HMAS Sydney – An End to the Controversy

Author

Mearns, David L and Captain Peter Hore, RN

Subjects

RAN operations, WWII operations

Tags

Kormoran

RAN Ships

HMAS Sydney II

Publication

December 2003 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)

There is an additional error in Table 2, because in typing up the German plain language text someone has added a zero, placing this in square brackets. Perhaps the writer was incredulous that the Sydney had got so close to the Kormoran. However, in the English translation the brackets have been dropped, ((PRO ADM 1/18899 contains the typed German and English language versions.)) so that in its commonest form this passage is held to say that Sydney opened out to 8000 meters. ((Wesley Olson, Bitter Victory: the Death of HMAS Sydney (University of Western Australia Press), Nedlands WA, 1997, is one example.)) Some theories about what happened in the fight between Sydney and Kormoran have been based on this misunderstanding.

Between the initial manuscript translation and the printed version such as that in Olson’s book on pages 190 to 193, many errors in the initial decryption and translation have been edited out, but in a notable exception a new error was introduced. In Table 3 (see below) the coded version clearly says ‘Vorsteven taucht fast voellig [völlig]’ i.e. in English ‘Stem almost entirely submerged’, but in later versions the English has been changed from stem to stern. ((See, for example, Olson ibid page 192 which repeats the error ‘Stern almost completely submerged’,))  The sum of these errors and changes has altered perceptions of what happened and confused some analysts. In addition in Table 3 the numbers are wrong, for the reasons explained above.

Table 3

Comparing the three accounts, it is clear that they are similar but not the same. As a rule the dictionary account is shorter and contains less detail, whereas sometimes different detail is included in the decrypted version (1945) and the confiscated plain language version (1947). A further comparison of three similar but differing portions of the text of these documents is shown in Table 4 (see below). This includes the translation in the decrypted version of the German  ‘stellt Motor ab also voellig [völlig] ahnungslos’ as ‘Cruiser stops engines, therefore completely unsuspecting’. In the German original there is no subject to this phrase and the translator has added the word ‘cruiser’: ‘Kreuzer’ does not appear in the decrypted version before translation from German. Again, a number of theories about what happened are based on this mistake, and a comparison with the dictionary account and the confiscated account reveal a different story: it is clear that it is the aircraft whose engine was turned off, not the cruiser’s.

Table 4

When, in November 1943, Detmers wrote a twenty page lecture on the subject of honour he did so on a typewriter which did not have a German typeface and therefore could not use German characters with an umlaut like ‘ä’. But when another German officer, Bunjes, wrote a twenty-one page account of the cruise of the Kormoran in March 1946, he did so on a typewriter with a German typeface. So, as the typed copy confiscated in 1947 was made on a typewriter with a German typeface, it was probably not written before the end of 1943. Thus the confiscated version can be dated to between 1943 and 1947: however, it certainly contains more information than the dictionary (1942) but has not been embellished as much as the coded version (1945), which implies that the confiscated version was written before the coded version which was captured in 1945.