FIGHTING ON TIMOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 763, 5 March 1954, Page 12

FIGHTING ON TIMOR

INDEPENDENT COMPANY, by LieutenantColonel Bernard J. Callinan, D.S.O., M.C.; William Heinemann, New Zealand price 19/-. HE Australians went to Timor in December, 1941, to prevent airfields ; falling into Japanese hands from which the enemy could bomb the harbour at Darwin, 500 miles away. In Dutch Timor a weak battalion was overrun in four days by 5000 Japanese; in Portuguese Timor the 2/2 Australian Independent Company, 327 strong, a (continued on next page)

specially trained commando unit, VES ried some 6000 Japanese for 12 months before it was eVacuated. Reinforced in September, 1942, by the 2/4 Independent Company, the Australians killed 1500 Japanese at a cost of 40. Their tactics were simple: hide, harass, ambush, disperse. They did not try to hold ground. Platoons made audacious hit-and-run raids on Japanese posts; their patrols ambushed enemy patrols and shot up their convoys. It was two months before the ‘company’s home-made wireless set could © make contact with an unbelieving Australia. They were months without quinine,’ and there were fewer than 20 in the company who did not get malaria. They were often hungry. But please don’t think of them as tagged guerrillas cowering in the jungle. This book shows them as an aggressive force in wireless communication with .Australia, supported by aircraft, Re oes and reinforced by ship, manning. at one stage a 60-mile front linked by 25 wireless stations, and with a hospital, and reinforcement training depot at its base. The credit for much of this must go to 2/2 Company’s courageous and efficient commander, Callinan, who for the last two months on the island commanded the whole force and carried out successfully a difficult evacuation made necessary through enemy weight of numbers and native

treachery,

W.

A.G.