Defence Business: Worth a read | ADM Feb 2010

A Special Correspondent | Canberra

Over a great many years in the media business, your correspondent has perused numerous reports of assorted official inquiries, Royal Commissions and the like.

After a day or two of headlines, most vanish without trace, exiled to dim archives and the pages of Hansard.

Just a small few approach the status of literature, conveying a message that transcends the years and written in a manner which imparts the facts of a complex issue in a way which invites reading from cover to cover.

This short list includes the captivating reports of Adrian Roden, when he was assistant commissioner of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.

To it can be added the report of Justice Terence Cole QC who headed the inquiry into the loss of HMAS Sydney II following the discovery of her wreckage and that of the German raider HSK Kormoran off the WA coast in March 2008.

To recap, both vessels were lost in a close range gun battle in November 1941.

Sydney went down with all 645 hands.

There were more than 300 survivors from Kormoran and they gave the only accounts of what happened.

For a variety of reasons, the German accounts, which provided the essential detail of what is contained in the Australian official history, were never wholly accepted.

Indeed some regarded them with grave suspicion and that produced an ever expanding conspiracy industry, which for sheer diversity now dwarfs the abundant conspiracy material on the assassination of John F Kennedy.

The key theme is that how could a fine Aussie warship be lost to an armed freighter, if not by hunnish bastardry, perhaps aided by conniving Japs who just happened to have a submarine nearby, even though Pearl Harbour was still two and a half weeks away.

Considering the paucity of hard information, the loss of Sydney produced a spectacular amount of reading material, some of quality scholarship and some plainly not.

Succumbing to pressure, the Howard government commissioned an inquiry which was conducted by the parliamentary foreign affairs and defence committee which held hearings over two years and reported in 1999.

The actual committee findings are pretty ambivalent but it did produce some positives.

It recommended that there be consideration of a search and that, eventually, led to the discovery of Sydney and Kormoran.

It also recommended there be a search for the body of a sailor who drifted up to Christmas Island and was interred in the island's cemetery.

He was subsequently located and is believed to be the only sailor from Sydney with a known grave.

The committee also invited those with assorted theories to step forward, which they did with great enthusiasm.

Their meanderings fill a good part of the thousands of pages of submissions received by the committee.

Terence Cole came to the Sydney inquiry after the politically bruising investigation into the Australian Wheat Board dealings with the former Iraq regime.

When this inquiry was announced your correspondent was deeply sceptical.

After all, this matter had been the subject of numerous books, the few elderly German survivors had all been interviewed and the archives had been searched over and again for relevant documents.

So what could Cole possibly bring to the party, other than to go over the same well trodden ground, with some help from imagery of the rusting wrecks on the floor of the Indian Ocean?

Wrong.

He brought a great deal, showing what can be achieved by a determined and well-resourced inquiry.

Your correspondent will touch on a few areas but there is much more and anyone with more than a passing interest should check out the actual report.

Because of its considerable size, there were few if any hard copies produced, with the media only handed discs.

It is available online at www.defence.gov.au/sydneyii/finalreport/index.html

First of all, the imagery of Sydney and Kormoran revealed a great deal.

DSTO analysis showed Sydney took some 41 15-centimetre shells to her port side, 46 to her starboard and a torpedo to her bow.

Kormoran was pretty much obliterated from the explosion of her cargo of sea mines.

That's consistent with the German accounts of the battle.

With nothing else surviving from Sydney to explain how Captain Joseph Burnett placed his vessel in a position to cop such a pounding, Cole approached from another direction and recreated what Burnett must have known about the disposition of friendly vessels in the Indian Ocean that day.

Throughout the war, naval headquarters in Melbourne maintained a comprehensive card index of the movements of all merchant vessels in Australian waters, with details sent by coded radio message to warships twice each day.

These vessels were marked on a plot maintained aboard the warship.

Cole was able to locate coded signals to Sydney in days leading up to and including November 19.

The recreated plot showed no friendly vessels nearby.

Further, it was known a raider was operating in the Indian Ocean.

That, coupled with mandated procedures to treat unidentified ships with extreme caution, should have made Burnett highly suspicious of the vessel purporting to be the Dutch freighter Straat Malakka.

Cole concluded that Burnett's erroneous decision to approach way too close, negating any tactical advantage, was wholly inexplicable and resulted in the loss of Sydney.

Cole devotes an entire volume to the conspiracies.

A curious sub-theme to the outpourings of many of the conspiracy theorists, is that if only the government would initiate a proper inquiry, all could finally be revealed. Cole gave them their big chance.

Most can't have enjoyed this experience.

Reading the transcripts reveals just how persistent and knowledgeable probing can unravel the most entrenched theory, revealing the paucity of actual evidence, the leaps of logic and flights of fantasy, culminating in wholly wacky conclusions.

For example, one leading theorist refused to accept that the vessel found off the WA coast was really Sydney, saying it was all part of the ongoing cover-up.

The Cole report is well worth reading for this section alone.

Cole concludes that none of the many conspiracies have any basis in fact whatsoever, tactfully suggesting their adherents should now bog off and do something useful with their lives.

It might just work.