The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  My research into the loss of Sydney wasn’t being conducted as an idle pursuit or for the sake of yet another book. For me, it was strictly a means to an end. I wasn’t discouraged by how difficult the challenge might be or by other people declaring that the wreck could never be found. I had set my sights firmly on leading a search for the Sydney, which meant it was also up to me to produce the information to make the chief of the navy sit up and take notice. The RAN chief was key, because without his backing the prospect of getting any Australian government funding for a search was zero. Because the cost of such a complex deep-water search would run into the millions, I personally saw no alternative other than it being a largely government-funded project. The one positive was that a search for the Sydney had already been elevated to the highest levels, and the 1998 parliamentary inquiry had recommended that the government provide up to $2 million in matched funds.

  At the time, I had no knowledge of how the Australian navy worked or whether I could get the attention of the RAN chief, but I decided to write to him in early September 2002 about my interest in Sydney. A couple of weeks earlier I had given an interview to a journalist from The Australian and told him that contrary to all the pessimistic pronouncements, I believed the wrecks could be found as long as the right technology was used and the search was conducted where the Germans said the battle had taken place. As my name was now publicly linked with a search for Sydney, I wanted the navy to hear my thoughts directly rather than reading snippets in newspapers. A changing of the guard had recently taken place, with Vice Admiral Chris Ritchie taking over from David Shackleton as the new chief, which I took as a good omen. I had no issues at all with Shackleton or his decisions regarding Sydney, but I thought a new man might have a fresh outlook and not feel shackled by the polarizing Wreck Location Symposium.

  I didn’t try to get Ritchie to immediately reverse Shackleton’s decision, but I did make him aware of a couple of technical misconceptions that might have been a factor in his predecessor’s thinking. The first was that a search area had to be no larger than 500 square kilometres in order for it to be technically feasible or viable for a search to be made. This was a throwback to the size of Bob Ballard’s searches for Titanic in 1985 and Bismarck in 1989, which somehow became thought of in Australia as the standard. Using my search for HMS Hood as an example, and also to establish my bona fides, I explained to Ritchie how we were prepared to search an area of 2,200 square kilometres, which would take us only eight days to cover with the superior technology that was now available compared to the forty-five days it took to locate Titanic.

  The second misconception was that there was a credibility problem with the information from German sources as to where the battle had taken place. I agreed that there was indeed a problem, but in my view it was with the people who were analysing the information rather than the information itself. Most people who discounted the German positions did so on the basis of their own personal, and unsubstantiated, opinion that Detmers and his crew were purposely lying about the location of the battle to hide misdeeds or illegal actions. These same people pointed to a lack of consistency in the reported positions as proof, but I told Ritchie this was not unusual in my experience researching World War II ship losses. In fact, when comparing the actual position of wrecks found on the seabed against where they were reported sunk, I had found that in most cases the most accurate positions were from German sources.

  I was pleased to receive a written reply from Ritchie the following month, even though he didn’t take up my offer to initiate a more extensive search of the German archives. His advice, from official and academic sources in Germany, was that all relevant documents were already in the public domain. I knew this was incorrect because it was well documented that earlier searches had been incomplete and that many sources previously inaccessible were now open, while additional records had been returned from the US and UK. Despite my protestations in a subsequent email, however, Ritchie held firm, refusing to fund any further archival searches as he wasn’t convinced that ‘new information would help to narrow down the search area for the wrecks’.

  I had been knocked back twice by Ritchie, but at least I had opened a direct line of communication with him and he could see that my interest in finding Sydney was a serious one. Ultimately this contact did have the desired effect on his attitude towards a search, but nearly three years would pass before that moment came. As I was beginning to learn, changing opinions in Australia about virtually anything connected with Sydney was an uphill struggle, calling for extreme patience and persistence on my part.

  After my initial research breakthroughs, the next year was spent making the type of slow, steady, undramatic progress that is more typical of the work that needs to be done before an at-sea search can be mounted. At my suggestion, Wes, Peter and I had been working together as a team since late 2002 to try and answer a number of questions I believed were important in pinpointing the probable location of the battle. If we could nail down where the two ships fought each other, we would have a good chance of finding Kormoran’s wreck, because the ship wouldn’t have drifted very far after being disabled by Sydney. And once Kormoran was found, we’d then have a fair chance of finding the Sydney, since her last sighting had been from the position of Kormoran. So that was my strategy in a nutshell: find the wreck of Kormoran first, and then use it as a pointer to find the Sydney.

  From my perspective as a shipwreck hunter, this was a logical and straightforward plan, but I knew it was also very risky and would be difficult to sell to potential sponsors and to the relatives, who understandably wanted the focus of any search to be on Sydney alone. Finding one lost deep-water shipwreck is hard enough, but for this project to be judged a success, two would have to be found in a single expedition, because we all knew we’d only get one shot at a funded search. I could easily imagine the distress and anger that would follow in Australia if we found Kormoran but not Sydney, especially if public funds were used. However you tried to dress up finding Kormoran as a good thing, it would never be appreciated unless Sydney was also located.

  In any search, whether it is deep or shallow, you need to have a starting point. Generally that is a geographic position in latitude and longitude coordinates or some other navigational information of reasonable accuracy and precision upon which the parameters of a search box can be based. As no survivors from Sydney lived to tell their side of the story, the only information that made it into the historical record was provided by the German crew from Kormoran. The first and most important question in my mind, therefore, was whether the Germans in general, and Detmers in particular, had been truthful in their accounts. If Detmers had lied, as a fair number of Australians believed, the wrecks would probably never be found. In fact no one – and certainly not the navy, given their original negative stance – would even contemplate backing a search if they believed that the only survivors of the battle were lying about where it had happened.

  With so many Germans ultimately making it to safety in lifeboats and rafts after abandoning Kormoran (316 out of a total 395 on board survived), the number of positions they gave when interrogated by their Australian captors was plentiful. By far the most common position was 26°S, 111°E, which was roughly 120 nautical miles SSW of Shark Bay, where Detmers had intended to lay the 340 mines he had on board before running into Sydney. It was obviously a shorthand position, truncated or rounded to the nearest degree of latitude and longitude, but this didn’t surprise me, as I had seen the same thing countless times before in records from both world wars. Whether it was abbreviated because the person had forgotten or didn’t know the full position in the first place, or had decided for whatever reason against giving any more details when questioned, it didn’t change the reality that 26°S, 111°E was a very rough approximation that rendered it unreliable as the basis of mounting a search.

  Although 26°S, 111°E wasn’t a strong enough clue by itself to justify a search for the wrecks, it did demonstrate to me and other
s that the German accounts were valid. The number of Kormoran survivors who gave this position was simply too large for it to have been a fabrication or a conspiracy to hide something from the Australian interrogation teams. It also came from some of the ship’s more senior crew: officers or people in a position to know the movements of Kormoran, like Hans Meyer, the navigating officer; Wilhelm Bunjes, the prize officer; and the wireless operators Hans Linke and Ernst Pachmann. For me, the clincher was that the men who gave these positions had been spread throughout the ocean on seven lifeboats and rafts, with precious little time together beforehand if they were supposed to be concocting a fictitious story.

  Having left all their logbooks and charts on board to be destroyed when Kormoran blew up and sank, Detmers decided very early on during his incarceration as a POW in Australia to secretly re-create a logbook-type report of his ship’s action against Sydney. This was a confidential account known only to him and was proof of his utter determination to inform the Kriegsmarine about the action and the loss of his ship. Detmers might have been stuck in POW camps from his capture until early 1947, but that didn’t stop him from fulfilling his professional duty as a raider captain. He was also understandably proud of his famous victory against a superior warship and obviously wanted it recorded for posterity. Using a standard Cassell & Co. German-to-English dictionary purchased with the regular pay that officers received, he ingeniously recorded his first and thus master account of the battle by a series of barely visible pencil dots placed under individual letters. The two accounts spelled out by the letters – one for Kormoran’s bridge and the other for the engine room — were fortunately in plain German and not encoded, as Wes Olson had initially thought.

  Detmers’ dictionary was the stuff of World War II movies like The Great Escape, which I had seen many times as a kid, so to hold such a remarkable piece of history when I relocated it with Hans-Günther Jantzen in Hamburg was truly thrilling. The dots were so small and faint, it was easy to see how Detmers had kept it hidden for all those years, even though he was regularly searched. The only way I could make out some of the indentations was by holding the page at just the right angle in daylight. The dictionary spoke volumes about Detmers’ time as a prisoner. I imagined how in the privacy of his bedroom he might have silently read the account, perhaps by candlelight, and relived his fight against the Sydney. Was this one of the ways he stayed mentally strong as the years, and the war, passed him by?

  When we got home with magnified copies of the dictionary, Peter Hore took on the job of turning the dots into letters – we called this ‘dedotting’ – and then translating the plain German into English. Detmers had a system for dotting the letters, which Barbara Winter had first worked out, making Peter’s job a bit easier, although no part of the job could really be called easy. The account contained numerous substitutions, abbreviations and misspellings, and no punctuation or spacing to indicate when one word ended and the next began. The damned dots drove Peter mad and nearly ruined his eyesight, but by the first week in July he had a draft of the dictionary account in both German and English ready for me to read.

  The first thing that impressed me about the account was the amount of detail it contained. It was in the format of a standard Kriegstagebuch but contained a lot more information than I typically saw in other such war diaries. The entry for 8 November noted the completion of the change of disguise into the Dutch merchant ship Straat Malakka, and Detmers’ intention to survey the coast off Shark Bay. The remainder of the account dealt with the deadly actions of 19 November and was essentially a blow-by-blow description of the raider’s surprise attack against Sydney recorded in five- to 10-minute intervals. The key entry occurs at 17.30 ‘G’ zone time (GMT minus seven hours). Having been unable to provide the secret signal requested by Sydney to verify their identity as the Straat Malakka, Detmers gave a general order that was chilling in its simplicity and lethal intent: ‘Entarnen! Feuer Frei!’ (‘Decamouflage! Fire free!’)

  1730 – Order, off disguise. Battle flag flies clear at the mainmast. Time taken to reveal identity 6 sec. Enemy drops astern. Two torpedoes on inclination 90, enemy speed 14, at the same time alter to 260 [degrees]. Single shot from No. 1 gun short, adjust range 1,300 metres. 2nd salvo [guns] 3, 4 and 5 up 400 metres, fire about 4 sec later gave hits on bridge and gun direction tower. Immediately after full salvo [from] the enemy falls wide no hits. Then at 5 sec salvo intervals about 8 salvoes fired. Hits amidships on bridge and aircraft and with bearing correction left between forward turrets. A/A guns and starboard 3.7 [cm gun] fire on [torpedo] tubes, A/A guns and bridge. Up to our 5th salvo no reply, then No. 3 turret [Sydney’s X turret] good and quick. No. 4 turret [Sydney’s Y turret] shoots only 2 to 3 salvoes all wide. A and B turrets shoot no more. About our 8th to 10th salvo torpedo hits at front of A turret, 2nd torpedo just misses the bow. Enemy turns towards. B turret roof flies overboard.

  Although the lopsided battle continued for another fifty minutes, with Sydney taking all the subsequent hits, in that opening five-minute exchange both ships had already suffered the fatal damage that would ultimately lead to their loss. At 18.25, with Sydney beyond Kormoran’s gun range at 10,400 metres, Detmers ceased fire and began to take stock of his own situation. The decision to scuttle Kormoran was quickly taken and the next six hours were spent by the crew getting the lifeboats and rafts into the water and abandoning ship. The last Detmers saw of Sydney was at about 22.00 hours, when the glow from the fires that had engulfed the stricken cruiser could no longer be seen. At thirty-five minutes past midnight, the fires set off in Kormoran by the scuttling charges finally reached the aft cargo holds, where all the mines were stored, causing the ship to blow up and rapidly sink by the stern.

  Detmers’ account of the action made for fascinating reading, and in time would be verified by the damage we observed in both the wrecks, but for my purposes the most important entry was the following couple of lines at the start of the next day, in which he recorded a more precise position than his crew did, at least in terms of the latitude component.

  Wednesday 19.11 – 111 East, 26 34 South, [Wind] SSE 3 to 4, sea [state] 3, medium swell from SW, [visibility] very clear, course 025, [speed] 11 kt.

  I recognized the format of the entry straight away as the string of weather and sea conditions recorded in standard Kriegstagebuch logs at the start of each day. It confirmed my suspicion that Detmers intended the dictionary account to be an ad hoc replacement for the war diary lost in Kormoran. The entry was slightly different however, in that it also included navigation information – namely a latitude/longitude position, course and speed – that isn’t normally recorded at the same time as the daily weather conditions. The conflation of weather and navigation information was slightly confusing, but would only become a problem if I couldn’t figure out the time of the day, or event, the position referred to. Because no time was given for this entry, I had to basically guess the time of day Kormoran was actually in the position 26° 34’ south, 111° east. As the ships were moving at considerable speed when they sighted each other (Kormoran at eleven knots, and Sydney at probably seventeen), an incorrect guess about the time could equate to a large offset of the search box in the wrong direction.

  The most logical time the position would have been taken was 12.00, when all ships in the days of celestial navigation would determine their position by taking a ‘sun-sight’ using a sextant. Wes Olson favoured noon, as did I, as it placed the position of the battle very close to 26° south, 111° east, where the other Germans said it happened. The problem with this assumption however, was that when Detmers’ lifeboat was picked up by the passenger liner Centaur and he was brought in to Carnarvon to be interrogated, he reportedly said that the action had taken place at a different position: 26° 32’ south, 111° east. When this position was relayed to the Navy Board the same day, it was changed ever so slightly to 26° 31’ south, 111° east. The one-minute change in latitude is so small it is almost immaterial, but it demonstrates ho
w errors – in either the transmission or receipt of such information – creep into the historical record and cause confusion. In fact, it appears that both positions were the result of errors, as every single written account created by Detmers himself, starting with the dictionary, recorded this position as 26° 34’ south, 111° east.

  That still left a major question mark over the time of the position. Was 26° 34’ south, 111° east the position of the battle at 17.30 or the noon position of Kormoran? The problem got even more confusing when Detmers published a book account in 1959, which included a line in the Appendix that listed 26° 34’ south, 111° east as the position where Kormoran actually sank, which we know didn’t happen until 00.35 the following day. There were numerous other questions and unknowns that would occupy my mind right up to the day the search began in early March of 2008, but this conundrum over the time of Detmers’ position was by far the most critical, as it would have the biggest impact on the size and placement of the search box for Kormoran. Most of my research and thinking over the next five years was spent trying to come up with other ways to independently corroborate Detmers’ position. However, as 2003 ended, I was sure that the German accounts could be trusted and that the additional precision of Detmers’ position made a search for the wrecks feasible.

  Peter and I staked our belief on the veracity of Detmers following a methodical and painstaking analysis of all the extant versions of his account. In addition to the dictionary account he made soon after arriving at HM Dhurringile Prison outside Melbourne in early 1942, there was his 1959 book The Raider Kormoran and three other accounts directly connected to him. Two of those, surfacing between the years 1943 and 1945, were already known before I found the fifth and final account, which Detmers called the Gefechtsbericht. This was a neatly typed two-page version of his battle report, confiscated from him when he was repatriated back to Germany at the end of the war. The Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) in Australia had had reason to believe that Kormoran survivors had produced a ‘Secret Official Report’ regarding the action and were going to turn it over to whatever authority was still in charge of the Kriegsmarine. Acting on this tip, DNI Admiralty searched the survivors when they landed in Cuxhaven on 21 February 1947 and found relevant papers on nine of the men, including Captain Detmers.