Posted on 11/03/2011 3:14:23 PM PDT by naturalman1975
JUST before midnight on April 11, 1945, a heavily armed navy patrol boat launched four folding kayaks near an island called Muschu off the north coast of New Guinea.
The "fold boats" contained eight members of the mostly Australian top-secret "Z" Special Unit whose 24-hour mission, codenamed Operation Copper, was to chart the extent of Japanese defences and capture a prisoner for interrogation.
Sapper Edgar "Mick" Dennis, from Maroubra, was the only survivor of the ill-fated operation. Yesterday, Mr Dennis, 92, was reunited with two crew members of the boat known as Harbour Defence Motor Launch (HDML) 1321.
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"They were hunting me. Every time they got close I would knock the first few over and go bush," Mr Dennis said. He mounted a one-man guerrilla campaign, killing dozens of Japanese troops before he decided to paddle back to the mainland on a gangway plank he had stolen.
The plank became waterlogged and after 10 hours of swimming alongside it, menaced by the unmistakable shape of sharks beneath him, he washed ashore on the New Guinea coast and resumed his one-man war.
"I am still a bit windy of the salt water," he said.
Mr Reynolds described Mick Dennis as a "soldier superb".
"If he was not the soldier he was, he could not have survived," he said.
When Mr Dennis emerged from his ordeal he still had three full magazines of ammunition and had fired just 80 rounds. "Everything I aimed at I hit and I killed about 20 and wounded a lot more."
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytelegraph.com.au ...
Note the sleeve insignia of Sub Lieutenant Smith in the centre. They indicate he was a reservist - part of the 'wavy navy' in the parlance of Commonwealth forces because of the shape of the sleeve lace (Royal Australian Naval Voluntary Reserve of RANVR in his case). I just mention it because sometimes people aren't aware of the contributions reservists can make and have made in war. I like to point it out when I have a chance.
Wow.
Thanks.
We don’t go looking for fights, whether we’re Aussies, Brits, Americans, or any others on the side of God and Liberty for all. We just give ‘em hell ‘til they whine.
I’ve never heard of this man, or this mission. Why were they risked with so little of the war remained?.
I’ve never heard of this man, or this mission. Why were they risked with so little of the war remained?.
April to August was an eternity....even FDR probably was still feverishly studying the mainland Nippon assault.
Understand that at the time much of New Guinea was Australian territory - ceded to Australia after the First World War.
If Hawaii had fallen to the Japanese, do you think America would have readily stood back and said: “We’ll let the Japanese hold on to it - after all the war will be over in six months?”
This was Australian soil in the hands of an enemy. We fought to get it back.
There was also no guarantee that even if their home islands fell and the Japanese Empire surrendered that these isolated outposts would all surrender as well. As it turned out the Japanese forces on New Guinea did surrender to allied forces - but not until a week after the surrender of Japan as a whole. We planned for the possibility we’d have to take the islands back by force - and there were still over 13,000 Japanese troops in New Guinea at the wars end. They would have been overrun by allied forces, but they could have killed a lot of our people if they’d chosen to resist and reconnaissance missions like this one was intended to improve the odds in our favour.
Japanese surrender at Wewak, New Guinea, 13th September 1945.
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