Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  In August, the Curtin Labor government was triumphantly re-elected with a gain of 17 seats in the House of Representatives. But life on the home front had become a struggle, a tangle of red tape and ration books and petrol coupons and regular government exhortations to fiery patriotism in the daily newspapers:

  We Australians refuse to contemplate in our green pastures, on our happy beaches, in the streets of our cities, the foul tread of Tojo’s licentious and barbaric soldiery. We in Australia will tolerate no concession that offers to piracy and rapine even a part reward for their treachery and bestiality. There shall be no looking back. Fate has willed it to be our war. From now until victory we will stand firm.1

  The flag-waving was probably necessary. Some families had not seen their fighting men for years. The Japanese allowed the POWs to write the occasional letter or to send pre-printed postcards, forwarded by the International Red Cross, but few seem to have been delivered and those that were arrived months and even years late. There was a pre-printed postcard that read:

  IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY

  I am interned at The War Prisoners Camp at Moulmein in Burma.

  My health is (good, usual, poor)

  I (am) (have been) in hospital

  I am (not) working for pay at … per day.

  My salary is … per month.

  I am with friends …

  Elmo Gee sent one of these back to Silver Creek, adding the words ‘and my thoughts are with you all. All the best for New Year. Remember me to all …’

  Frank McGovern also wrote one in October 1942, addressed to his father, James, and his mother, Minnie, in Sydney:

  Dear Mum and Dad – am in best of health, hope you are well.

  Don’t worry, pray and trust in God. Love to you all, Frank.

  It did not reach Taylor Street in Paddington until December 1943. Arthur Bancroft’s family, and his girlfriend, Mirla Wilkinson, heard that he was alive just by chance:

  It was eight months before we heard anything at all. The Japs took to broadcasting the names of men that they had as POWs, and a friend of mine heard Arthur’s name called out. She contacted me at work; I got this phone call from her as soon as I got to work: ‘Arthur’s alive, his name has been broadcast.’

  That was the first time we had any news at all. That was about October. For those eight months we didn’t know if he was alive or dead.2

  The families wrote in the hope that their menfolk might be alive, although never knowing where they might be or if the letters would reach them. They sent parcels of food or clothing – a lovingly baked cake, a book, fresh underwear – but if these ever arrived at the camps they were invariably kept by the guards. Some letters got through to be read and reread a hundred times, no matter how stale they were. Occasionally, a man would learn from a well-meaning friend that his wife or girlfriend had gone off with another man. Others received no mail at all. Their isolation was complete.

  But, with the railway built, life began to look up. Some of the prisoners were kept along the line as maintenance crews, but after the Speedo days their work was not so arduous and their rations improved. With the end of the monsoon, the threat of cholera faded and their health was better. Many of the Perth men were gathered at the 105-Kilo – which, they agreed, was almost a holiday resort after the ordeals they had endured. And on the first Tuesday of November 1943, being Australians, they staged their very own Melbourne Cup.

  The surviving stories of this event are extraordinary. The officers convinced the Japanese that this was an occasion of great national importance, and they were promised a yasume, or rest day. The men went about it with all the solemnity of the Victoria Racing Club itself, with a committee nominated to draw up a program of six races, bookmakers to be licensed, a Clerk of the Course and Stewards appointed, ‘police’ to control unruly crowds. A track was cleared in the dirt. Horses, like children’s hobby horses, were knocked up from bamboo and named for the champions of the day – Phar Lap, Peter Pan, Rivette – and jockeys were chosen from the smaller men. More implausibly still, the committee announced there would be a fashion parade, with prizes. Some men spent weeks gathering scraps of fabric and stitching frocks and elaborate hats, and on the day itself sashayed onto the course with all the aplomb of Toorak social butterflies, on the arms of their gentlemen friends.

  The day was a howling success, despite the on-course commentator collapsing with a sudden bout of malaria and unseemly suggestions that S.P. bookmakers, unlicensed by the committee, had fixed the races. The Japanese commandant got so carried away with the gaiety that he danced on the concert stage whirling his sword aloft and demanded that the whole thing be repeated the next day. With great difficulty, they talked him out of it.

  Christmas Day, their second in captivity, was not so good. The buzz, carefully filtered from the secret camp radios, was that the war was going well for the Allies. They vaguely knew that the Blitz on London had finished, the Germans were on the back foot in Russia and were being heavily bombed at home, Mussolini had fallen and the Allies had invaded Sicily – all cheering news. There were reports that the Americans and the Australians were rolling back the Japanese in the Pacific, which was even more encouraging. But there was no sign of the war ending and still less of their release.

  The Japanese granted another yasume on Christmas Day itself. The canteen scraped together funds to buy two pigs, which were set aside as food for the sick, and the cooks concocted a rice pudding flavoured with shindegar, a dark and sticky native sugar. The men sang carols and wished each other a Merry Christmas, but the message of the birth of Christ had little meaning for those who felt that God had forsaken them. It was a melancholy bunch who turned in for sleep that night. Perhaps things would improve in the New Year. There was a buzz that they might be sent back to Singapore.

  Ray Parkin and a smaller group of Perth survivors were at the Hintok Road Camp for Christmas and New Year. Their festive season had a little more zing to it. There was a Christmas concert and another on New Year’s Day, and the men in his tent made a pudding of rice, eggs, palm sugar, wild ginger roots and peanuts, which they boiled in an old singlet and ate with relish. They, too, had heard a buzz that they were on the move and, better still, another rumour that a Japanese officer had admitted to some of the prisoners the war would soon be over. It seemed too good to be true.

  For all the triumphant celebrations at the opening of the railway, there was little joy elsewhere for the Japanese Empire. As 1943 became 1944, the over-reaching folly of the Greater South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was being exposed layer by layer, like a peeled onion. Admiral Yamamoto’s remark to Prince Konoye, that he would ‘run wild’ in the first year of war, had been spectacularly vindicated, but his fear that Japan could not sustain a prolonged conflict with the United States was now proving equally prescient. And Yamamoto himself was dead. By late May 1942, Allied cryptanalysts had broken the Imperial Japanese Navy’s main code, known as JN25. In April 1943, American listening stations picked up a long signal detailing a flying inspection tour the Admiral would make from Rabaul to Bougainville. On 18 April, the Mitsubishi Betty bomber carrying Yamamoto was ambushed by a squadron of US Army Air Force P-38 Lightnings and shot down over the Bougainville jungle, where, according to the official Japanese report, the Admiral’s body was found still upright in his seat and grasping his samurai sword in a white-gloved hand.

  Yamamoto’s death was a heavy bruise to Japanese morale, and more of these were to come. The fatal flaw in Nanshinron was now exposed. Japan could only maintain its empire in South East Asia with a fleet of merchant shipping sailing behind the protective shield of its navy. After the American victory at Midway, that shield had begun to disintegrate – slowly at first, but by 1944 with increasing speed. Increasingly, far-flung land armies and island garrisons and the ships of the IJN were finding themselves short of food, fuel and ammunition.

  The Allies were on the front foot, led by three able commanders burning to take the fight to the enemy. In t
he west, they set up a South East Asian Command in October 1943, to which Churchill appointed the energetic Lord Louis Mountbatten with orders to throw the Japanese out of Burma, Malaya and Singapore and to beat them in China. In the South-West Pacific, the Americans and the Australians under General Douglas MacArthur had begun to roll back the Japanese in New Guinea in some of the most bloody fighting of the war. And in the Pacific proper, the American Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, led a resurgent United States Navy towards the series of tumultuous sea battles and island-hopping invasions that would bring Japan to its knees. The might of American industry was turning out new battleships and aircraft carriers to more than replace the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor. By the middle of 1943, the United States Navy’s fleet of carrier-based aircraft was three times the size of the Japanese naval air fleet, and American submarines had at last emerged as a potent weapon after their hesitant beginnings with inexperienced captains and faulty torpedoes.

  After Christmas 1943, most Australian prisoners of war along the railway, including many of the Perth survivors, were transported to another camp at Tamarkan in Thailand, near Kanchanaburi and the so-called Bridge on the River Kwai. This caused some nervousness, as Fred Skeels put it:

  On one hand, we were relieved to leave Burma, but the mode of transport had us extremely worried. Two hundred of us boarded a train to be the privileged first passengers on the line, but none of us was very happy about it. Some people had told us ‘we did this to the line today, so it is not going to hold up much longer’, so certainly travelling on it at that time was pretty hair-raising. We had one engine in the front and one in the rear to move us all out, which made the trip all the more frightening, as we weren’t sure of the bridge’s ability to stay together once we got to Thailand. At one particular part of the line, which went around the side of a cliff, we were about three or four hundred feet up above the river and had to cross the ‘Pack of Cards Bridge’ that was literally swaying in the wind before the train even mounted it. The native drivers rightly did not share the Japanese faith in our workmanship and refused to drive, so the Japanese had to drive the train over themselves. We crept across very, very slowly, but we reached the other side safely after many unrealised visions of catastrophe.3

  The trains ground their way south, wheels and brakes screeching in protest. As they passed the old camps, the prisoners saw rows of graves marked by bamboo crosses in clearings where jungle was beginning to close in again. So many good men had been left behind.

  They found that Tamarkan was an oasis compared with what they had known. There were some 6000–7000 prisoners there, British, Dutch and Australian – most of the Americans seemed to have been separated out – and the food was better and more plentiful. You could actually detect meat or vegetables in the evening stew, and for those with money there was a canteen selling such luxuries as bananas or duck-egg omelettes for a few cents. There was not much work to be done, and only light supervision. Some prisoners actually volunteered to go on working parties outside the camp, to collect fruit and vegetables. A few of the guards, a far cry from the sadists on the railway, would permit their charges to go swimming. And, as Elmo Gee found, there were shipmates to catch up with, close friends such as Slim Hedrick:

  To my delight Slim was waiting to greet me. He was rotten with dysentery and fever. Diarrhoea was running down his legs and he was blown up with beriberi. He was standing there with this big smile. He said, ‘I’ve got your wardrobe here, your urn for boiling water and a bamboo container for washing. And I’ve got you a new pair of pants made out of a piece of canvas. But the best news is I’ve got you an egg.’

  That was the great affection we shared as prisoners of war, and it never left us. We have always said that if you didn’t have a mate on the railway you died, and Slim was my mate. I owe him my life. I loved Slim.4

  The downside was the ever-present threat of Allied bombing. The Japanese refused to identify Tamarkan as a prisoner-of-war camp with markings visible from the air, and the site was ringed with anti-aircraft guns to protect the bridge. By night, they could hear the roar of aircraft engines as American bombers wheeled above on the approach to Bangkok, and there was the occasional attack on the bridge itself, which frightened the life out of everybody but seemed to cause little damage. At times, shrapnel from the Japanese anti-aircraft fire would fall in the compound.

  But this relatively relaxed regime in Tamarkan was too good to last. In March, the camp commandant announced that fit men would be chosen and sent to work in Japan – news that landed like a bolt of lightning and provoked much debate about whether it would be better to stay or go. Some said they would travel anywhere to remain with their mates; others feared that a sea journey to the enemy’s homeland would be infinitely more dangerous than anything they had seen so far.

  It was a parting of the ways once more. Two years on from the loss of their ship, despite their best attempts to stay together, the Perth men had become scattered across much of South East Asia. A few were still in Java. Tag Wallace and his small group remained at their camp in Sumatra, wasting away from malnutrition, mistreatment and hard labour. Two men, A.B. George Morriss and one of Perth’s bandsmen, Henry ‘Ned’ Kelly, had been transported from Changi to Borneo. Morriss, a champion swimmer from Frankston in Melbourne, and Kelly, English-born, would die in the infamous Sandakan Camp in 1945. Others, including several of the officers, were already in Japan. Some 70 men, among them Elmo Gee, whose sight was now seriously impaired, were kept in Thailand and sent to other camps further south near the Malay border. Others were ordered into separate kumis for the trip to Japan and were given tests for cholera and malaria and issued with boots and clothing that looked and felt almost new.

  The difficulty for the Japanese was to get the prisoners through seas that were increasingly under Allied attack. The first plan was to pack them into trains in Thailand and send them across country to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, then down the Mekong River to Saigon. From there, convoys would ship them to Japan. On 1 April – they wryly noted the date – a trainload of prisoners, including Buzzer Bee and Frank McGovern, were bundled into hot steel boxcars to begin their journey. Others would follow over the next few days. These trips were largely uneventful, and some of them actually began to enjoy the scenery as they passed by the gold-domed temples of Bangkok and southern Thailand and entered Cambodia.

  There was the usual confusion when they arrived at the main station in Phnom Penh. No trucks had been ordered and there was a lot of milling about in the dark, punctuated by angry shouts of ‘All men sit!’. At daybreak, they were marched through the city, admiring its broad boulevards and colonial architecture and delighting in the occasional friendly wave from French or Eurasian onlookers. They were back in civilisation again – an almost indescribable pleasure, although one that would not last long. After a meal of rice at a Japanese field kitchen and the inevitable chaotic tenko, they were hurried onto a steamer, the Long Ho, for the trip down the winding Mekong. Six days after leaving Tamarkan, they were in Saigon.

  By now, they had become, if not connoisseurs, then at least discerning tourists on the prison-camp trail. You measured the camps by several yardsticks: the cleanliness or otherwise of the accommodation, the food, the availability of medical care, the brutality of the guards, and so on. Saigon measured up well. Built of substantial timber huts with tiled roofs, their camp lay on the Rue Jean Eudel – a broad boulevard running parallel to the Saigon River, not far from the central business district. It had once housed troops of the French Foreign Legion. The Australians found that sailors from the Houston had arrived before them, along with a large contingent of British prisoners shipped there direct from Singapore and who, unknowing and unbelieving of the horrors of the railway, tended to look down upon their ragged colonial cousins as something akin to wild men of the jungle. The Australians thought it was the best camp since Batavia. Meat, eggs and vegetables were plentiful, and, miraculously, there was so
ap and even talcum powder in the canteen.

  The local French were friendly, arranging for medicines and newspapers to be smuggled into the camps. They would flash a ‘V for victory’ sign as the men were trucked to work on the docks or at the Saigon aerodrome. And there were European women – a sight for sore eyes and stirring loins if ever there was. Some of the British boasted that they could slip out at night to meet French girlfriends. And it was here, in June, that they learned of the Normandy invasion – the Allied bid to retake Europe. That was a huge fillip to morale. An end to the war was in sight, as real as it could possibly be, and, as ever, the optimists were talking of a return home by Christmas.

  But Saigon was not to last either. Lieutenant Yamada, the officer in charge of conveying this group from Vietnam to Japan, was unable to find a ship to carry them. The United States Navy had thrown a lariat of steel around the South China Sea, gradually tightening the noose on the slow Japanese transport convoys. These waters had become a happy hunting ground for American submarine skippers; they called the area ‘Convoy College’. And, by the middle of 1944, there was another bloody battle at Saipan in the Mariana Islands of the western Pacific. It ended in a Japanese defeat so devastating that hundreds of soldiers threw themselves off cliffs to avoid capture. Admiral Nagumo, who had commanded the carriers at Pearl Harbor, blew out his brains with a revolver in a cave. When the news of the catastrophe reached Tokyo, it brought down the government of Prime Minister Tojo.

  At the end of June, the Australians in Saigon were ordered onto another river steamer to retrace the journey back to Phnom Penh. From there, a train took them through Bangkok and down the Malay Peninsula, and on 4 July 1944 they arrived at the Singapore Railway Station. Their spirits rose, for it looked as if they would be returning to the relative comfort and freedom of the Selarang Barracks in Changi, where they had left some mates and there would be other Australian faces to greet them. But no luck there. They were marched towards the docks at Keppel Harbour and into what they learned was the River Valley Road Camp – another all-too-familiar sprawl of dirty bamboo huts and a staging post for prisoners bound for Japan.