“Pull The Aussie Cruiser Out” — How HMAS Australia Took 5 Kamikaze Hits Covering The US Army Landing
A Japanese Val dive bomber came out of the late afternoon sun on the starboard quarter of HMAS Australia and aimed straight for her upper deck. The aircraft struck between the 4-in guns of the starboard side at 17:34 on the 6th of January, 1945 with the cruiser still firing her main armament at Japanese shore positions inland.
Fragments from the bomb tore through the gun crews still closed up at action stations. 14 sailors of the Royal Australian Navy lost their lives in the next minute and 26 more were wounded. When investigators picked through the wreckage afterwards, they found that the Kamikaze’s bomb had been built from a large caliber artillery shell welded directly into the airframe of the dive bomber.
This was the second Kamikaze to find Australia inside [music] 24 hours. The day before at the entrance to Lingayen Gulf, another Japanese pilot had crashed his aircraft into the cruiser’s port side amidships and 25 sailors lost their lives with 30 more wounded. Both strikes had landed worst on the 4-in [music] gun crews, Australia’s secondary armament against air attack.
After the second strike, the cruiser had enough trained men left for one gun on the port side and one on the starboard side. A heavy cruiser designed to put up a wall of close-range anti-aircraft fire was going to fight off whatever came next with two guns and a crew that hadn’t slept in 2 days.
HMAS Australia was a heavy cruiser of the County class, the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy and one of the senior ships of Task Group 77.2, the bombardment and fire support group of the Allied invasion fleet under Vice Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf of the United States Navy. The task group’s job was to soften up the beaches at Lingayen Gulf on the western coast of Luzon where General Douglas MacArthur planned to land the United States 6th Army on the morning of the 9th of January.
That first wave alone would put 68,000 American soldiers on the sand. Japanese ground crews had emptied the airfields of Luzon and Formosa, and they were throwing pilots at the bombardment fleet in single-engine dive bombers and twin-engine bombers hoping to break the cover for the landing before the troops could come ashore.
Over the 5 days from the 3rd to the 9th of January, those pilots damaged 47 Allied ships and sank four of them outright. Inside Task Group 77.2, the situation on Australia was becoming an awkward problem for the American command. The cruiser had taken two kamikaze hits in 24 hours, her gun crews were thinned out, and the bombardment schedule still had 3 days to run before the landing.
Voices in the bombardment group wanted the damaged Australian cruiser pulled out of the line and sent home before she became a casualty the staff couldn’t justify. Captain John Mulette Armstrong of Sydney, the cruiser’s commanding officer, kept her on station. The official assessment from above was that her damage wasn’t severe enough to withdraw her from the operation.
That assessment was about to be tested. Three more kamikaze attacks were already in the air over Luzon, working their way south for the bombardment line over the next 72 hours. By the time the landing craft hit the beach on the morning of the 9th of January, HMAS Australia would have absorbed five kamikaze strikes in 5 days, more than any other ship in the bombardment force at Lingayen.
She’d still be firing when the Americans waded ashore at Kruegers Beachhead. The worst damage to her hull and superstructure was still to come. By the start of January 1945, the war in the Pacific was tightening around Japan from the south. American forces had retaken Leyte in the central Philippines, and the next step on the road to Tokyo was Luzon, the largest island in the archipelago and the gateway to Manila.
The chosen landing site was Lingayen Gulf, a shallow body of water on the northwestern coast of Luzon, 120 miles north of the capital city. The Allied Fleet’s route ran past Mindoro into the southern entrance of the South China Sea, where Japanese airfields packed wing to wing on Luzon and on Formosa lay overhead.
General Douglas MacArthur watched the operation from the light cruiser USS Boise, while overall naval command sat with Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid of the United States 7th Fleet. HMAS Australia had met the Kamikaze once already. Three months earlier, off Leyte on the 21st of October 1944, a Japanese aircraft had deliberately rammed her bridge structure.
By some accounts, the first time in the war a pilot had used his aircraft as a guided weapon, 4 days before the official formation of the special attack units in Japan. 30 sailors lost their lives in that strike, including the cruiser’s commanding officer Captain Emile Dechaineux, DSC. Australia limped to Manus and then to Sydney for repair.
When she came back into the line at the end of 1944, the cruiser was working under a new captain and with a partly new crew that hadn’t been together long. Captain John Malet Armstrong was a Sydney man, born on the 5th of January 1900, and educated at Sydney Grammar School and All Saints College at Bathurst.
He’d gone into the Royal Australian Naval College in 1914 at the age of 14, and worked his way up through destroyers and cruisers between the wars. The Australian Dictionary of Biography would later describe him as an intelligent and tactful officer, shy by temperament, but energetic in command. Armstrong took over HMAS Australia on the 29th of October, 1944, 8 days after the Lady Strike.
On the morning of the 5th of January, 1945, the captain turned 45 years old. And that same afternoon, the first kamikaze of the Lingayen operation came through his ship. The Australian ships in Task Group 77.2 were a squadron led by Commodore Harold Farncomb, RAN, who flew his pennant in HMAS Australia. With Australia were her sister cruiser HMAS Shropshire, an 8-in gun heavy cruiser of the same County class, and the two Tribal class destroyers HMAS Arunta and HMAS Warramunga, with HMS Ariadne of the Royal Navy in close
company. Together they formed the Royal Australian Navy’s largest combined contribution to an amphibious operation of the Pacific War, working as a single squadron under American operational command. The rest of the bombardment line was American, with the main firepower coming from six older battleships built in the 1910s and ’20s.
Around them moved several cruisers and a screen of fleet destroyers, and the Australian and American crews had been working alongside each other since the New Guinea campaigns of 1943. By January, 1945, HMAS Australia had been at war for more than 5 years. The cruiser had been in the Atlantic at the start of the war, and in Pacific waters from 1941 onwards, serving at the Battle of the Coral Sea and through the long bombardment campaigns of the New Guinea coast that followed.
By the time she sailed for Lingayen, the ship was on her fifth major amphibious operation of the Pacific War, and her crew had built up the working drill of a vessel that had been continuously at sea against a determined enemy. Her boilers had been worked hard through five years of war steaming. The dockyards at Cockatoo Island in Sydney knew her almost as well as her own engineers did.
The Japanese response had been simple in concept, with their own carrier air arm wrecked at the Philippine Sea and at Leyte Gulf. They’d pulled every flyable aircraft they could find onto the airfields of Luzon and Formosa, and fitted them with 500-lb bombs welded directly into the airframe. The pilots had a single briefing, aim at an Allied warship and don’t pull out.
The special attack units, known to the Japanese as Tokko, had been formalized on the 25th of October, 1944. By January 1945, the program was producing dozens of sorties a day against the Allied fleet off Luzon, with most of the pilots flying as young men on enough fuel for the one-way trip. The Allied side knew what was coming.
Kamikaze tactics had inflicted serious damage on Allied warships during the closing weeks of the Leyte campaign in late 1944, and by the start of 1945, the planners at Pearl Harbor and Manila were budgeting Kamikaze losses into their operational schedules as a known cost of doing business. The Lingayen invasion plan assumed the bombardment force would take heavy casualties during the run-in and the bombardment phase, and the orders to the heavy ships had been written with the Kamikaze threat already factored in.
Ships would stay on their bombardment stations under air attack unless their damage was severe enough to compromise the mission, and the decision on what counted as severe sat with the senior officer in the task group. The Allied Fleet for the Lingayen operation had left Leyte and the Palau Islands at the start of January and made its way up the western edge of the Philippines in two main groups, the bombardment force and the amphibious force.
Already on the 3rd and 4th of January, the Kamikaze were finding the fleet. By the 4th of January, an Allied escort carrier south of Mindoro had been hit hard enough that her own destroyers scuttled her and other ships were carrying their first Kamikaze damage. The bombardment force pushed north towards Lingayen Gulf with the airfields of Luzon already coming into range.
HMAS Australia reached the entrance to Lingayen Gulf during the afternoon of the 5th of January with the Japanese already waiting. At 17:35, a Japanese aircraft came in low across the cruiser’s port side and crashed into her amidships at the level of the boat deck. The aircraft type was never confirmed in the chaos of the impact.
Casualties from the strike were concentrated on the upper deck and among the port 4-in gun crews. An official damage report signaled to Oldendorf’s staff that night classed the strike as not severe enough to require Australia’s withdrawal from the operation and the cruiser held her station through the dark. Through the night, the damage control parties worked over the wreckage on the port side and brought the wounded down to the sick bay.
Surviving 4-in gun crews were redistributed across the remaining mounts. Ammunition handlers in the magazines were briefed for a long bombardment in the morning. By the time the sun rose on the 6th of January, the cruiser was on her bombardment line off the southeastern beaches of the gulf ready to begin the pre-landing fire that the operation plan required.
Her gun crews at action stations since the previous afternoon were already on their second day without sleep. At 1100 on the 6th of January, HMAS Australia opened fire from her 8-in main guns on Japanese shore positions along the Gulf’s southeastern shore. The cruiser carried eight of those main guns in four twin turrets fore and aft throwing 256-lb shells out to 17 mi.
Japanese engineers had built defensive works behind the beaches and on the high ground inland and the cruiser’s targets had been pre-plotted from aerial photographs taken during the run-up to the operation. The shore batteries answered when they could, but Japanese gun positions were old and underpowered against an 8-in cruiser firing from open water and the only effective Japanese response was coming from the air.
By the late afternoon, she’d been firing for almost 6 hours straight and the gun crews who hadn’t slept since the previous evening were still closed up at action stations. By the time the late afternoon shadows were lengthening on the 6th of January, Australia had absorbed her second Kamikaze of the operation and her upper deck looked very different from the morning.
Damage control parties were still working when at 1828, 54 minutes after the Val had struck the starboard side, a third Japanese aircraft came in low on Australia. Her air defense was thinned and slow, but the gunners of USS Columbia, an American light cruiser to seaward, opened up first and put the Kamikaze into the Gulf before it crossed Australia’s rail.
Columbia’s gun crews had saved their Australian neighbor from a third strike that would have arrived less than an hour after the second. Some of Australia’s wounded from the 1734 strike were still being moved below decks when the third aircraft hit the water. The night of the 6th into the 7th of January passed without further air attack on Australia.
The 7th itself brought a strange quiet across the cruiser. No kamikaze found her through the whole day, though the bombardment fleet was still under attack along the rest of the line. Australia stayed on her bombardment station and continued to fire on Japanese positions whenever fire support was requested by the minesweepers working closer to the beaches.
Her gun crews redistributed yet again, and by the end of the 7th of January, the 4-in armament was running with the absolute minimum of trained men. At 7:20 on the morning of the 8th of January, a Japanese twin-engine bomber broke from the south and made straight for Australia. The pilot misjudged his run at the cruiser badly.
The aircraft struck the water about 20 yd short of the hull and skipped across the surface before reaching her side. As it skipped past, the airframe clipped Australia’s port hull a glancing blow before falling away. There were no casualties on board, and the damage above the waterline was superficial enough that the cruiser stayed on station without a pause in her bombardment.
The relief on the upper deck lasted 19 minutes. At 7:39, a second Japanese aircraft began its run on Australia from a different bearing. The cruiser’s gunners caught this one squarely and brought it down just before it reached the rail, but the bomb it was carrying went off as the aircraft hit the water, blowing a hole in Australia’s port side roughly 14 ft long and 8 ft high right on the waterline.
The provision store flooded immediately. One of the cruiser’s fuel tanks took on seawater, and the cruiser listed 5° to port and began the slow process of counter flooding to bring herself back upright. The damage control parties below the armor belt now had a task they hadn’t trained for in any peacetime exercise.
They worked the soundings to find the boundary of the flooding, then sealed off the affected compartments before bringing pumps into the provision store. The list slowly came off as the counter flooding took hold. Above decks, the cruiser kept her station on the bombardment line. Her shore guns still needed answering and the 8-in turrets were still in working order even with a hole in the port side below the waterline.
The 9th of January was the morning of the landing. At 09:30, the first wave of the United States Sixth Army began to wade ashore from the landing craft along a 30-km beachfront on the southeastern shore of Lingayen Gulf. 68,000 American soldiers came in on that first wave under Lieutenant General Walter Krueger and another 130,000 would follow within the week.
The Japanese had pulled their main defensive positions back inland and offered next to no resistance on the beaches themselves. The landing craft came in onto dry sand and the first echelons of the Sixth Army were moving inland by midmorning. HMAS Australia was on her station off the beachhead when the fifth Kamikaze of the operation found her.
At about 1300, a Japanese aircraft came in across the cruiser’s bow on a shallow descent and clipped the top off her forward funnel before falling into the sea on the far side. The funnel cap was sheared off but the machinery beneath kept running. There were no casualties on board though the pilot lost his life on impact.
An Australian War Memorial photographer who recorded the damage that afternoon filed an image that survives in the AWM collection under the catalog mark for the 9th of January 1945. The picture shows the jagged metal where the upper section of the funnel had been. By the end of the morning of the 9th of January, the cruiser’s silhouette was no longer the clean line that had left Manus 3 weeks before.
Her forward funnel had a missing upper section that exposed the smoke ducting beneath. Below the waterline on the port side ran a patched over hole from the bomb of the eighth. And above it on the boat deck, the burn marks from the first Kamikaze still showed alongside the scorching on the starboard 4-in mounts from the valve.
Australia was carrying five separate Kamikaze impacts on her hull and superstructure, and the bombardment line ahead of her could see the damage from a mile away. HMAS Australia wasn’t the only ship taking damage in those days. American battleships up the line had taken Kamikaze hits in their upper works, and escort carriers offshore had been lost outright when their thin steel couldn’t absorb the impact.
The destroyer screens around the heavy ships were running with worn out anti-aircraft crews after 5 days of continuous air attack. What set Australia apart was that she’d absorbed more Kamikaze strikes than any other single ship in the bombardment force, and she’d stayed in her firing slot through every one of them with her 8-in guns still answering the Japanese coastal positions.
After the fifth strike, the signal finally came down from Oldendorf’s staff to detach HMAS Australia from the bombardment line. The landing was secured, and the beaches were quiet enough that the Sixth Army was already moving against the Japanese main line of resistance several miles inland. With her primary job done, Australia formed up with a small screen of destroyers and made for the open sea on a southerly course.
She’d been firing for 96 hours with five separate Kamikaze impacts on her hull and superstructure. The bombardment line behind her was still under air attack as she pulled out of the gulf. The cost of the Lingayen operation for HMAS Australia was 39 sailors lost and 56 wounded. Most of the casualties came from the 4-in gun crews on both sides of the upper deck where the Kamikaze had struck on the 5th and 6th of January.
The wounded filled the cruiser’s sick bay through the voyage south. Captain John Mulette Armstrong was decorated for his command of the cruiser with the Distinguished Service Order. The citation noting that he’d kept her on her bombardment line through five days of repeated Kamikaze attack until the United States Sixth Army was ashore.
He’d go on to serve as second naval member of the naval board after the war with the rank of Commodore. After Lingayen, HMAS Australia put into Manus for emergency patching of the bomb hole, then made the long passage south for Sydney. At Cockatoo Island Dockyard, the same place where she’d paid off her wounded after the lady hit in October, the engineers took a longer look at what five Kamikaze had done to her.
The damage list ran to several pages of dockyard notation. Her 4-in gun mounts were beyond local repair and the heavy structural steel work wasn’t available in Sydney for the bomb hole below the port waterline. The cruiser was ordered onto the British dockyards at Plymouth where the work could be done at scale on a heavy cruiser of her size.
On the 1st of July, 1945, HMAS Australia tied up at Plymouth Dockyard at the end of a long passage out of the Pacific. The Australian High Commissioner in London, S.M. Bruce, came down to the dock that afternoon and walked her decks alongside the British engineers who’d be cutting her apart over the next year. By that point, the war in Europe had ended and the war in the Pacific was running its last weeks.
Australia wouldn’t finish her refit before the surrender at Tokyo Bay. The cruiser had carried her wounds 3 months and 20,000 mi from the Gulf where she’d taken them. By the time HMAS Australia came out of the Plymouth dockyards after the war, the Royal Australian Navy was already drawing down from wartime strength.
The cruiser served on into the post-war fleet of the late 1940s before being paid off for disposal in 1954. She was sold for scrap and broken up the following year at a British yard. The repaired hull plates and the rebuilt forward funnel went to the breakers yard with the rest of her steel 10 years after the cruiser had taken her five kamikaze hits in Lingayen Gulf.
During the Plymouth refit, the 4-in gun positions that had been smashed on the 5th and 6th of January were rebuilt with new mounts and new ready use lockers. The forward funnel was rebuilt from the upper deck up to replace the section that the fifth kamikaze had taken off. New steel went into the patched plate on the port side where the bomb had blown its hole and the frames behind it were straightened to the original drawings.
In the cruiser’s surviving logbooks, an entry made at 1300 on the 9th of January recorded damage to the forward funnel and no casualties. It was the last engagement entry HMAS Australia made from Lingayen Gulf.
