by David
I sincerely hope this will give support to all ex-Prisoners-of-War, who in serving their country, sustained the terrible hardships of Japanese incarceration and are still suffering from the after effects.2
About the time I wrote to Humphreys, I began to think more deeply about my own health and state of mind. The more I studied the health of Ex-POWs in general and the effects that their treatment so long ago had on their present state of health, the more clearly I understood my own condition. I was gradually able to accept that I too was not as whole as I had always regarded myself.
It had taken me a lifetime to begin to understand my own condition. I knew that I had been in denial for most of my life, and of course I also realised that this was probably one reason why so many ex-POWs found it so difficult to apply for a pension. To help solve this problem, I wrote and distributed among the ex-POW community what I had discovered about myself. I thought long and hard before I decided to make it available to everyone.
War and Post War: The Ex-POW Japan
I was captured at the Fall of Singapore and held prisoner in Changi, the Siam/Burma railway and various Japanese Army projects in Siam for three and a half years. The Japanese were brutal captors. During most of that time, we were starved, overworked and deprived of medical treatment, clothing, footwear and anything resembling hygiene. The Japanese guards treated us as expendable slave labour, and the threat of death was a daily prospect, whether by accident, execution, casual brutality, illness or starvation. Only the atomic bomb saved us from certain death, either by pre-invasion execution or by starvation during death marches.
The prison camps taught us certain survival skills. One of the first lessons in survival that we learned was to show no resistance and to hide all expressions of anger or disapproval. We learned to be docile and uncomplaining in the face of extreme provocation. Where the normal human reaction to a blow is to strike back, we learned not only to repress that reaction but also to repress the emotion that would prompt such a response. Where it is only natural to show anger when one is abused unjustly, we learned to accept indignities, even pain, without displaying any emotion. We found reason to practise this deceptive behaviour daily throughout the years of our captivity. We came to be so adept at these life-preserving suppressions of our natural feelings that eventually the behaviour became an automatic response. We found ourselves enduring discomfort and physical punishment without even thinking about the need to blank out our feeling. We became accustomed to behaving in ways that were not normal until the abnormal became our norm for survival.
To an outsider, we appeared to be subhuman creatures, acting as automatons in such circumstances where ordinary men would have been rebellious, angry or hostile. This does not mean that we did not feel the blows and that we did not resent our unearned punishments. Did we come to accept the cruelties of our guards as right and proper? My own recollection is that we were just as enraged at injustice and sadistic cruelties after three and a half years as we had been after one week of captivity. We were no longer surprised by it and we were better prepared to survive such a regime than we were at the beginning of our ordeal. But we still felt the hurts and we still resented them as deeply as before. We never considered the starvation, overwork and the beatings as normal and acceptable behaviour. I do not remember becoming so inured to the brutality that I did not from time to time entertain myself with fantasies of revenge.
We eventually arrived back in Australia after spending almost five years overseas and receiving little notice, and no special attention was paid to our adjustment problems. In my own case, I recall that horrifying nightmares, nervous tremors, generalised paranoia, acute depression and crying episodes caused me to seek medical advice when I returned to Heidelberg Military Hospital after weekend leave. I was hospitalised for observation because of my complaints and later discharged from the Army as unfit for further military service. I was then awarded a 10% disability pension. One of the disabilities mentioned was anxiety neurosis. Today, those symptoms would be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Anxiety neurosis is a common affliction of former Prisoners of War (Japan). Many of us with that diagnosis do not understand the illness. We are not able to say just what is wrong with us, and we do not know why we have the symptoms associated with that type of illness. Most of us would, I suspect, deny that we are particularly anxious or that we are neurotic. For several years after liberation, I did have problems of adjustment. By 1960, however, fifteen years after the war, I was able to put aside my identification as an ex-POW and to see myself primarily in terms of my work role. I thought then that my behaviour was normal, and I believed that I no longer had adjustment problems.
Like most of us, I convinced myself that I had no grudge against the Japanese. Whenever questioned about it, I would absolve the Japanese people for the crimes committed by their military leaders. In my efforts to come to a peaceful resolution of my past, I acted sincerely. I believed that I was doing what was both right and necessary. So far as I could tell, I had no problem coming to terms with my prison camp experience.
It was in 1968 that I first began to suspect that I might have a more serious problem than I realised in shedding my prison camp history. On attending my first Anzac Day march and wearing my war medals for the first time, I found to my dismay that a few yards down the road I started to weep uncontrollably. I started to shake and became disorientated. I then broke away from the group I was marching with and made my way home. I have never marched or worn my medals since.
Later, it occurred to me that, during the march, memories had started to flood back of those horrendous years, memories that I thought had been put out of mind or in perspective. When I related the incident to my wife, I tried to tell her about the way the Japanese had treated us in captivity. I again broke down and wept, unable to continue.
In retrospect, I reasoned that I had denied myself the right to have normal human emotions about what had been done to my comrades and me by the Japanese. It was only natural that I should be angry with the Japanese guards. Instead of recognising and admitting my anger, I had denied my feelings because they conflicted with my social training. I had been taught as a child and counselled as an adult that it is wrong to hold a grudge, and that it is right to forgive one’s enemies. I did the dutiful and correct thing, dealing with the issue rationally and free of emotion. For the most part, I thought I was successful in forgiving the unforgivable and in forgetting the unforgettable experiences of my captivity.
It made me see that I was, first of all, a human being and not some kind of forgiving angel. I was able to live with my anger only because it had been so deeply buried in my subconscious that I was not aware of the burden I carried . . .
The joy, the easy and spontaneous happiness that I witnessed in others, I could not emulate in my own life. My ability to feel strongly and to care deeply about many things had been dulled. My life was much more serious and less fun than it might have been.
It affected my work life in ways that I did not realise for many years. My behaviour progressively got worse: bouts of emotionalism that at times left me shaking and near to tears. I would rant and rave at people I respected or loved, for no real or obvious reason.
What this tells me is that all of us, normal human beings, were deeply offended and terribly angered by what the Japanese did to us and to our helpless companions. We hid that anger in order to survive and we controlled it for so long a period that we buried it out of our consciousness. This numbing of feeling and burial of anger became necessary adaptations because there is no other way that we could have functioned in that setting. Today, these many years later, we live with the physical and mental consequences of that suppression of strong emotions. Fatigue, restlessness, depression, irritability, crying, insomnia, nightmares and shaky hands are some of the symptoms that point to the anger within each of us today. We have demonstrated a tendency to direct this latent anger toward members of our families and to blame them for our e
motional problems instead of the war years.3
The laws regarding pensions for ex-POWs (Japan) changed very little as a result of all this effort by Weary, David and many others. However, David’s self-analysis revealed to him exactly why he was so determined to make the Japanese government accept, apologise for and pay for their soldiers’ past behaviour.
George Beard and Clarrie Wilson, the chairman and secretary of the Queensland State Council of the Ex-POW Association, continued to make things difficult for David and the Reparations Committee.
George Beard kept referring to our Australian Reparations Committee as a sub-committee of the State Council. Perhaps we were, but he certainly knew that it would annoy the hell out of me. We had got this far despite his activities, not because of them. Here was someone who in the recent past had done his best to stop the Reparations Committee and had gone along with everything Weary said about the impossibility of the task. Now, when he could see how successful we were, he wanted to take control. Not on your bloody life! If we had to report to the State Council, fair enough, but I wasn’t having George run the show – no way!
George had various concerns about our activities and always wanted to meet and discuss them at a moment’s notice. I refused to play his game. Every request he made was of vital importance and urgent, according to him, so the first thing I’d do was take my time. Even although we reported regularly, openly and honestly, he was never satisfied and always wanted to run the committee his way.
He wanted to control where the money was invested, where the bank statements were kept, what our travel expenses were, what the quorum for a meeting should be, what the criteria for accepting claims were, what the taxation implications were, and so on. We told him that his claims were frivolous and mischievous, and that quieted George down – at least for a while.
Some registration forms from members came with the minimum of information, but others were accompanied by horrific stories of suffering under the Japanese. The committee recorded all of them, of course, and used some stories as evidence of suffering in their claim documentation.
One example of an understated claim form came from the very well known nurse, Sister Captain Vivian Bullwinkel, a survivor of the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke in the Banka Strait in February 1942. She stated simply that she suffered from ‘malaria, dysentery, tinea, Banka Island fever and malnutrition’. And in answer to the question about sadistic treatment, she wrote: ‘Shot in the back, only survivor of 21 nurses on beach, Banka Island, Japanese machine-gunned us from behind as we were forced to walk into the sea.’4
David also made direct contact with the Japanese government, through its Australian ambassador. He tried to persuade him that the best course of action for the Japanese government – to prevent further embarrassment – was to apologise and pay reparations for the wrongs it had inflicted on Australian POWs, just as other countries such as Germany were doing. He explained the Reparation Committee’s mission, and detailed how it had gathered extensive evidence of horrendous Japanese war crimes. Japan had to demonstrate ‘her genuine desire to make amends to former Australian POWs’, David wrote, which ‘would also help to restore Japan’s national honour in the eyes of the international community’.5
The Reparations Committee encouraged all those who had registered a claim to write to the Japanese embassy in Australia. They should explain their position, describe the harsh treatment they had received from the Imperial Japanese Army and ask when the Japanese government would pay reparations. All who did this received a standard reply, along the lines of that which the Reparations Committee itself eventually received:
The question of reparations to Australian nationals caused by the action taken by Japan or its nationals has already been settled between Japan and Australia, one of the allied powers, by Article 14(b) of the San Francisco Peace treaty of 1952.6
David decided that letter writing was getting them nowhere with the Japanese Embassy.
We made little headway with the Japanese through correspondence, so I decided to go to see them personally. I took Greta along to the embassy in Canberra on two occasions. We were always received very politely and shown every courtesy. However, the result of these meetings was no better than what we had achieved by sending letters.
We always met with the First Secretary at the embassy and several officials. All the questions I asked were answered only after the officials had a discussion in Japanese in front of Greta and I, and after they had consulted this huge bloody book. I have never seen such a big book. Apparently, it contained all the answers to every question they were ever likely to be asked about anything!
One of the officials was not as polite as the others. He looked like the worst type of railway guard, just as I remembered from all these years ago. He was in his mid-twenties, a squat, muscular little bastard, and he hated the questions about torture and starvation that I was putting very directly to the First Secretary.
I could always feel this guy’s anger, although he never said a word. I just smiled at him because I knew that would annoy him even more. I could feel Greta’s hand on my arm, pulling me back slightly as if to say, ‘Please don’t annoy that man any more.’ I really felt like thumping him but he was forty years younger than me so I resisted.
David arranged for Japanese newspapers to have access to the stories of Australian ex-POWs: what they felt about the Japanese and what they were preparing to do about it. The greater the embarrassment to the Japanese government, David reckoned, the more likely they were to pay reparations. It seemed likely that this was why the executive of the Federal Council of the Ex-POW Association had been so against claiming reparations. They didn’t like upsetting the Japanese government because that would upset the Australian government.
David’s strategy seemed to be working well, as evidence was emerging that the Japanese were worried about their relationship with Australia.
David never missed a chance to correspond with the media in Japan. He was even interviewed by the Japanese press, always emphasising that Australian POWs were owed compensation for the horrendous treatment they had suffered.
By mid-1989, the funds held by the Reparations Committee totalled approximately $77,000. The raffle for the block of land was expected to bring in another $30,000. Much of the money was lodged in term deposits, which at the time were paying interest rates of up to seventeen per cent.
The committee employed a writer, James Essex, to develop the claim documents and conclude the project’s draft stage. They hoped to have the final copies of the claim printed by September 1989.
Chapter 20
To Geneva
During the second half of 1989, the members of the Reparations Committee prepared for their trip to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, where they would lodge their claim against the Japanese government. They knew, as always, that publicity would be important.
This was foremost in their minds as they met, on 7 July 1989, at the offices of their solicitors, Collas Morro, on the Gold Coast. The more international publicity they could generate, the better chance they would have of shaming Japan into action. It was agreed that David and Peter Collas would travel to Geneva via Canada, the United States and Britain.
David’s attention was drawn to an article in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph of 24 July 1989. It reported on atrocities witnessed during the war years by a former intelligence officer of the Japanese army by the name of Nagase Takashi, who was visiting Australia. David immediately recognised the Kempeitai officer with whom he had worked during the War Graves Commission trip back up the railway all these years before.
David had suspected then that Nagase probably was guilty of war crimes, but he was apparently a completely different man now. Even then, David had not disliked him. Now he was, by all accounts, a respected former officer who had some influence in Japan, and he had admitted being ashamed of the atrocities he had witnessed against Allied POWs. That was enough for David to recommend that the Reparations Committee should ap
proach him.
Nagase Takashi had come to Australia at the behest of one Don Kibbler. He was a builder who had worked with the Japanese architect Ken Nakajima to construct the Japanese Gardens at Cowra, which commemorated the 234 Japanese POWs and the five Australian soldiers who had died during the breakout there in August 1944. Kibbler also had extensive business connections in Japan.
A meeting with Don Kibbler in Sydney was arranged, which was attended by David, Gordon Jamieson, the Reparations Committee’s secretary, and George Morgan, the NSW Reparations Committee’s representative.
After the group had briefed Don on the Reparations Committee’s mission, he proposed a strategy of more direct negotiations with the Japanese government, with Nagase Takashi acting as the middleman. Nagase’s views were well known by the public in Japan, and it was likely that he would be keen to help with their efforts to gain reparations. The mayor of Kyoto had also publically apologised to Don on Japanese television, and he thought there was at least an opening for them to approach the Japanese government directly.
Don explained that he thought it more likely that the Japanese government would respond to an intermediary such as Nagase because they would feel less intimidated. In his view, the Japanese would be less likely to agree to compensation if they felt threatened. David was not so sure but was willing to give it a go.
Don then went on to explain how they might propose a foundation that would benefit ex-POWs and their families. He argued that this might be more likely to win the Japanese government’s favour, rather than a straightforward claim for an amount of money based on the number of claimants.
The claim could be set out as a proposal to fund some institution, association or service that would promote greater understanding between the people of Japan and Australia. The claimants’ requirements could then be recognised in a trust deed, and a figure of $25,000 could be paid to each, at the discretion of the trustees. Don had some experience in setting up this type of trust: he had been chairman of the Cowra–Japan Memorial Foundation, which could serve as a model for the Reparations Committee to follow.