Australia: Darwin – Museum Underground WWII Oil Storage Tunnels

💣 The Raid That Changed Everything

To understand why these tunnels exist at all, you need to go back to the morning of 19 February 1942. Just before ten o’clock, 188 Japanese aircraft appeared over Darwin. They had taken off from four aircraft carriers lurking in the Timor Sea, and the raid was led by Commander Mitsuo Fuchida — the very same man who had led the attack on Pearl Harbour just ten weeks earlier. The Japanese, it seems, had very specific ideas about who they wanted running their most important bombing missions.

Darwin was not exactly bristling with defences. The air raid sirens sounded far too late to be useful. In the first raid, Kate bombers went for the shipping, Val dive bombers attacked the harbour and the aerodromes, and Zero fighters provided the escort. The whole first wave lasted about twenty-five minutes. The second raid arrived around 11.45 am, with fifty-four land-based bombers going after the RAAF base at high altitude.

By the time it was over, the death toll stood at somewhere between 235 and 252 people, depending on whose count you believe. Thirty aircraft were destroyed, six large vessels were sunk in the harbour and another fourteen were damaged, and the town itself was left in considerable disarray. The USS Peary, an American destroyer, went down with eighty-eight of her crew. The post office took a direct hit, killing postmaster Hurtle Bald, his wife, his daughter, and six of his workers. Twenty-one waterside workers who had gathered at the end of a wharf for their morning tea break were killed when a bomb landed among them. It was, and still is, the largest single attack by a foreign power ever to take place on Australian soil.

The chaos that followed the bombing was, by any account, impressive in its own way. Roughly half of Darwin’s civilian population packed up and headed south as fast as they could manage. A good number of RAAF personnel apparently did the same. One airman, according to reports, kept walking until he reached Melbourne, thirteen days later. There was looting. There was disorder. The government appointed a Commission of Inquiry under Mr Justice Lowe, which produced two reports in March and April 1942 and diplomatically noted that a number of mistakes had been made.

🛢️ The Problem With Oil Tanks

Before the bombs fell, Darwin had eleven above-ground oil storage tanks sitting on Stokes Hill. By the end of 19 February 1942, seven of them were gone. This posed something of a problem, because oil is rather important for fighting a war. Ships need it. Aircraft need it. Without it, the entire Allied effort in the Pacific would grind to an inconvenient halt.

The solution that presented itself was fairly obvious once you thought about it. If oil stored above ground gets blown up, try storing it underground. The Allied Works Council was directed by the War Cabinet to look into this possibility, and in May 1942 the plan was approved: the Civil Construction Corps would build eleven tunnels at a cost of £220,000 to hold 20,000 tonnes of oil. The project was given the rather uninspired codename of “The Safe Oil Storage,” which, as secret project names go, was not going to trouble any enemy spy worth his salt.

🪖 The Men Who Built Them

In April 1943, a civil engineer named George Fisher was appointed Engineer-in-Charge, and construction began properly shortly afterwards with a workforce of around 400 men from the Civil Construction Corps. These were not soldiers. They were civilian labourers who had been organised into a wartime corps to carry out exactly this sort of essential work.

The conditions were, to put it plainly, horrible. Darwin’s Top End climate features a wet season of extraordinary ferocity, with heat and humidity that would make a reasonable person question their life choices. The ground itself was problematic. The tunnels had to be carved largely by hammer and chisel — the term used was “hammer and tap” — because the rock was too fragile for heavier methods. Water kept getting in. Costs escalated from the original £220,000 to £850,000 by 1943, which is what tends to happen when you are trying to drill through wet, temperamental rock in tropical heat while a war is going on.

Each completed tunnel had a horseshoe-shaped cross section, was 4.5 metres wide and 5.4 metres tall, and was lined with concrete and steel. The smaller entrance tunnels measured just under two metres wide by just over two metres high. They were designed to be reached from Kitchener Drive at the waterfront, with a second entrance in what is now the car park of the Deckchair Cinema on Jervois Road.

🏳️ The Punchline

Here is where the story takes a turn that history has a habit of delivering when it wants to be particularly dry. By the time the tunnels were completed — six of the planned eleven were finished by 1945, with a seventh not completed until 1946, after the war had already ended — the Japanese threat to Darwin had largely evaporated. The tide of the Pacific War had turned. The need for bomb-proof underground oil storage in northern Australia was, by that point, considerably less urgent than it had been in 1942.

The tunnels were never used for their intended purpose. They were too wet to seal properly, which would have rather spoiled the oil. Two of them, numbers five and six, were eventually used in the mid-1950s by a company called S.G. Kennon for storing jet fuel, which at least gave them some brief purpose. Then they sat quietly beneath the Darwin waterfront for several decades, largely forgotten.

🎖️ Opening to the Public

In 1992, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Darwin, tunnels five and six were opened to the public as a tourist attraction. It was, appropriately, a way of marking what had been a defining moment in Australian history — a moment that most Australians outside the Northern Territory had, for many years, been rather less familiar with than they perhaps should have been.

Walking through the tunnels today, you pass information boards and wartime photographs showing Allied activity across the Top End during those years. There is a figure constructed entirely from WWII artefacts — the so-called Digger Man — which is either impressive or slightly unsettling depending on your disposition. The photographs tell the story of the Australian, American, and Dutch forces who used Darwin as a base, a story of determined people maintaining a defensive operation at extraordinary distance from any useful industrial support.

🌏 Darwin’s Place in the War

It is easy to underestimate what Darwin meant during the Second World War. By 1942 the population had swelled to around 7,500 troops. The Stuart Highway, previously a rough dirt track through the interior, had been upgraded to a proper supply road. The city was, as one description put it, the sharp end of Australia’s defence effort.

Japan had moved with remarkable speed through south-east Asia. Hong Kong fell in December 1941. Malaya and Singapore followed in early 1942 — Singapore capitulating just four days before the first bombing of Darwin. The Dutch East Indies were under attack. Darwin was not merely an inconvenient target; it was the gateway to the Australian mainland, and for a period in 1942 the threat of invasion was taken very seriously indeed by people who were in a position to know.

The bombing raids did not stop on 19 February 1942. They continued, in varying intensity, until November 1943 — a period of sustained aerial assault on Australian soil that lasted nearly two years and involved more than sixty separate raids on Darwin alone.

💭 A Final Thought

Standing inside those tunnels, in the cool and the quiet, with the thick concrete walls holding back the Darwin heat outside, I found myself thinking about the 400 men who dug them out in conditions that would have most people reaching for a sick note. They worked under difficult circumstances, in a difficult climate, on a project that the war ended before it could be used, and which cost nearly four times what was originally budgeted. There is something both admirable and faintly absurd about the whole business, which is perhaps the most honest thing you can say about a great deal of what happens in wartime.

For twelve dollars Australian, it is a very reasonable way to spend an hour. The air conditioning, as I may have mentioned, is extremely good.