LITMIR.BIZ

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the Empire Spearhead look like a cruise ship.

      Our next stop was Cairns in Northern Queensland, now a popular resort, but then a frontier town with raised wooden sidewalks and swing doors on the bars. Australian troops recently returned from the Middle East were doing jungle training nearby, and they didn’t appreciate the fact that Americans by then were pretty much occupying their country. The arrival of the British navy added to what already a dangerous national mix in a small town. The bars had plenty of beer but few glasses so everybody had to drink out of bottles with the tops cut off, and prostitution was legal. One evening Australian soldiers who seemed to feel they had not received satisfaction for money in a brothel dismantled a large brass bed and threw it piece by piece into the street, to the applause of an admiring crowd, including me. That was more or less harmless, but there were dangerous street fights which I took care to avoid.

      Our job was to pick up Australian troops and take them on training landings down the Australian coast before delivering them to New Guinea. We sent in our landing craft to bring them out to the ship, and I watched with awe as enormous men with rifles and packs, plus a mortar barrel or a piece of a machine gun on their backs, clambered up the scrambling nets we let down the side of the ship. Climbing those nets looks easy when you see it on a newscast, but the rope forming the net sags and swings and I found them difficult even when wearing swimming trunks. But I suppose that’s why they did jungle training: to become tougher and stronger than I ever was or would be. The first night aboard the Spearhead, on the deck under the Pacific moon, the Australians sang soldiers’ songs and then, inevitably, “Waltzing Matilda.” Even I with my a solid tin ear was moved.

      More practically, it soon became apparent that our LCAs were too small and light to ride Pacific rollers. Once or twice, embarrassingly, a roller carried one up the beach and left it stranded. So after a time we were reassigned to the scores of ships which followed the U.S. fleet into action, carrying supplies and reinforcements. In this way we participated in the invasion of Luzon in the Phillippines and observed, from a reasonably safe distance, the Japanese suicide bombers attacking U.S. ships. Crocodiles were a more immediate threat: On a swimming party on an island in a river mouth, we saw far away down the beach a Jeep racing towards us; it arrived in time to tell us that the other side of the island was swarming with crocs which liked on occasion to roll in the surf, as we were doing.

      As more and more British ships arrived in the Pacific, whatever symbolic importance the presence of our landing ships might have had ended, and we headed for Sydney, on our way home. But by then I was suffering from an unheroic condition, athlete’s foot, known in the navy as footrot, which kept getting worse despite the best efforts of the ship’s doctor. He had in fact been more successful in treating my eyesight. I had worn glasses for years and was handicapped when I sat on and broke the only pair I had while we were in some remote part of the Pacific without an optician in sight. The best the doc could do was to say that in the ship’s little library there was a copy of a book called Better Sight Without Glasses, by Aldous Huxley, as I remember. The basic idea was that poor eyesight was caused by lazy muscles that wouldn’t focus the eyes properly, and that eye exercises could correct that. Without specs, the alternative to falling down a hatchway or some other shipboard disaster was to make my eyes work better, and they did. It was years before I again needed glasses.

      But no such luck with the footrot, and at Sydney I was discharged into the skin disease ward in a naval hospital, right next to Rose Cottage, the navy’s name for the venereal disease ward. Life in the hospital was a good deal better than on a ship, and some of my fellow patients spent hours every day irritating the skin disease the doctors were trying to cure. Rubbing the milled edge of coins into the skin was supposed to work a treat. We enjoyed the presence of female nurses although it was entirely understood that they reserved their social life for officers; played cards on a bedspread in which the incriminating evidence of gambling could be swept up and hidden in a second, read, yarned, and took our treatment every day. My treatment was soaking my feet and ankles in some concoction which gradually brought the disease under control, although it could not cure it.

      When I was allowed shore leave — the navy goes ashore even from a hospital on land — I was commissioned by the ward to smuggle back bottles of cheap wine, called plonk. It was winter in Sydney so I wore my issue raincoat and concealed bottles in the deep pockets. The problem was that tropical rain and heat had weakened the stitching and I feared that unless I kept hold of the bottles they might easily fall through. That of course entailed keeping my hands in my pockets, which further entailed meeting no officers I would have to salute. Somehow I managed. But the time came when the doctors decided they could do no more and that I would have to return to a cooler climate. Equipped with salves and potions, I was discharged into the temporary Royal Naval barracks built on a dusty plain on the outskirts of Sydney, supposedly to await a passage home. But the United States dropped the atom bombs and Japan quickly surrendered.

      I was in Sydney on VJ Day, August, 15,1945, always the lone and interested observer rather than a participant in the celebrations. Within a day or two I had the awaited draft chit — but to go to Hong Kong rather than back to Britain. The Japanese in Hong Kong, and no doubt elsewhere, were ready to lay down their arms, but not until there were British or American forces to protect them from the civilian populations they had mistreated. The Royal Navy scrambled to sweep up all the spare bodies it could find and ship them off to former colonies now to be reoccupied. With hundreds of others, I went from Sydney to Hong Kong on an aircraft carrier, arriving when the actual surrender was still underway and the colony was in turmoil.

      During the Japanese occupation, the harbour ferry service between Hong Kong island and Kowloon on the mainland had fallen into disrepair, and there were even pirate junks operating in the approaches to the harbor — pirate junks being in the main regular trading junks which saw an opportunity for a little private enterprise on the side. I was assigned to a party based in the old British naval dockyard in Kowloon, on the mainland, with the task of running a small boat ferry service across the harbour for a month or so until the regular service could be restored. My job was to arrange to feed and fuel the fifty or so men in the group, and the problem was that there were no supplies and no place to cook anyway. I scrounged food off ships in the harbour, but attempts to cook over an open fire, using the top of a metal depthcharge container as a large pan, were not successful.

      Equally or more serious, there was no rum. When he was first lord of the admiralty — that is, civilian minister in charge of the Royal Navy — Winston Churchill was asked by a pompous officer to remember the traditions of the service, and famously replied that the traditions were rum, buggery, and the lash. The lash was no longer in use during my service, I’m happy to say, and the occasional incident of buggery of which I was aware, although nominally a serious crime, was ignored. But rum was almost a religion, and it fell within the responsibilities of the supply branch. Ratings aged twenty and above were entitled to one-eighth of a pint of rum a day, mixed with two-eighths of a pint of water to make grog, the idea being that grog could not be hoarded because it would not keep for more than a day. Chief and petty officers got neat rum, while commissioned officers had a private bar in which pink gin was the favored tipple. The rum was bought in barrels and tended to vary in strength depending on where it came from, but it was always stronger than the pub rum we know today. So at age twenty men who might never have tasted spirits before were issued every noon with three eighths of a pint — six ounces — of potent grog.

      It was easy to make it a habit — almost a precondition of eating the unappetizing naval lunch, or dinner as it was called — but it was more than that. The daily issue was a secular ceremony of almost mystical importance. “Spirits up” was piped throughout the ship, the rum and water measured exactly into a wooden tub under watchful eyes, and the grog issued to a representative from each mess who would be found in grave default by his mates if it were short even a drop. So it was not enough to dip a measure into the tub and fill it more or less; the level in the measure had to be convex — filled to the fullest extent possible. And every drop of rum in the ship had to be accounted for, which created real problems because the stuff tended to evaporate from the barrels. Anyway, there I was in Kowloon with no rum for sailors demanding their rights. Japanese brandy made from pine needles, which I discovered in a store in the dockyard, was sampled, but found to be no substitute. Nor were the sailors comforted by the knowledge

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