Cruiser
Authors: Mike Carlton
Mike Carlton is one of Australia's best-known broadcasters and journalists. In a media career of more than 40 years, he has been a radio and television news and current-affairs reporter, foreign correspondent, talk-radio host and newspaper columnist.
He was an ABC war correspondent in Vietnam in 1967 and 1970, and for three years was the ABC's bureau chief in Indonesia. Now happily retired from radio, he has returned to writing a column of comment and opinion for the Saturday edition of
The Sydney Morning Herald
.
Mike has had a lifelong passion for naval history.
Cruiser
is the book he has always wanted to write.
To Morag, with love
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Cruiser: The Life and Loss of HMAS Perth
ePub ISBN 9781742740928
A William Heinemann book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au
First published by William Heinemann in 2010
This edition published in 2011
Copyright © Mike Carlton 2010
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.
Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices
.
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher, and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Carlton, Michael.
Cruiser: the life and loss of HMAS Perth / Mike Carlton.
ISBN 978 1 86471 133 2 (pbk)
Perth (Cruiser)
World War, 1939â1945 â Naval operations, Australian.
World War, 1939â1945 â Prisoners and prisons, Japanese.
940.545994
Cover photograph courtesy of the Australian Department of Defence
Cover design by Richard Shailer
Maps and diagram by James Carlton
HMAS
Perth
in the Mediterranean, 1941
The Battles of the Java Sea and the Sunda Strait, 1942
The Battle of the Sunda Strait, 1942
The BurmaâSiam Railway, 1943
Many place names and spellings have changed since 1945, particularly in North Africa, the Middle East and Indonesia. It was impossible to fix a rule for which to use, the old or the new, so I have settled for those that I think will be most familiar.
Generally, this means employing the words that
Perth
's sailors would have recognised. So, for example, modern-day Cilacap in Indonesia keeps its old, Netherlands East Indies colonial spelling of Tjilatjap. Yet even this rule is not hard and fast, for I think Surabaya reads rather better than Soerabaja, Bandung better than Bandoeng.
Naval sailors â not officers â used to be known as âratings', which was an indication of their rate or rank. Thus, a man might be rated able seaman or petty officer. The British still use the word âratings', but the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) now prefers the simpler and more egalitarian term âsailor'.
A knot is a measure of speed at sea: one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is 1.852 kilometres. So a ship travelling at 30 knots is doing a speed of 55.56 km/h.
Another problem arose with gun calibres, which were measured by inches. Thus, a 6-inch gun fired a shell six inches in diameter, or 152 millimetres. It seemed sensible to keep the old units.
During the war, the RAN sailed under the White Ensign of the British Royal Navy â a Union flag in the top left-hand corner of the red cross of St George. The RAN adopted its own White Ensign, similar to the Australian national flag but with blue stars on a white background, in 1967.
I have done everything possible to track down and gain permission from holders of copyright. Where I have been unsuccessful, I would be happy to make amends in any future edition.