The Last Voyage of the Australian Submarine HMAS AE2
ANZAC Day Address 25th April 2010 RACV Club Melbourne
by Captain Paul A Willee RFD QC RANR (Rtd)
Many of the audience with an Army background have already questioned the propriety, if not the temerity, of a naval officer giving an ANZAC address. I can only cite this memorandum from the desk of the Almighty in my defence:
‘TO: All Former Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen
SUBJECT: Which Military Service Is the Best
1. All branches of the Armed Forces are honourable and noble.
2. Each serves their country well and with distinction.
3. Serving in the military represents a great honour warranting special respect, tribute, and dedication from your fellow man.
4. Always be proud of that.
(signed)
Warm regards,
GOD, RAN (Retired)’
In October 1911 King George V affixed his signature to the approval of the grant of the title ‘Royal Australian Navy’ to the Commonwealth Navy formed at Federation. Thus its ships and establishments became official entitled to use the prefix ‘His (or Her) Majesty's Australian Ship’ (HMAS).
Propitiously or not, as it has today, ANZAC day on 25 April 1915 fell on a Sunday. The army commenced its landings at dawn on that day. Some hours earlier at 02:30 an £115,000, 181 foot metal cylinder displacing 800 tons packed with three officers and 29 sailors set out to force the Dardanelles to enter the sea of Marmara. The Silent Anzac as it later became known was the first submarine and allied warship to succeed in doing so in a campaign which had been going on against the Ottoman Empire since 3 November 1914 before the declaration of the Great War. A campaign which up to that time had resulted in the loss of three allied battleships, the submarine E15 and severe damage to two Capital ships, a cruiser, and other significant fleet assets; all in return for just one very old battleship sunk and some significant damage to (but not the destruction of) a Turkish fort on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula.
This then is not just about the RAN’s contribution to the Anzac experience, or even how an Australian Submarine achieved what the whole British Fleet assembled for the same purpose could not. It is the story of how that contribution ignited the then guttering Anzac flame, and at the same time attached to the ANZACS the enduring nickname by which they became known as the ‘Diggers’.
Even before these events AE2 had created a record as the only Submarine to steam more than 200 miles continuously under its own power. It did so, on passage from Englandto Australia a distance of some 12,000 miles, although one source claims it was towed the last third of the distance.
Conditions on Board
In the context of AE2’s heroic achievements I hesitate to mention my still remembered albeit limited 10 day service in a British Submarine on loan to the RAN being harried day and night by two Daring class destroyers attempting to simulate successful depth charge attacks. Those boats known as T-birds after their Class were not as primitive as the E class. None the less their so called normal conditions of service were so indescribably vile as to persuade me to stay in the diving branch a nirvana by comparison. What it must have been like under fire beggars belief. That so called normality is rarely mentioned by those who served in the Boats in any polite society. Space was at such a premium that Hot Bunking was the norm for all sailors and most officers other than the Captain. That is as each man came off watch he got into the bunk of the person just going on duty. There was no space for additional afternoon kips. There were no showers or baths on board and the heads or lavatory had to be hand pumped out of the hull after each use with the appropriate use of valves. Inexperienced use under pressure resulted in very unhappy returns. Since it only became popular in my time for deodorant to be worn by real men, I assume BO to be a healthy contributor to the atmosphere. On board we couldn’t smell it but after even a short cruise coming alongside was so odiferous for those on shore that berthing parties had to be given some minutes to clear the wharf after tying up before a Boat’s hatches were opened to allow the crew to disembark.
In 1915, the 35 mile long heavily mined Dardanelles Straits hosted an adverse 5 knot current running back into the Med. It was narrow, and safe navigation required frequent surfacing. AE2 proceeded at 8 knots on the surface until illuminated by the searchlight at Kephez and heavily shelled. Submerged, its top speed on batteries was 10 knots. After scraping through the cables of the moored minefield AE2 surfaced only 2 miles from the famous narrows. It proceeded at periscope depth under heavy shellfire. The AE2 had no guns of any sort, only 8 torpedoes and 4 single tubes from which to fire them - one each in the bow, the stern and on either beam. Even so, its commander LCDR Stoker decided to attack a hulk but shifted target to a cruiser which steamed out from behind the hulk sinking it. At the same time he was forced to submerge to avoid being rammed by a TBD. While leaving the scene AE2 hit bottom sliding shoreward into 10 feet of water. Unsurprisingly, as its draft was 12.5 feet a considerable portion of the vessel protruded above the water when the boat came to rest below a shore based fort but so close, that its guns could not be depressed sufficiently to bear on the target. Stoker described the flash from the muzzle of the gun as almost reaching his periscope. After four minutes in this mini-maelstrom AE2 was refloated and slid back underwater heading in the wrong direction. While attempting to turn around at full speed on the port screw, he struck the Gallipoli bank and slid up under another fort. He was surrounded by watercraft and again open to receiving any incoming unfriendly fire. He literally drove AE2 off the bank bumping down its slope until he came off the bottom at 80 feet. Unable to use his periscope because of the enemy craft Stoker rounded Nagara Point by dead reckoning before making further observations when it was abaft the beam. He was ringed by enemy fire, surface craft, and two tugs closing, one on either bow with a wire stretched between them. No doubt well aware of the damage that could be inflicted on a submarine by a well towed wire, Stoker dived again. Having insufficient battery power to elude his pursuers before reaching the now close Marmora Sea he wisely decided to stay submerged for 16 hours on the bottom until nightfall, 80 feet down off Nagara Point on the opposite side of the straits.
AE2 was then attacked from the surface by some sort of towed object which enemy ships bumped across the bottom in an attempt to locate or damage the Boat. They had some success causing water to enter the engine space bilges. Because the oil in it was likely to betray the submarines position it could not be pumped out and had to be carried forward by buckets and dumped in other spaces to keep the Boat in trim. This treatment continued until 19:00. Two hours later Stoker judged it safe to surface and charge batteries while he entered the Marmara Sea.
Leave aside those who served in them without disclosing their constant nagging claustrophobia in such close confinement, which must have been heightened by the thoughts of a very large column of water above them; there being no satisfactory escape mechanisms devised until the Davis escape gear was adopted by the RN in 1929; the level of anxiety if not fear must have been palpable. Normally the air in a fully flushed submarine would be unbreathable after so long underwater at least by any personnel attempting normal evolutions.
At 04:00 on 26 April, AE2 unsuccessfully attacked one of two Turkish Battleships. This left him with 6 torpedoes. At 09:30 he encountered and attacked one of several vessels but the torpedo did not explode. During that day he tried to establish radio contact which he described as never having been successful. He found the lack of a gun most unhelpful and was constantly forced to submerge as the only means of defence. This pattern continued in the ensuing days of the cruise with torpedo engines failing to start, or near misses (one by as little as a yard as Stoker subsequently found out).
In the early evening of the 29th, AE2 down to its last torpedo, fell in with the RN submarine E14 commanded by Captain Boyle, who overrode Stoker's plan to sail to Constantinople and arranged to rendezvous with Stoker the next morning. When AE2 surfaced at about 10:00 it had to quickly submerge because of a nearby torpedo boat. Inexplicably, the AE2 lost control rapidly rising to the surface where it was attacked by gunfire. Another attempt to submerge failed because the vessel became uncontrollable and on re-surfacing the Boat was shelled and holed. The full ship’s compliment abandoned the Boat which was scuttled to protect its then relatively modern technology.
Welcomed ashore as captured POW’s these officers and men were promised favourable treatment. Instead they endured three and a half years of the sort of ill-treatment and privation only to be encountered in concentration camps. Three of them and four other submariners died in captivity. Several escaped more than once.
The Ship’s Company [1]
As I reflected earlier this month on this ANZAC tradition and marveled at the attention, some of it critical, that the media was giving it. I wondered who those men were and what they were really like. I will share with you my view that they were quite ordinary men of their time and even then of diverse national backgrounds and cultural levels which did not have a lot to do with rank. For example:
Stoker Petty Officer Henry James Elly Kinder RAN who joined at the age of 17 having ‘put up his age’, and was selected for submarine service four years later, completed the most amazing pieces of exquisitely worked fine embroidery on AE2’s long voyage out to Australia which his family still treasure. Unable or unwilling to speak or write about his experiences his diary ends abruptly after describing AE2’s passage through the narrows of the Dardanelles in April 1915: ‘In terror I counted 18 sets of scraping, menacing mine cables as I crouched in the darkness of the submarine . . .’. Yet he had the courage as AE2 was sinking to return to the vessel and retrieve important ship’s papers for Captain Stoker.
Only 14 of the 32 men of the Boat’s compliment were born in Australia. Of the rest 1 was a New Zealander another a Brazilian and the remainder were Irish and English specialist submariners lent to the RAN by the RN. That ethnic grouping is something to which all Australians can relate but particularly Victorian Australians [2]; adding another cohesive thread to the strong support of and connection with the ANZAC tradition exhibited by the generations of Australians now so far removed from the ANZAC battles in point of time and original ethnicity. Time only permits small snippets about some of them which in no way does them justice.
We have a particular affinity with the Irish in this country. The Captain of AE2 *Lieutenant Commander Henry Hugh Gordon Dacre Stoker was an Irishman who by age 23 had his first command and within 5 years thought to pursue a polo career in Australia before being lent to the RAN along with AE2 which he sailed to Sydney in company with AE1.He became a thespian of some note performing with Olivier and Gielgud after the war. It was he who was credited with bailing up the Minister for Defence behind the Speakers chair in the House of Representatives and persuading him to send AE2 back to Europe after the tragic loss of AE1.
So too was*Lieutenant/Commander John Pitt Cary RN/RAN an Irishman. No submariner but an expert hydrographer, map-maker and draughtsman the third officer who joined AE2 in January 1915. Apparently a dry wit, he had this to say in a letter to Miss Chomley of the Red Cross in 1918 during his confinement at Afion Kara Hissar prison camp, with his fellow officers:
“Dear Miss Chomley, I have just received your letter of May 28th. I regret to state that I was not wounded. In my prolonged visit to this country I have put my knee out once, I don’t know the medical term, but it’s my left knee and something to do with a semi-lunar cartilege. I am also at this moment recovering from a serious attack of the Spanish Grip, and in consequence am slightly deaf: this I think will yield to treatment. If you can get me exchanged, please do, but it is no good my being medically examined as they only laugh at me. Home sickness and incipient lunacy are really my main illnesses.”
He returned to Australia after the war and spent several years charting the Torres Strait region on the Merlin, before serving again in WWII.
But no Royal Naval officer forged greater ties with Australia than the First Lieutenant *Lieutenant/Commander Geoffrey Arthur Gordon Haggard, DSC RN/RAN.The connections with this ANZAC are common to all members of the Naval and Military Club through our association with his daughter the charming Jenny Smyth and her late husband Commodore Dacre Smyth a life member of that Club. I very much regret that Jenny could not be here today but I had a wonderfully enriching conversation with her last week which breathed life into the loving account of that which she had written in her first book about her father and his courtship of her mother. Her second book contains a much fuller account of his part in the eventful cruises of AE2. One to which I could not possibly do justice in this short account or perhaps at all. He was the nephew and Godson of Sir Rider Haggard the famous novelist. Haggard was accepted into the Royal Naval Training College despite suffering childhood asthma. It has been said that the surrender of AE2 was a moment of great personal anguish. His general and submarine experience was extensive, and included postings to HMS Britannia (1903), Isis, Implacable (1905), Swiftsure, Excellent (1908), Foam and Mercury, before he transferred in 1910 to submarines in search of more adventure, first on B2, then B11 in 1911, and then AE2 in 1915
In the prison camp, Haggard joined Stoker and fellow officers in working hard to keep up morale. They formed an amateur theatrical group, for which Haggard wrote, and acted in, productions. For the most part, Haggard coped well with prison life, until the end of 1916 when Bimbashi Musloum Bey, targeted Haggard asserting that Haggard seemed likely to try to escape, the commandant had him arrested, gave him a mock trial then locked him up in a small dark building which was strictly guarded and cut off from all communication. News of the behaviour of this individual was finally leaked to the Turkish authorities and he was removed from his post. Jenny Smyth says that during this terrible period of solitary confinement her father feared for his sanity: “all he had to read was a tin that had contained plum jam. He forced himself to read its label over and over again to keep his mind alive.”
Worse still for Haggard was that he was considered to be English and so missed out on the Red Cross parcels and money that came via the RAN representative in London and also overlooked by the British. This bureaucratic bungling seriously affected Haggard who had become weak and run-down following a bout of malaria, and devastated by the news that his only and younger brother Major (Rider) Lancelot Haggard had been killed in action at Passchendaele.
On 24 April 1919 Haggard was awarded a DSC in recognition of his gallantry on AE2 during the passage of the Dardanelles. After the war, he was keen to remain in RN submarines but after examination by the Admiralty, refused further service in submarines He retired at his own request on 27 November 1920, when he was offered the post of aide-de-camp to the Earl of Stradbroke, who was Governor of Victoria. Haggard accepted the post and returned to Australia.
In September 1923 he married Marjory Syme, daughter of David Syme, of the Age and became a successful country squire,
By 1939 he was seeking to be taken back into the RAN refused, but accepted by the RN on 10 October, stating ominously that he would be posted to the British Naval Base at Singapore. Daughter Jenny Smyth recounts: “That evening he was walking back home along the railway track after celebrating his call-up. As a train approached, the heel of his boot caught in the track. The train just missed him, but a rock thrown up by the wheel of the engine hit him in the temple and he was killed instantly.” Haggard left a very young grieving widow and a family of three small children.
To *Able Seaman; Albert Edward Knaggs RN/RAN 7893 belongs the honour of the only contemporaneous record of diary of events contained in a very small notebook with almost microscopic writing. His shipmates’ diaries were all written after the war. Knaggs was moved from camp to camp and given the most arduous of tasks. He described the conditions of the POW’s in Constantinople as; 'Nearly eaten alive with bugs and lice before supplied with soldier suites (sic), overcoats, slippers and red fezes, marched through the streets of Constantinople to a prison and given food not fit for pigs . . . heads shaved like criminals.' He died in the makeshift camp hospital at Belemedik on 22 October 1916.
Chief Petty Officer Harry Abbott, DSM RN/RAN coxswain of the AE2, one of the oldest crew members was officially lent by the RN to the RAN. At Belemedik, Abbott became the paymaster for all the AE2 crew, as well as their guardian. The money was delivered to the men only through the ingenuity of the RAN representative in London at that time, Captain Francis Haworth Booth who“discovered that there was a Firm in the City who had a Branch in Constantinople, with some special influence with the US Embassy and some ‘Dead Money’ unuseable in Turkey or get out of the country, and that they were glad to effect remittances to prisoners, as long as the funds at their disposal permitted”. Abbott also tried to shield his men. When two Australian submariners, Thomson and Gywnne, escaped. The Turks were deceived despite nightly head counts. Two men coming from the night shift took their place for the counting. It was said and no doubt was true that this dangerous gamble by Abbott, demonstrated real courage.
Able Seaman/Chief Petty Officer Cecil Arthur Bray RAN who was born at Bourke NSW, on 3 April 1890 grew up in government welfare homes and foster family homes was one of Australia’s longest-serving submariners. His illustrated diary recorded that the name of one of the prison camps: Belemedik, ‘Bele’ stood for ‘No’ and ‘Medik’ for ‘Place’ was appropriate for the desolate prison high in the bleak Taurus Mountains.
On 22 March 1965 Bray received a letter from a very elderly Stoker, who described to him a recent speech by the reigning Flag Officer Submarines who presiding over a particular ex-submariners’ dinner, during which the Polaris submarines were said to be of 7000 tons displacement. A reminder of how incredibly big most of the crew thought the E boat was at 700 tons. It wished him good luck for his 75th Birthday on 3 April 1965.
The News Goes Out
When the AE2 first surfaced near the narrows on 25 April after passing through the minefields I mentioned its attempt to send a radio message back to the fleet of which there was no acknowledgement. In fact it had got through. The Allied landings on the Gallipoli peninsular had been met with such stiff resistance that commanders on the spot requested that the whole force be withdrawn. That request was considered in a midnight conference held on the flagship Queen Elizabeth to decide whether to withdraw the troops off the peninsular.
It was a near run thing but when the message finally reached that conference the effect was electrifying. On the verge of disaster General Sir Ian Hamilton was able to release his now famous message:
“Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out. It would take at least two days to re-embark you, as Admiral Thursby will explain to you. Meanwhile the Australian submarine has got up through the Narrows and has torpedoed a gunboat at Chanak. P S You have got through the difficult business. Now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.” (If only they had known)
The news of the AE2's achievement reached the Diggers struggling to maintain the beachhead and they erected a notice on a shell-shattered stump on the hillside: 'Australian sub AE2 just through the Dardanelles. Advance Australia'.
The Achievement
This was not the only achievement of AE2. Its voyage to Marmara was a success in that Stoker managed to engage Turkish vessels en route and sink them, and succeeded in strafing coastal positions. From the early hours of 26 April when AE2 eventually entered the sea of Marmara, as ordered by the concluding words of his orders, Captain Stoker proceeded to ‘run amok’ attacking shipping . Regrettably he was let down by defective torpedoes and only managed to sink one cruiser but the very presence of the Boat achieved the objective of his orders of disrupting Turkish troop movement and supplies across the Marmara to Gallipoli and forcing the Turks to go the long way round to supply their troops opposing the ANZACS.
It opened the way to the Sea of Marmara and the one significant offensive success of the Battle of Gallipoli. Between April 1915 and January 1916, nine British submarines sank two obsolete battleships and one destroyer, five gunboats, nine troop transports, seven supply ships, 35 steamers and 188 assorted smaller vessels at a cost of total of 8 Allied submarines which were sunk in the strait or in the Sea of Marmara. The Turks were forced to abandon the Marmara as a transport route.
AE2’s *Telegrapher William Wolseley Falconer; RAN the man who sent the vital message was born on 14 October 1892 at Richmond, Victoria. When you consider the fact that AE2’s wireless mast was wooden and collapsible onto the deck, his feat in getting it up, and getting a message through under fire was a monumental achievement. It has been said of his conduct that: “If one man could claim to have influenced the course of history with a single deed, it would be AE2’s telegrapher William Falconer.” That is what justifies me saying that if he had failed there might not have been any more to report of the Gallipoli campaign than a truly bloody series of battles and the withdrawal of the whole force. His message hitting the meeting at the time of that decision ensured in it remaining on the peninsular and without it the Anzac legend might have been considerably shorter.
The Impact Today
For 3 years on this day while I had the honour of being President of the Naval and Military Club I also had the extraordinary privilege of attending the Dawn Service on the upper gallery of the Shrine of Remembrance looking down to the centrepiece of the interior and outside to the packed mass of people on the forecourt. In each of those years I witnessed a remarkable event. Each year the number of people present almost doubled from 4 to 8 and then 12 thousand persons. I can only assume that it is the not so obvious power of that connection between ordinary Australian civilians who are not of Anglo Irish or English extraction or even of any substantial military connection with the tradition of ANZAC but who are so affected by the depth and strength with which it is ingrained in our society that even without that background they don’t want to be left out - they want to be part of it.
Today as it has for many years now that inclusiveness is even shared as much with our comrades in arms and our friends as with our one time Turkish foe. Just another bulwark to support the spirit in which we celebrate the ANZAC reality. The recent critics of it, so busy in the press trying to improve their academic credentials or justifying their insecurity at not being able to claim to be part of it, entirely miss the point of ANZAC. It is powerful national and local unifying force. It is not the celebration of a monumental defeat but the commemoration of a magnificent and unselfish gift by those who fought and fell or were left scarred for life in mind and body.
To me that is a great victory the evidence of which is all around me on this day, in their memory, in your presence and in my freedom to assert that this monumental sacrifice was the start of the victory which allows us now to claim that part of Gallipoli as our own, which we tried to take by force and, which the Turkish people so graciously allow us to adorn with our memorials and an annual commemorative service.
[1] Not all members of the ships’ company outlined in this original text were mentioned in the prepared address delivered which was perforce truncated due to time constraints. The author believes he referred at least to those asterisked.
[2] In the crowd, on my way back from the march this morning, I was accosted by a fully uniformed tram Conductor, circa I guessed about the 1950’s or 60’s. From his leather change bag he was dispensing pennies which as we know went out of circulation in 1966. He said he had been trying to get rid of them since decimalization in 1966. How utterly Australian, how uniquely Victorian I thought.