by Tim Bowden
Our old guards that ill-treated us were taken away and new guards brought in. The Japanese, when they knew it was all over, probably wanted to avoid incidents. The Australian attitude, I think, is that you can’t kick a dog while it’s down and they looked so beaten and so subservient that we couldn’t do anything to them. But if it had been the ones that ill-treated us, we probably would have been into them. (Eddie Henderson)
Those Australians who did attempt to wreak vengeance were looked down on by their comrades. Ray Myors was still in Thailand when the news of the surrender broke:
We were down at the bank of the river in Bangkok and this particular fellow and a couple of his mates were a little the worse for wear from drinking lao—that’s the local brew of wine spirits, which was all that was available. When he saw this party of Japanese coming across the river in a canoe about 20 feet long, this fellow—without any assistance from anyone—just swam out in the river and tipped their boat over and then, one after another, held a Japanese underwater until he drowned the lot. He got his fair share of being sent to Coventry because we didn’t agree. But there were other isolated incidents where a Japanese was a bit presumptuous with his attitude and a bloke would drop him. Of course, that is very natural, but there was no taking up arms and slaughtering people, or anything of that nature.
Gordon Maxwell, who was a prisoner in Japan at the time, recalled: ‘One of our fellows did catch one of our Jap guards and put him in the guard room in the little solitary confinement cell that we used to be banged up in, for a couple of days. But the novelty wore off and he just let him go.’
The end of the war came more quickly than the Allies had expected. General Douglas MacArthur was determined that no local commanders would take the surrender of the Japanese before he accepted the formal surrender in Tokyo Bay. The prisoners in the camps waited impatiently for food, medicine, news, fellow countrymen and transport home. In Japan the Australians gradually began making excursions from their camps, foraging for food and delighting in their freedom. After a fortnight the prisoners had a new delivery service from the Allied air force. According to Hugh Clarke:
Well the first time they dropped, it was a terrifying experience because we were in amongst big pine trees. We saw these B-29s fly over very low, they had the bomb bays open and we could see all the tucker and even the crew looking out. They circled the camp a few times and then came over again and made the drop. Each food container consisted of two 44-gallon drums welded together, and they dropped them with coloured parachutes, red, blue and green. As we looked up, the parachutes opened with a jerk, half these drums broke off and came hurtling down into the camp. I got my arms around the trunk of a tree. The medical orderly in the camp was an American. He got hit on the head with a case of Spam and was killed instantly. There were broken legs.
Former POWs of the Japanese who were interviewed for the ABC series Prisoners of War: Australians Under Nippon and historian Dr H.N. ‘Hank’ Nelson’s book with the same title, have vivid recollections of those times:
Another American was standing up with his arms folded. The lid of a drum buried into his chest, cut both his arms off and killed him. (Dave Runge)
These two double drums came down and they described beautiful arcs very, very slowly. We rushed down, because we weren’t going to have the Japs get any of this, to find that the control room of the mine we’d been working in had been tastefully decorated and completely ruined by chocolate and tomato juice. (Don Noble)
They had boots, clothing, chocolate, flea powder, all sorts of stuff in the one drum, and when they came down they just crunched the whole lot up. Boots were permanently distorted—you couldn’t get them on. Cigarettes, without being broken, were compressed to about an inch long. Anyhow, poor little Japanese kids came up and got onto some of the chocolate. Later on they went back and started eating flea powder and chocolate and everything. The kids were nearly half dead. (Jim Richardson)
In his book, Hank Nelson wrote:
The parachute drops were both lifesaving and deadly. In Borneo, Thailand, Java and Japan prisoners were killed as excited men ran out into the open and drums broke away to become lethal. In Manchuria, a Chinese man, stunned by falling fruit cans, was lucky. He was just left ‘fruit salad happy’. The ‘Biscuit Bombers’, as they were called, also introduced the prisoners to some of the technological changes that had taken place in the outside world. Among the diverse products of the consumer society that came tumbling down was DDT insecticide powder. The men pondered its use, then dusted their tatami sleeping mats. The fleas, as new to the insecticide as the prisoners, bounced in the air and were dead when they hit the floor.
With their food supply secured, the prisoners in Japan begin making forays further afield into town and country. Some prisoners shifted from indulgence to anarchy.
‘It was about two months before we were evacuated from Japan,’ Ray Parkin remembered. ‘There were constant warnings coming over the radio to tell us to stay put and stay off bootleg grog. There were a few fellows died of that. Also a lot of fellows were hitching rides all over Japan—getting onto aircraft, and all sorts of transport. Some were killed as a result. There were a lot of aircraft accidents.’
Don Moore was one of the fellows having a good look around:
Then we started to go out for walks. We got a little more venturesome when we got fatigue uniforms and books dropped from the air. And cartons of cigarettes which were our currency. We walked onto a railway station one day. The train was very crowded. We travelled for two or three stations, then got off. We said, well, there’s a good place to travel. Let’s give a couple of packets to the driver and the fireman, and let’s go into the cab of the engine. Then I had a small boy’s ideal of travelling in the cab of a steam engine through tunnels and along the Japanese railway system of Kyushu. It was a wonderful experience.
Other ex-prisoners also took the opportunity to fulfil their ambitions, as Cliff Moss observed:
A fella called Jack ‘Gov’ Blythe was one of our notable citizens. He was a good fellow, Jack, but he was a bloke that had been around in his time. Bloody good man as a POW. He said, ‘I’ve done a lot of things in my time, but I’ve never cracked a bank.’ He thought he’d have a go. He was living it up anyway. He had a Buick with a gas-producing unit on it. The thing was as long as a modern-day stretch limo. He also had an unpaid Japanese servant to carry a chair for him down the street, and another Japanese in charge of his umbrella. If he wanted to sit down, one bloke positioned the chair and the other held the umbrella over him to keep the sun off.
He got a good waddy in his hand, walked up to the bank, where there was a guard outside the door. He smacked him over the head with the stick and he shot through. Jack walked through the door as all the girls inside disappeared. Jack, and two or three other blokes with him, gathered up a backpack full of yen and walked out. Well, they were walking down the street with a fair few yen fluttering about—they were falling out of the bloody pack. They came back to camp with about 80,000 yen—an immense amount of the bloody things. I think it all finished up back in the bank again, or practically all of it. Anyway, Jack had cracked his bank.
After the gross deprivation inflicted on all former Australian POWs over the previous nearly four years, not all were prepared to be forgiving when the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki suddenly gave them their freedom.
A POW gunner who kept a diary at Nakama wrote a month after the end of the war: ‘It’s a grouse life, eat and sleep and a boong does all the work.’ They were recovering from three and a half years of debts in food and freedom—and almost everyone was acquiring their own ceremonial sword. With a little organisation and much bravado, they souvenired swords en masse. They made their best hauls by moving systematically through the carriages of trains, demanding the personal surrender of all the Japanese officers they saw. Perhaps they considered the former prisoners to be a new form of ronin—the wandering masterless samurai of Japanese literature.
; Chapter 22
RETAIN ALL PRISONERS OF WAR INDEFINITELY
Although planning to recover Australian POWs from the dozens of locations all over South-east Asia and as far afield as Manchuria had begun in 1942, getting them all collected and sent home was a logistic nightmare. The strategy was to bring them in to reception camps in strategic areas. A special organisation was created to do this, the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI). During the weeks after the surrender, Australian Royal Navy ships transported thousands of Australian POWs in the south-west Pacific area to RAPWI reception camps in Singapore, Labuan, Morotai and other locations. But all this took some time, and RAPWI became known by the POWs desperate to get home as ‘Retain All Prisoners of War Indefinitely’.
Most prisoners of war were in poor health, still emaciated from three and a half years of starvation rations, and in the RAPWI centres they were first de-loused, bathed, re-clothed and, if they were well enough, interrogated about their experiences. They were put on high-fat diets, many putting on kilos within days of their rescue.
Once they had been fattened up and their bodies rid of the more obnoxious and debilitating prison camp afflictions, they were sent on to Australia by sea and air. Some were not yet out of danger. The Australian poet, broadcaster and author Clive James said recently that he was still haunted by the death of his father, Albert James, who was being flown home from his Japanese prison camp by the Americans in 1945 only to be killed when his military aircraft crashed. James, then six years old, and his mother had been eagerly awaiting Albert’s return in Sydney. James said, ‘I was there to watch my mother take the news. It still, now, deprives me of speech.’
The bulk of the surviving POWs arrived back in Australia during September and October. They had had priority. Only then could the Australian men and women serving in Borneo, Papua and New Guinea return to Australia in the final months of 1945 and early 1946.
Despite the euphoria of reaching Australia after what they had been through, most ex-POWs were mentally fragile. The awareness of what is now post-traumatic stress syndrome in 1945 was slight, and many needed counselling and treatment which they never had. As historian Dr H.N. ‘Hank’ Nelson wrote:
Prisoners who had enlisted at twenty years of age were coming home at twenty-four or five. They had missed the years when their vigour was its greatest, when they would have played their best sport, when they would have selected a career, and when they would have married. They were all conscious of the distorted pattern in their lives. They felt a need to try and catch up, and some were uncertain they could do so.
The prisoners were uncertain of their reception in Australia. There was no precedent. They were not like the Diggers returning from the First World War, nor the active service units that had recently paraded through city streets to be honoured for their actions in the Middle East and the Pacific. Many English prisoners of war of the Japanese went home almost unnoticed because the war in Europe had been over for five months—the English were already consumed by problems of peace. But in Australia the main groups of prisoners were met by cheering crowds, and that perception boosted the prisoners’ own sense of elation. Small boats escorted troop ships down the harbour, crowds met them on the docks, some holding notices such as, ‘Where is private Harry Jackson?’ City workers and shoppers gave them a boisterous reception as they went by on double-decker buses through the streets of Sydney. Those who travelled on to country towns were again greeted at railway stations by local dignitaries, old mates and flag-waving children given time off from lessons for the occasion.
Through their imprisonment most men and women thought constantly of home—and that home was particular. They knew its every detail. As they contrasted their home with the squalor and poverty of the camp they were likely to idealise it and all those who clattered backwards and forwards through its rooms. Now they faced the reality.
On arriving back in Australia, one of the first of his family, Don Moore set eyes on was his brother-in-law, Pat:
I’d never kissed a guy in my life before, but I did then. And I looked around and Dad wasn’t there. But I didn’t say anything. And they said, ‘Right, well, Jack’s got some extra petrol because you’re a POW, so we will be able to drive you back home. We live in Murrumbeena now.’ ‘Where’s Dad?’ And my sister said, ‘Dad died in 1944.’
Not all the POWs returned to joyous family reunions, as the following accounts reveal:
Some men went back happily to the arms of their wives and children, some did to their mothers, fathers and sisters, but I didn’t. I was not unhappy with my mother and my brother. My wife met me too—and then cleared out. (Patrick Levy)
I got a Dear John letter. She got word that I was missing in action, believed killed. And well, you can’t blame her, can you? So then I got a divorce and that was that. (George Williamson)
Before we were sent back to Australia we thought were going to get letters from home, acquainting us of what was going on. If that had happened there would have been less heartbreak. Lots of fellows came back to broken homes. One fellow shot his wife. Another fellow burned himself to death after he too shot his wife. (Rusty O’Brien)
Homecoming for some others was more idyllic. Captain Curlewis (later Sir Adrian Curlewis) remembered that wives and families had all been warned not to give prisoners too rich meals. ‘They were to treat them very, very carefully because their stomachs wouldn’t be able to take it. But somehow I got quite a good feed when I got home. And champagne. My wife had put a bottle away for three years and kept it for me.’
Lady Curlewis responded by saying, ‘And it didn’t seem to affect him at all. Then he just looked around and he said with a sigh, “Isn’t it clean!”’
In the camps the prisoners had helped hide doubts about their virility with the line, ‘And the second thing I’ll do when I get home is to take my pack off!’ Bob Yates recalled they had been warned: ‘As far as the opposite sex was concerned we were told that after our experiences we wouldn’t be much good. But that’s been proved wrong fortunately.’
Daisy Sloan, like many other prisoners, was concerned about infertility due to malnutrition and disease: ‘We’d been told we probably wouldn’t be able to have a family for a while.’ But after he and his wife had only been married for nine months, ‘we had a baby boy, and a couple of years later twin girls. So that wasn’t too bad on the rice diet!’
However, many ex-POWs found that there were soon immediate consequences of returning to a life of normality:
I know this, I couldn’t go into a bloody cafe. Even if I was as hungry as buggery, do you think I could go in there and order a meal? Had to find some bugger who looked like he was hungry and asked him to have a feed with me. I couldn’t do it on my own. (Chris Neilson)
You always seemed to be frightened of something. In my case, I couldn’t bear to be on my own. I had to have someone with me, someone around me, even if they were strangers. To be in a room by myself was just impossible. I’d have to get out or make an excuse to go and see somebody. (Herb Trackson)
I have an absolute horror of being shut in anywhere. I know it’s silly, as long as I control the entrance to a thing I’m right. But if anyone else shut the door, my claustrophobia is up. (Sylvia Muir)
There was this recurrent thing my husband Dick [one of the six survivors of the Sandakan Death Marches] had about lice on the bed. We would get up fairly regularly, strip everything off and examine the mattress minutely. He said to me, ‘I know you don’t ever think there is vermin in the bed, but look at my arms.’ And he literally had bite marks on his arms and raised psychosomatic lumps on his back. One was filled with great sadness that this should have happened and I wondered how long this would have to last for him. (Joyce Braithwaite)
I am over-fastidious with cleanliness. I’ll shower in the morning and use up most of the hot water in the house. Very silly when I think of it, because I know I’ve already washed and rinsed myself once, but I’ll soap up and scrub a second
time just to make sure. (Rod Wells)
I gave my wife a start one night. She came in and I dreamt there was a Jap outside the window and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll throw a hand grenade, that’ll fix him.’ So I grabbed the light beside the bed, and let fly and nearly knocked her bloody head off. She wasn’t real happy about that. (Geoff O’Connor)
Some years ago I was having a drink with three or four chaps and one of them came round to me and whispered, ‘Whitey, do you have nightmares? About, you know, the old days?’ And I said, ‘Of course I do.’ He said, ‘How often?’ I said, ‘Oh, a really bad one once every couple of months but you know, might be one nightmare a week or just every now and then.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘thank Christ for that. I have them too.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, and you thought you were going round the bend?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I did. It’s been worrying me for a long time.’ So I said to all the others, ‘Righto, how many of you blokes don’t have nightmares?’ And they all looked at me as if I was crazy. And each one said, ‘Yes of course we do.’ (Roy Whitecross)
To survive, the prisoners of war had to endure and endure. The prisoners have their own heroes, and they are the men and women who again and again demonstrated that they would lead and help others through persistent horror. The prisoners do not measure themselves against national history, but they are the ones best able to express what being a prisoner did to particular lives.