Torrance: Blitz in Malaya

By Jonathan Lunn

  From the bestselling author of the Martin Kemp series, an action adventure set in the Southeast Asian jungle as a British regiment battles the Axis powers.
 
World War II, Malaya, 1942: Charlie Torrance, a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, is plunged into the maelstrom of war after a blitzkrieg Japanese invasion. Suddenly, a sweltering but otherwise uneventful posting in the Malayan jungle becomes a living nightmare.
But when his group stumbles upon some mysterious documents, their plight takes a turn for the worse. Torrance is pursued remorselessly by the indomitable Captain Mitsumoto, who will stop at nothing to retrieve the papers.
As the British Empire crumbles amidst the mosquitos, rubber plantations and whip cracking bullets, even surviving will feel like victory . . .
Praise for the writing of Jonathan Lunn:
 
“Full-blooded action. Simply superb.” —Northern Echo
 
“A rollicking tale with plenty of punches.” —Lancashire Evening Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788634441

Jonathan Lunn

Born in London a very long time ago, Jonathan Lunn claims to have literary antecedents, being descended from the man who introduced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the Reichenbach Falls. To relax he goes for long strolls in the British countryside, an activity which over the years has resulted in him getting lost (multiple times), breaking a rib, failing to overcome his fear of heights atop dizzying precipices, fleeing herds of stampeding cattle, providing a feast for blood-sucking parasites, being shot at by hooligans with air-rifles, and finding himself trapped by rising floodwaters. He lives in Bristol where he writes full time.

Book preview

For Clare

One

Private Charlie Torrance wiped the blood from the bayonet fixed to the muzzle of his Lee-Enfield and tried to catch his breath. His heart pounded, and when he lit a cigarette, he was shocked by how much his hands trembled.

He gazed across the trail to where Archie McIntosh lay. Archie was dead. Torrance did not need to feel his pulse to check that, not with Archie’s head lying several feet from his body. The Japanese officer who had decapitated him with his sword also sprawled by the side of the trail. He was dead too: it was his blood Torrance had just wiped off his bayonet.

Something rustled in the undergrowth nearby, prompting a spasm of fear to twist Torrance’s guts. He backed between the buttress roots of one of the seraya trees soaring above him, and squatted down, trying to make himself as small as possible. He stubbed out his cigarette against the bark, cursing himself for a fool for having lit it in the first place. Not daring to breathe, he cradled the rifle’s butt against his shoulder, thumbed the safety catch forward and levelled the muzzle in the direction of the sound.

Sweat trickled into his eyes and made them sting. He had thought India was hot, until the day the troopship landed him and his comrades at Singapore. India wasn’t hot; India was balmy. Malaya was hot. Two years ago he had thought he would get used to the heat; now he knew better. It sapped the energy from you, so you barely had the strength or the enthusiasm to punch the smart alecs who said things like, ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.’ Even in the perpetual twilight below the canopy of the liana-festooned trees, the atmosphere was steamy, and his sweat-soaked khaki-drill shirt clung clammily to his back.

Through a screen of sago bushes, he saw Corporal Campbell step into view. Torrance resisted the temptation to call out to him: there might still be Japanese soldiers about, and there was no sense in giving away his position.

A stocky man with porcine eyes set in a freckled face burned brick red by the tropical sun, Campbell saw him, saw the rifle aimed at him, and raised his hands, holding his Thompson sub-machine gun above his head.

‘Steady on, Slugger! It’s me – Campbell!’ He spoke softly, as reluctant as Torrance to give away his position to any Japanese loitering nearby. The silver badge pinned to his khaki-drab balmoral above his left ear might be that of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, but Campbell’s accent was purest Clydeside.

Torrance lowered the rifle, thumbed the safety catch back on and slung it from his shoulder. ‘Wotcher, Soupy.’

Campbell scowled. ‘How many times must I tell you? Don’t call me Soupy, you cockney scunner!’

‘You stop calling me a cockney scunner, Soupy, and maybe I’ll stop calling you Soupy.’

‘But you are a cockney!’

Torrance doffed his own balmoral and ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. ‘It ain’t the word cockney I object to.’

Campbell grunted non-committally and sat down next to him. ‘Have you seen Sandy?’

‘Sandy’s dead.’

Campbell tilted his head over to one side to slap at a mosquito on his neck. ‘Are you sure?’

‘His brains are splattered across the bushes back there if that’s any indication. Jocko?’

‘Bullet through his skull. Never knew what hit him.’

Which made Torrance and Campbell the last two survivors of the five-man ‘Tiger Patrol’ Lieutenant Erskine had sent out to make aggressive contact with any Japanese troops trying to outflank them. Torrance suspected the five Japanese soldiers they had run into had been trying to do something similar.

Campbell gestured with the barrel of his Thompson at McIntosh’s corpse. ‘What happened to him?’

That was as stupid a question as Torrance had ever heard, and it deserved a stupid answer. ‘Must’ve cut himself shaving.’

Campbell crawled over to McIntosh’s corpse and went through his pockets until he found his wallet. He took out a wad of Straits dollars, was about to stuff them into his own pocket when he remembered Torrance’s eyes on him. ‘He owed me ten dollars.’

‘There’s more than ten there.’

Campbell stuffed the money into a pocket and helped himself to McIntosh’s watch. ‘I know his father,’ he explained, crawling back to where Torrance sat. ‘I’ll see to it his folks get the money and the watch, don’t you worry about that.’ He patted Torrance patronisingly on the cheek.

‘If you let me hold on to half the money, that way if one of us gets killed, at least the other can make sure his family gets half.’

Campbell did not respond to that suggestion. Instead he looked speculatively at the corpse of the Japanese officer.

‘Know his folks too, do yer?’ sneered Torrance.

Campbell scowled. ‘Well, we’re no’ doing any good out here. We’d better fall back to the plantation.’

The two of them threaded the way they had come along the jungle trail, Campbell in the lead, Torrance bringing up the rear, casting the occasional anxious glance over his shoulder in case the Japanese were pursuing them.

He wondered what day of the week it was. He knew it was the third, because the day before yesterday had been New Year’s Day, the night before – Hogmanay – celebrated with tinned ham, chocolates, champagne, and other delicacies abandoned by the NAAFI in their flight from the Japanese.

It was hard to believe that less than a month had passed since the Japanese had announced their entry into the war by dropping bombs on Singapore and Hong Kong – and some place called Pearl Harbor – while their troops landed on beaches on the north-east coast of Malaya, and poured over the border from Siam. Long overdue for a period of rest after their latest batch of bush training, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had scarcely settled into the barracks at Port Dickson before they had been ordered north to help stem the advancing Japanese tide. Since then, they had been in almost continuous contact with the enemy.

He followed Campbell through a strand of thorny palms and the two of them found themselves amongst the precisely arrayed rows of rubber trees on a plantation.

Sergeant Murray and Private Rossi crouched in a slit trench overlooking a rusty-coloured laterite estate road running between the rubber trees. ‘Where are Brown, McIntosh and Peddie?’ demanded Murray.

‘Brown bread,’ said Torrance.

‘We ran into a Jap patrol trying to work their way behind us,’ explained Campbell.

‘It’ll no’ be long before they come up the estate road in force, then,’ said Murray. ‘Soupy, get back to the transport harbour and see if you can raise Mr Erskine on the wireless. Find out how long he needs us to hold this sector for. Torrance, you can join young Jimmy in yon slit trench.’ Murray pointed to where Private MacLeod – a recent addition to the battalion – occupied a slit trench of his own.

‘Right-oh, sar’nt.’ As Campbell headed off through the trees, Torrance made his way to MacLeod’s slit trench. ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, jumping down into the trench beside him.

‘No, not at all,’ said MacLeod, a tall, gangly youth. ‘As a matter of fact, I was starting to feel a bit lonely.’

Torrance glanced across the road to where ‘Dicky’ Baird and ‘Titch’ Grant manned a Bren light machine gun in a trench of their own. If there was such a thing as a typical soldier in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Dicky Baird was it. Born and raised in the slums of Glasgow, stunted and wiry; not physically prepossessing, perhaps, but a hard man: harder than the rivets his kin drove into the hull plates of the ships built on Clydeside. Torrance had learned you could not wish to have better men at your side – or worse against you – in Waziristan before the war.

Grant saw Torrance looking at them and scowled, making a V-sign at him. Torrance thought about making an obscene gesture of his own in response, then thought better of it: about a foot taller than the average Glaswegian, Grant had put men in hospital for less. Due to a penchant for throwing redcaps through NAAFI windows, he seemed to spend the greater part of his service in various military prisons and detention barracks, but periodically the army liked to let him out. Indeed, Torrance suspected they had cut short Grant’s latest term of imprisonment just so they could let him loose on the Japanese; a move which, if not contrary to the letter of the Geneva Convention, was certainly a gross contravention of its spirit.

‘You’re no’ frae Scotland, are you?’ said MacLeod. New to the battalion, he was looking to make friends. Torrance did not want any. If life had taught him one thing, it was that friends were people who were taken away from you just when you’d got used to having them around.

‘No, I ain’t from Scotland.’

‘So how come ye joined a Scottish regiment?’

‘It was my dad’s regiment, wasn’t it?’

‘Was he Scottish?’

‘So they tell me. I never met him. He died on the Somme before I was born.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Silly sod shouldn’t’ve got in the way of a Jerry shell, should he?’ Torrance said harshly. He disliked it when other people started feeling sorry for him. He was afraid it might give him licence to feel sorry for himself, and he had not survived to the ripe old age of twenty-five by indulging in self-pity.

‘Why does everyone call you Slugger?’ asked MacLeod.

‘Regimental boxing champion, ain’t I?’

‘Aye, that’s what I thought. But when I suggested that to Sergeant Murray, he laughed.’

Before Torrance could reply, a whirring, clanking sound came from the bend in the estate road. His first thought was that it was tanks, and a frisson of fear made him shudder.

Then they came into sight around the trees about two hundred yards away: cyclists, riding four abreast in perfect formation. Cyclists dressed in olive-drab uniforms, with four-flapped havelocks hanging down from the backs of their field caps. Forty or fifty of them: a platoon at least.

‘Bicycles!’ exclaimed MacLeod. ‘Are them Japs?’

‘If they ain’t, the Tour de France is a long way off course!’ Torrance pushed the muzzle of his rifle forward and thumbed the safety catch off. Beside him, MacLeod did the same.

‘Hold your fire!’ Sergeant Murray hissed.

‘Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes!’ Torrance muttered in his posh-British-officer voice that always had the lads in stitches back in barracks. Watching the cyclists approach, he could hear them laughing and talking amongst themselves. Their rifles were tied across the handlebars of their bikes; they had no idea they were about to cycle into an ambush. Torrance was less afraid of being killed by the Japanese than that he would ruin everything by panicking and firing too soon.

The lead row of cyclists was only twenty yards away when Murray gave the order. ‘Fire!’

Torrance heard a burst from one Thompson sub-machine gun, then two, and then Grant opened up with the Bren. Not forgetting his training in the heat of the moment, Grant fired short, aimed bursts, resisting the temptation to hold down the trigger and hose the Japanese with lead. Crimson patches bloomed across their tunics, bright in the tropical sunlight, and the front row came to a halt as abruptly as if it had cycled into an invisible barrier. One man pitched headlong over his handlebars, another two fell back, arms waving almost comically over their heads, while the fourth simply tilted sideways to crash down on the road. Then the next four cyclists had careered into them. Torrance drew a bead on one, fired, saw the man next to him go down, then realised there was no point in wasting too much time aiming – all he had to do was fire into the brown of them and he was sure of hitting something. He drew back the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge with a wisp of smoke, then pushed it forward, working a fresh round into the chamber. He aimed, squeezed, felt the recoil, and reached for the bolt again. On the road, the Japanese still standing were struggling to untie their rifles from the handlebars.

In a matter of seconds, Grant had emptied his magazine: twenty-eight rounds did not last long, even with controlled, aimed bursts.

‘Change!’ he growled.

Baird left off firing his rifle to jerk out the spent magazine, slot a fresh one into the breech and then slap it firmly home. He clapped Grant on the shoulder, and picked up his rifle again as Grant resumed firing.

Torrance had emptied his own magazine. He took two five-round chargers from one of his utility pouches, slotting one into the charger bridge guide above the rifle’s breech and pressing the base of the uppermost cartridge with his thumb. The rounds slotted down through the breech into the magazine. He knocked away the empty charger, replaced it with the other, and repeated the procedure, closing the bolt to flick away the second empty charger and work a round into the breech.

He was scarcely aware of the crash of gunfire until it abruptly came to an end. There were a few seconds’ silence, broken only by the groans of the wounded. Then someone began jabbering away in a language that must have been Japanese but might as well have been gibberish for all Torrance could make of it.

No one remained standing on the road. All lay in a tangled carpet of fallen bikes and twisted limbs splashed with blood. One man tried to crawl towards the ditch on the far side of the road. A Thompson sang out; the man’s head exploded as the bullets tore through it, spattering the lalang grass with blood, brains and pieces of skull.

Something whined over Torrance’s head. They were returning fire. He remembered his first time under fire, in Waziristan; someone telling him, Dinna worry about the bullets when they whine above your head; it’s when they make a sound like a whip-crack, that’s when you need to worry. Where was the shooting coming from? He saw heads bobbing up from the ditch on the far side of the road. He aimed at one, fired, and saw the man flop back. He picked out another target but, before he could fire again, the man vanished in a cloud of rising dust as Grant swept the rim of the ditch with the Bren. Something flew from Murray’s trench – a Mills bomb – bouncing across the gravel to fall into the ditch. There was an explosion: a sudden flurry of dust and smoke, an agonised shriek and a body somersaulting through the air, legs truncated at the knees, stumps gouting blood. That was a good idea… Torrance fumbled for one of his own grenades, pulled the pin, counted to three, and lobbed it high into the air. He ducked his head down, heard the crash of the explosion, more screams…

Silence settled over the scene once again. Nothing moved on the road.

‘Is that it?’ asked MacLeod. He managed to sound disappointed.

‘What were you expecting? Dancing girls?’ asked Torrance. ‘Keep your head down and your mouth shut. They’ll be back.’

Torrance remembered the first time he had killed a man, one of the Fakir of Ipi’s ghazis in Waziristan. First there had been exultation, later a sense of shame. Now, when he stared at the corpses of the men he had killed, he felt only cold satisfaction.Bent double, Lance-Corporal ‘Primsie’ Kerr ran through the trees to crouch behind their slit trench, the single stripe on his sleeve still so new it gleamed. He considered himself a cut above his comrades because he came from Edinburgh, and apparently you got a better class of slum there than in Glasgow. No one could say that getting a stripe had changed Kerr: he had been a pompous prick before, and with a dog’s-leg on his sleeve, he was still a pompous prick. The only difference was, now he had the authority to back up his pomposity.

‘Where’s Sar’nt Murray?’

‘Over there.’ Torrance gestured towards Murray’s trench.

Kerr glanced that way, then at the corpses on the road, and frowned. Evidently the reek of cordite in the air was making him queasy. ‘Tell him orders are to pull back to echelon at once.’

‘Pull back?’ protested Torrance. ‘When are we gonna start attacking? I want to get stuck into these Jap bastards.’

‘So do we all. But the Japs have outflanked us again, so—’

‘So now we’ve got to fall back another twenty miles to prepare new positions,’ Torrance finished for him. ‘That’s bleedin’ typical, that is! We’ve held off every attack the Japs have thrown at us, and every time we do, we have to fall back because they’ve outflanked us again. How come we can’t outflank them for a change?’

‘I’ll be sure to mention that to General Percival, the next time I see him,’ Kerr said drily. He turned and hurried back the way he had come.

Torrance glanced towards the road to make sure no more attacks were in the offing. ‘Pack up the Bren,’ he called to Grant and Baird. ‘We’re pulling out.’

He made his way through the trees to where Murray and Rossi crouched in their trench. ‘What did Primsie want?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Orders are to fall back to echelon,’ Torrance told him.

‘Pull back?’ Rossi spluttered in disgust. With his short stature, crinkly black hair, dark eyes, thick black brows and dimpled chin, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the crooner Al Bowlly. A second-generation Italian, Rossi might have inherited his father’s swarthy complexion, but his accent was pure Clydeside. ‘At this rate we’ll pull back all the way to Singapore by the end of the month! Let me guess – the Japs have outflanked us again?’

Torrance nodded.

Murray sighed. ‘Never mind. Come on, shift your arses, unless you want to get left behind for the Japs.’

The three of them ran back to where MacLeod crouched in his slit trench, and gestured for Grant and Baird to join them. Then all six were hurrying through the trees. At the edge of the plantation, they squirmed through a fringe of sago bushes into the gloomy jungle beyond. Gnarly, moss-covered strangler figs made monstrous, seemingly unnatural shapes in the shadows, the trees they had grown up around and choked to death long since rotted away.

The ground became so steep they had to clamber up using their hands as well as their feet, pulling themselves up by gripping creepers. Torrance paused to gaze at the slope above him. The thick vegetation prevented him from seeing more than a couple of dozen yards.

A shot came from somewhere to his left, whip-cracking past his head. He ducked behind a stout tree trunk, breathing hard, then peered around the other side. Between the leaves of a sago bush casting stripy shadows on the jungle floor where a rare shaft of sunlight penetrated the canopy, he glimpsed a couple of figures wearing havelocks flitting between trees perhaps twenty yards away. Another rifle sang out, a bullet severing a liana climbing up the trunk he hid behind. He hastily withdrew his head.

‘Shit!’ He was amazed the Japanese had outflanked them so quickly. After the slaughter on the estate road, in any other army the men coming up behind would have pulled back, waited at least an hour or two for orders to push patrols forward. These Japs did not let up for five minutes!

He caught sight of a movement out of the corner of his eye: Murray gesturing from behind a tree higher up the slope. The sergeant waved for Torrance to come and join him. Too petrified to move, Torrance shook his head.

A rifle cracked, sending a bullet tearing through the sago bushes. Murray fired a couple of bursts from his Thompson. Torrance broke cover, hoping the shots would keep the Japanese’s heads down for a few seconds at least. Then another rifle cracked, and Murray dropped the Thompson with a cry, falling on his back. There was a hole in his knee from which blood began to run. He clutched at it as Torrance climbed past him.

‘Slugger!’ cried Murray. ‘Don’t leave me!’

Torrance hesitated, then ran back to where the sergeant sprawled.

‘Thanks, Slugger! I knew you were no’ the man to abandon a comrade. Help me back on my feet.’

Ignoring him, Torrance took Murray’s Thompson and fired a burst at the Japanese soldiers climbing up the slope below them. One of them fell with a scream, blood jetting from a wound in his neck, and the others dived for cover. Torrance slung the Thompson across his back. Going through Murray’s pockets, he found the sergeant’s grenades. He transferred one to one of his own pockets, pulled the pin from the other and lobbed it amongst the Japanese creeping towards them. It exploded with a flat crack, and dirt and smoke fountained up beneath the forest canopy, shredded leaves winking in a shaft of sunlight as they fluttered down.

Torrance went through the sergeant’s utility pouches, taking out his spare magazines and stuffing them into the pouches on his own webbing.

‘Never mind that!’ said Murray. ‘Help me up…’

‘Sorry, sar’nt. You’re going nowhere on that leg. Never mind, though, eh? You’ll get to spend the rest of the war in a POW hospital, with pretty Jap nurses to tend to your every need. See you after the war.’ He resumed climbing.

‘Slugger!’ screamed Murray. ‘Don’t leave me! Come back, you bastard!’

With Murray’s curses ringing in his ears, Torrance squeezed through a strand of thorny palms and emerged on to another plantation where three open-topped Bren gun carriers were parked. Strictly speaking universal carriers – they were as likely to be armed with Vickers heavy machine guns or Boys anti-tank rifles as Brens – the carriers were essentially little more than outsized biscuit tins with caterpillar tracks on the sides, not much longer or lower than a family saloon, albeit half as wide again, heavily armoured in front, pitifully armoured everywhere else.

Even as Torrance sprinted across to where they were parked, two of them gunned their engines and set off up an estate road with a throaty growl of their Ford V8 engines. Baird waved to him from the back of the third, motioning him to get a move on, as if he was not going full pelt already. He heard the crack of rifles behind him, bullets whip-cracking past his head to ricochet off the back of the carrier. Reaching it, Torrance hooked his hands over the coaming and scrabbled the soles of his boots against the back.

‘Pour on the coal, Lefty!’ Baird shouted over his shoulder as he helped Torrance into the back. In the driving seat, Rossi already had the engine ticking over, and now he put his foot down and the carrier lurched forward. More rifles cracked, the bullets pattering against its armour. The back of the carrier was divided into two cramped compartments by the engine housing: Baird sprawled in one and Torrance crouched in the stowage space on the other side, firing the Thompson at the Japanese emerging from the jungle behind them through the cloud of dust raised by the tracks.

Within half an hour they were back on the tarmac Trunk Road that ran all the way to Singapore, two hundred and fifty miles to the south. Manning a roadblock with two more men from Twelve Platoon, Company Sergeant Major Fraser flagged them down.

‘You’d better park up on the far side of the kampong.’ A spry, raw-boned man with bushy eyebrows, a wide mouth and a square jaw that lent him a startling resemblance to one of the statues on Easter Island, Fraser spoke with a soft Highland brogue. He wore a gas cape against the torrential rain now drumming on the leaves of the surrounding jungle. He gestured at a cluster of a dozen atap-thatched dwellings with walls of plaited bamboo strips, huddled beneath coco palms, mangoes, and betel-nut trees. Each house stood on stilts about five feet off the ground, as protection against venomous creepy-crawlies, floods, and the various other delights of the Malayan jungle.

They had parked the carriers and were climbing out when Corporal Campbell approached them. Like Fraser, he wore his gas cape against the rain. ‘You lot are billeted in this house here. Get inside and get out of those wet things. The lorries bringing your dinner will park there—’ he pointed – ‘at nineteen hundred hours, so send an orderly with a dixie. Kit inspection at oh-eight hundred hours tomorrow, so use your time well.’ He frowned. ‘Where’s Sar’nt Murray?’

‘He didn’t make it,’ said Torrance.

‘Dead?’

‘No, but he won’t be playing for Rangers next season.’

Campbell glared at him. ‘And you left him for the Japs?’

‘What else could I do? I barely got away from them myself!’

‘You gutless, selfish Sassenach bastard!’ said Campbell. ‘D’you no’ know, you never leave a man behind?’

‘Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? Pick him up and carry him on my shoulders? Who d’you think I am? Bleedin’ Superman? The Japs will take care of him. They’ve got to – it says so in the Geneva Convention.’

‘You bloody idiot! What makes you so sure the Japs are even signatories to the Geneva Convention?’

‘Well, what d’you think they’ll do to him? It’s not as if they’re total barbarians. You remember that Mr Shinoda who used to own the barber shop on Tanglin Road… he was a decent enough sort of bloke.’

‘Oh, aye, that’s the Japs for you,’ said Campbell. ‘Smiling to your face, bowing and scraping, and plotting to drive bamboo splinters up your fingernails the minute your back’s turned! What, d’you think they’re gaunae lay him on soft sheets and send Geisha girls to mop the sweat frae his brow? The poor bastard! They’re probably amusing theirsels torturing him to death even as we speak.’

Torrance felt sick at the thought. The nausea quickly gave way to anger. ‘Well, I don’t see what difference that makes. There was nothing I could’ve done, except stay and get captured with him. What would’ve been the sense in that?’

Campbell seized Torrance by the webbing straps and shoved him back against the side of one of the Bren gun carriers. ‘I wish it had been you, you selfish bastard! Next time I hope it’s you that’s wounded, that’s all I can say. I hope it’s you, and I get the chance to leave you the way you left Rab.’ He slammed Torrance back against the side of the carrier a second time, then let him go and turned on his heel, stalking off through the rain.

Torrance stood there trembling with shock and anger. Realising the others were watching him, he straightened his rain-soaked khaki shirt with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘Lucky for him he let go of me when he did. I’d’ve had him, otherwise. Hey, that was assault, wasn’t it? You lads all saw