The forgotten fears that sent a young man off to sea

By Geoffrey Blainey
October 23, 2005

Australia's last WWI veteran knew only too well the perils of our geography.

THE nation's pride — and those officials who organise symbolic funerals — would have been satisfied if the last of our World War I warriors had once served at Gallipoli or on the Western Front. Instead the final veteran of active service, Evan Allan, who died last week at the age of 106, was a sailor.

Nobody called him Digger. He did not see the inside of a frontline trench or hear the noise of a German howitzer.

But it is appropriate that he should be the last of the last. To those who were alive and alert in 1914, when the so-called Great War began, the navy was the symbol of Australia's hopes and fears. The war was widely expected to be decided by battles at sea. Some of the naval battles, it was predicted, would be fought on Australian seas.

The seas, however, have been largely forgotten. Armies, and the European battlefields, are now recalled as all-important. Perhaps that is why some historians argue that Australia had no business fighting in the war of 1914-18, and, least of all, to be fighting in Europe and Asia Minor.

Australia was hoodwinked, so they say, and should have remained neutral!

Chief Petty Officer Allan would have disagreed. He knew what we have forgotten. He knew his geography.

Australia's livelihood was endangered on the eve of the war. Germany had almost matched Britain in building the latest warships. Germany's navy held the potential to arrive out of the blue, isolate Melbourne and Sydney, and cut the nation's trade routes.

While Britain still owned the world's largest navy, it was incapable of defending all its colonies.

Indeed, Britain's policy in 1914 was to concentrate its naval forces in the northern hemisphere. Australia, therefore, relied primarily on its own new navy to defend its trade and convoy routes, with help from Japan's expanding navy.

In the western and central Pacific, Germany possessed a strategic chain of wireless stations and naval bases. Rabaul in the present Papua New Guinea was a German harbour; the island of Bougainville was German; Guam, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Nauru and Western Samoa were German. The normal sea lane from Sydney to Japan and North China passed through a large zone of what could be called German seas.

The Germans also held a naval force in their Chinese colony of Tsingtao (Qingdao). Indeed, from that port in August 1914 the armed cruiser Emden set out on one of the most remarkable raiding voyages in history. From that same port, Admiral von Spee and his East Asia squadron sailed south for destinations unknown and for weeks its whereabouts was unknown and a source of intense worry in Australia. Eventually it appeared off the coast of Chile, where it sank two British cruisers.

On the opening day of World War I most Australians understood that they were fighting not only for the Empire but for their own future. The insecurity of Thursday Island, which commanded the entrance to Torres Strait, was an early fear.

The opening battle fought by Australians was at Rabaul, where the mast of the German wireless station, almost completed and more powerful than any in this continent, was toppled by shots fired from a fleet consisting of most of Australia's navy. The first Australian battle deaths were not at Gallipoli but at Rabaul in September 1914.

Curiously, if the German warships had remained a danger in Australian seas, and if Thursday Island had been temporarily captured, or the ports of Townsville or Albany had been heavily shelled, then the sailing away to Egypt of the first AIF might have been delayed. The first months of the war were laced with ifs and buts, now mostly forgotten.

Naval warfare, devastating in the North Atlantic and the North Sea, continued intermittently in Australian waters. In July 1917 the cargo ship Cumberland, bound for Melbourne, was one of four vessels crippled by a fresh German minefield laid off Gabo Island, near the NSW-Victorian border.

Sailor Allan, not quite 18, saw some of the wreckage. He was in the crew of the Australian light cruiser Encounter, sent to search for the German raider that had laid the mines.

The fighting at Gallipoli in 1915, and in France thereafter, became the crux of this nation's war effort. The land battles and their massive casualties caught the imagination of later generations.

The vast military cemeteries have come to epitomise the war, incidentally giving rise to the hypothesis that the whole war should have been of no concern to Australia.

The hypothesis is daft. It would have amused Evan Allan. His generation of Australians saw the importance of the sea lanes.

Geoffrey Blainey's latest book, Short History of the Twentieth Century, is published by Penguin/Viking.
