The enemy’s more immediate objective was to capture the Mersing bridge, which would allow them to surge south in ever-increasing numbers. The Australians were not prepared to give in without a fight and had wired the bridge accordingly.
For a while the Japanese, wilting under a barrage of mortar and machine-gun fire, were stopped in their tracks. At the same time a section from the 2/20th Battalion crossed the river, attacking enemy gun posts and houses in which it was known the Japanese were hiding.
After suffering heavy casualties in a series of ambushes, the Japanese counterattacked. The two sides were locked in a devastating struggle, which took a massive human toll, but still the Japs kept coming. Was there no end to it?
Merv Alchin’s brother, Don, nearly came to grief when a bullet went through his army boot but luckily didn’t injure him. The close shave sent a shudder down his spine. A few inches higher and the same bullet could have done him serious damage. There was no time to dwell on the near miss, but he was badly shaken.
‘If anyone tells you they weren’t frightened they’re a bloody liar and I wasn’t looking forward to being knocked off,’ he told me. ‘We knew they were coming, because the intelligence blokes had told us – and by Christ, we soon found out they had plenty of gear.’20
Despite the growing number of dead and injured, the 2/20th kept up the fight.
‘We were shit scared but we were determined to get out alive, simply because we all wanted to get home one day. That’s what kept us going. So I thought, bugger this – I’m going to have a go.’21
Francis ‘Joe’ Wilson, from Orange, came to a similar conclusion after he took over 11 Platoon and managed to clear the enemy from a section post. His courage under fire was to earn him the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Such acts of bravery, though not always recognised, became commonplace in the 8th Division during the days and weeks ahead. Life became a lottery as the Australians tried to stall the Japanese advance, and you needed luck to survive.
Noel Harrison, who had spent many months enjoying the delights of Port Dickson before the war, was now in the thick of it. Mersing was his patch and communications were his job. He had been sent off on patrol into the jungle looking for enemy infiltration but had lost contact with HQ. For a signals man that could have been embarrassing, but Dame Fortune looked kindly on the boy from Bega, who risked being left behind.
‘I’d been sent out with a companion to see if there were any Japs getting through but we never saw anyone. Eventually I lost contact with my battalion because they were withdrawing from Mersing.’22
Stuck in the middle of nowhere Noel climbed a hill in a bid to restore radio contact and managed to pick up a weak signal.
‘We were able to make contact and were told to get back to the main road pretty damn quick as the 2/20th were in the process of leaving. Luckily for us we made it or we would have been left behind.’23
Such is the lottery of life in war. And as George Daldry was to discover, sometimes you have to make your own luck. George’s chance encounter with a Japanese patrol during a bombing raid found him captured by the enemy and imprisoned in their camp. Perhaps because of his slight physique and youthful countenance, the Japs looked kindly on the boy soldier. When the camp was unexpectedly raided one day George found himself unguarded and decided to slip away.
‘I just walked out and didn’t know where I was going, but eventually ran into a group of our blokes who seemed to know where they were heading. So I teamed up with them,’ he explained.24
It was as simple as that. George Daldry who had accidentally fallen into enemy hands had, with consummate ease, managed to extricate himself from them.
Back in the centre of Mersing the 2/20th had held their ground until 24 January, when the decision was taken to detonate the bridge. A couple of days later the battalion began their inevitable retreat towards Jemaluang.
Brigadier Taylor moved his headquarters back to the Nithsdale Estate, a rubber plantation a little over 12 miles (20 km) north of Jemaluang. The 2/18th Battalion, less one company, accompanied him, while the 2/10th Field Regiment were there to provide effective fire to make good their escape.
This was to be the 2/18th’s first major action. In the early hours of 27 January the battalion lay in wait for the advancing Japanese and sprang an ambush involving three of its companies. The Japs were taken completely by surprise and suffered heavy casualties. But the Australian offensive did not go quite to plan. What had been devised as a daylight operation took place at night. Command broke down and the complex plan ended in confusion. Brigade Headquarters ordered a premature withdrawal, forcing the abandonment of D Company behind the massed ranks of the Japanese force. It wasn’t the major triumph the Aussies had hoped for but they still dealt a severe blow to several hundred enemy soldiers.25
Once again the 8th Division had demonstrated its resolve in battle, but at the same time the catalogue of defeats over the past six weeks could not be ignored.
Then came a cable from General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief of ABDA, who was in overall regional control. It alluded to the possibility of what was once unthinkable: the Allied evacuation of the entire peninsula.
‘You must think out the problem of how to withdraw from the mainland should withdrawal become necessary and how to prolong resistance on the island,’ he wrote in a communication to General Percival. ‘Let me have your plans as soon as possible. Your preparations must, of course, be kept entirely secret.’26
Wavell’s demand for confidentiality was understandable. Had word got out that British military chiefs were seriously contemplating the evacuation of the mainland, it would have undermined any remaining public confidence in the Allies and instilled the enemy with an even greater determination to march on to Singapore.
But what else could be done to delay the Japanese at this late stage? Eastforce continued to demolish bridges along the way but it was not long before Batu Pahat, a small town about 62 miles (100 km) northwest of Johore Bahru, fell to the Japanese.
The 2/20th Battalion got its marching orders to move early on the morning of 29 January to Johore Bahru, the regional capital, which overlooked the narrow waterway dividing the mainland from Singapore. The town was to accommodate the outer bridgehead force, which would provide cover for all Allied troops on their way from the peninsula to the island. Time was of the essence, as General Percival noted in a message to General Wavell.
‘A very critical situation has developed. The enemy has cut off and overrun the majority of the forces on the west coast … Unless we can stop him it will be difficult to get our own columns on other roads back in time, especially as they are both being pressed. In any case it looks as if we should not be able to hold Johore for more than another three or four days. We are going to be a bit thin on the island unless we can get the remaining troops back.’
It was a humiliating admission and one which had to be addressed now rather than later. Within hours battalions from both the 22nd and 27th Infantry Brigades, whose presence had exuded so much public confidence in the early days of the war and whose valiant efforts had done so much to slow the Japanese, were on their way to certain defeat.
Before returning to HQ, Bennett decided to make a final call on the Sultan of Johore, who was so upset that the mainland was about to be abandoned at one stage started to sob. But the commander was not there to offer a shoulder on which to cry. He was there on a personal mission to save his own skin.
Bennett told the Sultan that he had no intention of becoming a prisoner of war and requested his help in acquiring a boat should it be necessary to escape.27 There is no record of the Sultan’s response, but given their close relationship, he probably would have offered whatever assistance he could.
After packing his bags at the 8th Division’s headquarters, Major-General Henry Gordon Bennett reflected on Johore Bahru’s demise. Once the streets had been full of Malays and busy Chinese; now the roads were deserted, the place was more like a ghost t
own than the thriving community it had once been.
‘I have never felt so sad and upset,’ he confided to his diary. ‘Words fail me. This defeat should not have been … There seems no justification for it. I always thought we would hold Johore. Its loss was never contemplated.’28
For Bennett the prospect of being vanquished was almost impossible to bear. The events of the past few days had been an emotional watershed for him and he was desperate to vent his spleen. But who to blame?
There was never any doubt in Bennett’s book that the defeat of the Allies in Malaya had to be put fairly and squarely at the feet of the British. In a vitriolic letter to Frank Forde, Australia’s Army Minister, he ‘venomously attacked the British, accused the 45th Indian Brigade of having “scattered like schoolgirls”, [and] rebuked Forde for not promoting him to lieutenant general.’29
He claimed the British were more interested in promotion than winning the war.
‘These English officers respect rank and little more,’ he observed. As for Lieutenant-General ‘Piggy’ Heath, commander of the Indian III Brigade, ‘He should have been relieved of his command long ago.’
What rankled Bennett was Heath’s ‘hidden power of influence’ and the ease with which he was able to sway Percival. ‘I have objected strongly to being placed under his command and have given as my reason that I will not allow the AIF to be slaughtered on the altar of Heath’s inefficiency,’ he wrote.30
And just for good measure Bennett could not resist a dig at his old bête noire, Blamey.
To restore the position here would require two good assault divisions. Australian Divisions would be required to provide the needed reliefs … [A]re you going to send a Corp Commander with them or are you going to give me command? I know local conditions. I have experience in fighting the Japanese. When the war commenced I was senior to both Blamey and Lavarack and was superseded, not on account of inefficiency, but merely because of jealousy. Also, certain people wanted to see a permanent soldier, not a citizen soldier at the head.31
Bennett’s thunder ended with a not-so-veiled threat: ‘If you want to bring anyone else here to command the Australian Corps when it arrives, I will ask to be relieved. I will take it as a note of lack of confidence in me. I was a Major General when Lavarack was a Lieutenant Colonel,’ he reminded Forde.
Perhaps sensing that he might have overstepped himself, Bennett concluded: ‘Please pardon my directness. It is a fault of mine.’32
How different the situation might have been if the Japanese had followed their original plan to invade Mersing by sea, as Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, who devised the invasion of Malaya, was to concede after the war.
‘If, as was first intended, we had made the attack by landing on the beach with 18 Division it would have ended in disaster,’ he said. ‘Thinking back it makes my hair stand on end to imagine what might have happened.’33
In the final analysis it was the right decision for the enemy to take the peninsula by road and move south, a strategic move that proved to be the Allies’ undoing.
By the end of January the last retreat was underway. January 30 was the fateful day when 2/20th Battalion moved in precision and on time to complete the withdrawal to Singapore.
The Australian battalions were among the final units to march across the causeway linking Singapore to the mainland before it was blown up. The depth charges were due to go off at 8 am but a few hours before the deadline a familiar wailing tone wafted through the morning air. It was the swirl of bagpipes coming from the Argylls, whose dramatically depleted ranks were not going to allow such an historic occasion to pass without honouring the fallen and the survivors who were determined to continue the fight.
To the sound of ‘A Hundred Pipers’ and ‘Hielan Laddie’ those members of the 8th Division who were gathered on the southern side of the causeway listened, heartbroken, as the last link with the mainland was severed. Few would admit it then, but the sense of foreboding was palpable.
How had it come to this? Seventy-five years later Bart Richardson reflected on the unfolding tragedy over lunch at the Diggers RSL near his home in Nelson Bay, north of Newcastle. It was a dazzling spring day and Bart was in no mood to garnish his memories with a nostalgic gloss. Too many good men died because of the poor judgement of a few.
‘It’s time the truth were told,’ he declared.
Bart, who was still driving his nippy VW Golf around town until shortly before he died in March 2017 at the age of 97, still suffered nightmares. Like so many of his mates he endured captivity in Changi and the slave-like conditions on the Burma-Thai Railway and he had little time for those who got him into the mess that ended in the fall of Singapore.
He rattled off a list of mainly British names, including Winston Churchill, as the principal culprits for what happened.
‘Singapore was never at any time an impregnable fortress despite Churchill and senior army officers declaring it so on many occasions. It’s said that at a British Army officers’ school in India in 1938 an exercise was set for the capture of Singapore and one bright young officer captured it just the way the Japs eventually did so – coming down from the north and from the sea. What a shemozzle!’34
Bart was in full stride. It was as though the war had never ended and in many ways it hadn’t. The men of the 8th Division had always felt let down by the colonial powers which held sway in the Malaya campaign and effectively ruined their lives. And they will feel it until their dying day.
But was the perceived failure of British military policy a justified criticism? Or were there other elements at play?
As Bart completed those final few steps over the causeway to Singapore, he could not foresee the bitter recriminations that would echo down the decades. The claims and counter-claims, the outrageous allegations and the sheer lies that would haunt all those who gave service in the pursuit of freedom.
Chapter 8
A TERRIBLE REVENGE
By now the Japanese were making their presence felt right across South-East Asia and much of the Pacific. On the same day that the Allies completed their evacuation of the Malay Peninsula, the Japanese Navy was about to strike further south on the island of Ambon in the Dutch East Indies.
Gull Force had already got wind of the enemy when an RAAF reconnaissance plane from 13 Squadron spotted a fleet of Japanese warships off the coast of Celebes to the northwest of Ambon.
There were 22 ships in all, including 13 transport vessels, three light cruisers, a heavy cruiser and five destroyers. The convoy was headed in a southeasterly direction, which could mean only one thing – its destination was Ambon.
Lieutenant William Jinkins confirmed the news a couple of days later when he saw the Japanese fleet approaching from his position 1000 metres above sea level, high up on the Mount Nona plateau.
Jinkins and his 2/21st platoon had been placed there just in case enemy troops tried to occupy the high point and in so doing gain an advantage over those members of the 8th Division based further down the hill.
He would not have to wait long. Soon Lieutenant Jinkins spotted the enemy coming ashore in motorised landing craft.
Elsewhere on the island, Walter Hicks, who had been out mapping near Eri on the southern peninsula, couldn’t believe his eyes when he walked down to the beach and saw ten Japanese transport ships sailing across the heads which separated the Hitu and Latimor peninsulas.
‘I thought where the hell did they come from?’
Not hanging around, he raced up the hill to raise the alarm and told his mates the news.
Walter remembers one of his officers shouting, ‘Oh my God, we’re dead.’
Cool-headed Walter replied, ‘We’re not dead yet, but we soon will be.’1
The initial assault involved four Japanese vessels, the Yamaura, the Africa, the Zenyo and Miike, which anchored at the southeastern tip of the Latimore Peninsula in the early hours of 31 January. Within a few hours the Japanese had landed three battalions of men who were fanning out across t
he island along narrow overland trails towards the main towns.
They made such extraordinary progress that by dusk on the same day one unit had converged on Ambon city, driving a wedge between the Australians, who were effectively trapped in the south, and most of the Dutch troops who were supposed to secure the north.
At the same time the other side of the island was being invaded from the north. Some 850 men of the 1st Kure Special Naval Landing Force made for the beach at Hitu Lama, cutting away the barbed wire defences and quickly securing the area.
The Nippon Times recorded in breathless detail how there was no stopping the Japanese landing parties.
‘Crawling across the beach and into the enemy’s pill box positions, the first charge scattered the enemy. The village of Hiti-lama was taken without much effort. But the fighting had only just begun.
‘Immediately plunging into the jungle and smashing the pill boxes holding the enemy at every point, the Japanese forces covered more than 30 kilometres [roughly 20 miles] of extremely difficult territory and at 4.30 p.m. engaged the enemy’s main strength holding the Laha airfield.’
The Nippon Times’ correspondent Genichi Yamamoto’s prose knew no bounds. To achieve their goal, the Japanese had ‘crawled up steep cliffs, pounded through dark jungles and whirled like the wind through the village of Hasale’.2
In fact the account was largely accurate, but how had the marines achieved so much so quickly? The answer lay with Lieutenant-Colonel J.R.L. Kapitz, Commander of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army and the man who was officially in control of the island. Kapitz had decided to withdraw most of his men from Hitu Lama to reinforce the town of Paso, thereby leaving the north coast extremely vulnerable in the event of an enemy attack. It was yet another example of what Gordon Bennett would see as the Allies’ major weakness: the eagerness to retreat whenever conditions got too hot for them.
Hero or Deserter? Page 11