J. E. MacDonnell - 119
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That hole in her funnel... Once in Sydney I was asked to address members of a ship-lovers' society; the subject was Sydney. When it was done a man came up somewhat diffidently and, after mentioning that his son had been lost in Sydney, asked me if I might like to keep "this memento." I looked, and tried not to snatch it from his hand. It was a piece of blackened metal about three inches square with the edges twisted, and mounted on a plaque; and it was part of the metal blown out of Sydney's funnel. I wonder if this fragment, now gracing a shelf in my study, is the only part of H.M.A.S. Sydney still left "alive"?
After another Bardia bombardment with Stuart and Waterhen, and bombarding Scarpanto Island and Port Maltezana in Stampalia, Sydney joined the Battle Fleet in a raid on Otranto Straits. In January, 1941, Collins sailed her home for hard-earned leave.
Before she left the Mediterranean the cruiser had established a reputation for sustained accuracy of gunfire which, added to the plain guts of men in their destroyers on the Tobruk "spud-run," rated Australia's name very high in the Royal Navy.
Captain Joseph Burnett (he had joined the Naval College with Collins as one of the original entry) was appointed to Sydney in command shortly after she reached home. He, too, was a gunnery specialist, and both his sons were to join the Navy before the war ended.
There is no mystery now about Sydney's fate in her action with the German raider Kormoran. From a report (which I have studied) of interviews with German prisoners conducted by Rear-Admiral Crace, then commanding the Australian Squadron, and from knowledge of what shells and torpedoes would do to a ship of Sydney's construction, facts of the action have been established, as near as they can ever be.
The only mystery lies in why her captain laid his ship so close to an unidentified merchantman.
Earlier the same year, and also in the Indian Ocean, New Zealand 6-incher Leander, raider-hunting with cruiser Canberra (I was in the latter ship), slid almost alongside a strange merchantman; only the Italian gunners' bad aiming laid a 4 inch broadside over her masts instead of into her belly. The "merchantman" was the Italian raider Ramb I. Surely one can assume that this near-miss was promulgated throughout the Fleet so that other ships could profit by the lesson?
Canberra certainly did. A few days later we came upon two German raider supply ships; opened fire at about 24,000 yards, closed to 18,000 yards (danger from torpedoes here), and altered out again, remaining clear of effective retaliation until the business was finished.
In view of these experiences, it is hard to understand why Captain Burnett, certainly a seasoned officer, approached a potential enemy at under two miles' range: point blank for guns able to open fire at five times that distance.
At 3 p.m. on November 19th, 1941, Sydney was positioned some 300 miles west of Carnarvon in Western Australia, steering southeast for Fremantle after escorting an Australian troopship to Sunda Straits.
From my time in sister-ship Hobart, we can assume that the following description of her routine is near enough to factual. She would be closed-up at cruising stations, a relatively relaxed state with one turret manned and a 4-inch gun crew standing by to deal with surfaced submarines. This would be a perfectly safe degree of readiness under the circumstances obtaining - visibility good, nothing in sight, nothing dangerous reported in the area.
Men were brooming down the upper-decks, and below on the mess-decks relieving gun crews were at tea; watches would change at four o'clock, when the Navy night begins and work ceases for the day; it had started at 6 a.m.
The bridge was a scene of quiet and watchful efficiency. Leaning one elbow on the binnacle, cap tilted to shade his eyes from the coppery glare of the sea, the officer of the watch continuously and instinctively covered the sweep of horizon ahead, his eyes returning frequently to where the compass needle clicked back and across the course.
A signalman fiddled with a shutter spring on his 10-inch signalling lamp, telescope handy on a lookout seat beside him. Head and shoulders inside the chart table near the bridge ladder, the navigating officer was preparing his work-book for the four o'clock sun-sight.
B-turret below the bridge suddenly jerked off its bearing, gathered speed and swung smoothly through its training limits, then shrugged back into the fore-and-aft position, tested for the first dog-watchmen.
Still high, the quartering sun's rays fell steeply out of a cobalt sky, and the sea itself, inkily blue, drew all about them the unbroken wheel of the horizon.
Then, just on four o'clock, rang the urgent - eager but not alarmed cry from the masthead lookout: "Bridge! Bearing right ahead. Ship!" The bridge buzzed, and presently up came the captain. It was soon apparent that the ship far ahead was turning to run.
Her masts opened, and shortly she was heading directly into the sun; though as the cruiser was well up-sun from her, the advantage of this manoeuvre was dubious. Or was the move deliberate, to indicate panic and thus lack of retaliatory effectiveness? Quite possibly, seeing that Captain Theodor Dettmers was a battle-wise and cunning as they come.
It is assumed that at this time there was no suspicion in bridge officer's minds that the running ship was enemy. Natural inclination and sound tactics would impel running from a warship, and when Sydney's W/T office intercepted a garbled radio distress signal in the name of a Dutch ship, Straat Malakka, claiming that she was being chased, they must have felt justified in classing her as a panicky non-combatant.
But aboard the "merchantman" there was no panic there was a plentitude of bravery and determination, for unhesitatingly she was preparing to fight - to take on a fully-commmissioned and experienced 6-inch cruiser, a warship fitted with the most modern fire-control equipment then in existence; a vastly superior fighting ship.
Captain Dettmers issued his orders. A deliberately jumbled hoist of flags in answer to the cruiser's peremptory challenge jerked up Kormoran's halliards, the Dutch ensign flew at her gaff - and along her decks hatches slid back above the smoothly rising snouts and breeches of five 5.9-inch guns. These brought her nowhere close to parity with Sydney's eight 6-inchers. In fact the cruiser, with her director, her transmitting station with its fire-control table, and her turrets with their hydraulic loading arrangements, not to mention her much greater speed and manoeuvrability, had a tremendous edge on her opponent - in a straight fight.
Dettmers meant to do his best to make the fight anything but straight.
Lifts brought his guns up, but stopped them just below deck level, invisible. Carefully behind the shelter of steel bulwarks the German sailors hurriedly stacked armour-piercing shells, and between their hidden torpedo tubes amidships the tube trainers, hands on their training handles, waited the order to swing outboard.
And to Dettmers' taut-minded satisfaction, the cruiser came closer.
From a range-finder hidden in the raider's bridge structure closing ranges were passed and set on the guns - 6,000, 5,000, then an incredible 4,000 yards.
Sydney's forward turret was alerted, but in accordance with policy on approaching a friendly merchantment it remained fore-and-aft; that is, bearing straight ahead instead of on Kormoran. Only the main gunnery-control tower above the bridge bore on the "Dutchman." According to Kormoran's survivors the range was well under 4,000 yards when, without warning, flaps along her side clanged down and five black barrels swung on to Sydney's bridge, the ship's brain.
They couldn't miss. The opening broadside tore into the bridge, killing or wounding most of its officers - and these were the executive ones. A moment later a torpedo leapt hissing out of its tube and splashed into the sea. Before Sydney's manned turret could swing the track of smooth water reached her. A wall of flames and water towered above her bow.
The explosion blew both A and B-turrets out of action, wrecking training machinery and jolting the heavy gun-houses off their bearing racks.
Men rushed along her decks to their action stations under a close-range blast of rapid broadsides from every gun the raider carried. The transmitting station beneath Sydney's bridge,
the controlling nerve-centre of all guns, was wrecked. Without waiting for orders, the after turrets shifted to local control and swung at full power on to the enemy's bearing, with men scrambling inside the gun-houses as they swung.
It takes seconds for a well-drilled crew to ram shell and cordite into a 6-inch gun and as X-turret's snouts laid on the raider they let go.
Kormoran's steel sides, heavier than her enemy's though they were, at that range offered paper protection against armour-piercing shells. Both projectiles punched through and, their fuses started, exploded in her engine-room. Six seconds later another salvo burst in a fierce heat that fired her fuel tanks instantly. The officer of X-turret earned his pay that day.
It was a macabre scene. Through the writhing pall of black smoke pouring from every hatch and crack above her burning tanks the raider's guns still cracked in brief stabs of red flame. Her gunners worked their weapons furiously to clinch the supreme advantage surprise had given them.
Sydney also was on fire, possibly from ready-use ammunition on her 4-inch gun deck. The plane on its catapult burned to a skeleton of ribs and rivets. Under somebody's orders - were they Burnett's? she dragged her broken bow round and fired four torpedoes at the raider. All missed. Kormoran replied with a single tube that also missed.
Though her enemy was crippled, Sydney herself was cruelly hurt. That close-range battering had been vehemently forceful. Within half an hour it seemed that both ships were incapable of damaging each other further. Almost stopped, and burning fiercely, they drifted apart, Sydney to the south-east, towards Australia.
German survivors allege the cruiser tried to ram. It is believed, however, that this approach was an involuntary manoeuvre produced by a break-down in steering.
It would be almost impossible to steer her. This probably accounts for Sydney's discontinuing the fight, as she could not be turned to keep her remaining turrets in action. The torpedo was a shrewd blow. Hamstrung by the drag of her bow, trailing, hundreds of fathoms of cable which, still secured to her foc's'le cable-holders, could have dropped from the shattered bottoms of cable-lockers, the crippled cruiser drifted into the night; victim of the same sort of damage she had inflicted on Barolomeo Colleoni.
Kormoran's company abandoned ship, and from the lifeboats watched their enemy, still blazing, drift out of sight.
The raider blew up at midnight. It is practically certain thatSydney ended likewise. Carrying hundreds of tons of high explosives and inflammables - cordite, shells, torpedo war-heads, depth charges and fuel oil - fire reaching any of these magazines would initiate a chain of eruptions that could shatter her hull to pieces; as Hood had gone, and Barham.
Somewhere in the night Sydney and her men went down.
While natural inclination leans towards our own ship, which, while under the disadvantage of being obviously and at once a known enemy to her foe, still fought her remaining guns with the initiative and skill to be expected of such a ship, one must in fairness pay tribute to the quite exceptional fight put up by the raider.
An armed merchantman had never before sunk a major warship; and in accepting the challenge of a cruiser's eight 6-inch guns with all their associated equipment, Captain Dettmers accepted terrific odds. That he did so much is proof of that German skill in gunnery and seamanship which units of the Royal Navy that have met it are freely ready to acknowledge. And of course there was the other detail of common guts.
Kormoran, sometimes called Steiermark, sank nine Allied ships before meeting Sydney. German raiders had no offical names, only numbers, which were periodically changed. Kormoran's was 41 when sunk. Her existence, though not location, was known; immunity being mainly due to attacks well spread over time and distance, and the fact that, apart from a garbled appeal from the Greek ship Embricos, sunk south of Ceylon in October, 1941, no victim succeeded in signalling for help.
Three hundred Kormoran survivors came ashore on the West Australian coast, and twenty-four were picked up from boats by the Aquitania. These had become separated from the main body during the night following the action.
For nearly a month air and surface craft scoured the area in the most intensive search for Sydney's survivors. All they found was an unoccupied, splinter-torn carley raft, and two empty boats.
Perhaps to the victor remains the last word. As late as September last year, writing from his home in Germany, Captain Dettmers said:
"The (Australian) crew fought in an honourable and seamanlike fashion, but in war you need luck, and luck was not with the Sydney.
The End