They were designed to be the best…
they met enemies face to face,
endured tragedies and enjoyed victories…
they went down in history due to the bravery of their crews…
they are the ships that deserve to be called
“Naval Legends!”
In this episode:
Australia’s Daring destroyers.
The first colonists of Australia had to fight all the time.
They faced heat, lack of water, flies, snakes, and even ostriches.
And today, the Australians still cannot live without fighting.
Every day, they fight boredom, trying to conquer the waves.
They created AC/DC, whose rock swept the world like a hurricane.
Nothing disturbed the country: no wars, no aggressors— the Germans, French, and Russians were nowhere around.
So they basically focused on making their lives better.
The first time the Australians really felt a threat to their way of life
was when World War II began.
It was the so-called Japanese Blitzkrieg, when within half a year, or maybe a year,
Japan advanced from their home islands to the coast of Australia.
In February 1942, Japanese aircraft attacked the city of Darwin in Australia.
Japan was expanding its empire mainly by occupying territories in Southeast Asia.
Though Australia was not part of their plan, military bases of the United States and the Allies
stationed on the Green Continent were undermining Japan’s intentions to dominate the Pacific.
And the Royal Australian Navy was actively involved in the Pacific War
until the very end of World War II.
Following the end of the Second World War moving into the Cold War,
Australia still realized that it needed to have a defensive asset in its Navy,
so it moved to bringing in a new generation of vessels of which the Daring-class destroyers were a member.
The Daring-class was essentially designed as the Royal Navy super destroyer.
So Australia decided to build three Darings being Vampire, Vendetta, and Voyager.
The British designed the Daring class, relying on their experience of using destroyers in World War II
and the progress in arms development.
The Australian-built destroyers were somewhat different from their British counterparts.
In terms of their specifications, the Darings were similar to light cruisers.
Total displacement: about 3,800 t Length: almost 120 m
Beam: a little over 13 m Draft: about 4 m
Armament
When commissioned, the Darings were equipped with versatile guns featuring the best rate of fire in the world.
Six 113-mm Mark 5 guns, mounted in three dual turrets
As for small-caliber anti-aircraft guns, the ships had six 40-mm Bofors autocannons.
Torpedo armament One five-tube 533-mm torpedo launcher
Anti-submarine armament
One three-barreled 305-mm Mark 10 anti-submarine mortar
The power plant consisted of two Foster Wheeler boilers
and two English Electric turbines, and provided 54,000 horsepower.
Maximum speed: over 30 knots
Cruising range: 3,700 nautical miles at 20 knots
The Australian-built Darings were the first all-welded construction warships built in Australia.
The ship incorporated all the best design features, developed during World War II.
Speed, maneuverability, artillery guns, a fire control system, radars—everything was there.
All these systems were researched and implemented in the Darings.
In a way, this was a perfect ship, with just one exception:
she was built after the first missiles were already produced.
In the early 1970s the Darings were fitted with surface-to-air missiles,
despite this they remained mainly artillery ships.
And they were the last ones of their kind.
The destroyers’ main turrets were their pride: 113-mm versatile guns could fire 24 rounds per minute
and showed themselves to be advantageous during World War II.
The Darings were equipped with the QF Mark V version of these guns, which was a post-war upgrade.
The turrets had a distinctive shape and made the destroyers easy to recognize.
This is the gun bay, for gun turret A on the Daring-class destroyers.
This is where the shells and the cartridges were assembled before being sent up to the guns.
This was an incredible challenging and very dangerous place to work on the ship.
It was confined and, as you can imagine, you got high explosives being sent into this room,
so there was the danger of explosion or fire.
And if that weren’t difficult enough this bay actually rotated as the gun above rotated.
And sometimes the rotation would occur without any warning and any indication of where it was going to go.
So you could be in the middle of trying to assemble a shell
and all of a sudden the entire bay would move, and you have to shift with it.
World War II created the communist threat for Western civilization,
the Western way of thinking.
And communism was already nearby.
The United States created the domino theory in this regard.
What does this mean? It means if Vietnam falls into communism,
then Laos falls, Thailand falls, Indonesia falls, and Australia falls too.
And the people in Australia believed this.
After World War II, the Soviet Union rapidly built up its influence,
which spread from Western Europe and China to the Caribbean Sea
and some exotic monarchies in the Indonesian archipelago
Military coups and revolutions were shattering tropical islands in the Pacific,
and the Australians who led their quiet life felt quite concerned about this.
Now they needed protection, not from bombs and kamikazes,
but from vigorous revolutionaries who could destroy their Australian serenity.
The ships essentially served around South East Asia under the Southeast Asia
Treaty Organization and often spent a lot of time in Singapore.
Essentially the only vessel, which saw service out of the class, was Vendetta,
which did so for a short period of time in Vietnam.
An Australian contingent of about 50,000 men participated in combat operations in Vietnam.
And Australia got involved in this war several years before the United States interfered in the conflict.
At first, 30 Australian military advisers were sent to South Vietnam,
but a couple of years later a several thousand strong military force was deployed there.
They required supplies, which were brought by transport convoys from Australia.
Darings were among the ships protecting them.
Despite the fact that Australia was officially at war, it was hardly felt aboard escort ships.
Of course, the service wasn’t anything like a pleasure trip.
However, one of the major concerns for the destroyer crews was to win the Gloucester Cup
—the main award for naval exercises.
I think the amazing thing about Vampire was that it was an extremely happy ship.
And I think it was because there were a lot of trainees on board and the atmosphere there was
“Give everything you got, don’t worry about it, just get in there and do your best.”
We’re standing in HMAS Vampire’s operations center.
It’s directly below the wheelhouse, which is just above us.
The nickname for this room, it was called the bat cave,
that’s because HMAS Vampire’s nickname was The Bat, it looked a lot like a cave
and at the time that HMAS Vampire was operational, Batman, and particularly the TV-show,
was very popular, so it was given the nickname based on that information.
The Darings were top ships, very friendly ships, especially Vendetta.
Everyone on the crew used to get along together, there were hardly any fights.
However, any joyful existence can be darkened by tragedy.
This is a fact of life and cheerful Australian sailors didn’t manage to escape it.
Unfortunately, the Australian Navy lost the Voyager in 1964 with a large loss of life
On the 10th of February 1964, HMAS Voyager, one of the Daring-class destroyers,
was struck by the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne during maneuvers off Jervis Bay
in New South Wales, Australia.
The ship was hit just after the bridge and it broke in half and rolled over.
I don’t think that the Voyager’s crew was poorly organized;
I don’t think that the Melbourne’s crew was poorly organized.
It was an accident.
Something got overlooked and a sequence of errors led to this collision.
Being on Vendetta we were always told, there is escape point 1, escape point 2,
go down this way if we get sliced in half;
as you start going down, go up,
know where your escape point was and that’s how we did it.
One of those to die aboard the ship was Chief Petty Officer Jonathan Rogers
who was too big to fit through the escape hatch,
but helped other crewmen get through the escape hatch,
before he led those who were still stuck in the ship in hymns and prayers as the ship sank.
This tragedy left a deep wound in the hearts of Australian sailors,
but soon their life returned to normal: exercises, regattas, and patrol duties.
Many veterans remember their years of service aboard the Australian Darings
as the best and most carefree time in their life.
Though the destroyers went on serious combat missions a couple of times,
in other respects the most dangerous challenges that the Darings’ crews faced
were visits to local bars and the consequences were comical rather than sad.
Friendly and well-knit crews of the Daring-class destroyers were very highly trained
and were rewarded by the command of the Royal Australian Navy on multiple occasions.
It’s not easy to serve in the Navy, but they were young, they were happy,
they accomplished some tasks.
Yes, he swabs the deck, but then he will go ashore.
He will be a sailor, he will be in the spotlight.
But at the time as a junior recruit, leaving school in the morning,
joining the Navy in the afternoon, then sent to Leeuwin all in the same day.
The Royal Australian Navy to me was life changing.
It set me on a career and I never looked back.
It was the best 12 years of my life, I wish I had done it for 20 or even longer.
The crew of the Vendetta at the time, it was all one crew.
Didn’t matter if you were a restoke, a greenie, a cook, a dibdeb,
even some of the officers and chiefs, it didn’t matter—we would all drink together.
We’d all go into a bar and glug glug glug. Which hardly ever happened on other ships.
There was such a good comradery on the ship. You know, “life is great on 08.”
In the 1980s when new wave music began conquering the world,
the Australian destroyers from the rock’n’roll era became history.
Voyager and 83 members of her crew rested at the bottom of the sea. Vendetta was scrapped.
She was scrapped, she sat there and went to Taiwan and basically ended up as razor blades.
Obviously we wished she sat there and sank as a reef but they weren’t sinking ships
back then for reefs, there was still money in steel.
Luck was kind to Vampire alone. She was decommissioned in 1986,
but remained intact.
This museum ship located in Sydney’s Darling Harbour has the right to be considered
a memorial to all Australian Darings. She is the last of them.
And all the parts removed from the Vendetta are now on Vampire, which is a museum ship you can just look at.
I’ll tell you there is probably a good 40% of Vendetta on Vampire.
So I’m very glad that they saved HMAS Vampire from the scrapyard,
because she does represent an era of Navy of which I’m very proud.
The probations of steam ships and the great spirit of the cruise.