Leo Bon Coulson

Leo was born in Broken Hill, New South Wales on the 4th of April 1900. He was the youngest of four children of Reginald Burgoyle and Fanny Letitia (née Pretlove) Coulson. Perhaps it was the barreness of the countryside around Broken Hill that resulted in Leo enlisting in the Royal Australian Navy on the 5th of January, 1920.

Leo completed his basic training at HMAS Cerebus on the 21st of May, 1920 and was then posted to HMAS Encounter. Encounter was the RAN’s first cruiser, being commissioned in 1912. By the time Leo joined her she was close to be decommissioned and was being used as a sea going training ship.

Leo’s next posting was to HMAS Platypus. She was initially used as a submarine depot ship. After only a few months she was designated as a Destroyer Depot and Fleet Repair Ship, a role she continued in until 1929.

HMAS Geranium was Leo’s next posting between April 1925 and January 1927. Geranium was a Flower Class sloop. By the time Leo joined her she was being used as a survey vessel in the waters around northern Australia. After leaving Geranium there is a blank in leo’s service records until October 1939.

Two months after the declaration of war with Germany, he was posted to HMAS Penguin (which was the recommissioned name for HMAS Platypus) as a stoker. While the term “stoker” came from the age of coal fired ships, it remained once ships had shifted to using oil as a fuel. Leo’s job would be down in the engine room, checking on the many values and gauges that informed how the engines were operating. In early April of 1940 he joined HMAS Parramatta. 

Parramatta, a Grimsby Class sloop of 1060 tons, was the second ship in the RAN to have this name. Her armament consisted of 3 4-inch guns and 4 3 pounder guns. She had just completed her commissioning and was under the command of Lieutenant Commander Jefferson H Walker MVO RAN. Following a brief period exercising with the 20th Minesweeping Flotilla, she sailed to the Red Sea where she spent the next nine months patrolling and minesweeping. 

In May of 1941 she was transferred to the control of Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Station, where she was assigned to duty on escort in support of the campaign in Libya. Over the next few months, Parramatta escorted ships to and from Tobruk. She gained the attention of both the German navy and airfoce, having many close encounters with enemy dive bombers.

About midnight on the 26th of November, she was in convoy with HMAS Yarra and HMS Avon Vale. Trailing the convoy was the German U-Boat U-559, under the command of Kapitan Hans Heidtmann. At 12 minutes past midnight at a range  of 2000 metres, he fired a spread of three torpedoes at a merchant ship in the convoy. All three missed. Thirty minutes later he fired a single torpedo at a range of 1500 metres. The target was the Parramatta. She exploded, broke up and sank. Only 24 aboard survived, with 138 killed, including Stoker Leo Coulson.

A letter written by Able Seaman Harold Moss to the mother of Ordinary Seaman Lyall J. Smith, who went down with the Parramatta, describes what happened on that night.

“… Anyhow to get to the night on which we sunk, we were off Tobruk and this night was rather heavy seas, moon was generally hidden by dark clouds and rian. This rain by the way caused the majority of deaths. Everyone used to sleep on deck and through the rain they all had to go below. Lyall was my opposite watch then and at midnight when I went below he came on deck to keep his watch on the forward gun. It was raining and just bfore I went down I had a funny feeling. I thought that it would be pretty awful to be adrift in that sea. I went right forward to try and get a place to sleep but there was no room so I came back amidships and lay on a stool in a little spare mess we had. My lifebelt was blown up and near my feet. At 12.20 I looked at my watch and then I was just dozing off when she was hit. I never want to hear that noise again, I was thrown to the deck and the lights went out. I grabbed my lifejacket and was up the ladder and on deck in 10 seconds. I just got on deck when she lurched over and immediately began to sink. I couldn’t tie my belt on and it was swept away. I was then in the water and swam to where I saw a float. I got on and began helping fellows on. We floated away and soon lost sight of the ship. We were picked up in about 2¹/₂ hours… There were lots of men clinging to rafts and pieces of wood. The next morning there was no survivors in sight. The night was bitterly cold and I couldn’t have lasted much longer myself. For myself I can’t believe that everyone who is missing is dead and I feel that there may be some who are in POW camps in Germany. It was hard for to realise that my friends, chaps who I had known as brothers were gone and it affected me for a long time.”

Leo Coulson has no known grave. He is remembered on panel 57 of column 3 on the Plymouth Naval Memorial, the Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour, and the Tallangatta WW2 Roll of Honour (where his name is misspelt as Coulston). For his service during the war he was awarded the 1939-1945 Star, the Africa Star, the Defence Medal, the War Medal 1939-1945 and the Australian Service Medal 1939-1945.

The U-boat that sunk the Parramatta, U-559, would become famous in the history of the Second World War. In all, she conducted nine war patrols, sinking the Parramatta on her forth patrol. On the 30th of October, 1942, she was sighted and hunted for sixteen hours, constantly being depth charged. She was forced to surface due to a crack in the hull which made it difficult for her to keep her trim. Upon surfacing she was shot at by HMS Petard with her Oerlikon 20 mm canon. The crew of the U-boat scrambled overboard without destroying their codebooks or Enigma coding machine. Sailors from the Petard managed to scramble onboard and secure both the codebooks and Enigma machine. The recovered items were immensely valuable to the code-breakers at Bletchley Park as it allowed them to decode and read coded messages from the German Kriegsmarine (Navy).