Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [62]
He swam to a small balsa raft and hung on as he watched the Perth draw away from him, still making headway. The quarterdeck was crowded with sailors hesitant to go overboard for fear of landing in the cutting swirl of the ship’s outboard propellers. Then, Ray Parkin wrote, “across the sea and under the sky came a great roar.”
From under X turret a huge ragged geyser of shattered water spouted skywards, ringed with debris and oil-fuel. The right and left six-inch guns of X turret jumped their trunnions, and each gun was left pointing outwards from the other. The ship gave a violent nervous twitch. Against the ice-white light the mass of milling figures shot into the air, turning over and over like acrobats or tossed rag-dolls.
Leading seaman H. Keith Gosden, escaping Y turret’s lobby, was thrown skyward by one of the torpedo blasts. “Light, almost gay, in that mad moment,” he felt the urge to sing and dance in the air. When he hit the deck again a wave of water produced by the explosion washed him overboard, and as he fell into the sea he envisioned the telegram his mother would receive announcing his loss, and the tears that would fall from her eyes upon learning the news.
John Harper “was suddenly appalled at the amount of shellfire falling amongst the survivors.” It was worse still on the ship. She had taken on a hard list to port. “Pieces could be seen flying off as salvoes exploded with wicked flashes all over her,” he wrote. The Perth’s navigator lay in the water and watched as his ship died. In his heart, sadness warred with pride.
When a ship turns onto its side, the world goes ninety degrees off kilter. Without the sky to orient them, sailors trying to escape from belowdecks find the familiar interior of the ship has become a house of mirrors. Decks become bulkheads and bulkheads decks, ladders become rails running surrealistically sideways, and athwartship passageways become deep wells yawning at one’s feet.
Lt. Frank Gillan, one of the Perth’s engineers, was struggling to get free of the turtling ship. Stationed with three other men in the fireroom, or stokehold as the Aussies called it, they were losing their bearings as their steel-enclosed world made a disorienting ninety-degree rotation. Leaving the fireroom, they realized their best route to the main deck was a hatch some distance down the passageway they were standing in. The hatch opened to the level above them, the enclosed torpedo space below the four-inch-gun deck. It was a path they had trodden many times when the world was on its feet. Now, with the ship nearly on her side, a significant obstacle lay in their path: the athwartship passage opened below them like a five-foot-wide trapdoor into an abyss. One of the stokers that Lieutenant Gillan had helped escape from the fireroom tried to jump across, but his boots slipped on takeoff and he fell short, vanishing into the depths of the upended passageway that swallowed his scream.
The other two men with Gillan successfully leaped the pit and kept running. Wearing a Royal Australian Navy ball cap with a coal miner’s lamp strapped to it, Gillan followed, but the seconds that separated them were meaningful. Ahead, he could see ocean water cascading through the hatch leading upward to his freedom. He froze for a moment, feeling the natural impulse to prefer a delayed but sure drowning to a more immediate but only slightly less certain one. Then he gathered his courage, took a deep breath, and plunged upward into the water, fighting his way up through the hatch. He succeeded, but even in his success he had to confront a sickening question. If the ship finally capsized, where would “up” finally take him? In moving toward the main deck, he might in fact be seeking her bottom as the ship turned turtle and came