Royal Australian Navy - World War I

At the outbreak of war, the RAN stood at 3,800 personnel and consisted of sixteen ships, including the battlecruiser Australia, the light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne, the destroyers Parramatta, Yarra, and Warrego, and the submarines AE1 and AE2. The light cruiser Brisbane and three destroyers were under construction, and a small fleet of auxiliary ships was also being maintained. As a consequence the Royal Australian Navy at the start of the war was a small but formidable force. Upon the declaration of war, the Commonwealth Government placed the vessels of the Australian Navy under the control of the British Admiralty for the duration of the war.

In September 1914, the first action by the RAN was when Australian ships assisted in the attack on German wireless radio bases at German New Guinea, Caroline Islands, Nauru, and Rabaul in New Britain by the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF). The only major loss of the campaign was the disappearance of the submarine AE1 during a patrol off Rabaul on 14th September 1914. The Battle of Cocos was the first naval battle in which the RAN participated on 9th November 1914, the German light cruiser SMS Emden attacked the Allied radio and telegraph station at Direction Island in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The inhabitants of the island managed to transmit a distress signal, which was received by HMAS Sydney, only 80 kms away, escorting the first convoy of ANZAC troops to the Middle East. Sydney arrived within two hours, and was engaged by Emden. Sydney was the larger, faster and better armed of the two, and by 11:15am the following day overpowered Emden, with Captain Karl von Müller running the ship aground on North Keeling Island so that he could safely evacuate his many wounded.

The RAN grew to include 37 ships and more than 5,000 personnel by 1918. Losses had been modest, only losing the two submarines AE1 and AE2, whilst casualties included 171 fatalities – 108 Australians and 63 officers and men on loan from the Royal Navy, with less than a third the result of enemy action. The most decorated Australian Naval unit of the war, however, was not a ship at all, but the Royal Australian Navy Bridging Train; a land-based unit composed mostly of reservists which landed at Suvla Bay with the British IX Corps and was responsible for receiving, storing and distributing the supplies, including potable water, of the British troops at Suvla. After Gallipoli, the Train was sent to the Middle East, where they made a second amphibious landing at the Battle of Magdhaba. Royal_Australian_Navy,_First_World_War
Australian War Memorial, First World War.