The bombing of Darwin

On Thursday 19 February 1942, a few minutes before 10 a.m., 188 Japanese carrier aircraft appeared over the harbour of Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory. They were led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, the man who ten weeks earlier had led the first wave of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had taken off from the same four carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo. The sirens sounded only when the first bombs were already falling on the harbour. Less than two hours later another 54 bombers arrived from airfields on Celebes and Ambon. In the two raids the Japanese sank several warships and merchant ships, destroyed most of the aircraft on the airfields, wrecked the wharf, the post office and the hospital, and killed, according to the most widely accepted findings, between about 235 and 250 people. It was the first and also the largest attack ever made by a foreign power on Australian territory.

A port at the edge of the Malay Barrier

In 1942 Darwin was a small, isolated town. Before the war it had some 5,800 inhabitants, and it was linked to the rest of the country by a single dirt road and a railway that ended at Birdum, several hundred kilometres to the south. Strategically, however, it counted for far more than its size. From the autumn of 1941 its airfield lay on the ferry route for American bombers to the Philippines, which avoided the Japanese mandated islands. After the outbreak of the Pacific War Darwin became the most important supply base behind General Archibald Wavell’s Allied ABDA command, which from January was defending the so-called Malay Barrier. From here the Australian battalions sent to Ambon and Timor had sailed in December 1941; here ships carrying ammunition, fuel and food for Java and the besieged Philippines were assembled; and here aircraft flying on to Java refuelled.

When in January and February 1942 Japanese forces advanced into the Dutch East Indies, Darwin lay in their path. On 24 January the Japanese took Kendari on Celebes, with one of the best airfields in the archipelago, and on 3 February the garrison of Ambon surrendered. A landing on Timor was set for 20 February, and one on Java soon afterwards. Before these operations the Japanese command wanted to neutralise the base from which the Allies might threaten the invasion convoys.

In Darwin itself the war had been felt for weeks. In January Japanese submarines had laid mines in the approaches to the harbour; on 20 January the American destroyer Edsall and Australian corvettes sank the submarine I-124 nearby. Women and children had been evacuated from the town since December, so that by mid-February some 2,000 civilians remained, mostly officials and port and service workers. Those who stayed lived in an atmosphere of expectation that the fall of one northern base after another only deepened, and that was completed on 15 February by the news of the fall of Singapore.

Plan and forces

According to Japanese studies, the idea of a carrier strike on Darwin was put forward on 20 January by Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, commander of the 2nd Carrier Division. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto approved it at the end of January and assigned to the operation almost the whole force that had struck Hawaii and in January had covered the capture of Rabaul. The detailed plan was drawn up by Commander Minoru Genda. From 10 February Japanese reconnaissance aircraft flew over Darwin; one of the first reports spoke of an aircraft carrier, five destroyers and more than twenty ships in the harbour. The “aircraft carrier” was in fact the Langley, the first American carrier, converted into an aircraft transport, which had left Darwin on 11 February.

On 15 February the Kidō Butai sailed from Palau. It comprised the carriers Akagi, Kaga, Hiryū and Sōryū, screened by two fast battleships, cruisers and destroyers. On the morning of 19 February the force was at sea north-west of Darwin, some two hundred nautical miles away. By 8.45 a.m. 188 aircraft had taken off: 81 Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers, armed this time with bombs, 71 Aichi D3A dive bombers and 36 Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters. The second strike was to come from land: 27 Mitsubishi G3M bombers from Ambon and 27 Mitsubishi G4M bombers from Kendari. In all, therefore, 242 aircraft took part in the two raids.

Against such forces the defence of Darwin was almost token. The army had sixteen 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns and two older 3-inch guns, whose crews had hardly practised firing for lack of ammunition, as well as a number of machine guns. An experimental radar station was not yet working. The Australian fighter squadrons were fighting in Europe and the Middle East; the Royal Australian Air Force had on the spot a few Wirraway trainers, none of them serviceable that day, and a few Lockheed Hudson bombers. The only modern fighters were ten American P-40s of Major Floyd Pell’s 33rd Pursuit Squadron, passing through Darwin on their way to Java; most of their pilots had no combat experience. In the harbour, according to various tallies, lay anything from forty-odd to sixty-odd warships and merchant ships, anchored close together and with no plan in case of an air raid. Some of them had returned the day before from an abortive reinforcement convoy to Timor, turned back on 16 February after attacks by Japanese aircraft.

The first raid

There was no lack of warnings. On Melville Island a coastwatcher reported a large formation passing over at around 9.15 a.m. At 9.35 Father John McGrath of the Catholic mission on neighbouring Bathurst Island sent a message over a pedal-powered radio that a large number of aircraft were flying south over the mission; at 9.37 the message reached RAAF headquarters. The duty officers, however, concluded that these were the American P-40s, which were indeed returning to Darwin after being turned back from their flight to Java by bad weather. No alarm was given. On the way the Zero fighters shot down the American Catalina flying boat of Lieutenant Thomas Moorer, later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the crew survived.

At 9.58 a.m. the first Japanese aircraft attacked the harbour. Only then did the sirens sound. The fighters, which had gone ahead of the main formation, destroyed the American P-40s circling over and landing at the airfield; of the ten aircraft one survived, and only Lieutenant Robert Oestreicher stayed in the air to the end of the fight. For about half an hour dive bombers and level bombers attacked the ships lying in the bay. The greatest tragedy was the fate of the American destroyer Peary. Hit by five bombs, one of which set off her forward magazines, she sank with her machine guns firing to the last; 88 of her crew were killed. At the main wharf lay the freighter Neptuna, loaded with depth charges and explosives. Hit in the engine room, she caught fire and shortly afterwards blew up, killing 45 people, including nine wharf labourers. Bombs also hit the wharf itself, where at least twenty-odd workers were killed.

The troop transports Zealandia, Meigs and Mauna Loa, the tanker British Motorist and the small auxiliary Mavie were sunk, and later also the tanker Karalee and the coal hulk Kelat. The American seaplane tender William B. Preston, the Australian sloop Swan and a dozen or so other vessels were damaged. A bomb hit the clearly marked hospital ship Manunda, killing a dozen or so people, among them a nurse; even so, her crew took in wounded throughout the day. According to the Australian War Memorial, eight vessels were sunk in the harbour, and two more were beached and later refloated.

At the same time the Japanese bombed and strafed the town, both airfields, the barracks and the fuel stores. A bomb destroyed the post office, killing ten people, including the postmaster Hurtle Bald, his wife and daughter, and young telegraphists. Government House, the hospital and the water and electricity networks were damaged. At around 10.10 a.m. the aircraft began to leave. At the RAAF airfield Wing Commander Archibald Tindal was killed while firing at them with a machine gun from a trench; he was the first RAAF airman killed on Australian soil.

The second raid

At 11.58 a.m. the sirens sounded again. Fifty-four land-based bombers appeared over the town and, in two formations coming from the south-west and north-east, simultaneously bombed the RAAF base at Parap, then turned and attacked a second time. They were flying at about 5,500 metres, and the anti-aircraft guns, with faulty fuses, could do nothing against them. At around 12.20 p.m. they left. They had destroyed the hangars and most of the aircraft on the ground: six Hudsons, two P-40s and an American B-24. According to various tallies the Allies lost between twenty-odd and thirty aircraft that day.

In the afternoon dive bombers from the carriers found two supply ships carrying arms to the Philippines, the Don Isidro and the Florence D., and sank both near Bathurst and Melville Islands. According to various findings the Japanese lost between two and several aircraft in the two raids, most of them to ground fire; several dozen returned damaged. The fighter pilot Hajime Toyoshima, who crash-landed on Melville Island after being hit, was captured by a local Aboriginal man and became the first Japanese prisoner taken on Australian territory. He was killed in 1944 during the mass breakout of prisoners from the Cowra camp.

How many died

The death toll was disputed from the start. The first government communiqués spoke of fifteen or so killed, though the Prime Minister, John Curtin, admitted at once that a “heavy blow” had fallen on Australian soil and that the damage was considerable; the popular claim that the government covered up the raid entirely does not stand up to comparison with the press of the time. The commission of Mr Justice Charles Lowe, which investigated the matter in March, counted 243 dead and concluded that the number was “about 250”, with between 300 and 400 wounded. Later researchers, including historians of the Australian War Memorial, usually give between about 235 and 260 dead; a plaque unveiled in Darwin in 2001 lists 292 names, and the journalist Peter Grose estimated that the total might have slightly exceeded 300. The stories, circulating for years, of a thousand or more dead are rejected by professional historians as undocumented. Most of the victims were sailors from the warships and merchant ships, wharf labourers and soldiers.

The “Adelaide River Stakes”

The raid threw Darwin into chaos. Water and power were cut off, the wharf and the post office lay in ruins, and rumours swept the town of a Japanese landing expected at any moment. Most of the remaining civilians left for the south that same day and over the following days – by car, by lorry, by bicycle and even on foot – towards Adelaide River and beyond. Australians mockingly dubbed this disorderly exodus the “Adelaide River Stakes”, as if it were a horse race.

It was not only civilians who fled. After the second raid the commander of the RAAF base gave a verbal order for the airmen to move half a mile down the road and half a mile into the bush, where they were to be given a meal. Passed on by word of mouth, the order was distorted to such an extent that many understood it as an instruction for a general evacuation. At a roll call four days later 278 airmen were missing. Some had reached Batchelor and Adelaide River, some Daly Waters, and one Melbourne. Historians stress that these “desertions” arose largely from unclear orders rather than cowardice, but the incident cast a shadow over the reputation of the air force. There was also looting of abandoned houses and shops, in which soldiers and military policemen took part as well.

In the first days of March the government set up a commission under Mr Justice Lowe of the Supreme Court of Victoria. Its two reports, of 27 March and 9 April 1942, criticised the failure to give warning despite the reports from the islands, poor cooperation between the services, the breakdown of discipline and the weakness of the civil authorities. They were not, however, published until 1945.

Why the Japanese struck

The raid was not the prelude to an invasion of Australia. It was a covering operation for the conquest of Timor and Java: it was meant to destroy the ships and aircraft that might threaten the Japanese convoys and to put Darwin out of action as a supply base for a time. That aim was achieved. The sinking of most of the transports waiting in the harbour cut Java off from seaborne supplies from Australia. Allied warships effectively abandoned Darwin and moved to Fremantle and Brisbane. The next day the Japanese landed on Timor.

In February and March 1942 a landing in Australia was indeed considered in Tokyo. Some officers of the Naval General Staff proposed seizing at least its northern extremities, but the Army General Staff rejected the plan as impracticable: by its calculations it would have required at least ten divisions and enormous shipping tonnage, which Japan did not have. Instead of an invasion, it was decided to cut Australia off from the United States by seizing Port Moresby and then New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa. The Australians, however, did not know this. For them Darwin was proof that the enemy was at the gates.

Place in the war

The bombing of Darwin came four days after the fall of Singapore, where most of the Australian 8th Division had gone into captivity, and in the days when Japanese aircraft were attacking Java and Port Moresby. As early as 16 February Curtin had declared that the fall of Singapore “opens the battle for Australia”. In the following days there was a sharp dispute with Winston Churchill, who wanted to divert the Australian divisions returning from the Middle East to Burma; Curtin demanded that they come home. Australia, until then tied above all to Britain, turned towards the United States. On 17 March General Douglas MacArthur, who was to take command of the Allied forces in the South West Pacific, landed at Batchelor airfield near Darwin.

Darwin was bombed many more times. According to the Australian War Memorial, by 12 November 1943 the Japanese had attacked the town and the nearby airfields 64 times in all, and the whole of northern Australia, from Broome to Townsville, experienced almost a hundred raids. The heaviest of the later ones, on 16 June 1942, set the harbour’s fuel tanks ablaze. Darwin meanwhile became an Allied air base, with more airfields and fighter squadrons, which in 1943 inflicted ever heavier losses on Japanese raids. From a defensive position it was turning into a springboard for attacks on the Dutch East Indies.

The four carriers that attacked Darwin on 19 February were sunk four months later at the Battle of Midway. After the war Japanese divers salvaged the wrecks in the bay for scrap. The memory of the raid long remained in the shadow of Kokoda and Tobruk. Today, every year on 19 February at 9.58 a.m., a wartime air-raid siren sounds at the cenotaph in Darwin, and in a waterfront park stands a gun recovered from the wreck of the Peary, trained on the spot where the destroyer lies; in 2011 President Barack Obama visited the memorial. The bombing of Darwin is now called “Australia’s Pearl Harbor” – with the difference that it fell on a country that had already been at war with Japan for two months.