Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

This year, on ANZAC Day 2025, I’m especially remembering William John Sheehan WX12583 (“Jack” to his family).
For a full year during 1942 Jack served with the 2/2 Independent Company, a commando unit of the Australian army, behind Japanese enemy lines in East Timor.
This unit of about 500 men, with the vital aid of East Timorese villagers and Portuguese colonists, conducted intensive guerilla warfare against a Japanese force more than 10 times its size. That operation was the longest special forces campaign conducted by any nation during WW2.
Jack enlisted in Perth in May 1941, at age 32. Born in Sandstone, Western Australia, he previously lived and worked around the Meekatharra mining and pastoral district, where he was known as a heavyweight boxer.
After basic training in Western Australia, Jack volunteered for the 2/2 Independent Company, a new unit manned largely by Western Australians selected for their hardy and independent dispositions.
The independent companies were an initiative of Winston Churchill to create irregular army units capable of conducting guerilla-style warfare, inspired by the Afrikaner commandos of the Boer War.
After a long trip in June 1941 on crowded troop trains from WA to Melbourne, the 2/2 was trained at a secret base at Tidal River, on Victoria’s Wilson’s Promontory. One of the Independent Companies organising officers was Captain F. Spencer Chapman, a British officer who went on to famously lead “stay behind” guerilla teams on the Malayan Peninsula following the Fall of Singapore in 1942.
After 2 months’ intensive training, the 2/2 was transferred to Darwin from Victoria via an arduous train and truck journey.
Jack’s unit, as part of the multi-national “Sparrow Force,” was sent by sea to resist Japanese expansion into Portuguese East Timor and Dutch West Timor. The Allied and Japanese intervention into the ostensibly neutral Portuguese territory of East Timor was controversial at the time.
Embarkation for Timor from Darwin was on 8 December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour, and two months before the bombing of Darwin and the Fall of Singapore.
Sparrow Force was soon largely overrun by Japanese forces, with the majority being obliged to surrender. However, the 2/2, which resisted Japanese landings in Dili, the East Timorese capital, evaded surrender and retreated into the hinterland of East Timor, from where it continued fighting from bush camps.
The unit lost communication with its Darwin headquarters and was posted “missing” for two months. Famously, communication was restored using a patched-up radio, dubbed “Winnie-the War-Winner” and resupply was resumed by ship from Darwin, with many travails.
Initially, the 2/2 fought very effective guerilla actions, in which they terrorised the Japanese troops, severely limiting their freedom of movement. The unit was credited with keeping large numbers of Japanese troops out of the critical battles for the control of the New Guinea and Solomon Islands.
Jack’s main weapon was the Thompson Submachine Gun. The brutal lethality of this powerful short-range weapon when used in combat, by his own account, shook him to his very core.
Eventually, however, the Japanese were gaining a greater foothold, at the expense of the East Timorese people, and the 2/2 was withdrawn in mid-December 1942 in a superbly executed retreat by sea. However, the abandonment of the East Timorese who had supported them in their fight against the Japanese, was an act which haunted the 2/2’s soldiers for the remainder of the their lives.
Back in Australia, Jack and many of his compatriots were hospitalised to remedy the intestinal parasites and other afflictions incurred by their living rough in East Timor, and then given home leave.
From mid-1943, while the 2/2 moved on to fight in New Guinea, Jack served mainly with the 1st Australian Commando Training Battalion, particularly at the big Canungra jungle warfare training base in southern Queensland, which still operates today. Australian and US troops, destined for the fighting in the Pacific war, were rotated through the base. Jack, a life-long "two-up" ringmaster, conducted two-up games behind the base store, after work was finished. He said these games were very popular with the troops!
In April 1945, Jack was posted to the Z Special Unit, a joint Allied special forces covert operations unit. In June, he was flown from Australia into the big Allied base on Morotai Island, from where he acted as a “cargo-master” on US bomber aircraft attacking Japanese installations around the oil town of Balikpapan in eastern Borneo. After dropping their bombs, the aircraft would fly on into the interior of Borneo, where Jack oversaw the parachuting of supplies and personnel to Z Special units operating with native Dayak teams against the occupying Japanese (I've since heard that the cargo-masters were required to be physically strong men to be able to manhandle the equipment to be parachuted, which fits perfectly with Jack.)
Later, Jack landed near Balikpapan with a reconnaissance team. From vantage points inland, they ”spotted” for the intense naval and air bombardments of the Balikpapan area preceding the large-scale Australian amphibious landings of Operation Oboe Two, which secured the town and port.
After the Japanese homeland surrender on 15 August, Jack was flown back to Australia in October 1945, and discharged in January 1946.
Such was the operational secrecy surrounding Z Special Unit’s activities, certain parts of his military records are marked “delete all references,” reportedly by order of General Blamey, the Australian Army Commander-in-Chief.
After his war service, Jack, and his wife Mona, settled in Kalgoorlie. There, they raised a family of seven, and where Jack, while running a firewood business, continued his lifelong passion with the Kalgoorlie two-up school, which is still operated today by his sons and grandson Jack.
I was fortunate to get know Jack, my father-in-law, in his later years and hear first-hand some of his war stories. I remember him as a tall, plainly and warmly spoken man of great presence.
His nephew Wayne Lamotte and his son Danny Sheehan wrote of Jack’s war exploits in their published book “Heads and Tails. The Story of the Kalgoorlie Two-up” (Self-published 1985 ISBN 0-9589443-0-X) and Wayne’s “Around the Blue Laminex Table. My Memories of Kalgoorlie” (Self-published 2022 ISBN 978-0-646-86113-5). Jack is also remembered in the several published histories of his army units and campaigns.
Australia’s WW2 Independent Companies are today recognised as the “grandfathers” of today’s professional special forces, which operate as the “pointy end” of Australia’s involvement in modern conflicts.