factor is for naval historians to describe the history of the Royal Australian Navy in a way that acknowledges the gap between subject and audience – and to appreciate that the subject must first be brought to the audience, not vice versa.

  Having described some of the problems and difficulties of naval history, the remainder of this chapter will show how those problems might be remedied.9 This will be done through a re-examination of the truly remarkable operations of HMAS Murchison on the Han River during the Korean War, including an account of what action within the ship was required to undertake these operations. HMAS Murchison was a ‘Modified Bay’ class frigate, built in Australia at the Evans, Deakin and Company dockyard in Brisbane. A product of the demand for more capable antisubmarine convoy escorts, Murchison was built during World War II but not completed until late 1945, after the war ended. Murchison was in the waters off Tasmania, conducting routine peacetime training, when on 10 March 1950 she was directed to return to Sydney to prepare for a deployment to Korea.10 Although destroyers were preferred for Korean operations, the Navy’s new ‘Battle’ class destroyers were not fully operational and frigates were all that were available to replace the destroyers already deployed. Murchison was chosen because she had the best radar equipment of the available frigates.

  In the aftermath of the World War II, the Navy had insufficient personnel to provide a full crew for all ships and the requirement to provide two vessels for service in Korea was a strain. Just to get Murchison to a point where she could deploy was an exceptional effort. At the time the decision was made, Murchison had a crew of between 60 and 80, instead of the full compliment of 180 needed for operations. The training of radar operators that the ship had been engaged in practised a much narrower range of skills than that required of a ship in
a combat zone. The ship also needed a period of maintenance to remedy defects that could be tolerated in peacetime running but not in a war zone.

  Murchison was brought up to near her full complement by the blunt but effective method of requiring other ships in the fleet to provide a specified number of sailors. Rather than sending their best sailors, the providing ships took the chance to rid themselves of men with poor disciplinary records. While not the most promising start, Murchison’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander W.O.C. Roberts observed:

  this unlikely group developed into the liveliest and most efficient ship’s company … in their former ships they were the above average intelligence type of sailor who found themselves bored rigid with peacetime routine. In an operational situation they found a meaning in the drills and discipline and responded accordingly.11

  The process of forming an ‘unlikely group’ into a lively and ‘most efficient ship’s company’ is something that is passed over quickly in all existing accounts of Murchison in Korea. As the distinguished historian Paul Kennedy has argued in the wider context of World War II, the historical accounts ‘may be lacking a fuller appreciation of that trickier level of “History in the Middle”’.12 So too in naval history, the process of making a ship’s company work well deserves greater attention, for it is this aspect that enables the technological capabilities of the ship (the characteristics on which most naval historians tend to concentrate) to be utilised to their full potential. In Murchison’s case, there were several remarkable aspects. The ship’s mess decks – the crew’s living quarters – had to be largely refitted, as they had been reconfigured, probably without authorisation, to be more comfortable for the ship’s smaller peacetime complement. With the influx of about 120 people, former storage and sleeping spaces had to be reinstated.

  Then the new arrivals needed to be fitted into the ship’s organisation. Every warship has at least three basic modes of operation – cruising watches, defence watches and action stations – and a variety of special purpose modes, such as emergency stations, leaving ships stations, underway replenishment and entering or leaving harbour stations. For each of these modes of operation, each person onboard has a specific task and location, and sometimes a different one for each. These different stations are usually recorded on the ship’s watch and station bill, forming a living document that must be updated with the coming and going of each sailor, whether the movement is permanent or temporary. The sailors have to know not only where to go for each mode of operation, but what they have to do when they get there, day and night, good weather and foul. Speed of action, reliability and the capacity to cope with the stress of injuries to others or damage to ship systems are also required. This kind of highpitched capability is achieved through constant drills, pushed to an even higher tempo in a ‘work-up’ process for deployment. Murchison must have achieved most of this during the passage north to Korea, which included a port visit and associated training in Hong Kong.

  The work-up period which Murchison completed en route to Korea applied not only for the experienced crew, but also for the ten junior sailors who joined the ship direct from the Flinders Naval Depot. These sailors would have experienced the steepest learning curve of any in the ship. One of them, Stephen Joyce, who served as part of the gun crew for Murchison’s forward twin four-inch ‘A’ gun, thought that: ‘having the senior crew, and also having new crew on board we were lucky that we had changeover RN [Royal Navy] sailors that had served during the war in the RN and then signed on in the RAN, we had excellent teachers’.13

  The efficacy of the work-up process can be judged in hindsight from the success Murchison achieved during her Korean deployment, which was acknowledged both by the allied naval commanders and by the Australian Navy, with the award of the Gloucester Cup – an award made annually to the ship judged to have been the best and most efficient in the preceding year – on her return to Australia. The success reflects very well on two aspects of the Navy. The first is Murchison’s officers and senior sailors who scheduled and conducted the multitude of training drills that brought the ship up to such a high standard in a relatively short period. The second is the Navy’s institutional culture which would have guided the officers and senior sailors and which, despite the massive reduction in numbers of people and ships, seems to have retained the lessons from World War II.

  Notwithstanding the apparent success of this training, the start of the deployment was not all straightforward. Murchison had a major engineering failure during her first patrol in Korean waters when both fuel pumps failed, dramatically reducing speed to about 4 knots – little more than a crawl. The ships engineers were unable to fashion replacement parts onboard and no replacement could be found in Korea or Japan. As a result, Murchison spent over a week waiting for spares to be flown from Australia. The inability to source them locally is interesting, because there were several current and former US Navy ‘Tacoma’ class frigates operating in the Korean theatre (operated by the United States, Colombian and Korean navies) that were built to a very similar design to the Australian ‘Modified River’ class. It is possible that the actual fuel pumps fitted differed greatly between the Australian and US built ships. If this was the case, the difference must have been considerable, as Murchison’s engineers could probably have adapted equipment, particularly with assistance from a dockyard or support ship. An alternative explanation is that the Australian and US naval supply systems were not very well integrated, and the Australian ships were either unaware of, or unable to source, the required spare parts from the US Navy logistics organisation.

  Once Murchison actually commenced operational patrols, she spent all of her time deployed to the western coast of Korea, generally a shallow and challenging navigational environment for a warship. The area of operations for which Murchison is best known, and should be much better known, is the Han River estuary. Several frigates spent long periods operating in the Han River estuary to enable them to bombard North Korean positions in the vicinity of the armistice negotiations at Kaesong, the idea being that this would put pressure on the North Korean negotiators. To achieve this, the frigates had to operate in a poorly charted area, with massive 10-metre tidal ranges and associated currents, shifting channels, sandbars and mudflats. All of this was very close to a hostile shore from where North Korean ground forces could fire on the frigates from concealed positions. The combination of marine navigational and war-fighting challenges at the same time, in littoral waters where a ship’s sensors had to cope with two vastly different environments, is one of the most difficult for any ship. It was no different for Murchison.

  The lack of complete charts meant that the first task for Murchison and the other frigates operating with her was to survey the area. In part this was accomplished by small boats taking depth soundings throughout the estuary, gradually expanding the area in which the frigates could operate. At other times, it required the use of a leadsman; a sailor who stood in the bows of the ship and measured the depth of the water with a lead line. The leadsman was unprotected from enemy fire and the weather, and also had no individual means to fight back if required. So the task required great courage, physical endurance and concentration. This is one key instance of the individual roles that must be performed well to enable a ship to operate well. It is also an example of those aspects of Australia’s naval history that have not been well recorded or frequently described in the existing historical record.

  The challenge of navigating a ship in waters like the Han River estuary is difficult to underestimate. One analogy is that it is a bit like rally car driving for ships. The margin for error is very small, so a ship’s most experienced sailors would normally be operating all the critical functions, from the engine room throttles and communication telegraphs to the ship’s wheel and bridge watch-keeping team. This mode of operation is known as ‘Special Sea Dutymen’ and is intended to ensure a ship can respond to any navigational or other contingency. Murchison’s Commanding Officer, Commander
Allen Dollard, recalled that one of these key sailors was the Coxswain, Warwick Rowel, who was:

  absolutely immaculate. When you are travelling in these channels … you are steering to half a degree, and he would steer exact, he was never flustered. But apart from that, his general conduct – he was one of the oldest hands on the ship – his influence on the ship’s company was terrific. He had young helmsmen in the wheelhouse with him, in action, and he was very calm and doing exactly right. I relied one hundred per cent on him. If he made a mistake, we were up on the mud.14

  At some points in the estuary, the navigable waters were so tight Murchison had to perform the equivalent of a handbrake turn to reverse course: the ship drops its anchor and uses it to keep the bow in place while it changed direction, before raising the anchor and proceeding again. To do such an action well required close co-ordination. High levels of endurance were required of Murchison’s crew, as many hours were spent in these confined waters performing such movements, during day and night patrols. The tasks each person performed all required high levels of concentration and some would have been physically demanding.

  Close inshore operations like those conducted by Murchison had a high degree of risk and were a subject of continual discussion between US and Royal Navy commanders, who disagreed on whether the risks were worth the possible influence on the North Korean negotiators. Certainly the possibility of a vessel grounding was ever-present. On top of the navigation risks, Murchison and the other frigates in the area faced the continual threat of enemy fire which could have disabled them, leading to even greater chance of grounding and possible destruction by enemy ground forces.

  The weather also had a massive impact on a ship like Murchison in Korea. Many of the crew’s tasks performed on the upper decks – the ship had an open bridge and all its guns were open mountings – and the temperatures were so cold that exposed skin could stick to metal and the grease for gun mountings could freeze. The Australian Navy did not have enough suitable cold-weather clothing, so sailors often relied on civilian clothing to keep themselves warm. Murchison had also been built for operations in warmer waters, so the ship did not have the heating systems built into the original British design. Even inside the ship, temperatures were so low that condensation froze on the bulkheads and the crew used layers of brown paper to help stay warm. Stephen Joyce recalled: