They were all like blind men about the elephant, each with a different view of how this massive, unwieldy animal should look. Yet it was not Churchill, nor Wavell, nor Curtin who would decide the matter. It was not even Brooke in his new post as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Weeks ago, a Sergeant was managing the loadout of the 7th Australian Division in the Suez Canal. His name was Bill Thornton, and he was a stickler Stevedore with an eye for detail, and a short temper when anything that mattered to him was botched or overlooked.
Sergeant Thornton was supervising the embarkation of the Australian 7th Division, flipping through a clipboard of unit registries, cargo manifests and other information relating to the movement. It was his job to get the troops loaded on the troop ships, the guns and heavy equipment loaded on the cargo ships, and it was a fine art that was called “tactical loading.” In a nutshell, it aimed to group ships with guns and equipment belonging to the proper brigades and battalions in the same convoy. If this was not done correctly, the troops would arrive without their equipment, and it could then take weeks for the division to sort itself out.
The interesting thing about Wild Bill Thornton, as he was called on the docks at Suez, was that he was not supposed to be there. He was to have been down with a bad case of dysentery, laid up for nearly a month, but in this retelling of events, the malady had not struck him, and he was fit and on the job when the 7th Division got orders to move. Four separate convoys would end up moving the troops, some composed of just a few ships. The first of these was just a single ship, the Orcades, which had pulled into the harbor at Batavia in spite of an order from the homeland advising it not to disembark there.
Once Orcades arrived, Wavell wanted to unload the AA guns and troops all neatly mated up and sent off by Sergeant Thornton, so that they could “protect the aerodromes” on Java. The Australians advised him that once disbursed on Java, it would seem impossible to ever safely withdraw the unit. It was a bit like quibbling over the movement of a pawn in the early stages of the game. Once pushed forward, the Australians argued it could never take a backward step, and they feared it would soon be lost in the fray.
Behind Orcades, three other small convoys were strung out between Bombay and Colombo. These “flights,” as they were called, were composed of larger troopships coming from the Suez that would first offload the men at Bombay, and then re-load them onto smaller ships for the final leg of their journey to Colombo and points further east. These were the heavy pieces in the division, carrying the 25th, 21st, and 18th brigades in that order.
Yet this was a chess game where there were two players on the same side vying for control of the Knights and Bishops. Churchill actually gave orders for the lead flight to divert north to Rangoon, only to find Curtin countermanding those orders and sticking to his guns that the troops should come home. One argument he would make was that the units had not been “tactically loaded,” and if the division went to Burma or Java it would still not be able to organize for operations until all the other flights arrived and all the equipment could be sorted out. In Curtin’s mind, the final destination of the first flight was going to determine where all the others would have to end up, and so his hand was heavy on the mane of that Knight’s horse, and he tugged the reins firmly to lead it east to Australia.
This time, however, Curtain’s argument could not be made, at least to Churchill. Sergeant Bill Thornton had seen to all of that in Suez, and the flights were all tactically loaded. In what would now become a perfect illustration of the maxim that amateurs talk strategy while the experts talk logistics, Thornton’s intervention had swept away Curtain’s arguments before they could matter. His methodical mind for logistics had seen the ships off in proper order, with all equipment correctly assigned to each brigade flight. Because of this, each flight was now capable of landing at any friendly port, and of functioning as a fully effective combat unit the day it arrived.
Yet Curtain did not know that, and assumed the hasty withdrawal from Suez would have seen the division embarked willy nilly, and scattered all over the seven seas. He had a subordinate issue a cable that Orcades should not debark at Batavia, and instead return home, and that all other flights should follow this same course.
At this point, another methodical man came on the scene at the quay in Batavia, demanding to know why the Orcades was sitting there idling about when it might be unloaded in a matter of hours. His name was General Bernard Law Montgomery, fresh off the boat himself and rubbing his hands together as he contemplated his new command and the defense of Java.
“Good show,” he said when he learned this ship had the leading elements of the Australian 7th Division. 2/3rd MG Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Blackburn and 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Williams would be a most welcome addition to the forces now building up on Java. He was lucky the ship was even there, for in the history Fedorov knew, it had been diverted to Oosthaven on the southern tip of Sumatra, where its units would act on orders to form a provisional brigade and advance north on Palembang and the vital airfields then under threat from the Japanese.
Montgomery knew the men of the 7th Division, for this was a unit he had in his corps in North Africa, and he also knew its fighting merit well. With it, and the troops he was already sorting out from Singapore, he had every confidence that he would hold Java secure.
“See here,” he said, collaring the dock master at Batavia. “Get that ship unloaded at once. What is all this dawdling?”
“But sir,” the man protested, “we’re still waiting for authorization on that one. It’s not yet on my clipboard.”
“Damn your clipboard!” Monty fumed. “Get the men to work on it this very instant. I am your authorization, and I won’t hear of any further mucking about. The Japanese will be on our backs in a hot minute, and those troops will do us no good on those ships. What if the Japanese bomb this port? They’ll be sitting ducks.Now get it done!”
Faced with the wrath of a full General, and with Montgomery’s unflinching will applied to the task, Orcades was summarily unloaded—the very day that the Japanese bombed Port Darwin. Curtin and the Australian War Cabinet were all caught up in the news, and the word sent back concerning the fate of Orcades never got through the chaos of that day.
Even Wavell had not been informed that the Orcades had debarked, and that the other flights carrying 7th Division had all altered course to Batavia. Australian officers on the scene came in to make a formal protest to Montgomery, but left that meeting knowing the meaning of yet another well turned line in the annuals of history—‘ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.’
In effect, the efficiency of Sergeant William Thornton, and the meddling intransigence of Montgomery, had effectively taken hold of the Australian 7th Division by the nose. Even while Curtin and Churchill exchanged long cables laying out arguments and counter arguments as to why the 7th Division should or should not go to Burma, it was steadily moving to Batavia, and then one more unaccountable fact would determine its destination point once and for all—fuel.
It was going to come down to the level of fuel oil remaining in the ships after their long Journey from Suez. All the strategy and high level wrangling that had pulled in heads of state as far as Washington DC when Churchill appealed to Roosevelt to pressure the Australians, would come to nothing. Strategy was now the servant of a fuel hose. Once diverted in that odd meeting of Thornton’s mindfulness and Montgomery’s iron will, the flights of the 7th Division could not easily turn about to other ports. They needed more fuel to reach Australia, and Batavia was now the best place to find it. The only other place they could land would be Colombo.