Sydney under attack, 1942

Sydney harbour today, from North Head. The boom referred to below was more or less where the dotted line appears.

This is a sidelight from my Kokoda Track: 101 Days, an Honour Book in the 2007 Eve Pownalls, and it was short-listed for the NSW Premier's History Prize. Originally published by Black Dog, which later became Walker, it is now available in my own updated and better-designed Polymoth Books imprint. This is from the Introduction.

The attack on Sydney

There was no valid reason the authorities to worry about the Japanese invading Australia, because as we know now, Allied code-breakers would have had early warning of any Japanese fleet being assembled to invade Australia.

Attacks on key sites like ports were more likely and harder to predict. That had to be kept secret, though, so the codes would not be changed. So the public were told the threat was real, to help keep the secret.

In June, 1942, the USS Chicago was in Sydney harbour. It was partly protected by a boom net close to the harbour entrance, from near Watson’s Bay to George’s Head. Some parts of the net were kept up by buoys, while other parts were strung between timber piles, driven into the sea floor. It was rather like a shark net, except that shark nets don’t have gates, sections that can be swung open to let ships in and out. These floating gates were pulled open, and hauled closed again, by an old ferry,

The gates and the gaps they left caused a problem that was made worse, because the boom wasn’t finished. Work was started in January 1942, and not completed until August. When the raiders called on the night of 31 May–1 June, there were easy ways in.

There was a third problem: when the attackers were seen, it took two hours before anybody “in charge” would believe there were submarines in the harbour. Midget submarines had been used unsuccessfully in the attack on Pearl Harbor, so the authorities knew they existed.

One of the subs surfaced near Dobroyd Head and was seen by a fisherman, who ran about 5 km to the nearest police station at Manly to report it. Nobody believed him. The most reliable report came from a boom watchman who heard the crew trying to free the first submarine, after it got tangled in the net.

The watchman radioed in a report. Finally, the submarine’s crew realised they could not get free, and blew their vessel up with demolition charges. After that, the Navy accepted that something was wrong.

This was a battle which would be won by the side which was the least incompetent, but most of the time, neither side really looked like winning. When a searchlight operator on USS Chicago saw a second submarine, the gunners opened up with machine guns and artillery, but the guns could not depress (tilt down) enough to hit the submarine. At least one of the shells bounced off the water and hit Fort Denison, and other shell fragments were found later in the suburbs of Cremorne and Mosman.

The submarine submerged and moved to a point in the harbour where it could see Chicago in silhouette, backlit by construction lights on Garden Island. The Japanese crews were on what was almost a suicide mission, yet amazingly, they failed to move in and launch a torpedo at Chicago. Equally amazingly, the lights on Garden Island stayed on for an hour and a half, but even more amazingly, the submarine only fired its torpedoes five minutes after the lights went out.

Both torpedoes missed Chicago, but one sank a ferry being used as a floating dormitory. In all, 21 sailors died, and ten were wounded. A third submarine was also in the harbour, and small vessels were rushing around, making and losing contact, dropping depth charges and in the process, damaging the third submarine to the extent that it could do no harm.

The midget submarines had failed in their main mission of sinking a major warship, but they certainly succeeded in their second aim of bringing alarm and despair to Sydney. People who could get away fled to the Blue Mountains, far from the sea. And in the Eastern suburbs, close to the ocean, there were spectacular falls in property prices in the winter of 1942.

Now about that fisherman who saw the sub: you probably won’t read about him anywhere, but he was real enough. He shouted to my (now deceased) aunt that the Japanese were invading, as he ran past her. This is one reason why we need more oral historians!