Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

LEADING SEAMAN ALLAN ROSS LLOYD HAWKE PA1661 RANR

Allan Hawke was born in Mount Barker South Australia on Christmas Eve 1919. Allan was the elder of two children born to Clifford and Christina Hawke. Clifford Hawke had served in the Australian Army Medical Corps during the Great War, enlisting in 1916 he had joined his unit on the Western Front in October 1917 only to be gassed with Mustard Gas in late December and evacuated to England. His condition was that severe he was returned to Australia. He discharged from the AIF in August 1918 and married Christina in the December. Despite his injuries Clifford would serve in the Army Militia Volunteer Defence Corps in WW2.

Allan Hawke had been a student at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College where he had excelled at football and tennis. He had enlisted in the RANR in February 1939, and he was mobilised for service on the 8th of September 1939. At that time, he was living in Nailsworth South Australia where his father was the SA Savings Bank Manager. After a period of training at HMAS Cerberus Allan served on the Armed Merchant Cruiser HMAS Westralia before joining the Light Cruiser HMAS Perth in September 1941, shortly after the ship returned from the Mediterranean.   He was advanced to Leading Seaman in October 1941.

Perth had returned to Sydney in August 1941 for a much-needed refit at Cockatoo Dockyard.  She would return to sea in December, and she departed Sydney on her final deployment on the 26th of January to sail via Western Australia before heading north to become part of the doomed ABDA Force defending the Dutch East Indies.

HMAS Perth was sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait fighting alongside the USS Houston. Of the 681 men in Perth, only 328 survived the sinking of whom106, including Allan would die as POWs.

Those who survived did so in a myriad of ways.  Some swum to shore, others were picked up by Japanese ships and others survived in boats and rafts from the Perth and Japanese ships sunk in the battle.  Eventually most of the Perth men, along with survivors of Houston were housed in POW Camps on Java.  In the middle of 1942, they were shipped to Changi in Singapore and very soon after to Thailand and Burma to work on the infamous Burma Railway. Allan would survive the Burma Railway and in late 1944 he was shipped to Japan to work in the coal mines on the Japanese ship the Awa Maru.  Enroute the ship narrowly missed being torpedoed.

The men were immediately put to work under brutal conditions, they were already dreadfully malnourished after years of slave labour and poor food. Allan would quickly catch pneumonia, and he passed away in Fukuoka on the 18th of January 1945. He was 25 years old. His body was buried at Fukuoka and later reinterred in the Yokohama Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery

References:

NAA A6770, HAWKE A R L
HAWKE ALLAN ROSS LLOYD : Service Number - PA1661 : Date of birth - 24 Dec 1919 : Place of birth - MT BARKER SA : Place of enlistment - PORT ADELAIDE SA : Next of Kin - HAWKE C

Cruiser, Mike Carlton, William Heinemann 2010.