Australian warship sank due to 'captain error': reportA military inquiry has blamed Australia's worst naval disaster -- the World War II sinking of HMAS Sydney Four ships of the Royal Australian Navy have been named HMAS Sydney after Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales.
The Sydney sank without a trace in a bloody battle with the German raider Kormoran on November 19, 1941, taking all 645 men on board to a watery grave Watery Grave is the third historical mystery novel about Sir John Fielding by Bruce Alexander. Plot summary When the captain of a British warship falls overboard and drowns, a Naval court martial is convened to investigate a charge of murder. off the country's west coast. The cruiser's resting place remained a mystery until last year, leading to decades of speculation about how the vastly-outgunned Kormoran managed to defeat the pride of Australia's fleet. Theories abounded that the Sydney was sunk by a Japanese submarine but Allied commanders covered it up because Japan had not entered the war. There was also speculation that the Kormoran's crew faked an emergency to draw the Sydney alongside then machine-gunned survivors in the water after the ship went down. A search team using high-tech sonar equipment discovered the wreck of the Sydney on the floor of the Indian Ocean Indian Ocean, third largest ocean, c.28,350,000 sq mi (73,427,000 sq km), extending from S Asia to Antarctica and from E Africa to SE Australia; it is c.4,000 mi (6,400 km) wide at the equator. It constitutes about 20% of the world's total ocean area. in March, 2008, prompting Australia's military to launch an inquiry into its fate. Inquiry chief Terence Cole Terence Rhoderick Hudson Cole, AO, QC (born 31 October 1937), Australian jurist, known best for presiding over two Royal Commissions. Cole was born in Longreach, Queensland, and was educated at Fort Street High School in Sydney and the University of Sydney. devoted an entire volume of his 1,500-page report to conjecture about the Sydney's sinking, finding no evidence to support the conspiracy theories. Instead, he found the ship's captain Joseph Burnett committed a fatal error A condition that halts processing due to faulty hardware, program bugs, read errors or other anomalies. If you get a fatal error, you generally cannot recover from it, because the operating system has encountered a condition it cannot resolve. of judgement when he did not order his crew to action stations action stations Noun, pl the positions taken up by individuals in preparation for battle or for some other activity as the Sydney approached the enemy vessel. While the Kormoran was disguised as a harmless Dutch merchant freighter at the time, Cole said Burnett knew there was a German raider in the area and had received no notification that a Dutch ship was nearby. "His decision to treat the sighted ship as appearing innocent (is) almost inexplicable," Cole concluded. "The terrible consequence of his erroneous decision was that Sydney did not go to action stations and approached to a position of great danger, where all her tactical advantages were negated and the advantage of surprise was given to Kormoran," he added. "It resulted in the loss of Sydney. Cole said the Kormoran used the element of surprise to rake the Sydney with more than 80 high-explosive shells from point blank range, also firing a torpedo into the stricken vessel. He found that at least 70 percent of his men likely killed in the resulting fire and the rest died when the ship later sank. The Kormoran was also irreparably ir·rep·a·ra·ble adj. Impossible to repair, rectify, or amend: irreparable harm; irreparable damages. [Middle English, from Old French, from Latin damaged in the battle, losing about 80 of its 400 crew before the survivors set explosive charges and scuttled the ship. 
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion