Hero or Deserter?

by Roger Maynard

  When the vessel docked in Sydney Harbour a reporter on the wharf spotted Bennett pacing up and down in a grey homburg, seemingly anxious about the response he’d get from returning soldiers.

  ‘Inside the man’s innermost mind was an unvoiced thought, “Are they going to be for me or against me?”

  ‘He need not have worried,’ wrote Gilbert Mant, who had himself been a member of the 8th Division and had been a Reuters correspondent throughout the Malaya campaign. ‘The men were for him. As they clustered around him and grasped his hand on the deck of the hospital ship, some said there were tears in the eyes of the tough, pugnacious General the Japs had tried so hard to kill.’21

  Mant reported that the men from the 8th Division greeted Bennett with enthusiasm, crying out, ‘Good on you, sir’, and ‘We are with you’ as they crowded around their former chief.

  ‘It was the vindication he wanted most of all: the faith of the rank and file. In the three years of frustration after his escape from Singapore, he had been the victim of a smear campaign and had developed almost a persecution complex. The knowledge that most of his men, who had had plenty of time to brood over the matter, were behind him, was a heart-warming experience,’ Mant wrote.22

  Although so many of the army staff had come out against Bennett, some senior officers who had been under his command remained stubbornly faithful, including Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan, who had looked after the Australian POWs in Changi. He claimed to have never met a soldier who disagreed with Bennett’s decision to escape.

  ‘Whether a General in war is right or wrong … is determined by what his soldiers think and not by the opinions of his contemporaries. In the case of General Bennett there is no doubt what his soldiers thought,’ he would later state.23

  The groundswell of opinion in support of Gordon Bennett was in sharp contrast to the official position of the military, who wanted to exact retribution on the recalcitrant general once and for all.

  The stage was set for his ritual humiliation on 26 October at Victoria Barracks, the stately edifice that sits between Oxford Street and Moore Park Road in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Much to the annoyance of the media it was to be a closed court, denying the press access to the proceedings and robbing the public of a comprehensive and impartial account of the evidence.

  Bennett also objected to the private nature of the court, but as it was a military inquiry the army could write the rules. The arrangement also satisfied the government, which could distance itself from the investigation and any final ruling which went against public opinion.

  But anybody who thought the inquiry would go to plan did not know Gordon Bennett and his propensity for fireworks.

  Chapter 17

  LIVING CADAVERS IN FILTHY RAGS

  Today there are few old soldiers left to bear witness to the tragedy that enveloped Malaya, Thailand, Burma, Borneo, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea, but thanks to the testimony of those 8th Division members who spoke and wrote of their ordeal in later life, Australia has a detailed record of this dark period in history.

  Alan Gaudry, who became enforced slave labour on the Burma-Thai Railway, would never forget the army doctors and medical orderlies whose heroic efforts helped to keep the death toll down.

  ‘Denied the use of even the most basic drugs and medicines and using the most primitive of instruments for surgery, they performed prodigies of improvisation and saved many lives,’ he wrote in his memoir.1

  On one occasion he recalled seeing a doctor amputating an ulcerated leg on a bamboo platform out in the open, using butchers’ knives and cleavers, a tenon saw and a needle and thread. The ‘anaesthetic’ was supplied by a former professional boxer, who knocked out the patient with a blow to the jaw.

  Then there was the utter barbarity of the guards, both Japanese and Korean, who would inflict punishment for the slightest breach of the behaviour code.

  ‘What we did not expect was the senseless violence which became part of our daily existence … the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain on others seemed to be the guiding motive behind the beatings and the ingenious tortures which they were so fond of devising.’2

  What helps a man through such troubled times? Not religion in Alan’s case. Few of the army chaplains impressed him with their integrity; least of all the padre who sold a full case of Bibles to the men: the pages were used for making cigarette papers. ‘Most of them seemed to us concerned with looking after number one and carrying on their religious feuds to the point where representatives of one denomination would not preside over the burial of men of other denominations,’ he claimed.

  ‘Of course I can only speak of my own experience in this matter and things may well have been very different in other places,’ he conceded.3

  Without religious faith to sustain him, the only way Alan could cope with the death and suffering around him was to harden his heart against human emotions such as love and grief.

  ‘I don’t want to convey the impression that I had become indifferent to the horrors of war, only that I was able to bear these blows with the same kind of stoicism which enabled me to put up with physical punishment,’ he explained.

  ‘The only catch was that I was so successful in insulating myself against the possibility of feeling compassion for the suffering and death of others that, when peace came, I could not break down this wall that I had built around my emotions.’

  Throughout his life luck was frequently on his side. Indeed the story of Alan Gaudry is not complete without reference to his remarkable salvation from a watery grave while on a ship to Japan in late 1944.

  By now he had left the Burma-Thai Railway and had returned to Singapore, where he was placed on board a captured Dutch inter-island cargo vessel in readiness for further slave labour in Indochina. Fortunately he avoided boarding the Rakuyo Maru or the Kachidoki Maru, which were packed with Australian and British POWs and which were both sunk a few days later, with heavy loss of life. Instead he joined a convoy of seven large prefabricated merchant ships loaded with more than 30,000 Japanese troops and their equipment, including trucks, tanks and ammunition stores. In addition there were five naval escorts, a large destroyer, three frigates and an anti-aircraft sloop. The convoy would have been a prize target for any passing Allied bomber or submarine.

  It was Christmas and Alan, who was also known as ‘Butch’, counted himself lucky to be allowed to stay on deck as the holds were already bulging with other prisoners.

  The convoy sailed uneventfully in a northwesterly direction for the first few days and everybody soon settled into the routine of shipboard life. The sense of calm was not to last. At two o’clock in the morning of the fourth day all hell broke loose when a merchant ship on their port side was hit by one of two torpedoes. There was a massive explosion, which sent a tremendous column of sparks and flares into the sky. The vessel broke in two and sank within a few minutes.

  Alan’s eyewitness account of this devastating moment is as dramatic now as it would have been had the explosion happened just a few weeks ago.

  Those of us on deck could see shapes of bodies, crates, trucks and all manner of things whirling skywards, then falling as fiery debris back into the sea. The two halves of the stricken ship reared upwards and sank, one half bow first and the other half stern, amid more explosions and a great hissing of steam.

  Immediately pandemonium broke out. Every gun that could be brought to bear let fly at nothing in particular, naval guns firing across the water, anti-aircraft guns firing into the air, flares bursting to shed an eerie light over the scene, tracers flying from machine guns and depth charges being dropped by the naval escorts as they dashed around in their efforts to locate submarines. The gun crew on our deck managed to loose off one round in the darkness, whereupon the gun tore itself from the deck and jumped over the stern, taking with it the mounting and most of the gun crew. The machine gun set up on the deck rail above our heads gave us a warning burst, just in case we might have any idea
s about taking advantage of the situation.4

  Escape was the last thing on Alan’s mind. He was more concerned about the possibility that his ship would be the next to be hit.

  ‘Even though we were expecting something of this sort, the actual event came as a complete and terrifying surprise and when the same thing happened to the merchant ship on our starboard side an hour or so later we all thought that we would be the next to go.’

  Yet again Butch Gaudry’s run of luck held good. By dawn the convoy continued its zigzag course across the South China Sea but by night the American subs were back. Two more big merchant ships went down as well as one of the escorting sloops. Nearly every night that followed Butch would see two or three more vessels sunk by a torpedo. Tragically for the Japanese and POWs who went down with them, there was no attempt to pick up survivors.

  ‘We reasoned that if the Japanese cared so little for their own countrymen they would have even less compunction for a shipload of the despised POWs,’ he wrote.5

  Butch Gaudry could not help but think it would be his turn next. It was around this time that his good mate Reg Sandon, from Wollongong, who had been a private attached to 22nd Brigade Headquarters, turned to him and said, ‘Butch, I think we’d better start praying.’

  Alan didn’t need convincing. They knelt on the deck together and prayed ‘very earnestly indeed to a God whose existence had not come into my calculations until now and promised to be one of his … a promise which I promptly forgot once we were on dry land again.’ 6

  Whether by divine intervention or not, the little Dutch trading ship ploughed on undetected by the subs and within a few days Alan and the rest of the POWs on board sighted the mouth of the Saigon River. Even here they were not out of danger because the entrance was heavily mined and there were no charts to help them navigate around the obstacles.

  The ship’s captain ordered everybody on deck to act as spotters while they nosed their way through the minefield. Once again fortune favoured Alan and his mates, who made it safely upriver to a wharf just south of Saigon.

  Along the way they passed more than 40 Japanese vessels, including large passenger liners loaded with about 200,000 Japanese troops and equipment, about to leave for a counterattack on the Philippines. It was not to happen. At dawn the following day a large force of American bombers put the enemy airfield surrounding Saigon out of action and hit most of the anti-aircraft defences along the river. Soon afterwards a second wave of US divebombers swooped low overhead and destroyed the flotilla before it had any chance to respond.

  Alan had a grandstand view of the attack, which left some 43 ships either sunk or burning. The whole counterattack force had been eliminated.

  ‘Butch’ Gaudry’s war was nothing but action packed. He had escaped injury in the fall of Singapore, suffered hard labour building the Burma-Thai Railway, lost several stone in weight, endured malarial fever and miraculously avoided friendly fire from US submarines on the way to Indochina.

  In later life Alan changed his mind about religion, becoming a devout Christian and forgiving his Japanese and Korean tormentors. Despite being told on his return to Australia that he would not make old bones, he took his soldier’s settlement and bought a sugar plantation in northern New South Wales, living to the ripe old age of 94.

  Many of Alan Gaudry’s pals in the 8th Division had similar wartime experiences to his, though not all were lucky enough to survive.

  Among those who perished as POWs were Rodney Breavington, who had been a police constable in Fairfield, Victoria, and Victor Gale, who had worked as a turner and fitter in Balwyn, Bennett’s home town. Both were privates in the 8th Division who loathed prison life.7

  In August 1942 there was a noticeable tightening of discipline in Changi when a new Japanese chief, Major-General Shimperi Fukuye, arrived to take command. Until then occasional excursions by POWs beyond the barbed wire had gone largely unpunished but on 30 August everything changed. The Japanese announced that all prisoners would have to sign a document promising not to escape.

  This conflicted with the Allies’ military code, enshrining the right of every man to try to evade his captors, and all refused to sign.8

  The Japanese were furious and for the next five days all 20,000 Australian, British and Dutch troops were incarcerated in the barrack buildings and the square. Each man was given two pints of water a day and no one was allowed to leave. The Japs were determined to break their captives’ spirit and in a bid to reinforce their message, on the third day announced the planned executions of Breavington, Gale and two British soldiers, Privates Harold Waters and Eric Fletcher. The four had escaped from a camp at Bukit Timah on 12 May and rowed a small boat some 200 miles (320 km) to the island of Colomba. In a ghastly twist of fate, they were re-arrested when they got there and sent back to Singapore. Now was Japan’s moment of retribution.

  As the Allied troops kicked their heels in the barracks square, creating a tremendous din, General Fukuye ordered the commanders of the British and Australian troops in Changi – Lieutenant-Colonel E.B. Holmes and his deputy, Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan – to be present at the executions.

  It was to be a grim but strangely defiant spectacle. As A.J. Sweeting described it in the official history of World War II:

  At the execution ground Breavington, the older man, made an appeal to the Japanese to spare Gale. He said that he had ordered Gale to escape and that Gale had merely obeyed orders; this appeal was refused. As the Sikh firing party knelt before the doomed men, the British officers present saluted and the men returned the salute. Breavington walked to the others and shook hands with them. A Japanese lieutenant then came forward with a handkerchief and offered it to Breavington, who waved it aside with a smile, and the offer was refused by all men. Breavington then called to one of the padres present and asked for a New Testament, whence he read a short passage. Thereupon the order was given to fire.9

  Even then it wasn’t over. Whether by nervousness or design, the Indian National Army Guard’s bullets failed to kill the poor men so they had to finish them off with a fresh volley.

  Word of the executions travelled swiftly around the camp. So far only three soldiers had signed the ‘no-escape pledge’ but the rest steadfastly refused. After all, under the Geneva Convention every POW had the right to escape and should not be punished if recaptured. The problem was that Japan had not signed the Geneva Convention and Fukuye was infuriated by this mass revolt.

  But the reality was that the prisoners could not hold out forever. There were sick and injured who desperately needed treatment and some were beginning to die. In the end the commanders decided to compromise. The troops would sign the pledge under duress. As the Japanese did not recognise English names, the British and the Aussies made them up, signing themselves as Donald Duck and Ned Kelly. It made a nonsense of the contract but it seemed to please the Japanese and life returned to normal.

  Interestingly the barrack square incident seemed to cement a new bond between the British and Australians. As Black Jack Galleghan would later write: ‘The most notable feature of this incident was the cohesion and the unity of British and Australian troops and the fine morale and spirit shown.’10

  The order and comparative comfort that set Changi apart from other POW camps helped prisoners hold on to life in mind and body. Sure there was sickness, hunger and boredom, but if you kept your nose clean then Selarang Barracks was almost tolerable.

  Pity the poor bastards then who ended up on the Burma-Thai Railway or in the mines and factories of Japan. This was slave labour in the extreme, consigning so many members of the 8th Division to an early death.

  Arthur Kennedy found himself working near what would become known as the Bridge on the River Kwai, later to be immortalised in celluloid but in those days a symbol of Japanese oppression. Arthur’s first task was to build an earthen embankment which was to rise to a height of 50 feet (15 m).

  ‘Each day we were required to dig and move a cubic metre
[35 cubic feet] of soil. The soil was dug out by one man and then two men carried it in stretchers, dumping it to form the embankment. During each carry the man in the hole dug out earth for the next load.’

  It was back-breaking toil, digging, lifting and carrying huge piles of soil in high humidity and under a burning sun. Sometimes they had elephants to help them drag tree trunks up to the embankment but the animals often resisted working on steep slopes and the prisoners were forced to do the job themselves. This gave rise to the popular catch-cry from Japanese guards that one elephant equalled ten Australians.

  ‘Ropes were used on big logs and there was always the danger that they would slip due to the greasy conditions. By the time a day had been spent on this work a team would be completely exhausted.’11

  And no health and safety either – far from it. When the men slowed down the guards hit them with bamboo poles. When the Japs used explosives to shift the rock there was no warning and no shelter from the tumbling debris.

  ‘Not everyone was lucky and one day a single rock reached the embankment and killed a man.’12

  ‘Bluey’ Kennedy protested but the complaints had no effect. The guards would merely laugh and increase the workload. Exhaustion, injury and sickness were no excuse: there was a bridge to build and they would have to stay there until it was finished.

  ‘Soon we were completely exhausted by the lack of sleep. Completing the task was aided by the constant application by the Japanese of bamboo rods to the nearest body as a spur to greater effort. By the end of the raising of what looked like a mountain we could only crawl back to the camp. Without thinking of food or washing everybody collapsed into their tents and slept.’13

  And so it went on, day after debilitating day, until the job was done and they were marched to the next section. This was conveyor-belt torture – toil without end – the work just kept coming. Only death could provide a blessed release.