Frame described the account as "bland and unemotional" and "necessarily superficial", but Gill's analysis of the battle is attacked by Frame as "seriously flawed, inconsistent and contradictory". Several biographical and autobiographical works which touched on the battle (including books by Detmers and former Sydney commander John Collins) were also published around this time; none of these contributed new information. Michael Montgomery's 1981 book, Who Sank The Sydney?, was the first published work to focus solely on Sydney and the events surrounding her loss and the first to comprehensively challenge the accepted view of the battle. The son of Sydneys Royal Navy navigator, Montgomery, could not accept the ship's loss as described by Gill, and he claimed that the true events were being covered up. According to his book, Kormoran had fired on Sydney while flying the flag of a neutral nation, a Japanese submarine was involved in the battle, and any Australian survivors were killed to hide the involvement of the Japanese.Montgomery, Who Sank The Sydney?, pp. 109, 135–7, 154–5, 188, 200–2 Montgomery also suggests that the British government had foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred three weeks later, and ordered the Australian government to cover up the truth of Sydneys loss so the United States would be drawn into the war.Montgomery, Who Sank The Sydney?, p. 205 Who Sank the Sydney? is reliant on assertions that had been proved false, unreliable sources (including a 'sailor's report' found to be a translation of an inaccurate Australian newspaper article), and selective use of German accounts that fit the hypothesis. Montgomery is generally credited with igniting the controversy surrounding the battle. Although not written as such, the 1984 HMAS Sydney: Fact, Fantasy and Fraud by Barbara Winter served as a reply to Montgomery's work. Winter used material from German and American archives in addition to Australian sources, with the main thrust of her work comparing the relative experience and competence of Burnett and Detmers, which supported the accepted view of the battle. In her work, Winter also sought to identify and prove false all the rumours and theories that had appeared since the battle. Frame describes her work as "reasonable and persuasive... [h]owever, she tried too hard to defend the crew of the Kormoran... at the expense of Sydney", while a government report in 1999 observed that Winter's defence of the German accounts saw her become the "bête