Darwin resident Wendy James was six years old when a military policeman threatened to carry her mother over his shoulder when she refused to evacuate before war came to Australia.
Shortly after the Japanese Navy attacked the United States' base of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the rattled federal government issued an evacuation order for the Northern Territory capital.
All women and children were made to board ships heading south - by force if necessary - with no more than 16kg of luggage.
Mrs James, 81, remembers air raid sirens ringing and her parents arguing in their home when she heard a loud banging on the front door.
"A huge military policeman walked in and said 'you have to leave immediately'," Mrs James told AAP.
"She told him she wasn't leaving, and he said 'in that case I'll put you over my shoulder and carry you to the ship', so that was the end of the argument."
Sunday marks the 75th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Darwin, which drew the Top End of Australia into World War II.
Mrs James was one of the 2000 women and children evacuated from Darwin to all parts of the country, and she still remembers waving goodbye to her father from the wharf.
"We didn't realise that we weren't going to see him for three years," she said.
The journey to Perth on the overcrowded and under-provisioned ship was traumatic, Mrs James said.
"The women took shifts at night to watch for submarines, Japanese planes or mines in the sea," she said.
The government didn't provide the evacuees with any food or accommodation, so her family moved from house to house while they waited out the attacks up north.
They were more savage than Pearl Harbour; more bombs fell on Darwin, more civilians were killed, and more ships were sunk.
Yet the story remained in the shadows because of wartime censoring - indeed all of Mrs James' father's letters fell out of the envelope in pieces.
"Anything that mentioned the bombing... had been cut out. So we ended up with all these strips of paper," she said.
"But at least we'd heard from him. His signature was at the bottom, so we knew he was alive."
When Mrs James returned to Darwin in 1945, her town was unrecognisable - devastated by 18 months of air raids.
School wouldn't resume for a year, so the then 10-year-old roamed old army camps, playing with ammunition that had been left behind.
"My brother and I went around on bicycles trying to find the Darwin we remembered," she said.
"We went looking for the house we'd lived in, and it had disappeared. Chinatown had been completely wiped out."