Turning Point

Chapter 10

It was an argument that John Curtin found difficult to dismiss. The movement of the British 18th Division from Singapore was certainly audacious and risky, and the fact that the 22nd Australian Brigade and 6th New Zealanders were also included in that withdrawal was difficult to overlook. Yet Curtin still had grave reservations. If Timor were to be taken by the enemy, Japanese air and naval units operating in those waters would sever sea lane communications between Darwin and Java, isolating the latter. Curtin therefore cabled Churchill:

“Deployment of our 1st Expeditionary Corps to Java is seen as a risky proposition, for it demands that all the barrier islands between Batavia and Timor be held as well. Enemy occupation of Timor, or any of the other islands, would effectively cut off our forces in Java, and make the prospect of their safe withdrawal to Australia a less than encouraging proposition. Notwithstanding the value of resources in Java itself to the enemy, it is the considered opinion of this government that any ‘last stand’ to be made in this theater would best be fought in Australia itself, for only here will there be found a base of sufficient strength to build up forces arriving from the United States, and plan the inevitable counterattack against Japan.

“To therefore risk our most capable and combat effective divisions on Java would seem to be unsound strategy. We would rather suggest that every available unit in theater should be moved to Australian soil as quickly as possible. To that end, we now find it necessary to insist the 7th Division return home, followed by the 6th Division, and request the immediate withdrawal of the 9th Australian Division presently operating in Libya as well. We will, however, strongly consider debarking this division at Port Darwin as you have suggested.”

In trying to hold one cat by the tail by tussling for the 7th Division, Churchill was now about to see two others slip out the back door. It was all a clear case of supposed allies unable to come to a common view of the purpose before them. Upon receipt of his orders, Wavell had looked the situation over and come up with a grand plan employing not only those forces he was receiving from Singapore, but both the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions as well. One would be sent to hold southern Sumatra and keep open the left flank of the vital Sunda Strait that led to Batavia, and the other would go to central Java. While he was floating this grandiose idea past the Australians, Churchill had been wrangling to get the 7th Division to Burma, and Curtin was dead set on clearing the board of all his pieces and then setting up a new game on the home soil of Australia.

They were all like blind men about the elephant, each with a different view of how this massive, unwieldy animal should look. Yet it was not Churchill, nor Wavell, nor Curtin who would decide the matter. It was not even Brooke in his new post as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Weeks ago, a Sergeant was managing the loadout of the 7th Australian Division in the Suez Canal. His name was Bill Thornton, and he was a stickler Stevedore with an eye for detail, and a short temper when anything that mattered to him was botched or overlooked.

Sergeant Thornton was supervising the embarkation of the Australian 7th Division, flipping through a clipboard of unit registries, cargo manifests and other information relating to the movement. It was his job to get the troops loaded on the troop ships, the guns and heavy equipment loaded on the cargo ships, and it was a fine art that was called “tactical loading.” In a nutshell, it aimed to group ships with guns and equipment belonging to the proper brigades and battalions in the same convoy. If this was not done correctly, the troops would arrive without their equipment, and it could then take weeks for the division to sort itself out.

The interesting thing about Wild Bill Thornton, as he was called on the docks at Suez, was that he was not supposed to be there. He was to have been down with a bad case of dysentery, laid up for nearly a month, but in this retelling of events, the malady had not struck him, and he was fit and on the job when the 7th Division got orders to move. Four separate convoys would end up moving the troops, some composed of just a few ships. The first of these was just a single ship, the Orcades, which had pulled into the harbor at Batavia in spite of an order from the homeland advising it not to disembark there.

Once Orcades arrived, Wavell wanted to unload the AA guns and troops all neatly mated up and sent off by Sergeant Thornton, so that they could “protect the aerodromes” on Java. The Australians advised him that once disbursed on Java, it would seem impossible to ever safely withdraw the unit. It was a bit like quibbling over the movement of a pawn in the early stages of the game. Once pushed forward, the Australians argued it could never take a backward step, and they feared it would soon be lost in the fray.

Behind Orcades, three other small convoys were strung out between Bombay and Colombo. These “flights,” as they were called, were composed of larger troopships coming from the Suez that would first offload the men at Bombay, and then re-load them onto smaller ships for the final leg of their journey to Colombo and points further east. These were the heavy pieces in the division, carrying the 25th, 21st, and 18th brigades in that order.

Yet this was a chess game where there were two players on the same side vying for control of the Knights and Bishops. Churchill actually gave orders for the lead flight to divert north to Rangoon, only to find Curtin countermanding those orders and sticking to his guns that the troops should come home. One argument he would make was that the units had not been “tactically loaded,” and if the division went to Burma or Java it would still not be able to organize for operations until all the other flights arrived and all the equipment could be sorted out. In Curtin’s mind, the final destination of the first flight was going to determine where all the others would have to end up, and so his hand was heavy on the mane of that Knight’s horse, and he tugged the reins firmly to lead it east to Australia.

This time, however, Curtain’s argument could not be made, at least to Churchill. Sergeant Bill Thornton had seen to all of that in Suez, and the flights were all tactically loaded. In what would now become a perfect illustration of the maxim that amateurs talk strategy while the experts talk logistics, Thornton’s intervention had swept away Curtain’s arguments before they could matter. His methodical mind for logistics had seen the ships off in proper order, with all equipment correctly assigned to each brigade flight. Because of this, each flight was now capable of landing at any friendly port, and of functioning as a fully effective combat unit the day it arrived.

Yet Curtain did not know that, and assumed the hasty withdrawal from Suez would have seen the division embarked willy nilly, and scattered all over the seven seas. He had a subordinate issue a cable that Orcades should not debark at Batavia, and instead return home, and that all other flights should follow this same course.

At this point, another methodical man came on the scene at the quay in Batavia, demanding to know why the Orcades was sitting there idling about when it might be unloaded in a matter of hours. His name was General Bernard Law Montgomery, fresh off the boat himself and rubbing his hands together as he contemplated his new command and the defense of Java.

“Good show,” he said when he learned this ship had the leading elements of the Australian 7th Division. 2/3rd MG Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Blackburn and 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Williams would be a most welcome addition to the forces now building up on Java. He was lucky the ship was even there, for in the history Fedorov knew, it had been diverted to Oosthaven on the southern tip of Sumatra, where its units would act on orders to form a provisional brigade and advance north on Palembang and the vital airfields then under threat from the Japanese.

Montgomery knew the men of the 7th Division, for this was a unit he had in his corps in North Africa, and he also knew its fighting merit well. With it, and the troops he was already sorting out from Singapore, he had every confidence that he would hold Java secure.

“See here,” he said, collaring the dock master at Batavia. “Get that ship unloaded at once. What is all this dawdling?”

“But sir,” the man protested, “we’re still waiting for authorization on that one. It’s not yet on my clipboard.”

“Damn your clipboard!” Monty fumed. “Get the men to work on it this very instant. I am your authorization, and I won’t hear of any further mucking about. The Japanese will be on our backs in a hot minute, and those troops will do us no good on those ships. What if the Japanese bomb this port? They’ll be sitting ducks.Now get it done!”

Faced with the wrath of a full General, and with Montgomery’s unflinching will applied to the task, Orcades was summarily unloaded—the very day that the Japanese bombed Port Darwin. Curtin and the Australian War Cabinet were all caught up in the news, and the word sent back concerning the fate of Orcades never got through the chaos of that day.

Even Wavell had not been informed that the Orcades had debarked, and that the other flights carrying 7th Division had all altered course to Batavia. Australian officers on the scene came in to make a formal protest to Montgomery, but left that meeting knowing the meaning of yet another well turned line in the annuals of history—‘ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.’

In effect, the efficiency of Sergeant William Thornton, and the meddling intransigence of Montgomery, had effectively taken hold of the Australian 7th Division by the nose. Even while Curtin and Churchill exchanged long cables laying out arguments and counter arguments as to why the 7th Division should or should not go to Burma, it was steadily moving to Batavia, and then one more unaccountable fact would determine its destination point once and for all—fuel.

It was going to come down to the level of fuel oil remaining in the ships after their long Journey from Suez. All the strategy and high level wrangling that had pulled in heads of state as far as Washington DC when Churchill appealed to Roosevelt to pressure the Australians, would come to nothing. Strategy was now the servant of a fuel hose. Once diverted in that odd meeting of Thornton’s mindfulness and Montgomery’s iron will, the flights of the 7th Division could not easily turn about to other ports. They needed more fuel to reach Australia, and Batavia was now the best place to find it. The only other place they could land would be Colombo.

By the time this was all realized by the higher ups in both governments, the 25th Brigade was nearing the Sunda Strait, and the Japanese were hastily preparing to launch a series of blows that were intended to deliver the real prize in this region, the resource rich island of Java.

In sharp contrast to the divided and sometimes chaotic dispositions of the Allies, the Japanese war machine continued to move with a single minded purpose, and ruthless efficiency. The forces they had arrayed to strike the barrier islands would form nearly three full divisions, a force the size of the army that had conquered Malaya. A full regiment of the 38th Division was already on Sumatra, forcing scattered British and Dutch units there to flee south to Oosthaven and get aboard any ship available in the harbor to make good their escape to Java. Among them was a small detachment of light tanks, the British 3rd Hussars, and it would soon employ the services of the Orcades to make the trip over to Batavia.

For the attack on Java, the entire 2nd Infantry Division would form the Western pincer aimed at Batavia, and it would be reinforced with a fourth regiment, the 230th ‘Shoji Detachment’ from 38th Division. This force was covered by the light carrier Ryujo returning from the Malacca Strait, light cruisers Natori, Yura, and Sendai, along with three destroyer divisions, (12 ships), and mine sweepers. Beyond this, the entire 7th Heavy Cruiser Squadron was present with Kumano, Mikuma, Mogami, and Suzuya.

The Eastern Task force would bring the entire 48th Division to attack central Java west of Surabaya, again augmented by a fourth regiment, the 229th Regiment of 38th Division. It would be covered by light cruisers Naga, Kinu, and Jintsu, another dozen destroyers, and the 5th Heavy Cruiser Division with Haguro, Nachi, Ashigara, and Myoko.

Yet that was not all. The Japanese were leaving nothing to chance here, and after its successful covering for Operation R at Rabaul, 5th Carrier Division sailed under Admiral Nagumo to support the attack on the barrier islands. This would bring the new fleet carriers Zuikaku and Shokaku into the Arafura Sea, escorted by battleships Kirishima, Kongo and Haruna. Another three heavy cruisers led the way, Atago, Maya and Takao, and the force was screened by light cruiser Abukuma with another ten destroyers.

All told, the Japanese were sending three carriers, three battleships, eleven heavy cruisers, seven light cruisers, 34 destroyers, four minesweepers and a number of auxiliaries. It was an overwhelming naval presence, and the reason why the Japanese advance had been unchecked up until that moment. It would also be backed up by no fewer than 420 aircraft based on land and sea. When it came to planning and execution, there was no quibbling, no equivocation, no misread orders at cross purposes, and nothing more than a skillful concentration of force and will that had produced one victory after another.

Against this irresistible force, the British would throw the best they had available, Admiral James Somerville with three of their new fleet aircraft carriers, cruisers Exeter, Cornwall, Emerald and Enterprise, with destroyers Jupiter, Electra and Encounter. The battleship Royal Sovereign had been joined by Ramillies, but those two ships would remain on duty as convoy escorts.

Soon the tide would break upon the distant shoreline of the barrier islands, and the last line of defense shielding Australia from possible attack. There, on the largest island rampart of Java, Bernard Montgomery, pleased to take the moniker of ‘Rock of the East’ upon himself, would hastily organize his defense. He had stopped Rommel at Tobruk, just barely, and then stopped Yamashita on Singapore. Now it was his to hold or lose this last bastion of Allied strength in the Pacific.

The Japanese plan was straightforward and strategically sound. Even as Prime Minister Curtin had argued his homeland was the only suitable base of supply that could host, sustain and build up a credible war fighting machine against Japan, the Japanese also saw Australia as the one place the Allies could use to mount a counteroffensive. Port Darwin was the closest location where sufficient port and airfield capacity permitted this, and the daring bombing raid that struck there was the prelude to operations now underway.

The decision had been made to sever the lines of communication between Port Darwin and Java, which would mean the Allies would then have to rely on the much more distant port of Perth for logistical support of the island. It was 1,750 miles from Perth to Java, but the route to Darwin was 400 miles shorter, and it was also much closer to resources in eastern Australia. The Japanese had two objectives in mind, both considered valuable for one reason only—their airfields.

The first was Bali, hugging Java’s easternmost coast, and with a good airfield at Denpasar. The second was the large island of Timor, with good operational fields at both Dili and Kupang. Once taken, these islands would effectively cut off all forces in the archipelago between them, allowing the Japanese to occupy them at their leisure. These operations were principally intended to secure the left flank of the planned invasion of Java, and they would begin with a scrappy, if chaotic naval duel off Bali on the pitch black of a rainy tropical night.

Chapter 11

The airfield at Kendari on the southeast coast of the Celebes was the largest and most modern base in the region, placing Japanese aircraft in good positions to operate over Java. It had but one liability, that being frequent and persistent fog and rain. To assure uninterrupted air support for “Operation J,” the Japanese therefore decided to invade and occupy Bali for its small but useful airfield at Denpasar. They would do so about a week later than these events transpired in the old history, but the outcome would be remarkably true to those events.

For this mission, a single battalion of the 48th division, the 3rd Battalion of 1st Formosa Regiment, was designated the Kanemura Detachment. It was hoped that this small force could slip in quietly undetected, but it was soon spotted and word was flashed to the local naval commander on the scene.

Rear Admiral Karel Doorman was determined to put his patchwork fleet to good use that day. Familiar with the Dutch East Indies from his youth when he served aboard survey vessels mapping the waters there, he eventually returned after the Great War and an abortive stint as a pilot. So it was off to the navy, where he was posted at Batavia, eventually working his way up to command the cruiser squadron composed of Sumatra and Java. Today he was aboard De Ruyter, a light cruiser of about 6,600 tons, with seven 5.9-inch guns and ten 40mm Bofors.

The first sign of a Japanese invasion fleet had been spotted in the Java Sea, but after his abortive attempt to impede the Japanese invasion of Sumatra a few days earlier, his little fleet was now divided into two widely dispersed groups. He had taken the light cruisers Java and his flagship De Ruyter down through the Sunda Strait to the relative safety of the port at Tjilatjap. That was where he was now, along with destroyers Piet Hein, and two American DDs, the John D. Ford and Pope. The Admiral was hoping to have better luck when he got the news that an operation was now underway against Bali, and decided to launch a two pronged attack.

He would lead his small task force out from Tjilatjap, along the southern coast of Java, and strike through the enemy landing site like an arrow. At the same time, the remainder of his forces at Surabaya on the north coast, would sortie with RNN light cruiser Tromp, and USN destroyers Stewart, Parrott, John D. Edwards and Pillsbury. If he was able to drive the Japanese off with his own group, they would then run right into this second force coming into the Badung Strait east of Bali from the north.

Admiral James Somerville had not yet arrived on HMS Formidable, diverted by the hunt for a pair of German raiders near the Cape Verde Islands. This left the carriers Illustrious and Indomitable as the nucleus of the Eastern Fleet he was to command, now under the capable hands of another rising star in the fleet, Captain and Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten. Men of his ilk tended to stack up names like that, and medals along with admission to select orders and societies to go with their titles.

The squadron had been well out in the Indian Ocean to conceal their presence from the Japanese, lingering in low rolling fog and clouds. As soon as they received word from Doorman that he had detected the Japanese fleet and was ready to sortie into the Java Sea, Mountbatten turned northeast running towards the Sunda Strait on the southern tip of Sumatra. Unfortunately, Doorman received word that the British fleet would not arrive in time to support him, and so he undertook to engage the enemy with this daring pincer attack.

He would be opposed that day by four Japanese destroyers of the 8th DD Division, Asashio, Oshio, Arashio and Michishio, escorting the Kanemura Detachment aboard two troop transports, Sasago Maru and Sagami Maru. Doorman would be late to the party, and the Japanese landing would already be underway when his southern pincer approached through the low clouds threatening rain, a little before midnight on February 25th. Cruiser Java led the way, followed by Doorman in his flagship and the three destroyers. They caught the Japanese still lingering near the sandy coast of Sanur at 22:20.

Doorman was squinting through his field glasses, frustrated by the darkness and looming presence of the island of Bali. Then he heard the cruiser Java open fire ahead, and the entire scene was soon illuminated when the Japanese fired off star shells to see what they were up against. A confused action resulted, with both sides opening up in a high speed dual that came to nothing. Strangely, Doorman decided to barrel right through the strait heading north where he expected to find his second task force.

The Japanese, however, turned away to the south, where they found the three allied destroyers that had been about 5500 yards behind Doorman’s cruisers. Captain Jan Chompff on the Piet Hein saw them coming, got rattled, and executed a sharp turn to come around to the south, firing his deck guns and launching torpedoes as he did so. It was then that an unaccountable thing happened. A crewman on the bridge of that destroyer lost his footing in that turn and fell onto a button that controlled the ‘Make Smoke’ command. Thick smoke poured from the funnels, and completely obscured the scene, frustrating the gunners on the American destroyers behind Piet Hein. Putting on speed to try and break through the smoke, the US destroyers emerged just as the Japanese returned torpedo fire against the Dutch DD.

They were firing the dread Long Lance, and its fabled accuracy, range, and power would not fail the Japanese that night. Piet Hein was struck a fatal blow, and peppered by accurate naval gunfire as she rolled to one side. The two remaining American DDs swapped gunfire with the Asashio in a brief five minute duel before Captain Jacob Cooper on the Ford began to also make smoke. They had already fired off their port side torpedoes, hoping to hit the transports, but failing to do so. So now Cooper came about in an attempt to get his starboard tubes into play, and this brought him right across the bow of the Destroyer Oshio, and into heavy gunfire.

Destroyer Pope fired off five torpedoes, all missing wildly in that action, and Ford swung around behind her, still making smoke. In spite of that, the sea around them was erupting with shell splashes that were close enough to wet the decks on both destroyers, and they decided trying to turn back north to follow the Dutch cruisers as ordered would be most unwise. The Americans broke off, running south in the confused action that saw the Japanese opening fire on each other at one point, with the Captains of two of their four destroyers claiming kills that never happened. It was all too typical of night actions, and the high speed in those restricted waters led to the haphazard results.

With his train of supporting destroyers now out of the action, Doorman was alone with his two light cruisers, though help was not far off. This time the four American destroyers of the northern pincer led the way with orders to charge in and attack the Japanese anchorage. They made a brave torpedo run, confronted by a pair of bulldogs when Asashio and Oshio came around to challenge them. The Japanese gunfire was again very accurate, and the American torpedo strike a miserable failure. Of 21 torpedoes fired, fifteen would miss, four would fail to explode and two would be jammed in the launch tubes.

The US flotilla had the enemy outgunned with their combined sixteen 4-inch guns to only twelve 5-inchers on the two Japanese DDs, but simply could not get hits. In the meantime, the Japanese saw the thin illuminating beams of searchlights from one of the American ships, slowly fingering the darkness. This gave them a perfect target, and they quickly put two hits on the USS Stewart, damaging her engines and forcing Captain Harold Smith to break off and turn back to the northeast.

As the remaining US destroyers came about to follow, Parrott and Pillsbury nearly ran into one another, and that near miss also forced the Edwards to make a sharp turn to avoid a grand pileup. The whole mess lurched north, with the Japanese running parallel between those ships and the Dutch cruiser Tromp. Though they brought another six 5.9 inch guns into play, the Dutch could not get hits either, but the two Japanese destroyers had a field day.

Captain Jan Balthazar de Meester on the Tromp decided to make the same mistake the American destroyer Stewart had made, switching on her bright searchlight to try and find the enemy in the heavy darkness. As the flashing light searched about, it clearly revealed the position of the cruiser to the enemy, and both Japanese destroyers opened fire.

Asashio pummeled the bridge and conning tower of the Dutch cruiser, her guns firing rapidly, the shell casings careening off the forward deck. The experienced gunners would get no less than eleven hits in a brief, hot engagement that was going to put Tromp out of the action, and lay her up in Australia for months after for repairs. Thus far, these two intrepid Japanese destroyers had been attacked by three cruisers and seven Allied destroyers, and come off the better. Now the odds would shift even further in their favor when Arashio and Michishio came up to join the fray.

As she turned to fall off to the north, Tromp got in one good hit on the bridge of Oshio, inflicting a number of casualties and temporarily shaking that destroyer badly enough to cause the torpedoes it had just fired to miss badly. Misery loves company, and the American destroyers Stewart and Edwards were inshore of the action near in the vicinity of the damaged Tromp, now attended by the US destroyer Pillsbury. The four allied ships suddenly found themselves under attack by the two newly arriving Japanese destroyers, which ran right between the two groups in a brazen attempt to decide the battle then and there.

With the two sides passing in opposite directions, the Japanese destroyers were about to run a dangerous gauntlet of fire from two directions. It was a fast and furious gun duel, but this time the two undamaged US destroyers Pillsbury and Edwards, acquitted themselves by putting accurate and damaging fire on the lead Japanese destroyer, Michishio. Tromp joined the action and the Allies riddled the ship with hits that would kill 13 and leave another 83 of her 200 man crew wounded, and the ship itself foundering, and nearly dead in the water.

Once the ships were clear of each other, the darkness folded her cloak over the scene, and the gunfire ended. Neither side wanted any more of the other, and the Arashio maneuvered to position herself to take her damaged sister ship Michishio in tow. That ship was so badly damaged that it would have to be towed all the way back to Japan. Oshio would be laid up for at least six weeks with extensive repairs required on her bridge, but the other two Japanese destroyers suffered only minor damage. They could claim a tactical victory in having faced down a vastly superior Allied fleet, while successfully shielding the final stages of the embarkation of the Kanemura detachment at Sanur.

An hour or so after the guns had fallen silent and the smoke cleared, nature intervened with a hard driving rain. It was the kind of weather that would always halt any active operations by Allied forces, the darkness alone often serving to prompt them to settle quietly into defensive positions. For the Japanese, however, it was perfect fighting weather. They would use the cover of darkness and rain to steal up from the shoreline and through the groves of trees towards the airfield at Denpasar.

There they would find the place defended by a company of irregulars in an outfit known as Korps Prajoda. It was a native contingent, 600 strong, recruited from the local population. While mostly armed with spears instead of rifles, and officered by only a few Dutch regulars, the company at the airfield was backed up by a few old armored cars. Far to the north, the main body of this force would defend, stupidly, at the coastal town of Singaradja. The Japanese had long ago written that site off as a potential landing point due to the steep rocky shoreline in the area. Furthermore, it was the airfield they really wanted, and that is where they attacked with the full battalion now safely ashore.

Soon the natives of Korps Prajoda would be facing the veteran Japanese troops that had already fought and won in the grueling battle for the Philippines. It was no contest. The airfield fell that night, and little more than a week later, two companies of the Kanemura detachment would sweep the island and overcome the meager resistance of the remaining Korps Prajoda “troops” at Singaradja.

So it was that with no more than a single pinky on the hand of the Japanese 48th Division, just one battalion, the valuable airfield on Bali was delivered into their hands. They had done this while Montgomery was still busily sorting out the haphazard arrival of his troops from Singapore. With that airfield secured, the Japanese would prepare to move air units there to support the next stage of the attack on Java.

That same night that part of the plan would swing into motion. General Takeo Ito would take in the veteran 228th Regiment of the 38th Infantry Division, which had taken Hong Kong earlier, intending to seize the vital bases on Timor. Five ships would carry the regiment. Miike Maru, the largest ship at 12,000 tons, held the regimental HQ and support units. Africa Maru carried the 3rd Battalion, Zenyo Maru the 1st Battalion, Yamamura Maru the 2nd Battalion, with 1st Mt Artillery aboard Ryoyo Maru. With a force so small, the loss of any single ship could be disastrous, but the recent action at Badung Strait gave them confidence, and the little invasion fleet would be well covered.

This same force had just defeated a small combined Australian Dutch force on Ambon Island to the north, and now it would face a similar defense for the attack on Timor. To put the scale of the operation in perspective, Timor was an island roughly twice the size of Crete in the Mediterranean, some 340 miles long and 90 miles wide at its greatest point, compared to the 150 mile length of Crete. Its land mass would exceed the total of all seven of the Canary Islands, which had been fought over so bitterly in recent weeks. Yet to conquer an island of this size, with nearly a million native residents, the Japanese were sending a single regiment, three battalions, and the Allies were defending with even less.

If Prime Minister Curtin clearly perceived the importance of that island to operations then underway, the units and equipment Australia sent to defend it belied that assessment. In fact, the troops did not even have a reliable radio link from Dili to Darwin. Curtin’s problem was that all of his core veteran fighting units had already been sent overseas, and the British always seemed to find one place or another where they were desperately needed. The rest of the Australian Army was ill equipped, barely forming and largely untrained. There were also many other places under threat, New Guinea and Rabaul being uppermost on the list. So the only forces that could be found were small ad hoc battalions given the code names Sparrow, Lark, and Gull. These three little birds flew out to face the might of the Japanese Army, but they could be no more than a brief delaying force.

Lt. General Sturde, Australia’s Chief of Defense, warned against this policy, seeing it as a “penny packet” dispersion of otherwise valuable battalions. What he wanted was a concentration of force in Australia, and was much behind Curtin’s insistence on recalling home the expeditionary divisions. His misgivings were soon proved correct when Lark Force went to Rabaul, where it arrived just in time to be overwhelmed and captured by the Japanese there in Operation R. Gull Force had already been met and defeated on Ambon by the same troops now coming to Timor. The last bird on the wire was a scrappy band of hearty defenders in Sparrow Force, which was also augmented with a company of Commandos that would prove particularly troublesome to the Japanese.

Elsewhere, Australia’s real birds of prey, the tough, experienced divisions now en route from the Middle East, were still mostly on the sea. The Eagles and Hawks were coming, but the question remained as to whether they could get there soon enough to matter.

Chapter 12

The landings at Timor were as audacious and brilliantly conceived as any of the other operations Japan had carried out. Utilizing a remarkable economy of force, the Japanese would send two battalions south of Kupang in a surprise landing, and then move north to attack the port. A third battalion would land near Dili in the northeast. These were the only two locations with airfield and port facilities worth having, and if controlled, the remainder of the island was largely irrelevant.

Major General Takeo Ito was arriving on the scene six days later than the actual invasion in Fedorov’s history, but with the same exact force in hand. With Dutch Admiral Doorman licking his wounds from the action at Badung Strait, these landings would be unopposed. The southwestern group came ashore between 02:35 and 04:00 on the morning of the 26th, with 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 228th Regiment, 38th Division, under Asano and Nishiyama. They moved inland quickly, through thickening stands of Mangrove trees, with their first objective being the airfield at Penfoi.

They would not find it in working condition when they arrived. While Sparrow Force had found themselves all deployed to defend the harbor, when they realized what was happening they immediately began to move inland. At the airfield, the dogged Engineers of 2/11 Field Company, R.A.E., had set up nine dumps packed with fifty 500lb bombs each. When they set those off the resulting explosions heavily cratered the field, putting it out of action for the near run. It was ironic that this force had been seen by Wavell as essential to the preservation of that airfield for a way station for shorter ranged planes out between Darwin and Java. The Japanese operation there was precisely aimed at eliminating that asset, and claiming it as a forward airfield of their own. But the first act of the defenders was to blow the place to hell.

The main force was 2/40 Tasmanian Battalion, otherwise designated as “Sparrow Force,” under Lt. Colonel William Leggatt. The Tassies had come a very long way to Timor, shipping into Darwin for a month leave before the war, where they soon ferreted out all the best pubs. Otherwise they trained hard, then lolled about, swimming in the Adelaide River where a Padre from a nearby Catholic Church would regularly hunt down crocodiles with a rifle. The men came to call him ‘Crocodile Bill,’ and some even took to barbecuing some of the Crocs he put down. When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, the fun was over and the troops shipped out on the Zealandia and Westralia, where they were finally told what had happened.

For some time all they had seen of the enemy were occasional flights of fighters that swooped in to strafe the airfield at Penfoi. They had dug out weapons pits, laid barbed wire, and then waited for their turn on leave in Koepang to hit the pubs and quaff down some good French Brandy. All that was soon to be over, and now they would finally meet the enemy face to face.

Alerted to the landings, the main body of Sparrow Force moved out from Koepang, intending to clear the road to the airport, but ran into more unexpected guests. In the third Japanese parachute operation of the war, the elite 3rd Kure SNLF Battalion had dropped after sunrise, at about 10:45. The Japanese interpreted the Australian movement east as a retreat, but in actuality, it was meant to clear their lines of communications back to Koepang, where a group of engineers and auxiliary troops was still holding the port.

Lt. Colonel William Leggatt wanted to secure the special supply depot established along that road at Champlong in the event they might be forced to move further east. At this point, there was no real appreciation of how big the Japanese operation was, so prudence dictated the line of retreat should be secured first. The SNLF paratroopers had no idea there was a supply center at Champlong, but had landed to try and prevent just this sort of eastern movement, hoping to net the Allied defenders into the battle for Koepang.

Once he had moved east, Leggatt soon found that he could not keep the road open behind him back to Koepang. He therefore decided to press on to Champlong to try and secure those much needed supplies, but kept running into stronger detachments of enemy paratroopers, first at the village of Babao, and then on the Usau Ridge beyond.

“We’ve got to push on through,” said Leggatt to his Company commanders. “Position the Vickers Machineguns to provide good cover fire. The Lewis Gun teams will move up with the rifle squads. Lieutenant—”

“Sir?”

“The Japs have worked up a roadblock ahead. Can your sappers deal with it?”

“Right away, sir.” Lieutenant Stronach was a big man, and at his side was Sergeant Couch and Lance Corporal Kay. They rounded up four more sappers and crept into position to get closer to the obstacle, all under enemy fire. It was cleared away, and the Tassies tramped on through.

It was hard fighting, but they cleared Babao, and then pushed on up to that ridge. At one point, with the Japanese putting up stiff resistance, Leggatt came forward to see what was happening. It would be no good to let his men get pinned down on that barren ridge, and he could think of only one thing to do, his hard voice shouting out the order for all to hear—“Battalion…. Fix Bayonets!”

It was an order that had been heard on countless battlefields over the last centuries, for the bayonet was a weapon made more of dread than steel. Now, all along the line, the hard click-click of the bayonets being fastened to the barrels of those Lee Enfields broke the stillness. The sound brought back awful memories to Leggatt, a man of 47 years who first heard it as a much younger man during the terrible trench warfare in France. He would do now what he had seen so many times before when a unit was faced with a determined enemy in entrenched positions. He would attack, the old fashioned way….

The battalion mortars would open the attack with a good barrage, hoping to keep enemy MGs pinned down. Leggatt looked at his watch, waiting, and almost reflexively reached for a whistle to sound the attack, but he had none. So instead he raised his pistol and gave the order to charge—one last push. It was to be the last bayonet charge mounted by a battalion sized Allied unit in history, but he could not know that. Captains Roff and Johnston would lead the attack, and the Australians charged on up that hill, braving the enemy fire, and falling on their enemy like banshees out of hell.

The Japanese instinctively knew what was happening. This was gyokusai, the ‘shattered jewel’ attack made by units who could see no other way out of their dilemma, and meant to be one last attempt at victory, or an honorable death if it should fail. The men of the 5th and 18th Divisions had made just such an attack on Singapore, their ranks swarming across Tengah airfield into the riveting fire of Montgomery’s stalwart defense. Such attacks often failed, but they were glorious, even in defeat, the very essence of warfare. It was men with rifles and flashing sharp steel, face to face with each other in the trenches in a moment of rage and terror that could leave only one or the other alive. Bayonets would clash with samurai swords wielded by the Marine officers, where the skill of those swordsmen was matched by the sheer brawn and guts of the Tassie soldiers.

For the men who made that charge, it was raw nerve and reflex, pushed on by the pounding pulse of adrenaline in each man’s chest. Up that hill they went, arms extended, big hands gripping the haft of their rifles, leaping into the enemy trenches and giving them the hard stiff forward thrust with the bayonet. As if to underscore the terror of that deathly hour, at one point a platoon swept over the ridge and down into a hollow that had been used as a graveyard. There, crouching behind the makeshift headstones, stolid Japanese Marines lay in waiting, suddenly rising up like walking dead and joining the action. The charge swept into the cemetery, becoming a furious, ghoulish hand-to-hand combat among the tombstones.

Men will do things in the heat of such a moment that would be unthinkable to them at any other time. They fired their weapons until they were empty, then fought with the bayonet, man to man. When one Corporal’s bayonet was bent and useless, out came his knife. It was hands on throats, head butts, ear biting work in that dead man’s den, with the hard muscle and brawn of the Tassies simply overpowering the smaller Japanese soldiers, even though the enemy Marines were all trained in martial arts. But nothing was going to stop the Tasmanian Devils that day—nothing.

They swarmed over the defenders inflicting terrible losses on the enemy to clear off the last resistance. This was no small feat, for the men they had faced were elite Special Naval Landing Force Marines, all veterans of China and Malaya. 2/40th lost 80 men killed, and another 69 wounded in that hellish fighting, but they won through.

The mortar fire during the attack on Babao had set many of the village huts on fire, and pallid grey smoke hung over the scene when the action subsided. Sparrow Force had sustained 149 casualties, but they gave much worse to the enemy. As the sun set, it was finally over, the last of the Japanese falling back towards Champlong. Hundreds of Japanese paratroopers had been cut down, and they had less than a company remaining. In spite of that terrible defeat, they doggedly established yet another blocking position on the road further east.

Night fell, and now Leggatt had to make another difficult decision. His men had fought long and hard, and come all the way from Koepang. He still had no idea of the size of the enemy force he was facing, and as company commanders reported in, the tally of wounded men rose from 69 to 132, with many others down with malaria.

“Tough fight today,” he said. “The men need rest, and any food and water we can get to them. We’ll just have to get patrols out ahead, and try to move on to Champlong before sunrise.”

He knew well enough that the enemy behind them were going to use these hours of darkness to good advantage. Word came that Koepang had fallen. There were only 111 men with the Fortress Engineers and some of 2/11 Field Company, with another 320 men in the AA gun batteries and some signals and service troops. They were not able to hold up the main strength of two Japanese battalions, and the city fell near dusk on February 27th.

As soon as it was secured, the Japanese sent one reinforced battalion in hot pursuit of Sparrow Force on the road to Champlong. They would march all that night to the scene of the battle, moving like tireless spirits in the gloomy murk of the darkness. By dawn on the 28th, they had caught up with Sparrow Force on the road, but hearing of the heavy casualties taken by the SNLF troops, Colonel Nishiyama decided to try and pull a Yamashita with a bold bluff.

Two men approached the Tassie encampment under a white flag, and a meeting was arranged. There they told Leggatt that Koepang had fallen and 23,000 Japanese troops had just landed the previous day, including a full battalion of tanks. To add thunder to their story, they had moved up all the tanks of a single company that had landed with the troops, and while the Australians were deliberating, Japanese bombers swooped in to bomb the head of their column. This infuriated Leggatt, but he took some solace in learning that several of the planes had also unloaded sticks of bombs on the SNLF positions.

Yet there he was, between the proverbial rock in those stubborn Naval paratroopers, and a very hard place. All his wounded and sick were at the back of the column, and they would be the first to go if those Japanese tanks made a run at them. They were cut off from Koepang, and still blocked from reaching their supply depot at Champlong. If he decided to fight, the Company Commanders indicated they might have two hours before the ammunition ran out. With great regret, and realizing he could ask no more from his men, Leggatt decided to seek terms with the enemy. Had he known the caliber of the men he was facing, the cruelty and barbarity they were capable of, he might have thought twice about surrendering.

The Japanese first order of business was to force the Australians to gather up all the dead bodies of their fallen SNLF troops. They had them lay them in great piles, and then calmly poured gasoline on the corpses and set them on fire. It seemed a horrid and undignified way to treat their own fallen soldiers, something that shocked and reviled the Tassies. Those men had given all they had in a fight to the death, and now the Japanese officers seemed to regard them as carrion trash. One Japanese soldier even took out his knife at the edge of the burning pyre, and was carefully extracting gold crowns from the dead paratroopers’ charred faces. It was as if their lives, and their service, meant nothing to them now. They were like empty, spent shell casings.

The stench of burning human flesh was never forgotten by the men of 2/40th that survived the war. They were then ordered to build the camp that would become their first prison, using the same barbed wire that they once strung out as a defense against this invasion. Their lot would be a hard one from that day on, making friends with hunger, thirst, cruelty, dysentery, gangrene and malaria. The troops were fed, but the Japanese swept weevil larvae and mice droppings into the rice bowls, laughing as the hungry men ate whatever they were given. The war was over for Sparrow Force, but their ordeal had only just begun.

Farther north, Colonel Alexander Spence was defending near Dili airfield with 2/2 Independent Company, a group of gritty Commandos who had special training in guerilla warfare. Each man had been handpicked for the unique skills required of a Commando unit. They were hardy young men, physically fit, bush-crafty, and able to live off the land. There were no slackers among them, and they wouldn’t stop for tea, for darkness or weather in any circumstance where their lives counted on them fighting.

2/2 was a unit of strapping, bruising misfits, many who had been plucked right out of a brig or detention facility and interviewed for the job they would now be given. If someone wanted to pick a scrap with them, they had best beware. Now, after extensive training in Guerrilla tactics, each man wore a distinctive double red diamond insignia, and they would soon prove they were a real gemstone in the actions that followed. In the early hours, no one had been informed of the enemy attack at Koepang, as there was no radio link. When the transports carrying Colonel Sadashichi and the men of 2nd Battalion appeared off shore, they were first thought to be Portuguese ships bringing in long awaited reinforcements.

Colonel Spence suddenly heard the sound of gunfire from the Dutch Coastal gun positions. He got on a field phone and rang up the nearest post to see if he could find out what was happening.

“It’s a Japanese submarine out in the harbor,” said the local Dutch Commander, Colonel van Straaten, but it was soon apparent that something much more than that was going on. When the ships began disgorging Japanese troops, the company began to fall back from the harbor towards the airfield, screened by one group as a rearguard under Lieutenant Charles McKenzie, with 18 Commandos of No. 2 Section.

The Japanese were too bold in their attack, thinking to simply overwhelm the enemy defense and storm into the airfield, and the tough Australians, with good prepared positions, inflicted a fearsome toll. Those 18 men fought all night, answering enemy offers to surrender with their Bren guns. They held the position until just before dawn, when McKenzie gave orders to slip away after demo charges were set on the airfield. They finally broke off, only twelve able bodied men remaining, four walking wounded, and two more unable to travel and refusing treatment so as not to hold the others up. No. 2 Section then joined the withdrawal, but not before they had inflicted some 200 casualties on the enemy, the barrels of their machineguns so warm that they had to be wrapped with the men’s shirts to be carried during the fight.

Another section of 15 men had been up in the highlands, completely out of touch, and were now heading towards Dili in a truck, not even knowing the invasion had occurred. They thought they would go into town to scrounge up some food for breakfast, but they were on a deadly road that day. Caught unawares, they blundered right into an ambush laid by Japanese troops, all captured before they ever had a chance to fight. Shortly thereafter, the fate they suffered would be a warning to the remaining men of the company. They had been taken by a small 50 man detachment of the 3rd Yokosuka SNLF, under Lieutenant Hondo Mitsuyoshi. No one knew exactly why he would act as he did, or whether he had heard of the terrible losses suffered by the others in his unit that had parachuted to the west.

An incident occurred on the road when a Dutch militia group fired at the Japanese column. Enraged, Mitsuyoshi quickly sent a platoon to deal with it. Then he selected out four of the 15 Aussies, ordering an officer to force them to kneel in the road and shoot them one by one in the back of the head. It was a spiteful act of cruelty, all too common in this theater. Every army would have lapses and failings in the ranks, and atrocities would come hand in hand with war, but the Japanese army would prove to be specialists at the art of this depravity.

Five years earlier, they had set their troops loose on Chinese prisoners of war, and civilians, in the city of Nanking in one of the greatest atrocities of the century. Chinese were bayoneted, beheaded, raped, burned, starved, buried alive, and infants were even thrown into pots of boiling water. It was cruelty and barbarity on a scale to rival the atrocities committed by the Germans in their concentration camps. Over 200,000 were killed in Nanking, for the Japanese mindset seemed to regard a fallen enemy as subhuman, particularly one who would suffer the dishonor of surrender instead of fighting to the death. Just weeks ago, after the desperate defense of Laha Airfield at Ambon, scores of Australian and Dutch P.O.Ws were executed, many simply beheaded as they knelt, bound and blindfolded. The Naval Marines were again behind the incident, where over 300 prisoners were put to the sword.

There was a saying among these hard minded warriors, coming down through the ranks from the days of the Samurai: “Loyalty and honor are heavier than a mountain, and your life is lighter than a feather.” A human life counted for nothing in those days. It could be taken at the whim of a Samurai lord, for the most trivial of reasons, and in many ways the modern Samurai of 1942 held the same mindset towards their enemies. Their lives were feather light. Whatever Lieutenant Mitsuyoshi’s reasons were here, he took those four lives that day, and later, he had the remaining men herded into a shed and summarily beheaded, one by one.

The rest of 2/2 Independent Company soon saw that they were badly outnumbered, and learning of the demise of Sparrow Force, they knew they would get no help from the west. Yet Timor was a very big island, and they had a clear line of retreat, which they soon took, hiking up into the highlands. The decision was made to disperse the company into small groups, and to fight on guerilla style until relieved. Soon their only connection to Australia would be a single radio cobbled together from spare parts found and collected over months by signaler Joe Loveless. When it finally came to life and actually worked, they promptly dubbed the radio “Winnie the War Winner.”

With ‘Winnie’ operating, the Commandos were able to make regular intelligence reports to the homeland, and also receive messages as to when they might expect secret shipments of air or sea dropped supplies. They soon became a band of shirtless bearded rogues, and the bane of the Japanese for long months. When asked if they wanted to be extracted, the men instead simply requested delivery of more ammunition for their Tommy guns. Their choice to fight on alone prompted Churchill to smile and give his own tribute, which would become the official motto of the unit: “They Alone Did Not Surrender.” It would be a long year in the steamy jungles and tortured highlands of Timor before they would finally be pulled off in Fedorov’s history. Yet here, in these altered states, that story would soon change….