The Night the War Came to Sydney

Luck was with the defenders when three Japanese midget submarines raided Sydney Harbour in 1942. By Robert Nichols. Published in Wartime, Issue 33.

By the end of May 1942, many Australians feared a Japanese invasion of the Australian mainland. They had been shocked by the apparent ease with which Japan had dealt a series of crushing blows to US and British Empire forces. Over the preceding six months, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, Singapore captured and Darwin bombed.

It must have seemed that worse was still to come.

In the evening of Sunday 31 May 1942 three Type A midget submarines of the Special Attack Flotilla pulled away from their large I-Class “mother” submarines about 10 kilometres east of Sydney – their mission to enter Sydney Harbour and sink Allied shipping there. The two-man midgets were battery-powered craft, about 24 metres in length, capable of a maximum speed of 24 knots submerged; each carried two Type 97 torpedoes.

Over the months leading up to the raid, Japanese aircraft launched from large submarines had made several reconnaissance flights over the city. The last, in the early hours of Sunday morning, reported that Sydney Harbour was filled with Allied ships. The most significant targets were the heavy cruisers USS Chicago and HMAS Canberra.

Sydney was not undefended. Underwater cables near the harbour entrance formed a series of electronic indicator loops, able to detect submerged or surface vessels, although the midget submarines would prove too small to be picked up by the outer loops. An anti-torpedo boom net stretched between Georges Head and Green Point, although only the central section had been finished at the time of the raid. There were coastal guns and anti-aircraft batteries on the headlands, and a small harbour defence flotilla – the so-called “Hollywood Fleet” of converted pleasure craft – patrolled the harbour.

The first of the submarines, M27 (the midget from I27), commanded by Lieutenant Chuma Kenshi, entered the harbour at 8 pm. Chuma’s craft became entangled in the central section of the boom net. It was detected at 9.30 pm by an alert Maritime Services Board watchman, 52-year-old James Cargill. Cargill reported his find to Sub-Lieutenant H.C. Eyers, captain of the Yarroma, one of the channel patrol boats near the boom net. He soon became impatient with Eyers’s reluctance to act on his warning. Rear Admiral G.C. Muirhead-Gould, the officer in charge of Sydney’s defences, would later call this failure to do anything “deplorable and inexplicable”.

Eyers sent Cargill and another man back to confirm that it was a submarine, which they did. Eyers then ordered the Lolita, another converted pleasure craft, to approach the craft. Her commander, Warrant Officer Herbert Anderson, dropped some depth charges which failed to explode.

It was then more than two hours since M27 had become entangled and more than an hour since

they had been detected. Chuma and his crewman, Petty Officer Omori Takeshi, having made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to break free, decided to destroy themselves and their craft by detonating its 35-kilogram scuttling charge. Their mutilated bodies were later recovered from the wreck of M27.

Meanwhile, the second submarine, M24, crewed by Sub-Lieutenant Ban Katsuhisa and Petty Officer First Class Ashibe Mamoru, had slipped past the boom net and made its way to a position off Potts Point. In doing so, it was seen and fired upon about 11 pm by the US heavy cruiser Chicago and the RAN corvette Geelong. A little before this, the third midget submarine, M22, with Lieutenant Matsuo Keiu and Petty Officer Tsuzuku Masao aboard, had entered the harbour but was immediately spotted by harbour defence craft and subjected to depth charge attack by HMAS Yandra. It survived, but laid low for the next few hours.

Ban in M24 took this opportunity to fire his two torpedoes at the Chicago, which stood out against the still-illuminated floodlights of Garden Island. Both missed their target: one ran aground on Garden Island and failed to explode, but the other passed under the Dutch submarine K-9 and the depot ship HMAS Kuttabul, and struck the sea wall against which the converted harbour ferry was moored. The blast damaged the K-9 and sank the Kuttabul, killing 19 Australian and two British naval ratings asleep on board; 10 others were wounded. “I saw the whole ferry lift,” reported one eyewitness, “as though she were on top of an enormous wave and then settle down again sinking at the stern … I saw pieces of wood flying through the air. Half the steering wheel was blown away.”

With all the gunfire and explosions echoing around the harbour, few of those anywhere near the water could have been unaware of the raid. The Allied warships finally started to leave port as harbour defence craft began a full-scale search for the enemy submarines. The third submarine (Matsuo’s) had hid on the bottom of the harbour after its earlier run-in with Yandra. Four hours later, it was spotted by the Chicago, then finally making its way out of the harbour.

Everyone around the harbour was on the lookout for more intruders and, in the understated words of official historian Hermon Gill, “more submarines were seen than were actually present”. After several false sightings, M22 was finally located in Taylors Bay at 5 am by HMAS Sea Mist. Lieutenant Reginald Andrew had only assumed command of Sea Mist at 4 pm the previous afternoon, and later described his discovery as “a shattering experience” which “caught me very much off guard” and felt he “was far from ready to deal with the situation”. Nevertheless, when ordered by the acting commander of the “Hollywood Fleet”, Lieutenant Athol Townley in HMAS Steady Hour, to attack the submarine with depth charges, he did so – although he was later to hold it against Townley that he had been ordered to set his charges to explode at just 15 metres. The force of the resulting blasts lifted Sea Mist out of the water and it had to retire. But they had also damaged the midget, which Steady Hour and Yarroma now moved in to finish off. When the submarine was finally brought to the surface, it was found that the two crew members had shot themselves to evade capture.

M24, Ban’s craft, was never found, although a reading on an underwater electronic indicator loop at the Heads would seem to suggest that he may have left the harbour at 1.58 am.

After the attack, Sydney was in turmoil, with the harbour the scene of intense activity. Kuttabul was raised, the bodies recovered, and the dead mourned. The public avidly followed the retrieval from the harbour of the two wrecked submarines, M27 and M22. Then, amid much controversy, on 9 June the bodies of the four Japanese submariners were cremated at Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs Crematorium with full military honours. Their ashes were returned to Japan, arriving at Yokosuka on 9 October 1942, amid great public rejoicing.

But the day before had brought yet another surprise for Sydney. Just after midnight in the morning of Monday 8 June, two of the large Japanese submarines lying off shore fired shells at Sydney and Newcastle. The aim was simply to create a sense of unease among the population. None of these shells caused any real damage or serious injury, but for many Sydneysiders, it seemed time to move to the country. Others dug air raid shelters in their backyards. Membership of volunteer defence organisations swelled to more than 80,000. And Sydney Harbour’s defences were increased, just in case the Japanese returned.

Eventually, the Japanese midget submarines even contributed to Australia’s war effort. Over the next year, one assembled from the best bits of the two recovered was taken on an extensive fund-raising tour of rural New South Wales and Victoria. For many Australians this would have been the first tangible evidence they had seen of the war.