HMAS Sydney

The warm afternoon sun hangs overhead in the blue sky.

HMAS Sydney cuts through the calm waters as her crew settles into the rhythm of another uneventful day.

She is homeward bound, having handed off the troop ship Zeelandia to another escort at Sunda Strait days earlier.

For the six hundred and forty-five men aboard, this is a routine voyage back to Fremantle.

Shortly before 4:00 PM, a lookout spots smoke on the horizon.

It's a single ship, and it's on a course that will cross Sydney's own.

It appears to be a merchant vessel simply going about her business.

But Captain Joseph Burnett wants a better look and peers at the stranger through his glasses.

And this is one of the... least talked about aspects of the second world war and one that i've always found very very interesting because the germans of course will go right back to their same tactics and they thoroughly analyzed what worked and what didn't work in the first world war and their tactics are even more refined now in the first world war they would just have their navy ships and loosely disguise them as civilian ships that i could get close and attack merchants and steal the cargo or sink them but in the second world war the kriegsmarine the german navy will start building ships specifically with this idea in mind they have very quickly convertible tops that can change from civilian to military structure they call them auxiliary cruisers and they will be an absolute nightmare for the royal navy especially in the first part of the second world war And not only will they be very good at destroying civilian ships, because they can be disguised quite convincingly as civilian ships, they will even attack navy ships if they get close enough and ambush them.

Probably the most famous example of this is when a German ship called the Cormoran will sneak up and destroy HMAS Sydney, which is an Australian cruiser.

The power disparity between these two is massive and the fact that they managed to pull that off is very impressive.

The spirit of some old school pirate captains are nodding along sagely at that one.