by Peter Yule
suddenly they see a Whitehead torpedo miss their stern by a
few feet! And how fired? From a submarine [which] followed
that battleship for a solid two hours under water.3
He concluded: ‘In all seriousness I don’t think it is even
faintly realised – The immense impending revolution which the
submarines will effect as offensive weapons of war’ [original
emphasis]. Fisher’s enthusiasm for submarines was reflected in
the original vessels ordered for the Royal Australian Navy.
When Prime Minister Alfred Deakin announced his plan for
an Australian navy after discussions with the British Admiralty
in 1907, it was based on a flotilla of nine submarines and six
destroyers. Deakin met strong opposition from Captain William
Creswell, Australia’s senior naval officer, who argued that sub-
marines would ‘be useless for Australia under present conditions
or against any attacks possible to occur’ and they were expensive
to maintain and difficult to crew.4
A U S T R A L I A ’ S E A R L Y S U B M A R I N E S
5
However, Deakin had the endorsement of Admiral Fisher, had
seen a demonstration of submarines in England and remained
committed. This was not to be the last time that Australian politi-
cians were more enthusiastic about acquiring submarines than the
navy itself was.
In the decade before 1914 Britain became increasingly fearful
of Germany’s rapid naval expansion and this led Admiral Fisher to
advise Australia to create a ‘fleet unit’ of one battle cruiser, three
cruisers, six destroyers and three submarines. This proposal was
endorsed by Deakin’s government in September 1909 and formed
the basis for Australian naval planning until the First World
War, although the three C class submarines originally proposed
were replaced by two of the more modern and more expensive
E class.
While most of the fleet was ordered from British shipyards,
there was great political enthusiasm for building some vessels in
Australia, and a destroyer ordered under the 1907 scheme was
reassembled at Cockatoo Island Dockyard in Sydney. This took six
months longer than planned and ‘was not without its problems’
but the government and the navy were satisfied that Cockatoo
Island could attempt more substantial projects. Orders were
placed in August 1912 for a cruiser and three more destroyers and
all were delivered during 1916. The construction of the 5400-ton
cruiser HMAS Brisbane has been cited as ‘the most complex indus-
trial project undertaken in Australia to that time’ and, while there
might be arguments that the BHP steel works at Newcastle has
stronger claims, there is no doubting that Brisbane was a sig-
nificant achievement.5 At her launch the Minister for the Navy,
Mr J. A. Jensen, said: ‘There is no reason why the Australian work-
man should not be able to produce practically everything required
on a destroyer, a cruiser, a battleship or a submarine.’6
In reality, Cockatoo Island, the only Australian yard able to
build large naval ships, had numerous drawbacks. Together with
the higher wages of Australian workers, these meant that Cocka-
too’s ships cost roughly double that of British vessels.7 In response
to an Australian query, Vickers argued that reassembling prefab-
ricated submarine parts and machinery was impractical but that
submarine hulls could be built in Australia with British fittings,
machinery and skilled workers. Vickers was clear this would be
an extremely expensive operation.8
6
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
Consequently there was no opposition to the government’s
decision in late 1910 to order two E class submarines from
Britain. Delayed by Vickers’ high workloads and shortage of
skilled labour, AE1 and AE2 arrived in Sydney in May 1914.
They needed maintenance and repair after a 12 000-mile voyage,
but support arrangements were incomplete: the submarine depot
ship, HMAS Platypus, was not ready, and even their base was
undecided. Reflecting both unfamiliarity with, and in some quar-
ters disdain for, the requirements of submarine operations, the
purchase of AE1 and AE2 also demonstrated a continual feature of Australian defence procurement – the failure to appreciate both
the full costs of supporting equipment and the opportunities for
integrating local industry support.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914 the new submarines
joined the fleet for the attack on the German wireless station
at Rabaul, but AE1 failed to return from patrol on 14 Septem-
ber and was never seen again. AE1 was the first vessel lost by
the Australian navy and its sailors were among Australia’s first
casualties of the First World War.
AE2 sailed to the Mediterranean where she played a dramatic
but little-known role in the Gallipoli landings. On 25 April 1915
AE2 was the first allied vessel to penetrate the Dardanelles and
her radio message giving notification of her success helped sway
General Ian Hamilton against withdrawing land forces from the
peninsula. Over the next few days AE2 torpedoed a Turkish
gunboat and caused great disruption to Turkish shipping, but
she did not return from her mission. Hit by Turkish gunfire,
AE2 was scuttled by her crew, who spent the rest of the war as
prisoners.9
In spite of these losses the Australian government remained
committed to an Australian submarine arm and made sev-
eral approaches to the British Admiralty for new submarines.
However, British shipyards were too busy and Australia would
have to wait upon the Admiralty’s priorities for access to
submarines.10
This raised the question: why not build submarines in Aus-
tralia? The opening of BHP’s steel plant at Newcastle, the wartime
need to replace imports with local production, and the enor-
mous military demand led to a rapid increase in industrial capac-
ity during the war years. Cockatoo Island successfully built two
A U S T R A L I A ’ S E A R L Y S U B M A R I N E S
7
cruisers, three destroyers and several large auxiliaries for the
navy between 1913 and 1919, with the destroyers being the first
steel ships wholly built in Australia.11 During the war, Canada,
whose economic and industrial development was at a similar
level to Australia’s, built 18 complete H class submarines for
the British and Italian navies and a further 17 in kit form for
Russia.12
The matter of replacements for AE1 and AE2 was raised in
parliament on 27 May 1915. Jens Jensen, the assistant minister
representing the Minister for Defence in the House of Representa-
tives, said, ‘I hope we shall soon have more than two submarines’,
to which Joseph Cook, always a passionate advocate of Australian
self-reliance, responded: ‘And I should like them all to be built in
Australia if possible.’ To which Jensen replied: ‘The submarine is
the one class of
vessel that it is impossible to build in Australia.’13
This statement was not contested. Naval experts and politicians
agreed that building submarines required specialised skills and
materials that were unavailable in Australia.
After the First World War the problem of excess demand for
military equipment quickly became a problem of excess supply. In
January 1919 the Australian government accepted a British offer
of six surplus J class submarines, which arrived in Sydney Harbour
on 15 July 1919. They were in poor condition and required exten-
sive refits. Although the management of Cockatoo Island had had
many months notice, the yard was quite unprepared for the work.
The repairs were slow and had scant regard for quality, primarily
because of shortages of skilled workers and delayed British spare
parts,14 and were not completed until the J boats were no longer
wanted. The navy’s budget had been slashed due to post-war hopes
for disarmament and an increasingly stagnant economy and, des-
perate to keep its surface ships, the service chose to sacrifice the
obsolete and expensive J boats. Laid up in 1921, they were sold
for scrap the following year.15
Yet government policy and Admiralty advice continued to sup-
port the development of an Australia submarine force. Even before
the J class boats were paid off, the navy was again looking at the
possibility of building submarines in Australia. On 23 November
1920 the chief of the naval staff wrote to Vice-Admiral Sir William
Clarkson, the member of the Naval Board in charge of engineering
and shipbuilding:
8
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
I shall be glad if you will investigate the possibility of
building submarines in Australia . . .
The following information is what is particularly
required:
a Can Submarines be built at the present time and if so
where
b Is the necessary skilled labour available locally
c What additional plant if any is required in order to
commence such construction and a rough estimate of the
cost of such plant and all it involves.16
The blunt reply came in just two days:
With reference to your enquiry, the following information is
appended . . .
a No
b Sufficient skilled labour is not available locally. A few
men have been trained in establishments where
submarines are built, but they are not sufficient.
c Will be investigated.17
The general manager of Cockatoo Island Dockyard was asked to
give an answer to the third question. He replied with a detailed
report on 16 December listing and pricing the equipment that
would be required to build submarines, and concluded that con-
struction in Australia would be feasible but certain raw mate-
rials and the batteries and electrical equipment would have to
be imported.18 However, in early 1923 Clarkson concluded that
‘the marine engineering development of Australia was at present
emphatically incapable of constructing submarines’. A submarine
built at Cockatoo Island would cost more than double the British
price and ‘ran the gravest risk of ultimate failure’.19 Consequently,
in late 1924 when the government agreed to buy two new O class
submarines, no voices urged construction in Australia.
The ill fate that had dogged the Australian submarine service
since the loss of AE1 in September 1914 continued with the O
boats, Oxley and Otway. Lengthy delays, mechanical failures
and public furore turned both political and naval opinion against
them. By mid-1929, when they were finally ready for service,
the economy was spiralling into depression, and it had already
been decided not to complete the planned flotilla of six. As in the
early 1920s, the navy leadership was determined to maintain its
A U S T R A L I A ’ S E A R L Y S U B M A R I N E S
9
surface ships and quickly agreed to sacrifice the submarines. In
May 1930 Oxley and Otway were paid off and a year later they were returned to the Royal Navy.20
An important lesson from the failures of the J and O class
submarines in the Australian navy was the importance of a mod-
ern and growing economy to the possession of modern weapons.
The Australian economy in the 1920s and 1930s had a narrow
industrial base, relying heavily on the export of primary prod-
ucts to Britain, itself with a steeply declining economy. The pitiful
state of Australia’s military preparedness in the late 1930s was not
entirely due to myopia – an empty federal treasury was unable to
fund rearmament and a tiny industrial base was unable to supply
more than a trickle of modern weapons and equipment.
The Australian shipbuilding industry expanded enormously
during the Second World War, building over 100 naval ves-
sels between 1939 and 1946, including 60 Australian-designed
Bathurst class minesweepers and 12 River class frigates.21 To keep
Cockatoo Island and Williamstown dockyards in work a post-
war program began to build 12 destroyers every 10 years. The
first were begun in 1949 but only three had been completed by
1959, with the cost between order and completion rising from
£2.6 million to more than £7 million each. This experience typ-
ified Australian post-war naval shipbuilding. Local construction
cost more and took longer than planned. While the quality of
the work of the local shipyards was good, productivity was low,
labour relations were a nightmare and many projects were never
completed.22
In May 1964 two Type 12 frigates, Swan and Torrens, were
ordered from Cockatoo Island and Williamstown. Although based
on the earlier River class, the designs were radically altered, con-
stituting a virtual re-design. Political pressure led to the ships being
laid down prematurely and ‘construction was hampered by design
delays, late equipment deliveries and constant design changes’.23
When Torrens was finally completed at massive expense in
January 1971, ‘it was to be the last major combat ship completed
in an Australian shipyard for 21 years’.
Naval shipbuilding reflected deeper problems in the Australian
economy. While manufacturing expanded rapidly in the 1940s
and 1950s, stimulated first by the war and later by a rapidly
rising population, it was dependent on high tariffs on imports.
10
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
Australian manufacturers were small-scale, technologically back-
ward and focused solely on the domestic market. Industrial rela-
tions were poor, labour costs high and productivity low. These
factors lay behind the malaise of the Australian economy in the
1970s and early 1980s when high inflation and unemployment
accompanied a rapid decline in the country’s manufacturing base.
C H A P T E R 2
Australia’s Oberon class submarines
Although Allied submarines based in Fremantle and Brisbane
wreaked
havoc on Japanese shipping during the Second World
War, Australian naval authorities showed no interest in acquir-
ing submarines afterwards. Yet submarines were needed for anti-
submarine warfare training and in 1949 it was arranged that the
Royal Navy’s fourth submarine flotilla (normally consisting of
two or three submarines) would be based in Sydney. This forced
Cockatoo Island Dockyard to develop expertise for maintaining
and refitting submarines – complex tasks requiring advanced tech-
nical skills lacking in Australia during its brief periods of subma-
rine ownership. Until 1960 the British submarines were refitted in
Singapore but between 1961 and 1966 five refits were successfully
carried out at Cockatoo Island.1
In the late 1950s Australia again began to debate the ownership
of a submarine force, led by John Gorton, whose term as Minister
for the Navy was noted for his questioning of many of the
navy’s dogmas. In 1959 the Chiefs of Staff considered the issue
and decided that ‘the institution of a submarine service would
be a valuable addition to balanced Australian Defence Forces’.
Their report argued that the main role of Australian submarines
11
12
T H E C O L L I N S C L A S S S U B M A R I N E S T O R Y
would be to train anti-submarine forces and, in wartime, to ‘hunt
and kill’ enemy submarines. By now they had recognised that
Australian anti-submarine training could not rely indefinitely on
Britain maintaining its squadron in Sydney. They saw little poten-
tial for the use of submarines for offensive action.2
The Chiefs of Staff considered the possibility of acquiring
nuclear submarines but decided against it until either:
1 The Indonesians or Chinese Communists have attained a
high degree of A/S efficiency, or have themselves
introduced nuclear submarines: or
2 The cost of nuclear submarines approaches twice that of a
conventional submarine, when, for a similar capital
expenditure the same effective number of submarines on
patrol could be obtained.
The report asserted that ‘one nuclear submarine can do the effec-
tive patrol work of two conventional submarines’ but, at one-
sixth the cost, conventional submarines were more efficient. The
report did not consider whether Australia could maintain nuclear
submarines without a nuclear industry.