Articles : Miscellany

ALBERT Mc- Lemore, a retired United States Navy Commander, was never a man to mince his words - and he doesn't intend to start now. "He was screwed" is his blunt verdict on the man who sank his ship in the South China Sea 30 years ago.

Thursday is the anniversary of one of the most appalling disasters in Australian naval history, when the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne sliced through the USS Frank E. Evans on manoeuvres off the coast of Vietnam, sinking the US destroyer and killing 74 of its crew.

McLemore, the captain of the Evans, was asleep at the time of the collision and was lucky to escape with his life. "I thought we'd been torpedoed or mined," he said. He clawed his way through a hole torn in the bulkhead and swam naked in the sea for 20 minutes before he was rescued.

Now aged 69 and living in retirement in Nevada, McLemore has little doubt that the tragic errors that drove the destroyer under the bows of the carrier were committed by the two inexperienced junior officers he had left in charge of the Evans. Asked whether the collision would have been avoided if he had been on the bridge, there is a long pause before he says: "Yes."

McLemore and his two officers were "reprimanded" for what a US military court found to be dereliction of duty and negligence. But it was the commander of the Melbourne, Captain John Phillip "Steve" Stevenson, who faced the disgrace of a formal court-martial when he returned to Australia, and who resigned soon afterwards.

McLemore still believes there was nothing Stevenson could have done to avoid the collision. But he says he was not surprised at the decision to court-martial the Australian skipper: "In the Navy you always have to have someone to blame," he says. "He was screwed, we all know that."

There is now little doubt about what happened that night. The proceedings of the partly secret joint Australian/ American inquiry convened in the Philippines to investigate were declassified in 1991, and the collision has been exhaustively documented in three books.

IT WAS 1969 and the Vietnam War was reaching a crescendo. Richard Nixon was in the White House and Australia, led by John Gorton, was his enthusiastic ally. It was the desire to preserve at all costs that "special relationship" that many believe led to the scapegoating of Stevenson and the destruction of his career.

The 20,000-tonne Melbourne, flagship of the RAN, was part of a fleet of 40 ships from four nations taking part in SEATO (South-East Asian Treaty Organisation) exercises that night. Evans, one tenth her size, was one of the carrier's escorts as the fleet zig-zagged across the sea, simulating tactics that would be used to avoid attack by enemy submarines.

The Australians were hyper-aware of the fact that five years earlier, while performing similar manoeuvres off the NSW coast, Melbourne had sunk the destroyer HMAS Voyager with the loss of 84 lives. McLemore remembers Stevenson inviting all the captains of ships involved in the exercise to a dinner the night before the fleet left Subic Bay at which he explained how that had happened, and issued written instructions on how to avoid another disaster.

At 3.10 on a bright moonlit morning with the sea oily smooth, Stevenson radioed Evans to shift position from in front of the carrier to "plane guard" station behind it, where Evans was to rescue any planes or helicopters which went into the sea. Instead of turning away from the carrier, Evans turned towards it.

Horrified, Stevenson radioed "Watch it. You are on a collision course", but the two ships raced together at a combined speed of 40 knots (75 km/h). On the bridge watching history repeat itself stood Petty Officer Stanley Heares: "I couldn't believe it was going to happen again. I just stood there and said a prayer."

On the bridge of the Evans were Lieutenant Ronald Ramsay, 24, and Lieutenant James Hopson, 28. Neither was a qualified watchkeeping officer. They had ignored instructions in not waking up McLemore, had confused Melbourne's course, and Hopson "appeared to panic" when told he was on a collision course, the inquiry later heard.

Evans at first appeared to have passed narrowly, but safely, in front of Melbourne but then, at the last minute, the destroyer whipped around and dived under the carrier's bows. She was cut in half, the front sinking in minutes in 1,100 fathoms (2,010 metres), drowning 74 of the ship's 273 sailors, including three brothers.

Aircraft handler Bob Winston, who had just turned 21 at the time, was asleep in the fo'c'sle at the front of Melbourne when the crash rolled him out of his bunk and he heard a terrifying grinding of steel. Running up on deck, he heard the screams of the doomed sailors as the front half of Evans went down.

Winston was one of 21 of Melbourne's crew who later received awards for their gallantry that night, leaping onto the still-floating stern section of Evans and lashing it to the side of Melbourne. Others jumped nearly 20 metres from the carrier into the sea to rescue drowning sailors. "There is no doubt many, many more lives would have been lost if it hadn't been for them," says survivor Roy "Pete" Peters.

Peters, a machinist's mate, was in the engine room of the Evans only metres from where Melbourne sliced through the destroyer. It ground to a halt, the lights went off, superheated steam filled the room and water began to rise around the men. Terribly scalded, Peters struggled onto deck where he collapsed. He owes his life to the men from Melbourne who strapped him to a stretcher and hoisted him to safety.

But heroism was not the focus of the inquiry convened in Subic Bay. It was headed by US Navy Rear Admiral Jerome King - an extraordinary choice since King was the commander of the squadron of which the ill-fated Evans was a part. Contemporary observers and historians have commented on the lengths he went to assign at least part of the blame to Melbourne.

Writing on his deathbed in a testament published six years later in Quadrant magazine, Anthony Vincent, a lieutenant in the RAN Legal Service who had been assigned to assist the inquiry, described it as a whitewash and a farce and said: "I hope that if any Australian officer conducted a board of inquiry in this fashion his conduct would be described as disgraceful."

So blindingly obvious was the cause of the collision that to this day, an instructional video about it called I Relieve You, Sir is used in naval training in the US to teach officers what not to do in similar circumstances.

But the inquiry had another agenda. As well as smoothing relations between the allies, the RAN brass needed to pacify American public opinion. Confidence had been shaken by a series of disasters in the previous few years in which 313 lives had been lost in six separate sinkings and other accidents. Melbourne, it decided, had to accept some blame.

Stevenson was devastated when he learnt he was to be court-martialled. He came from a family with a long naval tradition, had joined the Navy when he was 12, and had a remarkable career in which he saw World War II service with the British and Australian navies in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean, was given his first command at 28, and had been Naval Attache in Washington and equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

He was charged on two counts: not having taken evasive action by putting his engines into reverse and not having explicitly told Evans to change course to avoid a collision. The first option would have been pointless as there had not been time to slow, let alone stop, the carrier because of its massive momentum. The Judge Advocate, Commander P. L. Sharp, commented on the second charge: "What was he supposed to do - turn his guns on them?"

When Stevenson walked into the courtroom at HMAS Penguin at Balmoral, he knew before the verdict was read that he was to be acquitted. His sword, taken from him at the start of the court- martial, had been placed symbolically on the table with its handle towards him.

His counsel, Gordon Samuels, QC - now the Governor of NSW - has written in a forward to a book* about the case by Stevenson's wife Jo: "I do not think that ever in my experience as an advocate I have appeared in a proceeding ... in which the prosecution's case was so totally bereft of any possible proof of guilt ... I have never been able to understand how any rational mind could have concluded that Stevenson had been in any way at fault."

Stevenson had been expecting his next career move to be a posting to the Imperial Defence College in London, to qualify him for promotion to admiral. Instead, even before his honorable acquittal, he was offered what he still sees as a humiliating demotion - a shore-based posting, replacing an officer nine years his junior.

As he left the court, reporters asked him how he proposed to celebrate his victory. Heavy-hearted, Stevenson replied: "I have nothing to celebrate."

After 35 years dedicated to the Navy, Stevenson resigned, eventually taking a job as an executive with AGL, the gas company. So vindictive was the Navy that it took a newspaper campaign to shame it into paying his pension.

Now 77, Stevenson still believes that he was the victim of politics - that a desire by the Government to maintain the "special relationship" with the US was more important than justice.

Says Jo Stevenson: "The Navy made him a scapegoat. Nothing can be done about it now, but he was a hero that night. They should have decorated him, instead of humiliating him in that way."

In spite of this, Stevenson will be at the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park for a special commemoration service on Thursday at 11 am, along with about 200 survivors and former crew members of Evans and Melbourne.

But not Albert McLemore.

In spite of his lenient sentence, the US skipper was transferred ashore and was never promoted to captain. He left the US Navy in 1976 and is still burdened by what happened that night: "I will not be attending the ceremony - I don't think that psychologically I could take it," he said. "I still have bad nights."