By Jennifer Parker*
On the night of 31 May 1942, my grandfather was a young boy hiding under the kitchen table as Sydney went into a panic. The Pacific War, a distant thought to many Sydneysiders, had come home. The accommodation ferry HMAS Kuttabul had been torpedoed in Sydney Harbour by a Japanese submarine. And 21 lives—19 Australian and 2 British—had joined the statistics of the mounting war dead. Australia intimately knows the risk that adversary submarines left unchecked can pose. (Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The Strategist.)
