The saviour of Wau

In January 1943, outnumbered Australian forces in the highlands of New Guinea fought a desperate battle against Japanese soldiers to protect a vital Allied airstrip. Historian David Sutton details the battle of Wau in the latest issue of Wartime.

Captain Wilfred Holden Sherlock is often credited as being “the saviour of Wau”: the 34-year-old was killed during the fighting, and was posthumously Mentioned in Despatches for gallant and distinguished service. 

Born in 1908 to Harold and Olive Sherlock in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, Wilfred Sherlock attended Geelong Grammar School and Trinity College, where he was prominent in rowing and athletics.

When the Second World War began, Sherlock – known as “Bill” – was a grazier with a property at Coleraine, 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. He enlisted in the Second Australian Imperial Force in November 1939 and was given the non-commissioned officer rank of sergeant. By January 1940, he had been commissioned as a lieutenant with the 2/6th Battalion.

The 2/6th Battalion was sent to the Middle East, where it undertook training in Palestine and Egypt. Sherlock became ill with appendicitis in August, but recovered in time to embark with his unit on its first campaign, against the Italians in eastern Libya, in December 1940. Its first battle was fought at Bardia in early January 1941, and resulted in heavy casualties. The battalion fought again at Tobruk a few weeks later, and finished its activities in Libya by providing garrisons for Barce and Benghazi.

The 2/6th went on to fight in Greece and Syria in 1941, during which time Sherlock was promoted to captain. After leaving the Middle East in March 1942, en route to Australia the unit was diverted to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) with the rest of the 16th and 17th Brigades, and it defended the island from possible Japanese attack between mid-March and mid-July.

The 2/6th finally disembarked in Melbourne in early August 1942 and a little over a week later, Sherlock married Elaine Knox-Knight, the youngest daughter of the late Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Knox-Knight, who had commanded the 37th Battalion in the First World War before being killed in action in France in 1918. Their time together was brief, as Sherlock left for New Guinea in October.

The 2/6th met the Japanese in battle for the first time in January 1943 at Wau. The airstrip at Wau was vital to the Allied strategy of winning the remaining Japanese-held coastal positions and disrupting the enemy’s south-west operations.

Sherlock’s A Company was sent to Wandumi village, about 7 kilometres to the west, to cut off a track that the enemy were using to infiltrate toward Wau. At 4am on the 28th of January, the weakened company of 70 men – along with 22 commandos of the 2/5th Independent Company – came under heavy machine-gunfire.

Private Leonard Weeks was with Sherlock when the attack began: “They belted us with machine-guns and mortars,” he reported. “[I]t was on for young and old.”

For the next 24 hours the Australians would fend off two battalions of Japanese infantry, about 1,500 men attempting to cross the ridge and take Wau. At a critical point in the battle, Sherlock ordered the men to fix bayonets and led them forward to restore a key position. As darkness fell he pulled his men back along the ridge, but with a swarm of Japanese troops continuing to attack, he later led his battered command forward again, down Slippery Ridge to the flooded Bulolo River.

Captain Sherlock was fatally hit by a machine-gun burst near a makeshift log-bridge over the raging torrent. Soon after, transport planes carrying more than 800 vital reinforcements began arriving at Wau and the threat of the enemy assault abated.

The heroic stand of the troops led by Sherlock had delayed the Japanese attack on Wau by a crucial 36 hours. Sherlock, who was killed on the 29th of January, is referred to in the diary of the 2/5th Independent Company as the “saviour of Wau”. The commanding officer of the 2/6th Battalion wrote in the unit diary: 

A serious situation which would have probably led to the loss of Wau and the valley was averted by the splendid stand of A Coy under Captain WH Sherlock (killed). This stand enabled reinforcements from Port Moresby to be landed at Wau ... Consideration of time and space was bad, it was only Sherlock’s effort early on 28 January that averted disaster.

Captain Sherlock was 34 years old.