DAY 68 – Geraldton

Good Morning Geraldton!
 
Low 12°c (54°F) – High 21°c (70°F)
63km
 
Finally some sunshine after the rain clouds cleared and with my ankle feeling much better we decided to take a bit of a drive and look around more of Geraldton which was surprisingly larger than we had anticipated.  There are quite a lot of works going on around the centre of the town but it isn’t clear what the works are for.  Kudos though for the foreshore area right along the length of the main part of town – it is very inviting.  The area is colourful including buildings, interesting architecture and although the streets are quite narrow and not for the most part conforming to a grid pattern, it’s easy to find your way around.
 
It’s hard to miss the statue outside the Geraldton Regional Art Gallery (locally known as GRAG) as the weathered steel really contrasts against the pale walls of the gallery.  Unfortunately it was fenced off with work being done around it to take any decent photos.
 
We drove a bit further south and took in some of the lookouts then headed east and eventually wound our way back to the HMAS Sydney II Memorial on Mount Scott overlooking Geraldton and the bay.  I don’t think either of us were quite ready for the impact this memorial had – what a moving tribute and back story.
 
HMAS Sydney was one of three modified Leander-class light cruisers operated by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), was almost 170 metres (555 feet) in length and had a peacetime complement of 510 men that included six members of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) who maintained and operated her amphibian, catapult launched aircraft. She also carried four civilian canteen staff. When the declaration of war came on 3 September 1939, Sydney had already taken up her war station at Fremantle. There she received a draft of an additional 135 ratings from the Fremantle Division of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve (RANR) and several additional officers to boost her complement to a war footing of 645 men.
 
During the early part of her operational history, Sydney helped enforce sanctions during the Abyssinian crisis, and at the start of World War II was assigned to convoy escort and patrol duties in Australian waters. In May 1940, Sydney joined the British Mediterranean Fleet for an eight-month deployment, during which she sank two Italian warships, participated in multiple shore bombardments, and provided support to the Malta Convoys, while receiving minimal damage and no casualties. On her return to Australia in February 1941, Sydney resumed convoy escort and patrol duties in home waters.
 
On the afternoon of 19 November 1941, Sydney was off the coast of Western Australia, near Carnarvon, and heading south towards Fremantle when they spotted a merchant ship on a northbound course, which quickly turned away from the coast.  Sydney increased speed to intercept and began to signal the unidentified merchantman, first by signal light, then after no reply was forthcoming and the distance between the two ships had decreased, by a combination of light and signal flag.  The merchant ship hoisted her callsign, but the flags were obscured by the funnel.  Sydney sent a request that the merchant ship make her signal letters clear, which the signals officer did by lengthening the halyard (the rope used to hoist the flag) and swinging the flags clear.  The callsign was that of the Dutch ship Straat Malakka, but she was not on Sydney's list of ships meant to be in the area.  Further flag signals were exchanged between the ships, with Sydney asking the Dutch ship's destination and cargo.
 
At 17:00, a distress signal was transmitted by Straat Malakka, indicating that she was being pursued by a merchant raider (armed commerce raiding ships that disguise themselves as non-combatant merchant vessels).  Following this, Sydney pulled alongside the merchant ship approximately 1,300 metres (4,300 ft) away.  Sydney's main guns and port torpedo launcher were trained on the ship, while she sent the interior portion of Straat Malakka's secret callsign.  Fifteen minutes later the merchantman had not replied, and Sydney sent a signal ordering her to show the secret callsign.  Straat Malakka had not replied because she was actually the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran in disguise.
 
A German practice was to arm merchantmen with hidden weapons. An auxiliary cruiser usually approached her target under a false flag with guns concealed, and sometimes with her appearance altered. The victim was thus engaged at point-blank range and had no chance to escape. When asked to reveal a callsign the Germans did not know, Kormoran responded by decamouflaging and opening fire.  Prompted by the unveiling, Sydney also fired, but while her first salvo, (the simultaneous discharge of artillery or firearms including the firing of guns either to hit a target or to perform a salute, which as a tactic in warfare which has the intent to cripple an enemy in one blow and prevent them from fighting back) either missed or passed through Kormoran's upper superstructure with minimal damage, four of the Kormoran's six guns were able to destroy Sydney's bridge and gun director tower, damage the forward turrets, and set the aircraft on fire.
 
Sydney did not fire again until after the raider's sixth salvo and was able to put multiple shells into Kormoran, damaging machinery spaces and one of the raider's guns, while igniting an oil tank.  During this, Kormoran maintained heavy fire, and around the time of the eighth or ninth German salvo, a torpedo launched at the start of the engagement hit Sydney near the retractable sonar dome, located near the bow, which was the weakest point on the ship's hull, ripping a hole in the side and causing the bow to angle down.  Sydney swung hard to port, and passed behind Kormoran but during the turn, shells from the raider knocked "B" turret off Sydney.
 
By 17:35, Sydney was heading south and losing speed, wreathed in smoke from multiple fires.  Her main armament was disabled (the two aft turrets had jammed on a port facing and could not be swung around), and her secondary guns were out of effective range.  The cruiser continued to be hit by shells from Kormoran's aft guns as the distance between the ships increased.  The Germans reported that around 17:45, all four torpedoes from Sydney's starboard launcher had been fired, but as Kormoran was manoeuvring, they all missed. Kormoran's engines broke down after this turn, but she continued to fire on Sydney at a high rate despite many of the shells missing as the distance between the two ships increased.  
 
Observers aboard Kormoran reported that Sydney continued on a south-south-east heading at low speed and although disappearing over the horizon shortly later, the glow from the damaged, burning warship was consistently seen by the Germans until about 22:00, and sporadically until midnight. At some point during the night, Sydney sank: the bow was torn off as she submerged and descended almost vertically, while the rest of the hull glided 500 metres (1,600 ft) forward, hitting the bottom upright and stern first.  Sydney's shells had crippled Kormoran; the German sailors abandoned ship after it was determined that below-deck fires could not be controlled before they reached the gun magazines or the mines in the cargo hold.  The Kormoran was scuttled (deliberately sunk to avoid its capture) at midnight, and sank slowly until the mine deck exploded half an hour later.
 
Sydney's failure to reach Fremantle on 20 November was not initially cause for concern, as several factors might have delayed the cruiser, none of which were sufficient reason to break the order to maintain wireless silence.  However, with no sign of the cruiser by 23 November, shore-based wireless stations began transmitting orders for Sydney to break silence and report in.  A raft of German survivors was recovered by a British tanker on 24 November, at which point a large-scale air and sea search began.  During this search, which lasted until the evening of 29 November 318 survivors from Kormoran's 399 personnel were found, but apart from a carley float (a form of invertible life raft) and a lifebelt, nothing from Sydney or the 645 men aboard was recovered.
 
The then Australian Prime Minister John Curtin officially announced the loss of HMAS Sydney II during the afternoon of 30 November.  Sydney's destruction was a major blow to Australian morale and military capability: her ship's company made up 35 percent of the RAN's wartime casualties.  
 
The German survivors were taken to Fremantle and interrogated where attempts to learn what had happened were hampered by the German officers instructing their sailors to obfuscate the enemy with false answers, people describing events they did not witness but heard of later, and difficulty in keeping groups separated in order to check their stories against each other.  Despite this, Australian authorities were able to piece together the broad details of the battle, which was verified by a group of German sailors who had been taken to Sydney instead: their interviews showed the same commonalities and inconsistencies as those from Fremantle, and the interrogators concluded that the true story was being recounted.  Interrogations were concluded in December, and by the end of January, Kormoran's personnel had been moved to prisoner-of-war camps in Victoria (which was news to me as I didn’t realize there had been any in Victoria), where they remained until their repatriation to Germany in early 1947.
 
On 6 February 1942, a Carley float containing a dead body was spotted just off Christmas Island and towed ashore. Examination of the raft and its occupant led the island's inhabitants to believe that they were from Sydney.  Although a 1949 investigation conducted by the Royal Navy stated the raft was not from HMAS Sydney, and while some historians agreed, others concluded that the raft and the body originated from Sydney.  The body was exhumed in October 2006 and reburied at Geraldton Cemetery in November 2008, after DNA was extracted.  On 19 November 2021 – almost 80 years to the day of the sinking of Sydney - then Australian Minister for Veterans’ Affairs Andrew Gee announced that comparison of the extracted DNA with that of relatives of Sydney personnel had identified the sailor as Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark who had joined Sydney in August 1941, approximately four months before her sinking.
 
Despite the approximate position of Kormoran being known, the required search area for both ships was immense.  Multiple searches were carried out by the RAN between 1974 and 1997 but efforts were restricted to the continental shelf, they distrusted information from the Germans, and were usually in response to civilian claims that they had found Sydney at a certain location and consequently failed to find either ship.
 
American shipwreck hunter David Mearns first learned of the battle in 1996, and began to study it as a prelude to a search for the ships in 2001.  Mearns, with the aid of other researchers, focused on primary sources (rediscovering several archive files and diaries in the process), and came to the conclusion that the German accounts were true, and that the ship would be found at a more northern position. After attracting the interest of the RAN, Mearns entered into a partnership with HMAS Sydney Search, a not-for-profit company set up to administer and help fund an expedition to locate Sydney and Kormoran.  State and Federal government grants totalling just under A$5 million, coupled with private and corporate donations, were used to fund a 45-day search from the end of February to early April 2008.
 
After problems with equipment and weather, the search located Kormoran on 12 March 2008 with Sydney being located 5 days later.  News that the cruiser had been found was announced by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd the following day.  Sydney's wreck was located 2,468 metres (8,097 ft) below sea level, 11.4 nautical miles (21.1 km; 13.1 mi) south-east of the raider.  On discovery, both wrecks were placed under the protection of the Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976, which penalises anyone disturbing a protected shipwreck with a fine of up to A$10,000 or a maximum five years imprisonment.  Both wrecks were placed on the Australian National Heritage List on 14 March 2011. Sydney's defeat is commonly attributed to the proximity of the two ships during the engagement, and Kormoran's advantages of surprise and rapid, accurate fire. However, the cruiser's loss with all hands compared to the survival of most of the Germans has resulted in conspiracy theories alleging that a Japanese submarine was involved, and that the true events of the battle are concealed behind a wide-ranging cover-up, despite the lack of evidence for these allegations.
 
The part of this story that I found fascinating was in the planning for the memorial which commenced in late 1997.  The first, temporary memorial (consisting of a large boulder, a flagpole, and a bronze plaque), was installed prior to 19 November 1998, and was used in a remembrance ceremony that year.  During the playing of the Last Post, a large flock of seagulls flew over the participants and headed out to sea in formation.  This became a major feature of the permanent memorial which included four major elements: a stele of the same size and shape of the ship's prow, a granite wall listing the ship's company, a bronze statue of a woman looking out to sea and waiting in vain for the cruiser to come home, and a dome (dubbed the "dome of souls") onto which 645 stainless steel seagulls were welded.
 
The memorial (minus the stele, which had not been completed in time) was dedicated on 18 November 2001, and was used the next evening for a commemoration ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the ship's loss.  In May 2009, the memorial was recognised by the Australian government as being of national significance.  By 2011, the stele had been completed, and a fifth element—a pool of remembrance containing a map of the region and the marked position of Sydney's wreck—had been added.  RIP Sydney.