Interesting...when you said it was the greatest naval disaster Australia had ever experienced, my first thought was that it couldn’t be right, that had to be HMAS Canberra, but...when I looked it up, I was surprised to see the loss of life was relatively light when Canberra went down. (Relatively speaking)
Fascinating article, thanks for the explanation.
Yes - HMAS Canberra was a larger ship with a larger crew, but they had time to abandon ship and USS Patterson and USS Blue were able to take them aboard. That made all the difference in terms of casualties.