The number of sick had increased dramatically and several men were already dead from malnutrition or disease. Cholera was also soon to take its toll. An isolation hut was built and two medical orderlies volunteered to look after the sick; a considerable act of courage as the slightest relaxation of personal hygiene might have infected them too. Thankfully the two survived but it was too late for those who had already contracted the disease. Within a few days 16 men in Arthur Kennedy’s camp were dead.
It wasn’t only the Japanese who inflicted pain upon the prisoners. John Chippendale claimed the Korean guards were even worse. They had names for these sadists such as Boy Bastard and BBC, which stood for Boy Bastard’s Cobber, individuals whose cruelty knew no bounds.
‘One of our sergeants went into the bush to relieve himself when a Korean guard shot him in the face and chest at close range – he thought he was escaping,’ said John.14
Then there was the weather and the disease.
‘I was on a working party that was sent out to repair a bridge which had been washed away, during the wet season when the rain fell day and night. We stayed on the job 72 hours without a break. After we finished I came down with dysentery, malaria and very bad beri beri,’ John wrote.15
He survived thanks to the efforts of his old mate Ken Ducros, who was also with 8th Division Signals. The fellow Sydney boy nursed and spoon-fed John back to health in a makeshift hospital, but others were not so fortunate.
‘At this camp were some of the worst leg ulcers that anyone can imagine. Colonel Coates, our senior surgeon, was taking off about six legs a day. No one could imagine the horrific conditions that they had to contend with.’16
Come December 1943 many of the Australians who had been sent to work on the Burma-Thai Railway returned to Changi. First word of their condition and impending arrival came from Sydney-born Major Albert Saggers of the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion, who had escorted the body of an Aussie soldier back to Singapore for burial. He immediately informed Black Jack Galleghan, who was in charge of the AIF in Changi and advised fellow officers that the news was not encouraging. In fact that was an understatement.
As the trucks containing the POWs pulled up in the camp in the early hours of 16 December, the men who had assembled on the roadside to welcome them back were so shocked by the sight they beheld that many gasped in horror. Those members of the 8th Division who had left earlier in the year were barely recognisable.
As Stan Arneil described it in Galleghan’s biography: ‘It was a slow and ghastly business, there were no leaps from the back of trucks, no sounds of cheering, just a slow and stumbling movement as the skeletons helped one another to the ground.’17
They were like living cadavers, clothed in filthy rags and many near to death. Most were suffering from beri beri, their legs like tree trunks. The majority could not stand upright; others were so incapacitated they were forced to lie on the ground. Yet despite their physical state, those who were able to do so formed a straight line before their commander.
Galleghan was momentarily perplexed and enquired where the rest of his battalion were.
‘They’re all here, sir,’ replied Sergeant-Major Noel Johnston.18
Were his eyes deceiving him? Galleghan was confounded. Hadn’t 651 men of his own unit originally left for Thailand? A quick head count revealed only 459 had come back. There could be only one conclusion. One hundred and ninety-two of his own soldiers had died in the past seven months. Galleghan was speechless. He would later discover that more than half of the 7000 Australian and British troops who had been used as slave labour on the Burma-Thai Railway were dead.
Fortunately for Arthur Kennedy, whether by luck, willpower or a strong a constitution, he managed to survive the railway and eventually found himself en route for a new destination. Even today few people know that there were more than 100 prisoner-of-war camps in Japan, and that’s where Kennedy was heading. Thousands of other Australians were also shipped to the land of the rising sun, where in many ways work, weather and living conditions were even more extreme.
Those members of the 8th Division who felt they’d already suffered enough in the jungles of Malaya and Thailand would be in for an even bigger shock on the Emperor’s home soil. The 2/20th Battalion had been assured they were going on holiday when they sailed for the Japanese port city of Nagasaki. Nobody believed it but it broke the boredom. There were 550 Aussies aboard the Kamakura Maru but they would form two parties once on dry land. Three hundred would be chosen for the next stage of the journey – by rail to the coastal town of Naoetsu, roughly halfway up the west coast of Japan.
It was early December and bitingly cold when the train finally pulled in to the minor industrial town northwest of Tokyo. On the last stretch the POWs passed two factories – the Shin-Etsu Chemical Company and the Nippon Stainless Steel plant – where they would labour for nearly three years in the most appalling conditions. When they weren’t working they would be subject to another reign of terror, as civilian guards beat them into submission in the prison camp.
‘They were a pretty vicious mob,’ said George Daldry, the Sydney kid who was used to looking after himself. ‘Sometimes the guards would work on the same person each shift until he could take it no longer.’19
Cruel and sadistic, the guards took immense pleasure in meting out their particular brand of bashing, which came in the form of a thick 3-foot (1 m) long stick known as the dog walloper.
More than six decades later Joe Byrne could remember every agonising detail.
‘It was rounded hard wood and they used it like a baseball bat. They’d break arms, legs, ribs and anything else they could take a poke at. They just beat the hell out of you. You were always at the whim of the guards, which meant they could clobber you for no reason at all.’20
The jobs were exhausting and uncomfortable. Some men were made to work in scorching temperatures shovelling coal into furnaces, while others would unload coal from ships in the harbour. It was back-breaking labour, and all this was on measly rations that made the men susceptible to illness.
‘Felt very weak today,’ Signalman Don Fraser scribbled in his diary. ‘Too weak to lift an empty shovel really. Food less than half of what we need. Little bit of horse in the stew but only as big as a sixpence. It was an old horse at that, but lovely to chew.’21
The extreme weather, which could be intensely hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter, didn’t help matters. It was inevitable that sooner or later the lack of food and heavy workload in tough conditions would start to claim victims. More and more men were falling seriously ill because of lack of food. How long before they started dying?
Dudley Boughton, a carpenter from Manly, witnessed the slow disintegration of his mates after each day’s work.
‘Another chap carried home tonight which brings it up to five in a row. One had pleurisy and several have bronchitis. We’re so terribly hungry it hurts.’22
Kevin Timbs was hit with a strain of pneumonia so severe that he could hardly get out of bed for morning parade. The guards showed no mercy, ordering him to work regardless. Only his pals were able to save him.
‘The next morning I went out with one each side of me holding me up because my legs just wouldn’t work. Eventually I got over it, but that’s the sort of thing that happened.’23
By the middle of 1943 diseases like malaria and treatable conditions such as beri beri were also taking their toll. Diaries that the POWs kept were now recording almost a death a day. The passing of a mate was so normal that it was usually dismissed in one line.
The guards took particular delight in targeting those who were obviously sick, men who were suffering from dysentery or beri beri. To mark them apart they were made to pin red ribbons on their coats, ostensibly to identify them as members of the so-called light-duty party. The name had little effect on the way they were treated. It simply made the guards’ job easier in selecting those who needed a little extra physical encouragement.
As they crawled
to work, they would be struck by dog wallopers for falling behind the main group. Private John Cook, who was born in Sydney’s Clovelly, remembered it vividly.
‘As the men suffering from dysentery and severe diarrhoea were not allowed to stop on the way to the factory to go to the toilet, they had no choice other than to defecate in their trousers. This meant that the excreta would finish in their boots and remain there for the whole day, or in some cases, until they were allowed to have a bath under the furnace prior to returning to the camp.’24
All this and random bashings too. One man was so ill with diarrhoea that he dirtied his bed. Lance-Corporal John Magin was trying to clean up the mess when a young Japanese medical guard walked in, screaming abuse. Jimmy Houston reckoned it was the worst violence he’d seen.
‘He made this chap take off his clothes then laid into him with a thick leather belt. His body was a mass of bruises. After he got tired of using the belt he kicked him a number of times in the stomach, then made the poor chap do press-ups for an hour. When he finished doing that he was told to stand to attention to 5 am. All this happened because he was sick. This guard is nothing but an animal.’25
If you were suffering from beri beri, which was caused by thiamine deficiency, the daily grind was even more painful. The whole body would bloat to enormous proportions.
‘The face would be swollen so much that the eyes were just narrow slits,’ recalled John Cook. ‘Walking became very painful as the thighs used to rub together, causing the skin to rub off. The testicles would be the size of tennis balls and the penis looked like a white cucumber. Men with this complaint still had to go to work. You had to be almost completely immobilised before being allowed to stay in the sick room.’26
Much further south, in the Dutch East Indies, the 2/21st Battalion of the 8th Division was in a similar situation on the island of Ambon. Hunger, disease, brutality and low morale only added to the dire plight of Gull Force, who had been imprisoned there since February 1942.
The daily food ration was down to just shy of half a pound (200 g) and the ever-present threat of death by the sword hung over everyone from one minute to the next. And as if conditions weren’t bad enough, the POWs’ commanding officer was about to make it worse.
Within this bleak landscape Major George de Verdon Westley decided to impose his own home-grown brand of discipline on the men by building a cage – a barbed-wire encircled contraption – designed to hold petty thieves and malcontents. Just six-and-a-half feet (2 m) square, it was a box within a barracks, within a jail, within an island prison. Not surprisingly the fact that Aussies were being jailed by other Australians did not go down too well.
It was inside this uncomfortable holding pen that POWs found guilty of stealing another’s food were kept overnight with minimum rations, the idea being that it was a convenient way of punishing men and to send a lesson to the rest of the camp.
It’s possible to see both points of view here. Perhaps Westley’s controversial prison was ultimately in the interests of the camp as a whole. But some of those imprisoned in the cage died after the experience and few could forgive Westley for his role in it.
As the war rolled on, there were countless random bashings from the captors. Anybody who attempted to escape was beaten savagely and some were threatened with execution. Significantly it did not deter everybody. Here was a group of men imprisoned some 590 miles (950 km) north of Darwin, stranded right in the middle of nowhere, yet they never gave up hope of getting back to Australia.
Among them was Lieutenant William Jinkins, who used a small outrigger to sail from Ambon, and along the way hijacked a 40-foot motor cruiser. It was an epic voyage, which took about seven weeks, but amazingly he made it home.27
But for the rest of the men the mental and physical torture continued. As the period of imprisonment dragged on, even the tradition of supporting and helping your mates was being undermined.
Ralph Godfrey, who like most of the 2/21st Battalion came from Victoria, told me: ‘There was absolutely no Australian mateship for 18 months – it was every man for himself. If he got something, he kept it; he didn’t share it with anybody.’28
To make matters worse, a terrible tragedy occurred on 25 February 1943, when Ambon was bombed by a squadron of US Liberators. In their wisdom the Japanese had decided to store all their arsenal – about 200,000 pounds of explosives – right by the side of the prison camp.
It was a disaster waiting to happen. The POWs were quick to realise that if the camp was ever bombed they’d go up with it. And so it happened. As a result, among the 30 people killed were six Australian officers.
Meanwhile the starvation diet continued and death became an almost daily occurrence.
One of the prisoners, Stuart Swanton, was an experienced stenographer and kept a daily diary of his three-and-a-half years on Ambon, all of it written in tiny shorthand notes. Today they make grim but fascinating reading. On 11 August 1944 he wrote: ‘Jim Harvey died last night. I carried about two barrow loads of soil to my garden during the day. Cooked some cassava, paw paws, greens and had them for tea, Also had a bit of salmon which was beautiful.’29
How sad that the passing of a dear friend was dismissed in one line, while what he had to eat was deemed to be much more important. But that was the reality of POW life.
Eventually, under Westley’s tough leadership, a subtle change came about in the men’s social behaviour. The mateship that had been so sadly absent in the early days of incarceration began to return and a new spirit of mutual cooperation evolved, with the POWs forming themselves into small syndicates of four to five men. If they were to survive, they realised, they’d have to help each other and the syndicates proved to be a lifesaving move. If anybody fell ill the others would look after them. If somebody needed food they would share their own rations.
What a turnaround from the dark days that had gone before. In a strange way the camp had come to symbolise all that was right and wrong in society. It proved there were no easy answers to mankind’s problems and that only the love and care of one’s fellow man really mattered.
Unhappily this was of little consolation to those who didn’t make it. A total of 378 prisoners of war died on Ambon, including the 328 massacred at the Laha airbase in the early days of the invasion. Perhaps fortuitously, details of that atrocity did not emerge until 1945. Until then the other POWs who had been held in the main camp on Ambon remained unaware of their comrades’ fate. One wonders how their mood might have changed had they known earlier.
Gull Force was eventually evacuated from Ambon in September 1945. Out of 528 Australians who had been left there on October 1942, following the departure of the rest of the battalion for the Chinese island of Hainan, only 121 were still alive. As they assembled on the wharf to be evacuated by the navy, they were a sorry sight. Those who were able to stand joked and chatted with the incapacitated lying on stretchers.
One of the first Australian ships to arrive was the Latrobe, whose captain, Lieutenant-Commander Windas Smith, was momentarily stunned by what he saw.
‘When we did berth there were 20 to 30 skeletons on the jetty, as if they were standing in front of Buckingham Palace, and there wasn’t a dry eye on the ship,’ he said.30
How they succeeded in standing to attention on legs as ‘thin as matchsticks and knees like oversized cricket balls’ would haunt the skipper for the rest of his life.31
There was no time to waste. Of the 42 men on stretchers some needed to be evacuated immediately, such was their physical state. The most common complaints were malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers and severe malnutrition.
Could this really be happening? Were they about to be rescued? As if to break the spell of years of captivity, a little homegrown sustenance was produced. Mugs of sweet tea and plates of Vegemite sandwiches suddenly appeared before the POWs were carried aboard.32
There were tears as the men sailed out of Ambon harbour on the four corvettes that had come to evacuate them. They were bound fo
r the island of Morotai, where there was a hospital and plenty of medical care. After a two-day voyage they were welcomed by a military band and a fleet of ambulances.
Melbourne boy Eddie ‘Max’ Gilbert looked at his watch and noted the time. It was exactly 8 am. After three-and-a-half years of hell, freedom beckoned.
‘We were immediately transported and put to bed. The sight of Australian army sisters was wonderful. It’s hard to express one’s feelings at seeing civilisation, white men’s food and sleeping between sheets,’ he recalled.33
Heartbreakingly two men from Gull Force didn’t make it. They were so weak and sick they died on Morotai, casting a cloud over the excitement and sense of relief that had engulfed the rest of the battalion.
Within a couple of weeks the survivors were sufficiently recovered to sail home aboard the hospital ship Wanganella. Like the rest of the 8th Division’s men scattered across Asia, they were on their way back to Australia. Unlike Gordon Bennett they had endured the physical consequences of defeat and the subjugation that inevitably followed. But did it matter anymore? And did Australia really care?
By the end of October 1945, most of the men from the 8th Division were home. They’d had three-and-a-half years to ponder their plight; now they wanted to put it all behind them. Thrust back into civilian life, trying to adjust to their newfound freedom did not come easily. There were families, wives and girlfriends to get to know again. Some men were still suffering from the effects of disease and starvation. Others were emotional and mental wrecks. How could they explain what had happened to those who had never been there? No one could fully understand what it meant to have been a prisoner of war except other POWs.
The scale of their personal hell would silence many for the rest of their lives. Few would talk about it to loved ones. For some the only way of escaping the mental isolation was with booze. Others could only share their bitter memories with fellow veterans down at the RSL or on Anzac Day marches. Dressed in their neat, grey trousers and navy blue blazers, with medals proudly pinned, they would recall the hunger, the sickness and the brutality that haunted their lives on a daily basis, while also remembering the jokes, the gambling and the black humour that took their minds off the terrible conditions and helped to boost morale.
Hero or Deserter? Page 24