What happened to HMAS Sydney?
On 19 November 1941 the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney met the German raider Kormoran, disguised as a Dutch freighter, off Western Australia. Sydney came within a mile of her; the raider then opened fire with guns and torpedoes. Both ships were sunk. None of Sydney's 645 men survived, while over 300 Germans did; the wrecks were found only in 2008.1
The Australian War Memorial calls it the most grievous loss the Royal Australian Navy ever suffered. On 19 November 1941 the light cruiser HMAS Sydney, the most famous ship in the navy, met a merchant ship off the coast of Western Australia. By midnight both were burning wrecks. More than 300 German sailors from the raider Kormoran were later picked up; of Sydney's 645 men not one was ever found.2
Two very different ships
Sydney had made her name in the Mediterranean, above all in the action off Cape Spada, when she fought the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni. Sydney gave her a hero's welcome when she came home in February 1941, and for the rest of the year she escorted convoys along the Western Australian coast and up to Singapore.3
The Kormoran was her opposite. Converted from the freighter Steiermark, she carried guns, torpedoes and mines, all hidden so that only close scrutiny would show she was not a merchant ship. Her task was to work alone against unescorted shipping for months at a time, avoiding publicity and meeting supply ships in remote places. In November 1941 she was disguised as the Dutch freighter Straat Malakka.4
The meeting
Sydney had handed over a troopship to a British cruiser on 17 November and was heading back to Fremantle. At about 4 p.m. on 19 November, some 150 miles southwest of Carnarvon, the Kormoran's lookouts sighted her. The account below comes from the German survivors, as set down in the Australian official history and summarized by a parliamentary committee in 1999. Captain Theodor Detmers turned away into the sun; engine trouble was cutting his speed, so he could not outrun the cruiser, and he hoped his disguise would carry him through.5
Sydney closed on a converging course, signaling repeatedly for the ship to identify herself. Detmers hoisted Dutch colors and the signal letters of the Straat Malakka, placed where they were hard to read, and at 5 p.m. sent a radio message as the Dutch ship, reporting a suspicious vessel nearby. A tug and the wireless station at Geraldton picked it up only faintly and in garbled form.6
By about 5:30 Sydney had drawn almost level with the Kormoran, less than a mile away, with her guns and torpedo tubes trained on her. She asked for the ship's destination, and was told Batavia. Then she signaled IK. They were part of the Straat Malakka's secret identification signal, which the Germans did not know. The Kormoran could not answer.7
Point blank
Detmers decided he could not avoid a fight. He struck the Dutch flag, raised the German ensign and opened fire shortly after 5:30, launching two torpedoes at the same moment. The Kormoran's first salvoes missed, but the next ones hit Sydney's bridge and gun director. At that range the advantage of the cruiser's heavier guns and higher speed was gone. The Memorial puts it simply: the raider's disguise drew Sydney close enough for her to be overwhelmed with gunfire and torpedoes.8
Sydney fought back. Badly damaged, she hit the Kormoran hard enough to set her on fire, and Detmers ordered his crew to abandon ship; the scuttling charges were fired at midnight. The German survivors last saw Sydney about ten miles off, heading south, then only a distant glow, which faded before midnight. She sank during the night with everyone on board.9
The search and the questions
Sydney was due at Fremantle on 20 November. When she failed to appear the alarm was slow to rise, since her troopship's voyage had been delayed. On 24 November a British tanker picked up a raft carrying 25 Germans, and by 30 November the boats and rafts carrying the Kormoran's survivors had been found. The Memorial counts 315 survivors from a crew of 393, its Wartime magazine 317. The Australian National Maritime Museum puts the German dead at some 80. The only substantial wreckage thought to come from Sydney was a Carley float, badly damaged by shellfire, now in the Australian War Memorial, which considers that it probably came from the cruiser.10
With no Australian survivors, every account of the battle came from the enemy, and the gap filled with rumors and conspiracy theories that the Memorial says have no basis in fact. The parliamentary committee heard the arguments over why Captain Joseph Burnett, a careful officer in his first command, had closed on an unidentified ship instead of using his speed and range. On 17 March 2008 the Australian government announced that both wrecks had been found, about 112 nautical miles off Steep Point and some 12 nautical miles apart, at depths of about 2,500 meters.11
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”. ↩
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”. ↩
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”; Australian War Memorial, “Gallant Fighter”. ↩
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”; Australian War Memorial, “Auxiliary cruiser Kormoran”; Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”. ↩
- Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Gallant Fighter”; Western Australian Museum, “Battle with the HSK Kormoran”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”. ↩
- Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”. ↩
- Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”; Western Australian Museum, “Battle with the HSK Kormoran”. ↩
- Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”; Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”. ↩
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”; Australian War Memorial, “Gallant Fighter”. ↩
- Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Western Australian Museum, “Battle with the HSK Kormoran”; Australian War Memorial, “Gallant Fighter”; Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”; Naval Historical Society of Australia, “Australian Naval History on 28 November 1941”; Australian War Memorial, “Carley float”. ↩
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”; Parliament of Australia, “Chapter 4”; Australian War Memorial, “Gallant Fighter”; Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”. ↩
Sources
- Australian War Memorial, “HMAS Sydney II and the Kormoran”
- Parliament of Australia, Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, The loss of HMAS Sydney, 1999, “Chapter 4: The Engagement”
- Australian National Maritime Museum collections, “HSK Kormoran survivors under guard”
- Australian War Memorial, Wartime magazine, issue 43, “Gallant Fighter”
- Australian War Memorial, “Auxiliary cruiser Kormoran”
- Australian War Memorial, “Sydney-Kormoran action”
- Western Australian Museum, “Battle with the HSK Kormoran”
- Naval Historical Society of Australia, “Australian Naval History on 28 November 1941”
- Australian War Memorial, “Carley float”
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