HMAS Sydney – Lest we forget


TRAGEDY struck Australia on this day in 1941 when HMAS Sydney and its 645 crew, returning to Fremantle from escort duties in Sunda Strait, crossed paths with German raider HSK Kormoran.
After a fiery encounter off Carnarvon, both warships (Kormoran disguised as a Dutch trader) disappeared for nearly 70 years until their discovery in 2008. Most of the German crew survived and reached the coast in lifeboats.
The WW2 battle commemorated every year by family and friends claimed the lives of everyone on Sydney, of whom nearly 100 sailors grew up in the port city before they enlisted and embarked for war.
This author has for many years ‘covered’ the HMAS Sydney story, interviewed families and friends of lost sailors and in 2008, while teaching journalism at Curtin University, completed an honours degree at Murdoch University covering the challenges and ethical dilemmas journalists face when reporting discoveries of shipwrecks and their human cultural remains.
Coverage of the 2008 discovery of Sydney and Kormoran approximately 207km from the coast west of Steep Point at a depth of nearly 2.5km is available at https://bitly.ws/32F69.
StreetWise also revisited the historic event in 2021 and the deep impact the tragedy had on Fremantle at www.streetwisemedia.com.au/freos-war-at-home.
In early December, when Prime Minister John Curtin announced the loss of HMAS Sydney, residents called on the government to draw up evacuation plans for the port crowded with Allied ships, subs and refugees.
Blackouts, school closures, storefronts painted black, sandbagged or boarded, anti-submarine and anti-torpedo nets installed across the harbour entrance.
Families evacuated to regional areas or sent children there until the threat had subsided and schools in Fremantle were closed and students from Princess May and Fremantle Boys School sent to schools in neighbouring Bicton and Palmyra. By early 1942, Fremantle had become a ‘Fortress’.
Two 9.2-inch guns on Rottnest and Garden islands extended the reach of the coastal defence network more than 28km out to sea to deter long range ships firing on the city.
The sinking of HMAS Sydney off the Gascoyne coast on its way back to Fremantle drove home the reality of war at the doorstep, the loss of 35 per cent of Australia’s naval personnel at the hands of Kormoran having left Australians demoralised, and vulnerable.
Kormoran’s crew reached the coast in cramped lifeboats and taken into custody in Carnarvon and transported to Perth and Fremantle for interrogation and internment in WA and the eastern states.
Curtin announced the loss on November 30 as the rest of Kormoran’s crew arrived in Fremantle on Centaur with 162 POWs and Yandra, with 72. A reported total of 318 Kormoran crew including three Chinese laundrymen, taken from Eurylochus sunk by Kormoran 10 months earlier, were recovered.
Many of the German survivors were questioned as soon as they landed in Carnarvon and later in Perth at Swanbourne Barracks, Fremantle Detention Barracks and No.11 Internment Camp in Harvey where many Italians suspected of fascist activities also were imprisoned during WW2.
Archival records show the Customs Officer sent an urgent telegram to authorities after Kormoran survivors arrived on the Gascoyne coast, stating: “German prisoners of war held Carnarvon no prohibited or dutiable goods stop Naval Officer has interviewed them today stop Is any customs action necessary advise urgently prisoners have a dog and one monkey quarantine officer suggests destruction stop. What forms are necessary stop”. They were put down.
In his telegrams to Churchill and Roosevelt, Curtin continued until as late as March 1943 to single out Fremantle as especially vulnerable to a Japanese naval bombardment or attack by carrier-based planes.
Lest we forget.