John Herbert's mysterious special service in 1944
John Herbert enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy on his 18th birthday in February 1943. He had been a Cadet Officer, top rower and rugby player at school and a crack shot. He would add Navy boxing champion to his athletic accomplishments, but his actual naval service remains shrouded in some mystery.
He was first assigned to ML826, a Fairmile motor launch just launched in his hometown of Brisbane, as an ordinary seaman.
ML826 traveled in convoy with two other MLs around the southern coast of Australia all the way to Fremantle. 2600 miles in a 120' wooden boat across some famously rough seas must have been challenging but they made it in time for an evacuation of Fremantle port and emergency convoy escort duty as a Japanese naval attack was feared, in March 1944. The attack never came.
Officially assigned to HMAS Leeuwin, John was promoted to Able Seaman. His service record is blank until November 1944, but according to three anecdotes he only occasionally shared with his eldest sons he was busy.
The mystery is what he did while based at "Swanbourne W/T".
First he trained. His first anecdote was that Royal Marines trained them how to kill silently with a bayonet. He told of an incident in which one instructor accidentally killed another instructor silently.
The second snippet was also in training. He had to write a stack of letters to his family which would be sent out at regular intervals while he was on secret assignment to give them (and any spies..) the impression that he was still on base. His mother just thought he was the most boring letter writer, not knowing he'd had to write them all in one sitting. Famously he reported that the CO's cat had died one week.
His third anecdote related to a mission, supposedly in Burma (which is puzzling as it was in British zone, also he was navy..), where he got seriously ill and was left by his comrades "sitting under a tree with a bottle of water." Supposedly he was picked up by a British patrol including someone from the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, and woke up in hospital in Colombo. Apparently the doctors thought he would die and he had rewritten his will several times.
That's all we know.
He was back in Swanbourne in November 1944. Interestingly Swanbourne later became the home of Australia's SAS.
Later in 1945 he spent time in a naval hospital in Sydney which could be consistent with having got a tropical disease.
John's last posting was on HMAS Toowoomba, a Corvette minesweeper and escort ship going back around Australia and up into New Guinea waters in 1945.
John met his future wife Yvonne back in Brisbane on VP Day 1945. They'd known each other since high school and she was sitting in an office window watching the cheering crowds when John's face popped out of the crowd. His ship had docked that morning.
John and Yvonne went on to raise five sons and he had a successful political career in Queensland as an MP and cabinet minister. He was a solid ex-naval and RSL member and marched at Anzac Day services every year until his final year in 1977, but he didn't want his sons to join the navy as he had.
At his state funeral in 1977, he died just 52 of cancer, a simple sailor's cap sat on his casket.
Whatever he really did in 1944 remains a mystery.
