Hitting Home: The Japanese Attack on Sydney 1942
by David Jenkins
Random House Australia, 1992, 88 pages
The genesis of this book filled with photographs never gets clearly
explained, but it appears to have been published in conjunction with a 1992 special
exhibit of a Japanese midget submarine at the Australian National
Maritime Museum in Sydney. The midget submarine is normally on display at the
Australian War Memorial in Canberra, but it seems to have received some
restoration work prior to the special exhibit in Sydney based on information
provided in the rather
unexciting five-page appendix that provides technical details on the
restoration. The book provides no information on the author and lacks a
bibliography, although the narrative mentions a few sources such as
Australia Under Siege: Japanese Submarine
Raiders 1942 (1982) by Steven Carruthers.
Photographs, maps, and diagrams take up more than half the book. The
well-drawn diagrams of the midget submarine and the maps of the routes taken by
the three midget submarines and the reconnaissance flight made by a Japanese
pilot two days prior to the attack help readers better understand the
events. A few details contained in the maps and book's narrative have been shown
to be incorrect based on subsequent research, which is best summarized in
A Very Rude Awakening (2007) by Peter
Grose. The book's first part provides background to the attack on Sydney Harbor
by three midget submarines on the night of May 31 and June 1, 1942, but some of
the material does not have a close connection to the attack. The middle part
effectively summarizes what happened during the attack. The last part drifts
somewhat from the subtitle's topic of The Japanese Attack on Sydney 1942
as there is extended discussion of subsequent Japanese submarine attacks on
Australian commercial shipping and the shelling of Australian cities by
submarines on the surface off the coast.
This history has little to offer that is not covered by Peter Grose and
Steven Carruthers in their books on the Japanese midget submarine attack in
Sydney Harbor, but Hitting Home has a few interesting features. Four
pages, including three photos, cover the reconnaissance flight piloted by Susumu
Ito over Sydney Harbor in a floatplane launched from submarine I-21 in the early
morning hours of May 29, 1942. The book includes extended quotations from Ito
about the flight. He and his navigator/gunner almost lost their lives when their
plane flipped over when trying to land with fairly high waves at night, but they
managed to get out quickly from the capsized aircraft and grabbed a rope thrown
from the nearby mother submarine. Another worthy-of-note section in the book
covers the tour of a Japanese midget submarine throughout southern Australia to
help raise funds for the Australian Comforts Fund, which sent food and
recreation items to troops stationed overseas. The midget submarine that toured
the country was constructed with the bow section from one recovered submarine
and with the midship and stern section from the other midget that was salvaged.
This midget submarine is the one now on exhibit at the Australian War Memorial in
Canberra.
Wrecked control room of
Lieutenant Keiu Matsuo's midget submarine
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