The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  These confiscated documents were sent back to Australia for analysis by the naval war historian, and then finally returned to DNI London in late 1947, where they were placed in the box I found in the NHB archives marked Kormoran. Until I rediscovered this box in 2003, its full contents had not seen the light of day and previous researchers were unaware of the critically important information it contained. This included two new sinking positions for Kormoran that had never been revealed before – 26° south, 111° 2Г east; and 26° south, 111° 40’ east – and a four-panel diagram of the battle hand-drawn by Lieutenant Wilhelm Bunjes, the prize officer. Shortly after Sydney was sighted, Bunjes had climbed up into the crow’s-nest to act as lookout and thus had as good an overall view of the battle as anyone. This was exactly the type of primary source information, with a direct bearing on how the battle was fought and its location, that the Australian authorities had been seeking since the 1998 parliamentary inquiry.

  As exciting as these documents were, the trophy amongst them from my point of view was Detmers’ Gefechtsbericht account. It was tucked away inside the NHB box in a manila file folder with his name, incorrectly spelled, on its cover. What we found when comparing it to the master dictionary account and the coded account that was found on him when he briefly escaped from the POW camp in January 1945, was that other than some small differences, the three accounts were basically the same. In fact, from the very first time he committed the details of his fight with Sydney to paper in the pages of the Cassell’s dictionary, right up to the book he published seventeen years later, Detmers’ story of what happened on 19 November 1941 never varied. I felt this spoke volumes for his credibility.

  As I was to learn, not everyone in Australia shared the same belief in the German accounts as Peter, Wes and me. On the all-important issue of position, there was still a raging debate between those who advocated a more southerly location for the wrecks and those, like us, who accepted the German accounts as the truth. This disagreement had derailed the prospect of navy support for a search after the Wreck Location Symposium, and unless a consensus of opinion emerged, the controversy would ensure that there would be no action from the government. I decided it was worth one more go trying to convince Vice Admiral Ritchie that I was on the right track with my analysis into the most probable sinking positions for both Kormoran and Sydney. Fortunately, my strategy of staying in contact with the RAN chief finally paid off. Ritchie’s reply to a lengthy letter I sent him summarizing my research started by congratulating me for my persistence and went on to agree that I had found some interesting information. Most importantly, he indicated a willingness to reconsider the RAN’s position on supporting a search for Sydney, with the caveat that he wanted to see more cooperation between interested parties. He didn’t mention the other party by name, but I knew exactly to whom he was referring.

  As word of my interest in leading a search for the wrecks spread, the number of people contacting me to offer opinions, criticism and the odd tip about where to find new information ballooned. Mainly these were people who had conducted their own research into the battle and wanted to share their thoughts with me. Their attitude was that if someone like me, with runs on the board as a shipwreck hunter, was interested in searching for Sydney, then that could only be a good thing. But there were also a handful of ‘researchers’ who vigorously disagreed with my faith in Captain Detmers and seemed to take great pleasure in telling me that if I planned on searching in the general vicinity of the northern 26°S, 111°E position, then all I should expect to find was barren seabed and no shipwrecks.

  There is no doubt that the issue of Sydney’s loss and whereabouts generated very strong and passionate views from both sides. I heard from people who accepted Detmers’ version of the battle at face value, while others warned me to distrust anything he said, with one person describing him as a ‘trained and professional liar of great skill and cunning’. The question of position was just as polarizing, with the northern and southern location camps lining up to defend their ideas while lambasting the other side for their ignorance or sheer stupidity in not being able to grasp what they believed was the true situation. The debate had trundled on for decades before I got involved, so I was under no illusions that my ideas would be treated any differently. I expected to be scrutinized and criticized, and I was.

  Fortunately, however, I wasn’t alone in being confident about the northern 26°S, 111°E position, and found an ally in a group of volunteers from Western Australia led by Ted Graham. Ted wasn’t a researcher, but he had a background in marine survey, which gave him the requisite technical understanding about how to conduct a deep-water shipwreck search. He also had a gritty determination to mount an Australian-led search for the Sydney and was involved in several non-profit companies formed for the express purpose of doing just that. Although the first two companies collapsed, he soldiered on and finally found a more stable partnership with two other professionals who, like him, had a long-term interest in finding the Sydney. With Dr Don Pridmore (a geophysicist and director of an airborne magnetic survey company) and Dr Kim Kirsner (a cognitive psychologist and naval history buff), he co-founded the HMAS Sydney Search Pty Ltd (HMA3S), whose sole purpose was to find the wreck of Sydney and commemorate its crew.

  Ted was the first person who contacted me after I was interviewed for a popular ABC radio programme hosted by Liam Bartlett on the morning of 16 September 2002. This was typical of him, reaching out to anyone he thought might help realize his dream of finding the Sydney. Having discussed my interview with Kim, who was also listening, he wanted to start a conversation about us possibly joining forces, as they liked how I believed in the careful review of primary source information before deciding where to conduct the search. A few days later, I heard from Kim, who was essentially responsible for providing the research ideas within HMA3S. Although his approach was different from mine, he believed there was ‘clear and compelling evidence that HSK Kormoran lies in the vicinity of 26°S 111°E’. As our mutual belief in the northern position seemed to be good common ground for a possible partnership, I responded to their overtures and started to regularly correspond and share information with HMA3S.

  By late 2004, when I finally bit the bullet and decided to travel to Australia for a series of meetings with other researchers and the RAN, the make-up of volunteer directors at HMA3S had changed quite a bit. Joining Ted and Don, whom I had had a chance to meet during their travels to the UK, was businessman Keith Rowe, project manager Bob King, barrister Ron Birmingham QC, and retired RAN commodore Bob Trotter. The day before I arrived in Australia, Kim Kirsner had resigned over an internal dispute about the ownership of some research he and a colleague (John Dunn) had done on the search area. Kirsner’s absence during my first full meeting with the HMA3S directors had no effect on me, but it did point to underlying tensions within the group. From my perspective I was simply pleased to be meeting them, as our most recent correspondence hadn’t been smooth and I was getting the distinct impression they viewed me more as a competitor than a potential partner.

  I was sensitive to the fact that many people saw me as an outsider – I was even labelled a Pom despite being born in New Jersey – who hadn’t put in the years of effort they had. But I had made a real contribution with the discovery of the box of missing Kormoran documents and tracking down Detmers’ dictionary, so I wasn’t about to be fazed by mindless personal attacks. I also knew that I was the only one with the bona fides the navy and the government would require of someone leading a search costing millions of taxpayer dollars. Indeed, although I didn’t know it at the time, Vice Admiral Ritchie had already met with HMA3S and basically told them that he’d support a search provided they appointed me as the search director.

  Looking back now, it is easy to see the dilemma Ritchie faced. On one hand, his predecessor Shackleton had put paid to a search because of the Wreck Location Symposium, which aimed for a consensus but proved to be completely counterproductive. However, that didn’t en
d the public interest in finding Sydney, which if anything just got stronger. The chasm between those advocating differing positions for the wrecks wasn’t narrowing. In fact the voices were just getting louder, making it even harder for Ritchie to act. What he needed, and what he got with HMA3S and myself, was two credible groups agreeing about where to search for the wrecks. I imagine he probably saw this as a prerequisite before taking the bold step of reversing Shackleton’s decision and throwing his support behind a search, which in turn was the key to unlocking government funds. At the same time, he needed a shipwreck hunter he knew could deliver, and that was me.

  Ritchie did eventually reverse the RAN’s position, which as expected was the signal the government needed to back the search for Sydney. Prime Minister John Howard used the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II (14 August 2005) to announce that $1.3 million in federal funds was being granted to HMA3S to bankroll the search. In his statement, Howard pointed to my partnership with HMA3S and my experience in finding the wreck of HMS Hood as key reasons for the award. Shortly afterwards, the Western Australian and New South Wales governments added to the total with their own grants of $500,000 and $250,000 respectively. The $2.05 million raised was an impressive sum of money, and a serious vote of confidence in my partnership with HMA3S, but it still fell short of the total amount I felt was needed to safely search a large area of seabed in depths that might exceed 3,500 metres in a worst-case scenario.

  The worst-case scenario was a point I tried to convey to Ted Graham and Bob King, my main contacts in HMA3S, who didn’t have the experience I had about the margin of safety you needed with such complicated deep-water operations. In addition to all the things that could go wrong during the search – rough sea conditions, equipment failure, breakdown of the search ship and so on – we were about to search for not one, but two wrecks that many people thought could never be found. In my mind this called for extreme caution with our search plans and budgeting. Everyone knew we’d have only one chance with funding, so the biggest mistake would be to go out underfunded and run out of money before both wrecks were found and filmed.

  In the end, it took another two years of political lobbying before HMA3S were able to secure additional funds from the Commonwealth government to bring the total funding available for the search up to $5.3 million. In that time there were more personnel changes in HMA3S, with Ron Birmingham and Bob King resigning and Glenys McDonald joining as the fifth director heading into the search. The loss of Ron and Bob was unfortunate, as I liked both men and they had made important contributions right up to the moment they decided to stand down for personal reasons. Glenys’s joining was an interesting addition, because her very strong belief in the oral testimonies that placed the battle some 200 nautical miles south-east of the 26°S, 111°E position was one of the reasons the Wreck Location Symposium was deemed a failure. To her great credit, however, she kept an open mind about the northern position and agreed that this was the location that should be searched first.

  The new-look HMA3S still relied on the core directors to pull off what would be considered a remarkable feat in anyone’s eyes. Bob Trotter was the main conduit to the navy; Keith Rowe possessed the key political contacts to secure federal and state funding; Don Pridmore provided his substantial business acumen and management skills at critical stages; and Ted drove everything forward in his typically forceful manner. They were all volunteers with busy lives, but committed themselves to finding Sydney so that every living relative of the 645 men who died in her would know where their bodies rested. I too had volunteered my time since 2002, but in late 2007 my role changed and I was contracted to HMA3S as the offshore search director responsible for the operation. Ted had asked me a couple of times to join as a director, but I believed our partnership would have greater credibility in the eyes of the government if I remained independent, and this judgement ultimately proved correct.

  The final player of note was someone who worked quietly behind the scenes within the navy, but who turned out to be absolutely instrumental in guiding the new Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Russ Shalders, and the Minister for Veteran Affairs, Bruce Billson MP, in their push for the navy to recover the administrative lead after it had languished with another government department for two years. John Perryman was the senior naval historical officer at the Navy’s Sea Power Centre, and in this role he was the one tasked to deal with any letters that arrived arguing for more action or claiming some special knowledge about the location of the wrecks. He therefore had a grasp of all the historical information and issues connected with the search, making him the best-informed person in the government. In the end, it was Billson who convinced Prime Minister Howard to approve the additional funding and transfer the administrative lead, but without John providing him with the ammunition for his submission, Billson’s request wouldn’t have packed the persuasive punch that it did.

  I was pleased to hear from Ted, who rang me, on my birthday no less, with the fantastic news that the government was increasing its funding for the search, but an hour later I received another call that had the potential to destroy everything we had worked so hard to achieve. This second call was from Peter Meakin, the director of news at Channel Seven in Sydney and one of Australia’s most experienced news journalists. I had met Peter before and stayed in touch, and immediately thought that the government’s good news had leaked out and he was calling for a comment. Instead, he had unbelievable news that could only be described as bad: that a group of amateur divers were claiming to have found Sydney, and had underwater video of the wreck to prove their claim!

  The discovery hit the front page of the West Australian newspaper the following day, with the banner headline: ‘FOUND. Local amateur historians say they have discovered HMAS Sydney, solving Australia’s greatest military mystery.’ The timing of the news couldn’t have been worse for us, as the prime minister was planning to announce the increase in funding for HMA3S in a press conference the very next day from the deck of the current HMAS Sydney (IV), accompanied by Minister Billson, RAN chief Shalders, Ted and Glenys. Now, with all of Australia fixated on the possibility that Sydney was already found, the government had no choice but to postpone the funding announcement until the purported discovery could be confirmed one way or the other. Until such time, we had to wait patiently, even though I immediately knew from the photographs Peter Meakin sent me of the wreck that it wasn’t the Sydney.

  A fortnight later, a navy hydrographie survey vessel, HMAS Leeuwin, confirmed that the wreck wasn’t the Sydney or the Kormoran. It was just a small wreck, 30 metres long compared with Sydney’s overall length of 169 metres, that the locals in Shark Bay believed was a barge sunk there after the war. The whole episode was a fiasco that unnecessarily upset the relatives and caused us to lose valuable time in starting the real search effort. The amateur divers walked away from the experience feeling bruised and chastised, but it was the newspaper that suffered most of the damage for its poor judgement and irresponsibility in running such a questionable story without proper verification. It was a lesson to me about how careful we’d need to be in managing any news generated during our search, which after six long years of trying was now cleared to get under way in earnest.

  The economics of a shipwreck search are pretty simple: money buys time on the water. It follows, therefore, that the more money you have, the more days you can search and the greater your chances of finding what you’re looking for. For that reason, HMA3S’s $5.3 million pool of money was a figure I thought about only in terms of the number of days of search time it would buy, and whether that would be enough to find the Sydney. Excluding all the fixed expenditure, like the company’s overheads and the substantial mobilization costs for the vessel and search equipment, I reckoned that the budget could fund an absolute maximum of forty-five days of in-water search time. The number of days I would get for planning the search would be fewer, however, as HMA3S wanted to reserve some for contingencies. Normally these details are agreed
in advance, but as Ted was unable to give me a clear answer on the number of days I’d be allowed, I based my search plans on having at least thirty, which was two to three times the number I was normally given to find a single World War II shipwreck. As we all knew, this was not a normal search.

  If I were to summarize my strategy for finding Sydney, it would be: ‘plan for the worst, but hope for the best’. As it was imperative the wrecks were found whatever the cost, I wanted to make sure my plan covered every possible location, even the unlikely ones. In the end, I opted for a search box that was thirty-four nautical miles wide by fifty-two long. This was a huge area covering all potential locations derived from the German positions, and also incorporating large margins for error. It was a conservative plan, but one I could afford in view of the time I had at my disposal. This was the ‘planning for the worst’ part of my strategy.

  Hoping for the best meant that within the 1,768 square nautical mile area, I would first search the parts where my analysis indicated the wrecks had most probably sunk. If my analysis was right, Kormoran would be found first, early enough to leave sufficient time to conduct the second search and locate the Sydney. However, if Kormoran wasn’t located where I initially thought, I would move on to the next highest probability area based on the principles of Bayesian search theory. In practice, this meant choosing the sequence of track-lines to search in order of the highest to lowest probability. While I favoured certain parts of the box based on the relative weight I assigned to each of the German positions and the other loss clues, I didn’t go as far as placing an ‘X’ on the chart where I thought Kormoran had sunk, as that would be an arbitrary decision and contrary to the way I conduct such searches.