Transcripts:It was just past 1:00 in the afternoon on the 9th of January,  1945. The sun was high over Lingayen Gulf. The sea was glass. His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia had been firing her 8-in guns at Japanese shore positions for most of the morning. The bombardment  had paused.

 Men were eating what they could. A few were even smoking on the upper deck. A lookout shouted,  “He was pointing east.” There were two of them. Two specks closing fast. On the bridge, the officer of the watch turned and squinted.  The man beside him reached for the alarm. Below decks, in a boiler  room, the chief stoker felt the change in the engine telegraph before he heard the bell. The whole ship knew.

The whole ship had known this language for 4 days  now. They knew it the way a man knows his own breathing. One of the planes peeled off. It went for the battleship Mississippi  just off Australia’s beam. It struck her near the bridge in a long drawn-out crash that sent black smoke  rolling up over the gulf.

 The other plane kept coming. It was coming for Australia. The teenage anti-aircraft gunner on the port 40-mm Bofors  had not slept properly in 72 hours. His shoulders were burnt raw under his shirt from the friction of the gun harness.  He gripped the firing levers and he fired. The 4-in mountings to either side of him fired.

20-mm Oerlikons fired. Every gun that could be brought to bear fired. The noise was a single, solid  wall of sound. The kamikaze pilot was a young man. We do not know his name. He was perhaps 19,  perhaps 21. He had been told that he would be turned into a god. He pushed his stick forward  and he aimed for the bridge of the Australia because the bridge was where her brain was.

 and if you killed the brain,  you killed the ship. He missed. He missed by perhaps 15 ft. His wing tip clipped a strut on the foremast. The whole aircraft slewed sideways in the air. It struck the forward funnel of the  Australia at a flat angle. Sheared off the top third of it like a knife through soft cheese  and tumbled over the far side of the ship and into the sea taking its bomb and its pilot and its memory with it.

For perhaps 3 seconds, no one on the bridge moved. Then there was a thump. The whole hull rang with it. A deep iron note, black smoke and steam roared up out of the wrecked funnel down. In a boiler room, the chief stoker watched the steam pressure on two of his boilers fall off a cliff. He shouted to his men.

 They began closing them down before they could rupture. On the upper deck, a leading seaman who had been standing perhaps 20 ft from the funnel found himself sitting down. He did not remember sitting down. There was a piece of aluminum aircraft skin on the deck beside him. It It was bent in a strange way. He picked it up. It was warm.

 He looked at the man next to him. The man next to him said, very quietly, “That makes five.”  By the time the fifth kamikaze hit His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia, the men on her bridge had already survived four. They had been hit at sunset on the 5th of January. They had been hit again at sunset  on the 6th.

 They had been hit twice within 19 minutes on the morning of the 8th. And now, just past 1:00 on the 9th, they had been hit a fifth time. She was the most repeatedly damaged Allied surface combatant of the entire Lingayen operation. No other ship in the gulf had absorbed what she had absorbed and was still sailing. To understand  what this meant, you have to go back four days.

 You have to go back to the first one. Strike one. The 5th of January, 1945. Position roughly 16° north, 120° east,  off the western coast of Luzon in the Philippines. His Majesty’s  Australian Ship Australia was a County-class heavy cruiser. She was sometimes called a Kent. She displaced just over 10,000 tons.

 She mounted eight 8-in guns in four twin turrets, and she had been upgraded after  the previous October to add 10 40-mm Bofors and seven twin 20-mm Oerlikons for anti-aircraft work. Our commanding  officer was Captain John Armstrong of the Royal Australian Navy. He had taken command of her on the 29th of October, 1944, eight days after a Japanese suicide aircraft killed the previous captain, Emile Dechaineux, on the bridge of this same ship at Leyte Gulf.

 30 men had died with Captain Dechaineux that morning. Armstrong took command of a ship that had already learned what a kamikaze was. He was bringing her back into the same waters where she had been hit before. She was now part of Task Group 77.2  under the overall command of Vice Admiral Jesse Oldendorf of the United States Navy.

 Our job was bombardment. The Americans were going to land six divisions on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf to begin the liberation of the main Philippine island of Luzon. Before the landings could happen, somebody had to soften up the Japanese positions on shore. Australia was one of the ships ordered to do that softening up.

She brought up the rear of the formation as it sailed from Leyte on the 3rd of January. And over the next two days, her destroyer screen reported a steady increase in Japanese air activity. By the late afternoon of the 5th of January, the formation was within range of every kamikaze airfield on Luzon. The sky was full of them.

 At about 5:25 in the afternoon, a number of aircraft that had evaded the American combat air patrol came in low and fast from the west. The ship’s air defense officer counted at least six. They were just above the water. The destroyers in the screen opened fire. The American cruisers opened fire. Australia opened fire.

 One enemy aircraft was splashed near the destroyers. Another turned and went to stern. The others kept coming. Two of them crossed ahead of Australia within a hundred yards. One bore on through the formation and struck the escort carrier Manila Bay further ahead. Another, a Japanese Aichi D3A dive bomber, the type the Americans called a Val, executed a very steep banking turn to its right.

The pilot ended the turn in a near vertical dive. He hit Australia on the port  side of the upper deck amidships at 5:35 in the afternoon, almost exactly amidships, between her torpedo tubes and her port 4-in anti-aircraft mountings. It is worth pausing here, before we go any further into the four days that followed, to be honest about what a Kamikaze impact actually does to a ship.

 A loaded Kamikaze,  even a relatively small one, was about three tons of structure and fuel  and bomb, all of it moving at close to 250 miles an hour. When it struck steel decking,  it did not bounce. It punched. The fuselage flattened. The bomb, which on the 5th of January was carried internally, broke loose and tumbled forward through whatever it found.

 The aviation petrol in  the tanks atomized into a fine spray and ignited in the heat of the impact, producing a fireball that engulfed several gun mountings at once. Anyone standing inside that fireball was killed instantly.  Anyone within 50 ft was burnt, deafened, or knocked down. Anyone within 200 ft felt it through the soles of their boots.

 The first valve to hit Australia did this between her port 4-in mounts where her port anti-aircraft gun crews lived during action stations. There was nowhere to take shelter at an open mounting.  You stood at your gun and you served it. When the kamikaze hit, the men at the port mountings did not have time to move. 25 officers and ratings were killed on the port side. 30 more were wounded.

Three of the dead and one of the wounded were officers. Almost every casualty  was from one of the port side secondary or anti-aircraft gun crews. The men who had been holding rounds in their hands, the men who had been laying the guns at the diving aircraft, the men who had been doing their jobs.

 The fire was bad. It was also somehow brief. The damage control parties on Australia had been drilling for fire on deck since long before the war. They knew the layout. They knew the hose runs. They knew where the asbestos blankets were kept and they knew which scuttles to close. Within minutes, the fire was contained.

 Within an hour, it was  out. Captain Armstrong walked the upper deck afterwards. He looked at what had been done to his ship and to his men. The wreckage of the valve was still smoking. There was the smell of burnt aviation petrol and burnt cordite and burnt human beings. The blast had torn the port 2-lb pom-pom mounting clean off its bearings.

Officers from the damage control headquarters worked their way through the wreckage with stretcher parties. Armstrong made his decision.  The ship’s fighting efficiency on paper was barely impaired. The 8-in turrets were intact. The boilers were intact. The bridge was intact. She could still steam.

 She could still steer. She could still bombard. He signaled the flag that Australia was operational and would proceed with her assigned tasks.  He did not ask for permission to retire and no one offered it. That night, 25 Australian sailors lay in canvas sheets sewn shut with shell casings weighted at their feet.

The padre would commit them to the sea. A couple of days later, one of the sailors who watched the burials, Reg Walker, would describe the procedure in an interview decades  later. “The body was stitched in white canvas,” he said, “with a shell between the legs for weight.

 Then it was laid on a board the shape of a tabletop with the Australian flag laid over it. After the sermon was read, the board was tilted and you heard the body slide down into the sea.” That night, no one on Australia slept very much. Casualties on board His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia,  25 dead, 30 wounded, times hit, one.

 Strike two. The 6th of January, 1945. Inside Lingayen Gulf itself, at dawn on the 6th, the minesweeping group entered the Gulf  with the bombardment and fire support group covering them. The bombardment force split into two parts.  The San Fabian fire support group, with Australia among them, peeled off to bombard targets on the eastern side of the Gulf.

By 11:00  that morning, Australia had her 8-in guns in action firing on Japanese positions ashore.  The crew did not know it, but they had become the most repeatedly attacked ship in the Gulf already.  Several other Allied ships had been hit on the way in.

 The battleship New Mexico took a kamikaze that afternoon. The light cruiser Columbia took one. The destroyer minesweeper Long had been lost the day before. The Gulf was filling up hour by hour with  smoking ships. The men on Australia were tired in a way that was not normal tired. Many of them had been awake for the better part of 40 hours.

 The damage control parties had spent the night patching the gash in the port side and clearing debris from the gun mountings.  The galley had been turned over to making endless mugs of tea because nobody wanted food, but they would drink tea. Repair parties in white masks moved up and down the port side carrying lengths of timber and sheet metal.

 They had improvised a kind of armored deckhouse  around the worst of the buckled superstructure with timber shoring. By the late afternoon of the 6th,  the men were beginning to talk about it as if it had been an accident, as if a Kamikaze was the kind of thing that happens once.  The leading seaman, who had been knocked down on the 5th of January, told one of the new ratings with the false confidence of a man who has not slept that lightning never strikes twice.

 At about 25 past 5:00,  the destroyers in the screen began firing into the air. A number of enemy aircraft had appeared  and were being engaged. At 34 minutes past 5:00 in the afternoon, a Japanese Aichi Val dived on Australia from the starboard quarter. The aircraft flattened out at low altitude and struck the ship on the upper deck on  the starboard side between her forward starboard 4-in mounting and her after starboard 4-in mounting, almost a mirror image of where she had been hit the day

before, but on  the opposite side. This one was carrying a bomb. Australian armorers later examined fragments of it and concluded  that the bomb had been improvised from a large caliber naval The most widely repeated version of the story is that the shell  had been a 15-in or 16-in British naval projectile abandoned at the Singapore naval base when the allies surrendered there in 1942, salvaged by the Japanese and  welded to a rack inside the Kamikaze. The detail was not pleasant to

think about. The Royal Navy’s own ordnance returned to the Royal Australian Navy strapped to a suicide pilot. The shell exploded. The fire was savage. It was the starboard 4-in gun crews this time. The men who had been standing at the mounts that had not been hit on the fifth. 14 were killed. 26 were wounded.

 Most of them again were gun crews. By the time this fire was beaten down, Australia had lost so many of her 4-in anti-aircraft gunners that there were only enough trained men left to fully crew one mounting on each side of the ship. The 40-mm Bofors and the 20-mm Oerlikons  could still be manned, but the medium-caliber anti-aircraft batteries, the ones that could reach out and hit a kamikaze at distance, were now operating at less than half strength.

 At about half past 6:00 in the evening, another aircraft attempted to ram Australia. The light cruiser Columbia, herself damaged and bleeding, shot it down before it could strike.  Captain Armstrong stood on the bridge and watched. He understood now what was happening. The first hit had been bad luck. The second was something else.

 He had been a naval officer long enough to know the difference. Australia was not being randomly attacked. She was being hunted. The Royal Australian Navy ensign was high enough above the deck that the Japanese pilots could see it. She was the only ship in the formation flying it. She had been the most aggressively positioned shore bombardment cruiser on station for 2 days in a row.

 She had been the first Allied ship hit by a kamikaze back in October. And on the bridge of an enemy aircraft, where there was only the world telescoped into a windscreen  and the shape of a target growing larger, she was the target you went for because she looked dangerous and because she looked alone.

 Down in the damage control headquarters, the repair parties were now running the ship’s plumbing in their sleep. They had patched the port  side and now they had to patch the starboard side. The chief stoker pulled timber shoring out of his stores, and laid it ready before the orders to use it came down.

 The medical orderlies began rationing morphine. Casualties on board His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia, 39 dead, 56 wounded. Times hit. Two. Strike three. The 8th of January, 1945, 20 minutes past 7:00 in the morning. It is necessary to say something about the 7th of January. Australia had survived the day. She was assigned a counter-battery role, firing back at Japanese coastal artillery positions that had begun to range on the bombardment ships.

 Her gun crews fired methodically. Below decks, the ship’s company tried to sleep in shifts. Repair parties worked the entire day. The galley made more tea. The padre tried to find space below decks where he could speak privately  to men who needed to speak privately. Many of them had stopped talking entirely.

 Two days of strikes, 65 casualties, and the worst part was the smell. You could not get the smell out of your clothes. By the morning of the 8th of January, the whole task force was moving deeper into the gulf for a scheduled bombardment ahead of the landings, which were now less than 24 hours away. Australia was last in the column.

 She had been there for most of the operation, the rear cruiser, the one with the visible damage, the one any kamikaze pilot would see from a distance and pick out as the wounded ship. At 20 minutes past 7:00 in the morning, a lookout on the battleship California, ahead clears throat] of Australia in the line, reported five Japanese aircraft heading for Australia’s position.

 The five were taken under fire by half the ships in the formation. As they came nearer, the lookouts on Australia realized that what they were seeing was not five separate enemy aircraft. It was one twin-engined kamikaze, a Mitsubishi Ki-46 reconnaissance aircraft of the type the Americans called a Dinah, being pursued by four American F4F Wildcat fighters of the combat air patrol.

The Wildcats were firing. The Dinah was on fire. It was coming in anyway. One of the Wildcats followed the Dinah right through the screen into Australia’s own anti-aircraft fire, refusing to break off. That American pilot, his aircraft also damaged, ditched into the sea shortly afterwards.

 He was seen to bail out and was eventually picked up. The Dinah hit the water about 20 yd short of Australia. It did not break up. It skidded across the surface of the gulf like a flat stone, struck the side of the ship with a long scraping crash, and ground itself into pieces against her plates. Damage was, by the standards of what had happened on the 5th and the 6th, almost laughable.

 A few buckled plates, some loosened rivets, no fire, no fatalities. Captain Armstrong was on the bridge. He had been on the bridge, or near it, for 60 hours. He was, by every account that survives, a quiet man, a very tidy, methodical, almost professorial naval officer. He turned from the wing of the bridge and asked the officer of the watch to make a signal  acknowledging the strike.

He said something to the effect that the ship would continue. He had perhaps 30 seconds to enjoy the relief of the hit that had not killed anybody. Then someone shouted again,  and the alarms went again, and a teenage anti-aircraft gunner, who had been standing in his harness for the better part of an hour, swung his Bofors aft and started firing at another aircraft coming in from the same quarter.

Strike four. The 8th of January, 1945. 39 minutes past 7:00 in the morning, 19 minutes after strike three. The second Dinah came in low on the port quarter. The Wildcats had not had time to intercept it. The anti-aircraft fire from Australia and the surrounding ships hit it heavily. It was on fire as it crossed the last few hundred yards.

 The pilot was almost certainly already wounded, possibly already dead. The aircraft was steered, at least at the very end, by physics. It struck the side of Australia at the waterline, just below the bridge on the port side. This one was carrying a bomb. The bomb exploded against the ship’s plating.

 Whether it detonated  just inside or just outside the hull is still argued in the surviving reports. The action report describes the explosion as having occurred short of or against the ship’s side. Either way,  it opened a hole in Australia’s port side that was, by the official measurement afterwards, 14 ft long and 8 ft high.

 Some sources record it as 8 by 14. They are the same hole. The hole opened a provision storeroom and an oil fuel tank directly to the sea. The Pacific began to come in. The ship took an immediate 5° list to port. Adjacent compartments began to flood slowly  because the bulkheads between them had been weakened by the blast and by 2 days of accumulated strain.

  The damage control parties, the same men who had patched the port side after the fifth, were back at the same scene. Some of them, walking forward through the smoke, saw places  where they had nailed up timber shoring 2 days earlier, and they saw that the new explosion had pushed the same shoring out of place.  They did not say anything.

 They simply began again. Below the waterline, the chief shipwright began directing the closing of watertight doors. The list was holding at 5°.  It was not increasing. If the list could be held, the ship could be saved. If it began to increase, the ship would have to be abandoned. It did not increase. Up on the bridge, Captain Armstrong received a signal from Vice Admiral Oldendorf.

 The signal offered him the option to withdraw from the operation. He could take Australia out of the gulf  and steam slowly south to Leyte to begin temporary repairs and to evacuate his wounded. Armstrong declined. The official record of the exchange  is brief. It does not capture what must have been involved in declining.

 Australia was the most damaged  ship in the gulf. She had now been hit four times in less than 72 hours. She had lost 39 men and was carrying  perhaps 50 wounded. Her 4-in anti-aircraft armament was a quarter of what it should have been. Her portside had a hole in it through which you could throw a kit  bag.

Her main batteries were still intact but everything else was beginning to come apart at the seams. Armstrong looked at his ship and he waited against the landings which were now scheduled for 9:30 the following morning,  a date that the men in the gulf called S-Day. He thought about the soldiers who were waiting on the troop ships somewhere off to the south listening to the bombardment and trying not to imagine what was happening to the ships ahead of them.

He decided that the men on those troop ships were going  to need every 8-in gun in the gulf the next morning. Australia would stay. He signaled the flag. Australia would remain on station. Down in B turret, the gun captain ordered another set of shore bombardment rounds brought up. The ship’s company had not slept.

 They had a hole in the side. The bow was riding heavy and the guns kept firing. Casualties on board His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia,  39 dead, 56 wounded plus a few new burns and a few cracked  ribs from being thrown against bulkheads. Times hit, four. Strike five, the 9th of January 1945 about 11 minutes past 1:00 in the afternoon.

  Position inside Lingayen Gulf off the San Fabian beaches approximately 5,000 yd offshore. This is where we came in. It is necessary now to slow down because the fifth strike,  the one that finally finished the day for Australia, looks at first glance like the lightest of the five. There were no casualties. The damage was repaired within  24 hours.

 By the strict measure of dead men the fifth strike was the smallest, but by the measure of what it took out of the men who survived it, it was the worst. The morning of the 9th of January had begun before dawn. The transports and the landing craft had been moving into Lingayen Gulf since before 3:00 in the morning under a starlit sky in what the official  histories describe as almost choreographed precision.

 The bombardment ships Australia among them had begun firing again as the first light went up over Luzon. At 9:30 in the morning, the bombardment had lifted  and about 68,000 American soldiers under General Walter Krueger had begun landing on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf against in the end almost no opposition at all.

 Australia was lying offshore. She was firing on call. Her 8-in guns  ranged in on whatever the soldiers ashore needed silencing. The list to port was still there. The repair parties were still patching. Several of the gun crews had gone past tiredness into a place that was the other side of tiredness.

 The place where you stop thinking and you just do. It was around midday when the bombardment paused. The morning calls for fire had eased off. The captain ordered the ship to a relaxed state of readiness with hot meals to be brought up to the gun positions. Men came off their mountings in shifts to eat and to use the heads.

 A few stood by the rails on the upper deck and looked at the smoke rising off the Mississippi, which had been holding station nearby, and at the smoke rising off two or three other ships further into the Gulf. Everyone could see the smoke. Everyone could feel that the Gulf was a place where the smoke never went away.

 At about 11 minutes past 1:00 in the afternoon, lookouts on Australia sighted two Japanese aircraft approaching from the east. The whole air defense organization came alive again. The 40-mm Bofors crews tracked the incoming aircraft. The 4-in mountings still in service swung up. The Oerlikons fired controlled bursts.

 The first of the two aircraft having passed Australia dived on the battleship Mississippi and struck her near the bridge. It killed approximately 23 of Mississippi’s crew and wounded around 60 more. It was a serious hit for Mississippi. The Mississippi action report says  the explosion did not seriously damage her structure, but it killed a great many men.

 The second aircraft kept on for Australia. The pilot, in the last seconds of his life, made one of two possible choices, and we do not know for certain which. Either he aimed for the bridge of Australia and missed  by less than the wingspan of his own aircraft, or he aimed for her forward funnel and hit it almost  exactly.

 Captain Armstrong, who was on the bridge and watched the aircraft come in, was clear about what he believed. He thought the pilot was aiming for him. He wrote afterwards, in the formal language of his action report, that the aircraft missed its aim, however,  and diving under the foreyard, the wing tip caught on a mast strut,  which swung him into the foremost funnel and over the side.

 That is the captain’s voice. Diving under the foreyard, catching a mast strut, swinging the plane into the funnel. The captain of Australia, writing it down for his superiors, used the calm particularized English of a man who has just watched a young pilot die a few feet from his own bridge, and who is now responsible for describing exactly what happened because lessons will be learned from it.

 The fifth Kamikaze took off the top third of the forward funnel of Australia  and went into the sea on her starboard side. The wreckage carried with it the propeller of the aircraft, which the crew later recovered. After the war, that same propeller would be photographed standing in the foreground of a quiet formal portrait of Captain Armstrong speaking with the Australian High Commissioner in London.

 The propeller was the only fragment of the fifth Kamikaze that survived the strike.  There were no fatalities. There were no serious wounds, but what happened inside the ship in the moments after the strike is  worth understanding properly. In the air defense position above the bridge, men who had been on watch for hours were now sitting down on the deck where they had stood.

 Several of them did not realize for some minutes that they were unhurt because the strike had been so close that they had assumed they were dead. The duty signaler, when he was later asked what he remembered, said he remembered checking each  of his fingers individually to make sure they were still there.

 Down in a boiler room, the chief stoker watched the steam gauges on two of his boilers  drop because the broken funnel could not draw properly anymore. He gave the order to shut both down. A and B boilers came off line. The ship had two boiler rooms in service still and the remaining boilers could carry her, but at reduced power.

Her maximum speed dropped by several knots. She was now a damaged ship in a meaningful mechanical way that none of the previous four strikes had achieved. Radar aerials at the masthead were torn down. The wireless telegraphy aerials were torn down. The bridge could no longer communicate with the rest of the fleet by the normal means.

 The ship had to use her secondary aerials. A new hole was cut into the side of the damaged funnel  later that day to let the boilers below it operate properly, and by the next morning all of Australia’s boilers would be running again. But Captain Armstrong had finally had enough. The decision he had refused to make on the morning of the 8th, when Oldendorf had offered him withdrawal after strike four, he now made himself.

 Australia’s fighting efficiency on paper  was not destroyed, but her radar was gone. Her wireless was gone. Her boilers were too short. Her port side was holed. Her starboard side was holed. Her funnel was bent. Her 4-in armament was crewed at half, and the ship’s company, every man on board her, had now lived  through five separate Kamikaze strikes in less than four days.

 There was a point at which a ship and her crew could not absorb any more, and Captain Armstrong, looking at his ship in the early afternoon of the 9th of January, decided that Australia had reached it. He signaled the flag. He requested permission to withdraw. The signal was granted.  By the evening of the 9th of January, Australia, with the destroyer Arunta in company, was steaming out of Lingayen Gulf in the company of the light cruiser Columbia, the heavy cruiser Louisville, and a fast transport group also heading

south. They formed up under the designation of Carrier Task Force 79, although none of them looked very much like carrier escorts. The Australia was burning still in small places. Her crew were on deck in numbers because below decks was no longer entirely habitable. They watched the gulf recede behind them with its columns of smoke rising into the evening sky, and they watched the bow wave begin to fall away as the ship slowed for the long crossing back to Leyte.

 On the bridge, Captain Armstrong was reading damage reports. He had perhaps slept 3 hours in 4 days. Beside him, his navigating officer was plotting the course. The 8-in turrets  were silent for the first time in more than 72 hours. The 4-in guns were silent. The Bofors were silent. The only sounds, after so many hours of noise, were the wind across the bent funnel and the slap of the wave against the patched plating.

 Down on the upper deck, two ratings sat with their backs against the after 8-in turret. They were smoking. One of them said something to the other. The other one did not answer. He had finally fallen asleep sitting up. Casualties on board His Majesty’s Australian  Ship Australia at the close of the Lingayen operation, 44 dead, approximately 69 wounded.

 Total casualties, somewhere around 107 men out of a ship’s company of about 700 times  hit, five. She was the most repeatedly damaged Allied surface combatant of the entire Lingayen invasion. No other ship  in the Gulf of any nation was struck by suicide aircraft on  five separate occasions over 4 days.

 No other ship in the Gulf was hit, patched,  hit again, patched again, and still firing her main armament at the end of it.  The ship made Leyte on the 12th of January where temporary patches were welded over the holes in her side. From Leyte, she steamed slowly to Manus Island  in the Admiralty Group north of New Guinea for more substantial repair work.

 From Manus, she went down to Sydney arriving back home for the first time in many months. The men of her ship’s company who had homes to go to went on leave. The men who did not have home stayed in the ship. By May of 1945, with the war turning toward its end, it was decided  that Australia would have to go to England for the major refit she now needed.

 The dockyards in Sydney were full of British Pacific Fleet ships that took precedence. She sailed on the 24th of May by way of the United States  and arrived at Plymouth on the 1st of July, 1945. She was still in Plymouth undergoing her refit when Japan surrendered  the following month. She would never fight again.

 Lingayen Gulf was the last action of His Majesty’s  Australian Ship Australia. Of the men who fought her through those four days, many would never  speak about what had happened to them. Some, like the able seaman Reg Walker,  eventually sit down decades later in front of a tape recorder at the Australian War Memorial and tell their grandchildren what it had been like.

 Some, like the sailor artist Alan Hull, who had served on board Australia from April of 1944 until February of 1947, would record what they had seen in a series of small, exact, unsentimental pencil drawings of sailors running for cover under attack. Some would return to ordinary lives in ordinary  towns and would never tell anyone they had been one of the men on the most kamikaze struck ship in the Pacific War.

 One of the officers who had served below decks during the Lingayen operation, a young lieutenant by the name of David Hamer, would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry, skill,  and devotion to duty during the assault on Lingayen. He would later go on to become a rear admiral and a senator.

 Captain John Armstrong, who had brought her through, would eventually be photographed in London with the Australian High Commissioner Stanley  Bruce with the recovered propeller of the fifth kamikaze standing on a velvet draped table in the foreground between them. It is,  in some ways, the most extraordinary photograph of the Lingayen operation.

Two men in tidy clothes,  a polished blade of aluminum between them, and behind the propeller, just out of frame of the photograph, but unmistakably present in any honest reading of it,  the bridge of a damaged ship and a young Japanese pilot whose name no one will ever know,  and 25 Australian sailors stitched into canvas, and a chief stoker shutting down his boilers, and a teenage anti-aircraft gunner with his shoulders burnt raw beneath his shirt, and 107 men either dead or wounded, and a ship that had

been hit five times in four days, and had, against every reasonable expectation of what a ship can survive, kept fighting. That is the story of His Majesty’s Australian Ship Australia at Lingayen Gulf. She was hit on the 5th of January. She fired her guns and continued. She was hit on the 6th of January.

 She fired her guns and continued. She was hit twice within  19 minutes on the morning of the 8th of January. She fired her guns and continued.  And she was hit at 11 minutes past 1:00 in the afternoon on the 9th of January with the landings already going in behind her, with her funnel sheared off and her radar gone.

 And only then, only then did her captain ask permission to withdraw. And only then did she turn her bow south and steam slowly out of Lingayen Gulf in the last hour of her last action of the Second World War.