Fresh hunt for World War I submarine AE1 lost off PNG
The search is on for AE1, a submarine missing since the earliest days of World War I off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
When, in early 1914, Able Seaman James Thomas of the Royal Navy got the chance to join the AE1 and help sail it from England to Australia, he thought he’d hit the jackpot.
The submarine, Australia’s first, had been built only months earlier by the British weapons manufacturer Vickers, at Barrow-in-Furness in England, and represented the leading edge of technology in a new and possibly decisive weapon of war.
It had a just-developed gyroscopic inertial navigation system and could dive about 100 feet without being crushed by the pressure of the ocean.
But that wasn’t all that joining the AE1 meant for Thomas, an Englishman who had a wife, Emma, and two young children.
The AE1 was the family’s ticket to Australia; he would migrate with the vessel and set up a new life in its home base, Sydney.
Of the AE1’s crew, nearly half were Australian, but the rest, including its captain, Lieutenant Commander Thomas Besant, were British, apart from one New Zealander.
Like the other 34 men on the AE1, when he joined the submarine the Royal Australian Navy presented Thomas with what’s known as a “sweetheart brooch”, a pennant with the name of the vessel embossed on it.
He would have proudly given it to Emma before taking to sea for the antipodes.
Thomas and the AE1, accompanied by its sister submarine AE2, arrived in Sydney on May 24, 1914, and he moved into a house in Petersham Road, Marrickville, ready to receive his wife and children who were to follow in the coming months.
Emma and the children booked a passage on a ship in September that year, no doubt excited about rejoining their husband and father in a sunny new land.
But when the ship arrived in Sydney, Thomas was not at the dock — a family friend was there to greet the new arrivals with terrible news.
“The friend had to tell Emma, ‘James is missing’,” maritime archaeologist James Hunter told The Australian.
The AE1 marked Australia’s first big setback in World War I.
On September 14, 1914, it did not return from a patrol hunting for Imperial German Navy warships in the waters of what was then German New Guinea, which an Australian naval expeditionary force had started to capture for the allies in the first weeks of the war.
Thomas, the other 34 members of the crew and the AE1 are still missing, but that could change within the next fortnight, possibly as early as today.
One-hundred-and-three years after it vanished without a trace somewhere in the waters off the archipelago of islands that make up Papua New Guinea, a new hunt is under way for the AE1.
The search vessel Fugro Equator is on station in the search area in the Duke of York Island group.
The plan was that it would stay absolutely stationary yesterday to allow the GPS systems to calibrate a precise location.
Then, possibly today, the crew are to deploy some sophisticated technology to try to find AE1.
The Fugro Equator will launch an autonomous underwater vehicle, a torpedo-like robot that can be programmed to run a search pattern, darting around on its own under the sea.
The AUV has side-scan sonar and a multi-beam echo sounder that can produce three-dimensional images.
Just for good measure, the ship itself has a high-definition camera that is pointed straight down.
According to Hunter, who is the Australian National Maritime Museum’s curator of RAN maritime archaeology, if the AE1 is in the search zone, they’ll find it.
“I think we have a very good chance,” he says.
The Fugro Equator was one of the vessels involved in the failed Australian government-led search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. That search didn’t find the aircraft but it did find a couple of shipwrecks at great depth, producing some amazingly detailed photographs of them from the sonar imaging.
The general view is that the technology in the MH370 search was first class but the Boeing 777 was simply not in the 120,000sq km survey zone.
The dominant opinion in the professional aviation community is that the search failed because the Australian Transport Safety Bureau had the wrong theory — it maintained that MH370 was a “ghost flight” with incapacitated pilots at the end and crashed down rapidly after running out of fuel. Many senior airline pilots and top air crash investigators believe a rogue pilot hijacked his own aircraft and flew it to the end, ditching it in the sea.
The MH370 case goes to a fundamental point about the hunt for AE1: no matter how good the technology, you can’t find a wreck if you look in the wrong place. And to determine the right place to look, you have to have the right theory of what happened.
Hunter believes the collaborative team that determined the search area has come up with the right theory.
This two-week search, costing $1 million financed jointly by the federal government and a collection of corporate donors assembled by the chairman of the maritime museum’s foundation, John Mullen, who is also the chairman of Telstra, is a combined effort.
The team that devised the search strategy was composed of maritime archaeologists like Hunter, RAN officers, naval historians and also retired submariners.
“We have done our homework,” Hunter said. “We have looked at everything. We have come down to a very specific plan.”
There have been several hunts for the AE1, starting with an almost immediate search by Australian warships when it failed to return as ordered to Rabaul by 8 o’clock on the night of the patrol.
In the 1970s, a RAN officer working in Port Moresby, John Foster, became interested in the story and started studying wartime records.
Foster convinced the RAN to deploy the survey ship HMAS Flinders in 1976 to search for the submarine. It made one sonar contact but it was inconclusive.
It seems almost everyone has had a go at trying to find AE1: in 1990 the famous French underwater explorer, Jacques Cousteau, diverted his ship Calypso to look into the contact recorded by the Flinders but had no luck.
A whole series of searches by Australian and New Zealand naval vessels since then has yielded no result. All it has come up with are lots of false starts such as a vessel being identified as a submarine but which turned out to be a Japanese miniature model.
One of the most fascinating failed searches involved a theory based on the reported sighting in local folklore of an enormous “devil fish”.
The Mioko Island native people of the German colony, Hunter says, were terrorised when modern war came to their doorstep and the Australian ships started shelling German positions.
“They fled to the coast where they had caves,” Hunter related. “While they were there, they saw a devil fish come out of the water. Then it stopped, it went back, then it went back under the water. They thought it was a demon.”
In determining where to hunt this time, Hunter says, the team has studied the previous searches carefully, gone back to the basics of what was known about the AE1’s last orders and movements and reviewed various theories.
An apocryphal report that it was engaged by a German vessel was excluded as myth.
The premise of this search strategy is that something went wrong during a dive, and rather than the submarine imploding under pressure as it sank below crush depth, water entered the pressure hull at the start, causing it to sink.
“There are some clues worth noting,” Hunter says.
The initial search by the Australian warships in the days after AE1 disappeared was very thorough. “They found no debris, no bodies, no oil slicks,” Hunter says.
Had the submarine imploded, those sorts of markers would probably have been found.
The crew of the AE1 was still relatively green, Hunter says, and records indicate they may have only done about six dives.
In submarines — particularly the early ones — getting a dive right is tricky; there is a precise sequence of closing hatches and valves and opening ballast tanks.
The theory the search team is working on, Hunter says, is that “somewhere along that chain, somebody forgot to do something, or a mistake was made”, and water entered the pressure hull, progressively sinking the boat.
“If it’s true, that’s good news, because in theory, it’s going to be intact,” Hunter says.
One variant of this theory relates to the last known contacts with the AE1.
The AE1 and the destroyer HMAS Parramatta had both deployed from Rabaul, the town and port just seized from the Germans, with orders to patrol around the Duke of York Island group.
They made a rendezvous in foggy conditions in the afternoon of September 14 and the crew of the submarine sent a last signal — Hunter thinks probably by bull horn — asking, “What is the distance of visibility?”, to which Parramatta’s crew replied, “About five miles.”
While patrolling independently, because of the fog Parramatta’s captain, Lieutenant WHF Warren, decided he should not lose sight of the submarine for too long and periodically headed back towards it.
But about an hour after the last signal, he did lose sight of the AE1 and steamed in the direction it was headed but did not see it again.
One theory is that in the fog, AE1’s crew might have seen Parramatta creeping up on them, mistaken it for a German warship thought to be in the area, and made a rapid dive and botched it by not closing a hatch or valve properly, for example.
Interestingly, Hunter said, this search will be going mainly over unexplored territory, though there would be some overlap with earlier searches.
Precisely where the Fugro Equator is searching is being kept confidential — if it’s found, the searchers do not want to tip off the location for fear that scavengers will dive on it and loot it, as has happened with some other Australian naval wrecks.
There would be no thought of trying to recover the AE1 if it is found, but with modern technology it can be thoroughly documented in situ.
“We now have the ability to do three-dimensional laser scans underwater,” Hunter says.
Beyond that, though, “we don’t want to disturb it, we don’t want to do anything on it. It is, after all, the final resting place of the crew.”
And that is the key to the motivation of the mission: the participants, including Defence Minister Marise Payne, have said the real point is to not give up looking for the 35 men who gave their lives for Australia.
Sydneysider Vera Ryan’s uncle, John Messenger, a fitter and turner from Ballarat, was an engine room artificer on the AE1.
She says the purpose of the search for her and the other descendants is, of course, to provide closure on how and where they perished.
But she says it is also about sending a message to submariners.
“It is saying, if there is such an event again we will find you so that your families will have that peace of mind that they need.”
In the maritime museum in Sydney, the public is soon going to be able to see, for the first time, some things with a special connection to the AE1. The medals of Able Seaman Thomas recently showed up for auction and the museum grabbed them. The three medals were awarded posthumously to the members of the crew and given to their families.
But in the same lot was the “sweetheart brooch” that Thomas would have given Emma before he sailed away for Australia, never to be seen by his wife and young children again.
Arriving to find herself a war widow, Emma and the children nonetheless stayed and settled in Australia.
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