World War II Day by Day

Tokyo, Japan • February 9, 1942

On December 8, 1941, the U.S. Congress declared war on the Empire of Japan in response to the mas­sive Japan­ese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. That same Decem­ber day and the next the govern­ments of Great Britain, Canada, China, and Aus­tra­lia declared war on Japan. From Decem­ber 22 and con­tinuing well into Janu­ary 1942, U.S. President Frank­lin D. Roose­velt played host to British Prime Minis­ter Win­ston Chur­chill in the nation’s capital, Wash­ing­ton, D.C. The two states­men and their top milit­ary leaders and aides took a series of major deci­sions that shaped the Allies’ two-theater war effort into 1943. One of the imme­di­ate tac­ti­cal deci­sions of their Arca­dia Con­fer­ence was the crea­tion, on Janu­ary 1, 1942, of a uni­fied Ameri­can-British-Dutch-Aus­tra­lian Com­mand (ABDA­COM) in the Far East, where both the British and Dutch pos­ses­sions, the latter with cru­cial oil and rubber resources, were already under siege by surging Japanese military forces.

The four allies established their main supply base at the stra­te­gic Aus­tra­lian port of Darwin, cap­ital and largest settle­ment in the sparsely settled North­ern Terri­tories. Already Darwin was home to air­fields, training bases, main­te­nance facil­i­ties, fuel and munit­ions storage, and air and sea com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the South and Cent­ral Pacific. By Febru­ary 1942 the town (reduced to 2,000 souls) was an im­por­tant Allied base in the defense of the multi-island Nether­lands East Indies (now Indo­nesia). The islands of Cele­bes (Sula­wesi) and Borneo (Kali­man­tan) due north of Aus­tra­lia had fallen to Japa­nese inva­ders, and NEI’s Timor and Java to Aus­tra­lia’s north­west were in Japan’s cross­hairs as its mili­tary advanced through South­east Asia. On this date, Febru­ary 9, 1942, Adm. Iso­koru Yama­moto, com­man­der in chief of the Japa­nese Com­bined Fleet and the archi­tect of the sur­prise Decem­ber 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, ordered air strikes on Darwin to render its offen­sive facili­ties use­less against Japan’s planned sei­zure of Timor and Java, the latter island the site of the Dutch admin­is­tra­tive capi­tal, Bata­via (today’s Jakarta). Ten days later Japa­nese air­craft set out to obliterate Darwin in the first air strike on the Australian continent.

On February 19, 1942, 188 Japanese carrier and 54 land-based planes, in two sep­a­rate raids, attacked Aus­tra­lian and U.S. naval and mer­chant ships in Darwin’s harbor as well as air­craft and hangers at the town’s mili­tary and civil air­strips, plus the town’s hos­pi­tal, post office, and police bar­racks. Opera­ting in the Timor Sea less than 250 miles north­west of Aus­tral­ia, four of the six Japa­nese flat­tops that had par­ti­ci­pated in the Pearl Harbor assault—com­mander Vice Adm. Chūichi Nagumo repri­sing his Decem­ber 1941 role—were pre­sent for the Darwin raid. Incoming enemy raiders, just as was the case at Pearl Harbor, were mis­iden­ti­fied as friendly air­craft, so no alarm was sounded before four of five defending Royal Aus­tra­lian Air Force Curtiss P-40B Toma­hawk fighters were blown out of the sky. Only when enemy war­birds hurled them­selves at their first targets in the busy harbor did sirens sound.

The day’s second wave of raiders was made up of land-based medium bombers that pum­meled Darwin at mid­day. This high-level bombing inflicted exten­sive damage on the two air­bases. Between the two Febru­ary 19 air raids, the Japa­nese caused 243 and pos­si­bly 320 civil­ian and mili­tary deaths (some vic­tims while para­chuting from their stricken air­craft) and wounded between 300 and 400, destroyed 30 Aus­tra­lian and U.S. air­craft on the tar­mac and in the air, sank 11 ves­sels and damaged 25 others, and destroyed most of Darwin’s civil and mili­tary facil­i­ties. Sixty-three more enemy air raids would be directed against Darwin and more than 100 air raids against North­ern Aus­tral­ian towns during 1942–1943. (Sydney and New­castle, cities in New South Wales, were attacked by Japa­nese sub­marines.) How­ever, none of the air raids matched the scale, ferocity, destruc­tion, or inflicted the chaos of the February 19 Battle of Darwin.

Obliterating Darwin, February 19, 1942

Left: Thirty-nine-year-old Naval Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who directed the first wave of Japa­nese planes over Pearl Harbor on Decem­ber 7, 1941, and led the first wave over Darwin nearly 2½ months later, recalled the town “harbor was crowded with all kinds of ships which we picked off at our leisure.” The majority of the 65 ves­sels riding at quite anchor belonged to the Royal Aus­tra­lian Navy (one being the AHS Manunda, a hos­pital ship that was badly damaged in the raid in spite of sporting highly pro­mi­nent red cross markings), three belonged to the U.S. Navy (one destroyer sunk and a cargo ves­sel and a sea­plane tender damaged), while about a dozen were mer­chant­men of varying sizes. More bombs were dropped on Darwin on Febru­ary 19, 1942, than on Pearl Harbor, diminishing Darwin’s role as a naval port but not as an air base.

Right: Smoke billows from the Australian troopship SS Zealandia hit by a bomb and cannon and machine gun fire from Japa­nese Mitsu­bishi G3M “Nell” and G4M “Betty” bombers flying from two cap­tured bases in the Nether­lands East Indies; 142 out of 144 men survived the Febru­ary 19, 1942, assault on the troop­ship. The MV Nep­tuna, which was launched in 1924 and saw ser­vice in the mer­chant marine fleets of Germany and Aus­tra­lia, blazes at Darwin’s single wharf in the distance. Zea­landia and Nep­tuna were among 9 ships sunk and 10 others damaged in the initial aerial wave over Darwin, which lasted 32 minutes.

Left: A catastrophic explosion heralds the end of the MV Neptuna as clouds of smoke rise from on­shore oil storage tanks. Hit near the stern while carrying a cargo of depth charges, TNT, and other arma­ments, the hap­less Neptuna blazed fiercely before exploding, then turning on its side and taking the lives of 45 crew­men and dock­hands while seriously injuring many others with showered debris. In the fore­ground is HMAS Deloraine, a con­voy escort and anti­sub­marine patrol corvette that escaped unscathed and assisted in rescue and recovery opera­tions. The U.S. cargo ves­sel Admiral Hal­stead (not pictured), carrying 8,000 drums of avi­a­tion gaso­line, was strafed and damaged in the raid, its pre­cious cargo rescued. The Aus­tra­lian govern­ment, con­cerned about the effect of the bombing on national morale, played down the Darwin raid for decades to come. A fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of the period received mixed reviews in the 2008 his­tori­cal drama film Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

Right: Caught in the raid on the Cavite Navy Yard, Philip­pines, on Decem­ber 10, 1941, the U.S. Navy Clem­son-class destroyer USS Peary escaped to Darwin, arriving in January 1942. On Febru­ary 19, 1942, the Peary was attacked five times by Japa­nese dive bombers. The fourth bomb set off the for­ward ammu­ni­tion maga­zine. Lost with the ship were 88 offi­cers and men, about half of the mili­tary vict­ims who perished in the bombing of Darwin. The Peary was the first destroyer of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet (soon to be dis­solved and incor­po­rated into the U.S. Seventh Fleet) to be sunk in World War II.

The February 19, 1942, Bombing of Darwin, Australia