Kevin Meade | March 29, 2008
TWO or three times a month, Martin Pash relives the horror of the worst atrocity in Australian waters during World War II.
The 85-year-old retired truck driver tosses and turns in bed at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe and endures frightful nightmares recalling the sinking of the Australian hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the southern Queensland coast on May 14, 1943.
Mr Pash, who was a 20-year-old steward on the Centaur when a torpedo slammed into the bow of the ship about 75km east of Brisbane, told The Weekend Australian: "I see the flames again, and I see the ship going down."
A total of 268 people died when the ship sank. Only 64 survived. Mr Pash is one of only three survivors still alive.
The wreck of the vessel has never been found, but the recent discovery of HMAS Sydney and the German raider Kormoran off the West Australian coast has prompted relatives of those who went down with the Centaur to call for the federal Government to fund a search for the hospital ship.
Jan Thomas, secretary of a national organisation representing Centaur survivors and relatives of the dead, has called on members to write to Kevin Rudd urging the Prime Minister to consider funding of a search for Centaur by the SV Geosounder, the vessel that found the Kormoran and the Sydney.
Mr Pash, who was asleep in the bow when the torpedo struck and awoke to see flames shooting from the point of impact, yesterday gave his full support to the Centaur association's call.
"The sooner that ship is found, the better," he said.
He can vividly recall scrambling towards the deck with his fellow merchant seamen.
"We put our Mae Wests on and tried to get the lifeboats away, but we couldn't get up there because of the flames coming across from the port side," Mr Pash said.
He was washed overboard before the ship sank and was rescued at sea after clinging to a life raft for 36 hours.
Ms Thomas, whose doctor father, Bernie Hindmarsh, went down with the hospital ship, said that like the victims of the Sydney sinking, those killed in the Centaur tragedy deserved the dignity of a war grave.
Apart from being the centre of one of the great maritime mysteries of World War II, the Centaur has another connection with the Sydney and the Kormoran. Before it became a hospital ship, the Centaur picked up 61 of the Kormoran's survivors and took them to Fremantle.
Ms Thomas said co-ordinates were taken 10 minutes before the Centaur was hit, so the area that would be involved in a search would be significantly smaller than that in the Sydney search.
The Centaur was decorated with big red crosses when it was torpedoed about 4am.
It was unmistakably a hospital ship and should have been immune from attack under the Geneva Convention.
The wreck was "discovered" off Brisbane in 1995 by a Melbourne computer expert and diver and featured in television news reports, but the discovery was later revealed to be a hoax.
One Centaur association member who has already sent an email to Mr Rudd is Doug Hoare, whose brother John, an army ambulance bearer, was killed in the tragedy.
"Some years ago, our members were hurt when a TV station ran footage on the 'finding' of Centaur, which turned out later to be false," Mr Hoare wrote.
"No one wishes our members and friends to go through that hurt again. A confirmed location of the ship will preclude such possibility."
