In 1942, Darwin was a small town with limited civil and military infrastructure. Seeing its location in close proximity to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Portuguese Timor and others, the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force constructed bases near the town in the 1930s and the early years of World War II (1939-1945). In spite of being the Northern Territory’s capital city after the Territory split from South Australia in 1911, Darwin's pre-war permanent non-military population was 5,800 – for comparison, Sydney passed that population level in convicts alone, in 1816. Considering all this, it's not surprising that Darwin became a target for the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces. Early in the morning of February 19, 1942, four Japanese aircraft carriers - Akagi, Kaga, Hiryū, and Sōryū – launched 188 aircraft into the sky, heading south for Darwin. By the end of the day, the city was gone.