Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "World War II In the Indian Ocean: Ondina and Bengal versus Aikoku and Hōkoku" video.

  1. The Bathurst class minesweeper/corvette, of which the HMIS Bengal was a member, were really awful vessels. She was poorly armed, as shown in this battle, and too small to be effective ships operating in the Pacific. They were built to an Admiralty design for ships that, would serve in the Atlantic, not in the tropics. Below decks spaces were cramped and poorly ventilated with ratings often suffering from heat exhaustion. The ratings had to sleep in hammocks slung in what also operated as 10 man mess decks, the ships having more subdivisions than a normal corvette to help them survive a mine hit, a perpetual danger to a minesweeper. Because of all the subdivisions, it was impossible to ventilate any of the subdivisions adequately. There were no showers and only one head, the ratings having to use a buckets and sponge to try to keep clean, and a seat slung on either side of the ship as toilets. There were only two iceboxes That had ice enough for about a week for provisions and no freezers. Men would often take their bedding on deck, as it was nearly impossible to sleep in the stifling heat below, doing the best they could beneath moth eaten canvas awnings as their only protection from frequent nighttime rain showers. Several crew members wrote in their memoirs after the war that men went weeks never getting more than five or six hours sleep. The six to ten officers had individual or two man cabins at main deck level with things like bunks, electric fans, portholes, and desks. They ate better food than the ratings and had their own steward to serve them in the officer's wardroom. The ratings had their typical two cups a day of watered down rum while the officers enjoyed their own bar. The Bathursts replicated the worst of the British class system, but on a modern warship, and morale and discipline suffered as a result. Good captains did what they could to improve conditions, bringing onboard better provisions when they could be found and having officers and men eat the same food. Some allowed the engineering staff to modify the deck air intakes to bring more air below decks and having cots built for sleeping instead of hammocks. Other officers were either incompetent or just cruel, this treatment leading to four mutinies aboard the Bathursts, the most of a single class on the allied side. Most were small scale revolts but one, one the Pirie while in port, was serious enough that the captain had the main gun spiked and called on Australian army troops to surround the ship and arrest the men involved in the mutiny. Ten men were later sentenced to prison for their part in the mutiny, the men testifying to incompetent and cruel behavior of the captain at the courts martial. Amazingly, he wasn't relieved of command until six months after the mutiny, when he barely averted another mutiny.
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