The Road to Finding Sydney

By Carmelo Amalfi
They were only 19. University age. Old enough to drive, old enough to die for "king and country".
In late 1941, in the tense weeks leading to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the crew of HMAS Sydney was deployed along the remote coast of Western Australia where it crossed paths with the disguised German raider HSK Kormoran.
Most of the Kormoran crew survived the battle. None of the 645 Sydney sailors survived.
Until either wreck was found, their last hours at sea would remain a mystery.
Nearly 67 years after Australia's worst naval tragedy, the hunt for the World War Two wrecks has yielded its most important clue to finding Sydney - Kormoran. HMAS Sydney could be found any day.
"One of the most exciting aspects in any shipwreck search, but particularly this one, is the wreck(s) in questions can be found at literally any time," HMAS Sydney search leader David Mearns explains in his March 12 blogpost - on the same day the first Kormoran images appeared on his computer screen aboard the survey vessel SV Geosounder.
The search for the shipwreck began in haste soon after its sinking, with RAAF pilots and WA naval authorities scouring the Indian Ocean for signs of life, wreckage, clues.
But days turned into weeks, months and decades, the disaster clouded by conspiracy theories and claims of government cover-ups, followed by parliamentary inquiries, popular books and fruitless searches for the Sydney wreck.
By late 1945 controversy still raged over the fate of HMAS Sydney - culminating in a Royal Australian Naval Intelligence order to prohibit, "anything further concerning this action and its results".
Government censorship of information only fuelled a generation of public suspicion over how the Sydney crew vanished, seemingly without a trace.
Only a few artefacts have been found since the sinking, including the skeletal remains of a Sydney sailor whose decomposed body was found in a lifeboat washed ashore on Christmas Island in 1942 - three months after the Sydney-Kormoran battle.
A more recent archaeological find reported by this author in The Australian newspaper last year included the discovery of a badly corroded gun thrown into the water in 1941 by a Kormoran officer who reached the WA coast in a lifeboat.
The gun was found by a young electrician fishing for old lures lost off Red Bluff.
Kormoran survivors were rescued either at sea or landed at Red Bluff, south of Carnarvon, where they were arrested and held in custody in WA and Victoria until their repatriation to Germany after the war.
Of Kormoran's 397 crew, 317 survived the battle. The only eyewitnesses. Sydney and its crew sailed away, on fire and steerless - disappearing over the horizon, helpless and lost, in a south-south-east direction.
The 2008 search off WA is based largely on German accounts of the 1941 battle. More specifically, searchers are counting on the accuracy of Detmers' account, which the Nazi Party member hid from his captors while he was held in Australia.
People believed the shipwrecks would not be found because Detmers lied about the battle and sinking position of his deadly raider, given as 111 degrees east, 26 south.
Last week, the Kormoran was found pretty much near where Detmers said he had sunk it.
The account of the actual battle remains controversial, despite Detmers' records and supporting archival material. They still argue that the Germans lied to cover up a war crime in which Komoran survivors in motorised boats shot to death Sydney sailors in the water. Finding the wrecks could provide answers to what went down in the final hours of their tour of duty at sea off WA.
With Kormoran found, searchers expect to find Sydney nearby, possibly within 35km to 50km.
Search leader David Mearns is relying on Detmers' detailed account as the primary source of information about the Sydney battle.
Detmers recorded his account of the battle in a German dictionary, placing faint dots under specific letters to describe details such as coordinates and engine room logs. The 1941 code was cracked when Mearns with Peter Hore, a former Royal Navy captain and linguist, started the archival documentary search for clues to how Sydney sank.
Mearns, who discovered the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic in 1941, brought Detmers' dictionary to the launch last year of the Sydney search.
A packed crowd including Royal Australian Navy representatives, war veterans and widows of the Sydney sailors gathered at the WA Maritime Museum listened intently as the shipwreck hunter held up the book.
Mearns described Detmers' account of the battle as the "factual ground zero" for all other sources of information about the loss of HMAS Sydney.
"There are many theories about where the engagement between Kormoran and Sydney took place. However, the search area chosen is the only one that has any supporting evidence. It is for that reason it has been chosen as the area to be searched."
Mearns said the first-hand document concurred with a 12-page account Mearns obtained from the personal collection of Maria Hehir, the daughter of Australian naval captain John Hehir, who interrogated Detmers while he was a prisoner of war.
Mr Mearns had the Cassel German-English account decoded by Mr Hore, who corrected mistakes in earlier interpretations of the 1941 disaster.
"Capt Detmers's versions were nearly always identical, so I concluded he was always telling the truth," Mearns explained at the launch. "No other shipwreck hunter has had so many vital clues about the Sydney's resting place."
Those clues include the memories of the surviving Kormoran crew who meet each year to commemorate the loss of both ships. The German survivors, of which 30 remain, maintain Sydney captain Joseph Burnett is to blame for the tragedy because he came in too close to the disguised raider before all hell broke loose.
"I believe Detmers' accounts are credible, accurate and precise," Detmers said. "And that's the basis on which you can then go to find a shipwreck in the middle of ocean at depths of 3000m to 4000m.
"There is no way you can write this out, in a narrative, and get it correct unless you actually plotted it first. I just don't think that Detmers made all of this up to the point that he actually made a false plot first and then made the narrative to fit the plot."
This week, Mearns was proved correct.
He said their research brought them back to the same spot - Kormoran. Find the Kormoran, they argue, and Sydney will be found.
"The search for the wreck of Sydney can only be conducted after the wreck of Kormoran is found," the search website states.
"The simple reason for this is that the navigational coordinates recorded by Kormoran’s captain, Theodor Detmers, and other physical clues such as the location of floating debris recovered by Australian ships days after the sinking, are all referenced to the position of Kormoran and not Sydney.
"While there is reasonable information about where Sydney may have sunk and thus where to begin the search for her wreck, this information is relative to the final position of Kormoran and thus dictates that the wreck of Kormoran is found first.
"Once Kormoran is found, the search for Sydney can begin in earnest."
That search has begun.
Mr Mearns' team does not plan to disturb the Sydney or Kormoran wrecks. Once HMAS Sydney is found, he plans to lower a memorial plaque containing the names of the 645 dead sailors. The Federal Government plans to announce the find.
A wreck that is declared an historic shipwreck is granted legal protection. This means the wreck, any human remains and relics are protected from damage, disturbance or removal. To further protect the site, the Historic Shipwreck Act allows the minister to declare a protected zone of up to 200 hectares around the wreck site.
It then becomes an offence to engage in any underwater activity within the protected zone. The penalty for breaching the Act is a fine of up to $10,000 or imprisonment for a period of up to five years.
The sites will be managed by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts in Canberra under the Historic Shipwreck Act 1976.
The Finding Sydney Foundation said the Royal Australian Navy is the recognised legal owner of the HMAS Sydney wreck: "It is not planned at this stage to remove any artefacts from the wreck of HMAS Sydney II or HSK Kormoran.
"If removal of artefacts is considered, the appropriate approvals would need to be sought from the (Federal Government)."