chapter 4 | to love and serve
In Their Own Words
darwin’s dead During the Second World War, the Japanese flew 64 raids on Darwin and 33 raids on other targets in Northern Australia. From the first raid on 19 February 1942 until the last on 12 November 1943, Australia and its allies lost about 900 people.
T
he Courier-Mail of Brisbane, Australia, reproduced a poem of tribute to Darwin’s dead, written by Father Anthony G. Carroll, S.J., U. S. Army chaplain, and read by him at a memorial service to
fallen men at an advanced Allied base. Father Carroll served as a professor of chemistry at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass., prior to entering the service.
poem in memory of darwin’s dead On Darwin’s shore our bodies lie, And o’er our graves the soft winds sigh, And whisper through the star-filled night, The story of the silver blight That struck us from a wing-blacked sky.
Know ye who guard the slopes nearby – Know ye who overhead still fly – Till victory, with you we fight, And not till then, will bid good-bye On Darwin’s shore.
But death will never break the tie That binds us all – we did not die To idly gaze from some great height On Darwin’s shore.
Adapted from The Catholic News, 15 August 1, 1942
15 Anthony G. Carroll, “Poem in Memory of Darwin’s Dead,” Woodstock Letters, 71, 345.
60 | in their own words
