Les Penhall , seen here with his wife , Scottie, was in Darwin when the Japanese bombed the front door to Australia on February 19,1942. There was a large ceremony in Darwin this week to mark the 78th anniversary of the attack in which 243 people were killed , more than 300 wounded , eight ships sunk and others beached , much of the town destroyed.
From the Little Darwin files was retrieved a cassette containing Penhall's eyewitness account of the bombing. Just 18 years of age, he had arrived in Darwin from Adelaide on November 29, 1941, employed as a clerk in the Native Affairs Branch.
Each day he collected the mail from the Darwin Post Office where he knew all the staff who were from Adelaide. These included Mr and Mrs Bald and their daughter, Iris, she having worked in the same telephone accounts section as Les at the Adelaide Post Office .
On Boxing day, war tension mounting, he went on a grand adventure with bushman Bill Harney and two Aborigines in a small dinghy to the Delissaville settlement , across the harbour, to assess the situation there should it need be evacuated.
On the fateful morning of February 19, Penhall made arrangements with Iris Bald and two of her girlfriends to meet at The Star Theatre that night with him and some of his mates.
Shortly before 10am, the Japanese attacked . As he ran from the back of his office bombs were falling in many places. He saw a bomb fall on the post office less than 90 feet from him. Nine of the staff including Iris were killed in the raid. A bomb fell into a trench in which staff were sheltering .
Today there is a memorial plaque on the floor of parliament house marking the spot where the staff were killed .
As Les dived down the nearby cliff , a piece of shrapnel tore a hole in the sleeve of his shirt and caused a slight wound on his left arm. Zeros machine gunned the Darwin Oval aircraft battery opposite the Hotel Darwin.
In his account , Penhall continued : " I could hear the bullets actually zipping through the tree tops , and just kept my bloody head down. Funny thing, all I really thought of down there was to protect my head . I did not want to be hit in the head . "
There were numerous deafening explosions , loud gunfire, the scream of engines. He saw the destroyer USS Peary , bombed and burning , sink with the loss of 80 men, including the captain, Lieutenant-Commander John M. Bermingham."It just slowly, slowly sank into the sea . I have a memory of the anti-aircraft gun, an oerlikon, I think , on the stern , still firing as the ship went under the water . An amazing sight!"
He went on to say a painting he subsequently saw depicting the sinking of the Peary going down stern first did not accord with his vivid memory of the vessel's final moments.
The harbour was alight .The British Motorist , an oil tanker, was hit and the oil set alight by incendiary bullets fired by the Zeros . A lot of men were burnt in the water, buried on the foreshore between Government House and the wharf.
Evacuated to Alice Springs , which became the civil administrative centre of the Territory , Penhall helped draw up a list of surviving crewmembers from ships sunk in Darwin , evacuated south in convoys, many of them Chinese and Malays .
During the month he spent in Alice the US General Douglas MacArthur, his wife, and son , arrived in town , having fled the Philippines . On going south, General MacArthur made his famous "I shall return " to the Philippines statement .
Penhall went on to become a signaller with the 74th Mobile Anti-Aircraft Searchlight Battery on Horn Island , in the Torres Strait, Australia's most northerly operational airfield, said to have been the second most bombed place after Darwin . It had first been bombed on March 14, not long after Darwin .
Mrs Penhall, nee Effie Scott, at the age of 18 , became a wireless telegraphist at the RAAF headquarters in an old Toorak mansion in Melbourne . Everybody there was sworn to secrecy. It was a centre of great activity with encoded messages flying backwards and forwards to the islands and London . As the RAAF called everybody by their surname, she became Scottie and it remained in vogue thereafter, she not liking Effie .
