Australia’s Pearl Harbour

An aerial shuttle service then began between Tjiltjap in Java, and Broome in Western Australia (a distance of 900km across the Timor Sea) using an odd assortment of whatever aircraft could be commandeered and made to fly. In the last two weeks of February some 8,000 refugees passed through Broome, from the Dutch East Indies, and on some days up to 57aircraft passed through the town before heading south to Perth or across the continent to Sydney.

All seemed to be proceeding well with the evacuation until about 3pm on 2 March 1942, when a large Japanese Navy boat was sighted circling over Broome at a height of some 12,000 feet. After completing its leisurely observation of the town, the machine headed out to sea to return to its base.

The appearance of this aircraft alarmed the military personnel in Broome, who saw it as a prelude to an almost certain and imminent attack on the town. These fears were heightened, when it was reported that about 4am on the morning of 3 March, another Japanese flying boat made several low passes over Broome and it was alleged that someone on the jetty flashed signals to it with a torch.

These reconnaissance flights, and other intelligence confirmed the existence of a large concentration of Allied military aircraft (both land based and flying boats) at Broome. As a result, Commander Takeo Shibata, commanding officer of the Japanese 3rd Naval Air Group, based at Koepang in Timor, determined that an attack should be mounted on these tempting targets without delay.

What was not known to the Broome residents was that Shibata had been the Japanese Navy’s chief test pilot in the mid 1930s, and it was he who insisted that Mitsubishi build long range capabilities into their new Zero fighter. It was also Shibata who insisted that his men learn the special techniques that would enable them to coax the last mile of range from their Zeros.

At 7. 05am on Tuesday 3 March 1942, nine Mitsubishi A6M. 2 Zero fighters, and a CSM. 2 “Babs” reconnaissance aircraft, under the overall command of Lt Zenziro Miyano took off from Koepang en route to Broome, an unheard of distance for a single engined fighter aircraft in those days.

It was a warm and sunnyday in Broome and Roebuck Bay was a hive of activity as flying boat skippers completed their paperwork, or arranged for the refueling of their machines. It seems the warmth of the tropical sun and the distance from the war zone lulled many of the refugees and crews into believing they were safe in this friendly Australian port. This was to be an illusion which would shortly be shattered.

Miyano’sZeros arrived overhead Broome at 9. 30am local time and immediately jettisoned their long-range belly tanks (which created the still held belief that Broome itself was actually bombed). Sweeping in from the north, Miyano could not believe the tempting targets that lay before him. There were 16 flying boats in Roebuck Bay – mainly Catalinas and Dutch Dorniers, plus two Empire flying boats, one the RAAF’s and the other Qantas’. On the airstrip were two American Liberators, two Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and several twin engined Allied transports.

Fearing that such a large number of bombers and transports would be well protected, Miyano directed that three of the Zeros remain at high altitude to fight off the expected Allied fighter patrols. Three of the Jap fighters then peeled off and attacked the bombers and transports on the airstrip, whilst the last three machines – led by Miyano – dived to low altitude and attacked the flying boats on Roebuck Bay.

Finding no allied fighters in the area, the three “top cover” Zeros then joined the attack, leaving the “Babs” to direct operations from a safe altitude. The sudden appearance of these enemy fighters so far south of the war zone caused great alarm n Broome. When first sighted, many of the locals thought they were a flight of RAAF Wirraway trainers – how wrong they were!

Two Allied machines did manage to get airborne. A USAAF Liberator (actually an LB. 30, the earlier version of the B-24), of the 435th Bombardment Squadron, under the command of Lt Edson Kester scrambled into the air. The bomber was attached to Ferry Command and was only one of three in the whole Southwest Pacific area. Another was on the Broome airstrip and the third was in Melbourne. The LB. 30 had 30 passengers and a crew of three. The passengers included seven enlisted men from the 17th Pursuit Squadron, with the remainder being wounded US servicemen and their surgeon, Capt Charles Stafford.

The Liberator was climbing through 600 feet when three Zeros pounced on it – it was a sitting duck. Despite Kester’s valiant attempts to evade the attack, it could not match the manoeuvrability of the Japanese fighters, and not having self-sealing fuel tanks was soon ablaze and crashed into the Indian Ocean 10km offshore. The impact broke the aircraft in two and Sgts William Beatty and Melvin Donoho were thrown clear. Others tried to get out, but were sucked down with the sinking aircraft. After 33 hours in the water, Beatty and Donoho finally managed to reach the shore, having been swept around in the strong currents. Beatty died from exhaustion soon after reaching land, but Donoho survived the ordeal and ultimately the war.

The only other machine to takeoff was a Curtiss SOC Seagull flown by Lt John D Lamade, USN. Lamade had experienced an adventurous few days prior to this latest escape. Whilst the cruiser USS Houston was steaming past the island of Lombok, he was catapulted off the ship with orders to head for Broome. He was to have rejoined the ship about a week or so later, but it was to be bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Sunda Straits, soon after he took off.

As the Zeros swept in over Roebuck Bay, Lamade had been preparing to depart for Port Hedland, 600km to the south. In the confusion he got into the air, and with so many larger and more tempting targets to attack, the Zeros paid him scant attention. His Seagull was the only Allied aircraft to escape destruction on this day.

Other Allied aircraft and personnel were not so lucky. The Zeros continued their devastating strafing runs against the aircraft on the strip and the flying boats in the Bay. Within minutes all 15 Allied flying boats – Dutch, American, British and Australian – were either ablaze or sinking. The carnage was horrific, due to the large numbers of women and children – mainly Dutch refugees – crammed into the aircraft. Most of them had spent

the previous night on the machines due to the limited amount of accommodation available in the town.

Lt Cdr H M Juta, a navigator on one of the Dutch Catalinas, gave a vivid first hand account of the early minutes of the raid. He, his wife and a young boy had been sitting on the wing of the aircraft getting some fresh air, and escaping from the crowded quarters in the aircraft where many of the refugees were housed.

“I saw several fighter planes in the distance, and guessed these were Royal Australian Air Force machines”, he said. “I was soon proved wrong when they started strafing the flying boats in the harbour. All hell broke loose. ” As the Japanese fighters headed for his Catalina, Juta pushed his wife and the boy off the wing into the water, yelling to them to swim for their lives. He then jumped in after them, diving under the surface as the enemy fighters attacked.

Several more of the crew and refugees jumped from the Catalina, but before long the aircraft was a burning and sinking hulk, with petrol pouring from its ruptured fuel tanks, setting the sea alight and adding to the horrific scene. Juta, his wife and the small boy tried to swim towards the shore, but found it extremely difficult to battle against the outgoing tide. By a stroke of luck, when they were almost on the point of total exhaustion, all three were pulled from the sea by an American serviceman who had commandeered a small motor boat and was scouring the harbour looking for survivors.

There were to be many other acts of heroism that day. All through the night Capt Harold Mathieson and his crew of the vessel Nicol Bay had toiled to refuel the many flying boats in Roebuck Bay. As the raid began he had been refueling the Qantas Empire flying boat G-AEUC, whose captain was ashore attending to last minute arrangements. Mathieson immediately cast off from the machine, and with 180 full 44 gallon drums of petrol still sitting on the deck of his boat, set off rescuing survivors from the water. By good fortune, his vessel was not hit and he was successful in saving many aircrew and refugees.

Captain Lester Brain of Qantas was also ashore when he heard the gunfire. He rushed down to the beach, grabbed a small rowboat and headed out to the scene of carnage on Roebuck Bay. About 2km from shore he came across two Dutch aviators supporting a woman refugee. All were thoroughly exhausted, but Brain hauled them aboard the small boat and rowed them to shore. He was to repeat this exercise many times over the course of the next few hours. Despite all of the rescues, the death toll was still quite high. It is estimated that more than 70 aircrew and refugees perished in the flying boats – the true number will never be known as due to the chaotic scenes of departure from Java, no proper passenger manifests had been completed, and many of the victims either went down with the flying boats, were swept out to sea, or were taken by sharks.

The US Navy’s Patrol Wing 10 was also decimated as a result of the raid, having two of their last five Catalinas destroyed in Roebuck Bay. The two “Cats” had limped into Broome after a ten and a halfhour flight from Java, each crammed with 30 refugees. One of the Wing’s Catalinas that passed through Broome only days before – and thus escaped destruction- was flown by Lt Thomas H Moorer, later to become Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between 1970 and 1974.

Meanwhile other Zeros had been strafing the Allied bombers and transports on the Broome airstrip and before long these were burning furiously. By coincidence a Dutch pilot, Flt Lt “Wild Bill” Winckel, had taken a machine gun from his Lockheed Lodestar and was servicing it when the Japanese fighters swept down. He grabbed the heavy gun, and shooting from the hip, fired several bursts at the low flying Zeros. One burst hit the aircraft of Osamu Kudo, and his Zero crashed into the sea. Kudo was to be the only Japanese casualty of the raid.

The Zeros made short work of the machines on the airstrip. Before long two USAAF B-17s were ablaze, and the remaining Liberator was also destroyed. Two Dutch machines (a Lodestar and a DC-3)and an RA. A. F Lockheed Hudson werealso destroyed.

Coincidently, several large pieces of this Hudson could still be seen in thebush adjacent to the Broome airstrip in the late 1980s, and many pieces of wreckage from a number of the Allied machines can still be seen littered around the streets of Broome even today. Likewise the wrecks of at least five of the flying boats can still be seen in Roebuck Bay twice a year, when King tides drain the Bay of much of its water.

Within an hour the eight remaining Zeros were low on fuel and had almost exhausted their ammunition and so with the “Babs” mother plane, left Broome for the long flight back to their base on Timor.

Despite the carnage they had inflicted on allied aircraft and personnel at Broome, the Zeros still had one further and unexpected target ahead of them. In the early hours of the morning of Tuesday 3 March 1942, a Dutch East Indies Airlines DC-3 aircraft (PK-AFV) had left Bandoeng (Java) and set course for Broome. At the controls was one of the airline’s most experienced pilots, Capt Ivan Smirnoff and a crew of three, and there were eight passengers aboard. Five of the passengers were Dutch Air Force pilots, one was an airline official, and Mrs Maria van Tuyn – the wife of a Dutch pilot – and her 18 month old baby.

Just prior to takeoff, a Dutch official thrust a small brown paper into Smirnoff’s hands, told him to take very good care of it, and that it would be collected from him in Australia. After several hours flying, Smirnoff sighted the Australian coast and altered his course south to Broome. By a stroke of bad luck, the eight Japanese Zero fighters were then heading north to return to their base at Koepang. Smirnoff sighted the tiny specks in the sky when about 150km north of Broome, but thinking they were RAAF fighters took no notice. It was only when they got closer and started firing at his aircraft, did he realise they were Japanese. He immediately threw the DC-3 into a dive, but he could not evade the highly manoeuvrable Japanese fighters.

Smirnoff’s aircraft was again and again raked with machine gun fire and he was hit in both arms and the hip. Bullets also ripped into Mrs van Tuyn, her baby and passenger Lt Dan Hendriksz. Despite his injuries, Smirnoff managed to land his machine on the beach at Carnot Bay. At the end of the landing run, he swung the DC-3 into the surf in an attempt to extinguish the fire, then burning furiously in one engine. Pieces of the wreckage of the machine can still be seen at low tide.

The Zeros continued their strafing runs against the DC-3, forcing the passengers and crew to run to the safety of some nearby sandhills. Unfortunately, crew member Blaaw mistimed his run for cover and was shot through both legs.

With their ammunition gone and fuel supplies running low, the Zeros then broke off the attack and continued their homeward journey. One of the Zeros was to crash into the sea just south of Roti Island due to fuel exhaustion, but the pilot Yasuo Matsumoto managed to swim ashore. He was the only one of the Japanese pilots to survive the war, dying in Japan in the mid 1980s.

Smirnoff then gathered the survivors under a makeshift shelter in the sandhills, salvaged the wireless from his wrecked aircraft, and unsuccessfully endeavoured to radio for help. Despite doing all they could for the wounded, Mrs van Tuyn died that night and Lt Hendriksz passed away the following morning. Shallow graves were then scooped out by hand and the two bodies laid to rest on the beach. Blaaw and baby van Tuyn died the following night and were also buried on the beach.

As luck would have it, an aboriginal who was walking from Broome to the Beagle Bay Mission heard about the crashed aircraft and on reaching the mission reported his news to the Brother Superior. A rescue mission was immediately mounted by the Brothers and the survivors taken by horse to Beagle Bay. After several days’ rest and recuperation at the Mission, the Dutchmen were then taken to Broome where they could obtain proper medical attention.

After a complete rest in Broome, Smirnoff was then flown to Melbourne where, on arrival, he was approached by an official of the Commonwealth Bank and asked to hand over the brown paper package. Smirnoff told the official of his ordeal at Carnot Bay and said that retrieving the package had been the last thing on his mind. He said he had sent one of the crew back into the aircraft to salvage what he could, after the Japanese fighters had left the area, but the package had not been one of the items retrieved.

It was then that Smirnoff was amazed to learn that the package contained a collection of diamonds valued at £300,000, in 1942 values ($600,000). They had been smuggled out of Amsterdam {then the diamond capital of the world) in the face of the advancing Nazis and taken to Batavia for safekeeping. With the Japanese attack on the Dutch East Indies, the diamonds were being moved to what seemed the relative safety of Australia.

Several weeks after PK-AFV crash landed at Carnot Bay, a local beachcomber named Jack Palmer found the wreck and the package of diamonds. He claimed he had spilled most of the diamonds in the sand, scooping up what he could, and these were later handed in to the authorities.

In all, only $25,000 worth of the diamonds were recovered, leaving $575,000 of the gems unaccounted for. Allowing for inflation and the increasing value of gemstones, these stones could be conservatively valued at $50 million in 1991 dollars! The 50 year old mystery of the missing diamonds has never been solved.

It is interesting to note that the Australian Prime Minister made the following statement the day after the raid –

“The rumours to the effect that loss of life in the Broome raid yesterday, was very heavy, is utterly untrue. It is not in the national interest to make any statement giving details of casualties in any particular place, as this would give valuable information to the enemy. I can assure the Australian public however, that while some losses have been incurred – whether they be of life or property – the raid was not of a kind to give that satisfaction to the enemy which he expected. “