SYDNEY May 31 Kyodo (EDS: ADDING ...

SYDNEY May 31 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING INFO IN 2ND PARA)

Australians upon Friday commemorated the 60th anniversary of the night that three Japanese midget submarines invaded Sydney Harbor to attack U and Allied ducts anchored there.

While remembering the 21 soldiers -- 19 Australian and couple British -- who died in the attack, they also paid tribute to the courage of the Japanese submariners who carried revealed the raid.

The occurrences that brought the war to Sydney were remembered at a harbor-side pomp in Sydney attended by 350 folks including Chief of Army Lt Gen Peter Cosgrove who will become the Defense Force chief in July

forward May 31, 1942, the three submarines stole into Sydney Harbor in subordination to cover of darkness aiming to sink as many U and Allied warships stationed there as possible.

still the efforts did not move according to plan for the Japanese submariners, who were discovered in the harbor.

common of the torpedoes fired by dint of the Japanese, unable to strike its intended target, explod beneath the HMAS Kuttabul, a transmuteed ferry, resulting in the death of 21 soldiers who were asleep onboard.

''The navy sunk common of the submarines, one was scuttl on its crew and the third, believed to be the single that fired the torpedoes which sank Kuttabul, disappeared without trace,'' Cosgrove said.

Cosgrove regard fored the people of Sydney for the wartime honor showed to the submariners' remains.

''The bodies of the young Japanese crewmen when they were cureed were treated with the same consider which we accorded to our hold dead,'' he said.

''They were cremated in accordance with Japanese tradition and their ashes were recured to their families in Japan, a task not without its difficulties when sum of two units nations were in a war similar as that of the Pacific war,'' he said.

''The population of Sydney demonstrated to the security of the world that, on the same level in the course of a war, Australians understand courage and fair play and have a faculty of perception of decency'' he said.

Cosgrove also urg those in attendance to visit the Australian War Memorial in Canberra where they can view a rebuilded Japanese midget submarine ''and marvel at the courage of those young men who lived and worked in those cramped and ultimately lethal conditions,'' he said.

During his visit to Australia earlier this month Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi highlighted the manner in which Australia treated the Japanese submariners, saying the civility shown toward Japan during and after the war was unparalleled anywhere other in the world.

During World War II, Japanese bands captured more than 22,000 Australian soldiers and held them in conditions of brutality and forced labor that l to the deaths of 8000

Atrocities in succession the Thai-Burma (Myanmar) railroad and in the infamous Changi prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore dominate images of Australia's war in the Pacific region, coloring near Australians' contemporary perceptions of Japan.

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