Mackenzie Gregory
0071
HMAS Australia
HMAS Canberra
HMAS Adelaide
HMAS Shropshire

01

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Q: Your life before the war, how you came to enlist and why you chose the navy.

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Then we'll move through your war experiences and then post-war and if we could just get a feel for the major events of your life initially and then we'll come back and talk in further detail about significant experiences you've had. First, if you could tell us where you were born?

A: I was born in Geelong on 9 February 1922. I happened

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to be there because Dad was working with the J-Class Submarines which had come out from England in 1919 and they were based at Osborn House in Geelong, which happened to be the first Royal Australian Naval College. Mum and Dad were there and so that's how it happened. I believe on the kitchen table in Hope Street in Geelong.

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Q: And after your early experiences, you went to school?

A: Yes, Dad was always a steward in the navy and he worked for admirals and generally the first naval member so we went out of Geelong when I was quite young and were actually living in Haynton Place[?] in Toorak with one of the admirals and my first school was Christchurch Grammar

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on the corner of Toorak Road and Punt Road and probably my earliest memory was catching the tram and I started school the day before I was 5 there. Subsequently the next admiral had a house in St Kilda Road at Landene and it's still there, a lovely old brick place. I used to have to walk across the park, Faulkner Park to get to school.

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I remember it particularly when the magpies were nesting and I used to be quite terrified as they swooped down on me when I was wandering off to school as quite a young boy.

Q: And did you want to join the navy from an early age? Was that your intention?

A: Probably not at that stage. They bought a block of land in Coburg of all places and built a house and I went to Coburg State School until I was about 11 or 10

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I guess and then I went to Coburg High. At that stage I suppose I realised that we were very working class, went through the Depression. Dad was away a lot and Mother really had to struggle and I can remember her stuffing her shoes with paper to keep the rain out and making sure I had a pair of shoes and I had

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learnt about the Naval College where boys during their 13th year could sit for the Naval College and they selected maybe a dozen out of 300 applicants and I guess I saw if I could get into the navy and get a good education I'd get myself out of this very working class rut I guess. Even at that young age that's what I wanted to do

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and I was most surprised when I sat for the exam, then I was called for a medical and then eventually I had to face a series of captains and admirals at Victoria Barracks and being petrified as the young man being interviewed and these gruff naval officers saying things like, "Look out of the window young man. What car is that going down the road?" and all sorts of questions. Then I was one of 13 who were

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selected to go into the Naval College in January 1936.

Q: And when you went to the Naval College did you have to sign up for a number of years?

A: My father did. For the 4 years of the College and a subsequent 12 years from the age of 18 and the only way you could get out was to pay quite a considerable sum of money which was never going to be forthcoming from my family so having made the bed I really had to lay in it.

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Q: Tell me something about the College.

A: Well the first year was pretty tough. We had 3 senior years and we were really dogsbodies [lowest of the low]. There was a pretty nasty sort of initiation and you doubled [ran] everywhere around the College and we were the youngest and the eldest were 17 or 18 were quite young men. For instance we went swimming in an open swimming pool which was one end of Flinders Naval Depot from where the

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College was. We doubled everywhere and we carried our own gear and we carried the seniors' gear as well. The first year was quite rough and one of our lot was told not to return after the first term. We never knew what happened. We started with 13 and then after Noosey[?] as his name was just did not appear after our first term leave and we never knew why. He subsequently joined the air force

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and unfortunately as a fighter pilot got killed in the Western Desert in about 1940, '41.

Q: And what about the rest of your class?

A: Well we bonded pretty well of course. We had to survive I guess. For instance at night you had to be totally undressed, all your gear laid out, your chest of drawers open for inspection and have had a shower in 3 minutes against the stop watch and

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if that didn't happen you got a size 10 gym shoe on your bum quite regularly and you learnt pretty quickly to be able to do it. One would help each other and we had 2 double bunks in a cubicle so you lived with 3 others and we had our own gun room. I guess out of that 12, 2 died in the war and one got killed in a car accident but the other 9 of us are still going.

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We all were 80 last year and we all met in Sydney in July last year for a wonderful lunch at the Sydney Yacht Club and went from midday to about 4 or 5 in the afternoon.

Q: And what year did you graduate from the College?

A: We were due to finish our 4th year in '39 and in August '39 the international situation was quite alarming and we were due to go on leave in August

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of '39 to come back for our final exams, our big passing out parade, our graduation ball which was a big deal. The College was lined up and the commander said, "Years 1, 2 and 3 will proceed on leave. The 4th Year will stay. You are going to sea. Leave is a privilege not a right." We had a week's extra seamanship and signals

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and we were sent off to sea and we all went off to join the navy at sea before the war.

Q: Which ship did you join?

A: We all went to the [HMAS] Canberra which was an 8 inch cruiser and the [HMAS] Australia was not in commission at that stage, our sister ship. They'd both been built in the British Navy in about 1928 and came out to the Australian Navy. The Canberra and the Australia were sister ships of the County Class

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Cruisers because they were named after counties, Shropshire, Devonshire, Sussex, Essex, etc. Just after war was declared, 6 of us went to the Australia and I was one of those so 6 stayed on Canberra and 6 went to the Australia.

Q: Do you remember the day war was declared?

A: Very well. Very well. It was about quarter past nine in the evening when the Prime Minister who was Robert Gordon Menzies made the announcement that,

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"Because Britain was at war, we too were at war." and I was sent to run the pinnace which is a motorboat, mid-shipmen ran the boats, in the charge of the boats. You had a bowman, a stern sheet man and a stoker to run the engine and interestingly enough a couple of Anzac Days ago a tall gentleman fronted me and said, "Sir, do you remember me?" and I had to say, "Not really." and he said, "Let me take you back to the day

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war was declared. You were running the pinnace and you came into Man O'War steps and the end of Man O'War steps is a blue stone wall, you said 'Stop engines, go astern.' The engines cut out and we crashed into the blue stone wall and the bowman went over the side and I was the bowman." and then I remembered the incident and it was really breaking up the sailors from wives and mothers and saying goodbye.

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The ship had been recalled to go to sea. It was a Sunday and I remember it quite vividly still.

Q: Where did you sail?

A: Oh, we went straight out, just down the coast and to make sure all was well and we sailed around the coast for a day or two and then about - we didn't do much more than convoy work around the coast for the first 3 months then early 1940 we went over

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to New Zealand and picked up a New Zealand Army group and a couple of troop ships and that was probably a poignant memory of the war. I can recall the troop ships pulling away from the wharf in Wellington and thousands of people breaking out into The Maori farewell and singing as the troop ships left and we took them round to Melbourne where we picked up the Melbourne, Australian group

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over to Perth and we went across to South Africa with them and then the ship went on to England and joined the home fleet in 1940 about a month after Dunkirk when it was quite dark days.

Q: And you were then stationed where? Where did you sail after that?

A: We were stationed in Scarborough in the North of Scotland in a very bleak place up in the Orkneys. Very bleak and cold and

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wet. At one stage we were sent up to Bear Island to look for German trawlers giving away they thought, convoy information. That's 75 degrees north which is only 900 miles from the North Pole and bitterly cold, ice. The ships were not built to go into that sort of weather and within the month we were back based on

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the Clyde in Scotland. Greenwich which is a naval base on the west of Scotland close to Glasgow. We were told we were going down to Dakar with [General] De Gaulle's expedition which he was hoping to?. Dakar sits right on the hump of West Africa, right on the convoy routes. The Americans at that stage of course were not in the war, were very interested in

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getting hold of Dakar because of the convoy routes and Britain had to rely on America and Canada for food and oil to keep them going and we did convoy work for best part of a year. Dakar was an absolute fiasco. De Gaulle at one stage thought he was going to march in and take over and the brand new French battleship, the Richlour[?] had gotten into Dakar and she had

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14 inch or 15 inch guns and she was virtually a land fort. They had cruisers, destroyers. They had forts with 9 inch guns and for 3 days we went in and for 3 days they bombed us. They shot at us. We got hit twice with 6 inch shells.

Q: Was this the Vichy French?

A: Yes, it was the Vichy French and they were not going to give up to De Gaulle and he virtually stood off and said, "Well I'm not

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going to shed the blood of Frenchmen for Frenchmen." I'm afraid I haven't been too fond of the French which they showed pretty well in the present war I think, but they don't want to fight that much.

Q: And after Dakar, where did you sail to?

A: We went to Gibraltar. We did a bit of time in the Mediterranean with a convoy off to Malta and then we went back to England doing convoy. We were based in Liverpool.

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At that stage we went into dry dock to fix up the damage we had and it was December 1940 when Liverpool was very badly bombed and it was much worse being in harbour than it was being at sea running the gauntlet of the U-boats [German submarines] and ships being sunk and it was pretty nasty sort of time. At that stage we had three bad nights in December 1940

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when in fact the side of the dock was hit with a 500 pound bomb and one of the jobs - they dropped incendiaries all over Liverpool and one of the jobs the midshipmen had was to rush around the upper deck and kick off the incendiaries that landed there over the side as we'd left a few feet of water in the dock. There was a whoosh one evening and something came down and lobbed between the ship and the dockside which was probably

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no more than 15 or 20 feet. Nobody payed much attention and we were duly taken out of dock and another ship was put in and they pumped out the water and there was a 4000 pound land mine sitting on the bottom ticking away still. We'd been lucky.

Q: Lucky!

A: Yes.

Q: When an incendiary hit the deck - how big is an incendiary?

A: Oh fairly small. They just set fire.

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I think they were phosphorous and they'd burst into flame and the idea was to set the place alight then the bombers could follow where the fires were coming from and drop their bombs accordingly. Rather like we use pathfinders on our side to go into Germany and drop bombs and start the fires so the bombers could follow.

Q: So did you have to run around the deck literally and kick these things off the deck?

A: Oh if they happened, yes.

Q: You did that yourself?

A: Yes.

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Q: And were you burnt at all?

A: No, no. You wore boots and gave it a quick boot and hope it would happen. I only had it on one occasion I think but it was a bit scary.

Q: I'm sure it was. What happened after you left Liverpool?

A: We did a number of convoys working out of the Clyde. We did convoy work and prior to that in November 1940 we were out looking for a German cruiser or a pocket battleship I

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think. We were called out and a Sunderland aircraft which was quite a big flying boat which we used for anti-submarine work ran into a storm and it was a real Atlantic gale. Waves 30, 40 feet hight, 100 mile an hour winds. It had run out of petrol and had gone down and somehow the pilot had got it down. She'd been down for a number of hours and she was using her radio

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and with our directional finding equipment we were trying to find her. I think if I remember correctly the captain said he would offer ?10 to anybody who sighted the wreck. ?10 was a lot of money. As a midshipman we got 6 shillings a day, ?2 a week and that didn't go very far and eventually we sighted it and just as we got her in sight a huge wave picked it up and turned her right over on her back

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and broke the Sunderland in two. There was one of the airmen clinging to the tail and we were coming up with the wind and sea behind us doing 26 knots and I can remember watching the speedo [speedometer] down below decks and it went up to about 31 [knots]and back again as we literally surfed and the airmen were then in the water and they were too weak to even grab a line

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so eventually our commander, an officer and some sailors secured a line to themselves and leapt over the side and physically tied a line to the airmen and we got 9 out of the 13 and I remember being sent up to the fo'c'sle with a party of sailors and the heaving line to try and get the four who were drifting past but we were unable to cast a line to them. As soon as you threw it out it came flying back with the wind over your head and they went off to die.

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That was a dreadful moment to see them so helpless. 60 years ago I can still feel the absolute helplessness of myself and everybody else. We then took them back into - we could only do 5 knots back into the storm and we took them back into Glasgow and we recovered 9 out of the 13.

Q: Then from the Atlantic?

A: The ship

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was coming home. We left England with the biggest convoy that had ever left at that stage. The Mediterranean was virtually closed. It was a troop convoy and we took them round the Cape up to Aden to go into the Mediterranean that way. We then went to Capetown and Durban and Ceylon and the ship was coming home and this was about

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May 1941 and I'd been promoted to acting sub-lieutenant where you get your commission. We did our Seamanship Exam in the British cruiser, the [HMS] Emerald. We had 3 glorious weeks in Ceylon at the government's expense at the Gallface Hotel for 10 days and then we got sent up country to a rest camp at Desalawa which was interesting. We never had any money.

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We'd gone to 11 shillings a day which was a big increase and we were walking down the street one day and a very toffee-nosed English voice said, "Oh, some Australians I see." It turned out it was a tea planter who had been at Gallipoli and was badly injured and some Australian had hauled him up off the beach and he gave us a wonderful time. He had a Rolls Royce and he wined and dined us for 10 days in Desalawa.

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We then caught a troop ship back to England to go and do our sub-lieutenant's course. There was nothing worse for a sailor than to serve on a ship run by the army, I'm afraid. They had so many troops it was a hot bunk system almost. 4 hours in and 4 hours out. Two meals a day because they couldn't cope with 3 and we ran the gauntlet of the U-boats and got into Glasgow.

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We were late for our courses and nobody really knew that we were there. So we said, "Let's go off to people we know." We told our own group where we were going, there were 6 of us and eventually we got a recall with a telegram. Somebody had run out of money and gone into Australia House who said, "What are you doing here, you should be on your courses." They rounded us all up and sent us down and we did our

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gunnery signals and navigation. Some in Brighton in England. That was quite amusing. We were again bombed because 1941 was when they were expecting the invasion and at times you'd get called out to go and man the beaches overnight when they thought the Germans might be coming. There were stories, whether it happened but there were stories that they'd set the sea alight at one stage by putting oil on it and lighting it. Our hotel got

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the top floor knocked off with a bomb one night which wasn't very pleasant but we were all safe and the Signal School. The navy had taken over Roedean Girls' School, like our Fernbank here, fairly toffee-nosed [upper class]school.

Q: That's where Princess Anne when to school, I think isn't it?

A: Yes and it still had notices in the rooms, "If you want a Mistress during the night please ring." We rang those bells like hell but it never happened.

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We had quite an amusing time. We had 3 or 4 months we went to Whale Island for our gunnery. We did navigation at Dryden which happened to be just out of Portsmouth and was General Eisenhower's headquarters for D-Day where he made his famous decision, "We will go." That's where we did our navigation courses and we were to come home and we got bundled into a Blue Star

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ship called the Tuscan Star and we sailed in convoy to Halifax and then went individually down to Panama through the Canal and the ship had boxed Avro-Anson aircraft on their decks coming for the air force and we stopped on the east coast of Cristobel on the eastern side of Panama for the night and I'm afraid we all stayed ashore until about 1 in the morning and we missed the tide and the captain wasn't

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very pleased with us. We were late coming back. We got through the Canal and all of a sudden in the Pacific, smoke started to come out of these boxes. Somebody had got at them in Panama and put some type of incendiary and they all finished up all dropped over the side as they burst into flames. So the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] didn't get their Avros.

Q: So that was sabotage?

A: Yes it was. I understand you could have a

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little metal container with two chemicals which ate through and then caused a small conflagration and so they were dumped over the side and we arrived back in Melbourne on Pearl Harbor Day, 7th December 1941. We'd been away 2 years.

Q: Then were you immediately sent north?

A: I think we had 2 weeks leave. I was then not quite 20.

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We got engaged. I got engaged to Gladys who I'd gone to school with. Her brother was my best friend. Gladys was a year older than I was and we said we wouldn't get married until the war was over in case I got bowled over. I got sent to the Canberra as a sub-lieutenant to get my watch keeping certificate which means that you keep a watch on a bridge as an

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assistant officer until the captain says you are competent to run a watch on your own. I guess it would have been February '42 when we took the last troops into Singapore just to put then straight into the bag virtually and we went up through Sunda Strait through Banka Strait not quite to Singapore, called in at Surabaya or Jakarta as it now is.

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Then we did a bit of convoy work and went back into Sydney and we were in Sydney Harbour in May when the midgets attacked Sydney Harbour on May 31st, 1st June. It was a mad night in Sydney.

Q: After Sydney Harbour?

A: After Sydney Harbour we were then part of the - the

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coast watchers around Guadalcanal. There was Martin Clements, was an Englishman but he was in the coast watcher force for Australia. He was a captain in the British Army and he'd been a district officer and the Japanese landed on Guadalcanal and landed on Tulagi and they were building an airfield on Guadalcanal. He sent this information back and the Americans

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had decided and the British had decided that Germany was going to be knocked over first before the Pacific but Admiral King who was the commander in chief of the American forces decided that we ought to do a landing on Tulagi and Guadalcanal and we sent as part of the force for that operation. Operation Watchtower and we were part of the bombardment force and there were 18000 marines under

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Major General Vandergrift, the American carriers and [Frank Jack] Fletcher was the [vice] admiral in charge of the total force and we did a stage out of Wellington and went off the marines and convoy and Australia, Canberra and [HMAS] Hobart were the 3 Australia ships. We were part of the bombardment force to do the softening up beforehand. August 7th we arrived and we did our bombardments, did our

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night patrol. Fletcher said he'd stay for 3 days with his carriers but he nicked off after two and we were not very happy about that which meant we were absolutely without air cover and the Japs were coming down from Rabaul where they were bombing and we had a couple of nasty days of torpedo attacks and bombing attacks and about 4 or 5 of them

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were knocked over and we been at action stations for virtually 2 days and at night there was the Australia, the [USS] Chicago and Canberra and 2 destroyers south of Savo Island. Savo Island is a little island that sits off Guadalcanal which is sort of down one side. Savo's there. There is an entrance north and south or east and west of Savo. There were 3 American cruisers blocking off the northern one with 2 destroyers, [USS] Quincy, Astoria, Vincenze.

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We were the southern force. When Fletcher suddenly took his carriers off, Admiral Turner in charge of the landing called for Admiral Crutchley who was the second in command to take the Australia over to Giadalcanal for a conference and with Vandergrift they decided they would have to abandon the next morning and leave. So we were without our flagship and we were leading the Chicago who was the senior ship but he decided

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to stay astern of us 300 yards and I had the midnight to 4 watch and I'd just gone on watch at midnight on the night of 8/9 August. I was on the bridge it was 1.43 in the morning and I had to call the navigator at quarter to 2 so I could remember the time very well and all of sudden mayhem broke loose. There was an explosion to the north, there was someone flashing to us

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and all of a sudden there were Japanese, 6 cruisers and a destroyer about 3000 yards firing 8 inch guns and torpedos at us. The bridge got hit and I was relieved by the navigator. We got hit in fact by about 28, 8 inch shells and I virtually walked around 2 or 3. The captain was mortally wounded and the gun roister was killed. Everyone on the bridge except the navigator and I

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were either dead or shot and we were not able to fire a shot. We suddenly took up a list to starboard. There were fires going on, ammunition exploding, it was just mayhem.

Q: I'd like to come back to that experience later in more detail. Just at the moment I'd like to get a sense of what happened after that. Where you went in the last couple of years

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of the war?

A: I then came back to Australia. It took about 3 weeks to get home. I had to go the Court of Inquiry as to why we'd lost the ship being officer of the watch when it all started. I'd lost all my gear. I had a pair of boots and overalls. I did hang on to the binoculars which I've still got. I'll show them to you later. I re-kitted and got sent back to sea. I joined an old cruiser called the [HMAS] Adelaide convoying

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out of Fremantle and we were just doing basic convoy duty but we came across a merchant ship one day that turned out to be a German blockade runner. In combination with a Dutch ship, the Heemskirke and ourselves we sank her plus she put chargers on board and they all bailed out into their boats and paddled up and just as we were hauling the Germans in

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up paddled a dog and a pig that had been on board and the sailors stopped hoisting them in to get the dog and the pig on. Amongst that group of men were 10 allied merchant captains who'd been captured by German armed raiders so the Germans were stuck down below and they were freed.

Q: Was that your last ship of the war?

A: No. I stayed on her a year or

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so and then I was drafted to the [HMAS] Shropshire which was the replacement ship for the Canberra. Winston Churchill [English Prime Minister] had offered it to the Australian Navy as a gift. The Shropshire had been bought for over ?2 million by the citizens of the County of Shropshire and the ship was not renamed and I was in Perth and we didn't know where she was. She was somewhere up in the middle of the Pacific and I flogged

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round Australia by train up to Brisbane and I think 3 or 4 nights I went out to the airport trying to get a passage north. The only way you could go - the Americans were the only ones flying DC3s up to Manus, a city on the Equator which was the big forward base and they kept on saying, "No, no you've got no priority." so I went back to the HMAS Morton, the depot and said, "For God's sake give me some piece of paper that will get me out of

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here." They wrote out a South Pacific Transport Order that said, "If Lieutenant M J Gregory does not join the HMAS ship within 24 hours it will seriously hazard the war effort." Well I fronted with this and the Yanks said, "My God what do you do?" and I said, "It's too secret, I can't tell you." They bundled me into an aircraft and it took 2 days to get to Manus. Sitting on the floor with no heating and the mail and it was dreadful.

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Got to Manus, it was in a tropical downpour and you couldn't see 10 yards. I said, "Where's the Shropshire?" and nobody knew where the Shropshire was. I sat for 2 days in the concert hut and the rain cleared and she was about 600 yards away anchored in the harbour. I joined her just before the - she'd just come back from the battle of Surabaya Straits which was the last great sea battle of all time and we went to the Lengayne Landings

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in January '45.

Q: Right at the end of the war?

A: We then went off to Tokyo and we were in Tokyo Bay for the surrender which was a great day.

Q: That must have been extraordinary and we'll definitely want to come back and talk to you in very great detail later. How long were you in Tokyo?

A: 3 months. We were part of the occupation force. We were anchored off Yokohama but we got off

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to Tokyo quite a number of times and I was mate of the upper deck which meant I was the commander's assistant, the executive officer and we ran all the sailor's work, seamen's work on the upper deck. He said, "We've been here for ages." We'd acquired a jeep and a landing craft for 2 bottles of whiskey which I'd taken off and swapped.

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He said, "Go up to Tokyo in the jeep and find somewhere for the sailors to go and don't come back until you have." I was able to organise a travel company to send a train down 3 times a week and we put the whole ship's company through Nikko, 3 or 4 days each, gorgeous spot about 150 miles out of Tokyo up in the mountains and we stayed there until late November when we came back to Australia and we stopped on the

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way at Wewak and picked up 600 army troops and brought them home. I stayed on board Shropshire as a lieutenant and watch keeping officer and she was picked to take the victory contingent to England and I stayed as ship's company and we took them to London and I then stayed in England to do a specialist torpedo anti-submarine course which lasted over 12 months.

Q: So this was well

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after the war now?

A: Yes, all of '47 and a bit of '48.

Q: Then did you come back to Australia?

A: I came back to Australia and went straight back to sea again to the [HMAS] Warramunga, which was the flotilla leader as the specialist TAS [?]officer for the flotilla with Captain Harrington as the captain and then I started to get some quite bad headaches and eventually they sent me to the Torpedo Anti-Submarine

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School and they found I needed to glasses for astigmatism and I'd been at sea the whole war and I'd been back to England. It had been about 8 years and I'd had a pretty rugged time. I did a bit of teaching at the school and then I came to Navy Office for a year. They had a small group called the Director of Training and Staff Requirements with 3 specialist officers and you really were the eyes

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and ears of the Naval Board to set policy for that specialisation to the navy. I was called in one day. We'd had our first child in April 1950 - Nan. When she was a month old she got meningitis and she died. Then the Second Naval member said "How would you like to be Aide de Camp to the Governor-General?" I really didn't

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know who the Governor-General was and I didn't really know about that. We had a thought and he said, "Well, at least it will keep you home for a year. It won't do your career any harm one way or the other. If you say no or if you say yes." So we decided we'd go and we did. It turned out I did 2? years because the King died, there were various reasons why Sir William McKell [Governor General of Australia] didn't want a change and we then had 2 more

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miscarriages while we were there and then our eldest girl was born in Canberra, Jane. She won't want me telling you this but she's 50 now and she was born while we were at Government House.

Q: Then you?

A: Then I went back to sea again. The top job for your specialisation was on the staff of the admiral commanding the fleet. I went on Admiral Dowling's staff as the fleet torpedo anti-submarine officer on the aircraft carrier,

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[HMAS] Vengeance and we were then escort for the Queen's visit in 1954 and we went right round Australia and we had to produce a guard and a Queen's guard is 120 sailors and a lieutenant commander and a lieutenant. In case one of those gets ill you have a spare and I was the spare. When the Queen was doing the Australian War Memorial in Canberra

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I told Lieutenant Stacey that he was going to be sick and Hugh Jarrett and I did the Queen's Guard in 1954 in Canberra.

Q: How long did you stay with the navy?

A: I stayed until 1954 and at that stage we'd had a little boy. We'd had Jane, and then Anne and then a little boy. He was born with a congenital heart and he died

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after 10 days so we'd had a rough couple of years and I decided I'd try and get out of the navy before I was too old. I had 19 years.

Q: At that point you went into civilian life?

A: Yes, I took about a year to find out if I was going to get out of the navy. Dad was working for Sir Owen Dickson, the Chief Justice of the High Court.

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I used to see Sir Owen quite regularly. He was very pleasant and I got an unofficial reading on the Naval Discipline Act and he said, "They can hold you if they want to so be very careful before you resign." I'd talked to Sir Murray Tyrrell who was the official secretary and I knew Athol Townley who was the Minister for Defence very well and he said, "For your information they've liberalised for officers

01:40:30:20
and we're not going to tell anybody. So I think you should have a go." So we posed a hypothetical case to the Navy Board and I resigned and Admiral Dowling said, "Is this right?" and I said, "Yes, these are the facts." He said, "I'm going to be the next Chief of Naval Staff and you won't have any trouble." Within 10 days the signal came. I could go out without relief.

Q: Now that seems like a good moment to pause.

A: Right

Mackenzie Gregory
0071

02

02:00:11:09

Q: Okay Mac, we'd like to take you back right to the very beginning. I was very interested in what you were saying about your father. Could you tell me a little bit more about your father and his experiences in the navy?

A: Dad was a,

02:00:30:12
eventually became a chief steward and in fact he served the Crown for 50 years continuously and was eventually awarded with a British Empire Medal of which he was very proud. In the First World War he'd been one of the Old Contemptibles. This is the crowd that the Kaiser said, "What a contemptible little army." and he fought in Belgium. He was on the Somme. He didn't talk much about the war.

02:01:00:11
He was a very proud person and he came out to Australia. He brought?. my mother's mother was a widow, my maternal grandmother, Ellen Greening and she was a gorgeous little lady who always took my side. I was a Cub and I think the sub was tuppence and I'd bought 2 Wild Woodbine cigarettes and tried my first attempt at smoking.

02:01:30:13
I would have been 11. I came in and my mother said, "Have you been smoking?" and grandma knew I might have and mother was Minnie Winifred. She said, "Minnie, don't be stupid. Of course he wouldn't be smoking." and took my side. Dad took her into the house and she really was one of the household and she was not a burden at all. She died while I was England in the war and I wasn't able to say goodbye to Grandma.

02:02:00:12
Dad wanted to serve and he really did look after the admirals he had. He went to sea on a number of occasions and was the steward for admirals. He served on the Canberra, he served on the Australia and the destroyers. He ran the School for Stewards at the Flinders Naval Depot but essentially he was the guy who looked after the First Naval Member, Sir Agna Colvin [?]

02:02:30:14
and some of those and until we had our own house we lived with them. He stayed until the war was over. They made sure we never served together, the navy. I was never at sea or in a depot when he was there. If I was there, they I suppose made sure we weren't together. It would have been pretty invidious having to say

02:03:00:12
'Sir' to your son. I always thought that it probably helped. I never really knew how I'd got into the navy. I thought maybe as we've got the token Black Judge[?] maybe I was the token lower deck person's son to get into the Naval College. I was the only one of a serving sailor to get into the Naval College. Whether that's right or not I don't know.

02:03:30:20
Occasionally when I was quite young as a midshipman, the sailors who knew Dad and he was always well-respected would say, "Perhaps I wouldn't do that sir." if I was going to get into trouble in some way in what I was doing. In charge of a boat or in charge of a group or doing this or that. The senior petty officer would come and whisper in your ear "I wouldn't to that but can I suggest this?"

Q: So was there a sense of class differences?

02:04:00:11

A: Oh fairly big. Not so much in our navy as in the Royal Navy. Very distinct in the Royal Navy. Very distinct.

Q: Did your father talk about that at all?

A: He was conscious it might cause me a problem the fact that he was on the lower deck, as they say. It really didn't and I suppose the fact that he worked for the top people is usually

02:04:30:12
a help and they'd always say, "How's your boy going?" or, "What are they doing." I don't think it was a harm at all ultimately. You asked about the class distinction. In 1940, '41 when we were working out of Liverpool we got friendly with some WRNS [Women's Royal Naval Service] and in the very early part of the war the top families' daughters jointed the WRNS. There were two, Phoebe Sanderman-Allan whose father

02:05:00:13
was a colonel and Member for Parliament for Birkenhead. She took me home for a weekend. I was cleaning my shoes. Mother came up and said, "Naval officers do not clean shoes. We have servants to do that." Then I had some leave and she said, "You can't stay in Liverpool and be bombed, we'll send you down to Anglesea where we've got friends." I said, "They don't want me, I don't know them, they don't know me." She said, "Don't worry, they're Canadians.

02:05:30:20
They're colonials, just like you." That really pointed it out. The other girl was Penelope Evans-Loam whose father was a full admiral and it was unusual that they went as ordinary serving people but they took it as tradition but that sharp distinction wasn't so much in the Australian Navy but between an

02:06:00:14
officer and a sailor a) there's got to be a distinction because you've got to have someone fulfil an order on the spot without thinking. The same applied to me. Anyone who's a day senior to you in the navy, they're senior to you and that's it. More than probably the other services you have to rely on each other so much for survival at sea. You've got to do your job; everybody else has got to do their job

02:06:30:09
and you've got to do it properly. It's amazing the camaraderie that still goes on. Here we are 60 years on. The Shropshire Association is still fairly strong. We have two reunions a year. Here at Albert Park we get 100 people probably still.

Q: Did the fact that you were senior to your father in the service. Did affect your bond with him in any way?

A: No, not really.

02:07:00:13
I was probably closer to Mother than I was to Dad. It was after that we got closer I guess. Gladys was very good to him. We'd have him over regularly for meals when he was living on his own after Mother died then he formed an association with another lady that didn't please me greatly but it was his business. We drifted a bit until he got older. He lived to be over 90 before he

02:07:30:12
died and wanted to make sure I had his medals and things like that. He went with Sir Owen Dickson to India when he did the Partition for the United Nations and Sir Owen really relied on him. He used to pack for him and look after him like a son. The whole Dickson family were very supportive of my family and Lady Dickson

02:08:00:06
became Raymond's godmother when he was christened and she was pleased to do it.

Q: When you went into the College, were there any sort of rituals that you underwent as part of your initiation?

A: I suppose you had to fetch and what have you. There was one particular period where they made sure you had to climb through a window.

02:08:30:12
They could jam the window on you so they could belt you from behind so you couldn't get through the window and the usual sort of nasty things that went on. After your first year, you had a year below you that you could kick around. By the time you were fourth year you were absolutely cock of the walk. It was wonderful. It was just superb. Then you went to sea and you were down very much on the bottom of the ladder. Someone defined the midshipman as the

02:09:00:14
lowest form of animal life in the navy. It was thus. I had a very salutatory experience. I had been at sea less than a month and I was running the captain's motorboat. The captain was R.R. Stewart, Royal Navy. Very tough guy. He called the boat away and you ran the boat for 24 hours with a crew. I was in the heads or the toilet and I didn't hear it which was no excuse and I think

02:09:30:13
half the ship's company were up on the quarter deck waiting to see what happened when I arrived. I rushed up and saluted the captain who said, "Boy, punctuality is the politeness of Kings. It is the duty of a Naval officer. Don't you bloody-well forget it! Your leave's stopped. Get in the boat and take me to Rose Bay." We were at No. 1 Buoy which is right near Man O'War Steps near the present Sydney Opera House. Rose Bay's the other end of the harbour. We got down there and I lined up the wharf with a

02:10:00:17
nice big swing and ran aground before we got in there. He said, "Don't stand there. Get out and push." I was in long whites and I'm up to here in mud and almost in tears. I got back to the ship and the commander saw me and he said, "My God when did you run ashore, before or after you dropped the old man?" I said, "Before." He said, "Well, you can stay on board for a month." That was my punishment for that and it probably made me try and be punctual for the rest of my life

02:10:30:11
so much so that my family's like it. My third daughter Sue will say, "Captain Stewart will be pleased with me." when she arrives on time for something.

Q: Do you think that the training you received at the College really prepared you?

A: Certainly. Yes. You were confident. You were young but you were ready to take charge. We used

02:11:00:15
to be sent sailing. You'd go off on your own on a weekend. We'd take a 27 foot whaler and we'd sale from Flinders Naval Depot over to Cowes and back. It taught you to be very independent. They had a very nasty habit occasionally of rousing you out in the middle of the night, putting you into a closed truck, taking you maybe 20 miles somewhere along the peninsula. Putting you out at 2 in the morning and say, "Get back to the College." and there's a time to do it in. You didn't know

02:11:30:06
what it was but if you got back too soon, you got a lift, they knew that and they'd send you back to do it again. If you got back too late, you did it again. That sort of made you resilient, things like that.

Q: Did you ever get seasick?

A: The very first time I went out in the old destroyer [HMAS] Tattoo into Bass Strait I got queasy but I wasn't sick. No I never have.

Q: A lot of sailors do, don't they?

A: Oh, a lot of sailors do. They get sick for a day or two.

02:12:00:18
Quite terrible. Can never go to sea. Gladys hated ships. She was seasick before we got under the Harbour Bridge on our way to England when she came over in 1947.

Q: When you left the College, you said before that really the war intervened?

A: Yes.

Q: You didn't have the opportunity to graduate properly?

A: No we didn't graduate. We were the only

02:12:30:03
term ever to get out of the College without a passing out exam. They just had you for your four years, that's where you are. I think I was about 9/12. I struggled with calculus. We had twins in my term, the McDonald twins who were brilliant at everything. Didn't matter what. Sport. Their dad was a Headmaster. They came from a town in South Australia. Academically they were

02:13:00:14
superb. Good cricketers, good rugby players, good everything, tennis players. One got a Distinguished Service Cross as a sub-lieutenant on an arctic convoy, Russian convoy. Came out as a lieutenant and did medicine. His brother stayed in the navy and became a rear admiral and was in command of the fleet. One lives in Melbourne. Hugh lives in Melbourne and Neil is in Sydney. If anything happens the group will come together.

02:13:30:11

Q: When war did break out, what was your response to that?

A: I think - because in those days you were - Britain meant a lot. Mum and Dad being English they always talked a lot about home and one always was very proud to hear the National Anthem played. One stood to attention. You'd play it in theatres in those days.

02:14:00:11
It was a different atmosphere. I think we were all looking forward to it. It was going to be an adventure. Now war can be hell, war can be dreadful, it can be boring, it can be agony, you can get scared at wit's end but there's some good times as well.

Q: When do you think you first realised what war was about?

A: Being bombed in Liverpool. Having ships sunk around you and leaving

02:14:30:16
them there. I was ashore in Liverpool one night when there was a bad bombing raid and I was trying to make my way back. I hated going into the shelters and I'd rather take my chance on the street. In London you got shunted into the Tube, the railway stations, and I was trying to make my way back during a raid and there was an air raid shelter filled with women and children that got a direct

02:15:00:11
hit and probably 500 got killed. Seeing people lying all over the place really brought it home to you and made you hate the opposition really.

Q: Did you carry that hate into battle with you?

A: Not as individuals so much probably. I suppose you don't face them face to face in the navy. Often battles are some thousands of

02:15:30:13
yards. Later in the war the Kamikazes got very personal when you could physically see them in the aircraft and you got to hate them individually that way. I have probably had no great love for the Japanese and I probably still don't. I've been back to Japan on business a couple of times since the war and I know it's not those individual people but they are still the enemy, I'm afraid.

02:16:00:15
But the Germans weren't quite like that.

Q: What was the difference?

A: I suppose, well we knew how the Japanese were treating our prisoners of war, number one, we knew we had a lot of prisoners of war and we saw them first in Japan. We sent out troops of people to go and look for them because a lot of our prisoners of war had been taken up to Japan and put in the coal mines under the sea

02:16:30:18
and were really they were terrible. One of my team was in the [HMAS] Perth, two were in the Perth. One was killed, Jack Lester and Norm White became a prisoner of war. He survived. Went on to become a commodore. Learned Japanese and earned a living out of advising business people on what to do in Japan. In the last Queen's Honours got a Medal of the Order of Australia for

02:17:00:11
what he'd done in fostering interest between Australia and Japan in industry which is ironic.

Q: I'd like to go back to the Kamikaze. What ship were you serving on?

A: Shropshire.

Q: Shropshire. When was your first experience?

A: January 1945 in the Lingayen Gulf landings. Luson which is the north of - [General] MacArthur

02:17:30:06
had landed at Leyte which is in the south and we were doing a second landing in the Lingayen Gulf which is in the north of Manila and we went up with the second biggest fleet after D-Day. It was enormous and the Kamikazes. They seemed to graduate on Fridays from flying school on a one way ticket and they would send up a 100 aircraft.

02:18:00:14
The combat air patrol and maybe knock some of them down and after Leyte we'd gone back to Manison - I joined the ship there and we had Christmas Day on December the 17th because we were going up to the Philippines and the captain decided we didn't have enough anti-aircraft fire and he said to our gunner officer, Commander Bracegirdle, whose dad had been Rear Admiral Bracegirdle and

02:18:30:13
official secretary to the Governor General's office, "Go ashore and see if you can get some more 40mm guns from the Yanks." He said, "Use your initiative." so Brace's got a couple of cases of scotch, took them ashore and was gone for a day or two. A little tug puffed out with a pontoon with 13 single Bofors [guns] on it, about a million rounds of ammunition, the mountings and the ordnance officers

02:19:00:15
to put them on the ship and we stuck them all over the ship, on the turrets, round the quarter deck, 13 40mm guns, anti-aircraft guns. That saved us in Lingayen. Really saved us.

Q: Were the Americans better supplied?

A: Absolutely, in every way, every way. We used to joke about us. The way the Americans won against the Japanese. We were landing on an island. They would land

02:19:30:11
the stores. They'd build them up, they'd build them up until they fell over and crushed the Japs and then they'd go in. This is the way we'd describe the Americans. They had - the second thing to hit the beaches would be the ice-cream machine. They lived absolutely much better than we did food-wise, equipment-wise, everything was just absolutely incredible.

02:20:00:08
When we got up to Lingayen, the Australia had been hit once with a Kamikaze in Leyte in October 1944. The captain had been killed and whole heap of them had been killed. She was stationed 600 yards astern of us and she attracted them and in fact over several days in Lingayen Gulf she got 5 Kamikazes hit on board and

02:20:30:12
it would have been January 6th I had the last dog watch which was 6 o'clock in the evening to 8 at night. We'd had a hell of day with Kamikazes. From morning they'd come up and they'd fly round the fleet and then they'd got up to about 1000 feet and then just dive in to any ship and I'd seen about 80 ships physically get

02:21:00:07
hit over a period of a week or two and this particular evening I suddenly looked up into the sun and there's this Japanese aircraft screaming down for the bridge. We cleared the bridge and I flattened out on the deck. There was an explosion; the bridge is 60 feet above the water level. I got wet. I thought it was petrol. I reached out a hand and

02:21:30:12
had a lick and it was salt water. Cazaly who was the leading seaman in charge of the port pom pom - the son of "Up there Cazaly" from football was captain of the port pom pom which was an 8 barrel anti-aircraft gun that could fire 1200 rounds a minute from each barrel, 2 pound shells, had seen this Japanese and in fact had shot him in half. Half went one side of the ship with a bomb on, half

02:22:00:11
went the other side and the explosion splashed the water up onto the bridge. Well that's about the closest I've ever been to being written off. Roy Cazaly was given a Distinguished Service Medal and many years later in Adelaide we were having a Shropshire Reunion. My wife said, "Where's Roy Cazaly?" I pointed him out and she went up and kissed him. His wife looked very cross-eyed

02:22:30:10
at her at that stage. She said, "I wouldn't have him if it wasn't' for Roy and that's to say thank you." He has since died of asbestosis unfortunately. He lived in Hobart. That was probably a more frightening experience I think than even being sunk in the Canberra. You got to the stage where we hadn't lost a man - you'd keep on seeing your sister ship being hit, you'd see other ships being hit

02:23:00:12
and you got to the stage of saying "Can we go on? When are we going to collect one?" I think Shropshire overall shot down something like 19 Japanese aircraft We fired the 8 inch guns at them. We had them radar controlled and we could fire an 8 inch shell which weighs 256 pounds all at once, burst at 2500 yards and

02:23:30:07
we would splash them in front of the aircraft if they were flying just above the deck. Sometimes they'd go in. Cazaly was such a good shot. When we working up there'd be an aircraft, a friendly aircraft dragging a drogue, which is a target to shoot at and I've seen him cut the drogue in half, go up and cut the wire with his shots he was so good. All by eye until the pilot sort of said, "Aah, that's enough." and he'd nick off.

02:24:00:12
An American aircraft followed down behind a Jap one day and Cazaly knocked them both over. The pilot got out of it and we were able to - the destroyer was able to pick him up. They were not supposed to come down that close. If they were that close you shot at them. The only way you survived.

Q: Was it easy to tell who was who?

A: One of the things you had to do was aircraft recognition.

02:24:30:12
You'd got off and do a course and they'd flash up silhouettes of the aircraft and you got very good at picking out all the Japanese aircraft which had names like Zeke and Val and Betty and what have you. They all had a name. From the silhouettes you could pick them unless they were coming out of the sun and they were hard to see.

Q: But you had to have instant recognition?

A: Really, yes. You had an officer in charge of the guns. Cazaly would shoot all down the port side and we had

02:25:00:16
a tripod main mast. Three legs main mast just aft of where his gun was and it had a section, a triangle that he could shoot through that triangle through to the starboard side. The captain would ring the check fire bell which meant the guns should stop. You'd hear the port pom pom chattering on and the old man would say, "Get me Cazaly!" and Cazaly would go up to the bridge and he was a reserve leading seaman. He was only in for the war.

02:25:30:10
He'd salute the captain and he'd say, "Cazaly when I ring the check fire bell, you'll stop!" and Cazaly would say, "Sir, if I can see them, I'll shoot at them." He'd salute and walk off.

Q: And the noise level?

A: Oh, unbelievable. I have a picture in the study of an artist's picture of Shropshire under fire and you might think that it's far fetched. It isn't. You would not believe what an aircraft

02:26:00:12
can survive and will fly through. You just see all this black bursts of fire and Cazaly used to load tracer in every now and then. Tracer lights up as it goes so he could - he used to call it hosepipe - you could follow where the tracer was going. He was just so good with his eyesight and shooting. He had a joystick control which meant he could lay the gun

02:26:30:11
and train it by himself. All he had to do was get his crew to load it, to keep it going. If he yelled they would run. He was absolutely superb as captain of the port pom pom.

Q: Now, you said that it was more frightening that experience than being sunk?

A: I thought it was. More personal, more intense and over a longer period of time.

Q: So obviously we really need to talk a lot about what happened

02:27:00:10
to the Canberra and where you were at that time?

A: Yes.

Q: What role were you performing on that ship?

A: I was a watch keeping officer which meant you had to be an executive officer with a watch keeping certificate from the captain merely saying you were competent. I had got mine in May 1942. I joined the ship in

02:27:30:11
December. I had done the 3 months with somebody else and Captain George Moore was the captain who gave me my watch keeping certificate. He'd gone off on 2nd May, I remember and we got a new captain, Captain Getting, who'd only just joined in May. It's interesting; a cruiser is a big ship 12000 tons, 80000 horsepower,

02:28:00:10
4 propellers. It's not like driving a car where you put your foot down and it goes. They take a while to work up. I was still - although I had a ticket I was still learning. One afternoon we were only 600 yards astern of the flagship and I was a bit out of station, astern station and we'd line ahead so the admiral's only got to look out and see that you're out of station and he'll send a dirty signal and the captain hates that

02:28:30:19
when the admiral says, "Get back in station!" The navigator came up who was a lieutenant commander and said, "Sub, you're out of station. For God's sake use some of that horsepower and get back in station." I went up a couple of revs and nothing happened. He said, "Look, you've got 80000 horsepower, use them." I went up a knot, nothing happened, I went up another knot and suddenly we started to charge up and before we know where we are we're about 300 yards instead of 600 yards and the old man, the captain noticed

02:29:00:11
what was going on and he came up and had a look and said, "Sub, I don't believe the Admiral has invited me on board for dinner. Get back into station." I got back again. But he knew I had to practice. After a while you get very good and you can look at it and know you're in station or you're not. You have a little station keeper where you can get the ship down, you can measure the distance exactly but you can do it by eye. These days you've got radar. It's very easy. You navigate by

02:29:30:11
radar. You've got global positioning. It was much harder in those days.

Q: So where were you physically positioned on the bridge?

A: On the bridge. Well, behind the compass. You've got a voice pipe down to the helmsman who is one deck below and he's also got the controls to the engine room. So you give speed and course orders to the seaman who's in charge of the steering and you've got two helmsmen,

02:30:00:21
telegraphsmen who will telegraph what speed you want to the engine room. You've got a voice pipe to the captain.

Q: When you say they telegraph it, is that literally?

A: It's an instrument which you move, 'Slow Ahead', 'Full Ahead' and it registers in the engine room. Also you say so many revs. You go up in revolutions. You had 4 propellers, 2 each side. 8 boilers with 2 boilers linked to each screw.

02:30:30:16
20000 horsepower could be generated through the steam going through the turbines that drive the propellers.

Q: So if you're travelling in convoy, how do they all manage to stay together. I mean??

A: In line?

Q: Yes.

A: They don't. They wander all over the place. You try and shepherd them and that was one of your problems. You'd wake up in the morning and you may have 30 ships and you've got

02:31:00:22
to - someone's drifted off and you've got to round them up with a destroyer if you've got one. When you first leave, you'll have a battleship, a carrier, half a dozen destroyers, half a dozen cruisers. When you get well out west of England or Ireland, they'll all nick off and leave one or two ships to take the rest of the convoy. Actually we travelled from Liverpool to Durban by going around in a circle. Circling the convoy going right round doing

02:31:30:14
much greater speed. There's an old saying, 'the speed of the convoy is the speed of the slowest ship' which is very true. If one ship can't do 14 knots and that's what's ordered still drop back. You've got to cut back the speed to what they can do.

Q: What about supplies during that?

A: You'd only carry what you could but in the Pacific the Americans had what they call the Fleet Train. You'd stay at sea for months. They'd bring a tanker out. You would steam

02:32:00:11
hooked up to the tanker and pump fuel across the 15 feet you'd be steaming apart or 20 feet. Keeping station on the tanker. Then they'd bring a supply ship up and you'd hoist in the supplies while you were underway.

Q: Getting across to Durban from Liverpool would take you how long?

A: 3 weeks.

Q: Was that at the speed of the slowest ship?

A: Yes, might do 10 knots.

Q: Because some of those ships could have actually done it quicker than that?

A: Oh yes.

02:32:30:09
They would try and get ships that were pretty well compatible in making up a convoy but you'd have a tramp steamer, you'd have an Orcades or they were taken over and they would vary from maybe 5000 tons to 40000 tons.

Q: Were U-boats [German submarines] the biggest threat?

A: Oh yes, and the aircraft. The Germans had a big flying boat called a Focke Wulf Condor. It could fly right out, miles out

02:33:00:06
into the Atlantic and their job was to spot the convoys and then home the U-boats. They'd string the U-boats out in a line across the Atlantic and there was gap that we couldn't cover. From the west with air cover and from the east with air cover and the gap in the middle and that's where they'd go. That's the gap until we got - we were able with. We put aircraft on - old Hurricanes and old Spitfires onto a merchant ship. Squirted it off

02:33:30:12
once and the pilot shot down the [UNCLEAR] and then bailed out hoping to be picked up.

Q: So it was acting like an aircraft carrier?

A: Well, a little catapult on the front of some ships.

Q: And it would??

A: Squirt it off for once.

Q: And that would be it?

A: That would be it. He'd go up, abandon ship, abandon his aircraft and be picked up.

Q: So they couldn't land again of course?

A: No.

Q: So how many planes did they lose like that?

02:34:00:14

A: They used the older aircraft I think and they just fitted a number of them. That was one way they closed the gap.

Q: Right, so it was a deliberate policy of abandoning those aircraft and just trusting that the airman could eject and??

A: Be picked up.

Q: Yes, so it was a pretty high risk mission?

A: Yes, indeed. Churchill [Britiah Prime Minister] did a deal with Roosevelt [US President] for 50 old

02:34:30:20
American destroyers. They took over the bases in the West Indies for 100 years and did a great deal for the Americans and we got 50 old World War I destroyers to help these convoy ships, anti-submarine ships.

Q: Actually I think I read that the Australia had a sea plane?

A: Yes, the Walrus, on a catapult.

Q: Was that the same set-up?

A: No, it could land and be picked up again.

Q: How would you get the plane back

02:35:00:13
onto the ship again?

A: Hoist it up by the crane.

Q: Were you ever involved in that operation?

A: Oh, later as a lieutenant you'd be in charge of that, yes.

Q: And so you would be in the middle of the ocean?

A: Yes

Q: In possibly heavy seas?

A: Well hopefully it wasn't too bad but you could lay an oil slick down. Oil calms water and stops it being so bouncy. So you'd drop some oil, make a slick and the aircraft would land in it.

02:35:30:15
You'd have the crane out and the pilot would get out and hook on his aircraft and we'd hoist him up. Sometimes it would crash into the ship and do a bit of damage and in fact our aircraft at Dakar was shot down by the French and we lost our crew in 1940.

Q: You lost your seaplane?

A: Lost our crew and the plane.

Q: During that operation in support of De Gaulle?

A: Yes. When Operation

02:36:00:11
Menace which was De Gaulle at Dakar, we lost our aircraft.

Q: What were they doing as part of that operation?

A: They were spotting our fall of shot onto the Richelieu and the cruisers in the ports.

Q: What was your feeling about that whole operation?

A: Frustration essentially. A, that we didn't have a force big enough, B, that the French were there and wouldn't do anything. We were shot at by the French. We were bombed by aircraft

02:36:30:12
that the French had been given by the Americans. We sank a destroyer there or a light cruiser the Fantasque. It was all over in about 6 or 8 minutes. The first salvo was over, the second salvo was short, then we hit and just blazed up. We went to pick up survivors and the submarine squirted off torpedos and we just left them.

02:37:00:09
They were French.

Q: But their own ships?

A: And submarines.

Q: They had submarines?

A: They had submarines in there as well.

Q: And did they fire?

A: Oh yes. One of the battleships got torpedoed. The [HMS] Resolution. That really was an absolute debacle. Destroyers being hit with a 9 inch shell going in one side with a little hole and blasted a hole on the other side you could almost drive a truck through.

Q: And in the end??

A: No, got nowhere.

02:37:30:11
Had to be abandoned. We didn't get Dakar.

Q: Was De Gaulle actually on one of the ships?

A: Yes he was. Yes.

Q: But he never obviously went ashore at that point?

A: No, he'd sent a motor boat off. I think they were badly advised. They were to drop leaflets and it was to be either sticky or happy. If it was happy it was fine and they signalled happy and we gaily went in and it was foggy. It was the only

02:38:00:11
time I had an action station below decks and I hated it. I was in charge of the 4 inch high angle control position and I had a pair of headphones up to the chief petty officer up in the director who could see. He said, "Oh the forts are firing at us. No it's short. No it's gone over." Then you could hear the shrapnel hitting the ship's side where the shells had burst and we were below the waterline. I really loathed that. It was claustrophobic and

02:38:30:17
I didn't like being below decks at all. We had that for 2 or 3 days. We were stuck down there and just having to listen. The French coloured the shell bursts. It was like, green from the battleship, yellow from the forts, red from the cruisers so that they knew what shots were landing. Where they belonged.

Q: Extraordinary. I think probably time for us to change the tape just about. Seems like a good moment to have a

02:39:00:11
break. That's terrific.

Mackenzie Gregory
0071

03

03:00:33:22

Q: Okay Mac, just listening to what were you saying earlier, there are a couple of things that I thought we could explore further. Going back to when you returned to Australia in 1941 and then you joined the Adelaide and you went up to Singapore on the Adelaide wasn't it?

A: No, Canberra went to Singapore.

Q: You were on the Adelaide.

03:01:00:18
You'd mentioned that there was an engagement with a German raider?

A: No, blockade runner. The Ramses.

Q: Was this ship disguised?

A: Yes she was disguised and flying another flag and our navigating officer had been Merchant Navy and said, "That ship belongs to such and such German line." He recognised the goal

03:01:30:19
posts where they ran their derricks from. We got a book of German ships and he picked it out and said, "That's the Ramses." We'd stayed well clear about 5 or 6 miles away having remembered the Sydney had gone too close to the Kormoran in November '41. Captain Esdale stood off and we asked them to identify themselves which they couldn't.

03:02:00:17
They didn't have the signals. You used to have 4 letters. You'd give the outside two the signal of the day and the other ship had to give the inside two out of the four. That was one method of doing recognition at sea. It changed regularly and we decided to open fire. It was interesting; she had a big 6 inch gun on the stern.

Q: Can you see these? When the ship is disguised, how do they disguise a ship apart from running false

03:02:30:17
colours?

A: Generally, sometimes they - well the German raiders used to put false funnels up. They would have woodwork, for instance they'd have guns within a container that looked like deck cargo and they'd drop down the sides of it and have a 6 inch gun there. This one really was not too well disguised. She was just running false colours and she had a 6 inch gun on the stern that didn't

03:03:00:14
open fire and we couldn't really understand this but when she went down it floated off. It was only a wooden dummy and these people were all ready and she'd been in Japan and she was loaded with tin and tea and oils and tungsten and all the things that Germany wanted and she was there hoping to run through - pretty lonely place, the

03:03:30:16
Indian Ocean and the Atlantic and pretty stiff if you get picked up. It just happened that we were with a convoy. We were taking a convoy up to - there was an oil rig for Aberdan we were taking up from Australia in merchant ships. We were going up to Ceylon to hand over to the British. You worked a certain part of the Indian Ocean and they worked a certain part. You'd hand over and we with a Dutch ship. After it was identified we opened fire from about 10000

03:04:30:16
yards.

Q: What sort of armaments?

A: We had 6 inch guns. Single 6 inch. It was very old cruiser built about 1922. Built in Australia opposed to our Perth and that which were all British ships. Perth, Sydney, Hobart, Canberra and Australia were all British yard ships. She was not sort of a front line ship and was there for convoy work and did quite a bit of useful work around there. Was a terrible

03:04:30:21
sea, ship would roll on a (UNCLEAR) and used to ship them over most uncomfortable. They then had charges laid so they blew her up as well so we had a combination of them. We took them aboard and put them down below. They'd all bought their suitcases which were crammed with German crosses which the sailors helped themselves to and they complained. The

03:05:00:16
old man made us give them all back again.

Q: You also said that there were some Allied captives?

A: Yes. That had been sunk by - the Germans had a number of armed merchant raiders, the Penguin, the Comet, the Kormoran was one and they sunk a lot of our shipping and they used to keep the merchant captains and keep them as prisoners of war. They were Norwegian and Dutch so they were

03:05:30:18
very pleased to be released while we slammed the Huns [Germans] down below.

Q: Tell me about what the feeling in the navy was once the news of the Sydney had come through and how was that news - was it rumour - there wasn't much known of course?

A: There still isn't a great deal known really of how it all happened. Not a great deal was heard about it during the war at all.

03:06:00:08
We knew she was overdue, we knew she was lost and they'd got a couple of Carley floats and they thought they had somebody on Christmas Island, a sailor they thought, a body from the Sydney but they lost 635 which was our worst. It was interesting, it would have been 1988 we had an International Naval Convention in Melbourne. We had about

03:06:30:15
several hundred come from overseas and I was given the task of seating them for lunch at the Southern Cross [Hotel] and I looked at the list and I found a lieutenant or a guy - I recognised the name - he was a professor from Berlin and I put him on my table. And

03:07:00:24
I picked a few interesting ones that were going to be on my table and he turned out to have been the lieutenant who was the flying officer in Kormoran and I sat him next to me and said "Tell me about the Kormoran." He wouldn't talk very much other than the familiar line that she came too close so we fired torpedos. She went off under fire and the last thing we saw was her burning in the distance and we sank and

03:07:30:13
we didn't see anymore. That's all I could get out of him which was the line that Captain Detmers had pedalled ever since. We made the mistake of not separating them sufficiently in the beginning and he was able to get to all his crew when we got them ashore. We took them up to Queensland, the officers. So he'd survived that and came back and became an engineering professor in Berlin and came to that. That was an interesting experience too

03:08:00:24
but I couldn't get him to talk.

Q: The Sydney was the premier battleship

A: No, she was a cruiser. Light cruiser. 6 inch cruiser.

Q: Oh right so similar to the Adelaide.

A: Yes but she had twin turrets. She'd sunk the Bartolemeo Colleone under [Captain] Collins in the Mediterranean. She was a glamour ship.

Q: Alright. Then you came back to change ship?

A: I went to the

03:08:30:12
Shropshire from the Adelaide.

Q: Oh, so you were on the Adelaide after the Canberra?

A: Yes. Yes.

Q: Okay. Well I want to take you back to your convoy trip to Singapore. You'd come back into Australia late 1941?

A: I came back December 1941. December 7th. Yes. This was about February, early February.

Q: What ship was this?

A: I was in the Canberra and we were escorting the

03:09:00:11
- was it the 6th Div [Division] that went into Singapore?

Q: 8th.

A: 8th. The 8th. We took not quite into Singapore. We left the convoy about half a day out. We got it through Banka Strait which is a very narrow channel just north of Indonesia, now Indonesia and they took them into Singapore, virtually into the bag [captured] straight away in Singapore. 19th February '42 and they all went in as prisoners of war.

03:09:30:16

Q: So can you remember what date you were in Singapore?

A: We didn't actually go into Singapore. We stopped just short.

Q: So that was in January?

A: It would have been just 2 or 3 days probably before and we came back through Batavia. Stopped there. I got ashore in now Jakarta and then we came back to Australia and round to Sydney where we did a small re-fit and as I said

03:10:00:14
we were there for the Jap submarine attack.

Q: Again how did that affect nerves and morale on the ship?

A: In Singapore?

Q: No in Sydney.

A: Absolute mayhem that night. It really was. The poor Japs were very unlucky not to get the [USS] Chicago. I think probably, the Chicago was a heavy cruiser but she was very top heavy which she looked like a battleship and I suspect

03:10:30:11
that they set the torpedos too deep and passed underneath her. That's the one that ran up and sank the [HMAS] Kuttabul which was a ferry being used as an accommodation ship alongside Garden Island. The torpedo I think hit the wall and exploded underneath and also damaged the Dutch submarine the K-9 which also happened to be around, charging up and down the harbour.

Q: They didn't really fire on the ferry? It was misdirected?

A: No. A torpedo that

03:11:00:13
ran the wrong way. Another one passed up onto the beach at Farm Cove. Of course one got caught in the net. They sank one and one got out. Never to be discovered with Sub-Lieutenant [Katsuhisa] Ban on board and never found it. Still haven't found it to the day. They'd had an anti-boom net across the harbour that wasn't quite finished and also had a hole for the ferry to go through and they had

03:11:30:13
loops on the bottom of the harbour which measured magnetic - the field of the ship as it went over and they read quite clearly read this was the submarines coming in and going out. But it couldn't be a submarine could it? It was probably the ferry. We were inept totally that night. The dockyard lights didn't go off until about 11.00 at night. Captain Cook Dock was ablaze. The ships were just silhouetted. It was beautiful and we were at No. 1 Buoy

03:12:00:12
in the Canberra. They were that close to Chicago they saw one of them. They had trouble keeping depth one of the submarines and it was bobbing up and down and she was that close they couldn't depress the guns close enough, down enough without knocking of their own guardrails. Then she got down, Ban got it down - I think it was Ban got it under control again and lined up Chicago but ran it too deep

03:12:30:12
and eventually Chicago got fed up and went to sea. We stayed at No.1 Buoy and I was officer watch that night again.

Q: You wouldn't have known how many there were?

A: Oh, had no idea. We didn't know what it was to start with. There were guns firing and Pinchgut [Fort Denison] was - searchlights. It was just absolute mayhem and they were very unlucky. Somehow we muddled through and we had only - other than the 23

03:13:00:21
who were on the Kuttabul when she blew up.

Q: On board, you must have thought you were fairly safe in Sydney Harbour before that?

A: Absolutely, particularly No.1 Buoy which was a few hundred yards from Man O'War steps which is round from where the Opera House now is. It was that close. It's the prime position for the number one cruiser goes to the buoy and there we were.

03:13:30:08
Just lucky.

Q: Did things change on board after that? How did your morale and the watch must have been doubled? How did it change the day to day life on board?

A: I think we became more alert. I think we probably had motorboats then going around the ship to make sure there weren't anybody trying to put a mine on board. You'd have a boat circling the ship. Then we had what you call the Hollywood Fleet which is the pleasure

03:14:00:19
yachts that were taken over by the navy for harbour patrol. They found - the lieutenant in charge of one of them actually found the submarine in the net and he asked could he open fire. Could he have permission to open fire instead of getting stuck into it straight away? It was the watchmen who found it. He sent a boat off and said "I think there's a submarine caught in the net."

03:14:30:15
I think they gave him an award of ?10 for alertness in finding it. Rear Admiral Muirhead Gould was an Englishman who was in charge of Sydney Harbour and I thought he made an absolute bog of it. Muirhead Gould was in charge of the Court of Enquiry when I came back after Canberra and I was not impressed. I was a humble sub-lieutenant and he was asking me to give judgment on my captain. How did the captain

03:15:00:12
perform at the bridge on the night and he'd been killed? That really set me up.

Q: You felt like asking him how he performed the night the night of the?.

A: Honestly. He had poor old Captain Bode [?] who was captain of the Chicago. He'd been away from his ship which was a battleship at Pearl Harbor. He was in command of a battleship and he was ashore when that happened. He was away with

03:15:30:13
Muirhead Gould having dinner the night the Japs attacked. In Canberra, at Gualdalcanal he was second - he was senior to Getting and he didn't take the lead which he should have after Australia went over.

Q: Let's go to that night. Take us through. You're in the Canberra. You've left.

A: Wellington. We went to Wellington.

Q: After Sydney?

A: Yes. We went to Wellington to pick up

03:16:00:16
the troops which were Marines and they were all young fellows.

Q: They were Americans?

A: American Marines under Vandergrift, Major General A. A. Vandergrift. He was a tough American Marine general. Given an impossible task almost with pretty well raw recruits. Six months before they were in boot camp. He had trouble in Wellington because all the supplies were wrongly packed. He had to

03:16:30:08
pull them apart and re-stow them. The wharfies went on strike, it rained. Everything was against it. They went off to Koro which is an island in the Pacific to do some landings, pretend landings and nothing went right at that. In the end they just said we got to go because King wouldn't give us any more time and they had very little time to plan the whole thing. Nobody really knew anything about Gualdalcanal

03:17:00:11
had the barest of maps and the Japs were in Guadalcanal and they were on Telagi which is a separate little island where they had a flying boat base. So August the 7th was D-Day and Canberra went to bombard Telagi and about 6 in the morning there were strikes from the carriers and they caught the Japanese flying boats on the water and knocked

03:17:30:12
all those off and put the Marines after the bombardment ashore at Telagi where they had a hell of a time because the Japs couldn't retreat and it took them a day or two to get hold of Telagi where on Guadalcanal they had absolutely bombed the daylights out of it with the 6 and 8 inch guns you throw a lot of lead. You can fire probably 4 salvos of 8 by 8 and each shell 256 pounds plus

03:18:00:16
bombs from the aircraft. They didn't have much trouble getting ashore and they got the unfinished airfield fairly quickly on Guadalcanal and then the Sea Bees went in.

Q: Sea Bees?

A: Sea Bees are the American Construction Corps and they made the landing strip out of interlocking metal strips. They laid it down over the beach or over the jungle. They'd run in a bulldozer, clear everything down and then put metal matting

03:18:30:17
which was the runway and they weren't too long before they had Henderson Field named after a Marine pilot who was killed at Midway I think and so the first night, that's the night of August 7, 7/8, we were given the task with Australia, Canberra, Chicago, 2 destroyers, the [USS] Bagley and the Patterson to patrol

03:19:00:16
up and down at 12 knots altering course without orders 180? to starboard on the hour. We'd do a patrol 12 miles up and 12 miles back from the edge of Savo back towards Guadalcanal up and down as a group. That's the south side of Savo Island which squats in the middle. You've got Guadalcanal coming down, Savo, an entrance to the south

03:19:30:09
and an entrance to the east of it. The eastern side was blocked off with the 3 American heavy cruisers, [USS] Quincy, Astoria, Vincenze and 2 destroyers doing a box patrol. A box is a square. They drove round a square at 12 knots perhaps 5 mile sides. Then about 20 miles away they're still landing the troops and supplies at Guadalcanal. All the troop ships with about

03:20:00:16
8 screening destroyers are anchored off Guadalcanal getting the stuff ashore on the beach. Night time is a good time because there's no aircraft. In the meantime the Japs had found out the landing was on and Mikawa who was Japanese admiral was in Rabaul with the 8th Fleet and he gathered up some 8 inch cruisers, some 6 inch cruisers a destroyer and came screaming down from

03:20:30:06
Rabaul. He was seen by one of our Hudson aircraft flying out of Milne Bay run by Flight Sergeant Bill Stutt who subsequently became the Chairman of the Moonee Valley Racing Club. Bill was about a 20 year old sergeant pilot flying out of Milne Bay. They had just moved up camping in tents a squadron of Hudsons to do patrols.

03:21:00:10
They were not told that Guadalcanal was happening. They told they might see some Japanese. He in fact came out of the clouds and there's this Japanese fleet. He broke silence to report them. The American naval historian, [Samuel Elliot] Morison subsequently wrote years later he didn't break silence. He staggered back, had his afternoon tea, had his tea, then was

03:21:30:13
debriefed, total lie. It so happened that when he broke silence, Milne Bay was being bombed and they closed down the station and he couldn't get through. When he did get back to report them it then went from Milne Bay to Australia to Canberra to Washington, back to us and it was hours before we even heard that they were in the area. A second Hudson

03:22:00:12
with Flight Lieutenant Milne saw them, got shot at, got hit but got back and all reported them differently and they didn't have much recognition practice. It was very difficult in an aircraft and they reported them having a couple of sea plane tenders with them. Now this threw everybody out because the day before an American carrier had shot down a Japanese sea plane

03:22:30:05
on an island to the north of Guadalcanal. Everybody believed that's where they were going to set up a sea plane position at Rendell Island north of Guadalcanal. They were seen by one of MacArthur's B17's but it was probably - I knew when I went on watch at midnight that the Japanese force had been seen but nobody believed they were making for Guadalcanal

03:23:00:10
and nobody believed they could arrive before the next morning. We had been under severe torpedo and aircraft high level bombing attacks for 2 days. We had been at our action stations very little sleep. We'd gone into the second degree of readiness which means half were at their action stations. Two turrets manned, 4 inch gun but the guns were not loaded but it only

03:23:30:11
takes you seconds to load. The Yanks were in an even lesser degree of readiness than we were. All the opinion was, it couldn't happen at least before the morning if they were coming down. So on the morning of the 9th we are doing the same patrol as the previous night. I had the middle watch which means I had to be on the bridge by midnight as the 8th turned into

03:24:00:11
the 9th August 1942. Sub-Lieutenant Dorborne handed over the watch to me and the captain was on the bridge and the navigator was on the bridge at that time. I had lieutenant commander in charge of the armament, Lieutenant Commander White but I was in command of the ship's navigation and safety as the officer watch.

Q: What's your rank at this stage?

A: Sub-lieutenant. I was 20.

03:24:30:15
I'd had it for 6 months so I was relatively new at it but I was competent. He said we were doing 12 knots. He told me the course. We would alter course 180? to starboard on the hour without signal. The Australia had been pulled to of the line by Admiral Turner and as Guadalcanal was 20 miles away Admiral

03:25:00:13
Crutchley, the Englishman but in charge of the Australian fleet and nominated second in command to Rear Admiral Turner who was in charge of the landing operations and over above that was Vice Admiral Fletcher in the carriers that were 300 miles south east and South East Pacific Command was Vice Admiral Chormley sitting away in Fiji who had not bothered to go to

03:25:30:13
the briefing at Coro but had sent a captain over. Fletcher wasn't too keen about the whole arrangement anyway and he said he didn't think it would be a success and he had already been sunk in two carriers before and he was apparently fairly tired. Anyway he was the overall commander. Out of the blue he suddenly rescinded on his promise to be for 3 days and said he was running out oil, which he wasn't. He said he was

03:26:00:11
running out of aircraft, which he wasn't and actually nicked off with the carriers before we had approval. He didn't tell Turner he was going. Turner intercepted his message and that's the only way we knew. So Turner had called Vandergrift from the land and Rear Admiral Crutchley from the Australia to meet him on board his ship off Guadalcanal, 20 miles from where we were. So rather than take a boat in the middle of the night he went off about half past nine

03:26:30:12
in the evening so we were left with the Chicago, the Australia and the two destroyers. I was also told Captain Bode in Chicago had decided to stay astern of us and we would lead. So we've got the Bagley 2500 yards on our starboard bow.

Q: That's a destroyer?

A: Destroyer, American Destroyer. Patterson 2500 yards

03:27:00:12
on our port bow.

Q: What's the armament on these destroyers?

A: 5 inch guns and torpedo tubes. About 3000 tons.

Q: And the Canberra is about?

A: 12000. 10000 nominally but she was a Washington Treaty which meant they had to keep them under 10000 but they'd gone heavier than that with extra armament, radar and all sorts of additives and we had a bigger crew. We had about 800 and later in the war Shropshire had

03:27:30:09
1280 on a ship designed for 600 or 700 but that's jumping ahead. Dorbone also said there'd been aircraft engines overhead during the night and the water was quite phosphorescent and you could see your destroyer's wake. Lights - phosphorous in the water lights up the ship's wake. So from above you would be able to see a course very clearly.

03:28:00:12
The captain had been told about the aircraft and they thought they were probably ours because we had sea planes and the carriers had planes although we didn't really know the carriers were not doing night flying at that time. We are bereft of any air cover for the morning and subsequently they decided, but we didn't know then, that

03:28:30:14
they would withdraw in the morning. The whole force would withdraw and leave the Marines onshore without a great deal of food and without all their supplies. We couldn't afford to stay there without air cover. Everybody was fairly dirty on Fletcher which I have continued to be my whole life. However. So we did our first hour and we altered course. The navigator told me he wanted to be called at 1.45am

03:29:00:16
so he could fix the ship before we turned at 2 o'clock and we were making towards the Savo end. There was no moon. It was misty. Visibility was not good. There were dark clouds scudding around and it was a pretty foreboding sort of feeling. There was sort of an air about the thing and we were tired. It was 1.43am because I had to look at the clock.

03:29:30:12
I'd just looked at the chart table clock. Now the chart table is a little table with a covered hood on it with a little light because you couldn't afford to show a light. You could stick your head in there, look at the chart and at a clock and I was watching the time because I had to give the navigator a yell in 2 minutes time to get him up out of his sea cabin which is immediately below the bridge. He'd sleep with his clothes on and take his shoes off. The captain was also in his sea cabin at the end of a voice pipe fully dressed. You only had to

03:30:00:11
lift the lid of the voice pipe and say, "Captain Sir." and he'd be, "Yes." straight away. He was as quick as that. There was suddenly an explosion to the north which was probably 20? or 30? on our starboard side. I think it was one of the Japanese torpedos that had been fired a long way away exploding and the Japs had the long lance torpedo which is a 24 inch diameter torpedo opposed to our 21 inch

03:30:30:16
diameter. They carried a big load of explosive.

Q: And that's fired from a?.?

A: Cruiser or destroyer. Submarines only ran 21 inch but the long lance ran fast and ran an immense distance and was the best torpedo in the world. They were running on enriched air which was virtually oxygen. It is very volatile, mixed with oil it is liable to blow up. Canberra was the last

03:31:00:11
cruiser in the British navies to ever run enriched air torpedos and we'd got rid of them because we thought they were a safety hazard. We happened to be the last ship to get rid of them. We'd gone to an air driven torpedo opposed to an oxygen driven torpedo. Then the port lookout reported seeing a ship ahead in the distance. I couldn't see it. Lieutenant Commander White, the

03:31:30:12
principal control officer in charge of the armament couldn't see it. The signalman couldn't see it. Then we called the captain. I called the navigator, the gunnery officer. We went to action stations. You sound the action alarm and everybody goes to their full action stations. We loaded the guns. The principal control officer suddenly saw 3 ships. He told the

03:32:00:11
- you had what was called an Enemy Bearing Indicator. It is a control that when you follow with binoculars on it the director that controls the guns automatically follows it. Suddenly there is an enormous explosion. Probably where the Walrus is on the aircraft and the 4 inch gun deck. The 4 inch anti-aircraft guns.

Q: Forward or astern?

A: No, astern of the bridge. About

03:32:30:14
amidships. Just after the funnels or level with the funnels there is a raised platform that had 2 to port side and 2 to starboard side with ready use ammunition and that went up. The aircraft's on fire and it had bombs on it. Then the bridge is suddenly - I saw torpedos coming down our starboard side. We went hard to starboard. The captain was on the bridge, very quickly went full ahead. We gone hard to port he went hard to

03:33:00:11
starboard. The navigator came up and he was a bit slow getting up because he had to put his shoes on. He then becomes the acting officer of the watch. He took over from me. He said, "I've got the con." which means I'm then absolved from being in control of the ship and the navigator's got it under the captain's direction. My action station was in the fore control which is immediately above the bridge but up above it so you look down onto the bridge.

03:33:30:12
I was to really work out the ship's enemy's course and speed visually and pass that down to the torpedo to the controlsStation. By the time I get there the bridge has been hit on the port side.

Q: Is this from the air now?

A: Beg your pardon?

Q: From the air?

A: No no. Japanese cruisers. They'd approached in line ahead. They'd swept round the south of Savo Island

03:34:00:20
and we had 2 picket destroyers outside of Savo Island. The [USS] Blue and the [USS] Ralph Talbot that had been picked because they had the best radar and the best anti-submarine in the destroyer flotilla. They were stationed so they would come together leaving a small gap. Well the Japanese saw them visually, slowed down, steamed through the middle. The

03:34:30:12
approaching pack of dingoes on the unsuspecting sheep. They were not seen by either Blue or the Talbot. The [USS] Jarvis who'd been clobbered the day before, another American destroyer had been torpedoed was limping around Savo on her way to Australia. They saw the Jarvis, slowed down. Jarvis didn't see them. The Japs were supposedly not able to see at night. They were no good at night fighting.

03:35:00:11
They had slanty eyes. They could not see. In fact they trained lookouts especially. They had special night glasses. They picked us visually at 18,000 yards which is 9 miles away and nobody saw them. They are now something like 3,000 yards from us blasting away with 8 inch guns. The one that came under the bridge decapitated the gunnery officer,

03:35:30:17
mortally wounded the captain and filled up the torpedo officer, Lieutenant Commander Plunkett Cole with shrapnel who was dashing around the bridge saying, "I've been shot in the bum!" Midshipman Loxton was an absolute mess. He was the captain's mid-shipman. Dreadful stomach wound. Midshipman Sanderson filled with shrapnel.

03:36:00:12
The navigator, Lieutenant Commander White had gone. The gunnery officer had relieved him and he got away before that. I had to wait for the navigator. I walked off the bridge, walked around about 3 shells immediately under the fore control. The plot was wiped out and the navigator had told them to send an enemy report. We were off the air before that could happen and the plot was wiped out. Immediately behind the fore control was

03:36:30:07
the Signal Bridge. That got hit. We had had something like 25, 26 8 inch shells all down the port side. In between the boiler rooms and we stopped. We started to take a list to starboard. Some said they could feel a torpedo hit. I wasn't aware. I knew there'd been some sort of a bump but I was never absolutely sure that we'd been torpedoed but apparently post-war it's been -

03:37:00:10
Bruce Loxton who wrote a book "The Shame of Savo" who was the captain's midshipman and he survived and I'll talk about him in a minute - believed we picked up the Bagley's torpedo from our starboard American destroyer. That's the only torpedo we hit. The Japs fired something like 20 long lance torpedos and we dodged the lot. Two went on to hit the Chicago, one took off 16 feet of bow and the other didn't explode. So Chicago

03:37:30:11
went charging off into the night. We didn't see her. The Bagley went off. Patterson was the only one to open fire and engage the enemy. Patterson just about at quarter to two used her talk between ships, which was the ship's radio, where she said, "Warning, warning, warning, strange ships entering harbour." In fact we didn't have TBS [Talk Between Ships]. Canberra wasn't fitted. Can you believe it? We are working

03:38:00:11
with Americans with ship radio and we haven't got it so we didn't get that.

Q: Okay, well it's pretty exciting stuff. We've got to change a tape now so we'll do that quickly and keep going with this night.

Mackenzie Gregory
0071
04

04:00:18:14

Q: Okay, so?

A: Well I got up to fore control and I could look down on the bridge and I could see the captain lying down on the bridge. I could see the gunnery officer was obviously

04:00:30:12
dead and it was just carnage. We started to list to starboard and I had a sailor standing close to me probably as close as you are and he suddenly moaned. He'd been hit in the head with a lump of shrapnel; you know it was that sort of close. I can remember with my binoculars looking out and I could see the trunked funnel of a big Japanese cruiser, this big funnel and it was a Migami.

04:01:00:12
I recognised it as a Mogami type cruiser just blasting away about just over a mile away. I can remember saying "My God this is bloody awful!"

Q: Do some people panic in this situation?

A: No. Not really. No no. I suppose you got a nasty feeling at the bottom of your gut, it's churning over. I did say earlier, everybody had a job to do and

04:01:30:10
if you let somebody down it's not going to work and I think that's what drives you on. You might be scared as hell but you're going to do your job.

Q: And does that override any - if your best mate is lying there needing some medical attention but you've got a job to do?

A: I think you'd do your job first. I gave this young man some morphia. We had a pack of morphia in the first aid kit up there and I think he survived in the end. I'm not sure, I didn't really find

04:02:00:14
out what happened. We then abandoned the fore control because it was - I'd worn my cap up there and taken it off and thrown it in the corner and it was a very special cap because I'd come back from England and the navy issued caps were just ordinary and at that time the officer's cap badge in Australia was stamped out of