Javascript Convert Date Time string to Epoch

so I give up...been trying to do this all day;

I have a string that supplies a date and time in the format dd/MM/yyyy hh:mm (04/12/2012 07:00).

I need to turn that into an Epoch date so I can do some calculations upon it. I cannot modify the format in which the date time is sent to me.

JavaScript or jQuery is fine.

var someDate = new Date(dateString);
someDate = someDate.getTime();

You can use Date.parse(date).

function epoch (date) {
  return Date.parse(date)
}

const dateToday = new Date() // Mon Jun 08 2020 16:47:55 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)
const timestamp = epoch(dateToday)

console.log(timestamp) // => 1591606075000