Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  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 ma
ny 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.”