Ship’s effort hits home

After a long 10 week stint on Gascoyne, PO Simon East gets the special honour of nursing his nephew Dillon Byrne, 8 weeks, for the first time.

Eighty nine year-old Mrs Edna Payne of Cooma proudly wears the cap of her great-grandson, SMNMW Damien Baum after she welcomed him home from the Solomons. This marks the first time Mrs Payne has ever been to a Naval Base.

Photos: ABPH Helen Frank

By Graham Davis

The Royal Australian Navy asked 500 Solomon Islanders to go off to church recently so they could destroy an unexploded 250- pound Japanese World War II bomb which had lain beside an inter village pathway for 60 years.

The safety precaution was well justified.

When Navy divers detonated the bomb the blast made a hole five metres across and four metres deep.

Trees in a 75 metre radius were levelled.

LCDR Dean Schopen, the commanding officer of the coastal mine hunter HMAS Gascoyne told of the demolition task when he and his ship’s company of 43 returned from Operation Anode on August 13.

Fifty family members and friends were on the Waterhen wharf to welcome the 710-tonne warship home.

The destruction of the Japanese bomb was just one of three similar tasks the five divers/explosives experts on Gascoyne carried out in the seven weeks the ship was on station in the Solomons.

LCDR Schopen described to Navy News the demolition of the bomb.

“It was about two weeks ago that we did the Japanese bomb task,” he said.

“It lay about 600 metres from the village of Kolokapisi on the island of Choiseul.

“It was on the surface and about five metres from a path used by the villagers to go from one village to the next.

“We think it was dropped by a Japanese aircraft and failed to go off.”

He said when it came time for the ship’s five-man dive team to destroy the device a wide safety cordon was introduced.

“There were 500 people in the village. They went to the church,” he said.

Two earlier assignments saw Gascoyne’s divers destroy Japanese and US 5-inch shells located just 200 metres from two villages on the Shortland Islands.

“We had to impose a safety cordon for these,” LCDR Schopen said. With a policeman carried at all times, Gascoyne was kept busy during her deployment.

“We called at 33 villages, did three boardings and did many ‘queries’ of vessels,” he said.

He said a quarter of his ship’s company had not deployed before and that most of them were under the age of 25.

One of those under-25 was 19-year-old Seaman Damien Baum. He had a special relative waiting for him on the wharf.

Although confined to a wheelchair his very proud “Nan” great grandmother Mrs Edna Payne, aged 89, had come from Cooma to welcome him home.

Damien’s grandparents Fred and Helen Payne had brought her to Sydney for what was her first ever visit to a naval base.

There was a special hug from Mrs Payne snr and she didn’t mind a bit when Damien put his cap on her head. Another surprise came for PO Simon East.

He was able to give his eight-week-old nephew Dillon Byrne a “nurse” for the first time.

(Gascoyne was deployed for ten weeks.)

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