On 9 November 1914 the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, detached from the first convoy carrying Australian and New Zealand troops to the war, caught the German light cruiser SMS Emden at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean. Emden, a raider that had spread alarm across Allied shipping lanes, had come to destroy a British cable and wireless station. After a gunnery duel of under two hours her captain ran the burning ship aground on North Keeling Island. It was the first battle of the Royal Australian Navy.
The raider
Under Captain Karl von Müller, Emden had spent the first months of the war preying on Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean. The Royal Australian Navy credits her with 25 Allied steamers and two warships captured or sunk by October 1914, while an Australian War Memorial account gives 21 vessels. Insurance rates soared and merchants kept their ships in port, and the hunt for her tied down Allied warships across the ocean.1
Uncertainty over where Emden and the German East Asia Squadron were delayed the departure of the first Australian and New Zealand contingent. The convoy of 38 transports and four escorting warships, among them Sydney, finally left Albany in Western Australia on 1 November 1914.2
The wireless station
Von Müller planned to wreck the cable and wireless station on Direction Island in the Cocos group, which linked Australia and Britain, without knowing that his course took him close to the convoy. Emden arrived on the morning of 9 November and landed a party of about 50 men, who smashed machinery, cut cables and blew up the wireless mast. Before Emden could jam the signal, the station's staff sent a distress call. HMAS Melbourne, leading the convoy escort, picked it up at 6:30 a.m. and sent Sydney to investigate.3
Sydney, commanded by Captain John Glossop, was faster than Emden, better armored and armed with heavier 6-inch guns. Even so, Emden hit first, just after 9:40 a.m. Her opening salvos killed four of Sydney's crew and wounded twelve, according to the Australian War Memorial, or more than a dozen, in the navy's account. These were the only Australian casualties of the battle.4
Beached and done for
Glossop then kept his distance and let his heavier guns do the work. Emden scored only about a dozen hits in all, and by 11 a.m. she was ablaze, with her funnels and foremast down. Unable to fight back and hoping to save lives, von Müller deliberately ran her aground on North Keeling Island at about 11:20.5
Sydney left to chase Emden's collier, Buresk, whose crew scuttled her. When Sydney returned at 4 p.m. the wreck was still flying the German ensign, and after an inconclusive exchange of signals Glossop fired two more salvoes before the flag came down and a white sheet was waved. The navy's account notes that he did not send help to the survivors until the next morning, as he first had to learn what was happening on Direction Island. Emden had carried 316 men, and the battle left 134 dead and 65 wounded.6
Why it mattered
The Royal Australian Navy calls it Australia's first single-ship battle at sea and stresses its strategic effect: it removed the only immediate threat to Australia's sea links with Britain, and, it says, no Australian soldier was lost to enemy action on the voyage to the Middle East during the war. Sydney went on to serve in the Atlantic and the North Sea and was present at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet on 21 November 1918. On 9 November 1941 her bow was unveiled as a memorial on the shore of Sydney Harbour, where it now looks across to the Sydney Opera House.7
Also on this day
- 1870: Battle of Coulmiers. French forces under General d'Aurelle de Paladines attacked a Bavarian army under Ludwig von der Tann at Coulmiers, west of Orléans, during the Franco-Prussian War.
