Larrikins in Khaki

by Tim Bowden

  They knew it was Sunday because the padre arrived, escorted by a lone rifleman volunteer as usual. Padre Bill always made the rounds of the rifle companies each Sunday, rain, shine or shellfire, impartially administering religious services to Catholic, Protestant and atheist alike. On weekdays he read burial services over the dead, censored the outgoing mail and deplored their bad language. ‘He was as Irish as Paddy’s pig,’ recalled Slim.

  Jive once told him straight-faced that he followed the Hindu faith. ‘No problem, Private Horman,’ said Bill, ‘next time I come to see ye I’ll be bringing me copy of the Kama Sutra and deal with ye.’

  Jive was impressed. ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘I’ll bet he even knows the whole Bible backwards!’

  Padre Bill arrived, cheerful as always. ‘Today we’ll be taking communion for the benefit of the C of E’s and any other interested parties. You tykes had your turn last week.’

  One of Slim’s mates, Hank, had decided that the war was reasonably dangerous, and his soul could do with some reinforcing even at this late stage, so he lined up with the other penitents. Padre Bill draped his surplus over his muddy jungle greens and began the service. A nearby tank crew was working on their motor and a spanner dropped with a loud clang. The padre paused mid-sentence, glared at the offender and said severely, ‘Keep it down. Ye’ll be drawing the crabs!’

  The service continued. The faithful knelt in the mud to take communion. The wafer was a piece of army biscuit and the wine cheap watered-down sherry in a tomato sauce bottle administered by means of a tin mug. Bill paused before the kneeling Hank, and possibly because of the distraction of keeping an ear cocked for the guns across the river, made a minor error and handed Hank the bottle. Hank’s religious scruples dying momentarily with this rare, undreamed of opportunity, ‘He grabbed the bottle and took a generous swig before Bill woke up.’

  The onlookers regarded this heresy with a mixture of shock and envy. Snatching the bottle back, the padre snapped, ‘What do you think this is—the public bar of the Great Southern Hotel?’ He proceeded with the service without a break.

  The troops thought Sunday with Bill was as good as Saturday night back home.

  ‘How are you going to settle in when you get back to the parish, padre? Be a bit dull after this, won’t it?’ they asked.

  ‘Me boys,’ said Bill, ‘ye may not be believing it, but ’tis nothing like the problems back home. In spite of your proclivity for bloody murder and a disgraceful amount of blasphemy in your speech, I find ye not to be too sinful a bunch. Mind you, ’tis probably due to lack of opportunity—but there’s more genuine sinfulness in me parish to be dealt with than here.’

  Slim thought that was hard to believe—he figured they were a pretty rough mob, as an outing with Adolf turned out to be.

  ‘Adolf ’, so nicknamed because of his Hitler-style moustache, lay in knee-high fern and bracken. The Japanese fighting pits were clearly visible 40 yards ahead. Behind him the platoon struggled slowly and painfully to extract their wounded. Ten yards to his left a young Digger lay dead, riddled by machine-gun fire. Adolf ’s section leader crawled forward and called, ‘Pull back!’

  ‘Right,’ he answered, turning back, very careful not to let his head show above the ferns. Fire still crackled through the trees. He knew what it would be like back there, slowly dragging the wounded out under fire. If they pulled out, the Japanese would surely follow—and there was the river to cross.

  So the patrol stayed. As the fire slackened Adolf slowly lifted his head. The raw earth of the Japanese pits showed clearly: five, six, seven spread across his front.

  Silence. A head showed over a parapet and slowly rose until the Japanese was exposed to the waist, another alongside him, and another. All held rifles. Adolf gently lifted the Owen, laying it on its side so that the magazine would not show above the ferns, and aimed. He squeezed the trigger.

  The burst knocked the enemy backwards, and the one next to him staggered and fell over the parapet. The rest dived for cover—then the Japanese Nambu (machine guns) fired. Adolf flattened into the earth. But they must have thought he was behind a large tree, as two light machine guns sent burst after burst into it. Gradually the fire slackened.

  A minute passed and slowly Adolf raised his head. There was no movement. Then a Japanese head carefully lifted over the parapet. As Adolf waited, he could hear low voices and see movement. Silence again, then another figure rose. The Japanese knelt on the parapet and peered at the big tree. Adolf lifted his own weapon and fired, the kneeling figure fell forward, kicking wildly. Immediately the Nambu replied, slashing long bursts into the tree.

  Long minutes passed as Adolf duelled with the Nambu, killing or wounding four more Japanese, holding them while his platoon dragged itself back and across the river. They called in the 25-pounders and he heard the sighing rush of the first incoming salvo, flattening himself into the soft earth while the shells thundered around him.

  The Japanese panicked. During the break in the shellfire Adolf lifted his head and saw a Japanese soldier struggling in the tangled vines, trying to run. He killed him with a short burst, and the shells came again.

  When they could the platoon struggled exhausted out of the trees through the break in the wire. Possum, the artillery signaller, lay on a rough stretcher, arms and shoulders bandaged, unconscious. The walking wounded dragged themselves into the perimeter. Quickly the patrol members looked after those badly hit—the doctor was on his way and they worked fast.

  But Adolf was not there.

  Knowing they were mates, one patrol member, wiping his hand over his face leaving black smears, said, ‘I’m sorry Slim. He didn’t make it—someone said they saw him go down, but it could have been Hayley. There wasn’t enough of us on our feet to go and find out.’

  He stood there looking at Slim, saying again, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Slim turned away, an empty feeling inside. ‘Bloody Adolf! He and I’d been together since basic training. Leave together in Sydney—we wrote to the same girls. I sat on my bunk, and looked down at the muddy water covering my boots. Bloody Adolf!’

  Next morning, just after stand down, B Company called up to say, ‘One of Slim’s mob has wandered in from over the river.’ They sent Adolf back with a couple of B Company men, the Hitler moustache looking slightly bedraggled.

  ‘How are you mate?’ he asked Slim, grinning.

  ‘Bloody Adolf!’

  Adolf was sent back to battalion headquarters, where the colonel heard his story and gave him a nip of gin. Two days later he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

  Cooley Brooks was something of a legend. He was a D Company scout and almost daily his exploits were eagerly recounted throughout the battalion, including the day he took a prisoner.

  Brigade headquarters had decided it needed a prisoner, and Cooley’s platoon leader, Cranky Sam, was called and duly briefed. Sam objected strongly, pointing out that prisoners were hard to come by and tended to damage easily if caught. He was told to stop arguing and carry on. Two sections of the platoon were summoned and the order relayed. They queried the sanity of those responsible for this particular piece of idiocy and were told, ‘It’s an order. Carry on!’

  For two days the unfortunate fifteen roamed the tracks beyond the Mivo River. On two occasions Cooley took his boots off and scouted half a mile of well-used Japanese trails—if they saw his footprints they would think it was a native. Finally the platoon shot up an ammunition party, but no prisoners. Sam had the bodies laid by the track, piled the ammunition boxes in a heap and slipped a short-fused grenade under the stack. Then they retired to look elsewhere. ‘They tried to grab two Japanese tending a native garden near the Oamai River,’ Slim recalled, ‘but the victims proved recalcitrant and ran, and had to be finished off. Cooley was one of the exterminators.’

  Finally, Cranky Sam set a well-planned ambush on the Buin road at sundown, and picked a fight with more than 40 Japanese marines. They killed more than a dozen in the first
hail of fire, but the ensuing running fight was messy, and Sam was lightly wounded in one hand. But again, there was no prisoner.

  The following day two sections squatted by a narrow but well-used trail leading south-west and waited. Nothing. Cranky Sam’s hand throbbed and he was in a foul mood. Then rain began to drift through the undergrowth and in the distance artillery rumble grumbled. An hour had passed when a lone Japanese loaded with net bags of taro and potatoes, with thick glasses and a shiny carbine, ambled into view. Urgently Cranky Sam checked up and down the trail—all clear! He motioned quickly to Cooley and Nick the Greek, hidden behind a thick bush. They crouched lower and got ready.

  They took their victim with a flying tackle. Potatoes scattered, the Japanese squealed loudly and put up quite a fight. Cooley held him tightly in a headlock. Suddenly the Japanese stopped squealing, seized Cooley’s hand and sank his teeth into his thumb.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ!’ Coolly squeezed harder on the headlock he had his prisoner in. ‘Stop dancing around and do something, the bastard’s got me by the thumb!’

  Nick paused, ‘Hold on mate, just get your scone out of the way for a bit so I can have a good bash at him.’ He raised his rifle butt.

  Cranky was appalled. ‘Hold it, you stupid bastard. We’ve got to get him back in one piece!’

  The Japanese continued to thrash about, his teeth still clenched firmly on Cooley’s thumb.

  ‘Got an idea,’ said Nick. He pulled his bayonet from its scabbard, knelt on the victim’s kicking legs, and slid the long blade between the Japanese’s teeth behind Cooley’s thumb. He twisted strongly. A couple of teeth splintered, and the Japanese let go. He relaxed, spat and blinked rapidly. He sat up. ‘Americans,’ he asked—‘whisky?’

  ‘The rotten bastard,’ said Cooley. ‘He’s had one nip out of me already!’

  They hauled their prize to his feet, bound his wrists behind his back and shoved him back up the track, not forgetting the potatoes.

  Over time Cooley’s personal score mounted into double figures, and he seemed to be obsessed with finding more victims, but he became withdrawn, bunked by himself and took off prowling alone when his patrol stopped at night. As Slim said, ‘The trouble was he was too damned good to send back.’ Cooley killed Japanese in an area known as the Badlands, and two more on a long patrol inland towards the 47th Battalion area. Finally he began attaching himself unofficially to other patrols when his own section was having a day off.

  ‘Ain’t he a little bottler,’ marvelled Hank. ‘He’s knocking them over so fast he’ll soon have as many as you Fergie!’

  Fergie was unimpressed. ‘Bullshit—he’s troppo!’

  Cooley did not last much longer. No one in his right mind would stick his neck out continually just to build up a personal score. One night he crawled out to the wire, and an artillery signaller on picket saw his shadow. Against all orders, he fired a burst from his Owen at it. Cooley died an hour later.

  In his recollections, Slim lamented:

  You could kill remotely, impersonally. The booby-trap you had set exploded in the darkness outside the wire, or away in the distance on some remote trail. You felt grim satisfaction, and almost never saw the smashed remains of your victim.

  You could kill urgently, in frantic haste, your instinctive shot smashing into the suddenly appearing form a few feet away. Mouth open, panting shallowly, you watched him fall, watched in near panic for others to appear while you crouched and changed magazines without thinking. That night you woke often—if you had been a little slower, if you had missed …

  And you could kill deliberately, almost coolly. Your breath short and shallow as you watch them coming closer, strange stomach feeling, hands wanting to shake a little. Your mind repeating, wait for it. Wait! Feel again with your thumb that the change lever is on full automatic—now! But you did not sleep at all that night. The shapes kept returning. You lay in your hole in the ground, staring into the darkness—thinking.

  Each time it got a little easier—we did not regard them as human beings. They were strange, alien.

  But how could Cooley get to like it?

  The news of Japan’s surrender reached Slim Medcalf and his unit early one afternoon.

  We were amazed, uncertain. Strangely, no one laughed or cheered. All afternoon we sat quietly and speculated. We found it hard to understand fully—we were confused and bewildered.

  Dusk approached, and the tank behind our section pits tuned its radio to a station in Queensland. Some trick of atmospherics brought Townsville, relaying from Brisbane the sounds of wildly hysterical crowds celebrating the news of peace. We sat silent listening. Then a strange feeling among us—we began to hate the cheering, singing crowds. As the light died we looked into the jungle wall in front of us, and resented the naked parading of their joy and relief. Somebody called, ‘Turn that bloody thing off!’

  The news was shocking, and no one knew how to deal with it at first. The troops sat together in small section groups, silent, feeling strange, seeking reassurance from their own closeness. Slowly it came to Medcalf that they were suddenly lost. This was the life they had come to accept and to know, however reluctantly. The prospect of any other had become strange and bewildering.

  We had become part of this, the dim tracks and in the wastes of rainforest, the rushing rivers with their secretive tangled banks. Killing and death had become the norm, we accepted both as we accepted the constant rain, the smell of rotting growth, the night sounds of the jungle. Now this was gone, could we become part of a life we’d almost forgotten? Maybe it would be different for the older men—they would have the beginnings of something to return to. But for the rest of us, it would mark us for the rest of our lives. We were lost, we were not needed anymore, what we had become was not wanted …

  I do not understand why we felt this way, but that was what happened.

  Then, as if to prove the reality, from battalion headquarters down the track came the sound of their bugler blowing the Retreat. For the first time in months, the song of the bugles drifted over the lowlands, asking them to remember their dead.

  ‘That is exactly what it was like. It is hard to forget, even over the years. That is exactly what it was like.’

  Chapter 20

  BLOODY BORNEO—TARAKAN AND BALIKPAPAN

  In 1942, the invading Japanese were very keen to acquire the oil port on the island of Tarakan in the Sesayap River delta of east Borneo, which produced about 5.1 million barrels a year from two fields near the centre of the island, that only measured about 24 kilometres across. It also had a small airstrip less than 2 kilometres from the town of Tarakan, where there were four oil-loading piers on the south-west coast. The interior of the island was heavily forested and the coast almost completely fringed by mangrove swamps.

  The island fell to the Japanese on 12 January 1942. Tarakan oil was light, sour, crude. It was volatile enough to be used as fuel without any refining, but also contained enough sulphur to make the iron of ships’ boilers brittle. But by 1944, the Japanese navy was so desperate for fuel that it began using raw Tarakan crude in their ships in spite of the risk of serious damage to their boilers.

  There has been much criticism of the necessity for the Australian invasion of Tarakan at the beginning of April 1945, a bloody battle during which 240 Australians and some 1500 Japanese died. So fierce and uncompromising was the fighting that, despite the fact that so many more Japanese died than Australians, the appalling jungle conditions and constant deaths and casualties caused extreme stress and loss of morale. Many Australian soldiers suffered such severe psychological or psychiatric disturbances they could not continue.

  A number of Australian commentators have argued that the Tarakan invasion was unnecessary and inappropriate since the damaged airstrip on Tarakan was unable to be used, and Tarakan could easily have been bypassed on the general drive northwards towards Japan.

  Historian Peter Stanley puts a different perspective in Tarakan: An Australian tragedy, his 19
97 book examining this rather neglected affair:

  Australian historians have generally looked askance on MacArthur’s use of Australian troops in Borneo. The prevailing view derives from a widespread and vigorously nationalistic interpretation of Australian military history embodying a peculiarly Australian interpretation of the nature of military alliances … modern Australian nationalism has turned Australia’s military past to its own use which does not entirely accord with the historical reality of the evidence of it.

  In retrospect it may well be true that Tarakan could have been bypassed, but reasonable military objectives at the time indicated otherwise. This does not in any way detract from an appreciation of the courageous and tenacious campaign of the Australian forces in Tarakan. In appalling conditions and outnumbered, they triumphed against a desperate enemy prepared to fight to the death. Despite heavy casualties they maintained the highest military traditions.

  The invasion force consisted of the Australian 26th Brigade and the Ninth Division (reinforced to 12,000 men), which arrived on 1 May 1945. They faced 21,000 troops of the Japanese 455 Battalion and 2 Guard Force.

  Lieutenant Ken Joyce DCM, MID recalled that some of his men in 2/23rd Battalion thought Tarakan was going to be a walk-over, but ‘some of the older Diggers viewed this with deep suspicion’.

  ‘They say it will be over in three or four days, Lofty. It hardly seems worthwhile landing for such a short time.’

  ‘Yeah. Look mate, the only thing I’ve been short of in this bloody outfit is leave, cigarettes and beer. We haven’t had a short campaign in the history of the battalion. They started off with eight months in Tobruk, and they have made long-distance records ever since. I bet they’ll be shooting at us a couple of months after we land.’

  So began two of the bloodiest months of the Pacific Islands war. As Ken Joyce recalled: