the fast “ Get up and Go” attitude on the US ships and lavish material all around. In its place there was a quiet crisp efficiency but all extra comforts were very carefully costed and rationed out! We joined a ship with a complement of 600 to which over the next couple of days were added 445 POW s to give a total of about 1,050 people cramped and packed for the voyage down to Sydney. Whilst in the harbour, the nearest ship to us lying off our port bow, only a few hundred yards away was the great battleship the USS Missouri, aboard which General MacArthur three weeks earlier had received the Formal Surrender of all the forces under the Emperor of Japan. She towered above us, her great 16 inch guns on the extremely long foredeck, must have made her a very fitting and powerful reminder to the Japanese High Command of the awesome power that America possesses when it gets angry, and what it can deploy. 55 years later whilst in Pearl Harbour I was able with my wife to stroll its decks, now part of the US Navy Maritime Museum, and just remember our first sight of her, and the comfort we gained from being such a close neighbour in the port of Yokohama at the end of the War! Aboard the Ruler we could at last relax, chat with the officers and crew, catch up on news, and read some British papers, and magazines such as Picture Post and the Illustrated London News. We had followed the broad thread of the war thanks to Fred Garner’s translations of the Japanese press. Now we began to learn in more detail the things that had brought victory all about, and the scientific dimension to the whole military effort. For the first time we learnt of Radar, sonar, penicillin, Whittle’s new Jet engine, the 10ton Block buster bomb, Lancaster Bombers, the Dambusters just to name a few. Then there were all the other ex- prisoners from military camps all over Japan to compare notes with. One sizeable group of Army personnel mostly Australian were from a camp at Hiroshima, just on the other side of the hill from where the Atom bomb was dropped. They were made to work in the shipyards near there, heard the explosion and then saw the fireball ascending to 40,000 ft . Fortunately the hill had protected them from the flash and they had not been injured at all.. On the 14th September in the late afternoon, the anchor was hauled up with a deep vibrating rumble and we were at last slowly under way. The ship’s Royal Marine Band stood on the flight deck with all the sailors lined up and played “In the Mood” and “The Saints go Marching in”, “Bless ‘em All”, and other Glen Miller and Bing Crosby tunes, and everyone was overjoyed as we waved and cheered our hearts out to the other vessels of that giant armada as we slowly passed by, to at last be sailing from Japan on the first leg of the long voyage home. The crew of the “Ruler” had been continually at sea for over 5 months since they had left Sydney to arrive at the tail end of the battle of Okinawa. Now all they could think of, were the pleasures of Sydney and then back to UK. The ship was one of the many small carriers hurriedly built in America to help their island hopping attack of Japan and also to give air cover to the North Atlantic Convoys. The Ruler’s hull was laid down at Tacoma, Washington in September 1943 and she was completed by December only three months later, as part of the amazing crash build up of ships in America. Nearly 500 ft long with a GRT of 15,000 tons she sailed for Vancouver and was commissioned on the 25th February 1944 to the Royal Navy under “lend - lease”. Some of the crew at that commissioning were still with the ship and had now sailed over 78,200 miles or more than three times round the world when we had joined her. Basically it had the hull of a large “Liberty Cargo Ship” which was a standard pattern, but instead of the normal superstructure, a flat top flight deck had been added, a side bridge and control tower with its radar etc. and a cavernous interior with a hydraulic aircraft lift .

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