1942

Australian military authorities identified Bondi Beach as being a likely invasion point after the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service mounted a surprise bomb attack against the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Honolulu on 7 December 1941. The authorities fortified the beach by constructing barbed ‘concertina’ wire and other barriers along it. There was limited open space on the beach, so the members of Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club’s Bronze Medallion squads had to train in Bondi Park rather than on the sand, and an army officer had to give permission for any beach activity to go ahead.

On the night of 31 May and 1 June 1942, five Japanese submarines, including three Ko-hyoteki–class midget submarines, arrived off Sydney’s shores. Incidents in Sydney Harbour included a submarine’s entanglement in a net and the submarines’ disruption of east-coast supply lines.

Early on 8 June 1942, from about nine kilometres offshore and over four minutes, a dozen explosive shells – large-calibre projectiles – were fired from a 140-millimetre gun mounted on the deck of a Japanese submarine. Australian military authorities lost their chance to retaliate by firing from the 250-millimetre gun that’d been in place at North Bondi since 1892. Most of the shells landed in Rose Bay, Woollahra or Bellevue Hill, and some fell short into the Harbour or the open ocean. Only one shell exploded, outside a Rose Bay apartment block. One fell in Bondi’s Simpson Street, and although it tore a large hole in the road, it failed to damage any property or injure anyone. Lifelong local Jeanne Rockey remembers seeing the hole in the road when she was a child, and recalls, “It looked like a crater, like a big dinosaur had taken a bite out of the road.”

Many locals claimed that a second shell hit the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club, but there’s no evidence of it.

Courtesy Australian War Memorial and the Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.