While spending a long weekend on the glorious Mornington Peninsula last year at a boozy wine festival (is there any other kind?!?), I stumbled upon a most unexpected discovery, a tiny curio slice of history that has never travelled far beyond the annals of the Mornington Historical Society. Thumbing through the pages of a peninsula tourist publication, I came across an article reproduced from a local newspaper which focused on the little-known role of Fort Nepean on the southern part of the peninsula near Portsea during both world wars.

The article detailed the claim for the fort to be viewed as the site where the first shots in anger in both World War I and World War II were fired! This most improbable, double occurrence took place in the same stretch of water in Port Phillip Bay, a location as far removed from the major theatres of global war as could be imagined.

SS Pfalz 1914

The fortifications at Port Phillip Bay were strategically located to guard the narrow heads at the entrance to the harbour of Melbourne. Almost 100 years ago, on 5th August 1914, the outbreak of the Great War was imminent, Germany had declared war on Russia, and a reaction from Britain (as Russia’s ally) was anticipated. The command at Fort Nepean was receiving intelligence on the movements in Melbourne of a German ship, SS Pfalz, which was loading coal on board in Victoria Dock. The captain of the Pfalz was anxious to get his ship out of the harbour before hostilities were declared, and got underway before loading was completed.

Melbourne Herald headline

As the German coal steamer approached the heads, Britain declared war on Germany, automatically dragging Australia into the war. The commander at Fort Nepean was ordered to “stop or sink” what was now identified as an enemy vessel. Signal warnings to stop were flown from the fort but were ignored by the Pfalz, resulting in a single shot from a 6-inch MK VII gun being fired across the bow of the ship. The pilot on board the Pfalz apparently persuaded the captain to turn the steamer round and surrender, thus avoiding any fatalities. The crew were arrested at Portsea and interned for the duration of the war. The Pflaz was found to have 4-inch guns mounted on it, so had it made it’s escape to the open sea, it could well have posed a significant threat to Australian war-time shipping. Instead, it was renamed and used as a Allied troop carrier during the war [http://historic-landmarks.com/fort-nepean-protecting-the-entrance-to-port-phillip/].

25 year later, Fort Nepean, remarkably, was the scene of a parallel incident at the onset of the Second World War. When Britain declared war on Germany by Britain on 3rd September 1939, Australian PM Menzies followed suit immediately, and Fort Nepean was ordered to monitor all maritime traffic entering the heads. The next day the fort command at Point Nepean challenged an incoming vessel to identify itself. The freighter, a Bass Strait trader called the SS Woniora did not comply with the gun battery’s orders, and a single warning shot from another 6-inch gun was fired across the bow of the Woniora. The shaken crew of the freighter quickly identified itself and was allowed to proceed on its course to Melbourne. Like 1914, this was the first Australian shot fired in anger in the world war, in this case though, this was the first shot fired in confusion as well![‘Fort Nepean’, http://weekendnotes.com/]

Today, the long disbanded fort is now part of Point Nepean National Park, a nature conservancy where visitors can explore the remaining gun emplacements including the two gun barrels (A1 and B1) which fired the first shots of war (originally sold for scrap after WWII but later restored)

PostScript: Definitive bragging rights?
The shots from A1 and B1 on those two occasions were the only ones ever seriously launched from Fort Nepean in its history! Were these the first shots fired in anger by anyone in the two world wars? Probably this can’t be said in any absolute definitive sense, there is too much that can’t be certain about the exact start of hostilities in both conflicts. ‘Firsts’ are not always a straight forward phenomenon to try to pin down in historical fact. The established wisdom had accepted without serious disputation for 100 years that the Wright Brothers were the first persons to successfully make a manned, heavier-than-air flight, and then along came the counter-claims for Gustave Whitehead and Santos-Dumont et al, and the comfortable ‘certainty’ of this ‘first’ was suddenly up for serious reconsideration and hotly-contested debate. With much more confidence, we can say that the actions of the Fort Nepean gun battery on those two occasions represent the first Australian shots in anger in the two world wars, and almost certainly the first also by the Allied forces.