by Bruce Gamble
In addition to avoiding Robertson as much as possible, the nurses also learned to conduct their business with a degree of indifference toward all of the men at Vunapope. If they acted too friendly, their behavior was likely to invite lewd gestures and insinuating looks from the Japanese. The nurses were afraid of being raped, and on several occasions, inebriated soldiers banged on the doors of the women’s dormitory at night, terrifying the occupants.
The worst episode coincided with the fall of Singapore on February 15, which the victors celebrated with gusto. “Drunken Japs,” noted Alice Bowman, “made the night hideous with screams and cheers accompanying Japanese marching songs.” Some of the nurses kept vials of morphine hidden in their clothing, preferring suicide to rape—at least in theory. And virtually all of them slept fully clothed, which had the added benefit of saving time when attacks by the RAAF necessitated a midnight dash to the nearest bomb shelter.
Ten days after the fall of Singapore, at the request of the nuns, the nurses were permitted to move into the convent. Ironically, the harassment of the Australian women was mild compared to the mistreatment of the Catholic staff. Colonel Kuwada and his 3rd Battalion showed no regard for Christianity, nor did they respect the sanctity of the buildings at Vunapope. In their eyes, the campus was merely a collection of structures suitable for occupation, as Kuwada demonstrated by taking the bishop’s residence for his own. Apparently, the Japanese didn’t care that The Most Reverend Leo Scharmach and his staff were Germans; they were treated with the same contempt as the Australians. Adding insult to injury, the Japanese converted the cathedral into a stable for the battalion’s horses.
If the bishop was mortified about the desecration of his church, he never showed it. Slightly built, with an enormous nose and round spectacles that made him resemble Groucho Marx, he was an intellectual with the courage of a crusader. He flummoxed the Japanese at every opportunity, according to one correspondent, and deliberately maintained “an appearance of sublime self-confidence, an arrogance that not even the most fanatical follower of the bushido code could match.”
But Scharmach could do little to prevent the Japanese from abusing the women at Vunapope. Nuns who rebuffed the guards’ sexual advances sometimes received severe punishment. A favorite method was to force them to kneel on the ground, and a bamboo pole was laid across both legs behind the knee. Soldiers or collaborating police boys would then stand on both ends of the pole and bounce, mashing the victim’s kneecaps into the ground. One nun allegedly suffered permanent disability from such torture.
The women at Vunapope were in a constant state of fear, and Scharmach lodged complaints with the Japanese high command. Eventually Major General Horii took steps to stop the abuses by issuing a directive known as the “Guide to Soldiers in the South Seas.” It consisted of five simple commandments:
Do not needlessly kill or injure the local inhabitants.
Behavior such as looting and violating women is strictly forbidden.
Buildings and property in enemy territory must not be burned without permission.
Scrupulously keep secrets and maintain security.
Treat ammunition carefully, and reduce waste to a minimum.
Although the edict deterred common soldiers from raping and pillaging, it did not put an end to executions or indiscriminate atrocities. Natives, Asians, and Australians alike were punished—sometimes with utter brutality—for minor infractions. The Rabaul market was the site of numerous public executions, which served the dual purpose of demonstrating Japanese domination over the civilian populace and deterring would-be rebels. In one example, the Japanese rounded up several Chinese officials from the local chapter of the Nationalist Party, accused them of “underground activities,” and summarily executed them. On another occasion, three natives charged with cutting telephone wires were publicly beheaded.
To most Westerners, execution by decapitation seemed barbaric, a horrible method of killing. But among the Japanese it was an honored method, not only for death sentences but also as an element of ritualistic suicide. Swords were issued to all officers and many NCOs in the Imperial Army, and they were encouraged to perform a beheading as a “trial of courage.”
The army-issue swords, often referred to as Showa swords, were representative of the ubiquitous samurai sword, but their quality was only average. Many officers either purchased their own high-quality swords or received them as gifts, and they were fond of giving them pet names. If a soldier sought a “cutting test” to demonstrate his prowess, there was no shortage of prisoners to experiment on. Those who cut off a head with a single stroke, like the commandant at Rabaul boasted of doing, gained prestige.
Some of the executions at Rabaul were photographed. One pair of images that survived the war shows the beheading of a native catechist in a public area. In the first photograph, a dark-skinned native sits straight-legged on the ground with his back against a thick post. His feet are tied to a stake between his ankles, and his wrists are shackled. Several uniformed Japanese stand nearby, while numerous onlookers peer over a cloth barricade. In the second image, the executioner is off balance, having just swung his sword. Twin fountains of blood jet into the air from the victim’s carotid arteries, and his decapitated head lies near his outstretched feet.
The total number of beheadings at Rabaul is unknown, but there can be no doubt that plenty of Japanese executed captives with their swords. There were literally hundreds of victims, from individual sentences to mass executions. In one incident documented by historian Peter Stone, no fewer than thirty islanders were beheaded merely because “they discussed giving food to another native suspected of aiding the Allies.” Obviously, the edict about killing natives “needlessly” was open to interpretation.
At Rabaul, captured soldiers and airmen were subjected to some of the worst atrocities. John Gray, the engineering officer captured at Tol, was the victim of a particularly heinous crime committed by members of the 3rd Battalion. Taken to Vunapope rather than imprisoned at the Malaguna Road stockade, he was tied to a palm tree outside Lieutenant Colonel Kuwada’s residence and questioned for hours in the blazing sun. Periodically the Japanese slapped him with a length of rope, beat him with planking, or sprinkled biting ants on his body. When they grew tired of the interrogation, they took Gray to a distant hill where missionary students witnessed his execution. First, a doctor named Chikumi, whose reputation for malevolence had earned him the ironic nickname “Sunshine Sam,” administered an injection that rendered Gray semi-conscious. Next, Chikumi performed a vivisection and removed Gray’s still-beating heart, for no better reason than “to study his reactions.”
In the first weeks after the invasion, the Japanese murdered at least five officers from Lark Force: Glenn Garrard, Len Henry, Herb Silverman, Dick Travers, and John Gray. James Edmonds-Wilson nearly joined them when he refused to allow the officers to work; and when other Australians were threatened with execution, they knew to take it seriously.
Conditions for other prisoners on New Britain were just as grim. Soon after the fall of Singapore, tens of thousands of Malaysian and Indian captives were sent to Rabaul to build roads and perform other heavy labor. Proof of their service as slaves was discovered after the war in documents written by the 18th Army commander, Major General Hatazo Adachi, whose instructions stated that “prisoners and coolies” of the 31st Field Road Construction Unit were to rebuild a “motor vehicle road” in the vicinity of Kokopo. Month after grueling month, the work parties toiled under oppressive and appalling conditions, then returned to overcrowded, disease-riddled camps.
Shingara Singh, a jemedar (junior officer) captured with the 5/11 Sikh Regiment at Singapore, reported that about six thousand Indians were imprisoned near Kokopo along with “several thousand” Chinese. At Tanoura prison camp near Tunnel Hill Road, another two thousand Malaysians and Burmese were kept in a single compound. Brutalities were routine. Prisoners caught trying to escape were mutilated, their toes or the lower parts of their f
eet sliced off with swords to prevent further attempts. Those who were too sick to work were simply executed and tossed aside. As the war progressed, untold thousands of Asian and Indian prisoners died of neglect, malnutrition, exhaustion, or murder in the pestilential camps scattered around the Gazelle Peninsula.
DESPITE THE JAPANESE PROCLAMATION, THE FEMALE PRISONERS AT Vunapope did not feel safe until they saw dozens of kimono-clad women in the area. In Rabaul, Gordon Thomas observed them in the streets immediately after the invasion, and he later speculated that they had been aboard the fleet to serve the officers. Ultimately, some three thousand conscripted prostitutes were sent to Rabaul to provide a sexual outlet for the military in the separate army and navy districts. They were known as “comfort women,” but the friendly sounding name was deceptive: the vast majority were enslaved Koreans and Formosans taken forcibly from their homes or “hired” under false pretenses.
Each service maintained its own brothels. The Imperial Navy operated three establishments in Rabaul, fancifully named the East, West, and North Magnificent Love Lines. The first served officers and senior administration officials, the second served NCOs and below, and the third was for laborers and “military coolies.” Sailors were permitted four hours of shore leave per week, during which they could purchase a ticket at their representative “Special Purpose House” for a maximum of thirty minutes with a prostitute. Enlisted men and civilian workers were charged two yen per ticket; commissioned officers paid half a yen more.
The army also operated three brothels in town—but their privilege system was oddly different. The enlisted men were served until 1600, the NCOs until 1900, then the officers visited until 2200 or later. Naturally there were far fewer officers, which meant they had a more leisurely schedule, but many of the women had been forced to perform throughout the day.
Okyron Pak, a Korean who worked in an army brothel in Rabaul, recalled having intercourse with the rank and file, NCOs, and officers all on the same day. An hour was supposedly allotted for each customer, but no one dared take that long because of the queue of impatient men waiting outside the door. Sundays were the worst, with soldiers arriving by the truckload. “On those busy days,” recalled Pak, “we couldn’t find time to put on underwear. My private parts were all swollen and ached. Exhausted, I begged a warm-hearted officer to [send me] home.”
The road that led Pak to Rabaul was not unusual. Born in the province of North Cholla, she was married at age sixteen, then ran away and became the concubine of a wealthy man. She married him and had a child, but husband number two often beat her. He eventually sold her to an employment agency, which in turn sold her to a bigger agency in Seoul. She was put aboard a ship with other women, none of whom learned the truth about their “employment” until they reached Rabaul six weeks later. “We had never dreamt that we would have to serve soldiers,” she stated. “What we expected to do was wash clothes or care for soldiers. How terrified we were when soldiers broke into our rooms and raped us. We resisted with all our strength, but it was hopeless.”
In February, the 3rd Battalion set up a brothel at Vunapope, after first evicting the Brotherhood of the Sacred Heart from their dormitory. Alice Bowman and the other nurses watched the proceedings from the balcony of the nearby convent.
One morning after breakfast we looked out from the upstairs verandah to see a moving mass of color spreading from the lawn below us to the front of the cathedral. There were hundreds of tiny women in bright kimonos flitting about like swarms of butterflies…
Opposite our residence was a three-story building where the Brothers of the Mission lived, and it was painfully clear that they were moving out. Missionaries from the building were carrying cases and baggage; we saw Father Barrow, whom we’d met at Christmas, reduced to an undignified role among the porters. While the girls waited demurely on the lawn, the Japs looked on from a distance.
As the last of the Brothers left their home, the visitors on the lawn gathered up their handkerchief bundles and hurried inside. We felt a deep sympathy for the missionaries over this humiliation, yet, at the same time gained comfort from the realization that, with so many of their own women on the premises, the Japanese would no longer pay undue attention towards us.
Soon after opening the brothel at Vunapope, the Japanese heaped even more indignities on the Catholic staff. First, troops led the horses out of the cathedral, then they scooped the straw and manure off the floor. When the church was sufficiently clean, a long procession of soldiers filed inside for a special ceremony to honor their war dead. “The cathedral had already been desecrated when it was used for a stable,” continued Bowman, “and now it was being further defiled by what could only be regarded, by our Christian missionaries, as a pagan ceremony.”
AT THE MALAGUNA STOCKADE, PRISONERS DIED FOR LACK OF PROPER MEDICAL care. The Japanese blamed the deaths on malaria and did not send sick men from the prison to the hospital at Vunapope. A few men such as Bert Morgan had basic medical training, but little could be done for the sick except to give them extra food.
Some of the deaths among the close-knit Victorians were especially heartbreaking. Bespectacled baritone player Stanley A. French, a native of England and the oldest member of the battalion band, died in the stockade on February 15 at the age of thirty-nine. His passing was mourned by Morgan, Arthur Gullidge, and sixteen other captured bandsmen who had been together for almost two years. Most of the musicians were firmly committed to their Salvation Army roots. Although somewhat parochial, the “Salvos” happily accepted Jim Thurst (Methodist) and drummer William E. Edwards (Church of England) as part of “their” band. Vocalists as well as musicians, they all sang numerous hymns as a way of sharing their faith with their fellow POWs.
Initially, the Japanese prohibited religious gatherings, but several weeks after the invasion, they began to allow a short prayer meeting after the morning roll call. Upon securing that small victory, the clergy imprisoned at Malaguna sought permission to conduct worship services on Sundays. There was no shortage of preachers: John Poole and Laurie McArthur were among the eight Methodist ministers, and others included a Roman Catholic priest, a Seventh Day Adventist, several lay ministers, and the battalion’s Catholic padre, Victor Turner.
Soon after the advent of religious services, the Japanese allowed another opportunity for music in the stockade. In early March, the Imperial Navy’s 8th Base Unit accepted responsibility for the military control of the occupied islands in the Bismarck Archipelago. Rabaul was considered sufficiently developed for the establishment of a civil administration, or minseibu, which meant that representatives of the Imperial government would be headquartered in the region. In what was regarded as an important advancement of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Japanese officially established the minseibu at Rabaul on March 10. They decided to commemorate the event with a huge celebration and reception at the Regent Theater.
This was the moment that Alexander “Lex” Fraser, a captain in the 1st Independent Company, had been hoping for. An accomplished pianist who was also fluent in Japanese, he had been approached earlier by a Japanese officer who wanted him to transpose a book of army songs into conventional sheet music. Fraser not only agreed to cooperate, but arranged to have Arthur Gullidge join him. Together they spent several days in Rabaul writing music and getting “plenty to eat.”
Soon after, an officer named Kishida arranged for the Australians to provide the music for the gala event. Several instruments were available, including the Regent theater’s piano, and the two Australians picked some of the former battalion bandsmen to play them. With great cunning, Fraser also arranged to have some of the sick men attend rehearsals. By pretending to play different instruments, they received extra food. During the grand ceremony at the Regent, the Japanese drank so heavily they never realized half the orchestra was phony.
The real musicians made up for it by playing their hearts out. The evening affair, as described by Hutchinson-Smith, was a triumph for the A
ustralians:
The sake flowed freely, and many were the unorthodox dances to the prisoners’ music. The only occurrences which marred the proceedings were the thrashing of a Japanese belle by her escort who was mad with liquor, and the unexpected arrival of a decrepit truck which was driven into the theater by an intoxicated officer in the middle of the dance.
The band, however, had an extra meal with what was given them and what they could lift unseen, and they voted the function a success at which a good time was had by all. The Japs failed to realize that much of the music was a jazzed-up version of such songs as the National Anthem, “Advance Australia Fair,” “Rule Britannia,” “Waltzing Matilda” and similar numbers. A great hit was “Auld Lang Syne,” our knowledge of which surprised the Japanese, who stated that it was a Japanese melody. We never found out what their words were, but every time they heard the piece they became sentimental and wistful.
As a reward for their performance, the musicians were allowed to take the instruments—even the piano—back to the stockade. For a few pleasant days, the Fibro huts echoed with the strains of popular music, mostly played for the benefit of sick prisoners. The effect on the POWs’ morale was profound, and when the Japanese realized how much the captives were benefiting from the music, they took the instruments away.
AS THE WEEKS STRETCHED INTO MONTHS AT MALAGUNA CAMP, THE POWs suffered continuously from the compounding effects of heavy labor, malnutrition, and neglect. In addition to hunger and sickness, the majority of prisoners also endured personal indignities. Harold Page was singled out because of his former government position. While he struggled to unload cargo, the guards cajoled and sometimes physically mistreated him. Many other Australians were similarly abused, though the civilians generally endured less than the soldiers. “The Japanese never lost an opportunity to ridicule and humiliate prisoners, particularly officers,” recalled Hutchinson-Smith. “Beatings and invective in the presence of Kanakas and Japanese troops were designed to lower the prestige of the white men.”