The Bombing of Darwin

Today marks the 79th anniversary of the first air strike on Australian soil, the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces. 

Thanks to Hollywood, everyone knows about Pearl Harbor – the story has been told many times, but what most people don’t realize is that it was not the first, or only, Japanese attack on that day. That morning, before US forces were attacked at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had already invaded Thailand and British Malaya. We can blame the International Date Line for this confusion. As you may know, that’s the arbitrary, imaginary line that cuts the calendar in half in the western part of the Pacific, zigzagging it’s way between the islands. So, what was 7 December on the Eastern side (US time zones), was 8 December on the west (Australian time zones). 

So, while US forces were coping with the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese invasion of British Malaya had begun. It is easy to forget, now they are sovereign nations, that when World War II broke out, Britain held Malaya (now Malaysia), Burma (Myanmar) and Singapore; Timor was a Portuguese possession; and France ruled a large part of South-East Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia. The Netherlands controlled all the islands that were to become Indonesia (known as the Dutch East Indies), and the USA had military bases in the Philippines, Hawaii and a number of small islands in the Pacific.

It can be seen by the map of Australia and its near neighbours directly to the north, that the territory captured by the Japanese in early 1942 — in particular Indonesia and Timor — is directly north of Western Australia, and very close. It is easy to forget this fact, which also explains why so many Western Australians holiday in Bali. 

In 1942 that tourist industry did not exist. The Dutch, British, French and Portuguese colonies were exotic, faraway places visited by few English-speaking people. Apart from the normal maritime activities of the local people, travel among the islands was mostly the province of pearlers and other exploitative adventurers, using small steamers or sailing vessels. There were no regular passenger flights into the region. It was, after all, only twelve years since Charles Kingsford-Smith had made the first long-distance flight across the Pacific. At that time, even in Europe and the United States, only the wealthy could afford to travel by air.

Australia’s north was equally undeveloped. The important ports that now lie on the northwest coast were not to be developed until vast iron-ore deposits were discovered in the region decades later. In 1942, Darwin was the only important port between Brisbane and Fremantle but, as far as infrastructure and facilities went, it was just a large outback town, an enormous distance from the nation’s major population centres.

In February 1942, Britain’s ‘impregnable’ fortress at Singapore fell and with it went all hope of protection from Britain, which was fighting for its own survival against the might of Germany and struggling to hang on to Burma in the East. The rest of Indochina was already under Japanese control, and the Dutch, embattled in the Indies, had already lost their homeland to the Germans. The ships of the United States Navy had been driven out of the Philippines and were retreating towards the Australian mainland.

On 19 February 1942, only four days after the fall of Singapore, the Japanese bombed Darwin. The attacks were carried out by 54 land-based bombers and 188 attack aircraft launched from Japanese aircraft carriers in the Timor Sea. Just before 10am the heavy bombers led the first attack on the town and harbour, then dive-bombers, escorted by Zero fighters, targeted shipping in the harbour, and both the military and civil airfields. This attack lasted about forty minutes, but enemy planes were back an hour later, bombing the RAAF base at Parap.

In the interests of security and the maintenance of morale, the losses were minimised in published reports. The West Australian of 23 February 1942 published a government communiqué concerning the raid. No mention was made of casualties, but it was reported that there had been no vital damage to service installations and that ‘some damage had been done to shipping’. Quite an understatement! Some 243 people died in that first attack, including eight at the post office, while between three and four hundred were wounded.

During March, Darwin was again attacked, as were Broome and Wyndham in Western Australia, Katherine in the Northern Territory, and Townsville in Queensland. At Broome, 70 people are known to have died and 24 aircraft were destroyed, fifteen of them flying boats. Many of those killed were women and children, refugees from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) who must have thought they had finally reached safety. Bombing raids on Darwin, which suffered more than sixty attacks, and the North West ports continued until late 1943.

*Partly based on, and including small excerpts from, Secret Fleets:Fremantle’s World War II Submarine Base, Lynne Cairns (Western Australian Museum, 2011)