Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  The months at the Bicycle Camp passed in endless tedium. A radio secreted somewhere gave them a smattering of news of the war, but even that knowledge was carefully limited. Possession of a radio meant summary execution. But in this way they heard of the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, the first real check to Japanese expansion in the Pacific, and then in June of the great American victory at the Battle of Midway. Rumours spread. Buzzes multiplied. Things were looking up. At any moment, the Allies would recapture Java. The optimists began to predict they would be home by Christmas.

  That all changed in the first week of October. There was a flurry of activity through the camp, and they were all inoculated against typhoid and cholera. Then they heard they were being moved, to a rest camp, they were told, where conditions would be even better. Apprehensive, they packed their few belongings: rags of clothing, a pair of rough sandals, eating utensils, perhaps a treasured family photograph and some Dutch guilders, or, more dangerous, a contraband diary. It was surprising what you could conceal in a G-string – an art they had perfected while pilfering on the wharves.

  The journey began, as always, with the tenko, the head count. This was almost a standing joke for the prisoners because the Japanese could never get it right at the first attempt, sometimes even at the third or fourth attempt. Furious, the guards would begin all over again. ‘All men back, one big mistake!’ After more confusion, they were marched to Batavia’s main railway station and transported to Tanjung Priok, where two ships were waiting for them, the Kinkon Maru and the Dai Nichi Maru. To more shouts and curses, they were ordered into the holds – hot and airless steel prisons where they could only squat or lie with their bodies crammed together. Fred Skeels was on the Dai Nichi:

  Men had dysentery and in many instances were not allowed to go to the outside toilet. They had accidents where they stood, and the stench aggravated the already acrid air. We were stuck in squalor for the next five days. We only saw the deck when a kinder guard let us go to the latrines, which consisted of box-like structures hanging out over the ship’s side. Our only other escape from the cesspool conditions was when we were also allowed to surface for about half an hour at meal times. Twice a day we were herded onto the fo’c’sle to eat two tiny serves of boiled rice which was augmented by a spoonful of seaweed soup. The food did not help our constitutions, and more men got dysentery as we travelled … sometimes they used fire hoses to squirt salt water onto us to clean our stinking bodies. Sleep was almost impossible and you had to try to force yourself to shut your eyes and ignore the cramped, hot and stinking surrounds and the noise of the men being sick or going to the toilet where they stood.9

  After five days of this purgatory, they arrived in Singapore. Clambering on deck, helping the weak and the sick as best they could, they saw Keppel Harbour laid out before them, crowded with vessels big and small flying the Japanese flag, or ‘the flaming arsehole’, as they called it. Trucks were waiting on the docks and they ground through the city, past shops and buildings still showing signs of bomb damage and gunfire, and then at breakneck speed along the island’s east-coast road until they stopped outside the forbidding concrete walls of the Changi Jail. This looked like being their next home, but, after half an hour of the Japanese guards milling in confusion, the trucks ground forward again. Ten minutes later, they lurched to a halt outside Changi’s Selarang Barracks.

  The name Changi has become synonymous with the worst atrocities of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. The image in the minds of most Australians is of a rank and crowded prison where men, reduced to little more than skeletons, were trapped like rats and brutalised by bestial guards. Movies and television programs have portrayed Changi as a hellhole, where atrocities and executions were a daily occurrence.

  It was not like that at all. Changi today is the site of Singapore’s international airport, but before the war it was a picturesque fishing village and a residential dormitory suburb, home to a British Army base set in green lawns and manicured tropical gardens with pleasant views of the Johore Strait. The Selarang Barracks, a modern and well-built complex, had housed the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. It was here, not the Changi Jail, where most of the 18,000 Australians who surrendered on Singapore were imprisoned. When the first of them arrived there, they were astonished to find that their guards were not Japanese but Indian Sikh soldiers who had deserted from colonial regiments and gone across to the enemy. You could actually go for days without even seeing a Japanese person.

  Some of the more adventurous prisoners found it easy to slip out of the camp at night to forage for food or whatever else might be useful on the black market, and Singaporeans, especially the Chinese, ran a thriving illicit trade at great personal risk. Later, men who survived the Burma–Siam Railway or the coalmines of Japan would look back on the Changi Camp with something like nostalgia. After those horrors, the Selarang Barracks seemed almost like a holiday resort, where, overcrowded though it was, you were left pretty much to your own devices.

  The Perth men and the Java diggers with them saw a broad parade ground bordered by barracks of three storeys, with colonnaded verandahs and high ceilings. In the high noon of the British garrison, they had been a sparkling white. Now, they were a dingy charcoal colour, which had apparently been a futile attempt at camouflage, and pocked with bullet and shell holes. Almost all the windows had been blown out. But after the misery of the ships from Priok, the place looked like paradise. Best of all, they could see it was teeming with Australians, most of them still wearing their khaki-uniform shorts and slouch hats, some of them even playfully knocking a football around.

  In their G-strings or sarongs, the odd straw hat and homemade sandals or bare feet, with their few belongings bundled under their arms, the new arrivals felt like scarecrows, but they were warmly greeted by the soldiers, who were quick to offer food and whatever spare clothing they could scrape together. Space was found in one of the barrack blocks. Some men stretched out on charpoys, low wooden-framed beds strung with rope. A few piled into bunks, while others curled up on the concrete floor, where it was at least a little cooler. The nights were made miserable by bedbugs and mosquitoes. There was no electric light, only intermittent water from a few taps and the toilets had stopped working. The latrines, or the bore-holes, as they came to be called in prisoner slang, were trenches dug out the back. But, for Blood Bancroft and all of the Java men, to be among other Australians was a genuine pleasure:

  Good news awaited us here, for shortly before our arrival a Red Cross ship had arrived in Singapore with a supply of food for Allied POW. Unfortunately, most of the stores had been distributed and we received only a portion of the allotment. Still, half a loaf was better than no bread at all and we were very grateful for the rations we did receive, which consisted of nine ‘V for Victory’ cigarettes, half a tin of milk, one tin of bully beef, one tin of meat and vegetables and a quarter of a tin of beetroot, and a small quantity of sugar, cocoa, biscuits and dried fruits. This indeed was a windfall, and those who were responsible will never know, really, just how grateful we were.10

  Others didn’t do so well. Elmo Gee, in the agonies of dysentery, was helped along by a mate, Petty Officer George ‘Slim’ Hedrick, another member of the Portsmouth commissioning crew, who had a wife at Mordialloc on the bay in Melbourne:

  We reached Singapore on my 23rd birthday, 10 October 1942, and I was extremely ill and very weak … Changi was a very disturbing time for me. I thought we were there for two or three days, but Slim Hedrick said we only stayed one night. He told me I was so delirious I didn’t know where I was half the time. However, I do remember that Slim got hold of a tin of milk from somewhere and put it in boiling water. He opened it for me and I drank the lot in one go. Whatever it was, it settled my tummy down.11

  The rank-and-file diggers in Changi made them welcome; the officers were another matter. The Australian Army brass were doing their best to preserve military discipline – an entirely proper aim if the place was not to descend
into anarchy, but many took it to absurd lengths. For every officer concerned with the welfare of his men and respected for it, there seemed to be dozens of the tin-god variety. Swagger sticks tucked under their arms, insisting on smart salutes, they protected their privileges jealously. Private soldiers were ordered to hand over items of clothing so their superiors might be better dressed, which caused intense resentment. When these same superiors were asked to contribute a portion of their officers’ pay to buy black-market food and medicines for their men, a good many declined. Staff officers of the 8th Division Headquarters carried on as if their defeat and surrender had been only a momentary diversion from the far more important business of sending each other orders, memos and requisitions. Some who had seen no fighting whatsoever strutted about the parade ground as if they were conquering heroes off to drinks in the mess at Sydney’s Victoria Barracks. Inevitably, these blimps were mightily offended by the navy blow-ins from the Bicycle Camp. ‘The Java Rabble’, they called them with a sneer, and it did not take long for the insult to get around.

  Matters came to a head when the powers-that-were decided to call a formal parade in the barracks to mark Armistice Day, 11 November. The senior Australian officer in Changi, Brigadier Frederick Galleghan, not unreasonably believed that such things were good for morale. Imprisonment was no excuse for not having some well-drilled spit and polish. Universally known as ‘Black Jack’, Galleghan had fought with distinction in the First World War, ending it as a sergeant. He should have been offered a commission but it was whispered that he had West Indian blood – hence the nickname – and was therefore not entirely the right sort of chap to wear officers’ pips. Service in the militia between the wars took him to lieutenant-colonel’s rank, though, and in Malaya he had commanded the 2/30th Battalion, where, again, he had fought well. As the senior Australian officer in Changi, he had been given the temporary rank of brigadier in April 1942.

  But Galleghan was a martinet, inflexible and intolerant. One of his soldiers, Russell Braddon, author of a bestselling prisoner memoir, The Naked Island, variously described him as a vain and conceited egomaniac, who ‘became quite hysterical if he were denied by anyone, even officers, the military courtesies’.12 Other men, more generous, swear it was Galleghan’s iron will and discipline that kept order where there might have been chaos. ‘You will march out of here as soldiers, not prisoners,’ he told his men, and it is true that many of them admired him for it. It was legend that he stood up to Japanese threats and bullying time and again, at great personal risk. But Galleghan, too, despised the Java Rabble. They would be required to join his Armistice Day parade, but they would bring up the rear.

  This was not well received. The navy regards itself as the senior service. By tradition, it has always marched at the head of any service parade, and the men of HMAS Perth, however shabby, were not about to surrender this ancient right and privilege to a mere army half-colonel, or temporary brigadier, or whatever he might happen to be at the moment. The senior Perth officers in Changi were the ship’s two Commissioned Gunners, George ‘Johnny’ Ross and Frank Hawkins, both of them Royal Navy men on loan to the RAN. Ross, 47 years old, had served at Gallipoli and, as gunners notoriously are, was a salty custodian of naval custom as laid down in King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions. Hawkins stood staunchly by him. The two men firmly informed the Brigadier that they and the ship’s company would take their proper place at the front of his parade or not at all. They refused to budge. Black Jack had met his match. With ill grace, he backed down and the Java Rabble led the march.13

  There the dispute might have ended but for one more hilarious misunderstanding. The Australian Army salute is made with the palm of the hand outward and visible. The naval version is different, with the hand horizontal, the palm down. As the Perth sailors swung past Galleghan, Johnny Ross barked the customary order, ‘Eyes right!’ and snapped off a tiddly salute. The Brigadier exploded. ‘Who is that man giving me the Japanese salute?’ he bellowed. ‘Report to me at once!’

  Ross wheeled his men around to the back of the parade ground and stood them rigidly to attention, all pusser-like, as he explained to the barking Brigadier that he had been in the Royal Navy for 25 years and had never saluted any differently. ‘I am sorry that you know the Japanese salute better than ours, sir,’ he said. Eventually, some army officers managed to convince Galleghan that the navy salute and the Japanese Army salute were identical.

  But that would not be Black Jack’s last absurdity. In January 1943, another shipload of prisoners from Java arrived at Selarang in the same wretched condition as the earlier lot who had so outraged the Changi officer corps. They were commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Dunlop, a Melbourne surgeon turned army doctor who had been captured with Brigadier Blackburn in Java. In the years ahead, ‘Weary’ Dunlop and his feats of courage and compassion, his medical miracles, would attain a golden renown in the memories of the Allied prisoners whose lives he saved. For now, he was just another object of Galleghan’s disdain.

  Again, the Brigadier complained that he had not been saluted properly, and, by some men, not at all. The reason was, plainly, that this new instalment of the Java Rabble was led by a mere medico. Discipline had broken down. Galleghan wrote a stiff note to Dunlop instructing him to step aside and to hand command to the senior combat officer, infantry or artillery.

  At first, Weary was amused and willing enough to comply. He did not particularly care either way. He had not been impressed by the Changi lot to begin with – ‘officers neatly dressed, carrying canes, blowing out puffy moustaches and talking in an “old chappy” way,’ he noted sarcastically in his diary.14 But in the officers’ mess, when someone chipped him about the Java Rabble, he rocketed into cold fury. The men he had brought with him, he pointed out icily, had fought in the Battle of Britain, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, in Greece and Crete, in the Western Desert of North Africa and in Syria, and in the Java Sea itself. The clear implication – it must have hung in the air like a thundercloud – was that the 8th Division had not done quite so well in its brief and disastrous months in Malaya and Singapore.

  More angry notes flew back and forth. Galleghan had to retreat again when he found himself trumped by Brigadier Blackburn, who was senior to him and who took Dunlop’s side. Weary remained in command. But Black Jack exacted his revenge. When the 895 men of what became known as Dunlop Force were ordered off to Burma a few weeks later, Galleghan and his staff ensured that they went without the boots, clothing and medical equipment Dunlop requested, even though these were in sufficient supply in the Changi Quartermasters’ stores. And, in a final insult, he insisted that Weary should pay, in Dutch guilders, for the few medical items he was given. It was petty, it was vicious. It may well have cost men’s lives. Galleghan was knighted and lionised after the war, but his dishonourable behaviour towards Weary Dunlop and the Java Rabble is an indelible stain on his reputation. Nor was it forgotten. The Perth men took it particularly hard, for they had not surrendered; they had gone down fighting, and lost everything with it. Java Rabble was the title Fred Skeels gave to his memoirs.

  As 1942 came to a close, the Perth survivors found, to their regret, that fewer and fewer of them remained together. Jan Tyrrell and Tag Wallace, with the group from the timber lifeboat captured in Sumatra, never saw Changi. They ended up in a camp at a place called Sungei Gerong, near Palembang in southern Sumatra. There, Wallace, among others, nearly succumbed to the ravages of beriberi. The officers who were sent directly from Java to Japan spent the rest of the war there. Those of the ship’s company shipped from Java to Singapore were frequently separated, as the Japanese allocated them to different work groups and took them away from Changi at different times and in different directions.

  But when they did manage to stay together, and the more heavily their captivity pressed upon them, the more their bonds of mateship strengthened. Men who had not known each other in the ship instinctively formed partnerships for their mutual surviva
l. The fit and able cared for the weak and sick, realising only too well that one day they might have to rely on the kindness and concern of others. If they became delirious with malaria, or too feeble to get to a latrine unaided, or a bout of amoebic dysentery left them covered in their own filth, help came unasked, and there was no shame in accepting it.

  Some stayed in Singapore for only a few days. In October, Blood Bancroft, Elmo Gee, Frank McGovern and Gavin Campbell were among the Perth men shipped out of Changi in Williams Force – a group of 884 men named for the officer in charge, Lieutenant-Colonel John Williams, who had commanded the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion in the Middle East and in Java. Another hell ship, the Maebashi Maru, carried them to Rangoon. From there, by a second ship and then by train and a long march, they journeyed deep into the Burmese jungle. Williams, a good man and a fine officer, had been tortured in Java by the Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo. He would earn the deep respect of his men in the three long years ahead.

  Fred Lasslett went in a different direction. There was no rhyme or reason for this; it was just the luck of the draw. On 26 October, he was loaded aboard another rust bucket, the Tojuku Maru, which sailed with some 1200 Australians and Americans for Saigon and then Japan. Notices posted on board these hell ships left the prisoners in no doubt of the severity of the regime: