Although Broome was a small pearling port at the time, it was also a refuelling point for aircraft, on the route between the Netherlands East Indies and major Australian cities.

As a result, Broome was on a line of flight for Dutch and other refugees, following the Japanese invasion of Java, and had become a significant Allied military base.

[4] From about 09:20, the Zeros made strafing attacks on the flying boat anchorage at Roebuck Bay and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base at Broome Airfield.

These included an airborne United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) B-24A Liberator full of wounded personnel—nearly 20 died when it crashed in the sea, about 16 km (8.6 nmi; 9.9 mi) off Broome.

A KLM Douglas DC-3 airliner—PK-AFV (carrying refugees from Bandung)—was pursued and attacked by three Zeroes 80 km (50 mi) north of Broome.

The aircraft managed to limp on to perform a successful landing on a beach near Broome, but was then strafed, causing the loss of four lives and the theft of diamonds worth £150,000 – 300,000 (now approximately A$20–40 million).

One Zero pilot—Warrant Officer Osamu Kudō—was killed by ground fire from a Dutch ML-KNIL pilot, First Lieutenant Gus Winckel, using a 7.9-millimetre (0.31 in) machine gun he had removed from his Lodestar.

[14] Australian author Coralie Clarke Rees published a less prosaic, and highly personal account of the Broome air raid in her 1946 elegy to her dead airman brother, Silent His Wings:[15] You in a tiny hand-picked bunch of sappers chosen to gelignite Broome in the teeth of the down-swooping Jap, saw stately Dutch flying-boats, lovely Dutch women, riddled with bullets, blasted, floating, American Liberators and quaking Malays spine-shattered by the hail of yellow bombs.

Shipwrecks are protected by state law and may not be touched,[18] but part of the fuselage of a Catalina flying boat is believed to have been stolen by November 2020.