The genesis of this book is modest. It began in fact with a radio broadcast. ‘ML310’ was an episode of a serial called ‘On Active Service’, broadcast on New Zealand’s national radio network in early 1960. Imagine the moment a young boy, listening to the wartime experiences of ordinary New Zealanders delivered over the wireless in highly melodramatic tones, hears the name of his father – who then speaks! It was enough to justify a lifetime of enquiry.
I spent the school holidays in the 1960s travelling with my father up and down the gravel back roads of the central North Island, selling tins of re-refined motor oil out of the car to anyone who needed it. Unsurprisingly, during these long and invariably winding journeys, stories were told and questions were asked. After the radio programme the questions became more thoughtful, and over time insights were offered, snippets were revealed and answers were garnered. Naturally, even more questions arose. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know.
One source of my growing understanding lay in my father’s books. The titles speak for themselves. Ion Idriess and Tom Jones’s The Silent Service, Hilary St George Saunders’s The Red Berets, Roy Farran’s Winged Dagger and Wavy Navy, edited by Lennox Kerr and David James concentrate on special units. Len wasn’t a specialist in this sense, but he found himself in special circumstances. Ralph Barker’s Down in the Drink, Paul Brickhill’s Escape or Die and Eric Williams’s Wooden Horse offer remarkable stories of escape. Singapore Tragedy by S E Field describes life in Singapore before the war and vividly details the collapse, uniquely, from a New Zealander’s perspective. Noel Barber’s Sinister Twilight and Richard Gough’s The Escape from Singapore further describe the collapse. Alfred Allbury’s Bamboo and Bushido, Kenneth Harrison’s The Brave Japanese and Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo describe the prisoner-of-war experience. Two texts by Edward, Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido and Scourge of the Swastika, are essentially summaries of the war as perpetrated by Russell’s enemies.
It was clear to me that my father’s thinking about the war was broad, and extended well past its end. The authors that Len and Tim Hill suggested, privately, best reflected their personal experiences were Ion Idriess and Rohan Rivett respectively.
I am given to colonising second-hand bookshops, and have acquired a number of invaluable texts, including The Royal New Zealand Navy: Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–1945 by S D Waters, Blue-Water Rationale: The Naval Defence of New Zealand 1914–1942 by I C MacGibbon, The Rise and Fall of the Singapore Naval Base, 1919–1942 by W David McIntyre, the wonderful book about the RNVR by Brian Lavery, In Which They Served, and the essential Anzacs at War by John Laffin. My collection includes classics like Duff Cooper’s Old Men Forget – a first-hand account of events surrounding the fall of Singapore, from the inside.
The contribution, to the historical record of the RNZNVR from those who served – Jack Harker, John McEwan and Ken Cassells – is vitally important, as is that of Gerry Wright.
Of many possible sources, Australian Peter Brune’s Descent into Hell presented me with the best current interpretation of the Malayan campaign.
There are photographs. And there is the internet, of course, the marvellous tool that allows us to uncover information from the farthest, most labyrinthine recesses of our collective knowledge.
★ ★ ★
For me the most valuable sources of information – the most authentic – were the men themselves. It was my great privilege to have known not only Len, of course, but also Lofty Neville, Tim Hill and Johnny Bull. I can still hear the sound of their voices. In fact, Lofty Neville’s voice can still be heard, in the Navy’s Oral History archive. I knew others, too: men who served on the light cruiser Achilles and in the Solomons. The reader should not think that any of them gave information easily – but what little they did give was not easy to forget. Over tea, Johnny once told me ‘We didn’t row so much as bail for our lives.’ This image stayed in my mind ever after. On another occasion, fifty years after the event, Johnny confessed to me that he still carried the burden of survival, and the fate of his men continued to haunt him.
One of the voices in this narrative is that of Richard Pool, the young Sub-Lieutenant and survivor of the sinking of Repulse. Pool’s 1987 book, Course for Disaster, speaks of the fall of Singapore and the escape of ML310. Should the reader look closely, he or she will find differences between Pool’s narrative and mine. The reason for this is that my father and Johnny Bull disagreed with Pool’s account in several respects. Businessman and analytical thinker that he was, Len once wrote a letter to Johnny Bull in which he detailed, item by item, those aspects of Pool’s book with which he took issue. When Johnny read the letter, he countersigned each point and wrote the words ‘I concur’ beside his initials. In choosing the direction of the narrative, I went to primary sources and the original reports of proceedings and documents of record first, wherever possible. Taking this and, most significantly for me, Len’s letter to his Commanding Officer and Johnny’s subsequent response, into account, I leaned in favour of their account.
What is powerfully evident to me is that these men never forgot their experiences, but maintained a dialogue throughout their lives in search of the truth. Their silence was not due to absence of memory. In fact, many dedicated a significant part of the rest of their lives to understanding and preserving the facts; not for posterity, but privately, for their own peace of mind.
It is a sad fact that, at the time of writing, there is very little on record about those New Zealanders who served in Singapore. Furthermore, there are no records held by the Navy Museum for either the 80th or the 81st Fairmile Flotilla. It is as if the service of those young men of the Royal New Zealand Navy Volunteer Reserve was superficial, lacking in distinction, or of insufficient merit to warrant inclusion in our history. That is not the case. Happily, there have been other writers who have focussed on this omission, and it is hoped this modest effort will also help reverse that travesty.
I believe it is only appropriate to honour these men by using their real names. Not having had the privilege of knowing Richard Pool, Ernest Spooner or Ian Stonor, among others, their characters were difficult for me to express. The Admiral seemed to me to be a man of dignity and conscience, a staunch servant of King and country, and Ian Stonor a leader of men. In bringing these characters to life, I have tried hard to be fair-minded.
Otherwise, in joining the dots, I have made every effort to conform to the facts. These include the vexing story of New Zealand-born Patrick Heenan, whose treachery is best described in Peter Elphick and Michael Smith’s book Odd Man Out. It is unsurprising that such a devastating element of the Singapore story can have remained obscured for so long. Seeking the truth was difficult, and aspects like time, date, number and spelling offer enormous potential for error and contradiction, which seems to expand exponentially according to the amount of source material one has to hand. I still can’t be certain exactly who was on the crew of ML310, for example.
Perhaps the most valuable sources – over time – were, of course, the wives. As a boy growing up in the 1950s, I was regularly told by my mother, ‘Eat your Vegemite. It saved your Uncle Tim!’ I did not realise at the time of course, but that was a reference to Tim’s prisoner-of-war experience. Years later, in preparation for this narrative, Ava prompted me over things I had no knowledge of, or found difficult, pre-empting one line of enquiry with ‘You mean the gold?’ In between, the facts began to present in similarly small portions. Somewhere I even have a single Singapore Straits dollar bill.
The children too made huge contributions, particularly Tim’s older daughter Christine Dwight, and Johnny’s daughter Anne Heise, both of whom tolerated my random communications and offered heartfelt encouragement. Anne was able to deliver a wealth of written material.
I must acknowledge Michael Wynd, researcher for the RNZN and Petar Djokovic, researcher for the RAN, not to mention staff at the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Dutch Naval Archive in Amsterdam.
Dean Parker has been a particular source of inspiration and support. My friends and mentors Christopher Johnstone, author and arts administrator, and Jo Emeney, poet and educator, have both been tolerant listeners and invaluable sounding boards for my literary pretensions.
My deep gratitude goes to Huia Publishers and Creative New Zealand, who saw some potential in my manuscript, granting me a Te Papa Tupu award for emerging Māori writers; mentoring in the form of Mary McCallum, who provided stability, clarity and every encouragement in a wonderfully empowering partnership; and a very patient publisher in Eboni Waitere.
Finally, nothing would be complete without acknowledging Susan Haywood, classicist, educator, linguist and grammarian, who brought a rigour to the project that defies measure. She is also my wife (which helped). This book would never have been completed without her.
Nor would I.
David B Hill
Freemans Bay
April 2018