Anzac's Dirty Dozen Read Free Page A

bulkhead, let alone their enemy. Even those on the upper decks may have seen little. The resulting fragmentary stories are not easy to collect and piece together, makingit difficult for historians to construct engaging, broadly appealing narratives.
    How naval ships operate also contributes to the relative paucity of naval history and its understanding. Simply put, not many people know what goes on in the different parts of ships and how each contributes to the effectiveness of the vessel over-all; and very few of those who do have recorded their experiences. While it is self-evident that naval, army and air force units are quite different, these differences have a real impact on the ease of transmission of history. Aircraft and air bases are quite similar to their commercial counterparts and are relatively accessible; army units, battlefields and bases are to varying degrees readily accessible and can be observed by both contemporary and later visitors. In combination with the twentieth-century Australian Navy’s relatively parsimonious approach to the award of medals, the simple difficulty for a naval officer to observe bravery by a sailor in a different part of a ship goes a long way to explaining the relative lack of official acknowledgement and publicity regarding meritorious service by many naval personnel. Indeed, the Commanding Officer of HMAS Murchison during the Korean War (a subject to which this chapter will return) observed in later years that he wished he had pushed harder for greater recognition of bravery for his crew. 6 It is not unreasonable that the broader public does not seek to know more about actions that the Navy itself has hardly acknowledged.
    How navies view the relationship between a ship and the vessel’s commanding officer is another factor that reinforces the relative invisibility of the remainder of the crew. While the ‘great men’ of the Navy are undoubtedly worth studying, it is not possible to fully appreciate their accomplishments, decisions and failings, without also understanding the roles of those who served under them. The World War II losses of the cruisers Sydney and Perth , and the Voyager – Melbourne collisions are all examples where the responsibility for the loss of the ship, which resides with the commanding officer, can be confused with explaining and understanding how and why these ships were lost. In all three cases, to understand the reason for the loss it is necessary (although not always sufficient) to understand the operation of the ships’ bridge watchkeeping teams. The actions of the German ship Kormoran probably deceived not only Captain J. Burnett, but some or all of the other officers and sailors on Sydney ’s bridge before that engagement began. While the decision-making process in this case will never be known with certainty, it is possible to construct hypotheses about how it occurred by understanding how the ship operated. 7 But this is seldom done. How many know, for instance, who else was on the bridge with Burnett?
    The fact that ships are discrete units also tends to act against a well-rounded understanding of events when they are lost, as the unit records are often destroyed or lost with the sinking of the vessel. As a result, significant parts of an account of a vessel’s final hours, days and weeks are based on incomplete, circumstantial and inferred evidence. In the absence of specific information it is easy for others to assume the worst, whether justified or not.
    Importantly, while understanding of Australian naval history is patchy, it is not always for a lack of source material. A quick examination of the number of records available to anyone who is interested shows that Navy source material is voluminous and increasingly easily available, even online. The number of records available is in roughly equal proportion to the relative size of each of the armed services. In the National Archives of Australia in January 2011,