Remembering Anzacs and not forgetting HMAS Sydney

It has been noted, in the mass media at least, that over recent years there has been a rise in consciousness of our Anzac history among younger people, which has manifested in them visiting Gallipoli, for example, and attending Anzac Day services and marches in increasing numbers.

The term Anzac has been broadened to include all our war heroes, not just those who fought at Anzac Cove, and now refers more to the spirit with which our men have fought in various theatres of war.

But remarkably, and most unfortunately in my view, we do not consider those who fought and died on our own shores in World War II as heroes, as we do so readily and deservedly those who defended other shores.

I refer specifically to the 645 men of HMAS Sydney. They are not acknowledged for their dedication, bravery, and ultimate sacrifice, yet their Anzac spirit, the same spirit with which men have fought elsewhere, has most direct import for this country.

Instead of ignoring them, as we largely have done to date, we ought to validate Sydney’s men for their role in world history, for their sacrifice (and the initial secrecy of it) was pivotal to the allied victory in World War II. Moreover, Sydney’s 645 men were defending Australia, the very land and spiritual home of the Anzacs.

Importantly, this gross oversight of the actions of the crew of HMAS Sydney, and the enormous consequences and meaning of them, was contrived, knowingly and deliberately fabricated, by a triumvirate of men who are well-known figures of that same history - Prime Minister of Australia John Curtin, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill, and President of the United States of America Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Notwithstanding the importance of secrecy regarding HMAS Sydney’s actions and loss at the time, it is significant that the governments of these countries continue to maintain that secrecy to this day for political and economic reasons. In this way, they are responsible for the instigation and maintenance of the false consciousness of the Australian people.

Failure of successive Australian governments to acknowledge the truth about what happened to them and how we sacrificed and dishonoured, and continue to dishonour, Sydney’s 645 men is a national shame. The shameful way this nation has dealt with the loss of the Sydney contrasts sharply with the Anzac spirit of these martyred men, heroes of (arguably) Australia’s most significant post-colonial historical event.

The Sydney left Fremantle on November 11, 1941 escorting the troopship Zealandia to the Sunda Strait. She was expected to return to Fremantle by November 20 at the latest. On the night of November 19-20 1941, the HMAS Sydney sunk off the Western Australian coast, allegedly after being fired on by the German raider HSK Kormoran, with the loss of all on board.

Described as “Australia's worst ever naval disaster”, it has been inadequately investigated by parliamentary commissions and inquiries whose terms of reference were such that the information the public needed from the government was not revealed.

Documents tabled in the Western Australian parliament (in 2002) by Green’s MLC (WA) Jim Scott and Mr John Doohan allege that the Sydney crew may have been murdered by the German survivors of the Kormoran, which was disguised as a merchant vessel, and that a Japanese submarine could also have been involved in her sinking.

Both the alleged murder of the Sydney crew by Kormoran survivors (and its disguise) and the alleged involvement of a Japanese submarine are of historical, international and national significance. If the Kormoran survivors murdered the Sydney crew, then they were in breach of the Geneva Convention, and if the Japanese navy was involved, then they too breached the convention for murder, because the Sydney was sunk prior to Japan’s entry into the war.

Despite the importance and controversy of this event, since 1941 consecutive Australian governments have archived documents relevant to it and have not inquired into the event in such a way that would tell relatives and friends of the Sydney crew where, why, and how they died.

With the passage of over 65 years since the loss of HMAS Sydney and a stable peace between the nations involved, surely anything of national importance that may have initially warranted secrecy has passed. Yet, the Howard Government has archived the records relating to the incident for a further 20 years, depriving thousands of Australians of knowledge of what happened to their loved ones and leaving a gaping and painful hole in their personal and Australian history.

On the international scene at the time, Churchill was desperate to bring the United States into the war and had to draw Japan into it to prevent Japan’s desired domination of world trade.

Churchill’s two desires were to come to fruition in the form of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. However, knowledge of the engagement of HMAS Sydney with HSK Kormoran, and the involvement of Japan, 18 days prior to the planned attack on Pearl Harbour had the potential to prevent it, and alter the course of the war. Hence, the initial need for secrecy: the Allies could not afford to let Japan know that they were decoding their secret messages and knew of the planned attack on Pearl Harbour. If Japan knew that the Allies knew their war strategy, then they would not have carried it out.

If Japan did not take military action against the United States directly, then the USA would not enter the war. Without the help of the USA and Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, history would be entirely different and we would not have the world we have today.

Research by John Doohan of the available historical records shows that UK cryptographers had deciphered Japanese codes revealing their intention to bomb Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. Britain did not want to reveal that it knew the codes, and Churchill wanted the attack on the USA to go ahead so that America would enter the war and save Britain and its empire.

Churchill implored Roosevelt to bring USA into the war but Roosevelt would not involve the USA until he enjoyed the support of USA citizens to do so, which would not be gained until the USA itself was directly affected by the war. Churchill and Roosevelt had to allow Pearl Harbour to be bombed not only for the American peoples’ mandate to join the war, but to justify their use of the atomic bomb, which may not otherwise have been countenanced by the American public.

Hence, when Sydney was sunk, its attackers could not be named or retaliated against for fear Japan would not orchestrate its long-planned attack on Pearl Harbour, and Churchill and Roosevelt’s war plans would not be enacted.

This knowledge explains the initial need for secrecy about the sinking and murder of Sydney’s men, but it does not suffice for the period after the war. Especially, it does not suffice to explain why Australian governments refuse, deny, cover, and lie about it to this day. Their chosen, contrived version of events allows Australian people to deny Sydney’s men their rightful, honourable, memorable place in our history, in our hearts, and in our Anzac tradition and spirit.

Along with others, I thought that public awareness of the Sydney story had been raised nationally and internationally with the recent location and exhumation of a Christmas Island grave said to be the burial site of a HMAS Sydney sailor. There was a bullet in the skull of the exhumed skeleton. At the time, John Doohan, a prolific Sydney researcher, writer, and campaigner said that:

The bullet in the skull aspect of the Christmas Island Carley float passenger (the remains exhumed on Christmas Island) is causing official concern right now. The location of the grave, like other aspects of the Sydney story, has a history that includes official deception of the Australian public, disinformation reproduced by the media, and interferences by ASIO (Australia’s intelligence agency) and Australian Federal Police. Generally, Australian citizen’s have no idea the lengths their governments have gone to to keep the truth secret. We just hope that the recent finding of the grave and the bullet will spur the Australian people, and people worldwide, to demand the truth now.

On October 22, 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the exhumation saying that:

The shock discovery of a bullet in the skull of a sailor from HMAS Sydney has opened fresh claims a Japanese submarine sank the Australian battle cruiser weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

Forensic experts last week found the bullet while examining the sailor's remains. He was washed up on Christmas Island three months after the ship sank in 1941.

Captain Jim Parsons, leader of the naval team that discovered the remains in an unmarked grave on the island, said: “The round appears to be from a low-velocity weapon, possibly a handgun.”

Ballistic experts are trying to confirm the type of gun it came from. It fits descriptions of eight-millimetre bullets used in the Type 14 Nambu, a pistol widely used in the wartime Japanese navy. They are smaller than the nine-millimetre bullets fired by the German Luger and 0.38-inch Australian-issue bullets.

If it was from a Japanese pistol, it would add weight to the theory that a Japanese submarine torpedoed HMAS Sydney during its battle with the German raider Kormoran on November 19, 1941, off the coast from Geraldton, Western Australia (“Bullet in sailor reopens WWII war theory”, Sydney Morning Herald).

More compelling evidence was revealed, much of which also supported John Doohan’s research, and included that:

The shot was fired from behind the head just below the neck as though the man had his head bowed.

It was found lodged in his frontal lobe, according to Bruce Billson, the Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence.

These astounding revelations had profound implications for the government-generated lies about the fate of Sydney’s men: The insertion point and the trajectory of the bullet strongly suggested assassination in the pose seen in other Japanese theatres of war. This information elicited responses from two of Sydney’s dedicated researchers. In the Post, it was reported that:

“This changes everything,” said John Samuels.

“... It is clear that this should now be a murder inquiry conducted in the normal way.

“The investigation should be taken out of the hands of the navy ...

“Many people, including the navy, refused to believe it was possible that the Germans and/or Japanese had shot our men in cold blood.

“In my view, the police should be treating it as a murder investigation, not leaving it to the navy to see it as some historical curiosity.

“There is no statute of limitations on war crimes.” (“Coroner should handle murder probe”, Post Newspapers).

This powerful and important story however, like most involving the circumstances of Sydney’s loss, has been bizarrely obscured by contradictory findings of the forensic experts with whom the remains were entrusted. Despite previous unequivocal statements to the contrary, Australian people, and the world, have now been told that the metal recovered from “Christmas Island Man” was nothing more than shrapnel and hence, its peculiar lodgement insignificant.

No further information has been revealed of him and the history he heralds, and my efforts to get more, particularly the conference proceedings of Sydney University forensic expert Dr Denise Donlon who examined the bones, have come to no avail.

However, that Sydney’s men were fired on with small arms is confirmed in the statements of Heinz Grossman, the Kormoran crewmember who broke with the version told by the other German survivors, and which Australian governments have accepted as the official version of events. Denise Deason told his story in her article in 1997 under the headline, “Fifty Years of Lies”.

In that article, Deason writes that Ivan Wittner, a retired pastor from South Australia, was chaplain to the labourers on the Snowy Mountains Scheme in 1951 when he met Heinz Grossman. Grossman identified himself to Wittner as a gunnery officer on the Kormoran and said he had used his brother’s identity to enter Australia as part of the Snowy workforce.

Grossman told Wittner that the Sydney challenged and fired from about three miles away, hitting, and disabling the Kormoran, then almost immediately two torpedoes struck the Sydney in the full broadside position. Grossman said that these torpedoes were fired by a Japanese submarine lying in wait, in contact with the Kormoran, and from a distance of 2½ miles.

Sydney survivors lowered lifeboats, Grossman said, but they were destroyed by submarine small arms fire. Most importantly, he said that the Kormoran survivors heard gunfire throughout the night, then silence.

It was not until Anzac Day 1997, after hearing a radio program talking about the Sydney’s Captain Joseph Burnett, and how the government believed the German story that Burnett was fooled by the Kormoran’s disguise as a Dutch merchant vessel and caused the loss of both ship and men, that Wittner realised it was time to speak out and make the truth known. Until then, the fabrication of Burnett’s incompetence was used by the government as the excuse for Sydney’s loss, a lie Wittner, like Grossman, was compelled to disclose.

Important and contingent information is contained in the experience of other people who, like Grossman and Wittner, have chosen to break the silence on the truth and the cycle of governmental disinformation. Among them was World War II radio operator Reg Lander, who said in a sworn statement that he was part of a special radio tracking team in Sydney, working with another secret situation at the Pearce Air Base in Western Australia.

Using high-frequency direction-finding equipment, the team intercepted an enemy ship’s transmissions for 10 nights before the Sydney-Kormoran encounter. This information would have been relayed to Captain Burnett, the man his country has so cruelly maligned in his heroic Anzac death.

In an interview with Deason, Mr Lander said:

“We intercepted the raider’s traffic every night and were told that the Sydney was coming down from the north to meet it.

“All of a sudden we heard that the Sydney had been sunk, and we just couldn’t believe it.”

The Sydney’s loss came 18 days before the attack on Pearl Harbour - when Japan officially entered the war. In his interview for Deason’s article, John Doohan said that:

“There was no surprise - our boys knew the Kormoran was in the area and the Sydney was seeking her,” he says. “The Kormoran was out there to intercept the Aquitania, due to sail from Singapore to Fremantle to pick up the balance of the Australian Eighth Division to reinforce Singapore - something the Japanese did not want.

We believe if it came out that there was Japanese involvement in the sinking, it would have alerted Japan to the fact that their codes had been cracked - and this was the reason for the cover-up.

Our government is locked into more than 50 years of deception, and probably doesn’t want to offend Japan, a major trading partner.

Reg Landers and others say the government is just waiting for them to die - then the problem will go away. We say the truth must be told.” (“50 years of lies” Aussie Post.)

John Howard said that Australia’s greatest shame and embarrassment was how we treated Vietnam veterans. I am one of many who believe that Australia’s greatest shame and embarrassment is the cover-up of the loss of Sydney, which has extended from November 19-20, 1941 to this day. Few are the exceptions to the statement that members of all governments since 1945 have actively participated in this mammoth and shameful perversion of the truth. They ought to be embarrassed and ashamed of the way they have treated Sydney’s men, her survivors - the families and friends of her crew - and the Australian people.

Primarily, Australian politicians, past and present, ought to be embarrassed and ashamed of the way they have besmirched the character and spirit of the men of HMAS Sydney, for in so doing they deviously proscribe and taint the Anzac spirit.

Hence, young people, all people, who subscribe to the government’s version of events, which is also the German version of events, against the word and experience of brave Australian people and others who have told, researched, and written about this deeply suspicious so-called “mystery” of events are unwittingly, but by their government’s design, perpetrating and celebrating a lie by excluding Sydney’s men from their place in our and world history, and excluding them from the Anzac tradition, from whence they came, fought, and died for our sakes.

It is obvious that recognition of and appreciation for Sydney’s 645 men is not going to come from our “leaders”, for them to reveal the truth fully would show their implication and machinations in the affair, as well as the extent of their cover-up. Rather, I think that it is up to Australian people, collectively and individually, to decide to repair the damage done to their Anzac tradition and spirit by remembering the ultimate sacrifice of the Anzac heroes of HMAS Sydney this, their, Anzac Day.