A recent photograph of some veterans at the 75th anniversary celebrations of the great Battles of Leyte Gulf showed Rear Admiral Guy Griffiths and ex-Able Seaman David Mattiske who both ...
Leyte
Letter: The World’s Deepest Shipwreck
One of our most senior members, David Mattiske, who served in HMAS Shropshire in the Battle of Leyte Gulf and who maintains a keen interest in news from this famous ...
Luzon: A 75th Anniversary Australian Battlefield Tour of the Philippines – Part 2
By Paul Baker On the morning of 15 December 2019, a small ceremony was held at the Australian War Memorial in the forecourt of the Maritime Academy of Asia and ...
Australians in the Decisive Thrust KING II – The Leyte Landings
By Paul Baker Seventy-five years ago, on 18 October 1944, beaten only by the fast minesweepers and the attack forces securing the mouth of the Gulf, the crew of HMAS ...
HMAS Reserve in the Liberation of the Philippines and the Not-so-Little Tug that Could
By Paul Baker On Christmas Day 1944, just as the 34 members of the crew of HMAS Reserve celebrated the occasion aboard their ship in San Pedro Bay in the Philippines, ...
The Admiralty Islands
By David Mattiske Recent announcements that the United States will partner Papua New Guinea and Australia on an initiative to further develop a naval base on Manus Island has aroused ...
Occasional Paper 34: Paddle Steamer Weeroona
September 2018 Recently the attention of the NHSA was drawn to the possibility of a paddle-steamer serving in the RAN. It appears that the closest was PS Weeroona built as ...
An American at War in the Pacific Memoirs of Chief Radioman John Ottomar Adams, USNR
A long standing member of our Society, David Mattiske, was a friend of John Adams who died early in 2017. David presented us with a self-published memoir of John Adams ...
The Battles for Leyte Gulf: where Australian ships fought in one of the greatest battles in naval history
By David Scott David Horace Ford Scott grew up on a soldier-settler block near Holbrook, NSW but his parents were forced to walk off the property during the Depression and ...
The Royal Australian Navy at Leyte Gulf October 1944
By Kingsley Perry The series of sea battles at and around Leyte Gulf in October 1944 marked a turning point in the Pacific war. Despite together representing the greatest sea ...
HMAS Australia Night Order Book Raises Kamikaze Queries
Kamikazes, Suicide Bombers and Us
Gascoyne to the Rescue On Christmas Day 1944
The Nelson Touch – a Trafalgar Day address
[Trafalgar Day Address 1997 to the Naval Officers’ Association, Western Australia, by Captain John Lancaster AM RAN (Ret’d)] Trafalgar Day provides the embodiment of what in our waning years, we may ...
Binoculars from the Past
One of Australia’s major naval tragedies of World War II has had its echo in Canberra more than 50 years later. Commodore (retired) M. Rayment of the Royal Australian Navy, ...
HMAS Shropshire – WW2
HMAS SHROPSHIRE was a lucky ship! All drafts to the U.K. safely traversed the Atlantic at the height of U-Boat sinkings and not a man was lost through enemy action. ...
HMAS Warramunga – Battle For The Philippines 1945
Leyte Gulf – the RAN in the Biggest Naval Battle of all time
Letters: Attack on HMAS Australia
Having read the various accounts of the dawn attack on HMAS Australia on 21st October 1944, as contained in the Society’s publications, may I submit the following observation on the ...
Book Review: HMAS Shropshire
HMAS Shropshire by Stan Nicholls Published by The Naval Historical Society of Australia Published December 1989. 315 pp. Photos. Profile views. Press cuttings. Maps. Index. Limited edition. Hard cover. To ...