I would very much like to find a history of this ship which must have been written by someone who knew her intimately having perhaps served out his wartime years as a member of her crew. I remember speaking in a church in Aptos, California -a seaside town some 100k south of San Francisco as the crow flies- back in 1976. I was speaking on behalf of The Gideons and told the folk that I had received a New Testament from the Gideons in 1943 when I was on board ‘The Holbrook‘. As I was shaking hands with people at the door after the service a man waited back to talk to me and told me that his Dad had served on the Holbrook throughout the war. We miss so many opportunities as we rush through life. I didn’t even get his name.
But, who knows? With the advent of the ‘Information Highway’ there may yet be opportunity to contact someone who remembers her and has told her story. From here and there I have picked up fragments. I know, for instance, that she was at sea and bound for Pearl Harbour with a complement of American troops, when the Japs attacked on December 7th, 1941. She then had to play cat and mouse with the Jap navy and Airforce, to avoid being found until it was safe to discharge her ‘cargo’. I know also that, in 1943, she brought 2500 American troops to Brisbane. Under Admiralty restrictions “the numbers of personnel should be restricted to 250.” (Presumably this was an Australian Admiralty restriction which the Americans took no notice of).
Our total complement was 580 and, on a previous trip to San Francisco in late 1943, she carried 910 of RAAF, Navy, and American Army wounded. We boarded her at Hamilton Wharf in the afternoon of 5th May 1943 after a train trip from Sydney. We comprised a group of 12 officers and 188 sergeants bound for the United Kingdom. We had finished our Service flying in Australia, we all had our wings whether we be pilots, navigators or wireless air-gunners and we were bound now for operational training in England. Also on board were a further 35 officers and 169 sergeants bound for Canada. What they were going to do in Canada I don’t know unless like us they were going to ‘stage’ through that country as we would through America with their final destination being the U.K. The remaining passengers comprised 4 Australian Naval Officers, 2 Petty Officers and 21 Naval ratings, 93 American army and navy personnel and 56 civilians -53 American and 3 Australian- and one RAAF Nursing Sister.
I well remember the murmur of interest which went through the ship as this one lone girl came up the gang-plank the next morning. We saw nothing of her from that time forward but, no doubt, she was carefully looked after by the upper deck. We couldn’t have been further removed from them or from her for we were accommodated in the depths of what once must have been a cargo hold. It was filled with three tier metal bunks and we were left to sort ourselves out once we had descended into its bowels. Had we been torpedoed we would have had no chance of escape as we were well below the water line. Nevertheless, boat drill became a regular exercise in the days that lay ahead to condition us to think that some of us, at least, might make it in the event of a catastrophe.
On the morning of the 6th May I remember being on deck looking across the wool sheds at Nundah towards Wavell Heights and thinking of home and of how interested they would be to know I was here if only I was able to tell them. That, of course, was not possible. I could see the cars travelling towards the city along what is now Kinsgford Smith Drive and recalled how, in my civilian days in 1941, driving to work in the back of Mr Grimley’s utility, sharing the space with the charcoal burner which produced the gas to run the car, he would often drive as close as he could get to the wharves to see what shipping was in the river. I wondered whether he had gone by this morning and whether Dad was travelling with him.
Sometime in the early afternoon things began to stir and it was apparent that we were getting under way. What excitement! A long sea voyage at the Government’s expense. A small compensation for putting our lives at risk in the service of our country. We were determined to enjoy every moment of it. So what:that we were not travelling first class! that we slept at night in the fetid atmosphere of a cargo hold filled with sweaty bodies! that we had only two meals per day, one in early morning and the other mid to late afternoon -hash and beans ladled into one compartment of our tin eating tray and the dessert, whatever it was, into the other! We were young and used to service life with its accepted privations and the happy camaraderie more than offset the loss of more refined travel arrangements.
We were pulled out into the middle of the river by a tug and soon began to make our own way down to the mouth and out into Moreton Bay. The destroyer ‘Vendetta’ left its moorings at Caloundra at 3p.m. and set course to meet us as we travelled north towards Cape Moreton and then on an easterly course which would eventually take us to the north of Norfolk Island and then to an unknown course across the Pacific to San Francisco. Our last sightings of the land we were leaving were of the Glasshouse Mountains looking, no doubt, much as Captain Cook would have seen them when he named them. Apart from the destroyer which kept us company till night began to fall and which wished us ‘bon voyage’ by steaming alongside with its hooter hooting before veering off to starboard and rapidly vanishing into the dusk, we saw only one other ship. This was the ill-fated ‘Centaur’. She must have been tied up in the river with us and left either soon before or soon after on her way to Sydney.
There was quite a commotion on board when she was sighted crossing our bows. A little over a week later when we were in mid-Pacific, we were told that she had been sunk with a heavy loss of life off Cape Moreton on her return trip from Sydney to Port Moresby. I have read since that Japanese submarines operating out of their base at Truck in the Carolines had been actively patrolling the shipping lanes from Sydney to Brisbane and had, in the days before and after we sailed sunk numerous coastal vessels but none with such disastrous consequences as the sinking of the Centaur -a hospital ship, brightly lit and clearly identified as such.
Life was very indolent for the three weeks we were at sea. Day followed day with much the same routine. There were the meal parades and the boat drills but little else regimentation. We filled in the days playing bridge and 500. Jim Tudberry, Phil Thomas, Sid Ward and myself regularly made a foursome. Nightfall was usually heralded with an American voice proclaiming over the ship’s tannoy system: “Now hear this! Now hear this! All windows and portholes closed. No lights on the open decks.” This meant no smoking on the open decks so all the smokers, who were most of us, had to smoke indoors. Some of the more enterprising types, with an eye to making money – but why anyone should be interested in making money at a time like that I do not know – hopefully their money perished with them-had set up a gambling den in one of the larger ‘state rooms’.
This was well patronised by fellows who had nothing else to do of an evening except to brave the cold night air on deck or to lie on their bunks and read. Much money was won and lost mainly at the Crown and Anchor table but the atmosphere was so thick with cigarette smoke that it could be cut with a knife. People these days are so touchy about the dangers of passive smoking -they would not have had words to describe their peril had they been thrown into that atmosphere.
But, of course, they are much more conscious of health risks than we were, probably because they have no other risks with which to compare them. There was some attempt made by the authorities to stimulate our intellects and somehow or other I was detailed to take part in a debate on the question: “Should State Governments be abolished?” A stupid question to give to a bunch of nineteen to twenty year olds who, at that time, couldn’t have cared less about what went on in the civil structure. Instinctively we knew that there were many issues of far greater moment which had to be resolved before it was time to even think about the ‘weak piping time of peace’ which would eventually come, and none of us could have any certainty that we would be around to be interested in it. Fortunately the debate never occurred.
There was great camaraderie aboard particularly amongst those with whom we had trained at Uranquinty and elsewhere. We saw little of our officer colleagues -they were housed in cabins as befitted their status -no cargo holds for them! But we did not know, we could not, that one in three of that happy company would not make it back to the land they were leaving. On the 25th May we sighted the coast of California -the first and only landfall of the entire trip. For most of that day we made our progress northwards towards San Francisco. Navy blimps appeared in the sky -no doubt, keeping an eye out for submarines but all we saw in the sea were seals -we were now in colder waters. Next morning we entered San Francisco harbour with much excitement although, parochially, we judged it less spectacular than Sydney. The ship anchored in the harbour within sight of the island of Alcatraz and, we were transferred into lighters which took us to shore. There we boarded Pullman coaches and we were on our way by mid afternoon on our six day train journey to the east coast and Camp Miles Standish.
