Lost - and found - at sea

[Kyt]

A very interesting article

Lost - and found - at sea | Comment is free

No sooner was one wartime mystery solved with the recent discovery of HMAS Sydney off the coast of Western Australia than Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd now announces he'll consider an appeal to look for another missing ship. The Sydney was found with lifeboats riddled with holes and lying not far from the German raider Kormoran that sunk it in 1941, highlighting a poignantly nonsensical aspect of war probably not lost on families who mourned the 645 men.

Now attention turns to the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru carrying 1,053 captured Australians in 1942 and sunk by an American submarine in the Philippines. They included former Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley's uncle and grandfather of Peter Garrett, former Midnight Oil singer, now Rudd's environment minister, who has already written the theme tune, sung the theme tune.

Should the British government follow suit now that technology makes these searches possible, by hunting for the Suez Maru torpedoed in 1943, some of whose 548 British and allied POWs abandoned ship but were machine-gunned in the sea?

With the Royal Navy's second world war tally being "some 1,525 vessels lost, including ... over 50,000 British naval personnel", countless relatives must want to know where their loved ones lie, so they can mourn properly. Two may well have celebrated on May 1 when the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 (Designation of Vessels and Controlled Sites) Order 2008, adding ten more (including SS Storaa) to the protected list of 48 mainly naval shipwrecks, came into force.

Why not add more of the many merchant ships that went down? It took two gutsy women, whose father died when the Storaa was torpedoed off Hastings in 1943, to keep fighting when the MoD in 2003 kept it from glamour ships like HMS Hood, the appeal court upholding a high court decision in their favour in 2006.

Shouldn't all wrecks be protected, naval or not, and why not find a few from each main area of battle? Lost vessels of all nationalities in both wars totalled 40+ in the English Channel, 100+ in the North Sea, 160+ in the Mediterranean, and 200+ in the Atlantic, including the City of Benares on which 77 of 90 child evacuees died when it was torpedoed one night in 1940 during an Atlantic storm. The Atlantic's 3.9km average depth is one the Sydney wreck-hunter David Mearns says "would not prohibit a search".

Sometimes, we know where ships are but not the stories on them. My aunt's brother-in-law's mother-in-law was given a brooch by an injured King George V for nursing him on the hospital ship HMS Anglia in 1915 in a stormy English Channel. A fortnight later, she went down with the ship while tending patients after it struck a mine and sank off Folkestone. She survived and heard from him again. He gave her the Royal Red Cross - and another brooch.

While everyone likes hearing about survivors - like two Benares girls rescued after clinging for 20 hours to an upturned lifeboat - maybe an occasional search party for those who weren't as lucky is a symbolic way at least to help bring them home, too.

[Adrian Roberts]

I have just been watching a DVD that one of my Australian contacts sent me, of a programme aired on Australian TV about the loss and discovery of HMAS Sydney. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Sydney survivors were machine-gunned in their lifeboats by the Kormoran's crew. What the submersible cameras found was that the lifeboats were all still aboard Sydney, the theory being that she had sunk very rapidly when the bow snapped off in heavy seas after being weakened by the torpedo strike several hours earlier, and there was no time to launch any boats.

I clicked on the link to find where this article was from, and was not surprised to find it was from the Guardian: a source that will jump aboard any sensationalists attempt to make fighting men seem less than honourable.

[Antipodean Andy]

Exactly, AR. I jumped on that as I read the article as well. Nothing like making up a tenuous link on the spot to continue the theme with the Suez Maru.

Peter Garrett lliterally has sung the theme tune as one of the opening lines of a Midnight Oil song is something about his grandfather being lost at sea. I'll see if I can find it as can't remember which song at the moment.

[Antipodean Andy]

Midnight Oil's In the Valley:

The sinking of the ship also touched another prominent Australian many years later. Peter Garrett's grandfather Tom was also killed and the loss prompted the former lead singer of Midnight Oil to write about it in his 1990s hit "In the Valley".

His opening line is: "My grandfather went down with the Montevideo … the rising sun sent him floating to his rest".

Politicians' links to Montevideo sinking

[Kyt]

I was just about to post that!

YouTube - Midnight Oil - In The Valley

[Antipodean Andy]

Too slow in your old age...:-P

[Kyt]

Grrr. I knew the song - had to find the video

[Antipodean Andy]

Well, my google was - Midnight Oil grandfather sinking!

[Antipodean Andy]

Montevideo Maru - rather comprehensive site.
Remembering 1942 - The sinking of the Montevideo Maru, 1 July 1942 [Australian War Memorial]
Montevideo Maru - Japanese prison ship - tomb of over one thousand men

There is also a Montevideo Maru memorial at the Ballarat POW memorial. Spidge spoke about it here:
Ballarat POW Memorial Victoria Australia