Ships
- HMAS Perth (D29) Captain from June 1939
- HMAS Canberra (D33) Captain from June 1940
- HMAS Australia (D84) Captain from 24 December 1941
Harold Bruce Farncomb (28 February 1899 – 12 February 1971) was an officer of the Royal Australian Navy who spent almost the whole of the Second World War in sea command, and later a Sydney barrister. He was among the first boys to enter the Royal Australian Naval College in 1913, and in 1937 became the first College graduate promoted captain. He commissioned the light cruiser HMAS Perth in 1939, commanded the heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra on Indian Ocean raider patrols, and from Christmas Eve 1941 until March 1944 was captain of the flagship HMAS Australia through the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal and New Britain campaigns. In 1944 he commanded the British escort carrier HMS Attacker at the landings in southern France and in the Aegean. Recalled when Commodore John Collins was wounded at Leyte, he took command of the Australian Squadron as commodore first class and led it through the Lingayen Gulf landings of January 1945, where Australia was hit five times by Japanese suicide aircraft, and through the later operations at Corregidor, Wewak, Labuan and Balikpapan. Promoted rear admiral in 1947, he commanded the postwar Australian fleet until late 1949. After a recall from Washington and retirement in 1951 he gave up alcohol, studied for the Bar, and practised law in Sydney until heart disease forced him to stop. His ashes were scattered at sea from his last flagship, HMAS Sydney. Officers who served under him called him "Uncle Hal"; sailors called him "Fearless Frank". The Collins-class submarine HMAS Farncomb bears his name.
He was born at North Sydney on 28 February 1899, the second child of Frank Farncomb, a timber surveyor from England, and of Helen Louisa Farncomb, née Sampson, who had been born in Victoria. The family lived at Gordon, on Sydney's north shore. He was educated at Gordon Public School and at Sydney Boys' High School. The sources examined here do not describe his parents' household beyond those facts, nor name his elder sibling.
At thirteen he entered the Navy. The Australian War Memorial's people record dates his enlistment to 31 December 1912. In 1913 he was among the first intake of the Royal Australian Naval College, which opened that year at Osborne House, Geelong, Victoria, and was soon relocated to Jervis Bay. He did well academically, gained his colours for cricket, and topped his final year in 1916. A photograph held by the Memorial shows the first quota of midshipmen at the College with the Governor-General before they left Australia to join ships in the North Sea; Farncomb was among them.
He was promoted midshipman in January 1917 and sent at once to Britain for training with the Royal Navy. His first appointment was to the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign in the Grand Fleet. Later accounts by Alan Zammit, who wrote both the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry and earlier pieces for the Naval Historical Society of Australia, place him thereafter in destroyers, including operations against Zeppelin sheds on the Flanders coast, and after the Armistice in a destroyer guarding the surrendered German fleet; those details rest on Zammit's interviews and correspondence rather than on a published service chronology examined here. In 1920 he was awarded the maximum of five first-class certificates for his lieutenant's courses, a rare mark of professional excellence.
Back in Australia in 1921–22 he was gunnery officer of the destroyer HMAS Stalwart. While serving on Commodore Percy Addison's staff in the flagship Melbourne he was commended for intelligence work during the fleet's northern cruise in 1922. The following year he returned to England and in 1924 graduated from the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich. He came home in 1925 to staff duties at sea.
On 31 March 1927, at Trinity Congregational Church, Strathfield, Sydney, he married Jean Ross Nott. They remained childless. Contemporary newspaper reports of the wedding, cited by later biographers, describe the naval "arch of steel" of crossed swords outside the church and name Lieutenant John Collins—later the officer Farncomb would both precede and succeed in squadron command—as best man. Jean Nott came of a Sydney mercantile family; one later summary identifies her as a great-granddaughter of the merchant David Jones. The Dictionary records that she gave "staunch support throughout the vicissitudes of her husband's career."
Promoted lieutenant commander in 1927, Farncomb attended the Imperial Defence College in London at the unusually young age of thirty-one. While posted to Navy Office in Melbourne he was promoted commander on 30 June 1932. In April 1933 he joined the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia as executive officer. Strict but fair, he fostered high morale. With the midshipmen he was curt yet considerate, usually addressing them as "Mr Bloody …"; they nicknamed him "Uncle Hal." His commanding officer, Captain W. S. F. Macleod of the Royal Navy, was impressed by his ability and recommended him for accelerated promotion. One midshipman who later became Captain L. M. Hinchliffe remembered serving as Farncomb's "doggie," or runner, and being ordered, after a tactless remark to a visiting British admiral about Malta, to write the history of the island; when Hinchliffe admitted that the real reason he had not gone ashore was that he was broke, Farncomb lent him ten shillings. Another officer, A. S. Storey, who first met him when he joined Australia as commander, later recalled that Farncomb was "assiduous in his duties" yet managed "a real understanding of his men," "scrupulously honest and fair with his requestmen and defaulters," and that he "built into Australia a morale which was unequalled."
In December 1934 the Duke of Gloucester embarked in Australia for the voyage to England. Midshipman W. F. Cook later remembered Commander Farncomb on the scrubbed wooden decks at six in the morning in an old reefer jacket and sea boots, telescope under his arm, detailing the work that kept the ship gleaming for the royal arrival. For his service on that cruise Farncomb was appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order in 1935.
From August 1935 he was attached to the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty. By 1937 he thought war with Germany inevitable, and took leave to visit that country and improve his knowledge of the language. On 30 June 1937 he became the first graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College to be promoted captain. A press statement by the acting Minister for Defence, quoted in contemporary newspapers, called it "a red letter day for the Australian Navy" as "the first time a Jervis Bay boy had attained the rank of captain." He commanded the sloop HMAS Yarra from October 1937 to November 1938, then went back to England to commission the new light cruiser HMAS Perth in June 1939.
Perth sailed from Portsmouth for Australia by way of the Panama Canal and was representing Australia at the New York World's Fair when the European crisis deepened. On 23 August 1939, at Kingston, Jamaica, Farncomb received a signal asking that Perth remain on the America and West Indies Station. He cancelled his sailing arrangements and took up the duty of guarding tanker traffic in the southern Caribbean. News of the outbreak of war reached him at half past five on the morning of 3 September, when Perth was off Willemstad, Curaçao. She was then the only British warship in the South Caribbean. G. Hermon Gill's official history describes Farncomb as "a studious, coolly-efficient officer," and records that in those first months he moved rapidly at night and appeared off scattered neutral ports in the morning so as to give the impression that more than one ship was in the area, on occasion shipping a dummy third funnel. Of 120 days of war to the end of 1939, Perth was under way on ninety-nine. Fortune denied him captures: German merchant ships he had been watching broke out on the night he finally left Kingston for Australia. Before he passed through Panama homeward bound, the Commander-in-Chief America and West Indies signalled his thanks for six months' cooperation.
It was probably during this Caribbean period that he acquired the nickname "Fearless Frank." Signalling instructions to a convoy in the event of attack, he is reported to have said: "My intention is to engage the enemy with my main armament and close him until I am in torpedo firing range. If gun-fire and torpedoes are not sufficient in disabling the raider, I intend to ram the enemy ship." Gill, writing of the commissioning, also used the lower-deck nickname "Fighting Freddie." The reported signal and the nicknames come through later recollection; the combat reputation behind them was built in the years that followed.
In June 1940 Farncomb transferred to the heavy cruiser Canberra, which spent most of the next eighteen months in the Indian Ocean escorting convoys and hunting German raiders. On 4 March 1941, south-east of the Seychelles, Canberra's aircraft reported what appeared to be an armed raider and a tanker. The supposed raider ignored warnings. Canberra opened fire from about 21,000 yards. Farncomb kept the range beyond 19,000 yards in case the adversary carried torpedoes, and ceased fire when the merchant ship was seen to be burning. The strangers were in fact the German supply ship Coburg and the captured Norwegian tanker Ketty Brovig, both serving the raider force. Both were scuttled by their crews and sank. Having interrogated German prisoners, Farncomb warned the Admiralty of the Admiral Scheer's projected movements.
The action brought criticism as well as results. Farncomb's report, received in Navy Office in April 1941, made no mention in its covering letter of the 215 rounds of eight-inch ammunition expended, though the attached gunnery report listed them. Admiral Leatham, Commander-in-Chief East Indies, later wrote that it had been "over cautious" to avoid approaching nearer than 19,000 yards, and that a more effective range might have identified the enemy sooner and saved ammunition. Gill's official history sets that criticism beside the later conduct of Captain Joseph Burnett in HMAS Sydney, who in November 1941 closed the disguised raider Kormoran and lost his ship and all on board. Gill notes that papers commenting on Farncomb's standing-off circulated in Navy Office while Burnett was still Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff, and that a copy of Leatham's letter went to the Rear-Admiral Commanding the Australian Squadron in August 1941; whether Burnett's decision was influenced by that implied criticism "one can but conjecture." Gill also records that when HMS Devonshire met the raider Atlantis three days after Sydney was lost, her captain kept his distance until identification was certain and then destroyed the raider at long range—conduct "similar to that of Farncomb," and confirmation, in Gill's view, of the correctness of standing off. The conjecture about Burnett remains conjecture. What is firm is that Farncomb chose caution against an unidentified ship that might have been a raider with torpedoes, destroyed two enemy auxiliaries, and extracted intelligence from the survivors.
On 24 December 1941 he joined Australia as commanding officer and chief staff officer to Rear Admiral John Crace. Within months he faced an ordeal of a different kind. At sea on 12 March 1942 Stoker John Riley was stabbed. Before he died the next day he named fellow stokers Albert Gordon and Edward Elias, who, he claimed, had attacked him after he threatened to report their homosexual activities. The men were charged with murder. It fell to Farncomb to prosecute at their court martial, convened on 15 April at Nouméa. He studied the available law books and, after what the Dictionary calls a "masterly" performance, secured convictions. Gordon and Elias were sentenced to death. Reverting to the role of commanding officer, Farncomb then submitted an eloquent appeal for their lives; the sentences were subsequently commuted to imprisonment. The episode left him, years before he became a barrister, with the experience of arguing both for conviction and for mercy in the same case.
On 7 May 1942, in the Coral Sea, Australia led a force of cruisers and destroyers—Task Group 17.3 under Crace—sent without air cover to intercept Japanese troop ships headed for Port Moresby by way of the Jomard Passage. In the afternoon twelve Japanese land-based torpedo bombers made a determined attack. Gill records that timely and skilful handling enabled Australia to avoid two torpedoes which passed particularly close, and that Chicago likewise avoided three. Crace, in a passage quoted by later writers from his report, wrote that the day was calm and sunny and the sea very blue so that the tracks were easily seen; "How those torpedoes were avoided beats me … They can only have missed by a matter of feet. Farncomb handled the ship extremely well and it was entirely due to him and a great deal of luck that Australia was not hit." A few minutes later nineteen heavy bombers attacked from astern and up sun. Some twenty 500-pound bombs, and several smaller, fell in a pattern around the flagship; she was straddled in all directions and her upper decks were drenched with spray, though only superficial damage was suffered from fragments. Observers in other ships thought she had been sunk. American B-26 bombers from Townsville then mistakenly attacked the same force. Farncomb was mentioned in despatches for his part in the battle. Crace recommended him for promotion to flag rank. On Farncomb's confidential personal report in June 1942, a month after the battle, Crace wrote that he was "a very capable Captain who handles his ship admirably. A firm but just disciplinarian. Has a quick clever brain and possesses a wide knowledge of affairs. Is well read and speaks both French and German reasonably well and has travelled in these countries."
Rear Admiral Victor Crutchley replaced Crace in June. He and Farncomb joined American officers in planning the invasion of Guadalcanal. Embarked in Australia, Crutchley commanded the force that screened the transports. The landings took place on 7 August 1942. On the night of 8–9 August Crutchley placed five of his heavy cruisers around Savo Island, then was summoned in the flagship to a conference off Lunga Point. At about 1.40 a.m. a Japanese force of seven cruisers and a destroyer caught the defenders by surprise. In the Battle of Savo Island the Allies lost four heavy cruisers, including Canberra, Farncomb's previous command; the Japanese lost none. The Dictionary observes that had Australia—with Farncomb and his experienced crew—been at Savo Island, the tragedy might have been averted. For the rest of the month Australia operated in the South Pacific and screened American carriers in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Farncomb was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. The London Gazette of 9 February 1943 appointed him a Companion of the Order "For skill, resolution and coolness, in H.M. Australian Ships during operations in the Solomon Islands." He saw little further action in 1943 until December, when he directed Australia's bombardment in support of the landings at Cape Gloucester, New Britain.
Crutchley, the Dictionary notes, was less impressed with Farncomb than Crace had been. Early in 1944 the Australian government settled the succession to higher naval appointments. At a War Cabinet meeting on 4 February it was decided that Captain John Collins would command the Australian Squadron as commodore first class when Crutchley's term ended, and that Farncomb would succeed Collins in the squadron after obtaining further experience, "possibly in the British fleet coming to the Pacific." The minutes recorded that under these arrangements "all higher Royal Australian Navy appointments would be Australian." The appointment of Captain Emile Dechaineux to Australia in March 1944 was the first move in carrying the plan out. Farncomb left the ship, took short courses in England, and in May was given command of the escort carrier HMS Attacker.
Under him Attacker was senior ship of a group of escort carriers in Rear Admiral Thomas Troubridge's Task Force 88. On 12 August 1944 she sailed from Malta to support the invasion of the south of France, Operation Dragoon. Allied troops landed on the 15th; Attacker's aircraft struck railways, roads and bridges to block the enemy's escape. In October the ship took part in operations to clear the Germans from the Aegean and to liberate Greece. Farncomb was twice mentioned in despatches for his work in Attacker. Troubridge thought highly of him, but observed, in a remark preserved in the Dictionary, his "tendency to fortify himself with liquor" before important social occasions in harbour.
In October 1944 Collins was wounded when a Japanese aircraft crashed into Australia's foremast in Leyte Gulf, killing Dechaineux and many of the ship's company. Farncomb flew from the Mediterranean to Manus. On 9 December 1944 he assumed command of the Australian Squadron as commodore first class and Commander Task Group 74.1. The invasion of Luzon was imminent. Australia, Shropshire, Warramunga and Arunta—under Farncomb in Australia, with Captain J. M. Armstrong as the cruiser's commanding officer—formed part of Vice Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf's Bombardment and Fire Support Group of the United States Seventh Fleet. Gill records that Farncomb quickly grasped "the voluminous operation orders that emanated from the American command."
Off Luzon and in Lingayen Gulf, between 5 and 9 January 1945, Australia was hit five times by Japanese suicide aircraft. Gill's narrative, based on the ship's action report, is precise. On the afternoon of 5 January, during the approach, a plane that had crossed ahead of the ship turned and dived vertically onto the port side of the upper deck amidships, carrying a bomb; about twenty-five were killed and thirty wounded, among them entire anti-aircraft gun crews. Material damage was slight, but fighting efficiency suffered from the loss of men. On the evening of 6 January, while the ship was carrying out bombardment runs inside the Gulf, a dive-bomber hit her on the upper deck between two starboard mountings; fourteen were killed and twenty-six wounded. On the morning of 8 January she suffered her third and fourth attacks within minutes: one aircraft skidded into the ship's side doing little damage; a second hit the waterline below the bridge, blew a hole fourteen feet by eight, opened a provision room and an oil tank to the sea, and gave the ship a five-degree list to port. The list was corrected and the flooding controlled. Despite the damage, Australia met her scheduled firings that day, though blast from the forward eight-inch guns on the port side strained bulkheads enough that those guns were not to be fired on that side except in emergency. On 9 January, after completing her scheduled bombardments, she sustained her fifth suicide crash: an aircraft diving for the bridge missed its aim, caught a mast strut, swung into the foremost funnel and went over the side, cutting off the top third of the funnel and forcing two boilers to be shut down temporarily. There were no casualties from that hit. A hole was cut in the damaged funnel by the next day and all boilers were again in action.
Oldendorf signalled: "Your gallant conduct and that of your ship has been an inspiration to all of us." Rear Admiral Weyler, forwarding the bombardment report, wrote that Australia's performance was "particularly to be commended. Heavily hit three times and with the greater part of her dual purpose battery out of commission, she nevertheless executed scheduled fires in her usual effective manner." Admiral Kinkaid told the Commander-in-Chief United States Fleet that Australia had received "two minor and three major hits from enemy suicide planes" and that "despite the resulting damage and casualties, the fire schedule was executed in a very satisfactory manner." The Dictionary states that Farncomb was wounded and remained on duty. Gill does not name that wound in the Lingayen chapter examined here; the American Navy Cross citation later praised his "high degree of courage, determination and professional skill" as Commander of the Royal Australian Squadron during the capture of Lingayen Gulf and the landing on Luzon. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath. The London Gazette of 1 May 1945 recorded the appointment "for most distinguished service in the command of H.M. Australian Ships Australia, Shropshire, Arunta and Warramunga, which took part in the Assault Landing in the Lingayen Gulf, Luzon Island."
He had intended to transfer his broad pendant to Shropshire before Australia left the Gulf for repairs, but when Australia and Arunta were ordered into a Leyte-bound convoy Shropshire was not near enough. He returned to Leyte in Australia, then went back to Lingayen in Arunta and joined Shropshire on the afternoon of 22 January. In his report he wrote that he considered it an honour that the four Australian ships had formed part of the vanguard of the Lingayen operation, and closed with a complaint about the mail service that was then a sore subject throughout the Australian ships with the Seventh Fleet. In February he witnessed the bombardment and occupation of Corregidor. In May, June and July the Australian Squadron supported landings at Wewak in New Guinea and at Labuan Island and Balikpapan in Borneo. Farncomb was relieved by Collins on 22 July 1945 in Manila and flew to Sydney.
He had spent, as Vice Admiral Sir Richard Peek later put it, almost the whole of the war at sea in command—an enormous physical and mental burden. Between March and August 1942 his three previous commands, Perth, Yarra and Canberra, had all been sunk with heavy loss of life. Many of the dead had served under him. Zammit records that the loss of those three ships was a great personal blow. No letter or diary of Farncomb's expressing that blow has been found among the sources examined here.
From August to September 1945 he served as flag officer-in-charge, New South Wales, then became commodore superintendent of training at Flinders Naval Depot, Westernport, Victoria. In 1946 he was appointed a Commander of the United States Legion of Merit for his services with the Seventh Fleet in 1944–45. He went back to sea in November 1946, initially as commodore commanding, then as Flag Officer Commanding His Majesty's Australian Squadron (Fleet). On 8 January 1947 he was promoted rear admiral—among the first Australian-born Royal Australian Navy officers to reach flag rank in that service. He kept the fleet meeting its commitments through the postwar reductions in ships and men. He relinquished command late in 1949.
By then, the Dictionary records, he was frustrated, bored with continual official entertainment, and drinking more than was wise. Appointed head of the Australian Joint Services Staff in Washington in January 1950, he seemed unable to curb his drinking and was recalled in November. He was transferred to the Retired List on 7 April 1951. Peek later criticised the Naval Board for the destruction of Farncomb's career: the burdens of nearly six years of uninterrupted wartime command had been severe, and the Board could have rested him after the war but chose not to. Admiral Sir Louis Hamilton, Chief of the Naval Staff in 1945–48, had regarded him as "the best senior officer" in the Royal Australian Navy.
Farncomb gave up alcohol completely. He learned Latin in order to sit the Barristers' Admission Board examinations. Admitted to the Bar on 6 June 1958, he developed a reasonably busy practice in Sydney and later joined the solicitors Alfred Rofe & Sons. As a lawyer he showed, the Dictionary says, the same penetrating and analytical mind, industry and ability that had marked his naval years. Heart disease eventually forced his retirement from practice. Survived by his wife, he died on 12 February 1971 in St Vincent's Hospital, Darlinghurst, and was cremated with Anglican rites. His ashes were scattered at sea from HMAS Sydney, his last flagship. (Some later summaries give other dates in February or even December 1971 for his death; the date in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and on the Memorial's people record is 12 February.)
On 29 September 1989 his widow, Jean Ross Farncomb, OBE, opened Farncomb House at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra and unveiled a plaque in his honour. Former chiefs of naval staff and shipmates from Australia, Canberra, Hobart, Perth, Shropshire, Sydney and Arunta attended. Peek, who had served under him three times in Australia, said that Farncomb's association with that ship was so long and so close that he could be called "Farncomb of the Australia," and that of the first College entry three men stood out—Collins, Farncomb and Showers. Admiral Sir Victor Smith spoke of Farncomb's "great ability in decision making" and of the respect and affection in which "Uncle Hal" was held. Peek, on another occasion quoted by the Dictionary's sources, said that Farncomb's success stemmed from willingness to delegate and trust, from the knowledge that he was capable and wise, and from the fact that "the buck stopped with him"; that he could be savage with sloppiness but accepted blame from higher authority himself; and that he "had the best brain (of all the officers known to me), not only from the point of view of intelligence, but because of decisiveness."
In January 1998 the Collins-class submarine HMAS Farncomb was commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy. She had been launched at Adelaide by Jean Farncomb on 15 December 1995. The submarine's motto, "With Skill and Resolve," is taken from the language of the Distinguished Service Order citation for the Solomon Islands. The Australian War Memorial holds his portrait by Harold Abbott. Sailors who served under him in the war called themselves, the Dictionary records, "Farncomb men." Aloof and reserved, he never sought popularity; those who knew the private man spoke of charm, humour and "rich culture." The public record is that of a studious, exacting sea officer who kept his ships in the fight under bombs and suicide aircraft, who prosecuted two of his own men for murder and then pleaded for their lives, who was criticised for caution and decorated for resolution, and who, when the Navy cast him out, rebuilt a second career in the law.