“AUSTRALIA’S OLDEST naval mystery has been solved”, Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne said, as the first submarine to be lost in the Great War has been found, 103 years after she began her last patrol. HMAS AE1 was found in December 2017 off the coast of Papua New Guinea during the 13th search for the lost vessel, announced Payne, as she described what was “a tragedy for our then fledgling nation” and heralded the find as “one of the most significant discoveries in Australia’s naval maritime history”.
HMAS AE1 was an E-class boat built in Britain and commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in February 1914, with Lt Cmdr Thomas Besant, RN, at the helm. She and her sister, AE2, were quickly employed within the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, tasked with the capture of German New Guinea, achieved on 13 September 1914.
At 07:00 the following day, AE1 joined the destroyer HMAS Parramatta to patrol Cape Gazelle and Raluana Point, in poor conditions, but failed to return. A search found no trace of her, not even the shimmer of spilt oil, nor of the 18 Australian, 16 British, and one New Zealander sailors on board. Her disappearance was Australia’s first major loss of the …
