The old destroyer was riding low under her load when the dive bombers found her off the North African coast. Her decks crammed with soldiers and crates of ammunition. Her worn-out engines pushing her  through a flat evening sea toward a besieged port still over the horizon ahead.

 She had loaded at a base in Egypt and timed her run to close the coast in the dark because daylight near Tobruk belonged to the German and Italian air forces and a ship caught in the open was a ship marked for the bottom. The lookout saw the first formation tip out of the low sun, gull-winged, their sirens rising as they pushed over into the dive, and the 4-in guns swung up to meet them.

 Ahead of her, 14,000 Australians were dug into the rock of the fortress waiting on the bullets and the water    this single old ship was carrying. They would run out of both if she didn’t get through. Five worn-out destroyers  were running those supplies into Tobruk and every one of them had been laid down in a British yard  during the First World War, completed around 1918, and  already two decades past their best when the Second War began.

Their hulls were thin and their engines temperamental and  their crews half-joked that the whole flotilla was held together with string and chewing gum. The Royal Navy had handed them  to Australia in 1933 as cast-offs, replacements for an even older set of ships due for the scrapyard. They were the sort  of vessels a modern navy quietly retired and by the time the war was a few weeks old, a propaganda office in Berlin had found a name for them.

 The name came over the radio in the closing months of 1939 as the flotilla left Australian waters and steamed for the Mediterranean. The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, went on air and dismissed  the Australian squadron as a load of scrap iron, a consignment of junk not worth the fuel to sink it. He meant it to sting, to tell the world the Commonwealth  was sending rubbish to fight a modern war.

The crews heard about it and instead of bristling, they took the insult  and made it their own. From that day, the squadron answered to a single name, the Scrap Iron Flotilla, and they wore it the way a man wears a hard-won  decoration. By the spring of 1941, the joke had stopped being funny. Rommel and his Afrika Korps had driven the British back across Libya and surrounded Tobruk, trapping the garrison inside a perimeter of rock and wire on the 10th of April.

The men holding that perimeter were  mostly Australians of the 9th Division under Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, and the only way out ran through the harbor. Everything they needed to live and fight had to come in by sea in darkness, past the guns and the bombers, and everything had to go back out the same way.

  The ships that carried it became known as the Tobruk Ferry, and the old Australian destroyers were the backbone  of the run. The Germans and Italians knew exactly what the ferry meant, and they set out to break it. Their bombers and  submarines hunted the sea lanes between Egypt and Tobruk, and their gunners ranged the harbor itself, so that even unloading was done under fire.

Before the siege was over, more than two dozen warships would lie on the seabed off that coast. The men of the Scrap Iron Flotilla knew the numbers, and they kept sailing anyway into a stretch of water the enemy meant to seal off completely. What those old ships did over the next 8 months is the reason their name outlived the man who coined it as an insult.

Command of the Flotilla fell to a Victorian named Hector Waller, a career officer the Navy rated highly and the lower deck trusted on sight. He had joined as a boy of 13 and trained in British waters, and by the outbreak  of war, he flew his pennant in the leader, HMAS Stuart. His four other ships were Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager, and Waterhen.

 Each one a relic of the last war.    Each one now carrying a young Australian crew into the first months of this one. They reached Malta at the start of 1940 and settled into the grind of escort and patrol, shepherding convoys from one end of the Mediterranean to the other while the war around them stayed quiet.

 The handover that put these ships under the Australian flag had happened years earlier in a dockyard at Portsmouth. There on a single day in October 1933, the five vessels were paid off from the Royal Navy and commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy in the same breath,    then sailed for the far side of the world.

They reached Sydney before Christmas and spent the next six years  on the Australia station, going in and out of reserve as money allowed, manned by a navy that was small and stretched and grateful  for whatever Britain would spare. When London asked for help in the Mediterranean, Australia sent these old ships and the young men  who crewed them.

 And it was a long way from home to fight another country’s first battles. That quiet posting ended on the 10th of June 1940 when Italy declared war and the Mediterranean turned hostile along its  whole length. France collapsed within a fortnight and overnight the sea that  had been an Allied lake was ringed by enemy coasts and enemy fleets.

 Facing the British now was an Italian fleet of battleships and cruisers backed by close to 100 submarines against which the old Australian ships looked like exactly what Goebbels had called them. The scrap iron suddenly had a real war to fight with very little margin to fight it. The hardest part hadn’t even started.

 The first proof that the old ships could bite came in July 1940 off the toe of Italy. Stuart and her consorts joined the British fleet at the Battle of Calabria, the first major clash between battle lines in those waters since the previous war, and the old leader took her place in the screen as the heavy guns opened up.

That same summer, Waller was given command of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla, the five Australian ships and several British destroyers besides,  and a month later he was made a captain. Through the hot months, his ships shelled the Libyan coast, putting their guns onto the Italian  fortress town of Bardia ahead of the coming land assault.

The Scrap Iron  was earning its keep. The hardest individual fight of that first year began,  oddly enough, with a breakdown. By late September, 1940, Stuart was worn through, her machinery failing, and when she couldn’t hold the pace of a convoy  bound for Malta, she was ordered to limp back to Alexandria alone.

That should have been the end of her month, a tired old ship crawling home for repair. Instead, on the night of the 29th, her sonar operators picked  up something moving beneath the surface off the Egyptian coast. It was an Italian submarine, and she was carrying a secret that the British base at Alexandria had every reason to fear.

 The boat was the Gondar, and she belonged to the most secret arm of the Italian Navy, the unit that pioneered the manned torpedo. She had sailed from Italy carrying human torpedoes and the frogmen  trained to ride them, men meant to slip into Alexandria harbor and fix charges to the hulls of British battleships as they lay at anchor.

The raid had been called off, and Gondar was rerouted toward Tobruk when she ran straight into the one old destroyer nobody expected to be there. Stuart turned on her at once and attacked,  rolling depth charges off her stern into the black water. The hunt that followed lasted the whole night.

 Other ships came up through the dark to join her, the armed trawler Sindonis and and destroyer Diamond, with Royal Air Force Sunderland flying  boats droning overhead at first light. Hour after hour the depth charges went down, hammering the submarine, flooding her compartments, and fouling her air until her crew could barely breathe.

By dawn the Gondar had taken all she could and her commander brought her to the surface and ordered his men over the side. The scuttling  charges he set sent the boat under and Stewart and the trawler pulled all but two of her crew  out of the sea. An old destroyer sent home as worn out had taken the elite of Italy’s underwater  commandos prisoner.

Waterhen had her own moment that winter, the kind the lower deck  told and retold. On Christmas night 1940, 3 hours out of Sollum, she ran down an Italian supply ship in the dark and put her under with gunfire, taking off her people before she went. 28 of them in all, one fascist officer among them, and a ship’s dog that came aboard with the rest.

It was a small action in a large war, the sort that filled the gaps  between the set piece battles. The old destroyers spent most of their time on exactly this kind of work, the patrols and escorts that ate up the long nights far from any headline. The famous engagements were rare and the grind never let up.

 In January 1941, the army went forward and the Australians of the 6th division stormed into Tobruk itself, taking the fortress and its harbor from the Italians who had held it. Stewart and her sisters were offshore  in support, their guns adding to the bombardment as the town fell and tens of thousands of Italian soldiers were marched into captivity.

For a few weeks the port belonged to the allies, a prize won by Australian infantry with Australian ships at their back. None of them could have known that within 3 months the same harbor would be ringed by Germans and that keeping it supplied would fall to these very destroyers. The wheel was already turning.

Six  weeks later, the same tired ship stood in the line at one of the great naval victories of the war. In the last week of March 1941, off Cape Matapan, at  the foot of Greece, the British Mediterranean Fleet caught the Italian Navy in the dark and took it apart. Stuart was there in the night action, firing torpedoes and her main guns into the confusion as  Italian cruisers burned and went under.

By morning, the Italian surface  fleet was broken and any thought Rome still had of contesting those waters had gone down with the ships. The scrap iron had helped settle the question  of who owned the Mediterranean. Then, the war in that sea turned hard against the allies as the German invasion of Greece collapsed the position there and the same disaster soon overtook Crete.

The Navy was sent in to lift the survivors off open beaches under constant air attack. The scrap iron ships went in with the  rest, crowding soldiers onto their decks in darkness and running them clear before the dive bombers returned at dawn. Crete cost the fleet dearly with cruisers and destroyers lost to the Junkers Stukas in waters the Germans now ruled from the air.

The Australians came through it battered and short of sleep and they were given no rest because by now Tobruk was surrounded and a new kind of work was waiting. The fall of Tobruk and the siege had come fast. Rommel’s arrival in Africa had turned the British advance into a long retreat, the troops bitterly nicknamed the Benghazi Handicap.

 And by the 10th of April 1941, his forces had pushed the line back to the Egyptian frontier and closed a ring around the port.    Inside it, Morshead and his Australians refused to give ground, holding the perimeter against tanks  and infantry and turning back attack after attack. A Berlin radio voice, the traitor the Allies called Lord Haw-Haw, sneered that the trapped men were caught like  rats, and the garrison took that insult, too, and turned it into a badge, calling themselves the Rats of Tobruk. Above

them, and the ships  supplying them, the same Axis propaganda had now mocked two sets of Australians, and both had answered it the same way. The Tobruk Ferry that kept those rats alive was a plain idea, and a brutal one. A destroyer would spend the night loading at Alexandria, or the forward base at Mersa Matruh, then sail before dawn, and time her run to close the Libyan coast in darkness.

She would slip into Tobruk Harbor around midnight, throw her cargo ashore as fast as the working parties could move it, take on wounded men and prisoners, and be back out to sea before the  light gave her away. Destroyers drew the job because they were fast enough to make the passage in a single night, and the old Australian ships, for all their  years, could still find the speed when it mattered.

The margin between getting in and getting caught was measured in minutes. What they carried was whatever the fortress was running  short of that week. A destroyer would berth at Alexandria after dark and take on her load over the side,  40 tons of anti-aircraft and field gun ammunition, land mines, sacks of potatoes and onions, cases of tinned rations, and the garrison’s mail, all of it lashed down on deck because the holds were already full.

Then she would run the 350 mi of open sea the Navy had taken to calling Bomb Alley, fast and alone, or in a pair, timing the last stretch for the dark. Coming the other way, she carried wounded men and relieved  troops back to Egypt. Every ton that reached the harbor was a ton the enemy had failed  to stop.

 The harbor at the far end of the run was its own kind of trap. Tobruk had been bombed  so often that the water was littered with the masts and funnels of ships that  hadn’t made it out. And a destroyer coming in at midnight had to thread between the wrecks to find a berth. Working parties swarmed the cargo over the side into lighters and tugs, while the shore batteries and the anti-aircraft guns fought it out overhead.

 The whole basin lit by gun flashes and the slow drift of parachute flares. A ship that lingered past her hour would meet the dawn bombers still alongside, so the unloading was done at a run and the lines were slipped the moment the last crate was clear. Then came the same passage in reverse back down bomb alley before the light came up.

  Life aboard on those runs was wretched. The ships were cramped and stinking with no proper washing and meals of tinned meat eaten cold in a heaving  sea, the crews soaked and sleepless and never more than a few hours from the next alarm. Over and over the bombers came on the way out and the way back until the men stopped flinching at the near misses because flinching changed nothing.

They learned to read the sky, to feel a dive coming before they saw it, to keep loading  and unloading with bombs in the water close enough to shake their teeth. It was a war of endurance more than heroics and the old ships endured. Waller had a way of handling the dive bombers that became part of his name.

He would sit back in his chair on Stewart’s bridge with his pipe going, watching the Stukas tip into their dives,    and he would hold his course and wait until he saw the bombs leave the aircraft. Only then would he order the wheel hard over, throwing the ship into a tight turn so the bombs fell into the sea where she would have been.

   The men took to calling him Hard Over Heck after the helm orders he barked when the bombers came down. It looked like nerve and it was, but underneath it was arithmetic, a A reckoning of how long a falling bomb takes    to reach the water. Run after run, the old ships kept the port alive through the worst of the siege.

   Vendetta alone made 39 trips into Tobruk between May and August, more than any other ship on the whole service, British  or Australian. Her sisters weren’t far behind, sailing the gauntlet so often that the crews lost count of the bombings they shrugged off. Every passage was the same bargain, a night of speed and darkness against an enemy who owned the daylight.

 And every passage the old destroyers paid it and came back for another. The men aboard knew the odds were against them, and they made the run anyway because a garrison left unsupplied was a garrison left to wither. One of Waterhen’s last runs caught the whole grim business in a single night. On the way to Tobruk, she came on a tanker, the Pass of Balmaha, lying damaged and helpless.

 And rather than leave her, she took the crippled ship under tow and dragged her the rest of the way in. They reached the harbor in the middle of one of the nightly artillery duels, the whole desert skyline lit and rolling with gunfire.  And they nursed the tanker into what was then about the most dangerous birth in the world.

 It was the kind of quiet, stubborn job that earned no headlines and saved a cargo the garrison badly needed. Less than a week later, Waterhen herself was gone. What the ferry achieved across those eight months was paid for in hulls.  Before the siege ended, more than 20 naval vessels and a string of merchantmen had been lost on the run,    sent down by bombs and torpedoes along that one stretch of coast.

Taken as a whole, with British and Australian ships working side by  side, the ferry carried more than 34,000 troops out of Tobruk and brought almost 33,000 fresh men  in, lifted 7 and 1/2 thousand wounded to the hospitals, and landed close to 34,000 tons of stores. It even put 108 live sheep ashore, sent  in as fresh food for the Indian troops in the garrison.

The Australians ran their share of the losses and kept going because the alternative was to let the whole thing fall. By the last week of June 1941, the run had become deadlier than ever. Days before, the enemy bombers had  caught a British sloop in the same waters and sent her to the bottom. And the approaches off Sollum were thick with German and Italian aircraft hunting anything that moved by sea.

The flotilla was running on fumes  and frayed nerves. The ships long overdue for refit. The crews 2 years into a war that gave them nothing. Into that stretch, on the 28th of June, Waterhen sailed once more  from Alexandria for Tobruk in company with a British destroyer, HMS Defender. Both of them loaded with troops and stores for the garrison.

Neither would reach the port that night. Waterhen had become a favorite among the men of the flotilla, an unlucky-looking old destroyer they had nicknamed the Chook, the Australian  word for a hen. She had carried out every job the war had thrown at her, the evacuation runs off Greece and the night passages into Tobruk, and she had come through all of them.

The dive bombers caught the two ships the next evening  off Sollum on the border where the Egyptian desert runs down to meet the Libyan coast. 19 Junkers Stukas came over in formation, 12 of them German and seven  Italian, and they fixed on Waterhen and came down on her in sticks. The old ship twisted under  them, her guns hammering away at the sky.

 The bombs missed, but they missed close, three sticks of them straddling the destroyer and tearing the sea open along her hull. A blast below the waterline opened a gash 8 ft long between the engine room and a fuel tank, and the sea poured in, putting out her fires and jamming her wheel solid. The Chook coasted to a stop with a list growing under her hold and blacked out on a flat sea, the light failing  and the enemy still circling overhead.

She was a sitting target now,  stopped and powerless with a whole formation free to finish her at leisure. And then the attack  ended in a way the survivors would talk about for the rest of their lives. A formation of dive bombers  had worked over a stationary ship the size of a destroyer and not one man aboard Waterhen    was lost.

The single injury in the whole attack was a sailor caught by a flying tin of bully beef, knocked about by his own rations rather than by anything the enemy dropped. One of the ship’s officers was so taken up with filming her ordeal that he let his own kit go down with her without a thought.  Defender came alongside and took off the troops and the crew while the working party fought the flooding below.

 And as darkness fell, the British ship passed a towline and began dragging the crippled Chook    back toward Egypt. For a few hours it looked as though they might just save her. The tow held through the early dark and then began to fail, the list growing worse as the small hours wore on until the working party was taken off for the last time.

At about 10 minutes to 2:00 on the morning of the 30th of June, 1941, the old destroyer rolled  over and went down off the North African coast. She had been afloat for 23 years, built  in an English yard in the final year of the First World War and her whole crew were alive to watch her go. Waterhen was the first ship of the Royal Australian Navy lost to enemy action in  the war and the first of the scrap iron to be taken had carried every last one of her people home.

 The loss of Waterhen marked the end of the flotilla’s war in the Mediterranean. The four ships left were worn past safety, their engines breaking down, their crews hollowed out by 2 years of bombing, and the steady fear of the run. In the autumn of 1941, they were finally ordered home to Australia for the first real refit since the fighting began.

Limping back across the world, still answering to the name a German minister had meant as an insult. They reached home waters as the war turned toward the Pacific and a new enemy, and the old ships were wanted again almost at once. The scrap iron wasn’t finished. The Pacific took two more of them before it was done.

 Vampire was caught by Japanese carrier aircraft off Ceylon in 1942 and went down with the carrier Hermes she was screening far out in the Indian Ocean. Voyager ran aground that same year while landing troops on the coast of Timor and had to be destroyed where she lay, though her crew were brought off safely  first.

 Stuart and Vendetta came through the whole war and lived to be paid off in their own time,  the last survivors of the five. Of the old ships Goebbels had  laughed at, three were taken before the war ended and two came home to be retired in peace. Hec Waller didn’t  stay with the destroyers, either. After the Mediterranean, he was given a cruiser,    HMAS Perth, and he took her into the waters of the East Indies as the Japanese drove south through the  islands.

In the early hours of the 1st of March 1942, Perth ran into a far stronger Japanese force  in the Sunda Strait off the western tip of Java and fought on until her ammunition was spent and the torpedoes found her. Waller went down with his ship and most of her company, the careful, unhurried officer  his men had trusted with their lives, off to Brook.

 He was 41 years old. The name stuck the way the men had meant it, too. They had carried that Berlin sneer through the gun line at Matapan    and across the run into Tobruk until scrap iron meant something a long way from what Gerbils  had in mind. There was no metal struck for the flotilla and no parade when the worn out ships came home.

 Only a handful of old destroyers and the men who had kept them at sea. Years later when those men spoke of it at all, the thing they came back to was the Chook and the way every last one of her crew had walked away.