Merchant Ships associated with RAN in the 1939/45 War

The special requirements of the war saw a great many merchant navy and civilian vessels put to defence purposes. Among the largest ships utilised in this way were the Atlantic liners Queen Mary (82,300 tonnes), Aquitania (45,518 tonnes) and Mauritania (37,879 tonnes), which arrived in Sydney in April 1940 for conversion to use as troop transports. Work on these ships was carried out concurrently over only three weeks - Queen Mary alone being completed in an amazing fourteen days, after which it embarked 5,000 troops for overseas. In February 1941 the Queen Elizabeth (85,344 tonnes) arrived to complete a conversion begun at Singapore. Another eleven vessels ranging in size from 6,800 tonnes to 26,400 tonnes were also fitted out in Sydney for the troop ship role.

Kanimbla and Manoora viewed from Westralia at Leyte Gulf October 1944

As soon as the war began, the Navy resorted to requisitioning other privately-owned vessels to overcome shortages in the number of ships available for its direct needs. The coastal liners Manoora (11,000 tonnes) and Westralia (8,230 tonnes) were fitted with seven 6-inch (15 cm) guns and commissioned as armed merchant cruisers in the RAN in December 1939 and January 1940. Three other such ships - Moreton Bay, Arawa and Kanimbla - were similarly requisitioned at Sydney by the Admiralty for use in the same role. Although commissioned into the Royal Navy, these ships were crewed by RAN reservists.

The RAN's new auxiliary cruisers were initially stationed in eastern Australian waters, but within a few months were released for service on the China Station, Manoora arriving in March 1940 and remaining until relieved by Westralia the following month. Both vessels were back in home waters by mid-1940, the Westralia operating out of Fremantle. When Italy entered the war in June, Manoora was shadowing the Italian merchantman Romolo off the Solomon Islands. Overtaking the enemy ship on 12 June, Manoora called on it to stop but its frightened crew scuttled the vessel instead. From January 1941 Manoora also began service in the Indian Ocean.

HMAS Manoora engages the Italian vessel Romolo, 1940. (Frank Norton).

In mid-1942 Manoora was paid off and began conversion to the role of an Infantry Landing Ship (LSI). Westralia followed suit early in 1943, and when Kanimbla became available from the Royal Navy in April it, too, was prepared for this new role. All three ships saw service during allied landings in the islands to Australia's north, at places such as Arawe, Hollandia, and Morotai. All three also participated in the 1944 Leyte operation and the 1945 landings at Lingayen Gulf. Later in 1945 they were involved, both separately or together, in operations in the Borneo area: Tarakan, Brunei, Labuan and Balikpapan.

Another important use found for a few civilian vessels was as hospital ships. Three popular passenger liners from pre-war days were taken over for use in this role: Manunda, Wanganella and Centaur. After undergoing conversion of their facilities, these were crewed by merchant marine personnel and carried Army doctors and nursing staff. Though subject to joint Naval and Army control, they are perhaps more correctly regarded as military rather than naval units. A small Australian medical and nursing staff also served on the Dutch hospital ship Oranje from mid-1941 until March,1943.

The first of the hospital ships, HMAHS Manunda, was commissioned in July 1940 and made its maiden voyage to the Middle East in November; over the next ten months it made another three trips to the same destination. In January 1942 the vessel was sent to Darwin, where it remained awaiting orders. It was still in the harbour when Japanese bombers came over the town on 19 February.

Because Manunda was anchored close to vessels which were targets for attacking Japanese bombers, it too found itself under fire. A near-miss sprayed shrapnel across its decks, killing four people on board, but this was soon followed by several hits which destroyed medical and nursing quarters and started fires. Twelve members of the ship's crew were killed, along with a nursing sister: eighteen crewmen and another sister were seriously wounded, and there were some 40 other minor injuries.

In the midst of the chaos of that first Japanese air raid, the presence of Manunda became a god-send. Some of the hospital personnel manned lifeboats and set about rescuing badly wounded men in the water, while launches brought other injured personnel to the ship which effectively became a casualty clearing station. In the face of the clear and constant danger to the ship and everyone on -it, the calm and efficient conduct of Matron C. Schumack would later result in her being awarded the Royal Red Cross. Although damaged and its crew depleted, Manunda was able to evacuate casualties south to Fremantle the very next day.

After a refit at Adelaide in August Manunda made the first of 27 trips to New Guinea. The second of these found it in Milne Bay on the night of 6 September when a Japanese naval task force entered the harbour to engage allied targets ashore, during which the freighter Anshun was sunk. Faced with the dilemma of whether to continue showing lights to ensure the vessel was identified as a hospital ship, or turn them off to avoid marking it as an easy target, the captain chose to remain illuminated. While the Japanese fired over the Manunda while engaging other targets, and exposed it to the glare of spotlights, the ship itself was not attacked.

Wanganella became the second hospital ship when it was taken over in May 1941. Previously used on the trans-Tasman and Pacific passenger runs, in June 1940 it had rescued survivors from the liner Niagara after that vessel hit a mine near Auckland and sank.

After an initial trip to Singapore, Wanganella then made several trips to the Middle East - at one time finding itself in the middle of a bombing raid on Suez.

April 1944 found Wanganella at Bombay, India, during the calamitous occasion when an ammunition ship three kilometres away caught fire and exploded, causing at least 3000 casualties. Helping local hospitals to cope with a disaster on this scale, the ship's theatre staff worked 36 hours without a break, and the vessel stayed in the area to act as a casualty clearing station.

A final task of special poignancy for both Wanganella and Manunda involved the repatriation of Australian prisoners of the Japanese. The state of health of many of the men recovered after years of captivity was distressing, and necessitated special care during the voyage home - often deliberately slowed to allow time for patients to return to some sort of normality.

Converted to the role of hospital ship early in 1943, the vessel had made a number of trial runs along the Australian east coast during March and April, before undertaking its first medical voyage to Port Moresby. On 12 May 1943 Centaur left Sydney bound for Port Moresby where it was to collect casualties from the fighting in the Buna-Gona-Sanananda battles and deliver the 2/12th Field Ambulance for a tour of duty in New Guinea.

In the pre-dawn hours of 14 May the ship was off the Queensland coast, roughly 65 kilometres east of Brisbane, the Red Cross insignia painted on its sides fully illuminated. At 4.10 a.m. a torpedo from a Japanese submarine struck the Centaur's oil fuel tank on the port side. An enormous explosion followed, practically ripping the ship in two and causing it to sink in barely three minutes. There was no time for a distress call to be sent, nor for many below to reach the decks. Of the 331 persons on board, only 63 survived to be rescued 36 hours later; the 268 lives lost was the heaviest toll suffered in a submarine attack in Australian waters during the war.

The lone survivor among the hospital ship's female nursing staff was Sister Ellen Savage. Although injured herself, she had provided an inspiring example of fortitude and strength to those about her while they waited for help to arrive. Assisting in distributing the meagre amount of food and water available, she led the group in prayer and gave what medical attention was possible in the circumstances. Her bravery was subsequently recognised by award of the George Medal.

Other merchant ships were taken over from the first days of the war for use as auxiliary minesweepers. Initially just three vessels were involved, but by the end of September another five ships had been taken up from trade and used for the same purpose. Eventually the total of steamers and tramps in the minesweeping fleet was 36. As many as eight vessels were requisitioned from the
Pyrmont (Sydney) company of Cam & Sons, while the North Coast Steam Navigation Company provided five and three other companies each provided three. Most were returned to their owners at the end of the war, apart from a few purchased by the RAN.

Stationed in groups at the port of each State capital, and Newcastle and Darwin, the minesweepers were manned almost wholly by members of the RAN Reserve. These were, as one writer observed, 'an odd collection of but nevertheless gave valuable service, fulfilling minesweeping and later boom defence and patrol requirements.

Three of the auxiliary minesweepers became war losses, the Patricia Cam (305 tonnes) which was bombed off Wessell Island, east of Darwin, on 22 January 1943 by a Japanese floatplane. Six of the 23 men on board (six of whom were civilian passengers) were killed or fatally injured and the little ship was sunk. For half an hour the aircraft circled the survivors, directing machine-gun fire at
before landing on the sea to pick up one person (Rev. L. N. Kentish) for questioning; he was subsequently executed at Dobo, in the Aru Islands, the following month.

Also lost - indeed, the first RAN vessel sunk during the war was HMAS Goorangai (226 tonnes), which went down on 20 November 1940 after a collision with the vessel Duntroon in Port Phillip Bay. Its entire crew was lost in the accident.

Among the vessels taken over for mine warfare purposes was Bungaree, owned by the Adelaide Steamship Company. Requisitioned in October 1940 and commissioned into the RAN in mid- 1941 as a minelayer, this ship was responsible for laying minefields at Port Moresby, Torres Strait and Great Barrier Reef. Returned to a civilian role from 1947, it was sold several times before ding days after striking a mine in the Saigon River, Vietnam, in 1966.

Y et another 60 yachts and other private craft were taken over by the RAN for wartime use on patrol, escort or examination duties. As with the auxiliary minesweepers, patrol craft operated from bases established at the principal ports in every State, and also at smaller coastal centres. Others served in waters north of Australia. One of the most notable of the latter was Kuru, a motor vessel of 56 tonnes, which was used to support coastwatchers in the Northern Territory before being commissioned in December 1941. During the following year it made a number of crossings to Timor, as part of the effort to support Australian commandos fighting the Japanese on that island, before providing patrol and boom defence duty in Darwin's harbour defences. It fell to Kuru to rescue the survivors of the ill-fated Patricia Cam in January 1943.

Although the RAN had some purpose-built boom defence vessels when war began, it was found necessary to add to this number by pressing civilian craft into service. In 1941-1942 three former Sydney Harbour ferries, a wooden lighter and a schooner were requisitioned for use. The Kara Kara, originally built in the 1920s for use as a vehicle ferry in Sydney Harbour, was sent to Darwin as a boom gate vessel and suffered minor damage during the first Japanese air attack on that town. Also used at Darwin from 1943 to 1945 was the former passenger ferry Koompartoo.

Yet another 34 vessels were requisitioned from private ownership for use as naval support ships. In this category were: six stores ships, three depot ships, two ammunition ships, one repair ship, one transport, two minefield tenders, eleven tugs, one tender, one target vessel, three small survey ships, one cable repair ship, one accommodation vessel, a coal hulk, and 21 air-sea rescue boats. Perhaps the most famous of these is the depot ship Kuttabul (445 tonnes), which became the only victim of the Japanese submarine raid on Sydney in 1942.

Commissioned in February 1941, the former harbour ferry was sunk when a torpedo fired at MN the US cruiser Chicago missed its mark and exploded against the sea-wall under Kuttabul. Nineteen naval ratings were killed and another ten injured.

Now one of the most famous small ships of the war, Krait forms part of the National Maritime Museum display at Darling Harbour, Sydney.

No discussion of civilian vessels pressed into war service would be complete without mention of the 69 tonnes motor vessel Krait. Formerly a Japanese fishing ketch called Kokufu Maru, this craft had fallen into Allied hands on Japan's entry into the war. In September 1943 the vessel was a key part of a daring plan to take a 14man party from Exmouth, Western Australia, to carry out a raid on enemy-occupied Singapore.

Carrying six operatives of the Allied Intelligence Bureau, and a crew under the command of a RAN Volunteer Reserve officer, the Krait succeeded in evading Japanese patrols. On 26 September the AIB personnel set off in canoes to attach limpet mines to the sides of Japanese ships found in Keppel Harbour. Before dawn the next day exploding mines disabled seven enemy ships totalling 37,600 tonnes; only two of these vessels were actually sunk, however, as the remaining five were subsequently repaired and brought back into action. Nonetheless the raid, Operation 'Jaywick' as it was known, was regarded as a success. An attempt to emulate it a year later was a disaster.

Vigorous lobbying in post-war years for the preservation of Krait, as a memorial to the brave men who had risked so much in 'Jaywick', succeeded in having the vessel brought back to Australia in 1964. Entering Sydney Harbour on Anzac Day 21 years after the events which made it famous, Krait was welcomed by a crowd of thousands. It is now on display at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, a fitting tribute in its own way to the many innocent naval craft which had been improvised as warships during the great 1939-1945 conflict.