The Japanese raid on Darwin in May 1943

Shortly before noon on Sunday 2 May 1943 Japanese aircraft appeared over Darwin once again. According to the records of the Australian Department of Defence, it was the 54th raid on the town since the first great attack of 19 February 1942. This time, however, the raiders were met not by American Kittyhawks but by Spitfires – the famous fighters of the Battle of Britain, brought to Australia amid great publicity. The day that was meant to confirm their superiority ended in a defeat reported by the whole Australian press.

Spitfires in northern Australia

By 1943 Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, was less a town than a large military base. Most civilians had been evacuated after the raid of February 1942, and a network of airfields – Batchelor, Strauss, Livingstone, Coomalie Creek – had grown up in the surrounding area, from which Allied bombers attacked the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese replied with raids from their bases on Timor and Celebes.

In January 1943 the air defence of the town was taken over by No. 1 Fighter Wing of the Royal Australian Air Force, formed in October 1942. It consisted of three squadrons: the British No. 54 Squadron RAF and the Australian Nos 452 and 457 Squadrons RAAF, which had previously fought in Europe. All flew the Supermarine Spitfire Mk Vc, adapted for the tropics: under the nose they carried a large Vokes air filter, which protected the engine from dust but cost the aircraft some of its performance. The wing was commanded by Group Captain Allan Walters, and its leader in the air (the wing leader) was Wing Commander Clive Caldwell, the highest-scoring Australian fighter ace of the war, victor of many combats over the Western Desert.

Bringing in the Spitfires was a political decision. Prime Minister John Curtin, who since early 1942 had been pressing London for equipment for the country’s defence, announced in the House of Representatives on 4 March 1943 that Spitfires were already fighting over Australia – and members greeted the news with applause. Two days earlier the wing had clashed with a Japanese raid for the first time and shot down several aircraft. The first weeks also revealed weaknesses, however: only some of the pilots had combat experience, many had come straight from training, and field airstrips with dirt runways, tropical heat and a constant shortage of spare parts caused numerous accidents. On 15 March, in a fight with more than forty Japanese aircraft, the wing lost four Spitfires and three pilots, including the commander of No. 452 Squadron.

Attack and pursuit

The raid of 2 May was mounted by the Japanese naval air arm. According to Australian figures it comprised 25 twin-engined Mitsubishi G4M bombers and 27 Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters – the Zeros flew more than 1,600 kilometres from Timor and back, a feat of navigation. Radar detected the raiders in good time and 33 Spitfires took off, but they could not climb to the bombers’ altitude before the bombs were released. The bombs fell on Darwin and its surroundings; the damage on the ground was slight, and one soldier was killed.

Caldwell led the wing in pursuit of the retreating Japanese far out over the Timor Sea. No. 54 Squadron engaged the fighters, while the other two went for the bombers. The battle lasted about 25 minutes and quickly broke up into individual combats. The Zeros, lighter and more manoeuvrable, had the advantage in the turning dogfights into which many pilots were drawn; in the process the Spitfires used up fuel much faster than expected, and the weather over the sea was unfavourable as well.

The day’s toll

The outcome was painful. Five Spitfires were shot down. Five more, out of fuel, force-landed away from their airfields, and another three broke off the fight because of engine and propeller failures. In all, 13–14 aircraft were destroyed or damaged; of those that force-landed or returned with failures, all but two were later repaired. Two pilots were killed.

The pilots claimed six to ten Japanese aircraft shot down and several more damaged. Researchers who later compared these reports with Japanese records regard them as greatly exaggerated: the attackers’ actual losses were most probably small, and the day’s balance came out clearly in favour of the Japanese. This is a typical picture of the air fighting of this war – both sides, in good faith, repeatedly overestimated their successes.

A storm in the press

The matter could not be hushed up. A communiqué from the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur – who since his arrival in Australia in March 1942 had commanded the Allied forces in the South West Pacific – described the losses at Darwin as “heavy” for the first time. The Australian newspapers seized on the word, and the public, convinced that the Spitfires would keep the town safe, received the news with alarm. Feelings were already raw – relations between Australians and the Americans stationed in the country had been strained by, among other things, the Battle of Brisbane of November 1942, and Curtin’s government had to account for every setback in the north.

The Advisory War Council demanded that the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Vice-Marshal George Jones, explain why so many aircraft had been lost through lack of fuel and mechanical failure. In his report Jones concluded that the equipment had been sound and blamed the losses on Caldwell’s tactical errors, bad weather and the pilots’ inexperience with the new aircraft. Caldwell rejected these charges for the rest of his life, maintaining that Jones had not investigated the matter properly and that the main culprits were faults in the power units and the Spitfire’s insufficient fuel reserve. The dispute between the two officers is one of the longest-running controversies in the history of Australian military aviation.

Lessons

The wing drew practical lessons from the defeat. The Spitfires were given drop tanks, and pilots were forbidden to dogfight with the Zeros: they were to attack with the advantage of height and speed and break away after the attack – the tactic already used by the American Kittyhawk pilots at Darwin. The results came quickly. On 20 June 1943 the wing intercepted two Japanese raids and, by its own figures, shot down more than a dozen aircraft for the loss of two Spitfires; MacArthur sent the defenders his congratulations, and the press changed its tone.

Its place in the war

The raid of 2 May opened a period of heightened Japanese activity over northern Australia that lasted until the autumn of 1943. According to the Australian War Memorial, the Japanese attacked Darwin and the surrounding airfields 64 times in all, the last time on 12 November 1943, and the whole of the north of the country – from Broome to Townsville – nearly a hundred times. By then, however, these raids had no strategic significance. The threat of an invasion of Australia, real in the first half of 1942, had passed after the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal; the Japanese were trying rather to tie down Allied air power and disrupt the attacks from Darwin on their bases in the Dutch East Indies.

The weight of the war was shifting from defence to offence. Allied bombers took off in growing numbers from the airfields around Darwin, and by 1944 newer marks of Spitfire were stationed in northern Australia. The clash of 2 May remained in memory as a warning against overrating equipment and underestimating the enemy – and as an example of how quickly great expectations built up around a single aircraft type can turn into disappointment.