The attack on Broome

On the morning of Tuesday 3 March 1942 nine Japanese fighters and a reconnaissance aircraft appeared over Broome, a small pearling port on the north-west coast of Western Australia. Nobody was expecting them. More than a dozen flying boats lay at anchor in Roebuck Bay, having brought refugees from Java over the previous days, and were waiting for fuel; bombers and transport aircraft stood on the airfield. In less than an hour the Japanese destroyed more than twenty aircraft and killed at least 88 people, many of them Dutch civilians, including women and children. After the bombing of Darwin it was the deadliest Japanese attack on Australian territory.

The gateway of the evacuation from Java

In 1942 Broome was a small settlement that lived from harvesting pearl oysters (PL). Before the war many of the divers had been Japanese; when war broke out in the Pacific they were interned, like most Japanese in Australia. The little town nevertheless had two things that proved invaluable in February 1942: an airfield and a sheltered bay where flying boats could alight. It was also the nearest point of the Australian mainland on the route south from Java across the Indian Ocean to Perth.

When the Japanese, having taken Bali and Timor, closed the ring around Java and on 28 February and 1 March landed on the island itself, a flight from the Dutch East Indies began in anything that could fly. Transport and passenger aircraft took off from Bandung and other airfields; from the port of Cilacap (PL) (Tjilatjap) on the island’s south coast left Dutch Dornier Do 24 flying boats, Catalinas of several nations and big Short Empire boats of Qantas. On board were airmen and staff officers whom ABDA command wanted to save, wounded men, and the families of Dutch airmen. The sea route was even more dangerous: in the first days of March Japanese warships and aircraft sank many of the merchant ships and warships south of Java in which people were trying to escape from the island.

For a long time nobody knew how many people passed through Broome. The Australian official history stated that some 8,000 refugees went through the town in the two weeks spanning the turn of February and March, a figure repeated in many publications. The Australian historian Tom Lewis judged it greatly exaggerated and estimated that about 1,350 people arrived by air, mostly servicemen, including about 250 Dutch civilians. Even so, for a small settlement it was an onslaught it could barely cope with: aircraft landed day and night, and flying boats waited on the bay for their turn to refuel, often with their passengers still on board.

The attack

Broome had neither fighters nor anti-aircraft guns. Since the end of February, meanwhile, the Japanese had had the use of the airfield near Kupang on Timor, nearly 900 kilometres from Broome. Based there were Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters of the 3rd Kōkūtai, a naval air unit that had been fighting over the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies since December. On the morning of 3 March the squadron commander, Lieutenant Zenjirō Miyano, led nine Zeros fitted with drop tanks to Broome, accompanied by a Mitsubishi C5M reconnaissance aircraft, the naval version of the army’s Ki-15.

At around 9.20–9.30 a.m. the fighters swept down on the bay at low level. The flying boats, fully fuelled, caught fire at the first bursts and exploded, and burning fuel spread across the water. Many passengers who survived the strafing could not reach the distant shore through the burning petrol; there were also sharks in the surrounding waters. Frank Russell, an RAAF pilot who survived the attack aboard one of the boats, later described a “scene of ghastly destruction”: flying boats belching clouds of black smoke, patches of burning petrol floating on the sea, and tracer falling all around without pause. Several of the Dutch Dorniers were full of women and children waiting to take off for safety.

According to the most frequently cited tallies, fifteen flying boats burned on the bay: eight Catalinas of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Dutch naval air service, the US Navy and the RAF, five Dornier Do 24s and two Short Empires. At the same time some of the fighters attacked the airfield, destroying two American B-17 bombers, a B-24, two Australian Hudsons and a Dutch Lodestar. Over the sea the Japanese shot down an American Liberator that had just taken off for Perth with wounded men and airmen evacuated from Java. It came down about 16 kilometres offshore. Accounts differ on how many died in it, from about twenty to more than thirty; the only certain survivor, Sergeant Melvin Donoho, swam for more than a day and a half to reach the shore.

No bombs were dropped, although witnesses claimed to have seen them; most probably they mistook jettisoned fuel tanks for bombs. There was almost no defence. A Dutch pilot, Lieutenant Gus Winckel, who had only just landed at Broome with refugees, took a machine gun off his Lodestar and fired at the attacking Zeros holding the weapon without a mount, until the red-hot barrel burned his forearm. For decades he was credited with shooting down the only Zero lost over Broome; its pilot, Osamu Kudō, was killed. Research from 2010 suggests that the gunners of the downed Liberator may also have hit it; the question remains disputed. A second Japanese fighter ran out of fuel on the way back and ditched; its pilot survived.

The victims

Exactly how many people died at Broome on 3 March is not known. Passenger lists for the flying boats often did not exist, and many bodies were lost to the sea. The figure most often given is “at least 88” dead; the local historical society speaks of at least 89, and the Australian War Memorial of about a hundred. The victims included Dutch civilians, among them at least nine children, American, Dutch and British servicemen, Indians, and the Japanese pilot. In 1950 the remains of some of the dead were moved to the war cemetery in Perth. In all, according to different tallies, the Japanese destroyed between 22 and 24 Allied aircraft.

The people of Broome and the aircrews rushed to help. Charlie D’Antoine, an Aboriginal worker who serviced the flying boats, pulled two survivors from the water, swimming through burning petrol and wreckage; the Dutch government later decorated him.

Smirnoff’s aircraft

The Japanese fighters also caught an aircraft that was still approaching Broome. About 80 kilometres north of the town three Zeros returning to Timor attacked a Douglas DC-3 of the Netherlands Indies airline KNILM, flying refugees from Bandung. Its pilot was Ivan Smirnoff, a Russian émigré, a fighter ace of the First World War and one of the best-known pilots of KLM. Wounded in the arm, he managed to put the aircraft down on a beach by Carnot Bay. The fighters then strafed the aircraft on the ground. Four of the passengers died of their wounds over the following days, before the survivors were found. Also on board was a packet of diamonds, worth between £150,000 and £300,000 by contemporary estimates; most of them were never recovered.

On the same day Japanese aircraft also attacked Wyndham at the eastern end of the Kimberley, where an Australian DH.84 Dragon transport biplane was burned out on the airfield.

Australia under threat

The attack on Broome, two weeks after Darwin, showed that the whole of northern Australia lay within reach of Japanese air power. The air evacuation from Java was in any case coming to an end: a few days later resistance on the island collapsed. Broome was attacked several more times in the following months – on 20 March Mitsubishi G4M bombers bombed the airfield from high altitude, killing one civilian – and the last raid came in August 1943. According to the Australian War Memorial, northern Australia suffered almost a hundred air raids over twenty months, from Exmouth in the west to Townsville in the east.

In Western Australia the March attacks gave rise to what later came to be called the “March 1942 threat”. The authorities feared that the Japanese fleet would strike down the west coast at Fremantle and Perth. Garrisons were reinforced, fortifications built and the population prepared for a possible invasion. At Fremantle a base was set up for the American submarines that had withdrawn from Java; it operated until the end of the war. In reality Japan had no plans for a landing in Australia. Its army general staff rejected the idea as beyond the army’s means, and the navy opted instead to cut the continent off from the United States. The Australians, however, could not know that, and the burning flying boats in Roebuck Bay became one of the images of what post-war memory called the Battle for Australia.

The wrecks of the flying boats still lie in the bay and emerge from the water at the lowest tides. They are protected by law as the resting place of the dead, and in 2000 a memorial was unveiled in Broome to the British, American and Dutch servicemen and civilians who died there.