by Mark Felton
The remains of the two midget submarines raised from the harbour bed, A14 which was wrecked by the demolition charge, and A21, which had suffered some damage during depth charging, would go on to serve as a useful propaganda tool for Australia. From the two damaged midgets one complete example was reconstructed and toured rural New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia raising funds for the war effort. Eventually the composite submarine was delivered to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 1943, where it remains on display today. Incredibly, after all the efforts of both service personnel and civilians in foiling the Japanese attack on Sydney Harbour, not a single bravery or meritorious service award was made to any of the participants, even though many recommendations were submitted. Muirhead-Gould even went so far as to criticize Watchman James Cargill who had first spotted Midget A14 caught in the anti-torpedo net, commenting that he was too slow in alerting the authorities to his discovery. In the end it was only the two watchmen, Cargill and William Nangle, who received an award, both men receiving paltry sums of money.
As the citizens of Sydney digested the impact of the midget submarine attacks in the days following the raid, tensions remained high. Although the Royal Australian Navy and city authorities could correctly claim that the Japanese raid had been a failure, resulting in the known destruction of two of the raiders’ crafts, people nonetheless realized that Sydney had had a close brush with disaster.
Commander Newcomb’s January warning to Muirhead-Gould regarding the correct monitoring of the indicator loops had proved prophetic, as all of the midget submarines had passed unnoticed over Sydney’s early warning system until well inside the harbour. The Japanese had also been able to conduct an unchallenged aerial reconnaissance mission over the harbour before the attack in a Yokosuka E14Y1 floatplane piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Fujita from the submarine I-25, and it was really only pure luck that had prevented a significant warship such as the USS Chicago from being torpedoed. The death of twenty sailors aboard HMAS Kuttabul was serious enough, especially as it occurred deep inside a well-defended friendly harbour, and the death toll among Allied sailors would undoubtedly been more severe had not Lieutenant Matsuo’s torpedo tubes malfunctioned. Sydney Harbour, even with an electronic early warning system in place and mostly functioning, had been penetrated with relative ease by three Japanese midget submarines that were crewed by suicidally determined and brave young submariners, none of whom returned from their mission.
Another factor that emerged soon after the attack were details of a virtually identical operation conducted by the Japanese just seventeen hours before Sydney Harbour was penetrated. Two midget submarines had successfully entered the Royal Navy’s Indian Ocean base at Diego Suarez in Madagascar to wreak havoc, drawn from Rear-Admiral Noboru Ishizaki’s Western Advance Flotilla, sailing out of Penang in Japanese-occupied Malaya into the Indian Ocean.
Madagascar had been invaded and occupied by the British between May 1942 and the eventual Vichy French capitulation in November, in an effort to deny the Japanese port facilities for their submarines in the western Indian Ocean. The initial phase of the occupation of northern Madagascar had been completed when the French had surrendered on 7 May after three days of resistance. The operation had cost the British 105 killed and 283 wounded, with Vichy French casualties amounting to approximately 150 killed and 500 wounded. All Vichy French resistance on Madagascar ended with a complete surrender on 6 November 1942. Had the Japanese managed to persuade the Vichy authorities to allow them to have based submarines in Madagascar, as they had persuaded the collaborationist government to allow Japanese troops and aircraft into French Indochina just prior to Pearl Harbor, such a move would have placed the Japanese in an ideal position, sitting along Britain’s Middle East and South African convoy routes. The British had successfully conquered northern Madagascar, and crushed Vichy French resistance in the region by May 1942, enabling the utilization of the port of Diego Suarez as an Allied naval base. The Japanese, however, were determined to attack the anchorage and hopefully destroy several of the warships moored within, in a surprise attack employing the Type-A Midget submarine and long range I-class boats. In Diego Suarez harbour on 30 May there was a collection of Allied warships and supply vessels riding at anchor. HMS Karanja, Genista, Thyme, Duncan and Active, all convoy escorts, were berthed alongside a hospital ship, the Atlantis, the merchantman Llandaff Castle, and an ammunition ship. A bigger fish for the Japanese to attempt to fry was the battleship HMS Ramillies.
On the evening of 30 May 1942, the Japanese fleet submarines I-16 and I-20 had each launched a midget several miles off the Madagascar anchorage, a third midget launch being cancelled aboard the I-18 owing to mechanical problems. The two midgets, crewed by Ensign Katsusuke Iwase and Petty Officer Takazo Takata, and Lieutenant Saburo Akieda and Petty Officer Masami Takemoto respectively, would attempt to penetrate the port of Diego Suarez undetected and search out targets among a large number of British warships and merchant vessels moored inside. Iwase and Takata clambered into the confines of the Type A’s cockpit, both armed with pistols. Iwase also symbolically carried a short tachi sword, denoting his officer rank and status, and highlighting the Japanese military’s adherence to the samurai’s Bushido code, ‘which upheld the virtues of man-to-man combat in a machine age, and demanded that the Japanese soldier die rather than surrender’.17
As they approached the shallow harbour the Japanese crewmen dived their submarines to hopefully avoid Allied watchmen, and penetrated the port undetected. Darkness had fallen, but the light of a full moon bathed the busy anchorage and array of ships. Crewmen on the decks of the huge Ramillies, and aboard the nearby tanker British Loyalty, reported that they saw two conning towers negotiating the harbour entrance, though strangely no immediate action was taken. At 8.25 p.m. Akieda began his torpedo attack. Lining up on the Ramillies, Akieda launched a single torpedo at the battleship. A few seconds later there was an enormous explosion that lit up the harbour, a massive plume of flame, debris and black smoke climbing into the humid night air, as the Ramillies reeled from the torpedo strike. A thirty-foot hole had been blown in the port side of the ship, water flooding into the steaming gash in her side. Men had been thrown down by the force of the explosion, or battered mercilessly against metal surfaces inside the ship, injuring themselves. Although the ship’s damage control parties managed to save her from settling onto the muddy bottom of the harbour, intermittent power and communication failures throughout the rest of the night made their jobs very difficult. Fortunately for the British, Akieda must have assumed that he had crippled the battleship with a single strike, because he did not immediately launch his remaining torpedo at her. Close by, the captain of the British Loyalty ordered the crew to swing out the boats, and to raise the anchor. He rang the engine room telegraph to order the engineers to ‘standby’, but it was to take the tanker almost an hour to begin to move away from her berth. In the meantime Royal Navy corvettes, fast anti-submarine vessels, raced around the port, depth charging any suspicious targets in the hope of preventing further attacks. A signalman aboard the damaged Ramillies was searching the water for signs of the invisible attacker, when he saw the unmistakable wake of a torpedo running fast in the bright moonlight, heading not for the warship, but travelling to intercept the British Loyalty. The tanker was reversing noisily in its manoeuvres from its berth, directly into the path of the oncoming Japanese torpedo that was obviously intended to finish off the stricken Ramillies. Another booming explosion rolled out over the harbour as hundreds of pounds of high explosives detonated inside the tanker’s engine room. The British Loyalty began to sink rapidly by the stern, and Captain Wastell ordered his crew to abandon ship. Officers worked frantically to fill the boats with the mainly Indian crewmen, launch them down the straining davits, and get the crew to safety aboard other ships in the harbour. Five crewmen were killed aboard the British Loyalty, but the loss of the tanker undoubtedly saved the battleship. Akieda now attempted to leave the har
bour and rendezvous with the I-20 for recovery, but his midget ran aground and he was forced, along with his navigator, to abandon the vessel and swim to shore. The Japanese sailors were determined that they would not allow themselves to be captured by the British, and the two men set off on a long march across northern Madagascar hoping to be able to signal the I-20 from shore and be rescued. Cornered by British soldiers on 2 June after fifty-nine hours on the loose, Akieda and Petty Officer Takemoto determined to go down fighting. Armed with two pistols and Akieda’s short sword, the Japanese submariners managed to kill one British soldier and wound four others before they themselves perished in the firefight. The fate of Ensign Iwase and his midget remains a mystery to the present day, though it is surmised that he was probably sunk by mechanical failure or destroyed by British depth charging.
The British immediately suppressed details of the Diego Suarez attack, and, incredibly, they issued no warnings to other British and Commonwealth naval bases concerning the possibility of similar attacks being attempted by the Japanese. Sydney could, and more importantly, should, have been informed at some point during the intervening seventeen hours between the Diego Suarez raid and the discovery of Lieutenant Chuman’s Midget A14 stuck fast in the anti-torpedo nets in Sydney Harbour. Rear-Admiral Muirhead-Gould and the harbour’s anti-submarine officer, Acting Commander Newcomb, were deliberately kept in the dark concerning the attack in Madagascar, even though both were Royal Navy officers seconded to assist the Australians. Such a warning of even a few hours would have been sufficient time for Muirhead-Gould to have placed Sydney Harbour on high alert, ordered the recall of patrol boat crews from shore leave, and taken blackout precautions to deny the enemy navigation points and light by which to locate target ships. He would also have been able to instruct Newcomb to make sure all indicator loop contacts were investigated, and not ignored as was the case on the evening of 31 May, and perhaps the Royal Australian Air Force could have begun patrols of the harbour approaches, as well as sweeps out to sea in case any larger Japanese submarines turned up. In any case, all this is conjecture, and, as it stood, the Admiralty and British Government’s secrecy meant that Muirhead-Gould and his staff were not alerted to increase their vigilance in the light of a realistic chance of attack.
Off Sydney, the five Japanese I-class submarines that had participated in the attack, three of which had actually launched midgets, remained on station for several days hoping that at least one of the midgets would attempt a rendezvous. Their captains eventually realized that all three submarines had been lost, and the five larger boats moved off to begin a successful campaign of interdicting merchant shipping along the Australian coast.
The Japanese ‘mother’ and support submarines that had launched the Second Special Attack Flotilla of Type-A midgets against Sydney Harbour on 30 May had spent several fruitless days and nights waiting for the return of some or all of the small vessels. None returned, which hardly came as a surprise to the Japanese following the fates of the midgets launched against Pearl Harbor six months previously, and the two dispatched to Diego Suarez less than a day before the Sydney operation. The young officers and men who had cast off from the big I-class submarines and penetrated Sydney Harbour had demonstrated in their letters and final words a willingness to die for the Emperor and their families, and a realization that they were probably on one-way missions for Japan. The five I-class submarines abandoned their vigil in early June and moved off up the Australian coast to in order to hunt merchantmen assigned as the second part of their mission into Australian waters.
Following the surprise midget submarine attack on Sydney, and several Japanese submarine attacks on merchant ships off the Australian coast, Sydney and the nearby port of Newcastle were closed to outward ship traffic. Convoys were immediately instituted for coastal commerce in a belated attempt to warn off Japanese submarines from further mercantile interdiction, leaving only the smallest coastal craft to fend for themselves. The RAAF, assisted by a squadron from the Netherlands East Indies Army Air Corps, conducted anti-submarine sweeps over the sea approaches to both ports and convoy routes along the coast, assisted by naval ships. All these late precautions, however, did not prevent a pair of Japanese submarines from the original Sydney attack force from striking the Australian mainland in another daring and bold pair of attacks.
At dusk on 3 June, the Type-Cl submarine I-24 was recharging her batteries while sitting on the surface, east of Sydney. Sharp-eyed lookouts spotted a coastal steamer making her way quietly along, quite alone, and Commander Hanabusa brought his boat to immediate readiness for attack. The ship was the 4,734-ton Age and Hanabusa fired a single torpedo at the ship but missed. The deck-gun was swung into action against the freighter, which was naturally attempting to make off as fast as possible, and four shells slammed out across the ocean as the merchant ship’s radio operator called desperately for assistance. None of the shells found their marks, and the Age disappeared into the evening gloom.18 When Hanabusa saw the ship disappear he assumed that he had managed to sink her, and recorded a victory for the I-24 in his report of the action. About an hour and a half later Hanabusa had something genuine to report. Still east of Sydney, the I-24 encountered the Iron Chieftain, a British coke carrier on her way from Newcastle to Whyalla. Hanabusa launched two torpedoes at the 4,800-ton ship, one of which struck the freighter squarely amidships on her portside, and within only five minutes the Iron Chieftain was gone, another victim of the Japanese inshore submarine campaign against Australia. Two days later a third target presented itself to the I-24, the 3,362-ton Australian merchantman Echunga when the Japanese submarine was about seventeen miles off Wollongong. On this occasion Hanabusa failed to achieve a hit on the freighter and broke off his attack.19
The Type-Bl I-27 intercepted the Australian freighter Barwon (4,239-tons) off Gabo Island, New South Wales, on 4 June and attempted to sink her with both torpedo and gunfire. The Barwon managed to flee without sustaining any damage. Later that same day, the I-27 was cruising through the Bass Strait, off Cape Howe, when she discovered two Australian iron ore carriers travelling in company. A Japanese torpedo struck the 3,353-ton Iron Crown, which sank quickly. The other vessel that was sailing with the doomed ship, the Iron King, opened fire on the surfaced Japanese submarine, but the I-27 easily evaded the shots and made off.20
On the night of 8 June the I-24 was laying about nine miles off the Macquarie Light, Sydney, preparing to move towards the city. Motoring on the surface, proceeding north-west towards the coast, Hanabusa quietly brought his boat close in to the Heads, the landmasses marking the entrance to Sydney Harbour. Hanabusa’s plan was simple: unleash the deck-gun in the general direction of the famous Harbour Bridge. The silence of the night was suddenly shattered by the booming report of the submarine’s deck-gun, followed by the whine of high-velocity shells that ploughed into the districts of Rose Bay, Woollahra, Bondi and Bellevue Hill. The Japanese gunners quickly loosed off ten shells then the I-24 ceased firing and slinked away before the Australians had any time to respond to the surprise assault.
By sheer good luck no Sydneysiders were killed by the 140mm shells that came hurtling into the centre of their city in the dead of night, but some damage to property was caused. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that initially Sydneysiders thought they were being bombed instead of shelled: ‘In the seaside suburbs many people mistook the scream of the shells for screaming bombs coming from aeroplanes. No planes, however, were reported over Sydney, and the [air raid] alarm was sounded merely as a precaution.’21 Rather than taking shelter many local residents opted for a spot of sightseeing: ‘…people made for the open streets and stood in eager groups…watching the flashes [of the Japanese deck-gun]. There was no panic, though many listened intently, fearing that the explosions were caused by bombs and that they would hear the drone of planes overhead.’22 When the air raid sirens began to wail, ‘…the lights of Sydney flickered out in a few seconds. Up to this stage, thousands of people all over the ci
ty had been merely passive watchers of the gun flashes, which had lit up the sky far to the west of the coastal zone.’23
With the sudden blackout, most residents hurried back to their homes, ‘groping for matches and screened torches to enable them to get to their shelters’.24 Why only a few of the ten shells fired by the Japanese actually detonated will probably never be known, but the poor performance of the munitions probably saved many lives throughout the city. The Japanese later contended that it was because the shells were stored on the submarines’ weather decks in the ready-use ammunition lockers close to the deck-gun that explained the high proportion of ‘duds’. Moisture probably had penetrated the shells, making some malfunction occur.
The Australians (and the Americans who were also subjected to coastal deck-gun bombardments along the west coast) claimed that the Japanese were using the wrong type of projectile against shore targets. The Japanese armour-piercing shell was designed to penetrate the steel hull of a ship and explode within, and the tough shells simply passed straight through the softer brick walls of houses and business premises throughout Sydney, often failing to detonate but still causing considerable damage.
