Ships
- HMAS Warramunga (I44) Captain from 30 September 1944 · Relieved on 18 April 1945
John Melvill Alliston was a Royal Navy officer lent to an Australian destroyer. Lieutenant Commander J. M. Alliston took command of HMAS Warramunga (I44) on 30 September 1944. He was not Halle Charles Allan Jr., not Russell Bowes Allen, and not William Young Allen Jr. The London Gazette never calls him Royal Australian Navy. In January 1945 he was still “Lieutenant-Commander John Melvill Alliston, D.S.C., Royal Navy,” and the ship under his feet was Australian.
He lived a long time after that January, and he wrote about it. Much of the colour in the obituaries comes from one place: his own book, Destroyer Man (Greenhouse, 1985), as used by Captain Peter Hore for the Daily Telegraph obituary, which the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted on 26 June 2004 and the Naval Historical Society of Australia reprinted that September. Those three printings are one witness, not three. Where they conflict with the Gazette, with the ship’s compiled history, or with a short essay Alliston himself published in 1976, the conflict is marked below. His Admiralty service record is at the National Archives (catalogued as John Melville Alliston, born 26 March 1910) and was not read for this essay. What follows is what can be stood up without it, and without pretending the memoir has been opened.
Origins
The service-record catalogue and the compiled career used by uboat.net both give his birthday as 26 March 1910. Uboat.net adds London as the place. The obituary, following the book, says 3 March 1910 and calls him the elder of twin sons of a Manchester trader whose European export business collapsed in 1914. Both dates cannot be right. The Admiralty file’s date is the one to prefer until the file itself is read; the obituary’s “3 March” may be a slip, or the file’s “26” may be. The father’s name, the twin brother’s name, and the mother’s name are not in any source used here. “Manchester trader” and “London” are not quite a contradiction — a child can be born in one city and belong to a business in another — but neither has been checked against a birth certificate.
The spelling of his own name moved. The 1942 Gazette printed “Lieutenant-Commander Melville Alliston.” The National Archives catalogue uses “John Melville.” The 1943 and 1945 Gazettes, the 1946 American award, and his own later byline settle on John Melvill Alliston. That is the form used here.
He entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at about thirteen, the obituary says. The rank dates fit a cadet of that generation: sub-lieutenant on 16 February 1931, lieutenant on 16 June 1933, lieutenant-commander on 16 June 1941, commander on 30 June 1947, retired on 18 October 1949. Those dates are the uboat.net compilation, which for regular officers is usually taken from the Navy List; they have not been re-checked against the List page by page for this essay. Thirteen in 1923 or 1924, a sub-lieutenant’s seniority in February 1931, is the ordinary Dartmouth arithmetic. Nothing more precise — term, house, passing-out place — has been found.
Before the war
The early sea time is, for now, the obituary’s. Hore says his first ship was the battlecruiser Repulse, where a squash court had been built amidships for the Prince of Wales’s world cruise, and that in the destroyer Verity in 1931–32 he was on the China coast. The same paragraph puts him at Nanking, “400 miles up the Yellow River.” Nanking stands on the Yangtze, not the Yellow River. That one bad sentence is a warning. The China Station story may be true in outline and wrong in the telling. It is not repeated here as geography.
In 1932, Hore says, the Admiralty was talking of sail training again, and Alliston asked to use foreign-service leave to come home in one of Eriksson’s square-riggers. Approval was given and then withdrawn. By the time word reached him he had got as far as Adelaide, by a Japanese freighter via Sydney, and in Adelaide he met Eleanor Young. They married in 1937. The war kept them apart, the obituary says, for three years and seven months. She died in 2003. The children come later; their names are not in the obituary.
He wanted out of the fleet destroyer Basilisk in the Mediterranean, Hore says, and volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm. A medical test in a spinning chair failed him. He went instead to the cruiser Emerald in the Indian Ocean. The captain Hore names is John Crace, Australian-born, later of the RAN. Under Crace, the story goes, Alliston sailed a cutter up the Rufiji to look at the wreck of the German cruiser Königsberg, and on leave from Mombasa took five days at Kilimanjaro while other officers shot or played golf. When Emerald hosted the German cruiser Emden at Trincomalee, Hore says Alliston, who spoke German, was sent as liaison officer and lived on board. The Emden’s captain was Karl Dönitz. In 1937 Alliston and his mother went to Kiel, lunched with Dönitz, and saw Dönitz’s two sons in Hitler Youth uniform. All of that is his book, through Hore. None of it has been matched here to a log or a letter. It is the story he chose to tell about how he met Australia, how he was turned away from flying, and how, before the war, he had sat at a table with the man who would command the U-boats. Whether the lunch happened is not independently shown. That he remembered it, and put it in the book, is.
Kandahar, and a cross that was not for what the obituaries imply
As war came he stood by the new destroyer Kandahar, building at Denny’s yard at Dumbarton, as first lieutenant. Hore says he was hurt in a storm and was fit again in time for Norway in April 1940. Kandahar was with Mountbatten’s Kelly when Kelly was torpedoed; Kandahar took off Kelly’s wounded and saw her to the Tyne. Later in 1940 she was in the Red Sea. On 19 June 1940 the trawler Moonstone captured the Italian submarine Galileo Galilei. Hore says Alliston organised the transfer of prisoners and papers, and that those papers helped Kandahar, a few days later, to sink the submarine Torricelli, and fed an early break into Axis codes. The capture and the sinking are a matter of record: Torricelli was sunk on 21 June 1940 after a surface fight in which Kandahar took part. The claim that Alliston’s handling of the prisoners and the books was the hinge of it is the obituary’s, not a citation. He was the first lieutenant, not the captain. Commander W. G. A. Robson commanded Kandahar.
He was still in her for Crete. That is not a inference from the book. The London Gazette of 8 January 1942, in a list “for outstanding gallantry, fortitude and resolution during the Battle of Crete,” awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to “Lieutenant-Commander Melville Alliston, Royal Navy, H.M.S. Kandahar.” There is no further sentence saying what he did. The rank in that Gazette is a small problem. His lieutenant-commander’s seniority, in the compiled list, is 16 June 1941, and the battle was in May. The Gazette may have used the rank he held when the award was printed, or he may have been acting. The file would settle it. The award itself is not in doubt, and it is not the medal the obituaries sometimes let the reader attach to his later commands. The first DSC was for Crete, in somebody else’s ship, as first lieutenant.
Kandahar was mined and lost off Tripoli on 19 December 1941. By then Alliston had been gone for months.
Decoy
Uboat.net, working from Admiralty files it cites as ADM 199 and ships’ logs, gives him command of the destroyer Decoy (H75) from 16 June 1941 to March 1942. He was a lieutenant on the June date in that compilation, and a lieutenant-commander by seniority the same day. Decoy was an old D-class ship, working out of Alexandria and Haifa.
The documented work is the Tobruk run and the ordinary violence of that coast. In July 1941 she went up with Stuart, Waller’s ship, with troops and stores, and came back with wounded. On the night of 8/9 July, in moonlight, bombers attacked for about an hour; Decoy was very nearly missed, swung as if she had stopped, and steamed on with defects. She repaired and cleaned boilers, then went again, with Abdiel, with Hero, with Havock. On 11 August she unloaded at Tobruk while the harbour was being bombed, and was bombed again on the way back, and was not hit. In August she carried troops toward Cyprus and the Syrian coast — Port Said, Famagusta, Haifa, Beirut — which is the period Hore describes as gunfire support for the army against the Vichy French. The particular stories Hore tells (a column of armour near Tyre, in front of the Australian 6th Division; two large French destroyers driven off; a boiler-clean visit to desert airstrips; a flight in a captured Ju 87 with a Tasmanian wing commander named Al Goodman, under British and South African ground fire) are not in the log summaries used here. They may be true. They are, at present, one man’s book.
What the logs do add, and the obituaries skip, is small failure as well as the runs. On 19 October 1941 Decoy sailed with three other destroyers to bombard a rest camp on the Libyan coast. Havock ran aground. The bombardment was cancelled. On 4 December, coming back from a sweep along Cyrenaica, Decoy hit the Polish steamer Warszawa while going to her buoy at Alexandria and seriously damaged her own bow.
She was docked at Malta on 5 January 1942 and undocked on 11 February. The next day, 12 February 1942, the destroyer Maori, lying in Grand Harbour, was bombed and blew up. Hore, from the book, puts Alliston on Decoy’s bridge, close enough that the big pieces of Maori went over his head and red-hot rivets crossed the bridge like shot. He was thrown — Hore says twenty feet; the Herald text says six metres — and his clothes caught fire. Chest and foot were hurt. He is said to have backed Decoy out of French Creek and anchored her in the bay the obituary calls Bigi Bay — Bighi Bay, beside the naval hospital, is the likely reading — before he would be taken to hospital. His own sensation, as he later told it, was of a dark room in which the lights came on. By 20 February Decoy was at sea for the East Indies under another captain, George Balfour. The command list ends Alliston’s time in her in March, which may mean the formal appointment outlasted the day he left the ship. The wound, the fire, and the backing-out are his account of that morning, pinned to a date by Maori’s known loss. A medical board or a log entry would confirm the injuries. Neither was read here.
Hore says that when he was fit again he commanded Foxhound, Janus, and Javelin. Janus and Javelin are in the command compilation. Foxhound is not, and the published command list for Foxhound in 1942 does not include him. The Foxhound claim is not used below. It may be a short or acting command the compilation missed. It is not established.
Janus and Javelin
Janus (F53), August to November 1942, is a gap of a different kind. The appointment is listed. What he did with her is not, in the sources read for this essay. Three months in the Mediterranean in the season of El Alamein and the Torch landings is not an empty season. It is an unread one.
Javelin (F61) followed, from November 1942 to about the middle of 1943. The bar to his DSC, gazetted 4 May 1943, is “for bravery and skill in H.M. Ships Kelvin and Javelin in successful operations against the enemy in the Mediterranean.” The DSO in that same list went to Kelvin’s captain, Commander Michael Southcote Townsend. Alliston’s was the bar, not the DSO. Uboat.net’s notes on Javelin in those months — a night action with Kelvin in January 1943 in which a clutch of small Italian ships, including four minesweepers, were destroyed south of Lampedusa and off Tripoli; a bombardment of Zuara; a convoy from Alexandria toward Tripoli bombed off Benghazi on 1 May — are partly tagged there as personal communication, not as a file citation. The Gazette is solid. The night-action detail should be treated as probable and unfinished.
A catalogue note on his book says that after convalescence he took Javelin home to the United Kingdom in 1943. That is a reasonable reading of “about mid-1943,” and it is not a log.
The introduction to Alliston’s 1976 essay in the Naval Historical Review says that on 15 June 1941, while commanding Javelin, he went to the help of HMAS Nestor. The year, the ship, and the command are all wrong for that sentence. Nestor was mortally bombed on 15 June 1942. In June 1941 Alliston was taking Decoy. In June 1942 he was between Decoy and Janus, if the command list is complete. He is not to be written into Nestor’s loss on the strength of that introduction.
Shropshire, and then a ship that was not his until a sick man left her
Between Javelin and Warramunga the sources agree on a name and almost nothing else. Hore says he was “sent with the cruiser Shropshire to the Pacific.” The Sea Power Centre’s history of Warramunga says that on 30 September 1944, at Manus, Commander N. A. Mackinnon was taken ill, admitted to the American hospital, and relieved by “Lieutenant Commander J. M. Alliston, DSC, RN, from Shropshire.” A bibliographical note on Destroyer Man says the same: a spell in Shropshire with Task Force 74, then Warramunga.
What billet he held in Shropshire, and which of her actions he actually saw, is not stated. Shropshire had already been through the New Guinea campaign and would be at Leyte and Lingayen in her own right. Those are not, on this evidence, Alliston’s commands, and they are not narrated here as his war. He was a passenger or a watchkeeper or a staff officer or something the record has not named. “From Shropshire” is the phrase that can be used.
He joined Warramunga twice. That is his own correction of the tidy single date. In December 1976, thirty-two years on, he wrote: he joined first at Manus when Commander Mackinnon was sick, and again a week or two later, when Mackinnon was invalided south. The second time they were at sea, and he came across in a boatswain’s chair. The Naval Historical Society’s day-entry for 17 October 1944 says Lieutenant Commander J. M. Alliston, RN, assumed command at sea, relieving Commander N. A. Mackinnon, who had been taken seriously ill. Uboat.net’s command table, which looks fussy until it is set beside that sentence, shows him in her from 30 September to 3 October, from 5 to 13 October, and then continuously from 17 October 1944 to 19 April 1945. 30 September 1944 is the first day, not the only day. For a fortnight the ship still belonged, formally or practically, to a sick captain. Alliston said later that the chief and he were the old men on board. He was thirty-four.
Warramunga was a Tribal, built at Cockatoo Dock, Sydney, commissioned in November 1942. Hore quotes him on the look of her: clipper bow, two funnels, “the best looking destroyers ever built.” In the 1976 essay he was plainer. She was weatherly, she handled like a racehorse, and she had luck. In his time, he wrote, she had no casualties. That is his claim, not a casualty roll transcribed here. He also wrote that at Manus they mounted four extra 40 mm Bofors themselves, with artificers from Shropshire, and that with proximity fuses for the 4.7-inch guns the armament finally matched the aircraft. Hore adds that the guns came off a beached American landing craft, that he cut away the after control position to give the pom-poms a clear arc, and that he wrote to the Navy Board in Sydney afterwards to say what he had done. The whisky-for-a-washing-machine story — six bottles, an American supply ship, a cure for dhobi itch — is in the obituary only. It is the sort of story a destroyer captain tells. It is not a document.
Leyte, under his hand
From 13 October 1944 Warramunga sailed from Hollandia for Leyte with Australia, Shropshire, and Arunta, in Rear Admiral Berkey’s close cover group. If Alliston’s continuous command began at sea on the 17th, he was on board for the last days of that passage and for the landing, whether or not the first Manus appointment had already lapsed. The Sea Power Centre history, which follows the reports of proceedings, puts the ship under that command for what came next.
On the morning of 20 October the bombardment opened: American battleships, then the cruisers, destroyers in support. Through the day Warramunga fired at call from the beach. On the 21st she left Leyte escorting the damaged Honolulu and the damaged Australia, both hit by kamikaze aircraft, as far as Palau and, for Australia, on to Manus, then brought a convoy back and re-entered Leyte Gulf on 12 November. She joined a heavy group that was not itself the target. Japanese aircraft were going for the transports. Warramunga opened fire twice, at long range.
On 22 November a Catalina was seen to crash on Samar, about twenty miles off. Alliston got permission to leave a radar picket. The first lieutenant and the doctor landed with an armed whaler’s crew. Villagers said a large Japanese force was not far off. The landing party was recovered before dark, the details were passed to an air-sea rescue craft, and the destroyer went back to her patrol. It is a small decision, and it is the kind that shows him: he went, he looked, he did not stay to be brave after the light failed.
On 25 November, after sailing, an able seaman was found to be missing. At Manus it turned out that USS Mugford had picked him up. Alliston in 1976 remembered this differently, and more strangely: an ordinary seaman gone at dawn action stations off Samar, later said to have swum ashore in the night, and eventually sent to a fleet oiler. The ship’s history, taken from the reports, is the better evidence. The later memory is worth keeping only as a sign that the episode bothered him enough to misremember it. He never, he said, learned why the man went.
Lingayen
In January 1945 Warramunga went to Lingayen with Task Group 77.2: six battleships, six cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, and the four Australian ships Australia, Shropshire, Arunta, and Warramunga inside that number. The Sea Power Centre counts the whole attack force at about 850 ships, 305 of them combatant or semi-combatant, eleven of them Australian. The landings went in on 9 January under continuous air attack. Twelve ships of the heavy group were hit by kamikazes. Australia was hit five times.
Alliston wrote the day himself, years later, for the Naval Historical Society, and a 1993 article printed it beside the times from the ship. This is the closest thing to a contemporary voice that this essay has, even though he wrote it afterwards.
On 3 January Warramunga came through Surigao Strait with Oldendorf’s force. (He spelled the admiral Olendorf.) On the 4th, after 1700, aircraft attacked. Warramunga fired and zig-zagged. A dive bomber crashed onto the escort carrier Ommaney Bay. The fires could not be held. The carrier was abandoned and sunk. On the 5th, from 1645, somewhere between fifty and sixty kamikazes came in for two and a half hours. Seven ships were hit. Two were Australian: Australia and Arunta.
On the 6th Warramunga went to dawn action stations and stayed there for more than ten hours. She had been sent to cover minesweepers inside the gulf, and at 0730 she left the main body. Three aircraft picked her out at once. One dived on the starboard bow, was fired at, and turned away out of control. A second came from astern and dropped two bombs that burst near the starboard side. A third was shot down by American fighters. The task group commander recalled her. Alliston asked to go back in. He was allowed, and he took station astern of the old American destroyer-transports Brooks and Humphreys (the Australian history spells the second ship Humphries), still sweeping.
At 1145 two aircraft came off the hills, low and fast. Warramunga’s guns hit. One machine came through the bursts and looked, Alliston wrote, certain to hit her. At about a thousand yards it veered, crossed her bow, and went into Brooks.
American accounts put the crash at 1252 on Brooks’s port side. Steam lines were cut, the fire main was broken, the forward engine room flooded. Three of Brooks’s crew were killed and eleven wounded. Warramunga was alongside at 1305. The ship’s side by the 3-inch magazine was red hot. Eight hoses were kept on it. Alliston’s doctor — he names him Begg — and two sick-berth attendants, with volunteers, had the burned and the broken. The first lieutenant, Herbie Gunns, and the buffer got a tow across to Brooks’s cable. The engine room kept three boilers at immediate notice, because Alliston might ring down thirty knots or full astern and they would not know which until he did. The cooks fed their own ship and, he thought, about a hundred men from Brooks. He was proud of them in a sentence that does not inflate: young, and already veterans. The tow was on at 1345, speed about eight knots. Warrego and Gascoyne stood by. At 1545 Gascoyne was to have taken the tow and could not. They went on. At 1625 aircraft came again and were driven off; one was seen to crash. Attacks continued until 1815. At 1850 the log, as later quoted, has his four words: “Sunset, thank God for that.” Action stations were secured at 1939.
The next day the tow had parted. Gascoyne had Brooks. Warramunga had taken the damaged ship to shoal water off Santiago Island and then went to the southern end of the gulf to put the rest of Brooks’s people into the battleship Pennsylvania. The ship’s history says the transfer was by motor boat, with Pennsylvania underway the whole time, bombarding, and altering course. Alliston, in 1976, adds the part the official summary leaves out. They crept alongside. Pennsylvania was making about ten knots, beam-on to the swell, firing 16-inch. A salvo rolled her back down on Warramunga and chopped a hole in the starboard bow. The motor boat then did the work for hours. He could not remember the name of the petty officer shipwright who repaired the hole, and he was sorry he could not. A Wikipedia retelling of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships entry adds a harder sequel: some of the Brooks survivors Warramunga had taken off were later put into Hovey, and five more of Brooks’s men died when Hovey was sunk by an aerial torpedo before dawn on 7 January. The Sea Power Centre history does not say this. It is recorded here as a reported cost of the rescue, not as a line from Warramunga’s own report. If it is right, “no casualties” in Alliston’s 1976 essay means no casualties of his own ship. It does not mean everyone he took on board lived through the next night.
The London Gazette of 1 May 1945 made him a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, with Captain John Malet Armstrong of the RAN, “for gallantry, skill and devotion to duty whilst serving in H.M. Australian Ships Australia, Shropshire, Arunta and Warramunga in the successful assault operations on the Lingayen Gulf, Luzon Island.” On 15 October 1946 the same government announced that the United States had awarded him the Legion of Merit, Degree of Officer, “for services during an operation in the Lingayen Gulf in January 1945.” The obituaries call this the Legion of Honour. That is a different decoration, and it is wrong. Hore also says Alliston’s book never mentions the DSO, the DSC and bar, or the American award. He received the medals at Buckingham Palace in 1949, the Herald text says. That last detail is the obituary alone.
The rest of the command
Lingayen was the day his name was gazetted for. It was not the end of the appointment.
On 9 January Warramunga bombarded in support of the landing and engaged two aircraft while taking station. On the 10th, after signals that suicide swimmers and motor boats were among the transports, she patrolled to the north of them. From 6 to 18 January she worked off the gulf with the heavy ships and the escort carriers. On the 18th, with fighters ashore, the group anchored. On the 22nd she screened West Virginia for a bombardment.
On 12 February she and Arunta left Lingayen at 25 knots to trail a Japanese force reported moving up the coast from Saigon, under orders to wait for calls from the aircraft striking that force. At one point the two destroyers were within about 220 miles of Hong Kong. They were back to fuel on the 15th, and then joined a bombardment of Corregidor. Paratroops dropped after the shelling. The screen’s immediate problem was floating mines: thirty were sighted and destroyed. On 26 March, with Hobart, he bombarded Cebu. In between, the ship had been at Leyte and Manus. On 8 April Task Force 74 sailed from Subic Bay after a reported enemy force north of Luzon, found the report false, and was back the same day. On 18 April 1945 Commander M. J. Clark, DSC, RAN, assumed command. Uboat.net ends Alliston’s appointment on the 19th. One day is neither here nor there. He was gone before Tarakan, before Wewak, and before Tokyo Bay. Those passages belong to Clark and to the ship. They are not his.
He said the crew’s shooting, more than the extra guns, was what kept the aircraft off her. “When the heat was on the lines of tracer were right on target and the Kamikaze either got the knocker or decided to try elsewhere.” The engine room, he wrote, always gave him what he rang down. He could still hear the turbines. That is as close as he comes to a theory of command: guns, and the people below who made the ship answer while he was still deciding.
Urania, and a command he disliked
On 19 June 1945 he took the destroyer Urania from Lieutenant Commander D. H. P. Gardiner. Uboat.net ends the appointment in early 1946. A note on his book says May 1945; the June date is the one with a predecessor named, so it is preferred. Urania had already done a long Pacific commission under Gardiner, including the British Pacific Fleet’s strikes around Okinawa. That was Gardiner’s war. Alliston got her after the fighting he has left a record of.
Hore says that in Japanese waters he was surprised by how friendly the defeated enemy could be, and that on the way back to Sydney he found a new volcanic island and named it Urania-shima. No chart, notice, or second witness for that island was found for this essay. It stays as a sentence in the obituary.
After the war he commanded the tank landing ship Ben Lomond. Hore says Alliston wrote, in Destroyer Man, of his dislike of that command during Operation Harness, the British germ-warfare trials off Antigua. The operation is a matter of record as a series of biological trials in the Caribbean in the late 1940s. That Alliston had Ben Lomond for it, and that he hated the work, rests on the book as Hore reports it. No Navy List entry was pulled to confirm the appointment. The procedural detail of the trials does not belong in a life of the captain, and it is not given here. What belongs is the judgment he passed on himself. He wanted, the words Hore quotes, “to create things rather than destroy, and to be a true husband and parent instead of a sometimes one.”
He had been a commander since 30 June 1947. He retired on 18 October 1949. He was thirty-nine. The obituary says he resigned, to the astonishment of his naval friends, and took a £25 assisted passage to Tasmania to work as a jackaroo. “Retired” in the officer list and “resigned” in the obituary are the same departure described two ways. The reason beyond the sentence he gave — create, rather than destroy; be at home — is not documented. Hore says that after the palace investiture he took Eleanor to the Berkeley Grill and they drank to Tasmania as a climate for living, loving, and working.
The island
Three Hummock Island lies in Bass Strait, off the north-west of Tasmania, in the Hunter Group. Bass and Flinders named it in 1798. From 1932 to 1951, the island’s own history says, it was farmed by Cissie and Bill Nichols. Then John and Eleanor Alliston took it, with four children: Venetia, Robert, Warwick, and Ingrid. The obituary says two sons and two daughters, which matches, and does not name them. It also says he bought the island in 1952, after he had learned enough as a jackaroo, and gives the holding as 9,300 hectares, with 250 cattle, 700 sheep, and tens of thousands of wallabies. Hore’s Naval Historical Society text says five square miles. The island’s history says that in 1978 the greater part of its 7,400 hectares became a nature reserve. Five square miles is roughly 1,300 hectares and is not this island. Between 7,400 and 9,300 hectares, and between 1951 and 1952, the sources simply disagree. The island’s own page is the better guide to the place. The obituary is the better guide to how he talked about buying it.
The Herald text, which prints more of the domestic story than the naval reprint, says they left a manor house with servants in Hampshire for a wooden cottage with no light and a broken radio. Within days they fired distress flares so a fishing boat would take a seven-month-old son to hospital on the mainland. For a time, passing warships landed men and stores for an old shipmate. Later there were partnerships with Dutch migrants and with people who wanted to be castaways. None of them stayed. He bought a 12-metre boat and ferried cattle, more than fifty crossings, the children as crew. One December they were caught in a storm with a load of carrots, nearly lost the boat, missed the market at Smithton, and sold from door to door for £18 so the Christmas stockings could be filled. He later had a share in a light aircraft, which meant mail and a school. His mother came once, and brought a silver tea set; they used it every afternoon while the children went barefoot. The Tasmanian government made the island a reserve and made the Allistons its wardens. The island’s history says the family kept a presence there until 2006.
Eleanor wrote the domestic life down: Escape to an Island (1966) and Island Affair (1984; the island’s page says An Island Affair). Those books were not read for this essay. They are the other half of the record, and they are hers, not his. His naval book, Hore says, left the decorations out. Her books, on the evidence of their titles and of the obituary, put the children in. A 1983 film, Eleanor and John, with Love, exists in the Screen Australia guide. It was not seen.
He died on 31 May 2004. The obituaries say he was ninety-four, which fits a birth in March 1910 whether the day was the 3rd or the 26th. Where he died is not stated in the sources used here. Eleanor had died the year before. The two sons and two daughters survived him.
What the sea made of him, on the evidence
The temptation with this life is the hornblower note Hore sounds: the young officer who climbs mountains, lunches with Dönitz, flies a captured Stuka, backs a burning destroyer out of a creek, and then saves an American ship with hoses and a tow. Some of that is documented. Some of it is a book. The documented spine is enough, and it has a shape.
He was a regular officer, trained from childhood for a navy that still kept China stations and German guests. The first decoration was not for command. It was for Crete, as first lieutenant of Kandahar, in a battle the Gazette remembered for gallantry and fortitude and did not bother to individualise. Command, when it came, was Decoy on the Tobruk road: repeated, unglamorous, once nearly sunk by a near miss, once damaged by his own ship hitting a merchantman at the buoy. Malta broke him physically, if his account of Maori is accepted, and he got the ship out before he got himself to hospital. Javelin brought the bar, in company with another captain who received the higher award. Then the Navy sent him east in a cruiser that was not his, and gave him an Australian destroyer only because her captain collapsed.
At Lingayen he was ordered back to the screen and asked to go in again. He went alongside a ship on fire, put his hoses on a magazine, took her in tow at eight knots through a gulf where kamikazes were still flying, and wrote in the log, when the sun went, a sentence with no heroism in it at all. The next day a battleship’s broadside, if his later account is right, holed his own bow while he was trying to finish the job. He was thirty-four. He said afterwards that the young Australians were the marksmen, and the engine room was what let him dodge. The DSO and the American Legion of Merit came for that week. He left them out of the book.
He was off Warramunga before the war ended, in another British destroyer, and then, if the book is right, in a landing ship attached to a weapons trial he did not want. In October 1949 he stopped. The years on Three Hummock Island are not a pastoral afterthought. They are the costly choice the obituaries are actually about: a remote farm that did not pay cleanly, children raised a long way from a doctor, a government that eventually made the place a reserve and the family its keepers. He had said he wanted to make things and to be a husband who was there. The island is the evidence of whether he meant it. The decorations are the evidence of what he was walking away from. He did not, in the book Hore read, feel the need to mention them.