In the opening days of the war, German merchant ships operating in the Far East made for friendly or neutral ports. What the Allies feared was that their crews once in port would transform the vessels into armed warships or sea raiders and attack British merchant ships in the Pacific and Indian oceans as they had done in the First World War. On 20 September 1939, The New York Times reported rumours of secret merchant raiders preparing for operations in Japan:28
Japan has given official assurances to the British Government that she will not permit the arming of German merchantmen in her ports for use as commerce raiders. These assurances were the outcome of a British inquiry in Tokyo following a report in the newspaper Hochi Shimbun that the German liner Scharnhorst, of 18,000 tons, was being converted at Kobe into an armed marauder to prey on British trade routes … The British have never forgotten the depredations of the German light cruiser Emden, which ranged the Indian Ocean in the autumn of 1914 … Nor have they forgotten the damage done by the armed passenger liners Kronprinz Wilhelm and Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse … The British Admiralty knows the Scharnhorsf’s mischief-making capacity if she were armed as a raider, and it is determined not to tolerate anything of the sort.
Playing on British fears the Germans had spread the rumours as part of a clever deception plan to trick the Allies into deploying their navy to protect the merchant shipping routes. Kapitän Joachim Lietzmann, the German naval attaché in Tokyo, stoked speculation that the liner Scharnhorst was secretly being armed while allaying Japanese concerns: ‘In the event that any doubts might arise on the Japanese side about any such conversion of the Scharnhorst into an auxiliary cruiser, I have intimated to Commander Yoshida that we, for our part, would very willingly invite a Japanese officer to pay a visit to the ship.’
Reflecting the piece in The New York Times, the games manufacturer Parker Brothers launched the game Sea Raider in 1940 which it described as ‘An exciting new game for young admirals’. A simple spin and move game, it came in a box with a dramatic picture of an auxiliary cruiser or sea raider on the cover. The game consisted of a playing board, spinner and four metal ships, the black one being the Sea Raider and the remaining yellow, red and green ships being cruisers. The aim of the game was for the Sea Raider, who had the first move, to get from the start to the raider’s home base without being caught by the cruisers, the board consisting of several different paths to the objective. To catch the Sea Raider one of the cruisers had to land on exactly the same space as the Sea Raider occupied. Pieces could move in any direction but could not move back and if ‘hard pressed’ the Sea Raider could dodge the cruisers by moving along an alternative, black-dotted path for part of the board where they could not follow. If the Sea Raider reached its home base by spinning the exact number, it was the winner; however, if one of the cruisers captured the Sea Raider, they won.
The games manufacturer Parker Brothers launched the game Sea Raider in 1940, describing it as ‘An exciting new game for young admirals’.
In the same year that the game came out the Germans launched four real sea raiders called Orion, Komet, Pinguin (Penguin), and Kormoran (Cormorant) which waged a ‘pirate war’ in the southern seas attacking the British Empire’s maritime trade routes. The four raiders ranged across the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans as well as the Arctic and Antarctic, sinking or capturing sixty-two ships in a largely forgotten naval war. The Orion and Komet terrorised the South Pacific and New Zealand waters before Pearl Harbor when for many Americans the conflict still seemed far away. The Pinguin sank numerous Allied merchant ships in the Indian Ocean before mining the approaches to Australian ports and capturing the Norwegian whaling fleet in Antarctica. However, the most famous sea raider was the Kormoran which raided the Atlantic and then sank the Australian cruiser Sydney off Darwin in Western Australia, killing all 645 sailors on board in an action that saw both ships destroyed on 19 November 1941. A major blow to Australian wartime morale, it was the largest loss of life in the history of the Royal Australian Navy and the largest Allied warship lost with all hands during the war. Tragically, Australian authorities only learned of the Sydney’s fate from the surviving Kormoran personnel, who were held in prisoner of war camps until the end of the conflict.29
A simple spin and move game, the aim was to reach the Raider’s home base without being caught by the cruisers, the board consisting of several different paths to the objective.
The sinking of the Sydney remains one of the most controversial episodes in Australian wartime history, and the exact location of the two wrecks remained undiscovered until 2008. Since the war there has been much speculation about how a heavily armoured warship like Sydney could be sunk by a modified merchant vessel like the Kormoran. According to German accounts the Sydney approached so close to the Kormoran that the Australian cruiser lost the advantages of heavier armour and superior gun range. However, other investigations over the years have alleged an extensive cover-up, stating that the Germans massacred the crew following the battle, or that the Empire of Japan had been secretly involved in the action before officially declaring war on 8 December 1941.