Hollywood’s ‘recollections’ of the events of the first week of Dec 1941 notwithstanding, the attack on Pearl Harbo(u)r was little more than a sideshow. The main Japanese attack was on Malaya and the Philippines, and the timing was based around catching the Brits and the Yanks with their pants down early on Monday morning, Dec 8th, after another dissipated weekend. (With Hawaii being on the other side of the international dateline, where it was still Sunday, Dec 7th, this seems to confuse may people into thinking the attacks on Hawaii preceded the invasion of Malaya, which isn’t so. The Japanese had landed just north of the Thai border and attacked Kota Bahru in Malaya on the Sunday night, before they attacked Pearl Harbo(u)r.
My point for this pocket history lesson? I understand that the first Allied casualty of the Pacific war was an Australian PBY whose crew had sighted and reported the invasion fleet steaming south from Vietnam and off the Thai coast on the Sunday afternoon. They were promptly shot down by supporting Zeros, long before the war ‘officially’ started.
There are some who maintain that the first major casualty of the Pacific war actually occurred two weeks earlier, when HMAS Sydney, the Australian cruiser, was lost with all hands off the West Australian coast when it encountered the German merchant cruiser Kormoran. (For those not familiar with the term, a merchant cruiser was a cargo ship converted to be an armed raider, an unlikely winner in an encounter with a major warship, even if it did get the first salvo in.)
There have been allegations almost from the start that a (then neutral) Japanese submarine might have been involved in the engagement, possibly surprised by Sydney when rendezvousing with the Kormoran for who knows what purpose. There have been books published pooh poohing these allegations and ‘proving’ that Sydney’s captain was a reckless fool whose past performance suggested that he might well have sailed right up alongside the disguised raider and presented himself as an unmissable target. (The Naval version of ‘pilot error’?) This of course begs the question: what were the Sea Lords or their Australian equivalent thinking putting such a man in charge of Australia’s best ship?
Over 300 of the German crew survived, but not one Australian, and the only trace of Sydney ever found was a bullet-riddled life raft – and the bullet holes were clearly from small arms, not shrapnel. The raft is now on show at the Australian War Memorial.
I believe the people who found the ‘Titanic’ and the ‘Bismarck’ have ‘Sydney’ on their list of wrecks to locate and photograph. If and when they find it, it could re-write history, although in this day of Political Correctness, I’d be guessing that if these allegations were found to be true, they would be still too hard to swallow, and my money would be on the Australian Government sitting on any unpalatable findings in the interests of brotherly love among nations – to say nothing of tourism and trade.