Scattered across Australia lie hundreds of Japanese military aviators, in graves both known and unknown. 

Aircraft were brought down by enemy action; through accident, or misadventure. Sometimes the wreck of the aircraft they died in has still not been found. It lies scattered in pieces across the vast bush land of the Top End, thousands of kilometres of harsh terrain: hot, humid, and desolate. This is land where few people go. 

Even the Aboriginal communities are few and far between. Many machines were brought down into the sea. Sometimes part of their wreck is brought to the surface by a fisherman’s net or lines, or found through industrial exploration. But the majority have never been located. This is their story. 

I started work on exploring maritime wrecks in 1989, which led to the publication of my first book Wrecks in Darwin Waters. At the time I was not concerned so much with Japanese matters as identifying the World War II wrecks and those sunk by Cyclone Tracy. 

Concern over presenting the Japanese side of the war came from researching the submarine I-124, an 80-man vessel sunk outside Darwin. It brought home how much of a lonely death these men had died, doing their duty thousands of kilometres from home. Even today the I-124’s crew are forgotten by Japanese museums. 

Working on another book with co-author Peter Ingman about the bombing of Broome also explored lonely death, that of the pilot of one of the nine Zero fighters which attacked the port in March 1942. So too did researching the fate of a Val bomber crew which died over Darwin in the now famous attack of 19 February 1942. The two airmen were buried at the crash site. The Zero wreck remains lost. 

This is not to say that the fatalities which occurred on the Allied side were not a major part of my research. Indeed the fate of Australians, Americans, Filipinos, Dutch and others was a central feature. Their names and fates were indeed something that dominated a large part of Carrier Attack, a forensic analysis of the first raid that Peter Ingman and I worked on for a long time. 

As I searched through many Allied names – indeed there are 1,672 fatalities listed at the Darwin Military Museum – it seemed no-one cared about the Japanese. But crashing in your aircraft, brought down by combat or through accident, and ending up in the sea off the Top End coast, or in the bush land of a hot, dry, arid region was a sad and lonely death. 

So to the end of acknowledging their fight as well as bringing it to light I started working on this book, which contains the details of all of the Japanese aircrew who died, and the combat actions of all flights over northern Australia.