HMAS Sydney and Kormoran

On the afternoon of 19 November 1941, in the Indian Ocean some 200 kilometres west of Dirk Hartog Island and Shark Bay, the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney stopped for inspection a ship claiming to be the Dutch freighter Straat Malakka. In reality she was the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, which had been hunting Allied shipping for eleven months. When the cruiser closed to little more than a kilometre, the raider dropped her disguise and opened fire. Half an hour of fighting ended in the destruction of both ships. Kormoran had to be abandoned and scuttled, and most of her crew reached the shore or were picked up. Sydney, ablaze, steamed off into the darkness and sank during the night. Not one of her crew survived.

A figure of 648 dead aboard Sydney is often given. According to the Australian War Memorial and both later government inquiries, her complement at the time of the action was 645: 41 officers, 594 ratings, six members of the RAAF who serviced the ship’s aircraft, and four civilian canteen staff. It was the greatest single loss in the history of the Royal Australian Navy, and Sydney was the largest Allied warship of the Second World War to be lost with all hands.

The raider Kormoran

Kormoran was the largest and newest of the nine German auxiliary cruisers that the Kriegsmarine sent out onto the oceans in 1940–1941. She had been built at the Germaniawerft yard in Kiel as the motor ship Steiermark for the HAPAG line, intended for the East Asia service. After the outbreak of war she was requisitioned by the navy, designated “Schiff 41” and in 1940 converted into a raider. The British, who for a long time did not know what ship they were dealing with, called her “Raider G”. A vessel of 8,736 GRT with diesel-electric propulsion, she could make about 18 knots. Hidden aboard were six 150 mm guns (old ones, dating from the First World War) behind hinged side plates and hold walls, two 37 mm anti-tank guns and five 20 mm anti-aircraft guns on hydraulic lifts, six torpedo tubes, two Arado Ar 196 seaplanes and several hundred naval mines. These were to be laid by a small motor boat carried in the hold.

Her commander was Korvettenkapitän Theodor Detmers, a 37-year-old officer who had previously commanded the destroyer Hermann Schoemann in the Norwegian campaign – the youngest of the German raider captains. Kormoran sailed from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) on 3 December 1940, slipped unseen through the Denmark Strait in a storm and on 13 December reached the Atlantic. Ships of this kind were one of the instruments of the war on shipping that Grand Admiral Erich Raeder waged alongside the sorties of heavy warships and the U-boat campaign in the Battle of the Atlantic. A raider was to avoid warships, surprise lone merchantmen, jam their calls for help and vanish before any pursuit.

In the Atlantic, between January and April 1941, Kormoran sank seven ships, among them the British tankers British Union and Agnita, the refrigerated ship Afric Star and the freighter Eurylochus, carrying aircraft for West Africa, and sent the Canadian tanker Canadolite to Bordeaux with a prize crew. She also supplied U-boats and met on the high seas with supply ships, with the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer and with other raiders, Pinguin and Atlantis. At the end of April she moved into the Indian Ocean, where prizes were far scarcer: in June she destroyed the Yugoslav Velebit and the Australian Mareeba, and in September the Greek Stamatios G. Embiricos. In all, according to German and British figures, she sank ten ships and captured one, totalling some 68,000 GRT. Twice she abandoned plans to lay mines off the coast of India because British warships appeared nearby.

From July 1941 the raider masqueraded as Straat Malakka, a genuine Dutch freighter. Dutch ships, plying between the Dutch East Indies, Asia and Australia, were a common sight in those waters. In October Kormoran took on supplies at sea from the Kulmerland, which had come from Japan – the Germans were still using Japanese ports, and their supply ships sailed from them to rendezvous with the raiders. Detmers now intended to mine the approaches to Fremantle and Cape Leeuwin, but when his radio monitors picked up the Australian heavy cruiser Canberra in the area, he decided to head further north and reconnoitre the waters off Shark Bay. Promoted in the meantime to Fregattenkapitän, on 19 November he was taking his ship along the coast there at 11 knots.

Sydney on her way home

Sydney was a light cruiser of the modified Leander class, armed with eight 152 mm guns in four turrets, four 102 mm anti-aircraft guns, eight torpedo tubes and a Supermarine Walrus seaplane. She was the most famous ship of the Australian navy: in July 1940 she sank the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni off Cape Spada, and after eight months of fighting in Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet she returned to Australia in February 1941 to a hero’s welcome. She was assigned to Fremantle, from where she escorted convoys and patrolled waters in which German raiders had been operating since 1940. In May 1941 command passed from Captain John Collins to Captain Joseph Burnett, one of the first graduates of the Australian naval college, a gunnery specialist and until recently Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff. It was his first seagoing command.

In November Sydney escorted the troopship Zealandia, carrying soldiers of the Australian 8th Division to Singapore, and on 17 November in the Sunda Strait handed her over to the British cruiser Durban. She then turned back for Fremantle, where she was due to arrive late on the evening of 20 November.

The encounter

According to the German accounts, at 3.55 p.m. ship’s time Kormoran’s lookouts sighted the mast of a warship on the horizon. Detmers sounded action stations and turned west, into the sun, at the highest speed he could make – one of his engines happened to be giving trouble. Sydney sighted the ship at the same moment and set off after her at 25 knots. For more than an hour signals were exchanged. The cruiser called on the ship to make her identification signal. The Germans replied hesitantly, finally hoisting Straat Malakka’s call sign and the Dutch merchant ensign. Asked their destination, they answered: “Batavia”. At about 5 p.m. Detmers had the distress signal sent that a merchant ship threatened by a raider would transmit, using the name Straat Malakka. The message was picked up only in fragments, by a tug and by the coastal station at Geraldton, which attached no importance to it.

Meanwhile Sydney drew closer and took up station parallel to the raider’s starboard side, about 1,300 metres away. Her main guns and torpedo tubes were trained on the ship, and her seaplane was being prepared for launch on the catapult, though in the end it was not flown off. According to Detmers, the anti-aircraft guns were not manned, and some of the crew were standing on deck looking at the ship. Burnett signalled the two inner letters of the secret identification signal allotted by the Allies to the real Straat Malakka – the ship should have replied with the outer letters. The Germans did not know the code and remained silent. At about 5.30 p.m. the cruiser signalled in plain language: “Show your secret sign.”

Half an hour of fighting

Detmers decided that the game was up. He ordered the Dutch flag to be replaced by the Kriegsmarine’s war ensign, the camouflage to be dropped and fire to be opened. Both sides fired almost simultaneously. Sydney’s first salvo, according to most accounts, went over the raider. Kormoran’s first salvo missed, but the following ones struck home: 150 mm shells destroyed the cruiser’s bridge, fire-control position and wireless office, further salvoes knocked out both forward turrets before they could fire a second round, and others hit the ship near the engine rooms and struck the aircraft on the catapult. At such close range the raider’s anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns swept the cruiser’s deck and prevented her anti-aircraft guns from being manned. One of two torpedoes fired at the very start of the action hit Sydney forward of A turret, at the weakest point of the hull. The bow began to go down.

The cruiser could now reply only with her after turrets. Several shells from X turret hit Kormoran in the engine room and a fuel tank, starting a fire that could not be brought under control because the fire-fighting system had been destroyed. Sydney turned hard to port and passed astern of the raider – the Germans thought she meant to ram them – and at about 5.45 p.m. fired torpedoes, which missed. Shortly afterwards Kormoran’s engines stopped. The immobilised raider kept firing at the retreating cruiser until the range had opened to about six kilometres. She fired her last torpedo, which missed, at about 6 p.m. According to the German accounts the action lasted about half an hour, and at its end both ships, roughly ten kilometres apart, were on fire.

Sydney moved slowly away to the south-east, wreathed in smoke and flames. The Germans saw a glow over the horizon until about 10 p.m., some of them until midnight. Then it disappeared. When the wreck was found many years later, it turned out that the cruiser had stayed afloat for several more hours, until the bow, wrecked by the torpedo, broke away. The rest of the ship sank soon afterwards, probably within a few minutes.

Aboard Kormoran the fire was approaching the compartment where the mines were stowed. At 6.25 p.m. Detmers gave the order to abandon ship. Boats and rafts were lowered until 9 p.m. The greatest loss of life came when an overloaded rubber raft carrying several dozen sailors, most of them wounded, capsized. Around midnight the last men left the ship, scuttling charges were fired, and half an hour later the mine compartment blew up and the raider went to the bottom. Of the 399 people aboard – among them four Chinese, seamen from a ship she had sunk, employed in the laundry – 318 survived. More than eighty died (the figures differ by one), including one of the Chinese.

The search

When Sydney failed to arrive at Fremantle, no one was worried for the first few days: ships kept radio silence, and a delay could have many ordinary causes. Only on 23 November did shore stations begin calling on the cruiser to report. On the same day the troopship Aquitania picked up a raft with 26 Germans, but for fear of the raider kept silent until 26 November. On 24 November the British tanker Trocas reported rescuing German sailors from Kormoran, which had fought an action with an unknown warship – in Melbourne it was understood that this meant Sydney. Aircraft from Pearce air base and from Carnarvon, auxiliary vessels from Fremantle and merchant ships in the vicinity were sent to search. Two German boats reached the shore unaided on the vast Quobba sheep station north of Carnarvon. The remaining survivors, Detmers among them, were picked up by 28 November by the ships Koolinda and Centaur and the auxiliary Yandra.

Of Sydney all that was found was a lifebelt and a damaged Carley float. The search was called off on 29 November. On 30 November Prime Minister John Curtin, head of the government since the beginning of October, announced the loss of the ship. The press was allowed to publish the announcement, but radio stations had to wait 48 hours so as not to alert any other German ships in the area.

Why did Sydney come so close?

From the outset it seemed incomprehensible in Australia that a modern cruiser could be defeated by a converted merchant ship. On paper Sydney had the advantage: better guns, greater range and speed, and armour. She threw it away entirely, however, by closing to little more than a kilometre. At such short range the raider’s shells could penetrate her armour, Kormoran’s broadside (four 150 mm guns) was not much weaker than the cruiser’s, and the outcome depended on who first fired accurately. Detmers was ready for this, and his gunners knew what to aim at. Burnett, it seems, still believed he was facing a merchant ship.

Since no one from Sydney survived, Burnett’s motives remain a matter of conjecture. Some historians, among them Wesley Olson, believe that he had become suspicious and wanted to come close in order to examine the details of the ship and perhaps send a boarding party. The Admiralty recommended capturing German supply ships rather than destroying them, as every ship was worth its weight in gold. In March 1941 Canberra, firing from long range at the German supply ship Coburg and the tanker Ketty Brovig, which the Germans had captured, used more than two hundred shells, and both vessels scuttled themselves – Burnett, then on the naval staff, knew the lessons of that engagement. The 2009 inquiry, on the other hand, concluded that the cruiser had followed the procedure for an “innocent” rather than a “suspicious” ship: in the latter case she should have stopped her from a range of a dozen or more kilometres under threat of fire. The report also accepted that Sydney was probably not at full action readiness.

Controversies and theories

The absence of Australian witnesses meant that for decades the only source of knowledge about the action was the German accounts. The officers who interrogated the survivors in 1941 judged them to be essentially true: groups of survivors questioned separately, including those picked up by Aquitania, told the same story. Nevertheless rumours circulated from the very first days, and in 1981 Michael Montgomery’s book Who Sank the Sydney? set off a long controversy. It was claimed that Kormoran had opened fire under a false flag or had lured the cruiser in with a false flag of surrender, that a Japanese submarine had taken part in the action, that Sydney’s survivors had been massacred to conceal Japanese involvement, and that the authorities in Canberra and London had covered up the truth.

None of these claims has been substantiated. The parliamentary committee that examined the affair in 1997–1999 found no evidence for any of them, but its report did not end the dispute. That was settled only by the discovery of the wrecks. The inquiry conducted by Terence Cole in 2008–2009 found that Kormoran had raised her war ensign before the first shot; that there had been no Japanese submarine in the vicinity – the positions of all Japanese submarines at the time are known, and most were preparing for war in Japanese waters; and that the cruiser had sent no signal before, during or after the action. The report held Burnett responsible for placing his ship in a position of danger, though it did not regard this as negligence. The fragments in the Carley float proved to be pieces of German shells, not rifle bullets. According to analyses of the damage to the wreck, most of the crew were probably killed in the action itself and in the fires, and those who survived had little chance: almost all the cruiser’s boats had been destroyed, and lifebelts and Carley floats did not allow anyone to survive for long on the open ocean.

The wrecks and the last sailor

For decades the wrecks were searched for in vain. In 2008 an expedition of the Finding Sydney Foundation, led by the American researcher David Mearns, who trusted the German accounts and calculated where the raider had sunk from the drift of her boats, found the wreck of Kormoran on 12 March, torn in two by the explosion of her mines, at a depth of about 2,560 metres. A few days later Sydney was found, lying at a depth of about 2,470 metres some 21 kilometres south-east of the raider, with her bow torn away. Both discoveries were announced within a few days of each other by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The damage to the cruiser’s wreck matched the descriptions given by the German survivors. Both sites are protected as war graves and national memorials.

In February 1942 the sea washed up on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean a Carley float bearing the body of a sailor in overalls. He was buried in an unmarked grave, for the island was already under threat of Japanese invasion. The grave was found in 2006, and in 2021, thanks to DNA testing, the dead man was identified as a 21-year-old seaman from Sydney, Thomas Welsby Clark – the only member of the crew whose remains have been recovered.

The prisoners

The German survivors were sent to prisoner-of-war camps in the state of Victoria – the ratings to a camp near Murchison, the officers to the Dhurringile estate. Detmers, who had been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in December 1941, escaped through a tunnel with twenty other officers in January 1945 but was recaptured a few days later. Soon afterwards he suffered a stroke. The prisoners returned to Germany only in 1947. In 1959 Detmers published a memoir of Kormoran’s voyage.

Place in the war

The action off Western Australia was the only case in the Second World War of a cruiser being destroyed by a German auxiliary raider. For the Kriegsmarine it was also the swansong of the auxiliary cruisers’ war on the oceans. After the sinking of the Bismarck in May 1941 the British, drawing on decrypted German signals, rounded up most of the supply ships without which the raiders could not operate. On 22 November 1941, three days after Sydney’s fight with Kormoran, the British cruiser Devonshire sank Atlantis, the most successful of the raiders, in the South Atlantic. In 1942 only a few more such ships put to sea.

For Australia the loss was all the heavier a blow for coming at a moment when the war was approaching its shores. In the last weeks of November the world was watching the fighting in the Mediterranean, where the British lost the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and then the battleship Barham, and on 27 November the Australian sloop Parramatta was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk off the coast of Libya. Japan, whose Imperial Conference of 5 November had resolved to go to war if negotiations with Washington failed, struck at Pearl Harbor and Malaya less than three weeks after Sydney’s last action. The cruiser’s crew accounted for more than a third of all the Royal Australian Navy’s sailors killed in this war. In the years that followed, Australia had to face Japan with a navy weakened by the loss of its most famous ship, and the question of how she could have vanished without trace gave the country no peace for almost seventy years.