- Author
- Letter Writer
- Subjects
- Ship histories and stories, WWI operations, Letter to the Editor
- Tags
- None noted.
- RAN Ships
- HMAS AE1
- Publication
- December 2006 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
I was very interested in reading about the disappearance of the AE1 submarine without a trace in 1914.
I have an idea that it may have been sucked down by a large waterspout and pinned down under a reef in the ocean, which is very deep in that area.
I was born in Rabaul in 1924. My parents owned an island (coconut plantation) just north of Talasea in New Britain. My father served in the Royal Navy in WWI and II. Every six months or so we travelled from our island to Rabaul on my father’s schooner. When I was a very small child I remember passing some of those large waterspouts on the way to Rabaul or returning to the island.
In 1930 I travelled on a schooner called the Hermes from Rabaul to Kavieng in New Ireland and back. In the early 1930s, the Hermes disappeared without a trace travelling from New Guinea to Rabaul. No debris was ever found.
I heard from some of the old hands at the time that it had been sunk by a waterspout.
So my thoughts were that the AE1 submarine could have been caught in a waterspout and dragged down as there was no debris on the surface of the ocean.
John Hore-Lacy, ex. AIF