Australia Under Attack The Bombing Of Darwin-1942

by Douglas Lockwood

2022 marks 80 years since Australia faced an unprecedented foreign attack on home soil. Author Douglas Lockwood was an Australian newspaperman and author. Born in Natimuk, 25 kilometres west of Horsham in Victoria’s Wimmera district, Lockwood left school at 12 to help run his father’s newspaper, the weekly West Wimmera Mail, at the height of the Great Depression. With his father’s blessing he left home at 16 and worked as a reporter on rural Victorian papers in Camperdown, Tatura, and Mildura before being hired by Sir Keith Murdoch in 1941 as a journalist on The Herald in Melbourne. He stayed with The Herald’s parent company, the Herald and Weekly Times (HWT), for the rest of his life. At the end of 1941, during World War II, he was sent to Darwin with his new wife, Ruth, and was there for the first Japanese attack on Australia on 19 February 1942. While Douglas was there and was able to share his personal story he also interviewed American’s Japanese and other nations who took part. He was able to meet & interview former airmen who had flown against the Japanese that day and been shot down. He tells the story of the Bombing of Darwin.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Australia, Military Fiction

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Rosalyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an excellent and scholarly review of the happenings that resulted from the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese on 19th February 1942. Douglas Lockwood has dealt with myth and rumours, and established a factual account in his book, which should be compulsory reading for all seriously interested in Australian history and of the history of World War II

[Alistair Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was first published in 1966 but it remains a lucid account of the Bombing of Darwin in 1942, the first time Australia itself had been attacked in war.The book is slightly limited in that the author, a journalist, was denied access to some official reports at the time but he has done a fine job in teasing out the backgrund to the attack from both the Allied and Japanese view points. The author draws on eye witness accounts and places the attack in the wider context of the war as well as providing some views about why Darwin was largely unprepared for the attack.
The story is also told from both the military and civilian prespective.
There are a few photos to illustrate the text.
Recommended

[Arabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

for the time that this was published, it was essentially the only book on Darwin so 10/10 for that but the fact that I had to use this as one of my sources for my extended essay made me want to cry.