Questions remain over Australia’s greatest maritime mystery
INVESTIGATIONS into the wreck of Australia’s first submarine have revealed how the 35 crew on board died, but raised many more questions about one of the nation’s worst maritime disasters.
National
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THEIR end came quickly but questions over the fate of the crew of Australia’s first submarine that sank in 1914 remain unanswered with another underwater expedition being planned to solve what has been described as the nation’s greatest maritime mystery.
For 100 years the fate of the HMAS AE1 and its 35-man crew — which vanished off the coast of Papua New Guinea at the outbreak of war in 1914 — was unknown. But a Federal Government backed mission in December last year located the submarine on the sea floor off the Duke of York Islands on the way back to its base in Rabaul.
But while its finding debunked some of the more spurious claims, including that by a German POW at the time that she was sunk by a German steamer, the team behind the AE1 said 70 critical questions of her fate remained unanswered.
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Rear Admiral Peter Briggs (ret) said today there was no doubt the submarine came to a catastrophic end as it dropped to a depth of more than 100m, well below its operating depth of 30m, with the deep plunge causing a crush and a swift end for the crew.
He said from evidence the hydroplanes were set hard to rise and the crew would have been working frantically to get her to the surface, hampered as they were by a known fact the AE1 had only one working prop shaft, but they would not have suffered a slow death on the sea floor.
“The crush would have been somewhere between 90m and 120m we estimate and there is not much margin for error at that depth, it would have been going quite quickly … things would have unfolded quite quickly, the actual explosion I describe would have almost been like a truck bomb in the control room, a huge energy event which would have produced a major shockwave and would have killed the crew instantly,” Adm. Briggs said.
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He said the full report, presented to 75 descendants of the crew and the PNG and Australian governments which will now designate the site as a war grave and ensure it is protected, offered “knowledgeable speculation” but 70 questions his team had created needed to be answered.
That would include why the submarine lost control and whether all the hatches were closed at the time it dived; a question mark remained over whether human error or a badly sealing hatch led the submarine to sink.
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He said the deployed Autonomous Underwater Vehicle that made the breakthrough discovery provided solid overhead images to analyse but a more manoeuvred image and video gathering around the wreck would provide a huge amount more evidence.
“For that survey we have a list of about 70 questions coming from looking at the wreck … we hope to examine particular areas to be able to answer those questions,” he said.
“Once we turned to the engineers, naval architecture and the scientists the questions flowed pretty quickly.”
He said the number one question would be the state of the lower conning tower hatch — whether it was open or shut and whether the submarine had just dived when tragedy struck.
The search for HMAS AE1 was supported by the Royal Australian Navy, Silentworld Foundation, the Australian National Maritime Museum, the Submarine Institute of Australia, Fugro Survey, and the Government of Papua New Guinea.
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