Extract from Corvette magazine

 

HMAS BENDIGO - UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS

This article is reprinted from "HMAS Bendigo" - Author Wally Eves

 

Around 7.30 p.m. on Saturday the 20th March 1944, HMAS Bendigo slid quietly out of Langemak Bay on the north eastern coast of New Guinea and took up her escort position ahead of a large American Tug-com e-submarine-rescue vessel, the USS Courcal, which had in tow three enormous steel watertight pontoons.

 

Little imagination would be required to appreciate how painfully - and dangerously slow such a convoy could travel, particularly in the event of a sudden emergency; a tug dragging the dead weight of three huge unpropelled objects through the water, each about eight metres square and four metres high, but the pontoons were required urgently by the American forces in their assault on the Admiralty Islands to act as landing platforms for military hardware, which could not otherwise be got ashore.    Being attached to the American Seventh Fleet at the time the task of delivering this seaborne merchandise had fallen to corvette Bendigo.

 

Before leaving Langemak, Bendigo's Captain Lt. Cmdr. Dowson, had been informed by the Port Director that heavy fighting was still going on between the Americans and Japanese in the Admiralty Islands and it was not known who held control of the harbour entrance, information that not only underlined the urgency of getting the equipment to the Admiralty’s but also the dangers involved in the exercise.

 

It was a warm tropical night as the small, cumbersome convoy left Langemak under a star studded sky on a velvet sea and with hardly any wind. Visibility was excellent and even without binoculars the outline of the New Guinea coast, which the convoy followed for the first few hours of the journey, was easily discernible in the darkness.  This early part of the journey was to take the ships past two coastal points, Aitape and Wewak, which were later on to involve A.I.F troops against Japanese forces. To HMAS Bendigo that night however those two places were of no greater importance than reference points on a map, yet were significant in an incident which was to take place later that evening! Because of the tugs burden the convoy was able to maintain a speed of only two and half knots so, in order to afford a wider protection cover for her charge, and also to maintain a reasonable engine speed, Bendigo made longer than normal submarine search runs in her zig zag course.

 

At 11o'clock I took over the last hour of my Watch on the Asdic adjusted the headphones to sit snugly over my ears and settled into the tiny "hut" on Bendigo's Bridge to resume the relentless, monotonous, underwater listening search for submarines as my predecessor had been doing before I came on Watch and my relief would continue doing after midnight. It took several minutes before I realised a somewhat animated conversation was going on through a voice pipe between the Officer of the Watch, Sub Lt  Murray and the radar operator in his room below the Bridge.     Despite the muffling effect headphones have on outside noises however the "Subby's" voice was nonetheless audible. Eventually I gathered that our radar operator on duty, A.B. Laurie Shanks had picked up a contact of some kind which was located off Bendigo's port bow, but still a fairly long way ahead. Partly as a matter of normal procedure in such a situation and partly as a matter of concern I listened with particular attention for any unusual sounds, propeller beats, etc. each time the Asdic sound beam moved close to the bow on its "sweep" up the port side, but could hear nothing unusual.

 

The rhythmic throbbing of a ship's propellers, (which sound much like the heavy regulated noise of a steam train speeding through a tunnel), travel further underwater than the single note of an echo through the Asdic which, at that time, had an effective range of two to three thousand yards (approx. 2840 metres). This meant I would pick up the sound of propeller beats - or "hydrophone effect" as it was called - before receiving echoes back from the Asdic transmissions.

 

After about ten minutes or so of the voice pipe conversation between the Sub Lieutenant and the radar operator I sensed the "Subby" was becoming a little agitated so it wasn't surprising when he summoned the Captain to the Bridge. Quickly familiarising himself with details of the situation the Skipper wasted no time in ringing the Action Alarm bells and in less than a minute Bendigo was made ready to fight.

By that time the range of the radar contact had drawn closer, and was maintaining a constant speed of approach towards the Bendigo, obviously unaware there was anything in its path - which rather added to our anxieties!

 

The Asdic Officer, now on the Bridge for Action Stations, came straight over and asked if I was getting any hydrophone effect and I told him I wasn't. The atmosphere on the Bridge was becoming what might be described as pregnant! There was conjecture on the Bridge among the Officers as to whether contact was a ship of some kind or a submarine travelling on the surface. The Captain stated there were definitely no Allied ships or submarines in the immediate area so the chances of this mysterious object being a friend was highly unlikely.  And our charge was capable of a speed of only two and a half knots.

 

Radar room information being fed to the Bridge established two concrete facts - that the approaching craft  had no way of telling someone  was  in its path, which  had already been assumed, and secondly its estimated course - based on compass bearings deducted from the radar reports - indicated the craft would pass Bendigo's port side, albeit very, very close.

 

A tense atmosphere descended over Bendigo's Bridge as everyone waited for something to happen which might reveal positive identity of the oncoming craft - then suddenly I caught the soft sounds of hydrophone effect in the distance.  Reaction on the bridge was electric, the Captain immediately wanted the relative bearing – which I was in the process of giving him anyway – and the Asdic Officer made a dive for the switch to turn on the amplifier so everyone on the Bridge could hear what I was receiving over the headphones.  

         

From experience I could tell the craft was definitely not a big, heavy relatively slow moving vessel but a lighter, faster moving object.    By now it was also established from the radar reports that the object was too big to be a submarine on the surface so it had to be a ship of some kind.    Then, after what seemed an eternity, metallic echoes began coming through my headphones.   The range was exactly two thousand seven hundred yards! Almost simultaneously with my reporting of this the operator on the Asdic Range Recorder began calling out distance readings as they appeared in continuity as small purple coloured dashes on the litmus type paper rolling slowly through the machine.

 

And soon Bendigo’s bridge became a scene of melodramatic bedlam, backgrounded by the amplifier as it pounded out the hauntingly rhythmic sound of beating propellers – getting louder and louder as the mystery craft drew closer; against this the intermittent yelling of the Range Recorders voice giving out distance bearings, my own loud contributions of relative bearing variations and radar reports being relayed through the voice pipe, all this jumble of noise in syncopation with the clear, metallic echo notes returning from the phantom vessel through my headphones, and rapidly increasing in tempo as the range was shortening.  

 

A whole potpourri of sounds in a kind of crazy unison providing a satanic symphony that could be heard nowhere else on earth except in another situation identical to the one we were in. “Range eight hundred…..range seven hundred and fifty ……range seven hundred …..” so the voice of the Range Recorder continued its monotonous litany until finally the unidentified craft was too close to register distance and my Asdic went into “instant echoes”.  Within seconds of this happening the Recorder unit would automatically energise the buzzer signal and the depth charge parties on the quarter deck would let a batch of depth charges go overboard in their pre-set patterns.    But this was not a submarine attack and the depth charge parties had been instructed to ignore the buzzer signal.    The Bendigo’s gun crews were more interested in these proceedings!

 

At the point of “instant echoes” I climbed out of the Asdic “hut” and peered into the darkness across on the port side of the Bridge when suddenly the look-out over there yelled “a large, dark object off port bow”, then someone else reported it and someone else again.   

 

The tension was dreadful.   The Captain’s voice reverberated around the Bridge, “God Almighty”; he roared incredulously, “It’s a bloody Japanese destroyer”!  

 

Horrified, we could all see the unmistakable silhouette of a destroyer racing past so close it seemed only an arm’s length away and I’m suite sure it wasn’t in my imagination that I could hear the wash of its bow wave and the surging of the churned up water that lay between the two passing vessels – it was frighteningly real! In fearful anticipation we waited for the expected flash of gunfire from the enemy, but it never came.   In silent disbelief we watched the sinister shape disappear back into the night off our port quarter as quickly as it had appeared.

 

For HMAS Bendigo, although at the “ready” to fire on command from the Bridge, to have done so on an opponent with about four times the corvette’s firepower would have been suicidal – and after all, our prime responsibility was to get the cumbersome pontoons to the Admiralty Islands.

 

When the destroyer had gone our First Lieutenant, Lex Dalgleish, asked the Skipper his explanation for such an extraordinary incident and Lieutenant Commander Dowson offered two – either the destroyer’s Captain mistook the five shapes in the darkness, Bendigo, the tug and the three pontoons, as ships or, and much more likely, the Jap Skipper was under strict orders not to betray his presence in the area under any circumstances because at that stage of the war the Japanese were landing provisions, troop replacements and medical supplies at Aitepe and Wewak, which we had passed earlier that evening, under cover of darkness – the same darkness that almost certainly saved HMAS Bendigo and her ship’s company from destruction as two enemies passed each other secretively in the night.

 

 

Wally Eves - Watch on the Asdi