As she turned to fall off to the north, Tromp got in one good hit on the bridge of Oshio, inflicting a number of casualties and temporarily shaking that destroyer badly enough to cause the torpedoes it had just fired to miss badly. Misery loves company, and the American destroyers Stewart and Edwards were inshore of the action near in the vicinity of the damaged Tromp, now attended by the US destroyer Pillsbury. The four allied ships suddenly found themselves under attack by the two newly arriving Japanese destroyers, which ran right between the two groups in a brazen attempt to decide the battle then and there.
With the two sides passing in opposite directions, the Japanese destroyers were about to run a dangerous gauntlet of fire from two directions. It was a fast and furious gun duel, but this time the two undamaged US destroyers Pillsbury and Edwards, acquitted themselves by putting accurate and damaging fire on the lead Japanese destroyer, Michishio. Tromp joined the action and the Allies riddled the ship with hits that would kill 13 and leave another 83 of her 200 man crew wounded, and the ship itself foundering, and nearly dead in the water.
Once the ships were clear of each other, the darkness folded her cloak over the scene, and the gunfire ended. Neither side wanted any more of the other, and the Arashio maneuvered to position herself to take her damaged sister ship Michishio in tow. That ship was so badly damaged that it would have to be towed all the way back to Japan. Oshio would be laid up for at least six weeks with extensive repairs required on her bridge, but the other two Japanese destroyers suffered only minor damage. They could claim a tactical victory in having faced down a vastly superior Allied fleet, while successfully shielding the final stages of the embarkation of the Kanemura detachment at Sanur.
An hour or so after the guns had fallen silent and the smoke cleared, nature intervened with a hard driving rain. It was the kind of weather that would always halt any active operations by Allied forces, the darkness alone often serving to prompt them to settle quietly into defensive positions. For the Japanese, however, it was perfect fighting weather. They would use the cover of darkness and rain to steal up from the shoreline and through the groves of trees towards the airfield at Denpasar.
There they would find the place defended by a company of irregulars in an outfit known as Korps Prajoda. It was a native contingent, 600 strong, recruited from the local population. While mostly armed with spears instead of rifles, and officered by only a few Dutch regulars, the company at the airfield was backed up by a few old armored cars. Far to the north, the main body of this force would defend, stupidly, at the coastal town of Singaradja. The Japanese had long ago written that site off as a potential landing point due to the steep rocky shoreline in the area. Furthermore, it was the airfield they really wanted, and that is where they attacked with the full battalion now safely ashore.
Soon the natives of Korps Prajoda would be facing the veteran Japanese troops that had already fought and won in the grueling battle for the Philippines. It was no contest. The airfield fell that night, and little more than a week later, two companies of the Kanemura detachment would sweep the island and overcome the meager resistance of the remaining Korps Prajoda “troops” at Singaradja.
So it was that with no more than a single pinky on the hand of the Japanese 48th Division, just one battalion, the valuable airfield on Bali was delivered into their hands. They had done this while Montgomery was still busily sorting out the haphazard arrival of his troops from Singapore. With that airfield secured, the Japanese would prepare to move air units there to support the next stage of the attack on Java.
That same night that part of the plan would swing into motion. General Takeo Ito would take in the veteran 228th Regiment of the 38th Infantry Division, which had taken Hong Kong earlier, intending to seize the vital bases on Timor. Five ships would carry the regiment. Miike Maru, the largest ship at 12,000 tons, held the regimental HQ and support units. Africa Maru carried the 3rd Battalion, Zenyo Maru the 1st Battalion, Yamamura Maru the 2nd Battalion, with 1st Mt Artillery aboard Ryoyo Maru. With a force so small, the loss of any single ship could be disastrous, but the recent action at Badung Strait gave them confidence, and the little invasion fleet would be well covered.
This same force had just defeated a small combined Australian Dutch force on Ambon Island to the north, and now it would face a similar defense for the attack on Timor. To put the scale of the operation in perspective, Timor was an island roughly twice the size of Crete in the Mediterranean, some 340 miles long and 90 miles wide at its greatest point, compared to the 150 mile length of Crete. Its land mass would exceed the total of all seven of the Canary Islands, which had been fought over so bitterly in recent weeks. Yet to conquer an island of this size, with nearly a million native residents, the Japanese were sending a single regiment, three battalions, and the Allies were defending with even less.
If Prime Minister Curtin clearly perceived the importance of that island to operations then underway, the units and equipment Australia sent to defend it belied that assessment. In fact, the troops did not even have a reliable radio link from Dili to Darwin. Curtin’s problem was that all of his core veteran fighting units had already been sent overseas, and the British always seemed to find one place or another where they were desperately needed. The rest of the Australian Army was ill equipped, barely forming and largely untrained. There were also many other places under threat, New Guinea and Rabaul being uppermost on the list. So the only forces that could be found were small ad hoc battalions given the code names Sparrow, Lark, and Gull. These three little birds flew out to face the might of the Japanese Army, but they could be no more than a brief delaying force.
Lt. General Sturde, Australia’s Chief of Defense, warned against this policy, seeing it as a “penny packet” dispersion of otherwise valuable battalions. What he wanted was a concentration of force in Australia, and was much behind Curtin’s insistence on recalling home the expeditionary divisions. His misgivings were soon proved correct when Lark Force went to Rabaul, where it arrived just in time to be overwhelmed and captured by the Japanese there in Operation R. Gull Force had already been met and defeated on Ambon by the same troops now coming to Timor. The last bird on the wire was a scrappy band of hearty defenders in Sparrow Force, which was also augmented with a company of Commandos that would prove particularly troublesome to the Japanese.
Elsewhere, Australia’s real birds of prey, the tough, experienced divisions now en route from the Middle East, were still mostly on the sea. The Eagles and Hawks were coming, but the question remained as to whether they could get there soon enough to matter.
Chapter 12
The landings at Timor were as audacious and brilliantly conceived as any of the other operations Japan had carried out. Utilizing a remarkable economy of force, the Japanese would send two battalions south of Kupang in a surprise landing, and then move north to attack the port. A third battalion would land near Dili in the northeast. These were the only two locations with airfield and port facilities worth having, and if controlled, the remainder of the island was largely irrelevant.