The Final Battle, Part 2

Mitchell pointed to a ridge and he said, “Let’s get over that ridge,” and we’ve got some cover but we didn’t know what was on the other side. Well he looked at his map again and he spotted Mount Butler and he said, “Now let’s go down this valley and we’ll find A-Company over there somewhere.” We met up with them about 10 o’clock in the morning and a part of A-Company had already been up Mount Butler and had been driven off, that’s where Osbourne was and we met them on a ridge overlooking the Tai Tam reservoir and when you looked over the edge you looked across at the red sandy soil on the other side of that water, there was thousands of Japanese over there and unknown to us we had hundreds of Japanese below us and we were on a ridge and grenades came over and we threw grenades back and some of our grenades came back at us and there was no primers on them, that’s when we found out that some of them weren’t primed. And I guess about four o’clock Major Gresham, the position was hopeless and Major Gresham called the officers over and they decided we would pull back down the valley to get back to Wong Nai Chong to D-Company, we didn’t know what was behind us and we started out and called in the Brens that were out on the edges of the sections and we lost Charlie Smith on one Bren gun and his second man, the man that put the magazines on for him and we ended up, we left that area and we went back towards Wong Nai Chong Gap and two of the men were carrying Captain Tarboth, Lial Tarboth, he had been wounded, stomach wound and he was losing a lot of blood and he had told them then, he said, “Put me down on these rocks,” he said, “I’m not going to make it and I’ve got my revolver if I need it.” And they left him.