Lost No More

Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008 By LISA CLAUSEN
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It's a tale of riddles and clever science, but at the heart of the story of HMAS Sydney are simple names like Robert, Keith and David. When the wreck of the Australian cruiser was found last week, 66 years after she was last seen drifting ablaze in the darkness, it was the 645 men who vanished with her who came to mind.

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Described by a 1999 government inquiry as the Royal Australian Navy's "glamour ship," the Sydney had returned in 1941 from victories in the Mediterranean. Schoolchildren in her namesake city were given a public holiday to watch her crew parade through the streets. "She was a beautiful ship, a well-experienced ship," says Ean McDonald, a former Sydney signaler. But on Nov. 19, off the coast of Western Australia, she encountered a German raider, the Kormoran. What happened next will never be known for certain, but both ships sank. The Kormoran was scuttled and more than 300 of its 400 crew were rescued or washed ashore. The Sydney and all aboard it were lost. The exact locations of both ships were a mystery.

The result has been a flurry of speculation, false sightings, books and conspiracy theories — that a Japanese submarine was involved; that the Australian government staged a cover-up. In 2001, five Western Australian volunteers formed the Finding Sydney Foundation and began gathering evidence and government support for another search. In 2003, chairman Ted Graham met with David Mearns, the well-known American shipwreck hunter. Says Graham: "I just had the view that unless our generation found HMAS Sydney, and in particular found it while the widows were still alive, it would potentially be forgotten."

Mearns' team set sail in the Geosounder in early March to tackle a search zone of 1,800 square nautical miles between Carnarvon and Geraldton. After weathering technical problems and a cyclone, on March 12 it transmitted the startling news: the Kormoran had been found. Four days later, the Sydney was located. Graham's fellow Foundation director Glenys McDonald, who was on board, said: "I went up to the back deck and leaned over the railing and cried and gave thanks."

Science deserve much of the credit. Retired meteorologist Len van Burgel's task was to provide wind data from that long-ago November to help trace where debris from the Kormoran, found drifting days after the battle, could have come from. With no ocean wind reports available from that time, van Burgel dug through archives and extrapolated from land weather charts, then used computers and satellite imagery to model 1941 conditions. When the three approaches yielded similar results, he says, "we thought we were on to a good thing." Drift specialists could then identify where the German ship was likely to be. "And David [Mearns] kept saying, if we find the Kormoran, we find the Sydney," says van Burgel.

Both were near where Kormoran survivors had told interrogators they would be. In the 1990s, Perth naval-history buff Kim Kirsner sifted through those accounts and came up with possible coordinates. But many people were reluctant to believe the enemy, he says. The Germans stood accused of luring the Sydney with a white flag, sinking her and shooting at her crew in the water. There was "always a chorus in the background," says Kirsner, "that the Germans lied."

His predicted location was out by just three nautical miles. Yet his results lay untouched for years as funding and technological limitations hobbled the search effort. Eventually, however, Kirsner's work and research by Mearns using the diary of the Kormoran's captain convinced government to put up more than $4 million for the search, says Ted Graham. "No one had looked in this particular area before — and the technology, the funding and the expertise had not been available until now." Former signaler McDonald, who suspects details of the battle were hushed up at the time, says he won't believe the Sydney has been found until he sees photos, due this week. The discovery won't answer every question, he says, but it will help the relatives who have waited so long.

Last week came the first gesture in a series of planned commemorations. In a heaving swell, the Sydney's finders threw a wreath onto the waves above the ship and read a poem by one of its doomed crew: "There sleeps one who took his chances/ In that war-crazed, tragic hell/ Battled luck and circumstances/ Loved and laughed, but fought and fell."