“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
—Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke
Robertson Barracks already seemed fairly empty. The U.S. Marine Corps contingent had left just as the Crunch began, having been “retrograde deployed” to Hawaii. When rumors of the invasion began, all of the other tenant units at Robertson Barracks were moved to Queensland and New South Wales. Politically, it was deemed important to put an emphasis on defending Australia’s major population centers. Less well publicized was the fact that, strategically, it was seen as best to briefly “give ground” at the Top End to allow time to make a decisive counterstrike, to hit the invaders on Australia’s terms.
Australia’s newly drafted war plans included plenty of mistakes. For example, there was a misallocation of troops sent to defend Pine Gap, the joint Australian/U.S. intelligence-gathering satellite ground station center twelve miles southwest of the town of Alice Springs. The base was near the geographic central point of Australia. Pine Gap had dozens of satellite ground station dishes. Many of its antennas were enclosed in more than a dozen white domes that ranged in size from three to thirty meters. The long-term strategic importance of Pine Gap gave it unequal weight when choosing deployments. In the end, the majority of the troops sent there were shifted to fight the invaders, but initially their deployment seemed idiotic. In an e-mail to Chuck, Caleb Burroughs called the Alice Springs deployments “an enormous thumb-twiddling and navel-gazing exercise.”
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The invasion of Papua New Guinea began on the morning of February 5th. With no air cover and only three oil slicks to show where Royal Australian Navy ships had been sunk at their moorings while anchored at Port Moresby, resistance by the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) was pitiful. Their two light infantry battalions (one at Port Moresby and one at Wewak) were quickly overwhelmed by the much larger invading force. With no weapons heavier than 81 mm mortars, they were no match for Indonesia’s assault troops.
Landing first at Milne Bay, the Indonesians quickly set up a base and with several subsequent landings soon controlled all of the cities and major roads in Papua New Guinea. The three HMPNGS patrol boats were quickly sunk and their two Landing Craft Heavys (LCHs) were captured. The only two operational PNG aircraft—a CASA CN-235 transport and a UH-1H Huey helicopter were both intentionally destroyed by friendly fire to avoid having them captured by the advancing Indonesian troops.
Papua New Guinea’s Firearms Act of 1978 had mandated that all pistols and “high-powered firearms” (which included nearly all rifles and shotguns, except for air rifles) be registered. Seizing the registration records was at the top of the Indo-Malaysian Army’s priority list. Within a week, they had disarmed the populace almost completely. A handful of registered gun owners had disappeared, along with their guns. They became the focus of a manhunt that offered nearly twenty ounces of gold (payable in ten Tola bars) for information leading to the death or capture of each of the fugitives.
The Indonesian press hailed the early morning hours of February 5th as Heroes Night while the Aussie media compared it to the December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack, calling it the Night of Infamy.
The surprising effectiveness of the attacks defanged both the Navy and Air Force and turned the Indonesian invasion into a conventional ground war with very little air power involved.
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When news of the EPA monitor bombs became public, it caused a near hysterical panic. The hundreds of genuine air monitors were removed by bomb squads with much scrutiny and covered by television news crews in great detail. It was learned that most of the Indonesian agents who had infiltrated the EPA left the country before the coordinated attack. Just one of them was captured, put on trial, and given a life sentence. The outcome of his trial triggered many vocal public protests, calling for reimposition of the death penalty for mass murder.
The months following the attacks brought more bad news for Australia. In March, HMAS Melville was sunk in the Coral Sea, and in May the frigate HMAS Te Kaha was sunk at the mouth of the Bay of Carpentaria. Both ships were defeated with repeated strikes by Chinese-made C-705 missiles launched from the Indonesian Navy’s fast missile boats KRI Clurit and KRI Kujang. In both engagements, the missiles were launched from a distance of more than thirty-five miles. In the three weeks before she went down, HMAS Te Kaha had sunk six Indonesian ships, mostly cargo vessels.
The losses of Australia’s two remaining warships were crushing blows to morale in Australia. Aside from a few civilian cargo and pleasure vessels that were hastily fitted with missile launchers and torpedo tubes, Australia had no significant naval power. While large numbers of civilian aircraft had been purchased or donated to the RAAF, most of them weren’t useful other than as spotter planes or light transports.
One defeatist Tasmanian journalist compared the sinking of HMAS Te Kaha to the fictional sinking of the British ironclad torpedo ram Thunder Child, in H. G. Wells’s 1898 alien invasion novel, The War of the Worlds. He asked, “What was the difference between the Martian’s heat ray and the Indo’s missile technology? Only that one of them was fictional. Nothing now stands between us and the invaders.”
Watching the parade of bad news on television, Alvis Edwards became increasingly angry, both at the Indonesians and at the lack of preparedness shown by his own government. The most telling details came in confessions from captured Indonesian saboteurs. They revealed that the target list for the 786 Heroes included not just RAAF aircraft at Amberley, Edinburgh, Richmond, Tindall, and Williamtown, but also telephone networks, bridges, power generation stations, and refineries. They had even prepared to poison civic water supplies.
The telephone networks were both soft and hard. The soft attacks were made via hacks on telephone software. The largest number of hard attacks involved thermite incendiary collars on cell phone towers with timer igniters smuggled via diplomatic pouch. The bulk aluminum and iron oxide powder to make the thermite were purchased locally and aroused little suspicion. There were also thermite and explosive attacks on most long-haul military communications (multichannel) shelters. Alvis later heard that some older Australian Army Reserve RATT rigs were overlooked and later proved to be crucial in providing military communications across the vast expanses of the Australian continent.
Alvis and Vivian had a long talk about the recent events, and they decided that their frustration would be relieved only if they did something to get involved with the war effort. “There has to be something we can do, to pitch in. I think I should ask about volunteering with a weapons contractor,” Vivian said.
Alvis nodded. “Yes, please do. We may be too old to be fighters on the front lines, but we can still do something to do our bit.”
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Following the demoralizing sinkings of Australia’s last two RAN ships, the Indonesian Navy began some daring nighttime raids, landing Pembebasan Kerombakan Komando (PKK or “Liberation Demolition Commando”) teams and shelling Australian coastal locations, often without any substantive opposition.
Their naval gunfire targets were coastal airports, refineries, radar installations, bridges, port facilities, and a few selected factories. The shells were mainly fired from the 4.5-inch guns on their seven Van Speijk class Dutch-built frigates. These seven frigates were 113 meters in length and had 120-man crews. They all had their original Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers replaced by C-802 missiles from China, and the original Sea Cat anti-aircraft missile launchers replaced by Simbad (Mistral) launchers from France.
Most of their nighttime approaches were feints, designed to un-nerve the Australian defenders. These feints usually ended three to twenty miles from shore with the Indo ships veering off. A few pressed on close to shore, and the shelling commenced. In one instance what looked like a feint was actually an attack: After an Indonesian Klewang class trimaran had veered off, it fired two C-705 missiles—one each at a pair of tankers anchored at the Bulwar Island Refinery, sinking both of them in spectacular blazes. These composite-hulled trimarans were particularly feared because the 63-meter ships each carried eight C-705 missiles and were purposely built for stealth. The trimarans were also fast, with a top speed of thirty-five knots.
One much-publicized night, the Indos risked staying until dawn, repeatedly shelling the BP Kwinana Refinery on the shore of Cockburn Sound near Freemantle in Western Australia. This was Australia’s largest oil refinery, with a capacity of 138,000 barrels per day. Ava Palmer heard about this event firsthand in a telephone conversation with her grandmother, who lived just one block off the beach at Freemantle. Her grandmother described it as a night of intense fear. Sirens wailed all night. The concussion of the secondary explosions at the refineries could be felt and rattled windows up to fifteen miles away. The glow of the fires at the refineries could be seen from twenty-five miles away. Ava later learned that the lengthy shelling took the refinery off line for nearly a year.
The main goal of the Indo raids was to bluff the Australian military into moving their field artillery and few remaining air assets to defend cities on the east and west coasts rather than on the north coast, where invasion was most likely. Ironically, the 8th/12th Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery, normally headquartered at Robertson Barracks near Darwin, had all of its 155 mm guns defending Brisbane when the Indonesians invaded.
Australian military planners still had doubts about Indonesian intentions, and they had gaps in their knowledge of the enemy’s order of battle and transport capability. There was also still plenty of turmoil at home as economic adjustments were made to adapt to the post-Crunch world. This would be a “come as you are” war, and Australia was far from fully ready.