Bitter Victory; The Death of HMAS Sydney Trade paperback - 2002

Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2002. Reprint Edition with Amendments and Additions. Trade paperback. Very good. ix, [1], 437, [3] pages. Slightly cocked. Includes Illustrations. Acknowledgments, Glossary, Introduction, Appendixes, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. On November 11, 1941, HMAS Sydney sailed from Fremantle on a routine escort mission. The cruiser should have returned on the afternoon of 20 November, but failed to arrive. The disappearance of Sydney is one of the greatest maritime mysteries in Australian history. Many attempts have been made to unravel the sequence of events and answer the questions raised by this extraordinary episode. But no account has so far managed to deal convincingly with the problems and puzzles. Why did Sydney sink? Why was it lost without a trace? And why were there no survivors? Clue by clue, step by step, the author provides the most persuasive explanation proposed yet for the tragedy of HMAS Sydney. Wesley Olson's Bitter Victory: the death of HMAS Sydney, published in 2000, was a r-examination of the evidence, including comparisons with similar naval engagements and sinkings, which supported the accepted view of the battle. The Author, Mr. Olson, has done a superb job of researching the loss of HMAS Sydney. As the book was written before the discovery of both Sydney and Kormoran, it was more than a little interesting to see just how close many of the authors conclusions were - if not 100% accurate at least close enough - to the evidence provided by photographs of the wreck site. The battle between the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney and the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran was a single-ship action that occurred on 19 November 1941, off the coast of Western Australia. Sydney, with Captain Joseph Burnett commanding, and Kormoran, under Fregattenkapitän Theodor Detmers, encountered each other approximately 106 nautical miles (196 km; 122 mi) off Dirk Hartog Island. Both ships were destroyed in the half-hour engagement. From 24 November, after Sydney failed to return to port, air and sea searches were conducted. Boats and rafts carrying survivors from Kormoran were recovered at sea, while others made landfall north of Carnarvon: 318 of the 399 personnel on Kormoran survived. While debris from Sydney was found, there were no survivors from the 645-strong complement. It was the largest loss of life in the history of the Royal Australian Navy, the largest Allied warship lost with all hands during World War II, and a major blow to Australian wartime morale. Australian authorities learned of Sydney's fate from the surviving Kormoran personnel, who were held in prisoner of war camps until the end of the war. The exact location of the two wrecks remained unverified until 2008. Controversy has often surrounded the battle, especially in the years before the two wrecks were located in 2008. How and why a purpose-built warship like Sydney was defeated by a modified merchant vessel like Kormoran was the subject of speculation, with numerous books on the subject, as well as two official reports by government inquiries, published in 1999 and 2009 respectively. According to German accounts-which were assessed as truthful and generally accurate by Australian interrogators during the war, as well as most subsequent analyses-Sydney approached so close to Kormoran that the Australian cruiser lost the advantages of heavier armor and superior gun range. Nevertheless, several post-war publications have alleged that Sydney's loss had been the subject of an extensive cover-up, that the Germans had not followed the laws of war, that Australian survivors were massacred following the battle, or that the Empire of Japan had been secretly involved in the action (before officially declaring war in December). No evidence has been found to support any of these theories.