Dive!
Australian Submariners at War
Mike Carlton
North Sydney, NSW: Penguin Random House, 2024
Hardback 480pp RRP: $45.00
Reviewer: Adrian Catt, August 2024
This book is a most interesting blend of historical and biographical accounts of Australian submariners and their boats, submarines. It includes coverage from the development and origin of experimental, rudimentary craft through the ages, to the development of sophisticated (and survivable) evolution of technology-laden key defence weapons capable of both offence and deterrence.
This text covers the design, construction, crewing, and flawed delivery of Australia’s first submarines, AE1 and AE2 and their difficult journey from the UK at the outbreak of World War I. Also included are details of their challenges, failures, deployment and subsequent loss. The crew of AE2 were captured and their boat sunk after their daring penetrating raid of the Dardanelles and saw the remaining three years of World War I in a Turkish prison, where they faced brutality, starvation, torture, and repeated failed escape attempts. Desperate stuff!
Dive! explains that Australia’s initial submarines were commanded by Royal Navy (RN) commissioned officers, whilst NCOs and other ratings were from the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). RAN personnel did their basic training in Australia before being posted to the UK for specialised submariner training. The book mentions all the shore establishments which RAN candidates passed through in order to qualify for their prestigious ‘Dolphins’ badge; and that even fewer RAN Officers’ completed the gruelling British ‘Perisher’ Course for prospective submarine commanders.
The author takes the initiative to explain crew structures/duties on-board the boats, as well as performance, ability and tactics for the various classes of Australian and British submarines at war, highlighting a very steep learning curve for the entire crew, owing to the many hazards and dangers of deploying and operating in such boats. Much to its credit, this book contains excellent cross-section diagrams of the various classes of Australian submarines.
This work contains numerous exciting stories of daring wartime adventures/missions, and how/what crews faced pioneering and refining manoeuvrability and tactics, with endless drills and practice of crash-dives, fire and flooding etc. honing their seamanship. We are told of bold and daring raids upon Scandinavian fjords, their challenges, failures and successes. We also learn details of raids in Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong upon enemy shipping and communications, and of the men, their equipment and techniques, as well as failures; men washed overboard and vessels flooded, sent to watery graves.
Revealed are the role of midget subs in performing reconnaissance and pathfinding the way for the D-Day landings at Normandy, France during the Second World War. In the Pacific Ocean the US Navy (USN) was not initially interested in deploying Australian submarines as they saw no role for these RAN boats, but they were eventually lobbied with a pitch which changed their view.
Outlined are Cold-War shenanigans between RAN and Russians in Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) sorties in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. The book carries through to ‘O-boats’ design, deployment and decommissioning; and the tragedy and near loss of Collins-class boats is also mentioned.
Easy reading – engaging and suspenseful. An exciting page-turner, this book is straight-forward and unpretentious; but colourful when it needs to be. Very well done!
The RUSI – Vic Library is most grateful to the publishers for making this work available for review.