Pearls and Irritations

A few years ago Ken Haddock, a retired social worker, discovered that a legendary folk tale of Melbourne Catholicism was false. For decades Father Wally Silvester (1919-2005), a charismatic Pallottine priest, has been treated with awe as a former U-boat commander, and hailed as a war hero who defied Hitler by saving enemy Russian sailors.

Only last year did the Melbourne Pallottine order accept publicly the evidence that Silvester was not a U-boat captain and had not defied Hitler. Today, some Catholic websites continue to run the fake news.

The following paragraphs recap Haddock’s experience and ask why in 1966 the Melbourne Herald made Silvester a front-page story. Filling in a missing link in the local folklore, this article concludes that Silvester was lending a hand to anti-Soviet, and implicitly pro-Vietnam war, propaganda.

On Saturday night, 4 June 1966, the ‘In Black and White’ column of the mass-circulation Herald had a front-page story headed, ‘German U-boat captain now Kew priest’. The sub-heading said, ‘He sank Russian ship then defied Hitler and saved crew.’ The author was E W (Bill) Tipping, a well-known journalist, whose column had earned him the nickname ‘Mr Melbourne’.

The Kew priest was Walter Silvester, 47, born in Breslau, then Germany, now Wroclaw, Poland, who had been in Melbourne since 1951 and in charge of the Pallottine order in Australia from 1958 to 1965. The Pallottines were mainly stationed in the Kimberley, Western Australia, among Aboriginal communities, but Silvester was active in increasing their profile in urban areas.

Indeed, he had a reputation as a charismatic preacher and singer, gathering twenty or more groups of followers. Some leaders in the parish-based Young Christian Workers (YCW) were critical of what they saw as his over-emphasis on idealised talk about Christianity as opposed to their practical involvement with young people’s working lives and their leisure activities. Where the YCW was critical of B A Santamaria’s anti-communist Movement, Silvester was sympathetic..

Unquestioned by bishops, laity and daily press

In the course of his ministry, Silvester had told his story to many people. From at least 1958 the Melbourne Catholic Advocate had reported that he was “decorated for his successes as a U-boat commander”. Prominent Catholic figures who have repeated Silvester’s story of a U-boat command and defiance of Hitler include Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, Archbishop Peter Comensoli of Melbourne, Bishop Vincent Long of Parramatta and Father Frank Brennan SJ. When Silvester died on 24 March 2005, aged 85, Mark Brolly’s obituary in the Age used the headline, ‘Father Walter Silvester priest, U-boat commander’.

In his 1966 piece, Tipping, a WWII returned soldier, added that not only had Silvester been a U-boat commander but that also he had been “sentenced to death by the Nazis in 1943 — because he defied orders by picking up the survivors of a Russian cargo ship he sank in the Arctic, off Norway.”

Tipping’s 1300-word scoop is rippling with unlikely details: “They picked up 30 of the Russians, but had room for only 10 in the confined U-boat with its crew of 82, so they put the other 20 on the U-boat deck and lashed them to the conning tower. For rations they gave them a huge ham and a barrel of rum. and made full steam ahead for the nearest Arctic island. On their way to the island they ran into a storm and the 20 men on the U-boat deck were all lost when they were swept overboard by a freak wave. But the other 10 were put ashore and the U-boat returned to its base at Hammerfest. in Norway.”

The chief engineer, a Gestapo man, denounced Silvester, who was then sentenced to death by Hitler, personally, so the story went. The unbelievable twists of fate kept coming, but that will do for now.

No evidence that he served on a U-boat

A decade ago, on the web, some people queried details in Mark Brolly’s obituary and Haddock applied to the Military Records Office in Berlin for a copy of Silvester’s personnel history. In 2016 he received the German document and had it translated, and circulated it. In his youth Haddock had been a member of one of Silvester’s youth groups and subsequently spent seven years as a trainee member of the Pallottines. Haddock has insisted on affirming positive aspects of Silvester’s priestly life: “I knew Father Silvester personally and I benefitted from his dedicated pastoral work. I am not wanting to deny him due recognition for that work.”

The record says that Walter Silvester joined the German Navy in November 1940 at the age of 21, served on minesweepers, rose to the rank of lieutenant, had six months at the submarine teaching division from December 1944, and was taken prisoner by the British after the surrender in May 1945. The record is incomplete as to whether he actually served on a U-boat, but his war badge is for “mine search, submarine hunt and security units”. And the record has nothing about an order that Silvester be executed for picking up survivors, which the Herald article claimed.

A meeting to correct the Herald story

On 15 May 1999, thirty-three years after the Herald article, Silvester had scheduled a meeting with his friend Jim McKenna, a retired newsagent, who was assisting him in writing his life story. A surviving agenda document lists an item entitled ‘Correct errors in Herald story’, that is, the writer and the subject had already discussed falsehoods in the Herald article. McKenna’s widow, Kath, found the agenda sheet along with two drafts of the autobiography. In the final draft completed after Silvester’s death, McKenna had deleted the U-boat reference and replaced a paragraph about Silvester’s war service with one sentence, “I served in the German Navy from 1939 to 1945.”

Haddock put some of his findings on the web and notified Archbishop Comensoli. I forwarded Haddock’s results to the Melbourne branch of the Australian Catholic Historical Society. Neither the archdiocese nor the Pallottines made any response. When Bishop Long returned to the false account in his 2022 Walter Silvester lecture I wrote to him reiterating Haddock’s findings. He followed up. As a result, the committee responsible for the annual Silvester lecture launched their own investigation into Silvester’s war record, and came to a similar conclusion as Haddock. Kath McKenna’s discovery was a clincher. Later that year they cancelled the annual Walter Silvester lecture.

Earlier genuine story about saving Russian lives

Puzzled as to why the Tipping-Silvester Herald interview appeared at that time, I followed up a lead that Tipping himself gave: “This is how we got on to his story. A woman tipped us off about Fr Silvester’s U-boat experiences, suggesting that Ambassador Loginov might like to make another trip to Melbourne to honour the German priest for risking death to save the lives of those Russian seamen during the war. He took some persuading, but we managed to get him to tell us about it last night [Friday 3 June 1966].”

At the State Library I researched why Ambassador Vitaly Logonov was in town that week. On the Monday, the Herald published a story entitled, ‘The Russians track down modest Frank’. Readers of the Herald in 1966 knew what Tipping meant but the wording is cryptic for today’s audience.

At the Melbourne Town Hall, on Tuesday 31 May 1966, Ambassador Loginov of the Soviet Union presented Frank Huelin, 58, with a gold watch inscribed with the thanks of the Soviet people for his contribution in saving the lives of some Russian prisoners on the Channel Islands during World War II.

The Soviet Government awarded watches to 20 people of the Channel Islands and had trouble tracking down Huelin. They found him living in Surrey Hills, Melbourne, and working as a plant attendant at the City Council’s power house in Lonsdale Street. Frank Huelin, by the way, is the author of a much-acclaimed book, Keep Moving, about his experiences of being on the road and out of work in Australia during the Great Depression.

Born in Jersey, Huelin had come to Australia in 1928, and went back to Jersey in 1939 to see his relations. Two weeks after his arrival war broke out and he remained during the German occupation from 1940 to 1945. Huelin, his brother and others joined an underground group which hid any Russian POWs who had escaped from the camps on the Island.

The Herald’s report included an intriguing detail, namely that some members of the underground were caught and shot, one of whom was a Roman Catholic priest. I checked this out. The priest was Canon Clifford Cohu, a Jersey native, sometime Canon of Allahabad Anglican Cathedral in India, who was deported from Jersey to Germany for defiant actions such as spreading BBC news reports, and died in Spergau concentration camp on 20 September 1944 as a result of brutal treatment.

There are two errors in Huelin’s memory: Cohu was an Anglican not a Catholic; and he died from the effects of brutal bashings and other punishments, not by being shot. A portrait on Jersey memorialising Cohu shows him wearing a roman collar like those worn by Catholic priests. Such errors do not affect the essence of Huelin’s story.

Vietnam War context

That the Russians publicly honoured Huelin in Melbourne the same week is a basis for concluding that Tipping intended Silvester’s story as an answer to the Huelin one. Although the Herald did not report this, Huelin was a member of the Communist Party when he was on Jersey.

In June 1966 Harold Holt’s Liberal-Country Party government which supported the American war in Vietnam were facing growing public opposition. The first Australian conscript to die in Vietnam, Errol Noack, had been killed less than a fortnight before.

Mainstream media continually attacked the Soviet Union (Russia) and China as supporters of the Communist-led patriots fighting against the American invasion of Vietnam. The Soviet government’s award to Frank Huelin upset the goodies-versus-baddies propaganda and reminded the public that the Soviet Union was a crucial ally in the war against Nazi Germany.

The matter under discussion is not a private fault: it concerns a public deceit endorsed, presumably unknowingly, for five decades or more by the Pallottine order and bishops of the Catholic Church. My conversations with a range of people indicate that tens of thousands of people, Catholics and others, have accepted the false stories.

Walter Silvester, some could think, had told a story to promote love and forgiveness, but Tipping used his false heroic story in order to take the spotlight off the anti-Nazi record of Frank Huelin and the Soviet Union. In the end, Silvester’s and Tipping’s attempts to detract from Frank Huelin’s bravery have undermined Walter Silvester’s reputation, and Tipping’s.

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