by Juliet Wills
Entire small ’drome now covered with ships. Men sleeping on floors, porches or any other shelter they can find . . .’
On the morning Smirnoff was due to arrive in Broome, dozens of land-based aircraft and flying boats flew in ahead of him.
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No one had been prepared for the massive influx that
morning. Qantas had a tender to ferry the crews of their flying boats ashore, but no such arrangements had been made to ferry the crews or passengers of the Dutch flying boats. A single fuel-laden pearling lugger, the Nicol Bay, headed across the water to refuel the Qantas flying boats. The larger Dutch Dornier aircraft would take forty minutes to refuel. It would be a long stopover.
The night before, some of the Dutch Dornier commanders
had asked permission to leave, as their aircraft had been refuelled, but they were ordered to remain until morning to get some much-needed rest. Most of the crews had been on duty for
days on end, operating the shuttle service between Java and Broome, and they were utterly exhausted.
Unfortunately for many of the passengers, lack of accom-
modation in Broome meant they were forced to wait on board the aircraft while the captains sorted the paperwork and rested onshore. Adding to the delays, the eight-metre tides of Roebuck Bay made ship-to-shore ferrying difficult. The far north is notorious for its huge tides and March is when the tides vary most dramatically. On the morning of 3 March, the low tide was enough to hamper the movement of the aircraft and support boats, and some flying boats were stranded in the sand, the refuelling boat unable to reach them. The planes planned to move on, mostly to Perth or Sydney, as soon as they were
refuelled and the water rose high enough under their floats to
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enable a safe take-off. Flying boats continued to arrive throughout the early morning.
On board Dutch Catalina X67, navigator Henri Juta filled
out his log and looked up at the weary, forlorn faces of the passengers. The only one of the thirty-three passengers he knew was his wife, who sat in a corner by the radio equipment gazing at her husband, her face full of fear. ‘We’re fine, love.
We’ve landed on the water and nothing can happen now,’ he reassured her.
For a moment there was relief and everyone started talking.
Juta opened the hatch above the chart table and climbed out of the aircraft. The heat rising from the metal surface of the plane hit him, but also the wonderful fragrance of the desert and the sea. In the distance he could see the outline of the jetty and he watched as more flying boats landed on the bay.
Inside the plane, the women busied themselves preparing food and making coffee. The radio operator was annoyed at other aircraft using their radios to contact Java. ‘With all this noise we may as well just tell the Japs we’re here!’ he shouted angrily.
He wanted to get moving and handed Juta a megaphone to
try to make contact with the shore, but they were too far away and it seemed that everyone in the town was asleep. It was 7.15 a.m.
The metal hulls of the flying boats held the tropical heat like ovens. Women, men and children were cramped together in the small cabin with nowhere to stretch their legs or breathe fresh air, let alone sleep. Weary children whined as their mothers
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lamented their lost homes. Still, this was war, and at least they were alive. The adults had secured precious space on these planes for which air service personnel vital to the war effort had first preference. There was little doubt in their minds that their friends and families left behind in Java were in a far worse position than they were.
But as the heat built up the atmosphere in the Catalina
began deteriorating fast. All the windows and blisters were opened and three double 7.7 mm guns were turned outside to make space so the passengers could sit on the barrels. Juta urged his wife outside into the fresh air as she was suffering from seasickness, but she did not want to move. A twelve-year-old boy, Robert Lacomble, joined Juta; his father, a commander on the flagship of the Dutch fleet, the light cruiser De Ruyter, had died four days earlier when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes during the Battle of the Java Sea. Fascinated by the flying boat, Robert asked an endless round of questions about the Catalina. Juta pointed out another flying boat coming into land and the boy watched excitedly as the huge, high-winged Dornier Do.24K with its 27-metre wingspan skimmed across
the surface and came to a halt.
Henk Hasselo had never flown a Dornier float plane when he was assigned to co-pilot Dornier X-1 to Broome the night
before. The normal complement for the X-1 was a crew of
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seven, but on this trip they had carried between forty and forty-five people.
Instead of floats, the Dornier had sponsons which protruded from the sides of the craft like low wings. The sponson was similar to a float in that it was designed to stabilise the craft when it was moored in rough seas and keep it from tipping over. Right now, they also provided a platform to which people could escape from the cramped, smelly cabin. A few excited children were running in circles over the sponsons, glad to be outside. Adults were assigned to watch them for fear one might slip into the water and drown.
Henk Hasselo climbed through the hatch onto the top of
the Dornier. The massive wings of the flying boat were held up high above the body of the plane by metal supports which ran from both the body of the plane and the sponsons. Hasselo had a good view of the harbour from the top and was shaded from the sun by the wings overhead. There was no ventilation in the hot, overcrowded aircraft and he was glad to be out in the fresh air. He scanned the harbour for a boat that could ferry the crew to shore to organise paperwork and refuelling, but there was none in sight.
He could see a tiny seaplane dwarfed among the huge flying boats. The Curtiss SOC Seagull float plane had been assigned to the USS Houston, the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet sunk by the Japanese in the Battle of the Java Sea. When the Houston’s two other float planes were shot down, the captain ordered the pilot to fly south and save himself if he could. Broome was
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800 kilometres away and he made it on the last drop of fuel.
With his plane now refuelled, he taxied across the water eager to depart ahead of the big flying boats.
At the end of the Broome jetty, passengers and crew from
the Qantas flying boat Corinna waited for dinghies to take them back to the aircraft ready for take-off. Also on the jetty were the crew from the British 205 Squadron Catalina FV-W, who had been evacuated from Java and arrived the night before.
Another British Catalina, FV-N, arrived around 9 a.m.
‘Another Cat,’ Robert shouted to Juta, clearly excited by his new-found knowledge of flying boats. There were now eight Catalinas on the bay: four Dutch, two belonging to the United States Navy and two British. The fiancée of the second pilot climbed through the hatch, joining Juta and the boy on the body of the plane. Inside, many of the passengers had become seasick and the stench of vomit in the hot, humid cabin was overwhelming. Juta went inside and eased his wife outside, where she started to feel better.
Robert continued questioning the navigator. ‘Sir, what is that strange thing sticking out of the side of the plane?’ Juta started to answer, ‘It’s a—’ but he didn’t finish his sentence. A low droning noise that was getting louder drew their gaze skywards.
The fighter planes came in above the lighthouse at
Gantheaume Point which guarded the mouth
to the bay. At
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first Juta thought they were Australian RAAF planes and the boy was about to wave when the second pilot said something about a gun. The planes peeled away and they saw the telltale red rising sun on their sides.
At 7.05 a.m., nine Zero fighters and a C5M.2 ‘Babs’ reconnaissance aircraft under the overall command of Lieutenant Zenziro Miyano had taken off from Kupang in Timor, headed for Broome. Simultaneously, Commander Takeo Shibata ordered a further eight Zeroes to attack military targets at the northern Australian port of Wyndham. The Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter plane was a masterpiece of aviation. Its long-range capabilities and manoeuvrability brought astounding victories to the Japanese in the early days of the Pacific war and made it a legend in its own time. With it, the Japanese had decimated the Allied forces, and the sight of the aircraft now brought terror to the hearts of the onlookers.
The slim silver fighters jettisoned their auxiliary belly tanks, which held the fuel that had enabled them to make the distance from Timor to Broome. To the onlookers below, the tanks
plunging through the sky looked like bombs. The Zeroes then took up attack formation—three flights of three—and began to close in on their targets sitting helpless on the water. Within seconds, red bursts of gun fire sent white plumes racing across the surface of the bay.
The Australian Qantas flying boat Centaurus, a Short Empire A18-10, was the first to explode and sink. Captain Caldwell and his co-pilot had spent the night ashore. As the plane burned
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the crew threw themselves into action. One man rushed to the flight deck as bullets exploded around him, grabbing an inflatable dinghy and flinging it out the door into the sea. The remainder of the crew dived through the hatches, jumping into the water after the dinghy. Miraculously, all escaped and set about rescuing survivors.
The Zeroes were fitted with two cannons in the wings, each containing sixty rounds of heavy 20 mm shells, plus two centrally mounted machine guns. The cannon shells were fired first, causing most of the devastation and destruction.
Instinctively, Juta shoved his wife from the plane into the water and then pushed Robert into the bay too. Juta jumped in after them, taking the fiancée of the second pilot with him.
Nearby he saw the tracers dance like fairy lights towards their target. The tracer bullets held pyrotechnic chemical flares in their hollow backs, which allowed the pilot to see where his bullets were going without looking through a gun sight. The Zero pilots ‘walked’ their cone of fire towards the Catalina using the tracers as a guide. As Juta later recalled:
We disappeared under water and when we emerged about two
seconds later the world had changed. There was lead, fire, blood, death and ruin. The Cat was alight and the young
woman was hanging on a support between the wings and the
bulk of the plane. She yelled, ‘I’m hit!’ Blood poured from her face and the water below her was turning red. All I could think of was my wife and I swirled in the water to find her.
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I saw her just a few metres away; her black hair clinging to her face. She called my name. I swam to her and she clung to me. It was all I could do to keep myself above the water.
‘I can’t swim like this,’ I told her and I managed to get her to hold on to my shoulder. Just then I saw that a Zero was opening fire again. ‘Duck!’ I yelled to my wife and we both managed to get under water. We were not hit so I just thought I was lucky. Later I learned that the Japs shot in the water with machine guns and just before they came to the target they would shoot with a 20 mm cannon.
Rising to the surface I witnessed a shocking scene. A man jumped down from the plane with a small child in his arms.
He called to me, ‘Help, help, I can’t swim anymore.’ A few seconds later he disappeared under water with the child still in his arms.
Sergeant P. [probably C. van der Plas] swam to his fiancée but she was already dead. Her face was full of bullet holes.
There was another attack and I had to pull my wife under
again. When we surfaced we saw a small boy come out the
hatch and a woman jumped after him. They disappeared at
the other side of the plane. The Cat was sinking fast. Smoke and flames were coming out of the hull. The last I saw of the sinking ship was Mrs Lacomble [the mother of Robert], trying to climb out of the hatch. I think her clothes were stuck in the barrel of the double-barrelled gun. She disappeared later, together with the tail end of the plane, screaming and struggling under water.
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My wife and my own situation needed my full attention
now. She had swallowed a lot of water and she was coughing and clinging to my shoulders. I began swimming but my
strokes were too fast and irregular. As a good swimmer I
realised I was doing it all wrong, but at that moment it was the only way to stay afloat. I was fully dressed in shirts and shorts, woollen socks and sturdy shoes. I also had a gun
attached to my belt. The most uncomfortable were my woollen socks and the shoes, and my legs felt like lead. I tried to kick off my shoes but my wife, who was clinging to me, weighed me down and I almost drowned. All around me there was an
inferno of fire, explosions and screaming people who were dying.
The Zeroes peeled downwards like seabirds diving for fish, picking off one refugee-laden plane and then moving on to the next.
On Henk Hasselo’s Dornier, all those inside the cabin pushed towards the door. Bullets ripped through the fuselage and people were shot as they tried to flee. Gun fire, smoke, screaming and shouting filled the air as those who could get out leapt into the water. Hasselo, still up the top, ran towards the gun turret at the tail of his plane. There was an entrance to the turret from the outside. He opened the hatch and jumped in. Poking his head out, he spotted the planes above and was able to fire off a few rounds at the Zeroes. A few bullets found their mark, but they weren’t enough to stop the attackers. The sponson on
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the left was so badly shot up that the Dornier tilted to starboard and started to take water. There were still people trapped inside.
A thick pall of smoke surrounded the plane and Hasselo couldn’t see to shoot anymore, so he too jumped into the sea.
From the plane, Jan Piers and Simon Koens, both trained
marines, leapt into the water, as did Simon’s wife Sara and their son Piet. Simon’s eleven-year-old daughter, Elly, heard her father calling for her to jump in, so she sat down on the sponson to take her shoes off as she always did before she went for a swim.
Now she could hear the voice of her mother, Sara, pleading,
‘Jump, Elly! Just jump!’ Elly stood on the wing and looked down at the water. ‘Is it cold?’ she called out. Her father was drifting away with the powerful tide; she could see he was bleeding on the face and arm and it worried her. Her mother was trying to swim against the tide nearby, watching as the Zero swept down on the Dornier. Elly jumped into the water, swimming towards her mother, and as she did so she heard
screams from the plane. She turned to see Mrs Piers, clinging to the wing supports, screaming ‘I can’t swim! Help us! I can’t swim!’ Mrs Piers’s seven-year-old son Frans gripped his mother’s neck fiercely, while her eleven-year-old son, Cornelius, also held on to his mother. Jan Piers was by now too far away to get back to the plane to help his wife and children. Elly’s mother, Sara, was closer but the tide also defeated her and she had no hope of reaching them. Frans began to cry. With bullets flying around them, Elly duck
ed as Cornelius found the courage to jump. It was too late; he was hit by a bullet and never surfaced.
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Elly rose to see Mrs Piers and her little boy shot repeatedly as the plane burned around them. Her mother told her to not
look back and to swim with Piet as fast as she could towards the shore. The fuel on the water erupted into a ball of flame as the fire spread rapidly across the bay. Elly, Piet and Sara swam desperately against the tide, trying to escape the pull.
Sara was glad for all the times she had taken her children swimming in the mountain lakes of Java and at the local swimming pool.
Jan Piers watched as the Dornier shuddered and jerked at
its mooring before exploding into a blaze of light on the water.
He had watched as Cornelius disappeared beneath the surface.
He had seen the bullets pierce his wife and son and the flames engulf them. The flames leapt into the air in red and yellow streaks, and then there was another roar and three more flying boats went up, fuel tanks exploding and sending burning fuel across the surface as all over the bay figures leapt into the cauldron-like sea. Jan swam on towards shore and made it to safety, but he would never forget that moment. For his split-second decision to jump in a moment of terror instead of
staying to help his family, he would never forgive himself.
Tentacles wrapped around Elly Koens’s body and she screamed at the pain. Sara tried to pull them off but found herself entangled in the stinging tentacles of what was possibly a box jellyfish. Fear drove them to swim on in spite of the pain. The few boats they could see in the distance were taking the most badly burned people first. The smoking skeleton of the X-1
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was some distance away now. Finally a man rowed towards the mother and daughter. Hauling them up into the dinghy, he
