- Author
- Newspaper, London Daily Telegraph
- Subjects
- Ship histories and stories, WWII operations, History - WW2, Obituaries
- Tags
-
- RAN Ships
- HMAS Sydney II
- Publication
- March 2008 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
Whenever he nodded off he was woken by his chin falling against his chest; the only rest he got was when the wind died away. In rough weather he made one third of the crew link arms with their backs to the breaking seas, while the others baled or rested.
After five days von Malapert spotted cliffs, some 50 metres high, behind a reef on which the waves were breaking heavily. There was no way through, so he drifted north in the current, fearing that he would be carried into the Timor Sea.
Then, at dawn, he saw a brilliant white beach on the far side of a wide lagoon. There were huge turtles swimming around the boat and, seeing the tracks of the turtles up the beach, he reckoned that where these huge beasts could land, so could he. He decided to risk the outlying rocks.
As the boat grounded in shallow water at Red Bluff, Western Australia, his crew jumped over the side and dragged the boat so far up the beach that von Malapert feared it would never go to sea again.
He urged his crew to thank God for their deliverance and to pray for their comrades who might still be at sea. If interrogated, they were obliged to give only their names and addresses; in his case, he said, he would offer: ‘Malapert, and my parents live in Darmstadt in Germany.’
A little later an aeroplane flew overhead, and von Malapert ordered his men to form a circle and to hold ropes across its diameter. The aircraft flew along the beach, waggling its wings, and before it departed dropped a carton of Lucky Strikes – this was his favourite brand, and von Malapert recalled that the pleasure of the first draw was better than being awarded an Iron Cross.
He and his men were soon taken prisoner by the Australian army. His proudest achievement was bringing the survivors in their lifeboat safely to land.
Reinhold von Malapert’s first wife was Gertrud Brunst. They had met before the war at Vina del Mar, Chile, and she travelled to Germany to marry him in 1940. When von Malapert sailed from Germany later that year she was pregnant with their child, and he did not see her or his young son until 1947, the year he was released from a PoW camp in Australia.
The family home in Germany had been destroyed, and he and his wife emigrated to Chile, where he established a successful import-export business in Santiago. He never discussed the fate of Sydney.
In 1952 he was divorced from Gertrud, and he married, secondly, Sibylle Barends. Von Malapert died on April 22, and is survived by his son.