This was not an easy achievement. Australia did not, at any stage during the war, posess a balanced fleet of capital ships, fleet escorts, cruisers and replenishment ships capable of surviving in battle against an enemy such as Japan. The wartime RAN was essentially a navy of small fighting ships. There are more than one hundred and fifty ships listed in this website, and only seven of them are heavier than a destroyer. This had important effects on the tactical and strategic use of the RAN.

A second factor was the prevailing Empire spirit of the time. Throughout the war, the British Admiralty used the RAN to bolster the strength of the Royal Navy. This was not a move to repress the Australians; it came about because in 1939 the British thought in terms of the whole Empire, of which Australia was a part, and not in terms of numerous separate navies.

It must be added that the British view was shared by Australia's high command for at least half the war. In November 1939 the RAN was formally turned over to British Admiralty command. As late as 1945 Australian writers would still refer to the RAN as "the Australian Squadron". Australian ships flew the Royal Navy's White Ensign throughout the war. Thousands of Australian ratings served aboard Royal Navy ships and never saw the inside of an Australian warship.

When the Americans joined the war, the RAN remained unbalanced. The Americans thus took over where the Royal Navy had left off, combining the RAN's resources alongside those of the US Navy without creating or helping to create a cohesive Australian fleet.

Another issue was resources. It took most of the war for Australia to get together enough ships to have a navy. In 1939 there were shortages of everything; the first months of the war were marked by urgent requisitioning of civillian ships for naval purposes. Most of the British Empire's naval forces were urgently needed in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The regular Australian navy - just five cruisers, five destroyers and four sloops - had to be everywhere at once.

As if this wasn't enough, there were devastating reverses. By the middle of 1942, of the fourteen ships with which the RAN began the war, exactly half - three cruisers, four destroyers and two sloops - had been lost, in one case with all hands. Replacements had to be manned and maintained, and shortages had an impact here too. The British handed seven brand new destroyers to the RAN (mostly during 1942), but undertook to provide the essential maintenance for them themselves. This meant that these Australian warships had to operate out of British bases, as parts of British squadrons.

So how did the RAN win any spurs at all in these circumstances? Partly by gaining important parts in the victories of other navies - Cape Matapan, the sinking of Bartolomeo Colleoni, Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea. The five original destroyers were a priceless asset in the Mediterranean throughout 1940 and 1941. The RAN provided a cruiser squadron under American strategic direction which was very active from the battle of the Coral Sea until the final shots in the Phillipines. In keeping with the independent, aggressive spirit of the original ANZACs, a substantial force of commando-ships harried Japanese communications from Rabaul to Singapore for three hard years.

Another factor helping the RAN was that the shortages eventually came good. Between 1942 and 1945 three destroyers, sixty minesweepers and a whole class of frigates were built in Australian yards. The Royal Navy handed over another cruiser to replace some of the lost heavy ships. Seven new British-built destroyers were crewed almost entirely by Australians (but, as noted, almost always served as units within the British Fleet).

By the end of the war the RAN was an experienced force of roughly seventy warships and a huge assortment of auxilliaries. It was still not able to fight as a fleet. It was widely scattered, and the three surviving cruisers were its only heavy units. But as flotillas and individual ships the RAN was well able to mix it with the big boys in battles like Surigao strait, Lingayen Gulf, and the British carrier sweeps in the south of the Japanese home islands. They battled kamikaze attacks and fired barrages in support of invasions carried out by Australian troops. The minesweepers proved to be first-rate all-purpose escorts, transports, ferries and scouts, indispensable to the allied effort in New Guinea and Borneo. The unglamorous survey work which allowed huge fleets to manouvre in confined waters without striking a reef or running aground had been done flawlessly.

The result is summed up in the comment by the editorial staff of "HMAS Mk IV", the wartime chronicle of the RAN's deeds. "During the war, the Royal Australian Navy reached maturity, with graduates of the RAN College commanding the Squadron." Even if it was scattered across three navies in two oceans, the RAN had won the right to be Australian from the top down. It had come of age; it had "won it's spurs".