Sailors and gentlemen.(A Merciful Journey, by Marsden Hordern)(Book Review)

A Merciful Journey, by Marsden Hordern; Miegunyah, 2005, $49.95.

THE EXPERIENCE of many Royal Australian Navy men in the Second World War was to serve with scanty training and in poorly-charted waters in a makeshift fleet, covering a huge area of Australia's coast, as well as the waters around New Guinea and the Pacific islands.

By fortune and the logic of events they had hard, wearisome and often dangerous duties with relatively few opportunities to cover themselves in glory. But they did a vast amount of work which had to be done and which played a vital part in victory.

In A Merciful Journey Marsden Hordern, who has won acclaim for two previous books of Australian maritime history, tells of joining the wartime Navy in 1940 and rising to reluctant command of an eighty-foot Harbour Defence Motor Launch during and after the island campaigns. These HDMLs, despite their name, operated far from harbours in New Guinea and the islands as miniature warships, along with the slightly bigger Fairmile motor launches and an assortment of other craft, purpose-built and otherwise.

Hordern, the son of a clergyman, seems to have been "gently reared". As well as being an account of war, this is also a fascinating portrayal of growing up in middleclass pre-war Australia. He went, like many others, from a comfortable, modestly-privileged background into a savage war. He points out, as an example of the moral climate of the Pacific war, that one vessel he served in had a human skull wired to the mast (ordered to remove it by an outraged senior officer, he got stuck with it and did not succeed in disposing of it until long after the war).

Hordern's story seems representative of many Australians who found themselves amateurs at sea in a Navy which had to expand rapidly and in which professionals to lead, teach and guide were scarce. The professionals, of course, tended to stay with the big ships, and many were lost in Sydney, Perth, Canberra and the sunk destroyers and sloops, thinning even further the ranks of those available to teach or even administer the amateurs. The Royal Australian Navy began the war with just over 5000 men, and about 45,800 men and 3100 women enlisted in the course of the war. (In the Depression the entire strength of the Australian permanent armed forces had sunk to about 1500 men.) It is an amazing tribute to professionals and amateurs alike that the Navy maintained the standard of professionalism it did, that its men performed so well in dangerous, difficult and demanding tasks that were often completely new to them, and also preserved the Navy's highest ethos and traditions intact.

Hordern's first seagoing appointment was in HMAS Abraham Crijnssen, an old Dutch minelayer which had escaped the Japanese advance in the East Indies. It had a polyglot crew, was commanded by a twenty-six-year-old reservist, and was employed escorting convoys on the east coast. From there he joined a Fairmile, sailing from Sydney to Darwin and then working between Darwin, Thursday Island and New Guinea, with tasks that included supplying remote mission ...