Chapter One

The convoy which moved out of Halifax Harbour on that cold April day in 1941 comprised ships of a wide variety. There were merchantmen, tankers, several cargo-passenger ships, slick refrigerated cargo ships down to dirty old tramps all assembled to run the Nazi blockade and get their cargoes to England.

Our escort, two destroyers and a corvette, bustled around getting the ships into line. When everything was sorted out, we found the convoy was sailing in four columns – eleven ships on the two outer lines and ten each in the inner. The Karamac was in the second starboard, along with the tankers and vessels carrying the more valuable cargoes. On our left was a merchantman flying the special red flag indicating munitions and explosives. The closeness of this dangerous fellow-traveller didn’t please the crew. ‘If the fugger goes up’, said one, ‘she’ll blow us all to bloody hell’.1

The Karamac was nearly three months out from Sydney, Australia. In that time she had travelled to Christchurch, New Zealand, across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal, much to the wrath of Goebbels who declared her a ‘ship of war’. Having evaded the U-boats in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, she was now on the last leg of her journey.2

She was an old ship. A plaque on her foredeck testified that she had been born in the Clyde in 1908, had served through the First World War as a troopship, and had again taken up the job in 1939. Her gross tonnage was 17,000. It was claimed that she was the longest cargo-passenger vessel in the world.

When she passed through Sydney Heads three months earlier, she had been loaded to the plimsoll.3 At Christchurch, sweating watersiders had still further crammed her holds with urgently required cargo for war-torn England till it was assessed she held twenty thousand tons of vital goods in her bulging belly.During buffeting from a three-day gale in the Pacific the Karamac’s cargo had shifted slightly so she now had a ten-degree list to port which gave her a rakish air, like a plump housewife returning from market with one too many under her stays.

In addition to the urgently needed supplies aboard were a hundred and eighty-two members of the Royal Australian Air Force, comprising a hundred pilots, fifty navigators and thirty-two straight air gunners bound, like the cargo, for England; reinforcements for the sorely-pressed Royal Air Force.

On this particular day, eight gunners known as The Mob were gathered on the fo’c’sle4 watching the navy get things organised.

Over the three months’ voyage the gunners, particularly The Mob, had been an oppressed minority, for even in this tight little world the ‘class distinction’ of pilot, observer and gunner was already firmly established.5

To understand this, it must be realised that ninety-nine per cent of pupils who entered an Initial Training School, or ITS, had their hearts set on being fighter or bomber pilots. In the inevitable sorting and culling that goes on after examinations, those who missed out on the pilot’s course hoped for a posting as an observer. The mathematical wizards got first preference here. Bods who did not make these two grades were then posted as wireless air gunners – WAGs for short. There was usually no direct posting as plain air gunner.

When a pilot failed, he slipped a cog and could carry on as an observer. If he still missed out he descended one down the ladder and became a WAG. If he couldn’t make the grade here, he was given the choice of some twenty-odd postings, such as PT instructor, driver, military policeman, motor boat rescue crew, air gunner, clerk, etc. If he wished to remain aircrew, he became a gunner or, if he was fed up with the RAAF he could give it away, and, according to his inclinations, choose whatever position suited him. In other words, he had reached the end of the line and the nature of his postings offered in lieu of an AG testify to the low official opinion in which he was held.

With the AG’s who sailed in the Karamac there was a big difference. They considered themselves very hardly done by, for they were compulsory volunteers of the ‘You, you and you’ system, a subject that always raised the blood pressure and fighting spirit of the meekest member of this little band.6