On Nov 14, 1914, the Australian battleship HMAS Sydney duelled to the death with the famed German raider SMS Emden in the Indian Ocean.
It was our nation’s first major sea battle, and a classic confrontation between two great ships crewed by seamen who have become legendary in the annals of war. Now, using never-before-published diaries and letters of the combatants as well as official naval reports, First Blood takes readers into the fury of war at sea.

The book recreates in vivid and terrifying detail Australia’s baptism of fire, when officers and men of both sides displayed unimagined valour. In the first months of World War I, Emden cut a swathe through allied shipping in the Indian Ocean. Its masterful and gallant captain Karl Friedrich Max von Muller and his colourful officers and crew struck hard and fast, bombing Madras and Penang and ambushing a score of cargo ships, confiscating their cargo and sinking them but rescuing their crew and passengers.

Von Muller and Emden seemed invincible. Meanwhile, HMAS Sydney, a new Australian cruiser, swift and bristling with powerful weapons and skippered by the redoubtable Captain John C.T.Glossop was escorting the First Australian and New Zealand Infantry Force From Albany in Western Australia to Egypt and battlefields of Europe.
When word came that Emden had attacked a strategically-vital wireless station in the Cocos Islands, 2,750 kilometres north-west of Perth, Sydney was detached from the convoy. Her orders, seek and destroy the German fighting ship.