The shelling of Sydney and Newcastle

Shortly after midnight on 8 June 1942, a week after the night-time attack by midget submarines on Sydney Harbour, the war once again reached Australia’s largest city. The Japanese submarine I-24 surfaced some ten to fifteen kilometres off the coast and in the space of four minutes fired ten shells towards Sydney. Two hours later a matching attack struck Newcastle, a centre of heavy industry about 120 kilometres to the north: the submarine I-21 shelled it for a quarter of an hour. Neither bombardment did much damage or killed anyone, but they shook the people of the east coast more than many bigger events of that year.

Sasaki’s submarines off the Australian coast

Both boats belonged to Captain Hankyu Sasaki’s 8th Submarine Flotilla, whose large boats had carried the midget submarines to Sydney for the night of 31 May–1 June. That action, conceived as a diversion before the Battle of Midway, ended with the loss of all three midget submarines and sank only the old ferry Kuttabul, which was serving as a barracks ship. When it was over, the mother submarines did not leave at once. I-21 patrolled the waters north of Sydney and I-24 those to the south, I-27 hunted for ships leaving Melbourne, and I-29 headed for the waters off Brisbane. On 3 June I-24 attacked the coastal steamer Age with her deck gun and a few hours later torpedoed and sank the collier Iron Chieftain; 12 men died. The next day I-27 sent the ship Iron Crown to the bottom off the coast of Victoria, with the loss of 37 seamen. The Australians thus had the enemy right on the doorstep of their ports, while the east coast still lacked warships capable of hunting him down.

The shelling of the cities had no strictly military purpose. From the deck of a rolling submarine, with primitive rangefinders, it was impossible to hit a specific target. The Australian historian David Jenkins writes that the aim was to create an “atmosphere of unease”, in other words a psychological effect.

Sydney: ten shells in four minutes

I-24, commanded by Hiroshi Hanabusa, surfaced about 14 kilometres south-east of Macquarie Lighthouse, off the entrance to Port Jackson. According to Japanese accounts, the crew of the 140 mm gun were to aim at the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Between 12.15 and 12.20 a.m. the submarine fired ten rounds. Nine shells fell on the affluent eastern suburbs – Rose Bay, Bellevue Hill, Woollahra and Vaucluse, and, according to local records, one also on a street in Bondi – and the tenth landed in the water. One shell pierced the brick wall of a block of flats in Manion Avenue, Rose Bay, and failed to explode. Only one went off, in front of a house in Rose Bay, destroying part of the building. No one was killed. The injuries, caused by falling bricks and glass from shattered windows, were slight; sources mention one or two people injured, including a man with a broken foot.

The coastal defence searchlights came on a few seconds after the last shot, and the sirens sounded a few minutes late. The coastal batteries saw the muzzle flashes, but before they could open fire I-24 had dived. The only fatality in the Sydney area that night was an American airman, Lieutenant George Cantello. Against orders he took off from Bankstown airfield to search for the submarine, but the engine of his Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter failed and the aircraft crashed in a field near Hammondville. The pilot was killed. Since 1988 a small park in the City of Liverpool has commemorated him.

Newcastle: Fort Scratchley replies

Newcastle, a port at the mouth of the Hunter River, was the heart of Australian steelmaking. Here stood the great steelworks of BHP, and they were to be the target of I-21, a Type B1 submarine commanded by Kanji Matsumura. Because the boat’s gun was mounted abaft the conning tower, I-21 fired while heading east, from seaward, about 9 kilometres off Stockton Beach. Between 2.15 and 2.31 a.m. she fired 34 shells, eight of them star shells. The spread was wide. Only one high-explosive shell detonated, damaging a house in Parnell Place; another, a dud, hit a tram terminus.

At 2.28 a.m. two guns of Fort Scratchley, the old fort guarding the harbour entrance, replied. Matsumura, convinced that it would take the Australians some time to range on his boat, kept firing for another three minutes. The fort fired four rounds in two salvoes without scoring a hit, and I-21 got away unscathed. Australian historians emphasise that this was the only occasion on which an Australian land fortification fired on an enemy warship. In Newcastle no one was killed or injured. Neither submarine was pursued, because there happened to be no anti-submarine vessels in either port.

Why the shells failed to explode

The meagre results of the bombardment were largely due to the quality of the ammunition. The submarines fired armour-piercing shells, designed to penetrate steel hulls; the brick walls of houses may not have set off their fuzes. The shells had lain for weeks in boxes on deck, exposed to seawater. Among the duds recovered in Newcastle there were also British-made shells, probably stocks dating from the First World War, when Japan was Britain’s ally.

Fear in the eastern suburbs

There was hardly any physical damage, but the psychological effects proved serious. Within a week Sydney had lived through an attack on its harbour, news of sunken ships and a night-time bombardment. Many residents of the eastern suburbs concluded that invasion was only a matter of time. Those who could moved west, away from the coast. Prices of houses overlooking the harbour and the ocean fell, while property prices in the western part of the metropolitan area and beyond the Blue Mountains rose markedly. At the same time enlistment in voluntary civil defence organisations and the Volunteer Defence Corps increased, and the authorities strengthened the defences of the ports of Sydney and Newcastle.

This fear had deeper roots. Since February Australia had lived through the bombing of Darwin, the fall of Singapore and Java, and air raids on one northern town after another. In February General Iven Mackay, in charge of the country’s home defence, had proposed concentrating its slender forces on the most important area, between Brisbane and Melbourne. From this later grew rumours and a political dispute over the so-called Brisbane Line, an alleged plan to abandon the north of the continent to the Japanese; in the autumn of 1942 the accusations were raised by the Labor MP Eddie Ward, and most historians believe that no plan in that form was ever adopted. In June 1942, however, many people on the east coast were convinced that the government of John Curtin and the army might give up part of the country without a fight. Hope came from the arrival of the Americans and of General Douglas MacArthur, who since March had commanded the Allied forces in the South West Pacific from Australia.

Its place in the war

The shelling of Sydney and Newcastle did not change the course of the war. It was the last act of the June campaign by Japanese submarines off Australia’s east coast: by 25 June Sasaki’s boats had attacked at least seven ships and sunk three, after which they returned to Kwajalein atoll. They did, however, force the Australians to introduce a system of escorted convoys in the coastal waters north of Melbourne, which tied down the Royal Australian Navy’s limited forces.

The day before the bombardment the Battle of Midway had ended, with Japan losing four carriers. The Australians did not yet know it, but the threat of invasion that they feared on those June nights was by then unreal: the Japanese army had rejected plans for a landing on the continent back in the spring, and after Midway Tokyo did not even have the strength to cut Australia off from America. The struggle for Australia’s security moved to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, where fighting began on the Kokoda Track in July and on Guadalcanal in August.

Japanese submarines did return to Australian waters. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 I-21 sank more ships there and became the most successful Japanese submarine in the area, and in May 1943 I-177 sank the hospital ship Centaur off the Queensland coast, with the loss of 268 lives. Yet the shelling of 8 June 1942 remained in Australian memory as the night when the war first struck the homes of their largest city. The Australian War Memorial holds fragments and objects from the Rose Bay houses damaged that night.