Ships
- HMAS Nizam (G38) Captain from January 1943
The officer is Claude Henry Brooks. The London Gazette prints the full name twice, once as a commander mentioned in despatches and once as an acting captain appointed to the Order of the British Empire. The Navy List prints it too, against the same commander’s seniority of 30 June 1939. G. Hermon Gill’s official history, which still uses the initials, is the source for the birth: Kalamunda, Western Australia, 3 October 1903. He is not Robert Somers Brookings, and he is not Bert Franklin Brown. He is also not Leslie Rundle Brooks, another RAN officer born at Kalamunda, who went to sea as a boy from the training ship Tingira, finished as a commander, and was buried at Rookwood in 1996.
Origins
Kalamunda, in 1903, was a small settlement in the hills east of Perth, not a naval town. Nothing in the records used here says who his parents were, what the house was like, or whether the sea was already an idea or only a later escape. Gill gives the date and the place and then moves on. The next firm mark is the college. A compiled list of Royal Australian Naval College entrants puts C. H. Brooks in the 1917 entry. He graduated. The list’s last rank for him is captain, and its only decoration note is the mention in despatches. He would have been thirteen that year. The college was then at Jervis Bay, where the King’s Gold Medal for cadets had been established the year before.
The Navy List is how the medal can be tied to him. In December 1940, in the seagoing list of the Permanent Naval Forces, Commander Claude Henry Brooks appears with the symbol [KM] and with p.s.c. The RAN’s own account of the medal says that those letters after a name in the Navy List were the college’s further mark of it, and that the medal went each year to the cadet midshipman who showed gentlemanly bearing, character, good influence among his fellows, and officer-like qualities. The list does not say in which of his college years the medal was given. It does say, by printing the letters, that the navy remembered him as that kind of boy: not the one who came first in mathematics, on this evidence, but the one other cadets were supposed to take their tone from. That is an institutional judgment, made when he was still a child in uniform, and it is the earliest thing like a character that the paper leaves behind.
Formation
By the December 1940 Navy List his rank was commander, seniority 30 June 1939. The same entry carries p.s.c. In that list the letters mean he had passed the staff course at the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich. The date of the course is not given. What is given is the shape of the officer the navy had decided to make: a seaman commander who had already been taught to think as a staff officer, before most of his war had happened. Around him in that list are the men of his generation of the college, Harries, Moran, Tozer, the ones who would command ships and fill Navy Office. The remarks column, as the scan of that list survives, does not say which ship he was in that month.
The October 1944 list adds another qualification. Before his name stands (Met). In the Navy List’s own abbreviations that mark, in the seniority list, means an officer who has qualified in meteorology at the end of a twelve-week course. Again the year of the course is not stated. It may have been a staff job’s schooling rather than a destroyer captain’s hobby. It sits oddly, and usefully, beside the sea appointments. The man who would be remembered for Nizam had been put through Greenwich and through a weather course. The navy was training him for the desk as well as the bridge, and it started before the desk became his life.
Gill’s footnote is the spine of the war he actually had, and it is short. He commanded HMS Mistral in 1940–41. He was on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Fleet, in 1942–43. He commanded HMAS Nizam in 1943–44. He was Director of Plans at Navy Office in 1944–46. That is a career told in four lines. The ships and the dates below are only the parts of those lines that can be stood on without inventing the days between them.
Mistral is the first of them, and almost nothing of his time in her has been found outside that footnote and lists that do not cite a deck log. She was a French destroyer in British hands. Gill does not say where he took her, what broke, or whom he lost. A website that tabulates Allied commanders gives him two spells in her, a month in the French battleship Paris, and three weeks in the escort destroyer Hambledon. Those dates are not used here. They are not in Gill, not in the Navy List entries read for this essay, and not in a citation. If they are true, they are a story still sitting in an Admiralty record. If they are not, repeating them would invent a cruise.
The war as he lived it
On 15 December 1942 the King approved a mention in despatches for Commander Claude Henry Brooks, Royal Australian Navy. His name sits in a long list under the heading “For gallantry and devotion to duty at Singapore,” with John Augustine Collins and a crowd of officers from the Royal Navy, the Royal Indian Navy and the reserves. There is no separate sentence saying what Brooks did. Collins’s presence anchors the list in the disaster of early 1942, the fall of the city and the wreck of the ABDA command. Gill’s biography of Brooks does not mention Singapore at all. It puts him on the Eastern Fleet staff in 1942–43, which is the fleet Somerville raised after Singapore had already gone. The two statements can both be true. A staff officer can be decorated for the weeks of the collapse and then stay on the staff of the fleet that was left. They can also be a loose heading over a mixed list. What cannot be written, because nobody has published it, is the night, the signal, or the choice. The decoration is a fact. The conduct is a blank with his name under it.
He was still that staff officer, on Gill’s dating, when the ship that would make him visible was finishing a refit. HMAS Nizam reached Kilindini, the fleet base in the approaches to Mombasa, on 4 January 1943. Gill dates his succession to Commander M. J. Clark to 26 January. So he took over a destroyer that was already on the East African station, not one he had brought out from Australia. Clark had had her through the Mediterranean, Crete, the Tobruk ferry, Malta, the loss of her sister Nestor. Brooks inherited the hull and the reputation. Clark had already used both. When the ship came home in November 1944, a report named one petty officer from Hobart as the only rating still aboard who had been there since commissioning. The crew Brooks commanded was not the crew that had commissioned her.
The first operation that names him is not a battle. In February 1943, Gill writes, Nizam under Commander Brooks, with Norman and Nepal, was with the fleet covering convoy “Pamphlet” on that stage of its voyage to Australia. Pamphlet was the return of the 9th Division. The Eastern Fleet war diary, in the transcription of the Admiralty diary, shows what “with the fleet” meant. On 3 February Force A left Kilindini: Warspite, Revenge, Resolution, the cruiser Mauritius, and destroyers including Nepal and Nizam. They were at Addu Atoll on 11 February. The troopships, the “monsters,” went on and reached Fremantle on 18 February under cruisers and Dutch escorts. Force A, still including Nizam, was back at Kilindini on 20 February, with Norman named in the return and Nepal not. Gill’s three Australian names and the diary’s day-by-day lists do not match in every ship. They match in the thing that mattered for Brooks. He did not take the soldiers home. He took old battleships out into the Indian Ocean, stayed with them while the liners fuelled and sailed, and brought the covering force back to the same harbour he had left. The men going to Australia got the wharf. He got another three weeks of watchkeeping and a return to Kilindini.
That was the shape of his sea war. The Eastern Fleet in 1943 was a fleet that had survived the Japanese raid of 1942 by not being where Nagumo was, and then had settled into escort, sweeps, and the defence of convoys against U-boats working the Cape and the Mozambique Channel. Gill’s chapter on those months is an account of tonnage, not of glory. In April and May a number of Eastern Fleet destroyers, Nizam and Norman among them, were lent to the South Atlantic Station. In June, while she was on that station, Nizam spent some days searching for a suspected U-boat supply ship about three hundred miles south of Madagascar, and did not find it. While she was on that search, the American ship Sebastian Cermeno, 7,194 tons, was torpedoed about three hundred miles to the north-east. On 13 July Nizam sighted one of the American lifeboats 1,250 miles from the sinking and took thirteen men out of it. Gill says they were in good condition, “owing, among other things, to the excellent appointments of the American lifeboats.” The destroyer towed the boat in and delivered it that evening at Durban.
On 29 July the British Cornish City, 4,952 tons, was sunk in the same broad area, with thirty-two dead. Just before dawn on the 31st, Nizam found six survivors on two rafts. Gill sets the rafts against the American lifeboats on purpose. The contrast is the only picture he gives of what those mornings were like, and he does not put Brooks in the water or on the scramble-net. The captain’s part, on the evidence, was the ship’s: to keep looking after a search that had failed, to stop for thirteen men in a well-found boat and six men on rafts, and to land them. He took the six to Mauritius. On 1 August, Gill says, she sailed from there for Australia and arrived at Melbourne on the 18th for refit. The Sea Power Centre’s history of the ship has her leaving Durban on 26 July, calling at Geraldton on 13 August, and refitting at Melbourne until mid-October. The dates do not agree. Both accounts agree that the African cruise ended in an Australian dockyard, and that the captain who had picked up the survivors brought the ship home.
The refit is a blank of eight weeks or so in which no letter, no complaint about the dockyard, and no leave address has turned up. What followed, in the Sea Power Centre narrative, was the return to the work he already knew. After the Melbourne refit she was at Fremantle at the end of October 1943, took a convoy from Geraldton toward Colombo in the first half of November, was at Kilindini again, and was on a convoy to Aden in December. In 1944 the fleet moved back to Trincomalee. On 19 April 1944 the same history puts Nizam with Napier, Nepal, Quiberon and Quickmatch in the Eastern Fleet carrier strike on Sabang in Sumatra. It does not say that Brooks was on the bridge that day. It also does not name any other captain between Clark and the officer who relieved Brooks at the end. Gill’s span for him is the whole of 1943–44. Sabang, if he was aboard, was the nearest thing to a fleet action his command produced, and it was an air strike he screened, not a gun action he fought. From May to November 1944 the Sea Power history has Nizam on shipping protection in the Indian Ocean. No medal came out of it. The mention in despatches was already a year and a half old, and it was for Singapore, not for this.
In November 1944 the ship came back to Australia for another refit. A report dated 4 November, preserved on Trove, found Commander C. H. Brooks, RAN, captain of Nizam, and quoted him. “The Eastern Fleet is growing so rapidly,” he said, “it now needs elbow room, and must have a crack at the Japanese soon.” It is the only sentence of his that this search has found. It is not modest, and it is not private. He was telling a reporter, in an Australian port, that the fleet he had spent two years screening and escorting had finally become large enough to be let loose. The impatience is the interesting part. He had covered Pamphlet and missed the supply ship and picked up nineteen men and screened a carrier raid, and the line he chose, when asked, was that the real blow had not yet been struck.
He did not strike it. The Sea Power history has the Melbourne refit running from 3 November 1944 to 31 January 1945, and Lieutenant Commander W. F. Cook assuming command on 1 February. Gill sends Brooks to Navy Office as Director of Plans for 1944–46. The crack at the Japanese, the British Pacific Fleet, the run to the home islands, fell to other men, including Cook, who had been first lieutenant of Nizam and who later took her north. On 11 February 1945, twelve miles off Cape Leeuwin, a freak wave rolled her and ten men went overboard. None was recovered. Brooks was already off the ship. The wave is part of her story, not of his last day at sea. It is also the sort of ending a destroyer captain spends his nights imagining, and it happened to his old ship a few weeks after he left her.
What it cost
The sources are almost silent on what the war took from him personally, which is itself a kind of record. No wound is mentioned. No son or daughter is named in any naval list, gazette, or official history used here. The college medal, the staff course, the meteorology course, the mention, the OBE, the acting rank: the paper trail is professional, and it praises a type.
One personal fact is offered, and it should be kept at the strength of its source. In 2018 the Church Times published an obituary of Dr Joan Martin, a Guide leader and teacher who died at 102. It says that during the war she married an Australian naval officer, Claude Henry Brooks, rarely saw him, divorced him after a few years, and kept the marriage a secret until a biography of her appeared in 2011. The name is exact, and it is not a common one. The obituary does not mention Nizam, the RAN, Kalamunda, or a child. No marriage register or Navy Office next-of-kin card was found for this essay. If the obituary is this officer, the marriage was one of those war marriages that consisted of a ceremony and a long absence, and the cost of it was paid mostly by her, in secrecy, for decades. If it is some other Claude Henry Brooks in an Australian uniform, then this man’s private life is simply missing. Either way, nothing here shows him leaving a family a house, a name in a parish register, or a story they told.
The professional cost is easier to see, and it is smaller than the lives around him. Collins, named beside him in the Singapore list, went on to high command. Clark, the man he relieved, already had the DSO. Cook, the man who relieved him, took the ship into Tokyo Bay and was remembered. Brooks’s sea command ended when the fleet he had described was about to be used. Gill then gives him the plans directorate. The Australian Dictionary of Biography, writing of Henry Mackay Burrell, says Burrell was Director of Plans at Navy Office from September 1943 until he took Bataan in May 1945, and that the work included the basing of the British Pacific Fleet in Australia. Gill, in the same history, has already said that Burrell went to Navy Office as Director of Plans in June 1943, and has also said that Brooks held the post in 1944–46. Both footnotes cannot be literally true for the same chair in the same months. The conflict is set out below. What can be said without forcing it is that Brooks came ashore into plans work while other men finished the sea war in the ship he had just left, and that his name is not the one histories attach to the fleet’s great decisions.
After
On 1 January 1953 the Queen, on the advice of her Australian ministers, appointed Acting Captain Claude Henry Brooks, Royal Australian Navy, an Officer of the Military Division of the Order of the British Empire. The gazette gives no citation beyond the appointment. It was a New Year honour, not a decoration for a named action. The 1953 Navy List still carries him on the active list: commander of 30 June 1939 seniority, acting captain, borne at HMAS Kuttabul, the Sydney establishment, and named among the honorary naval aides-de-camp to the Governor-General. The shore job and the court duty are the last active appointments found.
By the 1956 list of retired and emergency officers he is no longer on the active list. He appears under Royal Australian Navy emergency-list officers, among the commanders: Claude Henry Brooks, O.B.E., seniority 30 June 1939. Several men near him are annotated as captains. He is not. The acting rank he held in 1953 was not, on this list, the rank the emergency list remembered. He is still there in the 1958 emergency list, still a commander, still O.B.E., still with that seniority. A compiled college roll calls his final rank captain. The lists that were printed while he was alive, and that were read for this essay, do not.
No death date, no funeral, no will, and no later civilian occupation were found. A date of retirement on his sixtieth birthday, 3 October 1963, appears on a commanders’ website and was not confirmed in a Navy List. He was alive to the navy, at least, in 1958. What happened after that is not in the sources gathered here.
What survived of him is the paper. A boy from Kalamunda who was given the college medal for the effect he had on other boys. A commander who had passed the staff course before the war and a meteorology course by 1944. A mention in despatches for Singapore that names no act. Two years in an N-class destroyer in which the recorded work was covering a troop convoy he did not take home, failing to find a supply ship, and stopping for nineteen men in a boat and on rafts. One sentence to a reporter, asking for a battle he did not get. An OBE, an acting captaincy, a Sydney shore posting, and then the emergency list, where the acting rank fell away and the commander of 1939 remained. The ship went on without him, lost ten men off Cape Leeuwin, and was in Tokyo Bay for the surrender. He was not aboard.