HMAS Australia, Australian Maritime Strategy, and the AUKUS Agreement

At just before three in the afternoon on Saturday 12 April 1924 the battlecruiser HMAS Australia rolled over and made her final journey to the deep. Overhead a Royal Australian Air Force aircraft circled and dropped a wreath, whilst a 21 Gun Salute was fired by the cruiser HMAS Brisbane. All told it was a most unusual fate for a ship.

Australia was scuttled off Sydney Heads, a decision ultimately determined by British imperial policy and the signing of the Washington Treaty that limited naval armaments. The passing of the ship elicited a considerable display of national emotion in a country still coming to terms with its Great War losses. Stanley Bruce, the Australian Prime Minister, noted that the country ‘sacrificed her with regret, rendered poignant by memory of great services’.[1]

In the decades that followed the story of those great services faded rapidly as Australian popular culture and identity was reformed around the ANZAC myth and the deeds of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Following the Second World War Australia was largely forgotten in the public memory, despite remaining as the only capital ship ever to have been commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy. Where the ship has been mentioned, it is invariably in the context of questioning the ties with Great Britain. Why should Australia have expended so much treasure on the ship in the first place, and then had to scuttle her so soon thereafter, all on the basis of British imperial policy? Even much of the academic literature has questioned the policy behind the acquisition of the battlecruiser and her career.[2]

When viewed in this light it appears that HMAS Australia is an unlikely model for the current AUKUS agreement under which Australia will acquire eight nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs), working together with the United States and the United Kingdom. This article will, however, argue that Australia is a useful lens through which to look at the enduring nature of Australian maritime strategy and that the ship’s wartime career, whilst on one level unremarkable, offers interesting insights into the potential roles that could be played by Australian SSNs. Australia’s early efforts to provide itself with security at sea rested on the duality of maintaining a degree of self-reliance within a wider alliance-based maritime strategy. HMAS Australia embodied this duality. Whilst much has changed over the following century, including the identity of Australia’s key alliance partner, the fundamentals of the country’s geography and demography ensure that this duality remains at the heart of Australian strategic policy, and is an inextricable part of the premise of AUKUS.

The roles played by Australia during the First World War reflected that duality with divisions, and at time tensions, between independent operations and those directly supporting its larger ally. However, they also quietly reveal another fundamental in Australian security. Australia was, and remains, a maritime nation, and its security depends upon access to the seas. HMAS Australia helped secure this, more through deterrence and denial than through action, but the results were the same. In order to be successful AUKUS submarines will need to contribute to both independent and coalition efforts ensuring that Australia continues to be able to use the seas, something that will have a far greater strategic impact than any individual naval action. When viewed in this light if the current acquisitions prove to be as successful as HMAS Australia in furthering Australia’s national interests, then the AUKUS agreement will have been a great success.

HMAS Australia: “the conscientious objector”

On one level it is easy to see why the battlecruiser Australia does not rank highly in the pantheon of the country’s military history. Despite serving throughout the First World War, she earned no official battle honours.[3] She only fired her guns in anger twice, once at a German auxiliary in early 1915, and again at a suspected submarine nearly three years later.[4] Australia spent the early part of the conflict in the Pacific, firstly escorting Australian troops to seize the German possessions in New Guinea, and later scouring the ocean in search of Vice Admiral Maximillan von Spee’s East Asian Squadron.

Following von Spee’s eventual demise at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, Australia was transferred to the Grand Fleet. There followed nearly four years of tedium. The ship spent much of the time at anchor at Rosyth and Scapa Flow, participating in occasional sweeps in the North Sea that encountered little more than fog and bad weather. Australia was to miss the Battle of Jutland, the seminal event of the First World War at sea, in a rather ignominious fashion. Whilst on a sweep in the southern North Sea in April 1916 Australia collided with her sistership New Zealand, and she was still in dockyard hands when the battle took place a month later. This misfortune, or good luck depending on one’s perspective, earned the ship the unwanted sobriquet “the conscientious objector”.[5] A further collision, this time with the battlecruiser Repulse ensured that Australia also missed the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight, the last big ship action of the war.

Just under eleven years after being commissioned Australia was scuttled, having previously been laid up and then stripped of anything of value. In many respects it was an undignified fate for a ship that had only a decade previous been labelled the ‘pride of the southern seas’, and had in many ways been seen to symbolise the birth of the independent nation of Australia. Despite her limited battle honours there was near universal regret expressed at the time in Australia at the decision to scuttle the ship. In the words of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, ‘that her end should be so unworthy is a fault that lies not at her door… Few events have so struck at the hearts of Australians as this pitiless decision to extinguish the life of an honourable and historic fighting ship.’[6] Whilst the mainstream media was unwilling to specifically name those who were responsible for the decision, others were not. The Australian Worker, for example, attacked the Prime Minister as a ‘liveried lackey’ for failing to properly stand up for the ship, and by extension for the country.[7] In its demise, as in its existence, HMAS Australia reflected the country’s deep ties to Great Britain, and at the same time embodied the tensions and questions around sovereignty and independence that came with those ties.

Early Australian maritime strategy

The reason why Australians at the time were so supportive of the ship was that there was a clear understanding of the roles that she had played during the Great War, and how they fit into the wider frame of Australian national and maritime strategy. Australians in the early twentieth century had a much better understanding of the maritime fundamentals of their security and prosperity, and were aware of the ways in which Australia had contributed to them between 1914 and 1918.

Australian maritime strategy in 1914 was based around two core requirements that were at times in tension. The first of these was for there to be a sufficient force based in Australian waters to deter, and if necessary, defeat, any immediate threat to Australian territory and shipping. Ideally this independent Australian naval force should be under Australian command, or at least focused in the region until any realistic threat had passed. The second requirement within Australian maritime strategy was that to contribute to the wider security provided by the Royal Navy and British imperial forces. It was universally acknowledged that the best way to defend Australia was to prevent any threat from entering the region in the first place, and in this period that meant ensuring the maritime supremacy of the Royal Navy. The question of whether Australia’s naval efforts should go into reinforcing an imperial fleet, or providing for its own immediate security had dominated the debate in the decades prior to the First World War, and the “fleet unit” of which HMAS Australia was the centrepiece was the product of a slightly uneasy compromise.[8] Under an agreement between the imperial government and the government of the Commonwealth of Australia the forces of the Royal Australian Navy would be based in Australia and under Australian control in peacetime. In wartime, however, the Commonwealth would hand over control of its forces to the Admiralty in London, which would deploy them as it saw fit.[9]

Despite certain ongoing tensions between London and Melbourne, Australia and her fellow Royal Australian Navy vessels managed to fulfil both core requirements with a remarkable degree of success during the First World War. As the conflict opened Australia was off the coast of Queensland, and following a brief return to Sydney for stores, she spent much of August and September searching for the German East Asian Squadron and escorting New Zealand and Australian expeditionary forces to Samoa and New Guinea respectively. This activity, and the absence of any meaningful result in terms of engaging the enemy, was the source of huge frustration to the crew of Australia. In reality, however, the battlecruiser was already having a significant impact on the course of events. Since the turn of the century the Imperial German Navy had been developing plans for its East Asian Squadron to conduct commerce warfare operations in Australian waters on the outbreak of a war.[10] The arrival of Australia in Australian waters in 1913 significantly altered the calculus for such operations. As Vice-Admiral von Spee wrote in a letter to his wife in August 1914, ‘Australia. . . is such a superior opponent that it must be avoided’. [11]

The East Asian Squadron’s long voyage across the Pacific to its eventual fate off the Falkland Islands was not a desired outcome, but one driven by ‘force of circumstance’, not least of which was the power, range and speed of Australia.[12] In early 1924, as part of a campaign to save the ship, Senator John Newland wrote that ‘Australians slept more soundly in their beds because of the protection of the Australia. As an historical fact, we now know that but for her presence on our shores Sydney, Melbourne and possibly other Australian towns would have experienced the horrors of bombardment…. That this was not done we owe to the powerful guns of the Australia’.[13] There is a degree of hyperbole in Newland’s comments, but there is also a significant degree of truth.

From 1915 to 1918 Australia was fulfilling the second of the core requirements in Australian maritime strategy, namely reinforcing the imperial fleet. Life in the Grand Fleet was tedious and hard, and Australia suffered from more than her fair share of bad luck which meant that she missed the major engagements. However, this presents something of a skewed image of the contribution that the ship made. The Grand Fleet as a whole did not achieve the second Trafalgar that its officers and men so earnestly desired. Contrary to much modern analysis this does not mean that the fleet did not achieve its core purpose.[14] The ultimate role of the Royal Navy was to ensure that Britain had sufficiently secure access to the global seas and oceans to be able to conduct the war as it saw fit. The Grand Fleet, including Australia, did not destroy the German High Seas Fleet, but it did force it to lie largely inactive in Wilhelmshaven, and in doing so provided what in the British tradition of maritime strategy is referred to as “cover”.[15] By ensuring that no major German vessels could exit the North Sea, the Grand Fleet provided general command of the sea, meaning that smaller vessels could exercise that command without risk of being overpowered by a larger force. It was this principle that ensured that from the end of 1914 vessels sailing in Australian waters could do so at very little risk, and also provided the overarching umbrella of security under which the troops of the 1st Australian Imperial Force were transported to the Middle East and the Western Front. This action of sea power lacked the trappings of a great naval victory like Trafalgar, but it too built ramparts of British power that ‘stretched to the ends of the earth’ and in doing so was critical in ensuring Allied victory in the First World War.[16]

Across both of the two critical requirements of Australian maritime strategy, Australia proved to be a highly effective weapon of war in the period 1914-1918. As the historian David Stevens has remarked ‘without doubt, Australia did her best work by presence and deterrence rather than through action.’[17] In maritime strategy, however, this matters little. Accounts of great naval victories were, in the words of Julian Corbett, ‘literary rather than historical’, and it is how sea power impacts upon the wider war that truly matters, and here Australia proved her worth.[18]

AUKUS and twenty-first century Australian maritime strategy

The value of HMAS Australia during the First World War is clear, but some readers may rightly be wondering what a century old battlecruiser has to do with AUKUS submarines. The answer lies in the enduring elements of Australian maritime strategy. Australia in 2026 remains a vast island continent which is absolutely dependent on the sea for trade and communications. Australia’s strategic circumstances have evolved, but its fundamentals, which are grounded in geography, economics and demography, remain largely unaltered. For Australia distance is both a blessing and a curse. It is a very long way from any potential adversaries, something that makes a direct attack on Australian territory challenging. At the same time, it is also a very long way from its friends and sources of trade. Australia’s economic lifelines run vast distances across the oceans and are extensive enough that the country cannot hope to secure them on its own. This is one of the fundamental drivers for Australia’s persistent search for security in alliances.

The continuity in Australia’s grand strategy means that whilst additional requirements have been placed upon the Royal Australian Navy in the century since the First World War, the two core principles which underpinned its maritime strategy at the beginning of the twentieth century remain. In the event of a major conflict the Royal Australian Navy still needs to be able to mount sufficient force in its home waters to deter, or if necessary, destroy any realistic threat that might enter its immediate region. Australian policymakers have long determined that the country should possess sufficient naval capability to conduct this task independently if necessary. The recent deployments of major People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) task forces into the waters surrounding Australia serves to underline the ongoing importance of this requirement, and Chinese capacity to operate in this region is only going to expand.[19] The ability to secure Australia’s immediate area of interest against an adversary of growing size and capacity is therefore a critical challenge facing the Royal Australian Navy going forward.

However, in the event of such a conflict Australia would not be fighting alone. Instead, it would be operating as part of a larger US-led coalition, with by far the most likely adversary being the People’s Republic of China. In such a conflict Australian security, and the coalition war effort more generally, would be absolutely reliant on the ability to maintain sufficient sea control over the wider reaches of the Indo-Pacific. In exactly the same way that Australian security in the early twentieth century rested upon the ability of the Royal Navy, assisted by its allies and partners, to command the world’s oceans, so twenty-first century Australian security is predicated on safe and secure access to those same oceans. Under current Australian grand strategy this task is largely devolved to the US Navy, albeit with considerable support provided by its allies and partners, including the Royal Australian Navy.

The AUKUS submarines which should start commissioning into the Royal Australian Navy from the early 2030s will arguably be the first capital ships that the service has operated since HMAS Australia (I) decommissioned in 1921. In the event of a conflict they will be expected to fulfil the same core roles that the battlecruiser did over a century ago. The presence of US, and ultimately Australian SSNs operating from HMAS Sterling in Western Australia will provide a very significant deterrent effect on any vessels that might wish to conduct offensive operations against Australian territory or shipping, especially early in a conflict. Just as HMAS Australia deterred von Spee from approaching the region in 1914, so AUKUS submarines will, it is hoped, deter any future adversary from mounting offensive operations in Australian waters.

Longer term securing the waters immediately surrounding Australia will not be enough, and it can be expected that Australia’s AUKUS submarines will support US Navy submarines and other assets in assuring wider coalition sea control. At the heart of any such efforts will likely be an attempt to exercise choke-point control on the exits to the first island chain.[20] This effort will seek to deter or interdict PLAN vessels from existing the confined waters closest to China’s coasts. The language may have changed from the ideas of distant blockade and cover that were used to describe the roles played by HMAS Australia in the Grand Fleet in the First World War, but the strategic principles remain. By operating alongside their major coalition partner, AUKUS submarines would provide localised sea denial around critical chokepoints so as to prevent major Chinese forces from contesting coalition control over the wider expanses of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In doing so they would secure not only coalition supply lines to the United States, but also the island of Australia itself.

The battlecruiser HMAS Australia was scuttled only eleven years after her commissioning, and without achieving any meaningful success in battle. As with AUKUS submarines her fate was deeply tied into debates over Australian sovereignty and the balance of the relationship with her key ally. Despite this, she proved hugely successful in further Australia’s maritime and by extension national strategy in time of war. Little more can be asked of a military capability, and the future AUKUS submarines, perhaps including a new HMAS Australia, will serve the country well if they can emulate this achievement.