by Mark Felton
Be that as it may, Sydneysiders were awakened by the crash and thud of Japanese shells falling on four city districts. Of the ten shells fired by the I-24, nine buildings suffered resultant damage. The people of Sydney, however, were undaunted by their most recent brush with the enemy. ‘In one case, when a woman discovered her kitchen had been destroyed by a direct hit, she calmly turned off the mains gas and steadfastly refused to leave her house.’25 Ironically, the only resident who was injured in the attack was a German Jewish refugee who had fled from the Nazis. A Japanese shell ploughed into his apartment on Manion Avenue in Rose Bay, but failed to detonate. He was injured when ‘…a heavy metal lampstand fell on his leg when the shell hit the apartment, passed through the room in which his mother was sleeping and out onto a staircase. He was buried under the rubble.’26 The Sydney Morning Herald reporter quickly on the scene gave this description of the action:
It [the Japanese shell] tore through the two brick thicknesses above the head of Mrs. Hirsch’s bed, skidded along the wall flanking her bed, bursting the bricks through in a large gash, but not penetrating to the next room, then pierced the third wall of Mrs. Hirsch’s room below the end of her bed, tore through the two walls flanking a hall, and finished up on a staircase between the first and second floors. Mrs. Hirsch was showered with bricks. Her bed was broken by the falling debris. She herself escaped unscathed.27
The shell, which was still live, ‘lay on the staircase for a time, then an air-raid warden carried it into a nearby street. A little later it was removed to Woollahra Park oval and buried.’28 The offending shell was eventually defused by the navy and found a new purpose in propping open the doors to the Woollahra Council Chambers until recently moved to a museum. Other residents in the apartment block also had lucky escapes. The wife of resident air-raid warden W.R. Clarkson recalled later that day:
I was awakened by the first shot, and looked out the first floor window and found that the rest of the occupants of the flat building were awake. I was looking out the window when I heard a loud swish and a bang. Pieces of brick from the wall hit me. I then took my two children to a room we had specially prepared for air raids.29
In another flat inside the block ten-year old Barbara Woodward, whose father was another air-raid warden, recalled:
Mummy fell down, and I was frightened. I heard a bang in the roof and grabbed my kitten, ‘Mr. Churchill,’ and went with the other children to a room at the back of the flat. ‘Mr. Churchill’ was not frightened.30
Outside another apartment block a Japanese shell exploded in Plumer Street, Rose Bay, the blast:
…shattered portions of the walls and all the windows and glass doors of Yallambee Flats. People in several flats had narrow escapes from injury as debris fell around them. A woman sleeping in a enclosed verandah was slightly injured by flying glass.31
The noise of the Japanese gunfire had drawn many of the apartment block’s residents to their windows before the shell landed. One resident recalled later that day:
We all seemed to be waiting for something to happen…Then we got it. There was a terrific blast, and the whole building trembled. Everyone rushed to air-raid shelters, but there was no panic.32
Wardens and police herded thousands of local residents into air raid shelters across the city. Patients at local hospitals were carried down to basement areas for their protection, though local civil defence authorities did some grumbling after the raid concerning some Sydneysiders who had refused to cooperate with them when ordered to evacuate their houses or to take shelter. The evacuations took far longer than the short Japanese attack, and the sites of shell strikes became thronged by eager locals the next day. Photographers snapped pictures of ‘…children playing in a huge hole created by a shell outside a small grocery store in Woollahra’.33 The economic effects of the Japanese bombardment were negligible, but demonstrated again the Japanese penchant for hit-and-run nuisance attacks using their submarines, all designed to lower civilian morale as well as cause physical damage to the enemy infrastructure and economy. Civilian morale was not lowered by the bombardment of Sydney, though many people still harboured fantasies of a Japanese invasion of Australia in the backs of their minds.
The bombardment of Sydney by the I-24 occurred shortly after midnight on 8 June. Two hours later another Japanese submarine, the I-21 under Commander Matsumura, surfaced at Stockton Bight, approximately six miles north-east of Newcastle. Matsumura’s intention was identical to that of his colleague, Hanabusa, namely to bombard important shore targets vital to the Australian war economy. Matsumura’s attack was to prove to be three times heavier than that launched upon Sydney on the same night, but on this occasion local Australian defences were able to reply, if ineffectually. In twenty minutes the I-21 unleashed thirty-four shells from her deck-gun into the city of Newcastle, causing some damage, although once again the armour-piercing anti-ship ammunition used by the Japanese mainly failed to explode on contact with buildings and road surfaces and either ploughed through brick walls or buried themselves deep in the earth.
The Japanese were targeting Newcastle’s B.H.P. steelworks and shipyards, but because of the range, darkness and the motion of the submarine on the surface of the sea, accuracy was difficult and shells ended up landing all over the city and in the sea. Newcastle was not blacked-out because no warning had been received by local civil defence authorities concerning an imminent attack, although as soon as the bombardment began local residents started to head for air raid shelters or their basements. The Japanese naval gunners had immediately to hand the twenty shells stored inside the ready-locker beside the deck-gun, and they also requested a further fourteen be brought topside during the engagement from the submarine’s magazine below decks. Included in the thirty-four shells fired that night were eight star shells sent aloft to provide the Japanese with increased illumination to try to discern their targets and fall of shot, a local reporter noting inaccurately that ‘Flare shells appeared in the sky over Newcastle before the explosions began’.34
The local defence of Newcastle was provided by the Fort Scratchley Battery located inside the fort of the same name on the shoreline, and by the Rail Battery, which consisted of a pair of First World War-vintage Hotchkiss 2-pounder emplaced field guns that protected the river mouth. Fort Scratchley’s searchlights failed to pinpoint the I-21 as she sailed closer to Newcastle, firing as she went, though the fort’s gunners could clearly discern the submarine’s deck-gun muzzle flashes every time she fired. It took the Fort Scratchley Battery thirteen minutes before they returned fire at the I-21, the battery’s commanding officer, Captain Watson, roughing out a fairly accurate range and bearing on the Japanese submarine from the tell-tale flashes of her gun. A communications telephonist then reported, ‘Fire Command says engage when ready, Sir!’ Captain Watson is then reported to have said, ‘Tell them I bloody well have!’35 The big guns at Scratchley fired only four rounds in reply to the I-21’s thirty-four before the submarine made off. As the Japanese submarine manoeuvred and fired, the gunners in the fort had experienced trouble depressing their gun barrels sufficiently to engage the target, one of their four shots removing part of the roof of the Electricity Commission office building in the city.
Some of the Japanese shells fell harmlessly into the sea, some exploded on the surface in white plumes of water, while others remain on the seabed to this day, unexploded. Other shells crashed into buildings across the city. One landed next to the tram depot, another tore through a row of houses in Parnell Place, close to the fort. Another penetrated a storage shed at the B.H.R Steelworks (which was probably Matsumura’s primary target), while yet another exploded at the Newcastle Ocean Baths, a swimming pool by the beach. With so much steel flying about it is a wonder that civilians were not killed or seriously injured. One soldier who had been asleep in the fort when the attack began leapt out of bed and twisted his ankle, and two civilians were injured by falling masonry in the city, but casualties remained negligible. The next day’s
addition of the Newcastle Morning Herald hailed ‘The Luckiest Boy in Town’, a story about a young boy and his brother who had been watching the action from their bedroom window at Parnell Place when the Fort Scratchley guns had opened fire close by. With ringing ears, the boys’ mother herded them downstairs to the lounge, just as a Japanese shell had slammed through the window of the recently vacated bedroom, cut the boy’s bed in two and set fire to the room’s contents. Dozens of properties throughout Newcastle were left scarred by shrapnel, and a good many window panes were shattered or cracked by the concussions from the Fort Scratchley guns opening fire. It has been surmised that had the Japanese managed to land thirty-four conventional 140mm high explosive shells throughout Newcastle instead of the inappropriate anti-ship shells actually used, very considerable damage and loss of life would have occurred. The same can be said of the attack on Sydney, the Ellwood Oil Refinery bombardment in California on 17 February and the two attacks later in June on the Estevan Point lighthouse in Canada and Fort Stevens in Oregon. Fort Scratchley has gone down in history as the only Australian fort to engage an enemy surface target in wartime, and is now a museum. The Newcastle Morning Herald had much to say about the twin attacks on Sydney and Newcastle, most of it concerning the lessons to learned from such events:
The reaction of Newcastle and Sydney to the raids and to the firing of East Coast batteries in anger for the first time in Australian history was one of curiosity mixed with irritation at the disturbance at a night’s rest. Perhaps the enemy’s attack was not so stupid as might appear. His purpose was intimidation. He was testing civilian nerves, and doubtless hoped by this demonstration that…he still has a number of submarines off our coast to slow down production and to limit the use of our coastal waters. Its effect was to annoy, not frighten, civilians, and to hammer home…the need for vigilance, for increased production, and for lending every energy to the great task of keeping Australia free and restoring the freedom of the seas.36
The reporter perhaps summed up quite neatly the feelings of most Australians following the midget submarine attacks, and two recent gun bombardments:
If the Japanese planned to lower civilian morale, they succeeded only in disturbing a complacency of which we are well rid, and in spurring our determination to make an end of such impertinences, together with more serious affronts to our national pride and honour.37
Australia would not be frightened by the seeming impunity with which the Japanese were able to strike at the country. Indeed, the local newspaper warned the residents of Newcastle that one of the reasons the Japanese had been able to strike at the city was the lack of a ‘brownout’ during non-alert times. The newspaper commented that:
…the instinct…to switch on lights and watch the proceedings is potentially dangerous. Curiosity is natural, but it killed more than cats and it cannot be impressed too strongly on civilians that they will serve their own and the community’s interests best by keeping lights off and going quietly to shelter.38
These were wise words for the Japanese planned to revisit the city to bombard it again.
The Japanese midget submarine attacks on shipping in Sydney Harbour, and the subsequent bombardment of the city’s suburbs and the city of Newcastle by the large I-class submarines, was not part of an elaborate Japanese invasion plan. The Japanese never seriously considered invading the continent. At the time of the Japanese midget submarine attacks on Sydney Harbour, Australia appeared isolated and indeed in imminent danger. Darwin, Derby, Katherine and Broome in the north had all suffered serious attention from Japanese bombers. Nearly every outpost of the British Empire in the Far East, Malaya, Hong Kong and Singapore to mention the most significant, had all fallen to the seemingly relentless Japanese war machine, and thousands of Australian servicemen had been taken prisoner. The fighting in New Guinea was fierce as Australian and Japanese troops fought each other, the jungle and disease along the Kokoda Trail. It was imperative that the Australians retained control of Port Moresby, and just as imperative for the Japanese to possess it. Certainly, the Japanese Navy was interested in isolating Australia by interdicting her merchant fleet, and by the aerial bombing of her northern towns and cities, but this strategy also became increasingly difficult following Japanese losses at the Battle of Midway in 1942. The myth that Australia was saved from a Japanese invasion by the fighting along the Kokoda Trail in New Guinea, or the Battle of the Coral Sea, are simply not supported by actual Japanese plans.
By early 1942, after the Japanese had invested the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), Japan was within striking distance of the Australian mainland, and a few Japanese naval officers mooted a plan to extend the Empire’s conquests onto the continent itself. The Imperial Japanese Army, however, immediately balked at such a plan, and killed it at the earliest possible opportunity. The army’s reservations were not based on a lack of courage or ability, but rather on the very practical manpower problem they faced as the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ (the Japanese euphemism for their new empire in the Far East) rapidly expanded. The Japanese found themselves, by mid-1942, in a similar situation to Germany, fighting a war on two fronts.
After June 1941, approximately three-quarters of the German Army was fully occupied fighting the Soviets in European Russia, leaving the remainder to hold off the British and Americans elsewhere. So the Imperial Japanese Army faced an equal challenge, namely the occupation of eastern China and Manchuria, and constant war with the Chinese Nationalists and Communists on the one hand and total war against British, American, Australian, Dutch and New Zealand forces in the Pacific and south-east Asia.
For Japan, the planned subjugation of China had been fully unleashed in 1937 when they had engineered an undeclared war, as prior to 1941 the army had most of its way in strategic planning. Japanese aggression in China properly began with the Manchurian Incident of September 1931, when the Japanese blew up a section of their railway in southern Manchuria and then blamed the Chinese. The Incident occurred at the town of Shenyang, then known as Mukden, and led to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. After occupying the province the Japanese renamed it Manchukuo, and installed the last Emperor of China (who had been forced to abdicate in 1911), Pu Yi, as head of state in February 1932. Not satisfied with this, the Japanese then applied considerable pressure to the Chinese government to bow to its territorial demands, eventually growing tired of the politicking and engineering another ‘incident’ as a pretext for war. In July 1937 shots were exchanged between Japanese and Chinese soldiers at the Luguo Bridge (then known as the Marco Polo Bridge) in Beijing. The Japanese then went on to occupy Beijing and Tianjin (then known as Tientsin). The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek refused to negotiate an end to hostilities on Japanese terms. After protracted fighting, the Japanese occupied Shanghai (minus the International Settlement and French Town settled by European and American citizens which was not occupied until December 1941), before capturing the national capital at Nanjing and committing one of the world’s worst atrocities against a civilian population known as the ‘Rape of Nanking’ in which approximately 320,000 Chinese were exterminated. In late 1938, Hankou (Hankow) and Guangzhou (Canton) were taken, and the Nationalist Chinese retreated to a new temporary capital at Chongqing (Chungking), where the struggle was continued with Allied assistance along the Burma Road until 1945. The Second Sino-Japanese War saw two million Japanese soldiers in China, and this figure remained a constant throughout the Second World War. Even as the Japanese Empire was eroded by the American’s island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, and the British and Commonwealth drive through Burma, a massive force had to be maintained in China, known as the Kwantung Army.
The Soviet Union continued to pose a threat to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, which necessitated a large deterrent force besides the Kwantung Army facing the Chinese. Therefore, the army simply did not possess a sufficient stock of trained manpower in reserve to make the occupation of the huge Australian continent, or parts
of it, feasible. The Imperial Japanese Navy also dismissed the idea of invading Australia, arguing that they possessed insufficient ships to conduct all of their operations across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Prime Minister John Curtin and the Australian government knew of Japanese reservations concerning invading the continent from intelligence briefings derived from intercepted and decrypted Japanese radio traffic, but fear of an invasion served as a useful propaganda tool to rally the Australian people behind the war. Government posters were issued, one infamously proclaiming of the Japanese ‘He’s Coming South’ to reinforce in the minds of ordinary Australians the grave danger they faced and the necessity of pulling together and supporting the war, and the Curtin government. Curtin and General Douglas MacArthur (‘Dugout Doug’ had been in Australia since being ordered out of the Philippines in March 1942 prior to the surrender of the Bataan Peninsula) had been informed of the Japanese abandonment of an invasion plan in early 1942, but Curtin withheld this information from the Australian people. The submarine attacks on Sydney and Newcastle in May only served to reinforce what Curtin had been warning, and it was only in mid-1943 that Curtin announced that no Japanese invasion was expected in the foreseeable future. Curtin was right in withholding this information, because the threat of invasion galvanized Australia to prosecute the war against Japan. The problem for historians has been the persuasiveness of Curtin’s argument. He did such a thorough job of inculcating a belief in a planned Japanese invasion in the minds of Australians that this myth persists even today.
As for the submarines responsible for strengthening Curtin’s hold over Australia, Hanabusa and the I-24 struck again just after the sun rose on 9 June 1942, south-east of Jervis Bay. Launching a submerged attack on the British freighter Orestes (7,748-tons), both of the torpedoes that Hanabusa fired malfunctioned and blew up before reaching their target. Frustrated, the Japanese ordered his submarine to the surface, and he determined to sink the Orestes with his deck-gun. Unfortunately, although the crew banged away at the fast retreating freighter, they only scored a single hit that caused minimal damage, but they continued firing until Hanabusa ordered the attack halted and broke off contact with the freighter.
