The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  The speed with which the ship sank left no time for an organized abandoning or for an emergency SOS call to be transmitted. None of the seven lifeboats on board were launched, and the two that eventually did float clear of the ship were damaged and unusable. Centaur was also equipped with four large drum rafts designed to free themselves automatically, but of these only one released properly and was seen to have as many as thirty men clinging to it. Everyone else was left scrambling for whatever pieces of wreckage they could find to support their weight. In these crucial first minutes survival came down to the seriousness of a person’s injuries, whether they could swim or not, or whether they had enough time to grab a life jacket before reaching the deck. In the end, the fact that only 64 out of the 332 on board survived showed how much luck also played a part in the difference between life and death.

  When daybreak came, it provided the survivors with the first opportunity to take stock of their situation, which in any analysis was grave. In addition to the men on the large drum raft, about half a dozen more were balancing on the roof of the navigation bridge — otherwise known as the monkey island — which had been blown off the ship by the explosion. The rest of the survivors were mainly in groups of two or three, hanging on to oil drums, a broken lifeboat, hatch covers and small rafts. There were undoubtedly some individuals floating by themselves, helped by a life jacket or other wreckage, but they were difficult to spot amongst the waves and would soon be drifting away from the main group. The second mate, Gordon Rippon, realizing that he was the senior surviving deck officer, began working to pull the survivors together into a larger group. Eventually, by paddling towards each other or through the efforts of a volunteer swimming out with a rope, they were able to get more than fifty people together into a single makeshift raft lashed together by whatever ropes or cables they could find. They would drift this way, on ‘survival island’, as Rippon called it, for the next thirty-five hours before being spotted and rescued.

  Other than the fortunate few who had been on duty or awake at the time of the attack, and were thus fully clothed, everyone else was wearing only their bedclothes, or in some cases nothing at all. About half had life jackets or lifebelts, although these would begin losing buoyancy after twenty-four hours. Injuries varied from severe burns and broken bones to lacerations and bruises. Jack Walder’s burns covered so much of his body he eventually died and was given a Christian burial at sea by the group. Another man paddled away by himself, saying he wanted to get some fresh water, and was never seen again. They had all swallowed their fair share of diesel oil, which covered everything and worked its way into people’s eyes, noses and stinging open wounds. Those were the physical ailments, but each of them also had to deal with the mental shock and trauma of witnessing the horrific deaths of so many friends and colleagues.

  When Sister Ellen Savage jumped from Centaur’s deck, she had two fellow nurses alongside to bolster her courage. She was sucked down deep into the ship’s vortex, got tangled in ropes and for a moment thought she might never rise. When she did, the other two nurses were gone and she herself had been badly injured by debris swirling around as Centaur sank, sustaining fractured ribs, a broken nose, a fractured palate and burst eardrums due to the pressure. It might have been worse, however, as she couldn’t swim and was probably saved by the lifebelt she grabbed just before jumping. Of the twelve Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) nurses on board, Sister Savage was the only one to survive. She realized this after she was transferred to the survival island raft and was shocked to see no other women.

  Undeterred, and hiding the true extent of her injuries, Sister Savage did what she could to comfort the injured and tend to their wounds. Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Outridge, the commanding officer of the 2/12 Field Ambulance Corps, was the only other medical personnel to have survived, though he had sustained severe burns. Despite their own injuries, the pair did their best to treat the injured with the limited supplies from a medical kit that had floated past Outridge as he was leaving the ship.

  When it came to lifting the survivors’ spirits, it was Savage, through her sheer presence and positivity, that the men remembered and responded to. If morale dipped, like when a plane flew past without spotting them, she would rally them with a singsong. When prayer was called for during Walder’s burial, she led the group with her rosary beads clutched tightly in her hands. When hunger or thirst beckoned, she took on the crucial responsibility of rationing and doled out the small amount of food and water they had found in the lifeboat. Their journey on survival island was beyond miserable: constantly wet, often cold, and harassed by sharks looking for a meal. Throughout the ordeal, however, Sister Savage suffered alongside the men without complaint.

  When rescue did come, on the afternoon of their second day at sea, Savage even made sure that everyone else was tended to before she was. Her remarkable character and the selfless way she helped her fellow survivors was plain to see. Quite rightly, the press and the government decided that she was a heroine, and one of the few positive stories resulting from this awful tragedy. The photos of her being interviewed in a hospital bed sporting a blackened eye spoke volumes about the callousness of the illegal Japanese attack on a hospital ship carrying nurses. Similarly, her image – or at least an image of a nurse symbolizing her plight as a shipwrecked survivor – was the basis for a famous and dramatic war poster that called for Australians to work, save and fight in order to ‘Avenge the Nurses!’ Savage was later awarded the George Medal for ‘conspicuous service and high courage’: only the second Australian woman to receive such a high honour.

  After failing to attract the attention of a number of planes and ships that passed by without seeing the emergency flares they shot into the sky, the survivors finally got lucky when a plane and a warship spotted them at virtually the same time just before 14.00 on 15 May. When the plane, an Australian Avro Anson, dropped down to sixty feet for a closer look, the pilot and his navigator were stunned to see, within an oil slick and scattering of debris two miles wide, a cluster of rafts with people waving at them. By Morse lamp the plane transmitted, ‘Will send help.’ Sister Savage, who had kept her emotions in check throughout, finally broke down and sobbed.

  The US destroyer Mugford was on routine duty escorting a merchant ship into open waters forty miles east of Cape Moreton when their zigzagging track happened to intersect the path of the drifting survivors. An alert lookout, who would have been scanning the waters for enemy submarines, sighted rafts on the horizon at 13.47, causing Mugford to break off from the escort to investigate. After receiving a signal from the Avro Anson, Mugford closed on the first group and had them safely on board by 14.10. Over the next seventy-three minutes the destroyer stopped six more times to rescue survivors, including one solitary man, Owen Christensen, who had spent the entire time adrift on a hatch-board by himself. The ship’s log recorded: ‘Total number of survivors on board 64.’ Another vitally important piece of information recorded in the log was the position where the Centaur had sunk: ‘070° true from Pt. Lookout 24 miles.’

  When the newspapers were cleared by military censors to report the sinking, they pulled no punches in describing the act as a despicable and cowardly war crime. A sampling of the headlines included: ‘WANTON AND DELIBERATE ACT’ (Argus, Melbourne); ‘TREACHEROUS NOCTURNAL ACT’ (Cairns Post); ‘LIMITLESS SAVAGERY’ (Liverpool Echo). There was very little doubt that the attack had been made by a Japanese submarine. Twice during their time in the water survivors reported seeing and hearing a submarine on the surface, which in one instance came so close that men could be seen in the conning tower. But which submarine was it, who was the commander and why did he attack a clearly marked hospital ship in violation of the Geneva Convention?

  Without specifically stating that the attack had been made by a Japanese submarine, Prime Minister John Curtin made it clear in his statement to Parliament that he directly blamed Japan:

  The attack on the Centaur bore all the marks of wantonness and del
iberations. The deed will shock the conscience of the whole civilized world. It will demonstrate to all who have any lingering doubts the unscrupulous and barbarous methods by which the Japanese conduct warfare. To the next-of-kin of those who are lost, the government and nation extend heartfelt sympathy, which is the deeper since those persons were non-combatants engaged on an errand of mercy, and were by all the laws of warfare immune from attack.

  Chris and John’s book on the Centaur was a wonderful introduction to the ship I would spend the next year determined to find. More importantly, it gave me a huge head start in identifying the archives and historical documents I needed to consult. A controversial incident like the sinking of Centaur was bound to leave a large documentary record, and one look at the extensive list of references in their 1993 book showed this to be the case. I still had to visit each of the archives they mentioned, but their book read like a virtual roadmap of the research I planned to conduct.

  Two notes in the book especially caught my eye, and they were the main reason I made seeing Chris Milligan a priority as soon as the project began. The notes referred to information Chris had received from Centaur’s second mate, Gordon Rippon. Rippon had had the midnight to 4 a.m. watch, which meant he probably took the last navigation fix before the ship was attacked at 4.10. As the senior officer amongst the survivors, it was probably also Rippon who provided the first recorded sinking position – ‘070° true from Pt. Lookout 24 miles’ – to the captain of the Mugford. Whoever had taken this position – and everything pointed to Rippon — I would be relying almost entirely on their skills as a navigator in deciding where I should conduct the search.

  In some ways the challenge in finding the Centaur was going to be similar to the problem I had faced with Kormoran. Because the Japanese submarine commander never owned up to the attack, I had a navigation position from only one of the vessels involved. And the only other clue I had to work with was the time and position where Mugford rescued the survivors. It meant having to conduct another reverse-drift analysis using the meteorological and oceanographic methods we’d perfected with Kormoran to see whether the drift of the survivors’ rafts agreed with Rippon’s position. There was also the strange case of the ‘official position’ to resolve. This position (27° 17’ south, 154° 05’ east) appeared in official documents such as the movement card for the vessel, and in authoritative World War II reference books, but it wasn’t clear what its origin was, or who was the source.

  Chris was all ready for me when I pitched up to his office at McGill University on a cold but sunny day in mid-May. He had retrieved four boxes of research material from storage and was reacquainting himself with documents he hadn’t looked at for over sixteen years. With the boxes at our feet we sat on a small sofa in his cramped office and for three days went through each of them page by page. It was an absolute treasure trove of unique information. Because Chris had started his research in the late 1970s, when a good number of the Centaur survivors were still alive, he had been able to record their personal recollections when writing his original version of the ship’s history (he published a monograph in 1981, before teaming up with Foley to write their 1993 book). To my great good fortune, his most extensive correspondence was with Gordon Rippon.

  The first thing Chris was able to confirm beyond any doubt was that Rippon was indeed on watch just before his ship was attacked, and it was he who worked out Centaur’s last position and provided it to the Mugford. His testimony was recorded in several documents, including a remarkable questionnaire that Chris was able to get nine of the survivors to complete. With respect to his responsibility on the ship, Rippon replied that it was ‘safety of the vessel both from a navigational viewpoint and the avoidance of other vessels’. In response to a question about what he did during his time on board the Mugford after being rescued, he wrote: ‘The captain asked me to go on the bridge to advise him about the position of the ship when torpedoed. I remained there until the search was abandoned.’ And if I needed any further proof that Rippon was the source of the last known position of Centaur, he provided it in a 1980 letter to Chris:

  Now as regards your 2nd letter on the Centaur’s movements. The position of the sinking is firmly based on the 3.30 a. m. position when Point Lookout light was abeam bearing 270° – 23 miles. This means she was steaming due north. Steaming at 12 knots she would be 9 miles further north by 4.15 a.m. when she was struck. By the way a knot is one nautical mile per hour.

  Short of the original plot that Rippon kept on the bridge of Centaur, I couldn’t have hoped for better information.

  In a long letter he wrote to his father about the incident, Rippon made clear his sorrow ‘to lose the poor old Centaur as I was very happy and would have liked to have had her for a year as mate’. He remembered it ‘as one of the happiest times in a life-time at sea’. He was also very distressed by the deaths of the ship and hospital personnel who had become his friends during the short period Centaur served as a hospital ship. What especially hurt him was the loss of eleven of the twelve nurses: he called them ‘marvellous lassies’. Rippon’s physical injuries were minor and his stay in hospital was short, but in an indication of the effect the incident had on him, he admitted to his father that he later suffered what he described as a ‘delayed shock reaction’.

  Gordon Rippon made the grade to mate all right. In fact he went on to become one of the youngest captains in the merchant navy and stayed with the Blue Funnel Line right through to retirement. There could be no greater testament to his skill as a navigator than the fact that he was chosen by this first-rate company to be the senior instructor for their in-house navigation school. He died in 1996 so I never had a chance to meet him. I would have liked to have talked to him about navigating at sea, even though our careers were spent at opposite ends of the change from celestial to electronic and satellite-based navigation. At least I had Chris’s papers to get a sense of the man and the skill with which he performed his duties.

  The papers also helped me understand Rippon’s answer in a contemporary interview he gave, a copy of which I found in the UK archives. He explained that when his watch ended, he gave a chit with his 4 a.m. position to the wireless operator on duty. This was normal practice during the war to make sure that the operator always had the most current position to transmit in case of an emergency. In this interview Rippon also testified that the final position he reported was based on a 4-point bearing of Pt. Lookout’. A four-point bearing is a special type of running fix that requires the navigator to take two bearings off a fixed point, in this case Point Lookout lighthouse, first at 45° and then at 90° when abeam of the light. With Centaur travelling at a constant speed (twelve knots) and course (north), its range from the lighthouse would be the same as the distance the ship would have run since the first bearing was taken. This was a relatively simple and accurate method of using the lighthouses along the eastern coast of Australia to help navigate a course, but it depended on the ship always being within the range at which Rippon and the other watchstanders could see the lighthouse lights.

  One of the discrepancies about Centaur’s route up the coast was why she didn’t follow the Green Route prescribed by the Naval Control Service. The Green Route was defined by a specific set of waypoints that would have put the ship about 110 nautical miles off the coast as opposed to roughly 25, and was supposedly a safer option for merchant ships as submarines generally patrolled nearer the coast for potential victims. Centaur’s, captain, George Murray, decided to ignore this advice because it would have taken him too far offshore, and as a hospital ship he believed he was immune from attack in any case. This decision cost him his life, and in death he did come in for some criticism for choosing his own route. But was it fair for his reputation to be tarnished because of the illegal action taken by another commander?

  However history was to judge Captain Murray’s command of the Centaur, the insights I gained from Gordon Rippon about the ship’s reliance on the coastal lighthouses for navigation
narrowed my focus for future research. I would need to investigate these lighthouses, especially Point Lookout on the tip of North Stradbroke Island and Cape Moreton on Moreton Island, in great detail. What I didn’t realize at the time was what a huge can of worms this research would open up, and how it would raise fundamental doubts about what Rippon actually saw the night his ship was sunk.

  I arrived in Brisbane at the start of July full of confidence in how the research was unfolding and in Gordon Rippon as a reliable source for the key position around which the search would be based. For a shipwreck hunter who relies on good-quality navigation information to do his job, Rippon was a dream source in terms of both his credibility and the evident care he took in preserving Centaur’s last-known position. When you consider his ordeal of being shipwrecked and then adrift on a raft for thirty-five hours, the fact that he was able to provide Mugford’s captain with such precise information immediately upon boarding the vessel and then remain on the bridge for a further four hours to assist with the search for survivors shows what a strong and professional man he was.

  In addition to a progress meeting with Anthony Crack and the JSC, it was also planned that I would give a presentation at a public forum that was being held mainly for relatives and Centaur Association members. I would be speaking about the initial research I had conducted over the past few months in archives in the UK and Australia, and I also had the initial results of the reverse-drift analysis to share. All the information I’d been able to find in the archives seemed to back up Rippon’s position, and I planned to discuss this in detail during my presentation. However, the source of the official position still remained unknown. One theory was that it came from the Japanese submarine, possibly by way of an intercepted communication, although I could find no information to verify this one way or the other. I was hoping that the additional research I planned to do in the National Archives of Australia in Brisbane and Canberra during this visit would shed more light on the mystery.