It’s 70 years today since the wartime bombing of Darwin by the Japanese on 19 February 1942. The anniversary is getting a lot of publicity here.
Interesting to note that - supposedly - more bombs were dropped on Darwin than on Pearl Harbour.
An honest question, how do they determine how many bombs were dropped?
I don’t know about Darwin specifically, but it would be generally compiled from reports by the pilots. A squad would fly out with a known amount of bombs. On its return (or the return of other squads) an after action report would be generated. When, where and how any munitions were expended would generally be included in these reports. Then making some guesses the final mission report would be compiled with a final estimate. In any case the mission commander would know how many bombs went out, and how many (if any came back). Even if some of the planes were shot down in route, we generally have a rough estimate on which ones those were, and thus which dropped their bombs.
There are obviously several problems with this. Pilot claims are notoriously bad, “Of course I dropped my bombs on the target, and not on an unrelated village 20 miles away.” Observations of other pilots are even worse, “Yeah I’m sure Bob dropped his payload before he was shot down (even though I was dodging ground flak and fire from the CAP fighters, and trying to drop my own payload on target).” But it at least gives us round figures.
What was in Darwin, in 1942? A few oil storage tanks, amybe a patrol boat of two?
Doesn’t strike me as a particularly fortified place.
Although I did have a professor from Australia, who grew up during WWII-he said people were scared to death of a Japanese invasion.
According to the Wikipedia article on Darwin, at the two closest censuses the population was:
1933 1,566 +11.9%
1947 2,538 +62.1%
So the civilian population in 1942 would have been around 2,000. At that time, full-blooded Australian Aboriginal people were excluded from censuses, so the population might have been significantly higher including them.
That article also says,“Around 10,000 Allied troops arrived in Darwin in the early 1940s at the outset of World War II, in order to defend Australia’s northern coastline.” So there might have been 12,000 people in Darwin at the time of the bombing. It would have been by far the largest settlement in the Northern Territory.
Not the Japanese,who controlled everything north of there.
Darwin was the last Allied-held outpost along the air- and sea-lanes from China, around Southeast Asia, to India.
My paternal grandfather was a young man serving in Darwin during the attack and he was permanently disabled as a result of the bombing. He never talked about it though.