Larrikins in Khaki

by Tim Bowden

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘the guards we had later were not so correct.’

  When General Yamashita’s troops stormed ashore on the north-east coast of Malaya on 8 December 1941, they faced a formidable task. But his soldiers were battle-hardened, skilled in jungle warfare and highly motivated—ready to die for their emperor. Yamashita was given some 30,000 troops from Japan’s 25th Army to conquer Malaya and Singapore, although they were vastly outnumbered by the British commander Lieutenant General Arthur Percival’s combined force of 85,000 men, 70,000 of them front-line troops. Yet seven weeks later the Japanese had surged down the peninsula (grabbing bicycles and any transport they could lay their hands on as they went) and for good measure, also invaded and took Singapore in that time frame. So much for the ‘Impregnable Fortress’. Somehow 38 infantry battalions—thirteen British, six Australian, seventeen Indian and two Malayan plus three machine-gun battalions—could not stop them.

  Admittedly some Allied units lacked experience and training and others were not at full strength. It also has to be said that many of the Indian battalions soldiers’ hearts were unsympathetic to this war. In India at that time there was a strong national call for the end of British rule, and the Japanese, realising this, encouraged the Indians to swap sides, which many did, some later becoming the gaolers of their colonial masters after they became prisoners of war.

  So rapid was this advance that even robust actions to stem the tide—particularly by the Australians—were inevitably turned into strategic retreats as the advancing Japanese immediately outflanked them.

  The Japanese were the ‘yellow peril’ long feared by Australians. Towards the end of 1941 the threat of a sudden Japanese attack had brought close to reality the Australian nightmare of covetous Asiatic hordes pouring southward. Prejudice replaced military intelligence. ‘The Japanese were all half blind of course,’ Sergeant Stan Arneil remembers being told. ‘And there was this brigade major who lectured us on how the Japanese set off crackers at night time, and we wouldn’t be frightened of that. We said, “No, we wouldn’t be frightened of crackers”.’

  Gunner Cliff Moss heard the comforting story that their rifles were no good. ‘You could squeeze the bullets out like blackheads.’ That is, if the myopic Japanese were ever able to hit anyone. The reputation of the Japanese as copiers of the tinsel and the tinny from the West precluded their being taken seriously as an enemy of the full might of the British Empire and the United States. It was only among a few of the senior officers and the more perceptive of the lower ranks that some were at all conscious of the efficiency of the Japanese—and of their own vulnerability.

  The Japanese advancing down the Malaya Peninsula did not clash with the main Australian land forces until the middle of January. By then they were numerous and confident. Their cyclists, rifles slung on their backs, rode into the ambush set for them by the 2/30th Battalion at Gemas. Further east near Muar, the 2/29th Battalion and supporting gunners were soon in action. After coming under attack from probing patrols and infantry in the night, the Australians took up positions just forward of Bakri, where the road curved through a cutting.

  Lieutenant Ben Hackney was first wounded on the morning of 18 January 1942. On that occasion Japanese tanks came right into the battalion position. They were met with an outstanding performance by Sergeant Clarrie Thornton of the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment—instead of firing away as the first tank came into sight, he waited until the first five tanks were in view before he opened fire. These were followed by three more very soon after, making a total of eight tanks that were destroyed.

  Thornton was hit in the hip with shrapnel. ‘The number two bloke took over swinging the gun and with me still hobbling around, that gave us two observers, which was essential as some tanks had gone past our position and others were still coming into sight.’ The detail of the action remained vivid to Thornton:

  I was giving a lot of orders in respect of which targets to go on to. ‘Can you front him Brownie? Can you pick him up?’ Or I’d sing out to Ray Cooper, ‘Ray, keep your eye on that bloke on the right.’ He said, ‘I’ve been watching him, he’s okay at the moment.’ That sort of talk was going on at the time. And there was a hell of a din. Other tanks were firing, shells exploding and we were banging them off as fast as we could.

  When we’d finished, Claudie Brown just sat back, he was older than us, and he said, ‘Well, Thorny, I feel very proud, man. We’ve done our job. We knew we could do it if we got the chance, and luck was with us. And,’ he said, ‘we upheld the name of the old Diggers. We often wondered how we’d go. The old blokes had it on the record and we had to put it there.’ As Captain Bill Bowing said later, ‘My God, they’ve upheld the old Digger’s name today, haven’t they.’

  They were not the only Australians in that short and brutal campaign who had the Anzacs in the back of their minds.

  In danger of being overrun, the gun crew then had to make their own way through the jungle to escape. In later years Thornton recalled: ‘After our battle with the tanks at Muar, we found ourselves surrounded by the 5th Imperial Guards Division and in the confusion that followed I found myself with twelve 2/29th Battalion chaps. After several skirmishes with the Japs, we finished up behind their lines.’

  They cautiously threaded their way north along the fringe of the jungle reaching down to the road, keeping well out of sight, hoping to regroup with some of their other forces. After two days of wandering aimlessly through the jungle, they ran into an ambush of Japanese signallers. With hindsight it turned out to be a lucky break—because had they been confronted by the Japanese infantry, armed as the Australians were, they would have all been shot.

  The signallers escorted them to a village that the Japanese had captured and they spent a miserable night under guard, sweating it out tethered together in the middle of the local padang (village square). In the morning, unfed, unwashed, wounded and feeling absolutely exhausted, they were ordered by a smartly uniformed officer, who spoke perfect English though with an American accent, to get on the back of a Jap army truck that had just driven onto the padang.

  They clambered aboard as best they could and stood waiting as he looked them over quizzically. Thornton recalled what happened next:

  ‘Are you Australians?’

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘All Australians?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then hop down off the truck.’

  No one moved. We were wounded, weak and weary. We were buggered, and had just climbed onto his bloody truck.

  Then he repeated sternly. ‘Get down off the truck if you don’t want to be shot. We thought you were British and were taking you into the jungle to shoot you.’

  Never before did a group of such unfit Aussies move with such agility. Never before had they all felt so lucky to be Australian.

  Then the Japanese officer asked, ‘What battalion do you belong to?’

  ‘The 32nd,’ one of our spokesmen replied quickly.

  He whipped out his sword threateningly. ‘Now listen to me you guys, do you want your lollies lopped?’ Then with unbridled pride, he continued, ‘I am the liaison officer for the Imperial Guards Division. I lived in the United States for 16 years, I am a graduate of Washington University. Australia has six battalions in Singapore, the 18th, 19th and 20th, and the 26th, 29th and 30th. Now which one do you belong to?’

  The 29th, we said in unison, with sudden new found respect for our interrogator.

  As Thornton was the senior NCO in the party, the English-speaking officer led him off to a tent where he told him to kneel down, as he was to be interrogated by the general commanding the Imperial Guards Division. Clarrie shuddered to think how the general would have reacted had he known Clarrie had knocked out eight of his precious tanks. The shrapnel wound in his thigh was giving him hell and he knelt on the ground uncomfortably, listening to the constant rumble of a never-ending convoy of Japanese trucks as they lined up to be ferried across the river. Some time went by before th
e general arrived, wearing an impressive sword and row upon row of campaign ribbons. He abruptly asked Thornton what he did in Australia.

  ‘I was a farmer from Berrigan in New South Wales,’ I told him. Then he commanded, ‘Tell me about the roads leading from Broome to Adelaide and Sydney.’

  ‘I was a farmer in Berrigan, Sir, I’ve never been to Western Australia and I don’t know anything about the roads there.’

  He seemed to expect that sort of ignorant answer from a farmer and went on to boast, ‘See those trucks outside? We will take Singapore in a few days,’ he said pompously and snapped his fingers. ‘Then we will bomb Darwin.’

  ‘Right now the largest convoy ever to sail the ocean is on its way to Australia, and we will conquer Australia just like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers belligerently. ‘Australia has no resistance. What do you say about that?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, but my answer just blurted out. ‘You may get to Australia but you won’t take it.’

  He didn’t like it and took his sheathed sword and belted me around my head and shoulders for quite some time. When he had enough, he ordered, ‘Take him away.’

  Clarrie had a horrible gut feeling the general might just be right.

  ‘I was hustled over to Kuala Lumpur and thrust into Pudu Prison. Hungry, smelly, my wound seeping with pus, I was way, way down in the dumps. But all of a sudden life seemed ridiculously funny.’ Clarrie thought, ‘If only Mum could see me now …’

  It had never occurred to the Australians that they might become prisoners of war. The order by the British commander General Percival that they were to lay down their arms came as a complete surprise. Captain Ray Steele had been with the artillery at Muar: ‘We were absolutely flabbergasted. All of us. I can remember the reactions from the various fellows—some of them just swore, some of them threw things about, some of them were just silent and shocked. We just didn’t want it. We felt we were capable of fighting on.’

  Most of the captives waiting to meet their captors were apprehensive. They were right to worry for they were ignorant of Japanese behaviour, which was to vary greatly at those first meetings. There was, however, mutual curiosity.

  ‘It wasn’t until the next day that we actually saw our first Japanese,’ Sergeant Jack Sloan recalled. ‘What impressed me was that we were looked on as curios, and we were somewhat interested in what they looked like. They seemed like ruffians. But the front-line Japanese soldier appeared to be a fellow who realised that, like himself, we were just doing a job.’

  Japanese were soon moving among the dispirited troops looking for spoils. Corporal Tom Morris lost a cheap watch he had bought recently in Singapore for 15 shillings—‘The little Jap already had about half a dozen on his wrist.’

  In Sumatra, Private Frank Robinson learned a quick lesson in cultural compromise:

  We were treated reasonably well by the Japanese for a start, except for the fact that we had to bow to the Japanese when we met them. This was a little bit below our dignity. We didn’t like the idea of bowing to a Jap, and much to our sorrow many of us were bashed about it. We decided in the finish to forget our dignity and bow to them. We realised later that to bow, and they’d bow back, was to salute them. It was just their way of life.

  But few Australians could ever bow easily.

  Other prisoners had more violent early encounters. Private Dick Ryan, from military transport, was recovering from a broken leg when the sector was overrun by the Japanese. He experienced two extremes of their behaviour:

  I was in hospital in Singapore when the Japanese came in, the day before the surrender. I was sitting up rolling a cigarette. I didn’t want to take any notice of them, but a Japanese stood at the end of my bed and when I finished he said, ‘gimme’. I licked the cigarette paper along and gave it to him. He got me to make three more for the three other blokes that were with him. They said how lovely they were. Of course they were made of Australian tobacco. They sent me in three packets of Japanese cigarettes. That was all right. The same day Japs came in and murdered one doctor in the ward, killed the patient on the table and wounded another doctor. Can you understand that sort of business?

  It is now thought that some Indian soldiers retreating through the hospital grounds had fired on the Japanese. Assuming that the British had used the Red Cross to protect fighting troops, the Japanese took savage revenge. But there were no mitigating circumstances to excuse the behaviour of the Japanese described by Lieutenant Ben Hackney: ‘Try and imagine a gorilla gone berserk, and that sums up the treatment of the Japanese. They had no care whatsoever for anything. Bayonets, rifle butts, anything used anywhere.’

  The Japanese Imperial Guards, all six-footers, were fresh from China where no prisoners were taken. Captured at Parit Sulong after the battle at Muar, the wounded Hackney was among 110 Australians and 50 Indians who were bashed and bayoneted. Hackney, pretending to be dead even as his boots were dragged off him, was left, while those bodies which still had life in them were piled in a heap, machine-gunned, then doused with petrol and burnt.

  Two days after the surrender on Singapore, nearly 15,000 Australians and 35,000 British prisoners were ordered to march to Changi on the eastern end of the island. The seemingly endless columns of men dramatised the enormity of the defeat, and the transformation of the white man, the tuan, from guardian of empire to prisoners of the Japanese.

  Uncertain what their captors would provide at the other end of the march, men carried as much food, clothing and bedding as they could. Ray Steele said: ‘It was a kind of amble or shambles—a bit like refugees, fellows carrying everything they possibly could. As the march got long and hot they tossed stuff aside until at the end some of them arrived with very little.’

  According to Cliff Moss, there was a strong incentive to keep going. ‘The story was that if we fell by the wayside we would be shot,’ Moss said. ‘That didn’t happen, but it made a lot of people keep on walking when they would have preferred to lie down. It got pretty tough, and the Chinese along the way helped us. They’d watch out for the Japs. They were flying Japanese flags on their houses, but they were running out with drinks for us. Without them we probably wouldn’t have made it.’

  With so many troops on the road, the march ended after dark. Gunner Don Moore recalled: ‘As darkness came on us, the villages, the kampongs, were a bit more spaced. And when we were feeling a little low, our piper, Jimmy Oliver, started up. Then it was really good. We knew he must’ve been as exhausted and depressed as we were, and yet up he sounded.’

  The march had been about 29 kilometres, not far for fit men, but the prisoners were exhausted by battle, wounded, ill-fed and depressed by defeat. At Changi they lay on ground or concrete. Gunner Frank Christie wrote in his diary: ‘All rooted, slept where we could.’

  Changi, with its rolling hills of lush vegetation, views of the sea and modern barracks, had been one of the best of the British garrison bases. But now Selarang Barracks had been through a battle. ‘Everything was upside down and the place was blown to buggery,’ said Private ‘Snow’ Peat. The barracks, once the home of 900 Gordon Highlanders, was crowded with Australians whose immediate concern was food. For the first few days they lived on the rapidly diminishing stores which they had carried with them.

  Don Moore described the desperate situation:

  We went on to some very tight rations. There was just one biscuit with bully beef pasted over it for the midday meal. In the evening there was another meagre ration, some tinned vegetables smeared over a biscuit. Things were a bit tough. We were asking, ‘Can’t the cooks use a little bit of imagination? Can we get some more stuff?’ ‘Well look,’ said the major, ‘we’ve got quite a few bags of rice here. It’s been coming in for the past few weeks. Would you eat that?’ ‘Oh Jesus! What do you think you’re coming at? Of course, yes, yes, we’ll eat the damn stuff!’

  However, as Gunner Tom Dowling soon discovered, having rice and making it palatable were two separate issues:
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  As far as rice went, we had every conceivable variety that existed, unpolished rice, mouldy rice, rice full of rats and weevils, sulphur rice and rice that smelt like shit. Nothing but rice. Our cooks didn’t have the slightest idea of what to do with it. During the next four weeks we lived precariously on the results of their trial and error efforts. During this experimental period, we were subjected to all sorts of unpleasant concoctions—gritty half-cooked rice, rice burnt black, claggy masses of rice. However tasteless or unpleasant, we ate it.

  As often as not the rice turned out to be a runny, sticky, gooey mess that swirled around unattractively in their dixies. Gunner ‘Prawn’ Hennebery complained he couldn’t stomach the sight of it: ‘It reminds me of a wet dream.’

  As the days passed the cooks improved and began to understand what they had to do with ‘the confounded stuff ’. The Australians gradually became accustomed to it and for the first few weeks there was little else to eat. Tasteless though the rice was, they felt they were lucky just to have a feed and ate whatever they were given. They were all steadily going downhill, losing weight, condition and their spirits.

  Don Moore recalled an unexpected development: ‘Everyone became uncomfortably but steadfastly bound with constipation. Not just for a week, or a fortnight, but for over three weeks without a bowel motion. The doctor informed everyone that he suffered the same complaint and it was just a matter of biding their time and the problem would right itself.’

  Prawn Hennebery had other ideas.

  The Japanese paid more than lip service to the privileges of rank, and officers got much more pay than the other ranks. One of the 2/4th Anti-Tank Regiment’s senior officers, ‘Big Red’, had elected to go it alone and live on his superior officer’s pay rather than pool it with the other officers for the benefit of all. Very quickly he sullied his reputation and became extremely unpopular. His flesh still sat comfortably on his huge freckled pink frame.