HMT Dunera


HMT Dunera was a British passenger ship which, in 1940, became involved in a controversial transportation of thousands of "enemy aliens" to Australia. The British India Steam Navigation Company had operated a previous, which served as a troopship during the Second Boer War.

Early service as a troopship

After sea trial in 1937, she was handed over to the British India Steam Navigation Company and served as a passenger liner and an educational cruise ship before seeing extensive service as a troopship throughout World War II. She was taken over by the Royal Navy as a troopship before hostilities started, and was taking troops to the Far East when her crew heard the news of war at Malta on 3 September 1939. Dunera carried New Zealand troops to Egypt in January 1940.

Transport voyage to Australia

Background

After Britain declared war on Germany, the government set up aliens tribunals to distinguish Nazi sympathisers from refugees who had fled from Nazism. As a result, 568 were classified as unreliable, 6,800 were left at liberty but subject to restrictions, and 65,000 were regarded as "friendly". However, after the fall of France, the loss of the Low Countries and Italy's declaration of war, Britain stood alone against the Axis and anxieties became acute. In what Winston Churchill later regretted as "a deplorable and regrettable mistake", all Austrians and Germans, and many Italians, were suspected of being enemy agents, potentially helping to plan the invasion of Britain, and a decision was made to deport them. Canada agreed to take some of them and Australia others, though, "not since the middle of the nineteenth century had Australia received the unwanted of Britain transported across the world for the purposes of incarceration".

Voyage

On 10 July 1940, 2,542 detainees, all classified as "enemy aliens", were embarked aboard Dunera at Liverpool. While the detainees included 200 Italian and 251 German prisoners of war, as well as several dozen Nazi sympathizers, the majority were 2,036 Italian and German civilians who were anti-Nazi, most of them Jewish refugees. Some had already been to sea but their ship, the, had been torpedoed en route to Canada, with great loss of life. In addition to the passengers were 309 poorly trained guards, mostly from the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, as well as seven officers and the ship's crew, creating a total complement of almost twice the Duneras capacity as a troop carrier of 1,600.
Using the tune of "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean" learned from their British warders, internees composed and sang "regularly on board the ship", "My luggage went into the ocean, My luggage went into the sea, My luggage was thrown in the ocean, Oh, bring back my luggage to me!" Most internees were kept below decks throughout the voyage, except for daily 10-minute exercise periods, during which internees would walk around the deck under heavy guard; during one such period, a guard smashed beer bottles on the deck so that the internees would have to walk on the shards. In contrast to the Army personnel, the ship's crew and officers showed kindness to the internees, and some later testified at the soldiers' courts-martial.
While passing through the Irish Sea, the Dunera was struck by a torpedo that failed to detonate; a second torpedo passed underneath the vessel, which was lifted out of its path by the rough seas. After the war it was discovered, partly from a German submarine captain's diary, that, on another occasion, the Dunera was saved from being destroyed because of the German-language items tossed overboard, "and picked up... to inspect" by that captain's divers who concluded that the ship was carrying prisoners of war.

Arrival and internment

On arrival in Sydney on 6 September 1940, the first Australian on board was an army medical officer Alan Frost. He was appalled and his subsequent report led to a court martial at Chelsea Barracks, London, in May 1941. The officer in charge, Major William Patrick Scott, was "severely reprimanded" as was Sergeant Arthur Helliwell; RSM Charles Albert Bowles was reduced to the ranks and given a twelve-month prison sentence and then discharged from the British Army. Lieutenant John O'Neill VC was an officer of the Pioneers, who appeared as a witness.
After leaving the Dunera the pale and emaciated refugees were transported through the night by train west of Sydney to the rural town of Hay in southern New South Wales.
In Britain relatives had not at first been told what had happened to the internees, but as letters arrived from Australia there was a clamour to have them released and heated exchanges in the House of Commons. Colonel Victor Cazalet, a Conservative MP said, on 22 August 1940:
Churchill reportedly regretted the hasty deportations, especially of those who had been seeking Britain's aid. A fund of £35,000 was set up to compensate the Dunera passengers for the loss of their belongings.
While interned in Australia, the internees set up and administered their own township with Hay currency and an unofficial "university". After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the prisoners were reclassified as "friendly aliens" and released by the Australian Government. About a thousand volunteered to join the Australian Military Forces and, having shown themselves to be "dinkum", were offered residency at the end of the war. Almost all the rest made their way back to Britain, many of them joining the armed forces there. Others were recruited as interpreters or into the intelligence services. In 1941, as honorary secretary of the Zionist Federation of Australia and New Zealand, Benzion Patkin organised the migration from Tatura internment camp to Israel of 150 of the refugees; he subsequently published Dunera Internees.

Notable transportees

Among the transportees on the Dunera were:
The 1985 Australian mini series The Dunera Boys depicts the events.
The 2001 Oscar-winning documentary, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, features an interview with Dunera and Kindertransport survivor, Alexander Gordon.
Nothing remains of Hay internment camp except a road called Dunera Way and a memorial stone which reads:
In 2024, the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney presented an exhibition of over 200 artworks created by Dunera internees.

Later service as a troopship

HMT Duneras next notable services were the Madagascar operations in September 1942, the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and in September 1944 she carried the headquarters staff for the US 7th Army for the invasion of southern France. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Dunera transported occupation forces to Japan. She was later employed to transport troops to and from the Suez Canal Zone.