Four Fires (78 page)

It don't make no difference, they run over their comrades' bodies, wave after wave. There's not enough of us to cover the whole perimeter and there's gaps between our various units which they find out soon enough and our crossfire don't keep them out.

We're expecting our own artillery to start hitting them any moment, but no such thing happens.

Later we find out that the

communication lines have been cut by the Japanese bombardment and, with no orders, our artillery blokes are helpless. Eventually a runner gets to them and gives them the orders. The artillery are told to bring down fire everywhere, so they give it all they've got. A total of 4800

rounds fall and now there's bodies landing with a thump in front of us.

'Soon enough the machine guns are out of ammunition, their barrels red-hot from continuous firing, and the Nips are still coming, shouting out in the dark, splashing through the mud and the water, happy to die in the name of Nippon. The machine-gunners fix bayonets same as we do and we're in among them hand-to-hand. We are outnumbered eight to one and haven't a hope in hell of stopping them.

'Did you kill any?' I ask, excited.

Tommy stops. 'It's not a question you ask a soldier, Mole.'

I bow my head. Tm sorry.'

'No, don't be. If you didn't kill the enemy, he was gunna kill you. The answer is you don't count, it's your bayonet or his, your knife or his, you do the best you can to stay alive. Killing don't really come into it, just staying alive is what it is all about.' He grins, 'Mate, when you've got yourself an enemy who don't seem to care if they die, you've got your work cut out just staying alive. We fought hard as we could and we retreated hard as we could without ever turning our backs.

'Eventually, at dawn we get the message to withdraw and by morning it is all over for the advance defence, which, of course, is us. The Japanese make one last assault before they finally halt the main attack. They've won the foothold they needed to take on the rest of the island and now need time to gather their forces.

'We withdraw to the other side of the Tengah airfield, that is, what is left of us. Our dead are now in Jap-held territory, we've had to leave them where they'd died.' Tommy sighs, 'A more sorry-looking bunch of blokes you wouldn't want to see at a school reunion. We're covered in blood and mud, some of the machine-gunners have no skin left on their palms, it's burnt off from the red-hot barrels.

'The 20th, 18th and ourselves have ceased to exist as battalions, the majority killed or wounded, or they've been cut off, routed,

wandering about in the dawn light not knowing what's hit them. I doubt we could have made up one battalion out of the lot of us. But one thing's good, there's still the six of us together under Blades Rigby. We're beginning to think we must be leading charmed lives, Malaya, now this. I'm the only one that's copped something, which is only a bloody awful headache where the fish hit the back of me neck, the other blokes are untouched.'

Tommy reaches out and picks up one of the sticks I'd cut earlier to dry our clothes and he pokes at the fire, turning the logs, bringing it to life. I get out of my sleeping bag and put a dead branch over the top of the fire so it will catch in the renewed flames.

'Remember before we went to sleep, I told you about the padre with the funny name, Wardale-Greenwood, how he helped lay on a mortar attack?'

I nod, 'I don't reckon you'd get Father Crosby doin' that, eh?'

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Tommy grins, 'Don't suppose, though you never know, he did rescue the Virgin in the fire. Well, the padre's still with us and if it weren't for him, I reckon a lot more blokes would have died. He takes no notice of the enemy fire, mortars landing, shells exploding, don't seem to matter to him, he's hopping from one wounded bloke to another, applying field dressings and comforting the dying, saying final prayers when it's needed. Then he wades up to the waist through a swamp to help get forty wounded men to safety. Reckon he should've got the VC, no risk.'

I smile to myself, Tommy's handing out VCs again.

'From the airfield we move back to Brigade HO at Bulim Village.

Much later the same day, a Captain Richardson arrives with some blokes from the 2/20th and a few machine-gunners. Poor bugger was

in charge of a forward post and didn't get the signal to move out when we did. Just about dawn, when we're in the process of getting the hell out, they get the full brunt of the final Japanese attacks and somehow they hold them out until about ten-thirty, most of it hand-to-hand combat.

Eventually the Japs withdraw and the blokes that are left, because most of them are dead, pull back to where their HQ should have been. All they see is dead bodies. The captain decides to try to make it to

Tengah airfield, a fair distance across country, hoping to find out where the commander, Brigadier Taylor, has his HQ.

'That's easier said than done. There's Jap snipers infiltrated everywhere and the enemy seems to control the intervening country. His blokes are on their last legs. Soon enough they're ambushed and Richardson breaks them up into two small groups and tells them to try and make their own way back.

'What's ahead is jungle, river and swamp, where a rifle isn't all that useful, so most of them chuck their rifles and any other kit that's heavy and just keep their bayonets. Eventually some of them, including the captain, make it to Bulim Village hours after everyone else. There's nothing said about their lost rifles and kit, they're not the only ones done that.

'Then at Bulim Village we move by truck to the base depot, where we're hurriedly formed into a scratch battalion that's got no real name. They simply call us X Battalion. There's some few of us know how to fight but the remainder are untrained reinforcements who couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. There's only about two hundred of us all up and those who haven't got rifles and kit get reissued. We're told to take a couple of hours sleep then to move back into the line.

'I can't believe my flamin' luck, a man couldn't take a prize in a one-man raffle, we've jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Like I said, we've got a bunch of no-hopers, drongos who couldn't fix a bayonet and charge if their lives depended upon it, which sooner or later it will. If I'm gunna have to fight, it would be nice to know the bloke next to me knows which end of a .303 is up!

'Having routed the 22nd Brigade the night before, the Nips now come after the 27th. Thank gawd, X Battalion isn't included with the 27th. I don't think I can take another helping of last night. Instead, we're held back in reserve.

'Poor bastards in the 27th cop the same as we done, first the shelling, and then the Japs coming at them in their hordes. They manage to hold on and repulse the first attack but their commander reckons they're in danger of being cut off. He decides to withdraw to a more defensible position about three miles to the rear. Fair enough, but that's when he makes his one big mistake that, in the end, may have cost us the battle for Singapore.

'In the 27th sector are these huge storage tanks that contain oil and aviation spirit. The brigadier decides the fuel shouldn't fall into enemy hands and he orders the cocks opened and the fuel set alight. Though he probably hasn't planned it that way, a river of fire flows to the exact spot the enemy has been trying to infiltrate and incinerates an entire Jap battalion.

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'But now comes the disaster. It seems we've made such a good job of repulsing the Japanese invasion that General Nishimura, the Jap commander, overestimates the numbers he's against and decides to call off the attack. But the flames from the storage tanks light up the whole area and Nishimura sees the Aussies retreating so he takes the initiative and continues the attack. The sector is lost.

'That afternoon, X Battalion is ordered to move into position to mount an attack. The one day we've been out of the attack, we've been instructed in weapons and kitted out and kept on our feet. It's been two days since those of us who have survived the first night's fighting have had any sleep, except for a couple of hours, and we're like zombies. The walking-dead. The bloke in charge of us is Colonel Boyes and towards sunset he's told to advance to high ground a little beyond the village of Bukit Timah, slightly further on from where a unit of Indian troops is positioned.

'It's coming on dark, we don't know the area and we stumble forward and get to the village just before dark. The whole place is up in flames and we skirt the village and come across where the Indian troops are supposed to be, only there's hundreds of dead bodies and no live Indians.

From the look of the bodies and the fresh blood, the enemy isn't that far away. There's a smell of roasted flesh in the air and I feel like puking.

We reach our designated position and we're told to dig in.'Tommy grins, Well, there's no way that's going to happen, it's now nearly three days since we've slept and the troops in X Battalion drop to the ground where they're standing and are asleep in a matter of minutes.

At least the six of us stay awake long enough to find a deep ditch and slide into it and bivouac under a rocky overhang, just in case the Japs send in a few mortars. I reckon I've never been that tired in me We. Blades Rigby says he'll keep watch. He's the only one who's got the stamina.' Tommy laughs, 'It must be the hashish. He was always chewing it in Malaya and it kept him going when the rest of us were completely rooted. He said he loved to kill the little yellow men and the ganja helped him to stay awake and get a few extra notches on his knife.

There's no denying it, he was always in the thick of the killing. I dunno how he ever made sergeant because he was a law unto himself and completely unpredictable. But if it wasn't for the knife drill he taught us, I'd have been long dead. As far as I know, knife drill don't come out of any army instruction manual neither, so where did he learn it, eh?

'There's no way a mere mortal could have stayed on guard after three days of fighting without sleep, unless he was on something. With him it was hashish or maybe something else he'd found.

He spoke fluent Malay and some of the Chinese lingo and was always talking to the locals, scroungin' information, bartering something.'

'What's hashish?'

'Hashish? It's a drug they use in the East, the resin of marijuana, which is a plant. There's lots of ways you can use it, smoke it, chew it, put it in food. In prison, some of the crims smoked the marijuana leaf when it could be smuggled in, it's much weaker than hashish, which comes from the blossom. The leaf can be rolled like tobacco into a cigarette called a roach, these days it's a joint.'

'Have you? I mean have you smoked it?'

'Yeah, makes you feel relaxed. Some blokes smoking it start to giggle a lot. If a screw finds it on you or in your cell, you get seven days solitary. The official name is cannabis.' Tommy reaches for another Turf. 'Personally I prefer these coffin nails.'

He lights up, draws back and exhales. 'Where was I?'

'You've just fallen asleep, Blades Rigby is on guard.'

'Righto. Well, I don't know how long we're asleep when he shakes me and whispers urgently,

"Japs! Wake up, Tommy!"

'The Japanese 18th Division have found X Battalion asleep, though I only know this afterwards.

The six of us just sit tight and from where we are in the monsoon ditch under the rock overhang,
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we can't see nothing. They've simply come up and bayoneted most of the blokes in their sleep.

Those who woke in time had a go but most don't have a

hope. Most are not fighting men anyway. We learned later that Captain Richardson managed to get away with a handful of troops. I reckon he should have got the VC.

'Anyway, we play possum until we hear the Japs have all gone and then we come out of hiding.

Everywhere we look there are dead Australians, some blokes left over from our battalion, not that that's a lot. They're mates you've shared a beer with. Worst thing is there are no Japanese dead. Either they've caught us completely by surprise or they've taken their dead and wounded with them. It's the perfect ambush, the whole of X Battalion caught napping.

'"Christ, I should've been fuckin' there!" Blades shouts out, real angry.

'"Remember, you were, mate, playing possum," I tell him, "And thank gawd for that!"

'"If I'd been up top, I'd have heard them coming, given a warning. Even if I'd only got two or three of the murdering sods!" The bastard's off his scone.

'What can I say? I know he's saved my life. If it wasn't for him, I would've been up top asleep. I'm getting a bit tired of Blades Rigby saving me life.

'Can't really call the Nips murdering bastards in this case. I reckon we'd have done the same if we had come across them asleep. Ambush is a part of war. I guess the sentries Colonel Boyes posted must have fallen asleep. Can't blame them neither. Anyway, he was dead as well.

'But it don't take that long to find out that the Japs truly are murdering bastards. Remember, we only found out later what they did to our wounded at Parit Sulong, bayoneting them, then setting them alight. Until now, we'd thought of them as pretty worthy warriors.

We make our way back towards Bukit Timah, using whatever concealment there is.'Tommy stops and looks at me. 'Bukit Timah isn't like a native village, it's a small town with streets marked, sort of half-native and half like one of our towns. There's a Catholic college and a post office, some administration buildings and shops owned by the Chinese that haven't been destroyed by artillery fire. We're creeping along a road named Jurong Road which is leading in the direction of the village when we come across this monsoon drain.

'There's sixteen Australian bodies lying in the ditch. They've been taken prisoner by the Japanese and they've been trussed and made to kneel above the drain. The Japanese have beheaded some of them and used their bayonets on the others. Their wrists are still tied behind their backs, some are without heads, their heads scattered willy-nilly in the bottom of the ditch like they've been kicked into it afterwards.