Posted on 03/24/2008 3:02:06 PM PDT by naturalman1975
IT has all the makings of a Boy's Own blockbuster: a mass breakout by German POWs from a rural Victorian internment camp; a mysterious dictionary revealing dotted codes of vital military importance; and a body washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island.
These events - three of many surrounding the evolving, extraordinary story of HMAS Sydney - continue to fascinate historians, who are now tantalisingly close to solving a military riddle that has haunted the nation for more than 66 years.
In the next few days, shipwreck hunter David Mearns and his crew aboard the SV Geosounder will sink high-resolution photographic equipment and get the first proper images of Sydney in six decades to the world.
They have found the light cruiser in 2400m of water 112 nautical miles off the West Australian coast. But it will probably be up to others to examine what are expected to be spectacular images of the hull and speculate how and why the ship went down as it did, with no survivors of the 645 crew.
But the historic discovery may not have eventuated if a small German-English dictionary had not been found when Theodor Detmers, the commander of the German raider Kormoran, was arrested in Shepparton, Victoria, after one of the most daring and little-known wartime escapes on Australian soil. Detmers was one of 315 survivors from the Kormoran, the first batch of 26 being picked up more than three days after the November 19 battle with the Sydney. Over the next four days, the remaining German survivors were recovered in six separate groups. Some were rescued by passing tankers and warships, while two boats carrying 103 sailors made it to shore, north and south of Carnarvon, 814km north of Perth.
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
Very cool stuff - thank you for posting this!!!
I second that. Thanks for posting.
Can’t wait to see the pictures.
This is undoubtedly going to reignite furious debate.
Ariel searches were undertaken but nothing was found. The fact that not a single lifeboat seemed to have got off, while most of the Germans were rescued over four days and even two boatloads made it to shore on their own, points to a massive magazine cookoff that killed the entire crew in one fell swoop.
The aussies paid terribly in blood during the first half of the twentieth-century in Britain’s wars of empire.
The WWI butcher’s bill alone goes a long way in explaining why they never became a superpower.
> ... points to a massive magazine cookoff that killed
> the entire crew in one fell swoop.
Could be; only 3 survived a similar event on Hood.
But another tidbit from the linked report:
“Not long afterwards, a man diving in the crystal-clear
waters off the Gascoyne coast discovered a clump of
unusual coral. He chipped away and underneath was a
German handgun, probably tossed overboard by
survivors of the Kormoran as they came to shore.”
Now why would anyone toss the weapon?
Perhaps because they were expecting immediate capture
by overwhelming force?
Or because the weapon had been recently fired, and
that fact would have been obvious.
Wiki reports that one body from Sydney was recovered,
with what may have been a 9mm head wound.
_________
As I remarked in the earlier thread,
9mm is not a round commonly used in
long-range naval engagements.
Link to the other thread:
Wreck of HMAS Sydney found
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1986730/posts
Excellent reading. The comments in this thread are excellent too. I hope National Geographic does a documentary on this soon. Has the Indianapolis been found and explored?
Thanks for an exciting read.
Thank you for the ping to this thread from the earlier thread.
I hope that the film is found that the German buried in the cave onshore. The German pistol found might be a marker to indicate the section of the coast to locate the cave. It sounds like a cursory search was made in 1942. Perhaps the film was in small metal containers for 35 mm film that a metal detector could now find.
How amazing it would be for someone to locate that film—the images would help to fill in one of the war’s biggest mysteries.
Ah, but they didn’t have today’s democraps aiding and abetting the enemy for political empowerment of the democrap party.
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