We've got good news and we've got bad news. We went to bed last night making a promise to our readers about a few irritated communists and maybe a T-34 or two. We hate to do it, but we're backing out on that. We woke up this morning realizing we had just done pissed-off Russians two days ago, and would thus be luring our reader into the same trap as yesterday's. Fortunately, (for us more than our audience) we have come across another one of those little stories that end up serving as a microcosm for war as whole.
Captain Theodor Detmers, a twenty year veteran of the German Kriegsmarine, must have thought his luck had run out early in the evening of November 19, 1941. He was skippering the auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, a blue water commerce raider that had been at sea for nearly a year. In the bountiful eastern Atlantic, his ship had executed a impressive run of successful raids. But as they passed the Cape of Good Hope and neared the coast of western Australia, their haul had dried up.
Captain Theodor Detmers, skipper of the Kormoran.
The Kormoran was struggling with a malfunctioning engine, and had not made contact with any enemy ship for months. Detmers planned to deploy a complement of sea mines before leaving the Pacific and returning home for repairs. He barely avoided an Australian convoy off Cape Leeuwin, but then on the evening of the 19th, sailed right past the light cruiser HMAS Sydney. Intercepted by the faster and better armed Sydney, Detmers disguised his vessel as a Dutch merchant ship. Now, the Sydney was so close, he could see Australian sailors moving around on her decks.
Detmers was puzzled, too. This warship, which easily out-gunned his disguised raider, was bearing down on him just off his starboard beam. Now, she had hoisted the letters IK, warning him to prepare his ship for a hurricane. In the serene waters off of western Australia, Detmers had no idea what the signal meant and had no idea how to answer it. After fifteen minutes of nerve-shattering tension, the Sydney signaled "Show your secret sign", and Detmers knew his ship was in trouble.
The Kormoran in 1940, pictured here from the deck of a German U-Boat.The fact that Detmers was even in this situation is what we'd like our readers to pause and think about today. At this point in the war, Germany had tasted very little defeat practically anywhere. With France overrun, England stood alone in the west, and Hitler had bailed out his ally Mussolini in Greece. Russia was on its heels, although the Germans were running into stiff resistance in front of Moscow. In North Africa, they were pushing on Tobruk. In the Pacific, a secret Japanese task force was just a week away from sailing for Pearl Harbor.
Still in its infancy, the Second World War had truly earned its name. Take Detemers' stand-off, for example. A German commerce raider, nearly 8,000 miles from its home port, was staring down the barrels of an Australian cruiser, on its way home from a tour of duty in the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Japanese boys were in China; Americans were in the Philippines and on Wake Island; Italian soldiers were stuck in the Libyan sand dunes, and the young men of the British Isles were in places as far flung as India and New Guinea, while fending off the Luftwaffe in the skies over Europe.
It is hard to imagine such a scenario today, most of the world at war in all corners of the globe, with more nations and more territory soon to be thrown in. By 1945 there had been at least some fighting on six of seven continents and on all four of the oceans. The sheer number of people involved and the size of the military machines required to sustain that effort is something we cannot comprehend today. There were times when it seemed no one, no where, could escape the war.
Certainly, Captain Detmers could not escape it, and by 5:30 pm on the 19th he had a decision to make. Obviously, the Sydney was challenging him with some sort of code. Unable to produce the correct response, Detmers had only one choice. What happened next was later pieced together with accounts from the survivors of the Kormoran.
Detmers ordered his men to run up the German colors and open fire on the Sydney. The Australian ship, finally realizing who she was along side, fired almost simultaneously. But the cruiser had come in too close, or her guns were still sighted for a warning salvo. Her first volley mostly flew over the smaller German craft. The Kormoran, however, didn't miss. Her salvos were raking the enemy fore to aft. The Sydney fired away for nearly half an hour, eventually damaging the raider, but was struck by a German torpedo and forced to retire.
Detmers' craft had fended off the bigger vessel, but with no safe port anywhere in reach, the Captain ordered his men to abandon their burning ship. 318 of the 399 German sailors would await rescue in lifeboats for days. On the night of November 19, the sky above them was lit by the fires aboard the Sydney, slowly dying somewhere beyond the horizon. The cruiser sunk sometime after that, and none of the 645 Australian sailors was ever found.
Crew of the HMAS Sydney before the war.
Afterward, the Australian government would launch inquiries into the case of the Sydney, trying to determine what events had caused such a superior ship to be sunk by an inferior enemy. Few clear conclusions were drawn, and some accused Detmers of firing before revealing his German colors. Survivor accounts refute that, and it is most likely the damage from the enemy torpedo did in the Sydney and her crew. Either way, Detmers was an Australian prisoner, and sat out the greatest conflict in human history far from home on the other side of the world.
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