HMS Lancaster sails for three years forward-deployed in the Gulf HMS Lancaster has left Portsmouth Naval Base for a three-year deployment to the Gulf. Photo: HMS Lancaster/Twitter HMS Lancaster sailed today Monday 15th August from Portsmouth and will not return home for three years, being forward-deployed in the Middle East and based in Bahrain. HMS […]
When the War broke out I was on exchange with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean as a very lowly Midshipman. We immediately sailed for our war station in Simonstown in South Africa. Our main task was to keep lookout for two German Battlecruisers, namely the Graf Sree and the Scheer which had sailed from […]
US Ambassador John Berry lays a wreath commemorating the Battle of the Coral Sea on the bow of museum ship HMAS Vampire. Veterans and members of the Australian and the American Militaries, Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen: On May 8, 1942, the Allied strategic victory of the Coral Sea changed the course of history. Without […]
ANNUAL COMMEMORATION AND LUNCH SYDNEY, 7 MAY 2016 Address by Rear Admiral James Goldrick AO CSC RAN at the Australian National Maritime Museum Sydney We think of the face of naval battle as grey warships on a blue horizon, with the flash of guns and the splash of shells. We imagine it as very frightening […]
By LCDR Desmond Woods, RANR Karl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the realm of uncertainly. The lived experience of war at sea bears this out. Ships like people can be the Victims of Circumstances, not of their making. So it is with the story of the RAN’s Heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra. It […]
Frederick Norton Cook joined the Royal Australian Naval College as a Cadet Midshipman in 1919. In 1936 he served as Flag Lieutenant to the Fleet Commander, Rear Admiral WTR Ford CB, onboard HA/L4S Canberra and on promotion to Lieutenant Commander in 1936 he was posted to the destroyer HMAS Waterhen as First Lieutenant, Executive and Gunnery Officer. In 1938 he was sent […]
By Mike Rossiter Reviewed by Kevin Rickard It was just before dawn in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945 when a bright flash filled the pre-dawn with a penetrating daylight. Next there was a huge shock wave as a great purplish column rose up into the sky, then there was a blast, duller […]
byTom de Voil, Nicholson VIC I was MEO of HMAS Duchess in 1972 and we were secured alongside in the Stores Basin in Singapore when it was similarly busy. We decided to hold an Engineering Departmental banyan on Seletar Island that Saturday afternoon. Seletar Island was an uninhabited island in Johore Strait a few kilometres […]
By Hector Donohue The following description of a little known incident onboard Yarra during Confrontation is taken from the recently published book ‘United and Undaunted – the First 100 Years’, a history of Diving in the RAN 1911 – 2011, by EW Linton and HJ Donohue. The Indonesia – Malaysia Confrontation (Konfrontasi) was fought from […]
By Richard Francis Today I managed to score an unexpected conducted tour of one of the RAN’s latest Collins Class submarines, HMAS Sheean, alongside the dedicated submarine berth at West Wall in Fleet Base East. On first appearance the black, sleek submarine hull seems small but sinister. On boarding and being greeted by a smart […]
