Australia Under Attack by Douglas Lockwood

Author:Douglas Lockwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Australia Under Attack
ISBN: 9781741102697
Publisher: New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Published: 2009-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“All Patients Under Beds!”

Large bombs caused damage to the Darwin civil hospital. An Army hospital at Berrimah was shot up. The R.A.A.F. hospital was bombed and damaged.

— OFFICIAL WAR HISTORY.

I did not know that hospitals were bombed and I am very sorry to hear of it.

— COMMANDER FUCHIDA.

Darwin’s only public hospital in 1941 was a ramshackle building of iron and concrete overlooking Doctors’ Gully, which derived its name from the off-duty romances of young medical officers and nurses. It was ill-equipped and unsatisfactory. Moreover the gate to Larrakeyah army barracks, an obvious target if war came, was only a few hundred yards away. The slightest miscalculation by bomber pilots might cause the hospital to be hit instead of the barracks. Work began that year on a new 130-bed hospital which cost £165,000 and opened in January, 1942. The building combined practicability with the most modern tropical hospital design; there were wide corridors and big open wards that could be made to accommodate many more than planned in an emergency. The operating theatre and obstetrical wards were said to be among the best in Australia. More than eleven thousand moveable fibro louvres had been used in the walls to ensure maximum air circulation. The hospital was segregated. Aborigines and part-aborigines, the latter known as half-castes but then treated as full-bloods, were confined in a special ward.

While taking all these factors into account the designers overlooked or ignored one of the vital reasons for relocation — to get away from Larrakeyah. The site chosen at Myilly Point on Kahlin Bay was no further from the military installations, as the bombs fly, than the old one had been. We shall never know with any certainty, therefore, whether the Japanese bombed it intentionally or were really aiming at Larrakeyah. The fact is that six heavy bombs fell near the hospital, causing extensive damage; the barracks across the bay were not hit at all.

On February 19, Surgeon Commander Clive James, R.A.N.V.R., was scheduled to begin an appendix operation on a sailor at ten o’clock. The anaesthetist was to be Surgeon Lieutenant A. James. The two were not related. Sister Audrey Jaffer, who had come from the Australian Inland Mission hostel at Alice Springs, was assisted by Nurse J. Palfrey in preparing the theatre.

Two minutes before ten o’clock Nurse Palfrey left the theatre to get the patient from the male surgical ward. On the way she heard the sirens and saw Japanese planes dropping bombs on ships in the harbour. She ran back to the theatre and said to Sister Jaffer, “Sister, the Japanese are here and dropping bombs.”

Sister Jaffer had a pair of theatre lifters in her hand and was about to take swabs from a steriliser. She went with Nurse Palfrey to the verandah and was in time to see bombs falling around the hospital.

“My heart stood still,” she recalls. “I ran to our quarters where I shared a room with Sister Eileen Elcock. When I got there I realised I still had the theatre lifters in my hand.

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