Bombing of Darwin

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bombing of Darwin began at 9:58 am on the 19th of February 1942, when 188 Japanese aircraft appeared over a small Australian town that had no functioning radar, no serviceable fighter aircraft, and no plan for what its ships should do if attacked. What followed was the largest single attack ever mounted by a foreign power on Australian soil. It happened just four days after the Fall of Singapore, where the largest surrender in British history had just taken place. The questions that linger are not just about the scale of destruction, but about how a target of such strategic importance was left so dangerously exposed, and what the true human cost really was.

• 2. A Town Unprepared

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  Darwin in 1942 was a small town of 5,800 people before the war, sitting at the top of Australia's Northern Territory. Its position made it valuable; its defences made it vulnerable. The Australian Army's anti-aircraft arsenal amounted to sixteen QF 3.7-inch guns and two 3-inch guns for high-altitude threats, plus a handful of Lewis Guns for low-flying aircraft. The gun crews had conducted little recent training because of ammunition shortages. The air forces nearby consisted of No. 12 Squadron flying CAC Wirraway advanced trainers pressed into service as fighters, and No. 13 Squadron operating Lockheed Hudson light bombers. On the morning of the attack, not one of the six Wirraways at Darwin was serviceable. There was no functional radar anywhere in the town. The Lowe Commission, led by Victorian judge Charles Lowe and appointed to investigate the raids shortly after they occurred, was told that defending Darwin against an attack of that scale would have required 36 heavy anti-aircraft guns and 250 fighter aircraft. Ten USAAF Curtiss P-40 Warhawks were passing through on their way to Java that day, but their pilots were largely inexperienced in combat. As many as 65 Allied warships and merchant vessels crowded the harbour, most anchored close together, and no plan had been drawn up for how they should respond to an air raid.

• 3. The Warning That Came Too Late

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  At 9:35 am on the 19th of February, Father McGrath of the Sacred Heart mission on Bathurst Island sent a message via pedal radio to the Amalgamated Wireless Postal Radio Station at Darwin. He had spotted a large number of aircraft flying overhead and heading south. The message was relayed to Royal Australian Air Force Operations at 9:37 am. RAAF officers made a fateful misjudgement: they believed the aircraft were the ten USAAF P-40s, which had turned back from a flight to Java due to bad weather and were expected to return. No general alarm was sounded. The air raid sirens at Darwin were silent when the Japanese formation arrived. Flying escort in a Zero fighter, Petty Officer Yoshikazu Nagahama had become separated from his squadron while attacking a US Navy PBY Catalina near Melville Island. He arrived over the city alone, ahead of the strike force, and engaged five P-40s. He shot down four of them single-handedly. HMAS Gunbar was the first ship to come under attack, strafed by Zero fighters, before the bombers began their work on the harbour. The sirens finally sounded around 10 am, close to two minutes after the Japanese raiders had already arrived.

• 4. The Strike Force

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  Commander Mitsuo Fuchida led the first wave. He had commanded the first wave of attackers at Pearl Harbor, and now he led 81 Nakajima B5N light bombers, 71 Aichi D3A dive bombers, and 36 Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters launched from four aircraft carriers. All four of those carriers had also participated in the Pearl Harbor attack. A tenth of February Japanese reconnaissance flight had already mapped the harbour: an aircraft carrier, five destroyers, and 21 merchant ships identified, along with 30 aircraft at two airfields. The bombers were launched by 8:45 am. The first raid lasted 30 minutes and resulted in the sinking of three warships and six merchant vessels, with damage to ten more. Among the ships sunk was the USS Peary, a destroyer from which 88 men would ultimately die. The hospital ship HMAHS Manunda was struck and lost 12 crew. At the main wharf, a vessel loaded with 14,000 drums of aviation gasoline exploded. At least 21 labourers working on the wharf were killed when it was bombed. Nearly two hours later, 54 land-based medium bombers arrived for a second raid: 27 Mitsubishi G3M bombers from Ambon and 27 Mitsubishi G4M bombers from Kendari in Celebes. Flying at 18,000 feet and attacking RAAF Base Darwin from two directions simultaneously, they destroyed six Hudson light bombers. Defective fuses on Australian anti-aircraft shells meant none of these high-flying aircraft could be brought down.

• 5. A Disputed Toll

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  The Lowe Commission estimated 243 dead and concluded the true figure was approximately 250. A plaque unveiled in Darwin in 2001 put the number at 292. Peter Grose, author of An Awkward Truth, calculated a figure of 297 known dead and suggested the full toll was likely a little over 300, perhaps as many as 310 or 320. Lewis and Ingman revised certain ship counts in their 2013 book Carrier Attack. Some survivors gave accounts that stretched far beyond these figures. A former Darwin mayor from 1921-1922 named Jack Burton reportedly estimated 900 people were killed. Harry Macredie, who helped recover bodies from the harbour, said the estimate he and others held was over 1,000. Rex Ruwoldt, one of the soldiers present, said he was told days later by Army Intelligence that approximately 1,100 had died. These higher numbers were firmly rejected by historians including Peter Stanley of the Australian War Memorial, who called 1,024 unsubstantiated, and Grose, who called figures like 1,100 fancifully high. Grose noted a telling detail: the count of wounded was far less contested. The Lowe Commission put it between 300 and 400; Lewis said over 400, about 200 of them seriously. The injured were treated and recorded in hospitals and aboard the Manunda, making that figure more reliable. The gap between wounded and the most extreme death estimates, Grose argued, simply did not add up.

• 6. Chaos and Its Aftermath

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  After the second raid, Wing Commander Sturt de Burgh Griffith, commander of RAAF Darwin, summoned his senior administrative officer and issued a verbal order for airmen to move half a mile down the main road and then half a mile inland. Passed by word of mouth, the order became unrecognisable. It was interpreted, by those who wanted to interpret it that way, as a command for immediate and general evacuation. Official records counted 278 personnel under RAAF North-Western Area Command as having deserted, though historians have argued that ambiguous orders were primarily responsible. The Australian Army faced its own breakdown of discipline, with troops looting private property described in official accounts as including furniture, refrigerators, stoves, pianos, clothes, and children's toys. More than half of Darwin's civilian population left the area permanently before or immediately after the attack. Some of those who fled and never returned found, in the post-war years, that land they owned in Darwin had been expropriated by government bodies in their absence, made legal by the Darwin Lands Acquisition Act 1945. The destruction of 7 of the 11 above-ground oil storage tanks at Stokes Hill, damaged across raids on the 19th of February, the 16th of March, and the 16th of June 1942, led directly to the construction of underground oil storage tunnels in Darwin in 1943.

• 7. Beyond the 19th of February

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  The four carriers that launched the attack on Darwin, the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu, were all sunk during the Battle of Midway in June 1942, less than four months after their aircraft had struck Australian soil. The 19th of February raids were only the beginning of a sustained aerial campaign: the Northern Territory and parts of northern Western Australia were bombed approximately 100 times between the 4th of March 1942 and the 12th of November 1943. One of the heaviest of these follow-up attacks came on the 16th of June 1942, when Japanese aircraft set fire to oil fuel tanks around the harbour. The Allied navies largely dispersed from Darwin after the initial attack, moving their forces to Brisbane, Fremantle, and smaller ports. Allied air commanders responded differently, building more airfields and deploying additional squadrons in the Darwin area. Every year, on the 19th of February, a memorial ceremony is held at the Cenotaph in Darwin. At precisely 9:58 am, the time the first Japanese aircraft arrived over the town, a Second World War air-raid siren sounds.