In 1941, he persuaded the Army to establish a special reconnaissance force of Yolngu men known as the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, including tribal elder Wonggu and his sons, to help repel Japanese raids on the northern coastline of Australia. In 1943, as the war moved northward from the Australian coast, the unit was disbanded, and Thomson returned to the Air Force. He was badly injured in action in Dutch New Guinea, and spent the rest of the war in hospital before being discharged from the Armed Forces. In central Australia (1957) In 1957, Thomson carried out the "Bindibu (Pintupi) Expedition" to the Western Desert to make contact with Pintupi there. For some Pintupi, this was their first contact with Europeans. They were almost the last Indigenous Australian group with whom white Australians were to make contact (the very last was a group of Pintupi in 1984). Thomson again demonstrated his excellent ethnographic skills. The photographs taken here, like those he took in the 1930s in Arnhem Land, have become invaluable historical records for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, particularly for the Pintupi. Thomson lived with the Pintupi, and liked them, through much of the 1950s and the 1960s. Later life, death and legacy He returned to the University of Melbourne and continued working there until his death on 12 May 1970. His ashes were flown to the Northern Territory and, accompanied in the plane by two of the sons of Wonggu, scattered over the waters of Caledon Bay. The Thomson Collection, which is currently held by Museums Victoria, includes approximately 4000 black and white glass plate photographs. One of these photographs was of a group of ten men in their bark canoes on a swamp, and was the inspiration for the title of a critically acclaimed film Ten Canoes. The title of the film arose from discussions between co-director Rolf de Heer and the film's narrator, David Gulpilil, about a photograph of ten canoeists poling across the Arafura Swamp, taken by Thomson in 1936. Thomson is remembered as a friend of the Yolngu people, and as a champion of understanding, by non-Indigenous Australians, of the culture and society of Indigenous Australians. He was largely responsible for turning the Caledon Bay crisis into a "decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations". Thomson's story is tolde in an episode in the 2013 documentary television series Desperate Measures, called "Donald Thomson