Australia punched well above its weight during the Second World War.
From the battlefields of North Africa to the seas of the Pacific, Australians gained a reputation
for fighting to the bitter end. In this video, we illustrate yet another epic last stand from
the Royal Australian Navy, where one sloop went up against an entire Japanese flotilla.
This is the story of Robert Rankin, Buck Taylor, and HMAS Yarra.
The Grimsby-class sloop HMAS Yarra was launched in 1935 from Cockatoo Island off of Sydney. She
had a new design and was built to replace the aging ships built during the Great War.
Her armament consisted of three four-inch guns which were primarily designed for high
altitude anti-aircraft defence. As secondary armament, Yarra was fitted with 50-cal and 303
machine guns for close AA defence. Her full war complement was 160 officers and crew.
When war broke out in September 1939, Yarra was sent to bulk up British forces in the Red
Sea. As a smaller vessel, the sloop was assigned to escort duties,
looking after merchant ships as they transited from British India to Mesopotamia
with supplies and reinforcements for the war effort in North Africa. Yarra was attacked by
high-flying Italian bombers on several occasions, but the Regia Aeronautica never scored a hit.
Yarra maintained her vigil in the Red Sea until April 1941,
when German agents successfully staged a coup in Iraq. The pro-British ruler was replaced
by Prime Minister Rashid Ali, who planned to boot the British from Iraq once and for all.
Yarra’s small size meant that she could steam up the Shatt al-Arab river to lend fire support
to the Allied landings in Basra. For the next month, Yarra acted as a mobile artillery platform,
bombarding Iraqi positions with her four-inch guns and laying down suppressive fire with her 50s.
By May 24th, the landing forces had captured their objectives and Rashid Ali’s government
was collapsing. The Australian sloop had fought her first battle. But the worst had yet to come.
When Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa, Army Group South quickly
swept through Ukraine towards the Caucasus. This posed a major threat to British holdings in Iran.
Less than 1000-kilometres separates Tehran from Tbilisi, and the Iranian oilfields were a prize
the British could not afford to lose. German agents were active in the country and tolerated by
the governing regime. Fearing a situation similar to Iraq, the British and Soviets jointly invaded.
The invasion’s naval contingent was pulled together from whichever vessels were available
nearby. One of them was Yarra, which, incidentally, was the most heavily armed.
At 4:00 on August 25th, Yarra steamed from her anchorage at Basra to the Iranian naval base
on the bank of Shatt al-Arab. Here, she attacked and sunk the sloop Babr with ten salvos from her
heavy guns. When two gunboats fought back, Yarra hit them with a hail of machine-gun fire before
drawing alongside and boarding them. Cooks and stewards armed with rifles went over the side and
captured one gunboat after another. Ninety Iranian and Italian prisoners were thrown in Yarra’s brig.
Over the next few days, Yarra captured several shore facilities
and an Italian freighter. Their naval forces extinguished and facing setbacks on land,
the Iranian government accepted British and Soviet terms on September 2nd. But Yarra wasn’t done;
she was immediately sent to the Mediterranean to help resupply the beleaguered troops at Tobruk.
Scores of ships ran the gauntlet between the British naval base at Alexandria and besieged
Tobruk. They carried ammunition and medical supplies and returned with wounded soldiers.
These supply runs, nicknamed by the Aussies the “Tobruk Ferry Service,”
were vital for maintaining the Allied foothold in North Africa. But the Axis knew this too. U-boats
stalked the waves and the Luftwaffe prowled the skies in search of these resupply ships.
In late 1941, Yarra was constantly at sea as part of the Tobruk Ferry Service. She was attacked by
a squadron of 35 Stuka dive bombers on December 7th but avoided getting hit. Her fellow British
sloop HMS Flamingo wasn’t so lucky, and Yarra towed the incapacitated Flamingo back to port.
This was the last Yarra saw of the Mediterranean.
Imperial Japan had announced its entry into the global conflict with the Pearl Harbour attack,
and the Australian people felt they were under threat. All ships were needed in the Pacific.
Yarra arrived in Batavia in mid-January 1942. She was immediately put to work escorting
supply convoys between Java and Singapore. By January’s end, the Japanese Army was
closing in and the British blew up the causeway, separating Singapore from the Malay Peninsula.
On February 3rd, a nine-ship convoy entered Sunda Strait bound for Singapore packed with troops and
equipment. Yarra was one of its escorts, along with three cruisers, a destroyer, and two other
sloops. Such a strong presence was supposed to deter the tenacious Japanese. It didn’t.
As the convoy neared its destination, Japanese planes appeared in the sky. They dove towards the
fleet, dropping bombs and strafing the decks of the freighters. As Yarra was one of the smallest
ships present, she was ignored, but this decision had deadly consequences for the attackers.
Yarra spat AA fire from all of her guns, striking one plane and sending it tumbling into the sea.
More were blown to pieces by interlocking AA fire from the other ships. But the
damage was done. The 17,000-tonne transport Empress of Asia was on fire.
Soldiers crowded the bow and stern of the vessel to escape the inferno within. Yarra launched her
boats and rescued no less than 1,804 men from the stricken transport. She was so overloaded that
the new passengers were ordered to sit down so their swaying didn’t impact the ship’s handling.
The soldiers from Empress of Asia were rescued, but all their equipment was lost.
Singapore was lost to the Japanese in late February, and control of the waves went
with it after the disastrous Battle of the Java Sea on the 28th. The Allies withdrew.
Yarra left Tjilatjap on Java’s southern coast on March 2nd, escorting the depot ship Anking,
the tanker Francol, and the minesweeper MMS-51. Her captain, Robert Rankin, had orders to see
the small fleet safely to Fremantle in Western Australia. As Yarra steamed toward her objective,
she sighted a seaplane in the distance, but it was too far away to shoot at. It disappeared
soon after, and Yarra’s crew hoped that would be the last they saw of their enemy. They were wrong.
The seaplane belonged to a detached heavy cruiser squadron of Admiral Kondo’s IJN
2nd Fleet. The heavy cruisers Atago, Takao, and Maya and the destroyers Arashi and Nowaki
were stalking the ocean south of Java in search of escaping Allied ships.
On the same day Yarra departed, they sank the destroyer USS Pillsbury. There were no survivors.
At 6:30 AM on March 4th, Yarra’s sirens rung out, urging sailors to their battle stations.
The Japanese fleet had been spotted and was steaming directly for the convoy. Rankin ordered
the ships to scatter and swung Yarra’s bow toward the enemy. Each of the Japanese heavy cruisers had
ten eight-inch guns and eight five-inch guns. With nothing but her three little four-inchers,
Yarra couldn’t have been much more outgunned. So what did Rankin do? He charged.
Yarra laid a heavy screen of smoke around the convoy,
obscuring them from Japanese view. Rankin then put his ship between the convoy and the enemy and
beelined for the Japanese. He knew one sloop had no chance against three heavy cruisers,
but that didn’t matter. His job was to protect the convoy, and that was what he was going to do.
Japanese shells peppered the convoy, and soon fires were raging on Yarra’s deck. Behind her,
Anking’s hull was breached and she went down. Next was the lumbering tanker Francol.
The clouds of black smoke billowed out as her oil caught fire,
setting the ocean ablaze. The minesweeper was then sunk by a hail of close-range destroyer fire.
Yarra was last. She was set on fire almost immediately but continued
fighting against the Japanese fleet for 90 minutes. She flung shell after shell
into the Japanese heavy cruisers, forcing them to open up the distance. Then, at 0800,
burning from bow to stern and listing heavily to one side, Rankin gave the order to abandon ship.
Seconds later, the bridge was hit, killing him and the whole bridge crew.
In a forward gun turret, Leading Seaman ‘Buck’ Taylor manned his gun until he went under,
despite Rankin’s order. He loaded and fired shells alone until Yarra disappeared beneath the waves.
After annihilating the convoy, the Japanese did not stop to pick up Yarra’s survivors.
Five days later, 13 sailors were picked up by the Dutch submarine
K11. They were all that remained of Yarra’s 151-man crew.
In 2014, Yarra’s crew received a posthumous Unit Citation for Gallantry, and in 2001,
a Collins-class submarine was named HMAS Rankin in honour of the captain. Its motto, fittingly,
is" Defend the Weak.”The brave little sloop went up against an entire Japanese fleet on its own,
throwing everything it had at the enemy to buy time for the unarmed ships to escape. But what
do YOU think? Did you know the Brits and Soviets fought together in Iran? What do YOU think the
Japanese thought when they saw the sloop gunning for them? Why is it that so many Australian ships
seem to charge fleets of Japanese ships way larger than themselves? Let us know in the comments!