Invasion Rabaul

by Bruce Gamble

  Greatly encouraged by the information, the prisoners managed to get through another brutal winter, and their optimism soared when American B-29 Superfortresses began striking the home islands in the spring of 1945. Although the POWs at Zentsuji did not experience the sort of close calls that had bothered them at Rabaul, they did feel the pinch of an increasingly acute food shortage. The ration of rice dropped to under three hundred grams per man per day, and even if more had been available, the cookhouse was constantly short of fuel for the coal-burning stoves.

  Eventually, the Japanese were forced to close down the camp. On June 23, 1945, more than three hundred feeble Americans stumbled out of Zentsuji’s main gate on their way to other camps. Two days later it was the Australians’ turn to leave. Just prior to their departure, a young officer from the 2/19th Battalion succumbed to malnutrition. Captured at Singapore, Lieutenant Charles P. Furner was the only Australian to die at Zentsuji. That it happened on the last day in camp was highly distressing to his countrymen.

  From Zentsuji, the Australians traveled by train and ferry to a new camp in the mining region of Hokkaido, northernmost of the main islands. The first morning of their journey found them approaching the main railway station in Osaka. As their train rolled through the outskirts of the city, they were awed by scenes of utter devastation. For miles in every direction, virtually as far as the eye could see, the landscape was covered with mounds of debris and twisted wreckage.

  Upon reaching the station the POWs were ordered off the train. Shortly thereafter, air raid sirens began to wail, and the Australians suddenly realized they were standing inside one of the few intact buildings in the center of Japan’s second-largest city. It wouldn’t be their first time in the line of fire, but this was no small-scale raid. More than one hundred B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force were coming from the Marianas to hit the Osaka arsenal on June 26; simultaneously, another seventy-one Superfortresses would hit secondary targets around the city. The POWs, able to hear the deep, throbbing hum of the approaching bombers, could not find any shelters to hide in. They did the next best thing, and sat on the concrete floor of the waiting room with their backs against the walls.

  Antiaircraft guns began firing at approximately 0845. The POWs huddled nervously, mindful of the plaster ceiling high above the center of the waiting room. Soon the whoosh of falling bombs became audible, followed by the crump of explosions. The blasts came closer, some hitting so close to the building that the doors blew in. Clouds of dust billowed through the doorways and windows, showering the men with debris. In the middle of the attack, some of the POWS and guards got up and staggered to the benjos. But they were unusable, clogged with inches of accumulated filth because the city’s water service had been destroyed.

  Hutchinson-Smith tried in vain to appear indifferent as he sat against a wall. His expression caught the eye of James W. S. Chisholm, a captain with the 2/18th Battalion captured at Singapore. Getting on his feet, Chisholm sauntered across the room in the middle of the raid, stopped in front of Hutchinson-Smith, and said, “You’re a bloody liar, and so am I!” It was just the tonic they both needed.

  The occupants of the train station endured the explosions and billowing dust for more than an hour before the attack finally subsided. Later, when they climbed back aboard their train, they saw that a large, eight-story building near the station, previously undamaged except for broken windows, had been reduced to a heap of smoking rubble. Other nearby damage included a still-burning train. The POWs’ extraordinary luck had held once again.

  IF ANYTHING, THE FEMALE PRISONERS HAD ENDURED MORE HARDSHIP THAN the officers. Shortly after the men departed for Zentsuji prison in July 1942, the women were moved to the Yokohama Yacht Club. Quartered upstairs in the clubhouse, they found the food and living conditions quite tolerable. But when winter approached, the Australians discovered that they weren’t accustomed to cold weather. Some of the older women, especially Mary Goss, had lived in the tropics for fifty years or more and felt chilled even when the weather was actually mild. Later, when the temperatures dropped below freezing, they experienced real misery.

  The Japanese kept the captives occupied with menial tasks of the sort their own women were obliged to perform. Each prisoner was given bundles of silk thread and taught how to hand-knit tiny drawstring bags. They would hold miniature charms called omamori—wooden tablets inscribed with Shinto incantations for good luck—which soldiers carried in battle. The women also produced hand-made envelopes out of colorful paper, but later they started eating the glue when their food was severely rationed. When the Japanese discovered this, they put a stop to envelope production.

  In the late summer of 1943, the women were moved temporarily to the police headquarters building of Kanagawa Prefecture. About two weeks later they returned to the yacht club and discovered that a pair of tough characters had taken over as supervisors. One man, known only as Komatsu, had an advanced case of tuberculosis; the other, nicknamed “Basher,” was a sadistic individual on furlough from the army. The women endured a great deal of face-slapping and intimidation from both men until the following spring, by which time Komatsu had died and “Basher” had returned to active duty. The man who replaced them was much different. Fat and elderly, with a congenial disposition and a penchant for singing, he was nicknamed “Papa-san,” an unavoidable cliché.

  In July 1944, after two years in the relative comforts of the yacht club, the women were moved to the village of Totsuka, west of Yokohama. Taking their belongings—which by this time included some old futons and thin blankets—they moved into their new “home,” a low, wooden structure built around three sides of a central courtyard. As the women spruced up the empty rooms, they realized with horror that they were in a former tuberculosis hospital. There was no indoor plumbing, only a well outside with a hand pump, and the benjo consisted of slits in the floor above a concrete pit.

  The amount of labor they were forced to perform increased significantly. They had to haul coal and firewood, piled alongside the main road near the village, uphill to the compound. The women drew water for cooking and washing from the well in heavy pails, and then emptied them into a large barrel outside the cookhouse. The captives, who also had to operate the pump for the local villagers, often made more than one hundred trips a day to the well. During the harsh winter of 1944-45, said to be one of the coldest in the previous thirty years, the pump was frequently frozen until mid-afternoon. It would thaw for a few hours, during which the women had to pump all the water for the villagers and their own needs before the handle froze again.

  The younger women performed most of the heavy labor. The hardships took their toll, recalled Alice Bowman. “We were so weak we could only stagger about and, with sunken eyes and general debilitation, we felt we had aged many years.”

  Eileen Callaghan, an army nurse, contracted tuberculosis and began to deteriorate rapidly. Her three roommates at Totsuka—Kay Parker, Mavis Cullen, and Lorna Whyte—did what little they could to comfort her. “Night after night in those cold winters we used to cuddle into Cal and she’d have these terrible TB sweats,” remembered Whyte. “We’d all be wet and trying to dry out but we had nothing to change into. The futons … were wet with the perspiration and sodden with B.O. and dirt because we could never have baths. We could wash our face but it was too cold to wash any other part. All you had was a bucket of water but you had to break the ice and throw that over you if you wanted to bathe.”

  The women arrived at Totsuka too late in the growing season to raise a garden, and by winter they were truly starving. “We were getting so desperately hungry, we would do anything,” Whyte added. “If you had to take a guard [his] tray, it didn’t matter if he had TB or if he was coughing all over it—if it had a crumb of rice on it, you took it. When you had to go and collect it, you’d take whatever was left on that tray and eat it.”

  One day, while trying to find the source of a foul odor that lingered near the hospital, the women discovered a graveyard behi
nd the building. It was a real oddity in Japan, where the dead are almost always cremated. In this case, villagers had put the corpses in shallow graves without coffins. The cemetery was supposedly off limits, but the women continued to explore and found a small shrine. It was apparent that visitors occasionally left gifts of food to honor the dead; subsequently, the women made sure the gifts didn’t go to waste. On a regular basis they would creep through the fence at night—being careful to cover their tracks if there was fresh snow on the ground—and take whatever edible items had been left behind.

  Snow still covered the ground when the women went to bed on the night of March 9, 1945. They fell asleep to the sound of fierce winds howling through the trees, but were awakened before dawn by the mournful wail of air raid sirens. To the northeast they could see the glow of fires stretching clear across the horizon. Tokyo was ablaze. The center of the city was only twenty-three miles from Totsuka, and some of the overcrowded neighborhoods were within fifteen miles, easily close enough for the women to see the results of Mission 40, one of the largest B-29 raids of World War II. A total of 279 Superfortresses hit Tokyo with incendiary bombs during the early morning hours of March 10. Multiple blazes, fanned by unusually strong winds, merged into massive, tornado-like firestorms that tore through neighborhoods crammed with flimsy wooden structures. A fourth of the city was destroyed and approximately eighty-four thousand people were killed. From the relative safety of Totsuka, Alice Bowman was enthralled by the sight of the burning city. “Flames were caught in the swirling winds and danced upward, turning into fireballs feverishly feeding upon themselves,” she later wrote. “Explosions tortured the air and the shocking scene took on the spectacle of a volcano in violent eruption.”

  Throughout the spring, the captives were able to glean enough information from stray copies of the Nippon Times to realize that the end of the war was nigh. The food shortage continued, but one day the women were thrilled by the sight of several single-engine fighters with white stars on their “turned-up wings.” The planes happened to be F4U Corsairs from American aircraft carriers, and soon they were appearing with regularity. On one occasion, the prisoners saw a fight in which Corsairs shot down Japanese planes.

  When a representative of the Red Cross visited Totsuka for the first time in July, the women were stunned to learn that word of their shipment to Japan had never been forwarded to Australia. Somehow, they had been “misplaced.” The visit by the Red Cross boosted their morale, yet the bombing raids continued, and the women constantly worried about the safety of other POW camps, several of which were much closer to the targeted areas.

  In early August, the women listened with skepticism to stories about a “big bomb” that had supposedly killed seventy thousand people and destroyed the city of Hiroshima. Several days later they heard rumors about another huge bomb which had devastated Nagasaki. Still they weren’t convinced, but a few days later they noticed a crowd of Japanese gathered in front of the camp administrator’s house. Loudspeakers were attached to a radio, and many of the villagers “prostrated themselves” on the floor while listening to Emperor Hirohito, whose voice had never before been heard over the airwaves. It took the women only a short time to realize what was happening: Japan had capitulated. The war was over.

  Later, having survived three years of misery, Lorna Whyte spoke for all of them when she made a vow to never feel hungry or cold again.

  THE WAR’S END FOUND THE LARK FORCE OFFICERS SAFE AT THE Nishi-Ashibetsu camp in the coal mining region of Hokkaido. In addition to the Australians, the camp population included three British and fifty-two American officers, most of whom worked in a nearby mine. The news about the surrender did not reach their remote location until August 18, and they continued to labor in the mine for a few extra days. Shortly thereafter, food and medical supplies began to appear in great quantities, much of it dropped by low-flying B-29s. The containers were rigged with parachutes, but sometimes the ‘chutes failed and the contents came crashing down with potentially deadly force.

  After each drop, hordes of Japanese and Korean civilians descended from the hills and pilfered the supplies. Justifiably frustrated, the ex-POWs played tricks on them. On one occasion, when a Japanese man scavenged a tube of shaving cream, an Australian officer told him it was joto meshi— good food. The hungry civilian squeezed a large amount directly into his mouth, then rapidly departed, his face looking contorted and pale.

  Although technically liberated, the ex-POWs had to wait at Ashibetsu while arrangements for transportation were sorted out. Delayed by nearly a month, they grew more annoyed with each passing day. Finally a convoy of trucks drove into camp on the morning of September 12. Out hopped an officer of the 1st Australian Prisoner of War Contact and Enquiry Unit. After introducing himself, Captain Francis J. Fenwick tried to field dozens of questions about current events in Melbourne and Sydney. When he finished, an American army doctor announced that it was his happy duty to start the ex-captives on their journey home. “Well…,” he said with a smile, “if you haven’t anything else to do, let’s go.”

  Transported to the Chitóse airport, the officers slept that night on mattresses with pillows and sheets in a barrack formerly used by Imperial Navy flight students. The next day, several twin-engine transports flew the ex-prisoners to Atsugi airfield, about twelve miles west of Yokohama. After another overnight stay, the officers were flown to Clark Field in the Philippines via Okinawa. Some had to wait as long as two weeks at Manila for an RAAF flight to Australia, but by the end of September all sixty officers from Lark Force were home.

  By then, most of the women from Totsuka were also home. The exceptions were two nurses: Eileen Callaghan had been placed aboard a hospital ship in Tokyo Bay because of tuberculosis, and Marjorie Anderson fell ill with malaria and was hospitalized at Okinawa. The others reached Darwin on September 12, then flew to Sydney the next day in an LB-30, the cargo variant of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber.

  Unaware that they were among the first captives to return to Australia, the women were overwhelmed by a tumultuous welcome at Mascot Airport. Emerging from the airplane, they had to shield their eyes from dozens of popping flashbulbs. Throngs of cheering spectators pressed forward, many of them elegantly dressed, which made the women suddenly felt dowdy in their ill-fitting uniforms.

  No one cared how they looked. One of the happiest people there was Hilda Keary, the matron of army nurses. Back in 1941 she had scolded Kay Parker and the other AANS sisters at Rabaul for their “uniform revolt”; later she deeply regretted her behavior. Lorna Whyte Johnson recalled, “When we got back to Sydney after four years, she was at the airport with tears streaming down her face. She said that all through the war, she couldn’t believe that she could have done such a terrible thing-telling us to put our stockings back on—and here we were, prisoners of war. This dear soul was standing there, just overwhelmed to see that we’d all returned.”

  LIKE MANY PEOPLE IN AUSTRALIA, THE REPATRIATED WOMEN WERE EAGER for news about the men who had been aboard the Montevideo Maru. Nothing had been heard for more than three years. Even after the officers returned in late September, the whereabouts of the ship’s 1,050-plus prisoners remained a mystery.

  At Rabaul, a formal surrender ceremony had been conducted aboard the British aircraft carrier HMS Glory on September 6, fully three weeks after the capitulation of Japan. Since then, the AIF had been holding thousands of Japanese in several makeshift camps pending investigations into war crimes. No one in Australia was aware yet that four civilians from Rabaul—Gordon Thomas, Al Creswick, George McKechnie, and Jim Ellis—had been found alive on New Britain. They were with dozens of Catholic internees who had been moved to the Ramale Valley after Vunapope was destroyed by bombing in 1944. At least eight other civilians, including Bob Evenson and Bill Korn, were never seen again.

  Thomas was aware of the Montevideo Maru s sinking, but his limited information did not reach Australia immediately. In fact, the ship’s loss was not announced pub
licly until early October. Credit for the investigation and subsequent reporting goes mainly to Major Harold S. Williams of the Recovered Personnel Division. A former businessman, he spoke and read Japanese fluently and was sent to investigate the case of the missing POWs. Arriving in Japan on September 27, he visited the Prisoner of War Information Bureau in Tokyo the next day and pressed them for information. The bureau insisted that nothing was available, but the dauntless Williams began to uncover a paper trail that same day.

  First, he discovered a maritime casualty notice dated July 20, 1942, in which the Imperial Navy reported the sinking of the Montevideo Maru to its owners, the Osaka Shosen Kaisha line. Another file revealed that the navy had forwarded details of the sinking, including “a complete nominal roll of the 848 PWs and 208 civilians who were on board and presumed lost,” to the POW Information Bureau the following January. Williams also discovered that the Japanese had never sent the information to the International Red Cross; instead, the bureau had deliberately withheld the facts despite numerous inquiries by the IRC and other agencies. The Japanese tried to claim that they had “persistently informed all enquirers that all known information had been transmitted,” but later the bureau’s director, Lieutenant General Hiroshi Tamura, admitted that the details of the sinking were not forwarded. This omission was “due to an oversight,” he stated, yet his confession trapped the bureau in a lie.

  Williams reported his findings to the Recovered Personnel Division in Melbourne, and on October 5 the Minister for External Territories broke the news about the tragedy to the House of Representatives:

  Investigation in Japan … has confirmed the Government’s fears that the majority of Australian prisoners of war and internees captured in Rabaul, and still missing, lost their lives at sea. It has now been ascertained that the Japanese Navy Department officially informed the Tokyo Prisoner of War Information Bureau on the 6th June, 1943, that the SS Montevideo Maru sailed from Rabaul on approximately the 22nd June, 1942, carrying 845 prisoners of war and 208 civilians, and that this ship, during its voyage, was torpedoed near Luzon with a total loss of the prisoners …”