We Were Pirates by Robert Schultz

Author:Robert Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2010-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Pirate Poetry”: At Liberty in Australia

In the six months before the Tambor’s arrival in Western Australia in September 1942, the area had become one of the Allies’ main bases of naval operations, a development which the Australians welcomed. The country had been shocked two days after the Pearl Harbor attacks when the Japanese sank the Prince of Wales and Repulse, two British warships sent to the South China Sea by Winston Churchill to protect the island continent. As the Japanese rampaged through the South Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942, destroying Allied bases and overrunning islands and atolls with virtual impunity, the Australians felt increasingly vulnerable to a Japanese invasion, and abandoned by the British. Australian prime minister John Curtin bitterly declared that his countrymen “would now look to America, free of any pangs as to [her] traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

It was, ironically, the Japanese who did the most to make Curtin’s prediction come true, by pushing American forces relentlessly to the south. After the Cavite Navy Yard was destroyed, the Asiatic Fleet and its submarine command moved to Surabaya, in the Dutch East Indies, and from there to Tjilatjap on the southern coast of Java; after the Japanese navy drubbed the Allies in the Battle of the Java Sea, the closest port available was in Fremantle, a small town near Perth on Australia’s western coast which Admiral Lockwood once compared to “a typical Kansas boom town.” Captain Wilkes set up a sub base there and established his headquarters in nearby Perth, the largest city in Western Australia. One of Wilkes’ first orders was to send the submarine Permit to evacuate General MacArthur from Corregidor after the Allied disaster there in March 1942. Always the showman, MacArthur stood up the Permit, preferring a more theatrical departure on a PT boat to an underwater exit, but the Permit did evacuate thirty-six code-breaking experts from the island. On its way to the new Fremantle base, another U.S. sub, the Sailfish, sank a 6,400-ton maru near Bali on March 2, and two days later the S-39 sank a large fleet tanker in the Java Sea. Eleven of the old S-boats patrolled the Solomon Islands for a time from a base in Brisbane, on Australia’s east coast. Although they weren’t equipped for the heat and humidity of the South Pacific, they proved surprisingly effective, sinking several Japanese ships, including the heavy cruiser Kako. By the end of 1943, with the Japanese driven out of the Solomons and Allied fortunes on the upswing in the South Pacific, the Brisbane base was shut down and all U.S. submarines were based in either Pearl Harbor or Fremantle. The main task of the Fremantle subs was to hunt down the tankers ferrying oil to Japan, so that any warship that escaped Allied firepower would eventually die of thirst.

At first the move to Australia was not popular with the Tambor crew. The fourth war patrol had left them exhausted and frustrated, and it

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