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.