"How we killed the men of HMAS Sydney"
A
German officer describes Australias's biggest World War II sea disaster.
Heinz
Messerschmidt was unprepared for the question his son was
about to ask as he looked up from a photograph of the officers and
crew of Australia's World War II cruiser HMAS Sydney:
"And all these
men killed by you?" he asked.
"Yes," said Mr
Messerschmidt. "All of them."
As a 26-year-old
lieutenant commander on the German raider Kormoran, Mr Messerschmidt
witnessed the murderous barrage that sank the Sydney and led to a
mystery that remains today:
Why did none of
the 645 crew members of the Sydney survive to tell their tale?
Mr Messerschmidt
dismisses conspiracy theories of Japanese submarines being involved
as "ungrounded speculation and a huge defamation" for the officers
and crew of the Kormoran.
He explains the
mystery with a closer examination of the two main figures involved:
Captain Detmers,
of the Kormoran, and Captain Burnett, of the Sydney.
Mr Messerschmidt
is now 83 and lives in a small, tidy apartment near Kiel in northern
Germany. He spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Australia
and had many opportunities to rake over the battle with Captain Detmers.
A widower with neatly combed white hair and a perfectly ironed white
shirt, he adjusts his Kiel Yacht Club tie and says:
"Captain Detmers
was a very strict man who placed great emphasis on dress and abstinence
from alcohol. " A month before our engagement with the Sydney, Captain
Detmers celebrated his birthday. We were allowed to drink whisky,
and one of the crew members got a bit drunk and let his tongue run
loose. "Detmers cut him short straight away, saying that he would
like to make something very clear to the assembled gentlemen, and
that was that our moment of truth would come when we had a visit from
the 'Grey Steamship Company', as the British Navy, and by inference
their Australian allies, were referred to. "Then he said no more whisky
and that was the end of the evening."
Mr Messerschmidt
shuffles his folders and memorabilia relating to the Sydney and looks
over his glasses. "And Captain Detmers was exactly right, and not
for the first time. He sensed that a visit from the Grey Steamship
Company was on its way.
"As the Sydney
approached, he sensed that they wanted to continue on their southerly
course and that they were not prepared for any irregularities. "Captain
Detmers said the Sydney would come by, say many thanks, wish us bon
voyage and see you later.
"He ordered everyone
below and said the Sydney would notice nothing and that we would get
away with it, referring to the disguise of a Dutch merchant vessel
the Germans were using..
"He was the right
man for an undertaking of our nature, a Himmelsfahrtkommando as our
ships were known (suicide mission); he could always sense that little
bit more. "Basically, all the survivors from the Kormoran, all of
us, must thank Captain Detmers for his finger-tip touch. Without him
everything could have run differently from the start".
"Captain Detmers
said right from the first contact with the Sydney that the Australians
weren't suspicious." The Sydney failed to make a thorough investigation
of who we were, and came far too close.
"You have to
picture it. It was late November and the Sydney was in Western Australian
waters; the crew had warred hard in the Mediterranean and been successful
in conjunction with the British Navy. "What should a merchant raider
be doing in these waters, so close to the Australian coast? "We had
disguised ourselves as the Dutch merchant ship Straat Malakka, and
carried a Dutch flag. "A raider simply could not be in these waters.
"And they must have thought 'But we have the assignment to at least
clarify who it is'.
The Sydney asked
what type of cargo we had, where we were travelling to ... but we
didn't have the secret signal and letters [to reply]. "Basically it
was this signal that was the death sentence for the Sydney and the
cause of this terrible chapter of history for Australia."
Mr Messerschmidt
wanders back in time. "As the Sydney approached we could see that
they had prepared to send up their spotter plane, which would have
given us away because we had a deck cargo of mines. "But then the
plane was suddenly put back into its normal position. That was the
moment when Captain Detmers said 'Ah yes, it's tea-time on board ...
they'll probably just ask us where we are going and what cargo and
then let us go on.
Then Captain
Burnett of the Sydney made the following mistakes:
he came far too
close and, worse still, instead of putting himself directly behind
us, he put himself directly opposite. "If he had sat behind us he
could have used both forward turrets on us and we could not have brought
all our weapons to bear on him. He was only 900 metres away. You could
see the ship's cook with his hat on at that distance. "We saw that
no-one ran around on deck and that they were not alarmed.
"Detmers said
'Now comes good journey etc', but instead came the order to hoist
your secret signal. Detmers immediately ordered the camouflage to
be dropped and the German flag to be hoisted. "Then, with anti-aircraft
guns, we held the bridge under continual fire to put all the officers
out of action. "At the same time we fired torpedoes and our six-inch
guns."
The Sydney was
not ready for battle. The four turrets were not trained on us and
the torpedo tubes were not manned. As we opened fire, the crew started
running for the torpedo tubes, but we held the torpedo tubes under
constant fire with our guns so they couldn't get there."
This is the murderous
nature of the attack, when a totally unprepared cruiser lies in such
close range to what it believes is a Dutch merchant ship - which within
a minute can transform itself into a warship.
"The six-inch
shells were armed in the base and not the nose, so they went over
the short distance and pierced the armour and exploded inside the
ship. "It was half an hour of continual fire. It's no surprise no
one survived."
The few that did
survive the initial onslaught were the firing officer and crew of
the rear X turret, who fired three times and hit us in the magazine,
once amidships and the third time through the funnel, which was used
to pre-heat the oil before it was pumped back down into the motors.
"You can picture what happened as the hot burning oil flowed back
down into the engine room. Only one man survived. Then we had no power
and could not put the fires out. "It was then we realised it was all
over for us. We would have to abandon ship and would be picked up
as prisoners."
Heinz Messerschmidt
flicks through carefully arranged photos and reveals the stranger
side of his encounter with the Sydney.
"In the mid 1930s
I was a midshipman on a training cruise and we were docked in Cadiz
in Spain at the same time as the Sydney. The photo here is the Sydney.
It was docked opposite and both crews made tours of the respective
ships. I went on board the Sydney and met some of the crew and took
some photos of them."
He shuffles his
memorabilia and extracts another small photo with a large Australian
face beaming across it and the words HMAS SYDNEY clearly emblazoned
on his cap. "I don't who this man is, nor if he was on the Sydney
at the time of the encounter with the Kormoran, but none of us would
have ever dreamt that we were to meet again, and under such different
circumstances."
Mr Messerschmidt
pauses. His memories of Australia are full of warmth towards the Australians,
who treated him so well, not only as a prisoner-of-war but also as
a tourist and guest of the RSL.
"You all make
so much effort to find another answer as to the fate of the Sydney,"
he says wistfully. "This is everything I have collected over the years
on the Sydney and Kormoran. I gave my Iron Cross to one of the prison
guards in Australia just before we were shipped back to Germany on
the steamer Orontes." And then there was the final twist in the tale;
the ship lying next to the Orontes in Port Melbourne was the real
Straat Malakka.
