The Lost Battalions: A battle that could not be won. An island that could not be defended. An ally that could not be trusted.

206 Pages·2018·2.36 MB·English

by  Tom Gilling

For Aidan
CONTENTS
Author’s note
1 Brothers in arms
2 Destination unknown
3 Greatcoats will be worn
4 There are no Japanese within 100 miles
5 They got nothing from me
6 Special Mission 43
7 Java rubble
8 A hell of a temper
9 Hundreds of whores and wicked bastards
10 Speedo!
11 One vast hospital
12 Where are the rest?
13 Stoppo!
14 Do not overeat
15 We have developed queer habits and outlook
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There is significant variation in the spelling of place names in the former
Netherlands East Indies, Burma and Siam. Where countries, cities and towns
have been renamed since the war (e.g., Batavia is now Jakarta), I have generally
used the wartime name rather than its modern equivalent.
Keeping Fit in the Tropics
Follow these simple rules to avoid tropical diseases. Tropical malaria can be
avoided by an intelligent soldier. Take atebrin tablets as ordered, after a meal,
and followed by a drink of water. Always carry a supply of atebrin tablets, and if
separated from your unit, take one every day. If you forget one day, take two the
next day. Sleep under a mosquito net.
Always from dusk until dawn, unless sleeping under a net, wear slacks, gaiters
and long sleeved shirt (sleeves rolled down) and apply repellent lotion to face
and hands every 3 hours. Always carry a bottle of repellent lotion. Treat your
clothes with Anti-Mite Fluid. Follow the directions for its use exactly and avoid
Scrub Typhus. To avoid dysentery and typhoid do not drink water unless it has
been boiled or chlorinated. Keep flies and other insects off your food and keep
eating utensils clean. Wash your body as much and as often as possible, to avoid
tropical skin diseases. Carry your own soap always. Carry an extra pair of socks
and underwear. Wear the socks on alternate days.
Australian Military Forces Record of Service Book, revised August 1944
Chapter 1
BROTHERS IN ARMS
On Good Friday, 11 April 1941, nine hundred officers and men of the 2/3rd
Machine Gun Battalion steamed out of Sydney Harbour aboard the military
transport ship MM, destination unknown. The MM—‘a monster’, in the words of
Alf Sheppard of B Company, ‘larger than any ship any of us had ever seen
before’—was painted grey, but its drab exterior could not disguise the fact that it
was the luxury ocean liner Ile de France, which had been commandeered by
Britain after the fall of France. In total it carried more than 4000 soldiers.
Accompanying the Ile de France out of Sydney Harbour were three more
requisitioned ocean liners, Queen Elizabeth, Mauretania and the Dutch Nieuw
Amsterdam. The Queen Mary was waiting for them at Jervis Bay, 170 kilometres
down the New South Wales coast, with the soldiers of the 2/2nd Pioneer
Battalion, a newly formed unit like the machine gunners. (A few of the Pioneers
had been squeezed aboard the Queen Elizabeth.)
Between them the five converted liners carried 25,000 soldiers—the largest
Australian military force to be sent overseas since the First Australian Imperial
Force in 1914. Private Desmond Jackson, who had joined the machine gunners
at the age of 20, described the convoy as a ‘fleet of giants’.
Raised in South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia, the
machine gun battalion was led by an Adelaide lawyer, Lieutenant Colonel
Arthur Seaforth Blackburn. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, Blackburn had
been awarded the Victoria Cross by King George V at Buckingham Palace for
his bravery in France, where he led repeated attacks on German strongpoints
outside the village of Pozières. Reports of Blackburn’s extraordinary exploits on
the Western Front appeared in newspapers big and small all over Australia. In a
letter published in October 1916 by the Richmond River Express and Casino
Kyogle Advertiser (and reprinted in many other papers), Blackburn recalled the
‘fearful scrap’ at Pozières, where he and his men
fought solidly for three days and nights, almost without stopping, and drove our way foot by foot through
the village … Goodness only knows how I got out of it alive, as 17 times the man behind me was killed,
and 22 men behind me were wounded … While working my way up the trench, I came upon a lad of 19
chained by the hand and waist to a machine gun. Fancy having to chain your men to guns. No wonder the
beggars are hard to drive out, as they are all quite convinced that we take no prisoners and will kill them all.
At the age of 49, Blackburn was determined to prove to his newly formed
machine gun battalion that he was not past it. In forced marches, the ‘skinny-
legged’ colonel always led from the front, astonishing men young enough to be
his sons with his physical stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness.
As well as being an experienced and resourceful soldier, Blackburn was a
skilled organiser—a talent that would prove indispensable to the troops aboard
the trouble-prone Ile de France. Veterans described sewerage problems, a
shortage of drinking water and a diet consisting almost exclusively of boiled
potatoes and porridge. ‘After about a week on these rations we were almost on
the verge of mutiny,’ Private Tom Keays recalled in the 2/3rd Machine Gun
Battalion history, From Snow to Jungle. After Blackburn took over domestic
arrangements, ‘the cooks were hastily replaced by our own army cooks and the
meals were much more palatable thereafter’.
To Des Jackson it was an ‘uneventful’ voyage, but danger was rarely far
away. Fear of attack by German raiders meant that a total blackout applied to
ships off the New South Wales coast. Escorted by a warship, the heavy cruiser
HMAS Australia, the converted liners carried little in the way of armament.
Eight of the battalion’s Vickers machine guns were manned round the clock to
protect the Ile de France from attack by enemy aircraft—‘a popular duty’, one
soldier remembered, as it meant escaping from the darkness and suffocating heat
below deck. Life jackets and full water bottles had to be carried at all times, and
there were regular emergency drills.
After picking up the Queen Mary off Jervis Bay, the convoy steamed south.
Although many of the Queen Mary’s interior fittings had been stripped out when
she was converted to a troop ship, the men of the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion were
surprised to discover her luxurious accommodation largely intact. Corporal
Harry Walker, the middle child of eleven from Alma, in Victoria, was impressed
with the size of the ship but would suffer along with his mates as the ship neared
the equator. ‘It was designed for the cold Atlantic Ocean run,’ Walker said in his
tape-recorded memoirs. ‘There wasn’t sufficient air conditioning for the tropics,
and boy did we swelter.’
Problems in the engine room of the Ile de France slowed the rest of the
convoy, and heavy seas made the voyage through the Southern Ocean a misery.
When troops were denied shore leave at Fremantle, Blackburn had to act quickly
to prevent a riot. A note in the unit diary reads, ‘2030. Disturbance by certain
personnel re conditions on boat. Mostly reinforcement personnel and as far as
can be ascertained no members of this unit took part.’
The battalion reached full strength when the men of D Company, who had
been in Perth on pre-embarkation leave, joined at Fremantle. The diary notes
ruefully, ‘Endeavours to reduce number of personnel on board failed.’
The Ile de France was too big to dock and had to be provisioned by lighter.
For security reasons letters home had been strictly censored since the battalion
left Sydney, but after arriving in Fremantle some of the machine gunners had the
bright idea of throwing letters over the side to avoid the censors. Arch Flanagan,
a Tasmanian from C Company, told Blackburn’s biographer, Andrew Faulkner,
‘A bloke on one of the boats said “got any letters … I’ll post them for you.”
Well, I don’t know whether he was a German spy but the next thing the letters
were with the colonel.’ Flanagan was not the only man to get a rollicking from
an angry Blackburn, although he protested that the letters ‘contained no more
information about the convoy than every wharfie in Fremantle knew’.
Secrecy had been an overriding concern ever since the convoy left Sydney.
‘Most secret’ orders issued before departure from Fremantle stated that ‘too
much stress cannot be placed upon the importance of preventing any leakage of
information in respect of movement overseas’. Messages in bottles were banned
from being thrown overboard, since an enemy raider could theoretically plot the
convoy’s course by picking up ‘two or more bottles containing dated messages’.
Life for the soldiers on the Ile de France began to improve after the convoy
set sail for Colombo, although Blackburn professed to find it ‘extremely dull’.
An ill-judged ban on all forms of gambling ordered by Blackburn’s superior
officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stillman, was quietly dropped (no doubt on
Blackburn’s advice). An order requiring ‘officers, NCOs, sentries, picquets and
patrols’ to suppress forbidden games wherever they were found was replaced by
a milder ban on gambling ‘during training hours’. The battalion history records
that after Fremantle ‘the aft lounge was set up to cater for Bingo, two-up, Vingt-
et-Un, Crown and Anchor and roulette, amongst other games, to be played after
working hours’. Under the new regime, the lounge resembled ‘a smoke-filled
Dante’s Inferno’.
As the convoy entered the tropics, the heat became stifling. All ranks were
warned that sunburn was a ‘self-inflicted wound’. A shortage of fresh water
meant that troops could only wash clothes in seawater. On 14 April orders were
issued for the fresh water supply to be cut off daily between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.