This time it was the Dutch who were to cave in without much of a fight. While the details remain unclear there were several reports of the Dutch hoisting a white flag, but offers to surrender went unheeded by the enemy. The Japanese still had the Australians to contend with and were in no mood to countenance a ceasefire until the entire island had downed arms. In the end it was bad advice that finally prompted the Dutch to capitulate. The official account of the fighting, as reported by Lionel Wigmore in The Japanese Thrust, claimed Kapitz was under the impression that the situation was far worse than it was.
‘He considered that they had been intimidated by the bold action of small numbers of Japanese who had penetrated the lines and [he] was ashamed that fighting had been given up so soon.’3
Wasn’t this the same old story? That the Allied forces all too often assumed the enemy was stronger than it was and gave in without a struggle? Hadn’t the same happened in Malaya? And wouldn’t a carbon copy mentality herald the fall of Singapore?
Up to a point, although on Ambon the jury was still out. The Japanese were yet to confront the men of the 8th Division’s 2/21st and this battalion was certainly not prepared to give up without a fight. The Australians had no idea the Dutch had surrendered. Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott, who had taken command only three weeks earlier after a disagreement with his predecessor, knew they were up against it but was in no mood to hand in the towel. Supremely confident that help was on its way, Scott was convinced that Australia would provide air and naval support to see the enemy off. It turned out to be little more than wishful thinking.
Even the men were beginning to ponder their fate as morale started to plummet. But they didn’t show it. In fact there were some remarkable acts of bravery over the next few days. In Joan Beaumont’s history of Gull Force she cites the case of Lieutenant Ron Green, commander of 17 Platoon, who offered his men the chance to take part in an almost suicidal raid on Ambon town. All agreed to participate without exception.
One soldier’s determination to take on the Japs would go down in battalion history as probably the most heroic act of the entire campaign. Bill Doolan, a transport driver, was in a reconnaissance patrol when they were sent towards enemy lines. They devised a plan whereby Doolan would drive into town with such confidence that the Japanese would assume he was one of their own. It was a cheeky and potentially fatal manoeuvre but surprisingly it worked. Once behind enemy lines the party let rip, tossing grenades out of the truck and spraying the Jap headquarters with gunfire before beating a swift retreat. Stunned by the audacity of the Aussies, the Japanese replied with force but Irish-born Doolan, who loved a good fight, stayed behind to assist the patrol’s withdrawal. For several minutes he kept the enemy at bay, his brave actions culminating in an heroic last stand from up a tree. One of those who lived to tell the tale was Doolan’s washboy, who would describe how Doolan turned on his pursuers and showered them with machine-gun fire and grenades.
By the time he dropped dead from his lofty perch, Doolan had, by some estimates, killed or badly wounded as many as 80 infantrymen. Even the Japanese were astonished by his fearlessness and gallantry, allowing his body to be buried beneath the tree from which he had fallen. A simple wooden cross marked his grave and hardly a day passed when the native population would not deliver fresh flowers to the site in honour of the man who had given his life to defend their island paradise.4
Doolan’s spirit of derring-do reflected many similar acts of bravery by the 8th Division on Ambon. Facing seemingly insurmountable odds, they refused to make life easy for the enemy, whose navy was by now pounding Australian defences at point-blank range.
Philip Miskin was the 23-year-old captain of B Echelon, which was positioned in the foothills of Mount Nona on the outskirts of Ambon town. Hiding in a coconut grove, the location offered an uninterrupted vista of the Japanese navy as it sailed into Ambon Bay. Usually the boys from B Echelon found themselves at the rear of the battalion but on this occasion they were in the front line, about a third of a mile (300 m) from the enemy’s shipboard guns. It was a classic case of the mouse that roared, as People Magazine would relate in a post-war account of the clash: ‘The odds and ends of B Echelon fought back magnificently under the terrible pounding of the naval barrage. They swept the decks of the warships with rifle, machine gun and mortar fire. But the exchange was unequal. In return for .303 and .5 inch bullets and three inch mortar bombs, they got 4 and 6 inch shells.’5
By now the Australians were beginning to enjoy the game of cat and mouse, particularly the way one of the unit’s Brownings had forced a Japanese minesweeper to steam away from the machine gun’s range. Unfortunately for those on board, the ship’s crab-like manoeuvre was to no avail. Suddenly an almighty explosion sent a column of smoke and wreckage some 430 yards (400 metres) skywards. The minesweeper had hit a mine, killing most of the 100-strong crew.
Alex Hawkins, who fired the fatal round, was so elated he claimed it as a ‘kill’, prompting Miskin to promise he’d give him the Browning as a prize once the war was over. Unfortunately Hawkins did not survive to collect his trophy, and through his actions many of his colleagues would also die. The 8th Division didn’t know it then, but the Japanese would exact a terrible revenge for the loss of the minesweeper. It would result in one of the biggest and most bloody massacres of the war in the Far East and cast a dark cloud over the history of the 2/21st Battalion.
The so-called Battle of Rabaul began on 4 January 1942, when the Japanese dropped its first bombs on the peacetime capital of the Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The 2/22nd Battalion, which comprised 900 men and 38 officers, had been in place since Anzac Day 1941 and with the arrival of more troops in December totalled about 1400. With them were members of the 2/10th Field Ambulance, anti-tank and coastal artillery batteries and militia from the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. There was also air cover provided by 24 Squadron, which sent ten Wirraways and four Hudsons to Rabaul.6
Back in December, five days after Japan declared war, the Australian Chiefs of Staff were asked to advise the War Cabinet what to do with Lark Force. Should they leave, stay or be reinforced? Foolishly they ordered them to remain, despite the fact the Australian government knew there was little hope of holding out against a much larger and better equipped Japanese invasion force. And so it was on 23 January, a week before Gordon Bennett and his men evacuated the Malay Peninsula, that their 8th Division comrades in arms were feeling the full force of the Japanese Navy. As enemy ships entered the harbour at Rabaul, Japanese troops were coming ashore at Blanche Bay near Kokopo, to the southeast.
On 20 January around 100 Japanese planes attacked the island in successive waves. The RAAF sent up eight of their Wirraways but it was a futile mission. Three of the Australian aircraft were shot down, two crash-landed and another was damaged. Of the Australian air crew, six died in action and five were injured. Only one of the Japanese bombers was shot down and that by anti-aircraft fire on the ground. Like the situation on Timor and Ambon, the Rabaul campaign was turning into a disaster. And no one had heeded the warnings.
The 2/22nd Battalion didn’t stand a chance. Armed with a few anti-tank guns, mortars and Vickers machine guns, the Australians fought valiantly for a couple of hours but were no match for the enemy. The first of 20,000 Japanese troops began to land and although some faced fierce resistance many came ashore unopposed. It was no fault of Lark Force, who were simply overwhelmed and outnumbered.
There followed a series of noble attempts by the Australians to turn back the enemy, particularly around Simpson Harbour, Keravia Bay and Raluana Point, but they were to no avail.
At one stage Lieutenant-Colonel Kuwada Ishiro, who was in command of the 3rd Battalion, 144th Infantry Regiment, endured heavy resistance at Vulcan Beach thanks to the combined might of an Australian unit from the 2/22nd Battalion and the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, but elsewhere on the island the Japanese were able to land on unguarded stretches of coastline.
By dawn t
he airfield was in enemy hands and Lark’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John Scanlan, had no alternative but to issue the order, ‘Every man for himself.’ Twenty-eight Australians, including two officers, died on the day Rabaul fell. Only the RAAF, who had organised an emergency airlift, managed to escape. The army had made no such plans and simply retreated into the jungle, for which they had no training. Inexperienced in the skills of guerilla warfare, most of the soldiers who fled were forced to surrender in the coming weeks. Short of food and supplies, they grew hungry and eventually succumbed to tropical ailments which in turn reduced their effectiveness as a fighting force.
Japanese aircraft dropped messages warning the Australians: ‘You can find neither food nor way of escape in this island and you will only die of hunger unless you surrender.’7
The Battle of Rabaul was a debacle but worse was to follow. In the coming weeks more than 1000 Aussies from the 8th Division were captured. While most were held as prisoners of war, 150 were massacred in a series of atrocities which became well-documented after the war. In one incident small groups of Australians were marched into the jungle near Tol Plantation and bayoneted to death. At the nearby Waitavalo Plantation others were shot.
Thanks to the testimony of six men who survived, the man held responsible for these massacres, Masao Kusunose, commanding officer of the 144th Infantry Battalion, was eventually accused of war crimes. However, rather than face military justice he starved himself to death before standing trial.
Remarkably some Australians succeeded in escaping from New Britain. About 450 troops and civilians were evacuated from the island by sea thanks to the efforts of individual officers who mounted rescue missions from New Guinea. Similar to other escapes from Ambon, Timor and Malaya, they got away against all odds. Escape would become a recurring theme in the 8th Division, but for some it would not be without controversy.
Back in Singapore Major-General Gordon Bennett was already hatching plans to flee the island, but unlike others who managed to avoid capture, the Australian commander’s excuse would have far-reaching consequences.
Chapter 9
‘WE’LL BLOW THEM ALL AWAY’
And so the fall of mainland Malaya ended without a shot being fired across the causeway. Most of the Allied forces completed their withdrawal to Singapore safely, but not without the loss of the 22nd Indian Brigade and the British commander of the Indian 9th Infantry Division, Major-General Arthur ‘Bustling Bill’ Barstow. They were supposed to be following up behind but the Indians became isolated and Barstow was killed in an ambush near Johore. Only Major Charles Moses, the Australian liaison officer with the Indian Division, and Colonel Trott, the senior admin officer, made it back in one piece. Barstow, who was a popular officer among the Australians and widely respected for his reputation as a fearless frontline soldier, was found shot dead at the bottom of a railway embankment.
It had taken just 55 days for the Japanese to conquer the 550 mile-long (885 km) peninsula.
‘Thus ended the retreat to the island,’ Bennett recorded in his diary entry for 31 January. ‘The whole operation seems incredible … forced back by a small Japanese army of only two divisions, riding stolen bicycles and without military support. The Japanese sent patrols outside our resistance and sat on a road behind our troops. Thinking they were cut off, our troops retreated.’1
This was the Japanese military strategy in a nutshell. In essence it had been one big confidence trick and the Allies had fallen for it. Now only 600 yards (550 m) of water – the narrowest point across the Johore Strait – separated them from the enemy.
The blast which had partially demolished the causeway was still ringing in many ears. It was, as Lionel Wigmore was to acknowledge in his official history of the campaign, symbolic of the moment.
‘The roar of the explosion seemed to express the frustration and fury of the forces which had been thrust back and penned up in “the island fortress”,’ as it was still regarded.2
The explosion had left a 70-foot (21 m) gap in the causeway but it would not remain that way for long. Still the army thought the island would offer them protection. It was Lieutenant-Colonel J.O.C. Hayes, the navy’s liaison officer with the army, who saw the writing on the wall.
‘It was the same sensation as after Dunkirk,’ he would later say in a radio broadcast. ‘We knew where we were. There could be no more retreat without calamity. But driving along the north shore that morning, back to the naval base, now an empty settlement, I doubted for the first time that Singapore was impregnable. Somehow it did not look its part.’3
Bennett had not taken long to acquire new quarters near Bukit Timah village, a strategically important location towards Singapore town on the south coast of the island.
‘My home is in a delightfully furnished, comparatively new bungalow on a hill,’ he described in his diary, much as a real estate agent might promote a property to potential occupants.
His staff did not fare quite so well: ‘My headquarters officers are in a poky little place about a mile away, just off the Jurong road. The staff is very cramped. They are living in small cottages nearby, while some are in tents.’
It was a temporary hardship but far better than the conditions they would have to endure eventually.
As for the civilian population who had been left behind on the mainland, Bennett vowed to retake their homeland as quickly as he could.
‘Our duty now is to recapture Malaya at the earliest possible opportunity. We owe it to the natives! We owe it to ourselves.’
At least that was what he promised in his diary, but as we now know his more immediate responsibility was to himself.
Casting an eye across the straits to Johore Bahru he saw a Japanese flag flying over the administrative buildings.
‘Very soon the Malay inhabitants will be driven from their homes and possibly used by the Japanese, the men as workers and the women …! How will they be treated?’ he wondered.4
Of course Bennett knew the answer but he was deluding himself if he thought the Allies would save the day. In the same way, many of his fellow officers also chose to ignore the inevitable. Back at Division HQ they had no conception of the seriousness of the situation facing the island.
As Don Wall revealed in his detailed history of the 2/20th Battalion: ‘Orders began requesting details of leave arrangements for troops – a directive from Malaya Command informed officers that leave arrangements would commence on February 15th – and other matters concerning laundry.’
Were they living in a parallel universe? Maybe so. It certainly seemed that way. The mood was one of optimism. There was no consideration of defeat. Most of the mail sent home saw the men writing in glowing terms of their ability to hold Singapore. Though one letter – from Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Assheton to his family back in Australia – disclosed he had suffered many anxious moments.
‘What the future holds it is impossible to predict, but there is no doubt that a stern struggle lies ahead, not only here but in other theatres of the war.’5
By now there were about 85,000 troops on Singapore Island, including most of the 18th British Division, who had disembarked on 29 January and had yet to acclimatise themselves. The fighting force was divided into 45 infantry battalions, which included 21 Indian, 13 British, six Australian, two Malay and three from the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force. There were also three machine-gun and one reconnaissance battalions.6
Nearly 2000 Australian reinforcements had also arrived but they were largely untrained and turned out to be more of a liability than an asset. Many hadn’t even fired a weapon. Why these new recruits had been sent to fight and not some of the 87,000 militiamen on full-time duty in Australia, most of whom had received months of training, is a mystery.
Only the 2/4th Australian Machine Gun Battalion, comprising nearly 1000 men of all ranks, seemed up to the task when they sailed into Singapore. The rest of the reinforcements were mere boys in comparison. While the 2/4th Battalion were late arriva
ls, what they lacked in battlefield experience they made up for in training and esprit de corps. A largely West Australian battalion, they’d come by a most roundabout route to Singapore, first sailing from Darwin to Port Moresby then, because of a Japanese air attack on Rabaul, turning around to sail to Malaya via the southern route. It meant calling in on Sydney and Fremantle before heading north again.7
Given that many of the lads had family in the Fremantle area, there was no stopping some of them from disobeying orders and making an unofficial overnight stay ashore to catch up with wives and girlfriends. When the battalion’s ship, the Aquitania, set sail the next day 94 men were left behind. Most were eventually picked up by the military police and held in custody for a fortnight, before being released and sent north on another ship, the Marella, to rejoin their mates.
In the meantime such was the Australian government’s increasing panic over the deteriorating situation in Malaya, 150 partially trained reinforcements from the 2/4th’s base in Perth were also despatched to Singapore. Truth be told, many of them lacked proper training and were ill-prepared for war.
It was frustrating for the 8th Division’s 22nd and 27th Brigades, who had become hardened soldiers over the previous few months. The job of defending the northwestern sector of the island now rested on their shoulders.8
It was the 2/20th Battalion, numbering nearly 800, including 32 officers, that drew the shortest straw. They would be positioned along that section of coast immediately overlooking Johore Strait. None of them realised how difficult their task would be, until Captain Frank Gaven was taken down to the area adjoining the Kranji River.
Hero or Deserter? Page 12