RANCA NSW
HMAS BOWEN J285
Namesake: Town of Bowen, QLD
Builder: Walkers Limited
Laid down: 9 February 1942
Launched: 11 June 1942
Commissioned: 9 November 1942
Decommissioned: 17 January 1946
Battle honours:
Pacific 1942–45
New Guinea 1943–44[1][2]
Fate: Bowen paid off on 17 January 1946 and was sold for scrap to the Hong Kong Rolling Mills on 18 May 1956
Class & type: Bathurst class corvette
Displacement: 650 tons (standard),
1,025 tons (full war load)
Length: 186 ft (57 m)
Beam: 31 ft (9.4 m)
Draught: 8.5 ft (2.6 m)
Propulsion: triple expansion engine,
2 shafts
Speed: 15 knots (28mph)at 1,750 hp
Complement: 85
Armament: 1 × 4-inch gun,
3 × Oerlikons,
Machine guns,
Depth charges chutes and throwers
Extract from Corvette Magazine
Little Jap gun is pride of Bowen RSL
by Des Webster
Thanks to the wartime crew of HMAS Bowen and two Vietnam veterans, the Bowen RSL Memorial Club is the proud owner of a little Japanese mountain gun. Its war record is not known, but its post-war record is known and is colourful in the extreme.
On 14 October, 1945, the Japanese at Seleboboe Island, just south of the Philippines, surrendered officially to the Allies, and during the ceremony the crew of Bowen were spiking the fixed-position garrison guns and dumping all Japanese arms and equipment off-shore.
They came across a small Japanese mountain gun and decided to give it to the city of Bowen as a memento of their ship. On 11 December HMAS Bowen arrived at Bowen and next morning the ship’s company towed the little gun to the town hall where the captain presented it to the mayor. With great ceremony it was given pride of place at the entrance to the building.
Many years later a new town hall was built and the gun was presented to the RSL, where again it was given pride of place in front of the building. However, one Anzac Day some larrikins hitched it to a utility and rode it around the town, damaging the spokes of the wheels in the process. To prevent a recurrence, the RSL cemented it in concrete.
The weather took its toll and over the years it deteriorated, with the aid of drunks shoving their beer cans down its barrel and stubbing their cigarettes on it. The RSL club went into liquidation with debts of $750,000 and the little gun’s future looked black.
The years rolled by and two Vietnam veterans, Robbie Dyson and Tek Burrell, took pity on it. They were both pensioners suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, and they were both highly qualified tradesmen. They borrowed a pneumatic drill and jack hammer, dug the gun out of the concrete and set to work on it, sand-blasting the rust and paint, re-spoking the wheels and bringing it back to pristine condition. They dismantled it and got all the mechanisms working again, except the breach – they left that out in case somebody got their fingers caught in it.
In May, 2000, I visited Bowen and went looking for the little gun. I eventually found it in a place of honour on a red carpet in the foyer of the now financial RSL Memorial Club. It is under cover and is never to be moved. It is in a condition far superior to when we delivered it to the mayor 55 years before.
The gun was 70-mm (2.756 inches) calibre and was a highly successful weapon, combining fire-power with mobility. It could be used for either direct or indirect fire and could easily be handled by a few men. It had very simple sights and was rarely used against targets that were not clearly visible. It could also be used as a mortar.
In jungle warfare, a small team would drag or carry it forward, blaze off a few rounds at a known target, then move quickly on to a new position or out of the area altogether. Although it was only a small artillery piece, it often had an effect on enemies that was quite out of proportion to its range and projectile weight.
Its vital statistics were :
Barrel length 0.622mm (24.5 in);
Elevation minus 10 degrees to plus 50;
Maximum range 2,745 metres (3000 yards).
Extract from Corvette Magazine
Corvette sailors bathed the kids
and nursed them to sleep
Service in corvettes required skills like seamanship, navigation, engineering and gunnery, but the crews of five corvettes demonstrated that they had other skills too, as nurses and mothers. The corvettes were HMASs Bowen, Glenelg, Rockhampton, Junee and Latrobe. Immediately after hostilities ceased they were sent to Menado, a port on the northern tip of the Celebes, to embark prisoners of war and internees.
They arrived at dawn on 14 September and began the task of getting the pitiful survivors of Japanese prison camps to medical treatment and rehabilitation at the Allied base at Morotai. It was a harrowing experience for the corvette sailors, as Able Seaman Jack Lloyd, of HMAS Bowen, explained in an interview with the Women’s Weekly.
“We embarked 100 internees. Two thirds of them were children and the rest were women, mostly Dutch. The sight of them was something I will never forget,” he said. “The children were between the ages of two and 10. Many had bayonet wounds – the Japs would beat them for stealing coconuts that had fallen to the ground, and pin them to the trees through the arms with a bayonet.
Most of the children’s faces were swollen with beri-beri and nearly all the internees suffered from malaria. The women had terrible tales to tell – they had been living far worse than slaves. The original plan was to place them on the mess-deck, get them comfortably settled and fed and then to clear out and leave them alone, but it didn’t turn out that way.
When we got to sea most of them were sea-sick or were sick because the food we gave them was too rich after what they had been used to, so we shifted the worst cases to the upper deck, where they could get some fresh air.
I took charge of a little nine-year-old girl and laid her on a stretcher. Then her foster- mother came along so I got another stretcher and gave it to her. Then somebody brought me a tiny little Dutch boy and for the rest of the trip I adopted all three and stayed up with them all night. I got a bed pan and three little towels and for the next hour or so I had my time cut out with the little children, but eventually I nursed them off to sleep.
The mother couldn’t get to sleep, so, being a mere sailor, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but to stroke her on the forehead and then she started to weep and I felt like crying myself. Even the awkward clumsiness of my attempt to help was so much better than what she had been used to and that is why she broke down.
For the rest of the night she told me about herself. She was a Dutch woman of 26 and spoke English well. She had lived most of her life in Java and had married a Dutch official who was transferred to Menado. In January 1942 the Japs captured the island and placed all white people in internment camps. In March her husband was beheaded before her eyes, and then a few months later her baby died of beri-beri.
The women worked 14 hours a day in the fields and those who were unlucky enough to get beri-beri in its worst stages were beheaded. Both her parents were beheaded for that reason.
At various times during the night I had to leave them to get cold water and I noticed that most of my cobbers were doing much the same as myself, either nursing children or trying to put the women to sleep. There were very few of the ship’s company who had any sleep that night, but I am sure we would all have done it for a week straight for those poor unfortunates.”
In the Bowen captain’s Report of Proceedings, he said: ”Special mention is made here to the superb performance of the ship’s company, who voluntarily, to a man, gave up their mess- decks and wardroom spaces, where stretchers, hammocks and bunks were made up to give the women and children as much comfort as possible. Each child was bathed by volunteers and every assistance was given to the adults. Not one sailor slept that night. The internees were all landed safely at Morotai and the whole ship’s company felt they had done a worth-while job".
Some weeks after the event it was disclosed from captured Japanese charts that the ships returning to Morotai had steamed straight through the northern extremities of a Japanese minefield.
BOWEN ANSWERS AN SOS
Bowen began her preparations for peaceful activities on September 8 1945 when she handed over 80 depth charges to the depot ship Poyang.
At 6 p.m. next day there was an SOS from SS Samuel French, which had picked up a distress signal from a C47 aircraft that had crashed near Salebobee Island that morning. Bowen was sent from Morotai to Salebobee in the nearby Talaud Islands, arriving next morning. The colonel in charge of Japanese forces on the island was interrogated and it was found that a PBY Catalina aircraft had picked up the crew of the C47 at noon the previous day. Bowen was back in Morotai next day, refuelling for the following day, when personnel and medical stores were taken aboard.
Menado was reached early the following morning and Bowen anchored off the boat harbour with other ships of the force. In the afternoon, orders were given to embark civilian internees and their effects and take them to Morotai. By 6 p.m. one male, 39 females and 56 children were aboard and the ship set off. The Ships Company gave up their Mess Deck space and prepared stretchers and hammocks to make the passengers as comfortable as possible. On arrival on board each child was bathed and cleaned by volunteers and the adults given every assistance. The crossing was made in rough weather and most passengers were seasick during the night. When Morotai was reached next afternoon, 15 September, the passengers were transferred to Army ambulances.
Two days later Bowen took aboard 56 AMF officers and men to rendezvous on 21 September outside Keopang Harbour, Timor, with HMA Ships Warrnambool and Gladstone. Troops and stores were unloaded and Bowen headed for Darwin. The remainder of the depth charge equipment was unloaded and more than 14 tons weight of gear was taken ashore. The trim was adjusted by flooding the after trimming tank with seawater. Stores taken aboard for Ambon included sixty-one 44-gallon drums of diesel, petrol, kerosene and lubricating oil and five tons of potatoes. The CO, Lieut-Commander Berry was put ashore into hospital suffering from a stomach ulcer and Lieut. C. J. West took command.
The ship departed on 25 September and arrived at Ambon three days later, Stores were transferred to Glenelg. Cootamundra was given 40 tons of fuel oil. Then Bowen departed for Morotai towing Anaconda. Weather was ideal and a good speed of 9.7 knots was maintained reaching Morotai on 1st October for a boiler clean.