Word: kormoran
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...namesake city were given a public holiday to watch her crew parade through the streets. "She was a beautiful ship, a well-experienced ship," says Ean McDonald, a former Sydney signaler. But on Nov. 19, off the coast of Western Australia, she encountered a German raider, the Kormoran. What happened next will never be known for certain, but both ships sank. The Kormoran was scuttled and more than 300 of its 400 crew were rescued or washed ashore. The Sydney and all aboard it were lost. The exact locations of both ships were a mystery...
...predicted location was out by just three nautical miles. Yet his results lay untouched for years as funding and technological limitations hobbled the search effort. Eventually, however, Kirsner's work and research by Mearns using the diary of the Kormoran's captain convinced government to put up more than $4 million for the search, says Ted Graham. "No one had looked in this particular area before - and the technology, the funding and the expertise had not been available until now." Former signaler McDonald, who suspects details of the battle were hushed up at the time, says he won't believe...
...Mearns' team set sail in the Geosounder in early March to tackle a search zone of 1,800 square nautical miles between Carnarvon and Geraldton. After weathering technical problems and a cyclone, on March 12 it transmitted the startling news: the Kormoran had been found. Four days later, the Sydney was located. Graham's fellow Foundation director Glenys McDonald, who was on board, said: "I went up to the back deck and leaned over the railing and cried and gave thanks...
...Science deserve much of the credit. Retired meteorologist Len van Burgel's task was to provide wind data from that long-ago November to help trace where debris from the Kormoran, found drifting days after the battle, could have come from. With no ocean wind reports available from that time, van Burgel dug through archives and extrapolated from land weather charts, then used computers and satellite imagery to model 1941 conditions. When the three approaches yielded similar results, he says, "we thought we were on to a good thing." Drift specialists could then identify where the German ship was likely...
...Both were near where Kormoran survivors had told interrogators they would be. In the 1990s, Perth naval-history buff Kim Kirsner sifted through those accounts and came up with possible coordinates. But many people were reluctant to believe the enemy, he says. The Germans stood accused of luring the Sydney with a white flag, sinking her and shooting at her crew in the water. There was "always a chorus in the background," says Kirsner, "that the Germans lied...
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