Darwin was pounded by the Japanese time and time again, but 80 years ago next week bombs also rained down on this unsuspecting town.

The shock raid on Katherine came at the tail end of the wet season in 1942, a hail of shrapnel and high explosive rained down from high in the sky.

Katherine is about 300 kilometres inland from Darwin, it wasn't thought to be of much strategic importance.

The bombing of Katherine, which will be marked as it is every year with a small ceremony on Tuesday, was the furthest encroachment of enemy aggression ever recorded on mainland Australia.

History remembers Darwin's destruction well, not so much Katherine.

On March 22, 1942, nine "Betty" bombers from the Japanese Navy dropped between 82-92 high explosive bombs, "Dairy Cutters", as they were popularly known.

Because of Darwin's vulnerability, there had been a large buildup of military personnel at Katherine as it was thought to be safe and far from the action.

For the same reason Tindal RAAF Base, Australia's largest air base, is located where it is is today just outside Katherine, remote from the coast to give early warning of enemy invasion (plus it's supposedly outside the nuclear bomb blast radius of anything dropped on Darwin), so was Katherine used as a staging post for military purposes.

It is presumed the Japanese were hoping to find either Australian or US aircraft at the Katherine airfield, which they failed to do but dropped most of their bombs in and around the airfield, location of today's museum.

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There was one fatality, an Aboriginal man called Dodger Kodjalwal, and two other people were slightly injured.

Some of the bombs fell at Knotts Crossing, near the town centre, just missing a telegraph line crew and few more targeted the airfield in the bush at Manbulloo.

It was the most southern Japanese bombing raid in the NT during the war.

Although the bombing cause little actual damage, it did change Katherine forever.

Families were immediately evacuated south to Adelaide, whole Aboriginal peoples were herded together "for their protection" and some have said to have lost their cultural distinctions and languages as a result.

But it was the continued military buildup, as most Allied strategists thought Darwin would have to be abandoned to any Japanese land-based assault, which boosted Katherine's growth.

After the war, local people and new arrivals built on the military framework and infrastructure which was left behind to create a much larger town than Katherine may have been if it had been left alone.