First Blood, Australia's First Great Sea Battle

First Blood, Australia's First Great Sea Battle

With a foreword by Mary-Louise William, Director, Australian National Maritime Museum.

On November 14th, the Australian battleship HMAS Sydney dueled to the death with the famed German raider SMS Emden in the Indian Ocean. It was our nation's first major sea battle, and a classic confrontation between two magnificent ships crewed by seaman who have become legendary in the annals of war.

Now, using never-before-published diaries and letters of the combatants as well as official naval reports, First Blood takes readers into the fury of war at sea. The book recreates in vivid and terrifying detail Australia's baptism of fire, when officers and men of both dies displayed unimagined valour.

In the first months of World War I, Emeden, cut a swathe through allied shipping in the Indian Ocean. Its masterful and gallant captain Karl Friedrich Max von Muller and his colourful officers and crew struck hard and fast, bombing Madras and Penang and ambushing a score of cargo ships, confiscating their cargo and sinking them but rescuing their crew and passengers. Von Muller and Emden seemed invincible.

Meanwhile, HMAS Sydney, a new Australian cruiser, swift and bristling with powerful weapons and skippered by the redoubtable Captian John C.T.Glossop, was escorting the First Australian and New Zealand Infantry Force from Albany in Western Australia to Egypt and the battlefields of Europe. When word came that Emden had attacked a strategically-vital wireless station in the Cocos Islands, 2,750 kilometers north-west of Perth, Sydney was detached from the convoy. Her orders, seek and destroy the German fighting ship.

This blockbuster of a tale is written by author Larry Writer and acclaimed naval researcher and aficionado Douglas Sellick. Larry's previous books include the award winning Razor, the story of Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine and the Razor Gangs of the 1920s and '30s, best-selling biographies of John Newcombe and Chrissy Amphlett, and Never Before, Never Again, the story of the St George rugby league team of the 1950s and '60s that won 11 consecutive premierships.

First Blood, Australia's First Great Sea Battle
Media21 Publishing
Author: Larry Writer with Douglas Sellick
ISBN: 9781876624057
Price: $34.95