Liberty ship configured as a landing ship and intended for the invasion of Europe, which by then had happened. The interior included troop decks with metal framed canvas cots four or five high, and on davits along the sides she carried assault landing craft — LCAs — manned by Royal Marine crews and designed to carry forty or so men from the ship to the beach. With several other landing ships, we were going to the Pacific to show the Americans that, with the war in Europe well in hand, the Royal Navy was coming to help them defeat Japan. And so I went to war, sailed around the world, saw many interesting places, and had many interesting experiences which I would not have wanted to miss. But life in the navy was never comfortable, the arbitrary discipline was hard to endure, and the class distinction between officers and men was a hangover from past centuries. But looking back on my career as a warrior, I doubt that I made a scrap of difference to the war effort — or, if I did make a difference, I’m not sure whether it was to the advantage of the Allies or the Axis.
My first job in the Empire Spearhead was in the supply office where I was a clerk entering columns of figures in ledgers. That ended when, bored to tears, I made an error that took the chief petty officer days of work to discover and correct before he could balance the ship’s books. One up for the Axis, I suppose. I was thereupon banished to work as a manual labourer, more or less, in the holds where the stores were kept. I much preferred it to bookkeeping. I had other duties, one of which was to mix and ladle out the lemonade which was issued instead of the traditional lime juice as a protection against scurvy. With the luck that has often attended me, I happened to be doing that job on the foredeck on a golden summer morning when we sailed up New York harbour, to dock in Manhattan — the land promised not by God but by Hollywood. After bombed, blacked-out, rationed Britain, the bright lights and well stocked stores of New York were an extraordinary experience. We worked hard to store ship for the Pacific, and to prepare to take aboard the American sailors and soldiers we were to ferry to New Guinea, but on shore leave with mates I managed to visit The Stage Door Canteen where we saw no stars but encountered a puzzle which remains to this day: On every table there was a can of condensed milk, and nobody seemed to know why.
The Americans, black soldiers and white sailors, came aboard, a band on the dock played “Anchors Away,” and off we went into the wild blue yonder, or in fact south and through the Panama Canal. By that time, the Yanks, who were fresh from training camps in a land flowing with steaks and ice cream, had encountered British naval rations and cooking. There were mutters of mutiny, but the presence of Royal Marines with rifles discouraged any such ideas. As the weather got warmer, life below deck for the crew and passengers became difficult. Instead of slinging hammocks in the traditional way, we were assigned to the canvas cots intended originally for troops on short trips to the invasion beaches. The sun beating on steel decks turned the troop decks into ovens and we tossed, turned, and grilled on our cots, stacked one on top of the other. By the time we reached Bora-Bora, an island in French Polynesia which had become a refueling base for ships and aircraft, the idea of a run ashore with dusky maidens with Parisian style was attractive. But it was not of course to be. We were told that there was so much venereal disease on the island that we would be allowed no contact with the island population. Instead, the landing craft would take us to a remote beach for swimming. Better that than nothing, until I came as close to drowning as ever I have in a lifetime of swimming. As young men will, we were wrestling in the surf when a shipmate got one arm around my neck, forcing my head under water, while with the other arm he fought off another mate. All my struggles seemed to him to be just part of the game; to me it became life and death, but fortunately he let go before I expired. From Bora-Bora we went to New Guinea to launch our passengers into jungle warfare which probably made the Empire Spearhead look like a cruise ship.
Our next stop was Cairns in Northern Queensland, now a popular resort, but then a frontier town with raised wooden sidewalks and swing doors on the bars. Australian troops recently returned from the Middle East were doing jungle training nearby, and they didn’t appreciate the fact that Americans by then were pretty much occupying their country. The arrival of the British navy added to what already a dangerous national mix in a small town. The bars had plenty of beer but few glasses so everybody had to drink out of bottles with the tops cut off, and prostitution was legal. One evening Australian soldiers who seemed to feel they had not received satisfaction for money in a brothel dismantled a large brass bed and threw it piece by piece into the street, to the applause of an admiring crowd, including me. That was more or less harmless, but there were dangerous street fights which I took care to avoid.
Our job was to pick up Australian troops and take them on training landings down the Australian coast before delivering them to New Guinea. We sent in our landing craft to bring them out to the ship, and I watched with awe as enormous men with rifles and packs, plus a mortar barrel or a piece of a machine gun on their backs, clambered up the scrambling nets we let down the side of the ship. Climbing those nets looks easy when you see it on a newscast, but the rope forming the net sags and swings and I found them difficult even when wearing swimming trunks. But I suppose that’s why they did jungle training: to become tougher and stronger than I ever was or would be. The first night aboard the Spearhead, on the deck under the Pacific moon, the Australians sang soldiers’ songs and then, inevitably, “Waltzing Matilda.” Even I with my a solid tin ear was moved.
More practically, it soon became apparent that our LCAs were too small and light to ride Pacific rollers. Once or twice, embarrassingly, a roller carried one up the beach and left it stranded. So after a time we were reassigned to the scores of ships which followed the U.S. fleet into action, carrying supplies and reinforcements. In this way we participated in the invasion of Luzon in the Phillippines and observed, from a reasonably safe distance, the Japanese suicide bombers attacking U.S. ships. Crocodiles were a more immediate threat: On a swimming party on an island in a river mouth, we saw far away down the beach a Jeep racing towards us; it arrived in time to tell us that the other side of the island was swarming with crocs which liked on occasion to roll in the surf, as we were doing.
As more and more British ships arrived in the Pacific, whatever symbolic importance the presence of our landing ships might have had ended, and we headed for Sydney, on our way home. But by then I was suffering from an unheroic condition, athlete’s foot, known in the navy as footrot, which kept getting worse despite the best efforts of the ship’s doctor. He had in fact been more successful in treating my eyesight. I had worn glasses for years and was handicapped when I sat on and broke the only pair I had while we were in some remote part of the Pacific without an optician in sight. The best the doc could do was to say that in the ship’s little library there was a copy of a book called Better Sight Without Glasses, by Aldous Huxley, as I remember. The basic idea was that poor eyesight was caused by lazy muscles that wouldn’t focus the eyes properly, and that eye exercises could correct that. Without specs, the alternative to falling down a hatchway or some other shipboard disaster was to make my eyes work better, and they did. It was years before I again needed glasses.
But no such luck with the footrot, and at Sydney I was discharged into the skin disease ward in a naval hospital, right next to Rose Cottage, the navy’s name for the venereal disease ward. Life in the hospital was a good deal better than on a ship, and some of my fellow patients spent hours every day irritating the skin disease the doctors were trying to cure. Rubbing the milled edge of coins into the skin was supposed to work a treat. We enjoyed the presence of female nurses although it was entirely understood that they reserved their social life for officers; played cards on a bedspread in which the incriminating evidence of gambling could be swept up and hidden in a second, read, yarned, and took our treatment every day. My treatment was soaking my feet and ankles in some concoction which gradually brought the disease under control, although it could not cure it.
When I was allowed shore leave — the navy goes ashore even from a hospital on land — I was commissioned by the ward to smuggle back bottles of cheap wine, called plonk. It was winter in Sydney so I wore my issue raincoat and concealed bottles in the deep pockets. The problem was that tropical rain and heat had weakened the stitching and I feared that unless I kept hold of the bottles they might easily fall through. That of course entailed keeping my hands in my pockets, which further entailed
