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FREMANTLES SUBMARINES
HOW ALLIED SUBMARINERS AND WESTERN AUSTRALIANS
HELPED TO WIN THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC
by MICHAEL STURMA
Advance Praise
Once again, Michael Sturma has provided valuable insight and
understanding to a relatively unknown but vital aspect of history.
With Fremantles Submarines, Sturma not only offers an
exhaustively-documented work of great value to researchers,
authors and historians, but he has done so in a wonderfully
readable wayensuring accessibility to people of all levels of
interest. If more academics were as willing and able as Sturma
to relate the human side of events alongside the required, wellrendered, historical perspective perhaps more readers could
experience the time, place and life events that are so often lost in
the broad sweep of history.
DON KEITH, author of The Ship That Wouldnt Die and
Undersea Warrior
Fremantles Submarines blends naval history with a detailed
portrait of life in the Western Australian home front, fully
describing the crucial and genuinely friendly alliance that
formed between Allied submariners and their Australian hosts.
Michael Sturma has once again written a significant contribution
to the history of the Pacific War.
JOEL I. HOLWITT, author of Execute Against Japan: The U.S. Decision to Conduct Unrestricted Submarine
Warfare

About the author: MICHAEL STURMA is a professor of history and leader of humanities at
Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. He is the author of six previous books, including Death at
a Distance: The Loss of the Legendary USS Harder (Naval Institute Press, 2006). He served as editor
of The Great Circle, the peer-reviewed journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History,
from 2008-2013.

rom unpromising beginnings in March 1942, the Allied submarine base at Fremantle on the
west coast of Australia became a vital part of the offensive against Japan. Pushed back from
the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, American submariners, accompanied by a small group
of Dutch forces, retreated to Fremantle as a last resort. The location, chosen for its good harbor
and the fact that it was outside the range of land-based Japanese aircraft, was also far from the
American patrol areas and supply lines and difficult to reinforce against enemy attack. Virtually
cut off from their respective patrol areas and supply lines, the Allied forces had few reasons to
feel optimistic. However, thanks largely to a welcoming civilian population, morale quickly
improved. Perhaps as a result of such a positive experience, and reinforced by British submarines
from 1944, the Allied forces became much more successful in combat.
Intertwining social and military history, Fremantles Submarines not only documents the
courage of the submarine crews and the multinational cooperation that developed between the
Allies, it also integrates the experiences of submariners on shore with their operations at sea. The
hospitality and sense of belonging fostered by Western Australians became legendary among
Allied submariners and remains central to their wartime memories. At the same time, visiting
submariners helped fill the emotional void created in many Australian families due to the absent
sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands who were fighting overseas. In an atmosphere of wartime
austerity and rationing, the submariners also proved generous in sharing scarce resources with
the local population. Fremantles Submarines relates how courage, cooperation, and community
made Fremantle arguably the most successful military outpost of World War II in terms of overall
troop morale.

FREMANTLES SUBMARINES
How Allied Submariners and Western Australians Helped to Win the War in the Pacific
by Michael Sturma
Publication Date: 15 September 2015. 248 pp., 17 photos, 1 map, notes, bibliography index.
Hardcover list price: $32.95 | 21.75 | [$31.47 AUD: Kindle edition]
ISBN: 978-1-61251-860-2 | History Naval | eBook edition also available.
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