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Remembering Anzacs and not forgetting HMAS Sydney

By Jo Green - posted Tuesday, 24 April 2007


“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).

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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.

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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.

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About the Author

Jo Green has a PhD from Murdoch University where she is currently an Honorary Research Associate and a Research Associate in the School of Media, Culture and Communication.

Dr Green became intensely interested and involved with the truth about HMAS Sydney after a chance encounter with one of its survivors, Betty, widow of Sydney Engineer Fred Schoch. She describes their meeting as one of the most intellectually and emotionally challenging experiences of her life: "to look into Betty's eyes and see her intellect, her 65 years of pain, and her 'hope light' that resides in and exudes from them. Betty and her remarkable qualities are my inspiration for researching and writing about Sydney."

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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