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 many 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.