HMAS Sydney remains - Handle with Care

By Carmelo Amalfi
Shipwreck experts say human remains are not expected to have survived the ravages of time, pressure and seawater since HMAS Sydney sank off the WA coast in 1941.
A close-up survey of the World War Two wreck is planned once cyclonic conditions in more northern waters clear up over the next few days.
If skeletal material still exists at the wreck site off Shark Bay, it probably will be beyond camera view, inside compartments or rooms buried in the wreck's twisted remains discovered in 2.5km of water.
Underwater video will only be able to survey the outside of the damaged wreck, the first images expected to be available by next week.
Any remains identified at Australia's newest war grave will be left to the sea - the Federal Government having placed protection zones around the wrecks of both the Sydney and German raider HSK Kormoran.
How they will be managed will differ greatly when compared to other wreck sites such as Batavia's Graveyard off Geraldton. Or should it?
In Sydney's case, the issue is closer to home whereas the Dutch ship was wrecked in the Abrolhos in 1629, affecting fewer people.
Shipwreck archaeologists and historians say any Sydney remains should be treated no differently to those found on other shipwrecks including Batavia or Titanic - with respect and care, particularly during excavations and exhumations on land.
At sea, the same treatment should apply, the Sydney discoverers having stated there are no plans to touch the broken ship.
HMAS Sydney was found about 12 nautical miles from Kormoran and eight nautical miles from the scene of the fiery battle on November 19, 1941.
Most of Kormoran's sailors survived the encounter while Sydney's entire 645 crew perished, except possibly a Sydney sailor whose liferaft reached Christmas Island about three months after the sinking off the Gascoyne coast.
The Australian light cruiser was discovered this month, its largely intact hull resting upright in deep water about 112 nautical miles west of Shark Bay.
The sea at these depths is cruel to such shipwrecks, its internal structure disintegrating as chemistry, temperature, currents and great pressures take their toll over time.
And it is no less obliging to human souls and the cultural artefacts they carry.
WA Maritime Museum conservator Ian MacLeod said it was highly unlikely human remains would be found on Sydney. Inside the ship, it could be a different picture.
He said bacteria and sea life would have quickly broken down the bodies of the dead sailors and most of the belongings they had on them when the ship sank.
The sea did the rest, dissolving the calcium carbonate in bones as the temperature dropped in the face of crushing pressures. This made bone unstable.
Dr MacLeod, the executive director of collection management and conservation, said skeletal material has been found on other wrecks, including Titanic, Batavia and Mary Rose.
In 1993, when some of the first material was brought up from the Titanic, Dr MacLeod was asked to inspect it and recommend ways of conserving objects which had not seen the light of day in 81 years.
Dr MacLeod recalls handling a 1911 copy of the Sydney Sun newspaper: "It wasn't the paper, but a page of it. It was used to wrap kangaroo skins one of the passengers was taking back to the United States to start a new export business."
Tom Lewis, editor of Australian Warship, explains in the latest issue of the magazine published before the HMAS Sydney wreck was found, that no remains will be found because there would be no compartment of Sydney left unflooded under the extreme sea pressures.
"The ship will be open fully to the sea, and it is almost certain human remains will not be present," Dr Lewis writes.
"Paper disappears, breaking up, eaten by fish. Wood becomes porous and crumbles. Bones are corroded by salt water and remains are dispersed by tide and fish.
"This takes a comparatively short time."
Dr MacLeod said how wrecks such as Sydney are managed often is determined by ethical and legal standards applied to artefacts discovered on wrecks.
Human remains usually complicate the issue, particularly if they are found on more younger wrecks.
Studying remains of Roman sailors will affect people differently than those which turn out to be from victims of the Batavia and Titanic tragedies.
The loss of Sydney's men continues to be felt deeply, nearly 67 years after the naval nightmare off WA.
How the sea grave will be managed will depend largely on the hopes and wishes of families and friends who now have a place to point to and honour.
To visit, if they can, the final resting place of loved ones.

Copyright 2008

DNA hopes to identify "Unknown Sailor" from HMAS Sydney

By Carmelo Amalfi
The Federal Government wants relatives of 13 HMAS Sydney crew members, including two canteen workers and two British sailors, to provide DNA samples as a way of identifying Australia's "Unknown Sailor".
The badly decomposed body of the young sailor, possibly one of two or more Royal Australian Navy sailors to have survived the 1941 battle off Carnarvon, was carried in a bullet-ridden liferaft that washed ashore three months after the November 19 battle with Kormoran.
Residents buried the remains in an unmarked grave on Christmas Island (shown here in this Sydney Morning Herald image) after an autopsy was held on the island.
After several unsuccessful attempts to find the grave, searchers funded by the Federal Government returned to the island in 2006 and exhumed the remains of what they now believe to be a sailor from Sydney.
According to analyses so far, it appears the sailor who was tall for the time suffered horrific head wounds when he struggled onto the life raft, possibly with a second sailor whose identity is marked on a single shoe.
The 1999 Senate Committee report to Parliament on the ship's loss concluded: " ... on the balance of probability, that the body and the Carley float found off the shore of Christmas Island in February 1942 were most likely from HMAS Sydney".
Dressed in a bleached blue boiler suit, the corpse had its arms outstretched and the flesh stripped from its face. The lower portion of the sailor's body was in water which had collected in the raft during its three-month journey north. The sailor's right arm was partly eaten off and a small crab found inside its mouth during the 1942 autopsy on Christmas Island.
The bullet or pieces of shrapnel in his skull was overlooked. The parliamentary inquiry heard that Christmas Island harbourmaster Reg Smith, who recovered the sailor's corpse, noted the carley float had a bullet hole in its wooden decking while remains of another were found in the kapok filling.
Smith apparently kept one of these bullets on his watch chain but his wife, who died in Perth several years ago, did not recall him wearing it.
The sailor's remains were buried in a purpose-built coffin on Christmas Island after a solemn ceremony and military escort by a few volunteers including a Sikh policeman who sounded the Last Post.
The 2006 search for the sailor’s grave turned up an odd-shaped coffin that measured about 1.2m by 980mm by 500mm deep.
With the threat of a Japanese invasion, Captain Smith sailed to Perth with the autopsy report and part of the Carley float - both of which were destroyed or lost after they were handed over to naval authorities.
The Christmas Island searchers had just about given up hope in 2006 when, "virtually the last thrust of a crowbar caught the edge of the coffin".
The first discovery was an ankle bone then a skull lying face down with the hands underneath the body. It was in a foetal position, explaining the odd shape of the coffin and condition of the corpse at the time of burial.
The rusty press-studs, timber and nails from the coffin have been analysed by experts at the University of Sydney and Australian War Memorial. The bullet and shrapnel holes in the navy-issue float suggest the unknown sailor was from HMAS Sydney.
A canvas topped shoe which was stamped Australian Government issue and bearing the name McGowan or McEwen was also found in the raft. Both were seamen on the Sydney. The shoe did not belong to the corpse.
The identity search has eliminated 500 Sydney crew members based on dental records and historical and physical anthropological
research.
This left nearly 150 crew members who have not been excluded on scientific grounds. To reduce this number to a manageable level, the outcomes of analyses conducted on artefacts found with the remains in the grave have been considered.
Australian War Memorial analysis of cloth fragments caught within press-studs suggested the sailor was buried wearing white coveralls. Initial historical research concluded that the sailor was most likely to be an officer or warrant officer (they were entitled to wear white coveralls), but DNA testing showed this may not be the case.
The DNA search will focus on the 11 officers and warrant officers who have not been excluded on dental or anthropological grounds. Two civilian canteen workers also will be considered as potential matches.
Work is underway to locate surviving relatives of these 13 crew members.
Ballistics analysis on the remains has ruled out speculation the sailor was shot in the head by German sailors in motorised boats. Former Minister Assisting the Defence Minister, Bruce Bilson, said the tests revealed the fragment was probably a piece of shrapnel: "That examination reveals it's not a small calibre fire-arm round as was originally thought after visual and X-ray assessment. It looks more like a fragment from munition, a piece of shrapnel embedded in the skull of the victim."
He said that a number of German survivors reported significant shrapnel injuries: "That may be the case with these remains, but we're carrying out further examination of the metal itself to see if we can match the metal to other kinds of metal held from the event or from munitions at the time."
The 13 crew members DNA experts want to sample include:
* Sub-Lieutenant James Irvine CLIFTON, RAN, born 7 November 1916, WA
* Lieutenant Thomas Garton BROWN, RAN, born 22 January 1920, NSW
* Lieutenant Eric Elton MAYO, RAN, born 28 July 1912, SA
* Lieutenant Robert Ernest RIDOUT, RAN, born 4 September 1914, VIC
* Surgeon Lieutenant Mervyn Clive TOWNSEND, RAN, born 5 February 1917, VIC
* Lieutenant Ian Thomas Roy TRELOAR, RAN, born 10 April 1919, VIC
* Schoolmaster Percy Francis SKEWES, RAN, born 28 November 1914, QLD
* Sub-Lieutenant Alexander Vinrace EAGAR, RAN, born 13 March 1917, QLD
* Lieutenant Commander Michael Morgan SINGER, RN, DOB 5 Dec 1909, UK
* Warrant Officer Gunner Frank Leslie MACDONALD, RN, UK
* Flying Officer Raymond Barker BARREY, RAAF, born 23 July 1916, SA
* Salvatore ZAMMITT, canteen manager, family believed to be in Sydney
* Samuel PSAILA, canteen assistant, no other details
Anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of surviving family members of the above HMAS Sydney crew are urged to make contact with the Christmas Island Investigation Team by email on xmasisland.generalenquiries@defence.gov.au, or by letter to: Christmas Island Investigation Team, R1-4-C070, Russell Offices, Canberra, ACT, 2600.

"There are probably very few parents of sailors who were lost on HMAS Sydney who are still surviving, but there are many wives, children, brothers, sisters and other relatives who are. They are part of the Sydney family, and most would wish to know the identity of the sailor on Christmas Island." - ex-Melbourne magistrate and HMAS Sydney researcher Ted McGowan, whose older brother Tom celebrated his 21st birthday the day before Sydney's loss.

Copyright 2008

Loaded pistol survives 1941 Sydney-Kormoran battle encased in coral

By Carmelo Amalfi
In the days following the loss of HMAS Sydney and its 645 crew off Carnarvon, a German survivor of the World War Two naval disaster, in one of two crowded lifeboats approaching "enemy territory", threw his loaded pistol into the surf at Red Bluff.
Only a few rounds were missing from the officer's wooden handled weapon. Settling on the bottom in the week after the sinking of the Australian light cruiser and German raider HSK Kormoran on November 19, 1941, the palm-sized handgun lay undisturbed until last year.
Few artefacts survived the battle, including a bullet-ridden carley float, life vest and possible human remains of a Sydney sailor whose liferaft reached Christmas Island in 1942.
Amazingly, a young Geraldton electrician stumbled across the coral-encrusted gun while he searched for fishing lures in just a few metres of water about 50m from the shore.
"I was diving on the reefs when I spotted a row of brass bullets glittering in the water," Tom Goddard, 20, said after the chance find.
"They were all lined up. I went down and cleaned away the rocks and sand and there was a whole pistol. I couldn't believe it."
Wanting to keep the maritime treasure in public hands, Tom contacted WA Maritime Museum archaeologists and gun experts who returned to inspect the site.
The detailed investigation since then has yielded a national maritime treasure and one of only a handful of artefacts recovered after the HMAS Sydney loss.
WA Museum archaeologist Mike McCarthy said the 1934 model handgun was issued to officers in the Kriegsmarine or German Navy.
Thought at first to be the larger Luger pistol, the Fremantle team confirmed the remains as those of a mauser, usually carried by German navy officers. It fired eight bullets.
Fragments of wood used in the handle of the smaller weapon also were recovered from the Red Bluff site.
"The German Navy-issue gun was much smaller than a Luger," Mr McCarthy said. "The mauser was something a navy officer would carry in his pocket, rather than in a holster."
He said Kormoran officers would have carried the pistol to keep order on the crowded life boats heading for the Gascoyne coast. Some sailors, who were forced to take turns standing up, tried to jump overboard. Its other use included keeping at bay hungry sharks.
"Officers from Kormoran carried the handgun," he said. "In this case it was probably used to maintain discipline on the lifeboats after the loss of Sydney.
"It is a national treasure for both Australia and Germany."
Most of Kormoran's nearly 400 crew were either rescued at sea or taken prisoners of war once they reached WA. Two lifeboats reached the coast on November 25. One carried 46 survivors to Red Bluff and the other 57 to 17-Mile Well.
Mr McCarthy said the Red Bluff find had also yielded an unexpected surprise - a second German gun.
While investigating the origins of the mauser, the museum was alerted to the discovery of a Luger many years earlier from the 17 Mile Well site. Only a photograph of the Luger survives, confirming its existence, the gun probably destroyed by police authorities.
Other artefacts from Kormoran included a life belt, flashes and a set of keys.
One of the Kormoran survivors, Fritz List, reportedly hid a Leica still camera with images of the HMAS Sydney battle in the caves at Red Bluff. No trace of it has been found despite several searches.
Interestingly, the owner of the mauser can be corroborated by Kormoran eyewitnesses and Australian authorities such as former Victorian POW guard Jonathon Robotham, who interviewed some of the Kormoran prisoners.
Kormoran survivor Fritz Englemann, who visited WA in 2001, also confirmed the identity of the German gun owner.
"Robotham talks about the mauser having been thrown into the water by the lifeboat's lieutenant-commander, Bret Schneider," Mr McCarthy said.
"Fritz Englemann confirmed it was Schneider. He said he saw the lifeboat commander ditch it in the water when they landed at Red Bluff."
Museum conservator and trained warrant officer Dick Garcia said that Mr Goddard had been careful to remember where he found the pistol.
He said photographs of the remains on the seabed gave the team a good picture of the shape of the gun stock and material it was made from.
The corroded remains of the firing pin spring also survived its underwater coral entombment.
The butts of the well-preserved bullets (copper and brass are highly resistant to underwater corrosion) revealed the German war factory that made them.
A report on the museum team's gun analysis has been sent to experts at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Copyright 2008

Last letter from a lost HMAS Sydney sailor

"The Indian Ocean has seen quite a bit of us or else it is the other way round but so long as we are on top is all that we worry about. At the moment, we are waiting for an enemy ship to show up." HMAS Sydney sailor Ernest David Rolley, 21.


By Carmelo Amalfi
A LETTER posted by a HMAS Sydney steward before disappearing off WA on November 19, 1941, offers a poignant reminder of why the ship's discovery was worth the 66-year effort to find the World War Two wreck.
Stuffed inside a teapot until its discovery a few years ago, the handwritten letter by Ernest David Rolley, 21, is a rare snapshot, not into where to possibly find the wreck, but that moment when the Queensland-born sailor found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A casualty of Australia's worst naval disaster. One of 645 sailors who never came home.
Ernest joined HMAS Sydney only after his ship, the coastal defender Cerberus, sailed while he was attending his mum's funeral on March 12, 1941.
He would not have been on Sydney.
But by Easter of 1941, the third of four sons from Herberton in Far North Queensland who worked in Brisbane as a hotel and "picture theatre" worker was sailing west on escort duties that would bring him face to face with the German raider Kormoran, whose wreckage was found about 12 nautical miles from Sydney's remains.
The steward thanks Nancy Francis, president of the Returned Soldiers, Sailors and Airman’s Imperial League (now Returned and Services League) for her postal note or money order he received, "the last time in harbour".
Miss Francis' grand-daughter Ros Fielding inherited the letter in the teapot after her father died several years ago.
"It was all wrapped up and put into a box, which I almost threw out," she said from her home near Townsville. "We used a lot of teapots then."
Having served in the Army, the former radio operator and Australian spy said she realised the correspondence could be important, and passed it on to friend Mary Hilbig, a volunteer at North Queensland Military Aviation Museum who contacted the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
Rolley's brother Stan, who lives near Brisbane, said his older brother by nine years was posted to HMAS Sydney on April 7, 1941: "He had been on Cerberus since September 1940. When my mum died, he returned to Herberton for the funeral, and missed Cerberus, which had sailed."
Stan said he couldn't believe it when his older brother's letter turned up in Ros' teapot: "It had been around for more than 60 years. "Luckily, Nancy Francis' family did not throw it out."
Wes Olsen, WA author of Bitter Victory: the Death of HMAS Sydney, said Rolley's letter provided a personal chronology leading up to the tragic loss of HMAS Sydney.
"The letter is an important reminder that HMAS Sydney's sailors, who lost their lives protecting Australia, had hopes and dreams," Mr Olsen said.
"Rolley talks about mundane things, the weather and his long time at sea."
HMAS Sydney left Sydney on April 11, 1941. By Easter Sunday on April 13, the ship was, as Rolley writes, at sea and headed for Fremantle via the Great Australian Bight.
Admiral Ragnar Colvin, Chief of Australian Navy Staff, also was on board, bound for an American-British-Dutch defence meeting in Singapore.
"Rolley notes a change in temperature," Mr Olsen explains. "From the bitter cold which probably refers to the passage through the Bight and the heat of the tropics in Singapore."
Rolley says one week it is bitter cold and miserable and the next, "it is just the opposite, we can't get cool". HMAS Sydney arrived in Singapore on April 19, where it stayed for three days before reaching Fremantle on April 27 for maintenance and training work.
Mr Olsen said this would have been the best opportunity for Rolley to post his letter to Miss Francis and the Women's Auxiliary in Queensland.
Rolley also says that the Indian Ocean, "has seen quite a bit of us or else it is the other way around but so long as we are on top is all that we worry about".
Asked which enemy ship Rolley refers to, Mr Olsen said it was not Kormoran. Both Sydney and Kormoran were believed to have sunk each other about 120km west of the Gascoyne coast, off Shark Bay.
By the time the Sydney sailed into the Bight towards Fremantle port, Kormoran was rounding the Cape of Good Hope having sunk seven ships and captured one in the Atlantic before running into Sydney.
Mr Olsen said HMAS Sydney was after the German battleship Admiral Scheer which entered the Indian Ocean in February 1941.
HMAS Sydney Captain John Collins, who was replaced by Captain Joseph Burnett on May 17, wanted to sink the Scheer with the combined might of HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart.
He said the only raider naval authorities were aware of at that stage was the deadly auxiliary cruiser Atlantis, which left Australia for the Pacific in August until it finally met its match against HMS Devonshire off Ascension Island in the Atlantic on November 22, two days after HMAS Sydney sank off WA.
"There was no other threat except Scheer and enemy merchant raiders," he said. "Sydney was here protecting Australia's shipping routes."
WA Maritime Museum archaeologist Mike McCarthy said Rolley's letter was one of many written by members of Sydney's crew.
"It is one of the most interesting accounts confirming HMAS Sydney's state of readiness," he said.
"The letter is extremely important, carrying references both to the desire to remain afloat being all that was important to this young sailor and to their waiting to sink an elusive enemy ship."

Ode to the HMAS Sydney

Ode to the HMAS Sydney

T'was Banjo who did wrote it, and to you I will quote it
No foe shall gather our harvest, nor sit on our stock yard rail
Now this is a tale of the ocean blue, of an Aussie vessel brave and true
The HMAS Sydney and the boys that didn't fail
- Alexander Fullarton 2001 (full poem below)

Carnarvon commemorates Sydney discovery

By Carmelo Amalfi
On St Patrick's Day this year, WA solar farmer and taxation lawyer Lex Fullarton shared a quiet beer with his late father, Z Force commando and Carnarvon's longest serving public servant Robert Francis, or "Bob" to his friends and family.
It was the 11th anniversary of his dad's death and the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the discovery of HMAS Sydney off Shark Bay.
For Lex, it was a day to celebrate and commemorate.
Lex says "Bob" never stopped talking about the day German survivors of the Sydney battle landed on the coast in lifeboats, having later taking leave without pay from Carnarvon's harbour and lights department to go on suicide missions in the South West Pacific.
He says Carnarvon played an important yet largely unrecognised role in the HMAS Sydney story in the days and weeks following the naval disaster on November 19, 1941.
That role extends to the discovery last week of the Sydney and Kormoran wrecks.
He says Carnarvon was drawn into the wartime mystery after members of the rifle club, including his father, acting as emergency reservists under the Defence Act of 1908, rounded up the German survivors of HSK Kormoran at Red Bluff and 17-Mile Well.
His 19-year-old father was in the armed posse sent to Red Bluff.
Their orders were to guard the eyewitnesses to Sydney's disappearance until military authorities arrived to truck survivors south to be interrogated in Perth and later the eastern States until their repatriation to Germany after the war.
"The Germans were found in good shape, killing a sheep at Quobba station," Lex said exclusively for this blogsite.
The Kormoran survivors landed in two lifeboats, those landing at Red Bluff apologising to late Quobba station owner Keith Baston for killing one of his sheep for food.
They were taken into custody by local police sergeant Stan Anderson and Dr J.W. Piccles, who wanted to know why more guns were needed to bring in the German "aliens".
"What do you want more men for? You've got me," Dr Piccles tells Sgt Anderson, the 1941 exchange recorded by leading HMAS Sydney author Barbara Winter in her 1984 book on the ship's loss.
Lex said extra information about the 1941 beach confrontation emerged in 2001 when he met Kormoran survivor Fritz Englemann, who visited Carnarvon during the Fremantle Maritime Museum wreck seminar that laid the foundations for the search for and discovery last week of the Sydney and Kormoran wrecks.
Lex, 52, learnt from Fritz that a few Nazi Party members who came ashore wanted to overpower the Australians then make their way north, possibly rejoining other Kormoran survivors.
That is, until they ran into Bob and his ".303".
"My father started to raise his rifle but Arthur Snook, (of Gascoyne Trading which provided trucks to transport the POWs), spoke German and welcomed them to Australia. It was a bit of a stand-off, but Snook convinced them to give it up."
Lex said his father was a "dead eye", earning the reputation as one of the finest shots in the Australian army.
"He could shoot a target the size of a man's head from 1000 yards, every time."
Lex has kept his father's weapon, a rare 1908 British small arms rifle, firing it every year to signal the start of Carnarvon's Anzac Day commemorations.
Lex's family has lived in the Carnarvon area since 1885. He is the president of the RSL Club, bagpiper for weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs and is completing a PhD on taxation law at the University of New South Wales.
"Z Force" was the unofficial popular name given to Australia's Z Special Unit that operated behind enemy lines in the South West Pacific during World War Two.
Consisting of Australian, British and New Zealand units which trained around the country including Garden Island, it was the elite forerunner to the Australian SAS. They operated in many missions including a canoe raid on Singapore Harbour and contacting headhunters to help boost resistance against Japnese.forces.
Lex says people had to accept the fact that the Kormoran sank Sydney, aided by some bungling that allowed the German crew to catch Sydney off guard.
He says for those who still remember 1941, Sydney's sacrifice runs deep: "It's fairly certain that had the Sydney not intervened in Kormoran's plans (to lay mines in Carnarvon's harbour), my family would have been casualties, as all were engaged in shipping either as employees or passengers. Either way they would have been aboard one of the State Ships or other wool ships."
Winters, in HMAS Sydney: Fact, Fantasy and Fraud, agrees: "He (Kormoan captain Theodor Detmers) would go to Shark Bay and leave some 'visiting cards' at the approaches to Carnarvon."
The Kormoran had more than 300 mines on board when it crossed paths with Sydney, their explosion after the battle forcing the Germans to abandon ship.
Most of the Kormoran reached Carnarvon's shores, the rest including Detmers were rescued at sea.
"We, the older community of Carnarvon that was around in 1941 and their descendents, (There are not many of them as the population was only about 300 in 1941) are eternally grateful to David Mearns and his crew for finally locating the ships And proving what we have been saying is true," he said.
"The media continues to ignore Carnarvon's role in the sinking of the Sydney by stating it was off the WA Coast and in some news reports still of the Mid West Coast. "It was off Carnarvon. To steal a man's property is a crime, to steal his name is abhorrent, to steal his honour is the lowest to which a person can sink."
"Dad couldn't be here physically to witness this but it is a nice touch that the finding of the HMAS Sydney was on the 11th anniversary of his death."



Lex's "Ode to the HMAS Sydney"

T'was Banjo who did wrote it, and to you I will quote it;
No foe shall gather our harvest, nor sit on our stock yard rail:
Now this is a tale of the ocean blue, of an Aussie vessel brave and true;
The HMAS Sydney and the boys that didn't fail:

T'was race day in Carnarvon and the sun was going down;
When the boys from HMAS Sydney were sailing passed our town:
Another job was over; they'd made another run;
When they chanced upon this bastard, called raider 41:

The enemy had travelled far to bring destruction here;
But they'd reckoned not on Sydney, and this would cost them dear:
They swung towards the setting sun; they made for it a chance to run;
They thought that they would sneak away, did Raider 41:

The sharp eyed crew of Sydney saw the Raiders flight;
They closed the gap; they knew they had a fight:
They'd fought before had every mothers son;
They thought that they would capture her, this Raider 41:

But the Germans were so clever they had a nasty plan;
She held their destruction did the bowels of Kormoran:
The cloak of her mystery she soon would throw aside;
As she thought to hammer Sydney with shell from side to side:

They set to work with grim profession; they knew their grisly task;
The Sydney, she would sail no more and home had seen them last:
"They've torn our bloody guts out, we'll never make it home;
We'll never see our loved ones or the seas again to roam";

The layer of the turret gave out an anguished cry;
Then we'll take this Bastard with us, cried the boys from turret Y:
They snatch another round; they mount to their six inch gun;
They target their tormentor, this Raider 41;

Their ears they are a bleeding, their muscles strain to lay;
Their shot must be a true one in the twilight of the day:
They aim her at his engine room, and there's a mighty crack;
And now these sons of Hitler will never journey back:

Now we'll leave them lying there, their souls have gone to rest;
There passing but a brief one and Carnarvon town was blessed;
Their lying out there somewhere, toward the setting sun;
The HMAS Sydney, her crew, and Raider 41.


Written by Lex for the 60th anniversary of the Sydney loss off Carnarvon in 1941. Lex is the son of one of the armed men who retrieved the Germans from Quobba station after the battle.

Sydney found. Now the how and why?

By Carmelo Amalfi
HMAS Sydney author and WA train driver Wes Olsen says the truth to why none of the 645 sailors survived is written in the World War Two hulk sitting upright in 2.5km of water off Shark Bay.
Instrumental in the archival search for HMAS Sydney and the German raider ship HSK Kormoran, which were discovered within days of each other, Mr Olsen says video images of the wrecks will reveal how the ships sank on November 19, 1941.
More importantly, their discovery ends a 66-year wait for news of the final resting place of Sydney and its crew.
"The find is significant for the families of those lost," he said after a long shift hauling trains through the wheatbelt.
"The search was about providing closure for the families. They now know where their loved ones are.
"Now we have closure for a large number of Australians including British because there were Royal Navy people on board too."
Mr Olsen, whose contact over the past few years with British-based shipwreck hunter David Mearns and other Sydney researchers helped lead searchers to the Sydney site about 250km off WA, says he was lost in endless rail lines when he heard Kormoran was found.
That was on Sunday. On Monday, he was heading back from Merredin when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the discovery of Sydney just 12 nautical miles from Kormoran.
Mr Rudd described the historic find as a turning point in the search to find closure for Australian relatives and friends of the Sydney.
Most of the crew came from NSW and Victoria, 91 from WA; their loved ones converging on war memorials on November 19.
Why none of the Sydney crew survived the battle remains a mystery until video images of the seabed, expected to be available this week, sheds light on the wrecks’ war wounds.
“The bottom line is we trusted the German accounts and built the search pattern around their statements and hey presto we found the ship where it is supposed to be,” Mr Olsen said.
"Sydney is so close to Kormoran it's not funny. Everything fits with what the Germans said occurred."
That included the coordinates of the action given by Kormoran captain Theodor Detmers - 111 degrees east, 26 south, about 112 nautical miles west of Steep Point.
He said Kormoran caught fire during the sea battle and brief barrage from Sydney, flames threatening hundreds of mines which later exploded, the crew abandoning ship.
Most of the Kormoran crew, 317 out of nearly 400, arrived on the WA coast or were rescued at sea.
"The front section of Kormoran should be relatively intact," Mr Olsen explains. "The Sydney, from the German statements, was severely damaged on the forward superstructure and on fire, having also received a torpedo hit under the forward turret region.”
The survivors reported that Sydney was hit 50 times by the disguised raider's heavy guns, the firestorm causing severe casualties on its bridge and open decks.
The remaining 30 Kormoran crew, who meet each year to commemorate the batttle, maintain the 6830-ton light cruiser came too close and was unprepared for the battle.
"The best case scenario is Sydney took on so much water that she lost her buoyancy.
"The ship simply capsized and sank."
Mr Olsen says this was supported by initial reports indicating the hull is relatively intact: "In other words, we have 560 feet of ship, which is what we started with, and it's sitting upright on the seabed."
Mr Olsen said he did not expect to see much left above Sydney's waterline; big ships lose their turrets, masts and guns.
"The forward bridge superstructure will be badly smashed if not gone completely," he said.
"Guns, funnels, aircraft catapults and ship planes will be gone, leaving just a basic ship structure. The best we can hope for is the Sydney's four-inch guns."
He said torpedo tubes and other damaged sections of the ship structure would reveal how the ship fought her last action off WA.