Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  Before the outbreak of hostilities we repatriated a considerable number of men . . . who could not stand up to tropical conditions—. . . dermatitis or asthenia . . . neurotic reactions of various kinds and plain cold feet. So we had time for a ruthless pruning process of the unfit and the unwilling, in whatever guise the unwillingness manifested itself. There is no end to human ingenuity when the reward is a return ticket home.

  It was the strangest of times in Malaya—preparing for war but not quite sure when it would arrive. To amuse themselves the 2/9th Field Ambulance formed its own Australian Rules football team. Its captain was 21-year-old Harold Ball, who had recently held the 1940 Grand Final Cup aloft as a member of the victorious Melbourne Football Club. Ball was possessed of a big head and square jaw; it was a mug that said ‘footballer’ even before you knew he was one, and at six foot two Harold Ball was a quelling sight.

  John was promoted to major prior to the 2/9th moving to Mersing, a town on the eastern seaboard of the Malay Peninsula. We have one telling memory of him from about this time. John never spoke about this event, or at least never took the time to write about it, but fortunately for us, Jack Sammons, a member of the 2/9th did. It is transcribed in Carl Johnson’s mammoth book on the 8th Division, Australian Army Medical Corps, Carrying On.

  As Jack Sammons described the incident:

  A dispatch rider was coming in from Mersing and he and his bike parted company. The result was a very badly cut and scratched soldier, who had lost a lot of blood and was urgently in need of a transfusion. A doctor, on loan to us from a British unit, was an orderly medical officer on duty and called for blood donor volunteers. Paul Payne’s blood was comparable and he reported to make his donation. Our visiting medical officer botched the job and was splattering Paul’s blood all around the aid post when Major John Cade—our company commander and a doctor—arrived on the scene. He was ropeable and made serious threats, which, if he carried them out; would have had very disastrous consequences—especially as it was one doctor against another. Fortunately, things quietened down. John took over and nothing more was to come out of what looked like an international incident.

  John’s keen eye observed how the army cooks tossed out so much refuse; and that it was being collected by an old, bent Malayan man and his grandson. Within months John wrote that the boy, by just eating these food scraps with a few bits of enrichment tossed in by the cooks, grew rapidly into a robust boy. John marvelled at this change in human constitution in a growing boy and later in life reflected: ‘I have never forgotten this lesson in nutrition.’

  He writes home to Jean of what he observes in Malaya: of luscious pawpaw, of scorpions larger than dinner plates and king cobras the length of a bus. A pet python of one soldier drapes about the men at 16 feet in length and sleeps at night in the man’s locker; a colony of chattering monkeys entertain him; a 14-year-old boy from Australia has somehow snuck into the ranks of the men; mosquitoes are their enemy and everyone fears malaria. After he drives through the kampongs of Malaya he writes at length about the dozens of curious children running to him; of the ‘nondescript hens and chickens, bantam roosters, numerous goats of all sizes . . . There are not many dogs and what there are [are] mangy looking mongrels.’ He wryly observes a meditating yogi sitting on nails, and as an aside wonders (pragmatically) how and when he gets up to go to the toilet; John bangs his boots every morning for spiders and watches a column of ferocious marching tropical ants: he is consumed by the sights and smells of Malaya. Of his two small boys in suburban Melbourne he writes: ‘I hope neither of them will have grown up too much before Daddy returns, because he’s missing such a lot.’ All the while John waits for the Japanese to attack.

  On 8 December 1941, the waiting was over; before dawn the Japanese landed on the beach near Kota Bharu on the Malay Peninsula. John and the 2/9th—safe for the moment—were well to the south of the invading Japanese. But in the distance a storm brewed; not thunder, but the distant rumble of exploding shells. The jungle was restless; thousands of Japanese foot-soldiers, like the marching ants John had observed, coiled their way south. The Japanese streamed down the narrow Malay Peninsula and attacked with unfettered ferocity, meeting with spasmodic and uncoordinated resistance from the Allied troops. The Allied strategic plans, it turned out, were abysmal and chaotic; the required thinking had not been done and resources were inadequate. The Allied forces took flight and fled southwards; a shambling mess of soldiers and displaced civilians—hungry and beaten—drained towards the island of Singapore. It was clear that the British were unable to offer the protection so many Australians back home had hoped for, even expected. By the end of January 1942 this river of refugees had withdrawn to Singapore, still regarded as an impregnable fortress by many, and here they hoped to stage a final battle.

  6

  Jean often sat at her Singer treadle sewing machine, stitching new clothes and costumes for the boys, her right foot rhythmically rising and falling.

  David fondly remembered:

  Mum made a lot of our clothes during the war. She stitched suits for Jack and me; for Cowboys and Indians. She made the Indian suits out of sugar bags, which she dyed dark brown then hemmed them; and she made headbands. We had chooks and used blue-coloured feathers from the chooks and roosters in the headbands. And we had a vest each, with a sheriff’s badge on it. And she made wooden swords.

  While John was at war, Jean lived by the rigid rationing rules of the time. Everything was carefully counted out, measured and marked; nothing wasted, whether food or clothing—her two chief preoccupations in caring for Jack and David. Before he left for war, John had excavated a huge vegetable garden out the back; Jean and the boys assiduously tended this to grow the greens the trio needed. With few cars on the road and even less petrol available, visitors were rare at The Righi, and the Cades only occasionally ventured beyond their own suburb. Jean’s next-door neighbour Yvonne, in an effort to lessen the isolation, cut a gate through the fence separating their backyards.

  Jean still had the gorgeous Dodge coupé. But on a meagre ration of 4 gallons a month, driving was a luxury she indulged sparingly. Her mother-in-law, Ellen, insisted (4 gallons or not) that Jean and the boys come to visit her and John’s father who, although he had officially retired in 1940, was intermittently filling in as acting medical superintendent at Mont Park Mental Hospital. So most Sundays Jean packed the two neatly attired boys into the Dodge and drove about 15 minutes to their destination. The boys remember the car as a beauty with ‘a seat that shot up in the back’, to make it a two-seater. The round trip just about exhausted the petrol quota. To Jack and David it was a touch of exotica to drive northwards from The Righi and out of the depths of suburbia to where there were ‘no houses, only paddocks full of Scotch Thistles’, until this trio of Cades arrived at the elaborate wrought iron gates that marked the grand entrance to the asylum. Mont Park was built with splendour in mind, and John’s father—when in charge—lived in the gracious two-storey superintendent’s house. Once out of the car the boys larked about in the grounds. Most of all they remember games around an Aboriginal canoe tree, ‘a big old gum’. When summoned into the superintendent’s house, they sat somewhat sullenly ‘in a dingy parlour with a coal fire’ until released to play. Best of all, though, was the afternoon tea prepared by Amy, the mental-hospital patient who acted as the housemaid for the superintendent. Amy’s speciality for these Sunday afternoon wartime visits, and the boys’ favourite, was to roll out a varnished trolley, on top of which sat a batch of fresh scones, jam and tea.

  Back at The Righi, some of these wartime moments at home are frozen in three black and white photographs. In one photograph, taken on a particularly sunny Melbourne day, Jack sits in a toy motor car that he can propel with his feet and steer around the yard; nearby, David sits on a tricycle shaped like a horse’s head. The two boys, sweet and innocent, look deeply into the lens of the camera. In another photograph, Jean sits with the boys in the yard: an impish-looking Jack a
nd the blond curls of David steal the scene; Jean, for her part, seems preoccupied with faraway thoughts. In another, Jack and David are immaculately dressed for the camera in shorts and shirts, their hair impeccably swept to the side, not a strand out of place. Jean is a picture-perfect, young lipsticked woman with a string of pearls and a prim knee-length skirt; she strikes a pose that is motherly and doting. These warm and innocent days inoculated the boys from the war. Their radiant world was defined by the shelter of the house and the warmth of its garden. The unthreatening front- and backyards of The Righi offered them a secure world; nothing dangerous here, unless it was the antics of the boys:

  We had a red racing car. A peddle car with a steering wheel. Our driveway was steep to the garage. Jack and I would get to the top of the driveway and take it in turns to hurtle down as fast as we could, heading straight to the garage. At the last second we had to swerve and miss the garage and head around the corner into the backyard. Mum, I’m sure, thought we’d kill ourselves.

  The boys played out these days in a world of fantasy, of heroes and villains, where Indians fought cowboys and everyone came in for lunch—and then they’d fight again all afternoon. The tranquillity of suburban Melbourne belied a world breaking apart. The real war beyond their front fence was not something the boys really understood. Even now, seen through the sometimes vivid, sometimes hazy aperture of childhood memories, Jack and David recall with immense happiness this blissful backyard life.

  7

  As the Japanese swarmed down the Malay Peninsula, John and the 2/9th Field Ambulance, along with all the Australian and Allied troops, retreated. The troops drained towards the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula where, over a narrow stretch of ocean, the island of Singapore—a tiny plot of land only 50 kilometres long and 26 kilometres wide—awaited them. By the beginning of February 1942, tens of thousands of Allied troops crammed into this tiny island. It would be their final refuge.

  John Cade and the 2/9th were holed up in its northwest corner helping to ferry and treat the wounded. Frantically, he and his men stemmed bleeding, splinted broken bones, dug trenches and erected tents. Injured Australians kept pouring in from Malaya across the Johore Strait into Singapore. Then the Japanese bombing began. Swarms of buzzing bombers, engines rumbling like a hive of agitated bees, dropped their whistling bombs from the heavens to blister the earth below.

  John recalled:

  I had a little tent at our Main Dressing Station in a rubber plantation on northwest Singapore Island. The enemy shelling became heavier and heavier as their invasion hourly approached. As I lay down one night exhausted I covered my head with my tin hat. Then I shifted it to my chest. Finally, convulsively I shoved it over my genitals. Such were the varying orders of priority.

  Another time at this same location, as a result of an air-raid warning, I had shepherded all wounded and sick into slit trenches and then as I was making my way back to HQ dugout found myself caught in the open by the scream of falling bombs. I burrowed into what I fondly imagined was a slight saucer shaped depression in the ground, face down; then thought, ‘No, I’d like to see what’s coming’ and turned face up.

  John remained for some time in that position, on his back, face up and limbs unmoving, mesmerised by the insanity of the moment. As he peered into the sky the bombs continued to fall: it seemed impossible one would not hit. It was not the only time in those fateful weeks that John expected to die.

  The great fear of all ambulance men was to leave behind a wounded soldier to the caprice of the advancing Japanese; all effort and courage bent towards preventing this. It was in such a determined mood that John, in an ambulance, accidentally found himself behind enemy lines, surrounded by Japanese soldiers. John recalled the surreal and dangerous moment:

  I was on reconnaissance trying to locate X battalion, the ‘odds and sods’, not knowing that it had even then been wiped out to a man, to provide them with an RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] when my driver and I ran into an ambush in pitch dark (we didn’t dare use head lights) and my reaction was (I was standing on the running boards—they had them in those days—directing my driver) terror, I hissed inside the car—‘Reverse and turn and let’s bugger off quick!’ He did, thank God. The Nips weren’t after such small fry as us . . .

  This act of cool-headedness—evaluating the position rapidly and immediately dealing with it—became legendary within the 2/9th Field Ambulance. Over the years it has been recited and, without doubt, finessed to suit the mood of the occasion. Like all war stories, the light and shade varies in the telling, the mix of truth and fiction differing from person to person.

  In the final frantic days before surrender, John was tearing about, caring for the injured in the city of Singapore, ‘charging round the aisles of St Andrew’s Cathedral’. To make way for the wounded, pews were pitched outside, stretchers and mattresses carted inside. John moved about the battle-wounded and dying on the floor of the cathedral; some lay still, bleeding, unable to move; others writhed in agony. The cathedral floor groaned with bodies of soldiers and civilians, though in dying there was little to distinguish between them. The fetid cathedral air was thick with the sounds of the wounded and the smell of dead flesh and soggy bandages wrapped around dying limbs. Decades afterwards, John could still remember the acrid blend of blood and faeces and smoke, a sticky scent that clung to his nostrils. Whatever reserves of energy John possessed he spent in ‘slugging hundreds and hundreds of exhausted and panic-stricken troops’ with sedatives ‘from a huge syringe’. John, for the most part, was endowed with a capacity to curtain off his immediate reaction to these obscene images and do what was needed.

  On 15 February the Allied command surrendered. Exhausted, John expected, along with all Allied prisoners, to be executed by the Japanese: ‘The night of capitulation I expected to be my last. The Nip rough stuff were infiltrating the city centre and cutting down anything that moved.’ Then, with the serenity of a man who believes his future is fixed, John fatalistically ‘lay down on the grass beside [his] ambulance not expecting to survive the night’. When the following day dawned and he awoke still resting beside his ambulance, no one was more astonished than John that he was ‘safe and sound’.

  In the first anxious hours after surrender, John found himself in a post-apocalyptic city. George Aspinall, a fellow POW, secretly recorded a stunning series of grainy black and white photographs from this period after capitulation. The images show a city that has ceased to live. St Andrew’s Cathedral, John’s last refuge, appears eerily normal, a line of ready-to-use ambulances standing at attention; on the beaches, rocks are strewn about, like the disgorged remnants of a volcanic eruption. Among the rising spirals of smoke, three defeated men, more dead than alive, wander along the waterfront, lost. No Allied soldier had expected to surrender; they expected to fight and either win or lose. This was neither, and now they assembled in this netherworld, tens of thousands of numb soldiers, shuffling about, waiting for their Japanese conquerors to arrive.

  As the triumphant Japanese swaggered into Singapore, the victors seemed dumbfounded by the problem at hand—what to do with over 50,000 captive Allied personnel and civilians? Their impromptu solution was to muster the tens of thousands and force them towards the southeast corner of the island, to a place called Changi. So, regardless of their state of health, wounded or otherwise, all soldiers were ordered to trudge the roughly 25 kilometres to Changi. John recalled with some considerable gratitude how, stretched out along the sides of the road, local residents, particularly the Chinese, extended their hands towards the Australian soldiers offering small kindnesses of bananas, water and coconuts.

  It was several months after his incarceration as a prisoner of war that John found out that his closest friend—John Park—had been murdered in the mayhem as the Japanese attacked the island of Singapore. There are several versions of what happened but the following is about as close to the truth as anyone can get.

  All was chaos and death in those final days
as the Japanese invaded. A call came out to John Park that several Australian soldiers, wounded and without transport, were trapped and unable to retreat from the advancing enemy. Park and three other men gallantly responded: the first, a driver, was Harold Ball, the giant ruckman from the 2/9th Aussie Rules football team. After Ball there was another driver, William Lewis, and an orderly, Alf Woodman.

  John Park and his three companions jumped into their ambulance, responding to the distress call ‘without hesitation, consultation or loss of time’ and drove into the haze of battle in the northwest corner of Singapore Island. They did not reappear.

  Several months after the Allied surrender, Australian POW work parties were sent out by the Japanese to scour parts of the island for wood and the like. Surreptitiously they looked for dead Australian soldiers. They came across John Park.

  Even when bodies were found like this, identifying them was made difficult by the accelerated decomposition in the hot atmosphere and constant rain. Looters, like vultures feeding upon carrion, often ransacked these Allied soldiers’ bodies, and removed any valuables they could find. When Park was found, rumours flew around the camp about the grisly find and how the men died. One oral history handed down is that Park had been bound and then beheaded. The belief is that all the men were captured, tortured and executed, but what actually occurred is mired in uncertainty.

  Park’s death was a blow from which John never fully recovered. Jean just said her husband ‘never got over that’. Even though he was a forgiving man, it seems likely that John never quite forgave the Japanese. One senses that John Cade felt he never was quite the man that Park was; not in an envious or grasping manner, but simply an acknowledgement that he had once had the privilege of knowing someone sublime. John wrote of Park that ‘No one could know him and not love him’, a tribute few could be accorded. Park was recommended for a posthumous Victoria Cross—but no award was ever bestowed.