The Tobruk Spud Run 1941 The three Services, Navy, Army and Air Force were as dissimilar as chalk and cheese, yet we were all bent on one purpose, to beat ...
History - WW2
HMAS Adelaide 1918 – 1949
Watchers of the Sea and Sky – 13th Radar
Ken Wright revisits one of Australia’s first coastal radar stations and remembers the time when busy shipping lanes were menaced by enemy ships and planes. The Japanese submarine I-25 lying ...
German Prisoners of War in Australia WW2
After the sinking of HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran in 1941, a considerable number of Kriegsmarine survivors were rescued and became prisoners of war. This account details some of their ...
Captain Cook Graving Dock
The sixtieth anniversary of the official opening of the (then) largest dry dock in the Southern Hemisphere by the Governor General, HRH the Duke of Gloucester, falls on 24 March ...
RAN Minelaying Effort during WW2
This extract is taken from NHSA Monograph No. 179 ‘HMAS Bungaree – Australia’s only Minelayer’ – which was published in 2003, but has not been widely circulated. The Admiralty suggested ...
Anti-Submarine Defences of Sydney Harbour 1942
The British Officer-in-Charge of Australia’s anti-submarine training establishment warned Navy chiefs, four months before Japanese midget submarines attacked Sydney Harbour in May 1942, that the defences against such a raid ...
Hitler’s Indian Ocean Grey Wolves
BY MAY 1943, Germany had lost the Battle of the Atlantic. U-Boat losses had reached an intolerable level for the Germans with the loss of 38 U-Boats for that month ...
Sydney’s Anti-Submarine Boom Defences 1942-46
A small, lonely memorial can be found near the water’s edge at the westernmost shore of Green Point at Watson’s Bay, Sydney Harbour, recalling the erection of a considerable seaward ...
Operation Pedestal and the Tanker Ohio
The Sinking of HMS Glorious – Evacuation From Norway 1940
HMAS Australia – Kamikaze Attack 1944
This year (2004) marks the 60th anniversary of the first kamikaze attack on HMAS Australia. As Roger de Lisle reports, Japanese suicide pilots hurled their aircraft onto Allied ships with ...
HMAS Vendetta WW2
This is part 3 of an hitherto unpublished personal account was given to the Editor shortly before the death of the author, together with several other brief accounts of his ...
The Great Amphibious Invasion: D-Day, 6 June 1944
One of the clearest demonstrations of sea power occurred on 6 June 1944, when the Allies landed in German-occupied Normandy in the greatest sea-borne invasion in history. Operation OVERLORD was ...
Australians in Midget Submarines
A short account of British midget submarine operations during WW2 in which Australians participated with considerable success. Previously published in ANWM Wartime Issue 19 and the Naval Officers’ Club Newsletter ...
HMS Vanessa North Atlantic 1941
HMS Viscount 1940
Ping Wo’s Golden Secret
HMAS Ping Wo was not the most glamorous ship ever requisitioned by the Royal Australian Navy. Described by at least one of her crew as a ‘rust bucket’, the 3105grt ...
Obituary: Captain W.F. (Bill) Cook, LVO, RAN Retd.
The youngest officer to command an Australian destroyer during WW2, Bill Cook, has died aged 87, after a notable naval career and having forged a second equally distinguished career at the ...
German U-Boat Surrender 1945 – U-977
A previous article described how surrendering German U-Boats were boarded and taken as prizes into captivity to remote lochs in Scotland and Northern Ireland. One wonders what the German Navy ...
Southwick House and D-Day: Events of 1944
Devotion to Duty in Darwin – Laurance Ernest Tozer RAN
Mediterranean Memories
Book Review: Lost but not forgotten – a bitter sweet victory
Lost but not forgotten – a bitter sweet victory HMAS Sydney II – in memory of the 645. by Keith Shegog Self-published Reviewed by Peter Colthorpe This book is no ...