The Scrap Iron Flotilla by Mike Carlton. William Heinemann. 448pp. $34.99.
Mike Carlton loves the Royal Australian Navy. And that is not too strong a way of putting it.
His love is revealed on almost every page. Some might call it a passion, some an absorbing interest, some a lifelong enthusiasm, but it is love. Carlton writes with wondrous knowledge of the ships, which he knows intimately, the men, likewise, and the traditions of which he knows more, I suspect, than many navy men.
This is Carlton's fourth book of naval history, written over more than a decade. His is a committed love. Pleasingly to readers of Australian military history, Carlton writes in the Bean tradition. This is not top-down history. A stoker can claim Carlton's attention just as much as a commander-in-chief. We meet men, from all parts of a fighting ship, whom we come to know. We celebrate their achievements, rejoice in their survival, mourn their loss. In other words, this is engrossing history.
There were five ships in the "scrap iron flotilla", an insult tossed off by Lord Haw-Haw, the Nazi propagandist, and embraced by the sailors as a true badge of honour. Not unlike Haw-Haw's sneer at the "rats" of Tobruk which became the quickly embraced moniker of the Australian soldiers there.
The flotilla consisted of Stuart, Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager and Waterhen. They were well past their best when pressed into service in the Mediterranean. Boilers blew up, steam pipes buckled and broke, turbines ground to a halt on all the ships not once but all the time. Readers will thank Carlton for taking them deep into the bowels of the ships for there were real heroes down there.
Stuart, the leader of the pack, receives most of the attention in the early part of the narrative. Its captain, Hector Macdonald Laws ('Hec') Waller is the central character of this book, and rightly so. He is almost the perfect Australian naval commander: skilled, humane, firm, approachable, cheery and inspired.
That Stuart survived unscathed is a tribute to Waller's immense ability as a captain and a sailor. Waller attracts the attention and admiration of the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, for whom Carlton also has an immense affection and admiration.
From time-to-time Carlton raises his gaze from the sea to look at the land war and the development of strategy in London. He is no fan of Winston Churchill whose strategic errors, allied with his supreme self-confidence, caused disastrous losses in Greece and on Crete and immense danger to the flotilla. That Wavell, and probably Churchill, lied to Robert Menzies and Thomas Blamey about the use of Australian troops in those theatres is well known in the story of Australia at war, but Carlton brings a special vehemence to his account.
And then there was Tobruk. With the Australian defenders clinging to a small parcel of land, gallantly holding up the German advance, only the navy could supply them with the guns, ammunition and supplies an army will need. The scrap iron flotilla played a crucial role in the Tobruk "spud run" shepherding the fuel tankers and supply ships into Tobruk harbour from Alexandria and Mersa Matruh.
Carlton has described in worrying detail the size and structure of these little destroyers where the comfort of the crew played no part in the design. Privacy non-existent, bathrooms not provided. Deeply unpleasant. When action starts the structure of the ships is a large part of the problem.
By now, the Nazi air force had near total dominance of the skies and hammered every convoy, most of them very small, seeking to resupply the Australians at Tobruk. Perhaps Carlton's accounts of the fearful bombing of the ships may become repetitious for some readers. But it is the certainty of trouble that begins to awe the reader. To suffer such horror once would be awful, but voyage after voyage after voyage. The courage of every sailor and officer on the spud run is simply stupendous.
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To round off his account of these ships Carlton takes each of them to the end of their story. A couple are destroyed in warfare, others survive to be sold off as scrap. This was the fate of Stuart and a cruel fate it was. To have survived so much and to end so ignominiously shows for how long Australia had needed a maritime museum.
The last chapter of this truly magnificent book is a surprise. Carlton imagines Hec Waller being entertained on the current HMAS Stuart Mark III. So much would have been familiar to him, but so much is also beyond his imagining.
In this short piece of writing, the final appendix, Mike Carlton shows how well he understands the continuity of the Royal Australian Navy across the generations. And the extraordinary changes in personnel and technology.
It is the latest of his love-letters to a navy that has served Australia so well.
