Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Oceanliner Designs" channel.

It's a poignant video, but I know about the history of HMAS Sydney II from David Mearns book about it. It was a remarkable discovery of his salvage crew when the submersible robot found the wreck at the enormous depth the Sydney was resting (the Kormoran wreck was also discovered by his salvage crew). The Australian nation was deeply shocked once the missing ship had been reported sunk by the surviving German crew of the Kormoran, rescued along with the captain off the Western Australian coast. As it turns out, missing with all hands is kind of rare, even for a sunken warship in battle. However, a similar fate belonged to the RN battlecruiser HMS Hood, when a chance salvo from the battleship Bismarck found the Hood's forward magazine and it violently exploded, with all hands lost bar 3 sailors. The shock and disbelief in Britain was similarly expressed months later in Australia with the loss of HMAS Sydney with all hands of a decorated ship, with the loss impact on the much smaller Royal Australian Navy and relations of her lost crew keenly felt. Thus, the tragic losses and heartbreaks of war. This spawned all sorts of conspiracy theories about the sinking of Sydney after WW2 (before David Mearns find), such as a third involved ship such as a Japanese submarine secretly firing torpedos at Sydney in concert with the Kormoran gun battle (more or less ignoring the torpedo tubes that Kormoran carried and reported fired by Detmers). The wreck of the Sydney vindicated Detmers, more or less, accurate account of the battle and scotched any such rumours of Japan attacking an Australian warship before the Pearl Harbor attack.
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There wasn't much crew left after the Kormoran kept raking the decks of the Sydney with gunfire at point blank range. Perhaps the auxially engine of the Sydney kept this ship under way until the bow fell apart. Immediately after which the Sydney would have sank under a minute, taking the few remaining crew with her.
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Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were battlecruisers, not battleships, i.e they were a little undergunned in calibre with 11" main guns, most battleships had 14" guns or bigger in that era, her main belt armour was 50mm thick, thin for battleships at that time, although her 105mm sloped longitudinal armour might have classified her as a battleship. For example modern mid-1930s RN battleships, e.g King George V class had 137mm main armour over machinery spaces. However, Scharnhorst alone was a deadly opponent one-on-one for any warship less than battlecruiser class. The HMS Ramupindi, a converted ocean liner auxillary cruiser, did not stand a chance.
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The tragically heroic loss of HMS Jervis Bay to save an important convoy was legendary, but it is also a incidement of the RN Admiralty in the importance of defending Britain's most important lifeline to stay in the war. The Admiralty, despite the losses of U-boats from World War 1 was underprepared by a paucity of destroyers and corvettes to deal with the U-boat threat threat early in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, the Admiral Sheer was built precisely for that purpose deployed when she ambushed the large trans-Atlantic convoy, HX 84. The liner was Australian, as was her captain, but her valiant merchant marine crews came from all over the Commonwealth, notably Bermuda, Scotland and Canada. The lack of cruiser warships by the RN and her allies needing to fight a war in two theaters (North Atlantic and Mediterranean at that time) to escort large convoys was a factor in her demise. The RAN would do well to name a permanent naval vessel after her. Particularly a supply or transport ship.
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All war is bad, all deaths are felt by friends or loved ones. It's a terrible story, but so are the nuclear weapons bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same war. I don't have confidence in the common sense of human beings will prevail, we are all at risk of massive military conflicts happening again. Politicians and supreme power should never be trusted by ordinary people.
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