Air raid on Broome

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Attack on Darwin
A burning USAAF B-24 Liberator at Broome Airport after the attack.
A burning USAAF B-24 Liberator at Broome Airport after the attack.
date March 3, 1942
place Broome , Western Australia
output Japanese victory
Parties to the conflict

AustraliaAustralia Australia United States Netherlands
United States 48United States 
NetherlandsNetherlands 

Japanese EmpireJapanese Empire Japan

Commander

Zenjiro Miyano ( First Lieutenant )

Troop strength
22 planes 10 fighter planes
losses

88 people
22 planes

1 fighter pilot
2 planes

The air raid on Broome took place during the Pacific War in World War II on March 3, 1942. Ten Japanese planes attacked seaplanes carrying refugees and landing off the coast, as well as military planes at Broome Airport . In the low-flying attack, 22 aircraft were destroyed and 88 people were killed.

Before the attack begins

Broome was a small pearl harbor at the beginning of World War II and served as a stopover for refueling aircraft that traveled between the Dutch East Indies and Australian cities. This route is used by Dutch and other refugees after the Allied forces were defeated by Japanese forces in the Battle of the Java Sea during World War II . When the Japanese occupied Java, Broome became an important military base. In the period of two weeks in February / March, more than a thousand refugees from the Dutch East Indies fled; many of them by seaplanes to Broome.

Recent studies by the military historian Tom Lewis have shown that the number of 8,000 refugees mentioned so far is extremely high. The number was published in the important standard work Australian Official War History and distributed in other publications. The number of refugees is estimated at 1350 today, most of whom were military. Around 250 people were civilian Dutch refugees, most of whom were family members of the Dutch flight crews.

attack

Lieutenant Zenjiro Miyano from Dai 3 Kohkuu Sentai of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force conducted nine Mitsubishi A6M -Kampfflugzeuge and a Mitsubishi Ki-15 - reconnaissance aircraft from Kupang on Timor on the morning of March 3 in this attack.

From around 9:20 a.m., the Japanese fighter planes attacked the Allied seaplanes at a low level with on-board weapons, which had landed on the coast of Roebuck Bay or were at Broome airfield. No bombs were dropped, although some reported it. They may have viewed the dropped auxiliary tanks on Japanese planes as bombs. The attack lasted an hour.

The Japanese fighter pilots destroyed 22 Allied planes. This includes one under the air bomber B-24A Liberator of the USAAF , the about 16 kilometers from Broome to a launch into the sea crashed, what took the deaths of 30 soldiers by himself. The Allies lost 15 seaplanes on the coast, in which many Dutch refugees were staying. The number of those killed in these aircraft is unknown. On the airfield, the Japanese destroyed two Boeing B-17s and a Consolidated B-24 from the USAAF, two Lockheed Hudson from the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and a Lockheed Model 18 from the Dutch Air Force Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger (LA-KNIL). Other aircraft destroyed were eight of the Navy's Catalinas Luchtvaartdienst (MLD), United States Navy and Royal Air Force ; two Short Empire from RAAF and QANTAS and five Dornier Do 24 from MLD.

A civil Douglas DC-3 of KLM with refugees from Bandung was shot down 80 kilometers north of Broome. Five people were killed. The damage amounted to AUD 20–40 million in today's values .

There was no Allied fighter aircraft in Broome at the time of the attack. The Japanese fighter planes drew fire from light weapons, while a fighter pilot, Warrant Officer Osamu Kudo , was shot dead by the LA-KNIL pilot Lieutenant Gus Winckel. He used a machine gun with a caliber of 7.9 mm, which was mounted on the Lockheed 18 and which he had removed. In 2010, however, a new investigation came to the conclusion that the aircraft crashed because it had been hit by a rear cannon of the B-24A Arabian Nights , which crashed when hit by Kudo. 19 to 20 US military personnel on board were killed.

Another Japanese fighter plane crashed on the return flight because it had lost its fuel. The pilot survived.

Review

After the attack, RAAF officer Frank Russell, who was in one of the seaplanes during the attack, wrote:

“… A scene of ghastly devastation! Our flying boats all over the place were sending up huge clouds of black smoke. Burning petrol in sinister patches floated all over the sea ... All around us there fell a ceaseless stream of tracer ammunition. Several of the Dutch Dorniers had been full of women and kids, waiting to take off to ... safety ".

Charlie D'Antoine, an Aboriginal who refueled planes, helped two passengers on an airplane on the beach who were swimming through burning fuel and debris. D'Antoine was later awarded a medal of bravery by the Dutch government and invited to the Netherlands.

US Sergeant Melvin Donoho saved himself by swimming the 16-kilometer route from the crashed B-24 to the coast for 36 hours. The same is said of Sergeant Willard J. Beatty, who died soon afterwards. Other sources assume that this is misinformation from a newspaper.

More air strikes on Broome

The Japanese Air Force carried out other, but smaller, attacks on Broome after this attack. On March 20, 1942, Mitsubishi G4M Betty attacked Broome Airport from a great height. One civilian was killed. The bombing hit several craters in the runway.

The last Japanese attack on Broome came in August 1943.

See also

literature

  • Mervyn W. Prime: Broome's one day was. The story of the Japanese raid on Broome, March 3, 1942 . Shire of Broome (Broome Historical Society), Broome 1992.
  • Mervyn W. Prime: WA's Pearl Harbor - The Japanese Raid on Broome . Royal Australian Air Force Association Aviation Museum, Bull Creek o.J.
  • Tom Lewis, Peter Ingman: Zero Hour in Broome. Avonmore Books, Adelaide 2010.
  • Cees Nooteboom : Broome 1942. A Dutch war drama . In: Ship's Diary. A book of distant journeys . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-518-42227-4 , pp. 111-197.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ navy.mil : Lt (jg) Paul D. Petsu (2002): USS Sides pays tribute to Broome's One Day War (US Seventh Fleet website). Retrieved April 18, 2007.
  2. ↑ a b c Lewis & Ingmar (2010)
  3. ↑ Gillison, Douglas: Royal Australian Air Force 1939–1942, Australia in the War of 1939–1945 , Series Three Air, Volume I. Australian War Memorial: Canberra, 1962, pp. 463–468
  4. ↑ abc.net.au : ABC-TV, "Broome Hero" ( Message Stick from February 5, 2006). Retrieved April 18, 2007
  5. ^ Western Australian Museum (no date), "The B24 Liberator crash". Retrieved April 18, 2007
  6. ↑ pacificwrecks.com : Broome 1997-2007 . Retrieved April 18, 2007
  7. ↑ awm.Gov.au Australian War Museum (2006): The Japanese raid on Broome . Retrieved April 18, 2007
  8. ↑ Veterans Review Board (no date), "Darwin" ( Memento of the original dated August 28, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 17 kB). Retrieved April 18, 2007 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.vrb.gov.au

Coordinates: 17 ° 58 ′ 41.5 ″  S , 122 ° 13 ′ 34.7 ″  E