by Mike Carlton
The group of Australians that included Ray Parkin and his shipmates Harry Knight and Horrie Abbott had left River Valley a few days before. On 1 July 1944, they were taken to the North Pier in Singapore Harbour for their sea journey to Japan – a horrifying ordeal in one of the worst of the hell ships.
The sailors were aghast at the sight that met them at the docks. The Rashin Maru had begun life in 1919 as the Canadian Seigneur, a coal-burning freighter of some 5500 tons, but, now owned by a Japanese shipping company, she was little more than a floating hulk. With her paint flaked and her plates buckled and weeping rust, she had obviously been bombed and set on fire on some previous voyage, for her bridge structure was a charred ruin. A temporary bridge for conning the ship had been jerry-built on her stern, for all the world like a wooden shed, and aft of that was an ancient muzzle-loading field gun with its ammunition, rusty lead cannon balls, piled beside it.
At the wharf, 1060 Australians were ordered into a shed and told to pick up an ingot of rubber weighing about 30 kilos, one for each man. Then, to the frenzied shouts and kicks of the guards, they were herded up a gangway and forced at gunpoint into the ship’s holds fore and aft, a mass of writhing bodies. They thought the rubber might be some sort of life preserver kindly provided by their Japanese masters, but when some of it was quietly thrown overboard by night it sank like rocks and they realised it was cargo for Nippon.
That afternoon, the Rashin Maru limped into the outer roads, where she lay unmoving for three days, waiting for a convoy to assemble. With gallows humour, Ray Parkin and the Perth men gave their prison a new name: the Byoki Maru. Byoki was Japanese for ‘sick’.
She finally set sail on 4 July, in a convoy of 13 vessels that included other prison ships and a trio of small oil tankers, escorted by three anti-submarine corvettes. Day upon day, then week upon week, they wound a tortured course through the South China Sea, trailing clouds of coal smoke that were an open invitation to any prowling Allied attacker, for there was no visible indication that the ships carried prisoners.
The sailors prevailed upon the Japanese guards to allow them to practise an abandon-ship drill for the soldiers. The food was filthy, the usual lumps of congealed rice, and water was so short that sometimes they drank what they could gather of the morning dew. They trudged along the north coast of Borneo, through steamy calms and sudden rain storms, until they reached the Philippines and dropped anchor in Manila Bay beneath an exquisite sunset. There they stayed for another three weeks, many of the men in agonies of malaria, dysentery and beriberi, while the ship coaled from lighters and the convoy commander eventually summoned up the resolve to move again.
A couple of days out of Manila, wallowing northwards, the convoy was attacked. An explosion rang through the holds of the Byoki like a sledgehammer striking an oil drum, causing something close to panic among the Australian diggers and the Japanese guards who had not heard that sinister clang before. The Perth men recognised the sound of a torpedo detonating and reckoned that at least one Allied submarine was after them. In a few minutes, there was another explosion. Two of the tankers were sinking in clouds of oily smoke and burning flotsam, and the escort vessels were charging this way and that, trying to depth charge the attacker. The guards, howling with rage, retaliated at this insult to Nippon’s honour by rushing in among the prisoners and flailing at them with bayonets, but there were no more torpedoes fired and the convoy lumbered on.
Forty days from Singapore, on a voyage that should have taken perhaps a week, they were assailed by another peril. They ran into a typhoon. Parkin had chilling memories of the hurricane in the Caribbean all those years ago, but at least that had been in a well-found warship. The Byoki was a floating wreck:
The ship seemed as if she were driving straight at the bottom when an overtaking sea lifted her stern high and ran forward with her as if to fling her down and stick her stem in the bottom of the sea like a dart. The screw raced, threatening the shaft bearings until the throttle was cut. She would teeter on the crest then, breathlessly, slip from the wave’s grip as it over-ran her. Her bow would go high, as if she were about to fall over backwards. This thirty or forty-foot rise and fall of the bow left the men feeling that the bottom had fallen out of the world and they, giddy and sick, were going to plunge through into some awful pit … the shrieking wind tore the tops off the waves, leaving a whole wide plain of whirling white scars. Now the sea looked old – incredibly old – streaked with league-long streaming hoary strands of foam tossed violently about like the hair of an angry prophet. The shattered wave-tops were swept across the sea and struck the ship like vast and vicious volleys of musketry. Flying over her, it was sucked into the vortex of the open hatches in drenching salt spray …
Men fell into helpless paroxysms of sickness. Stomachs contracted, rock hard. On all fours with misery, men’s backs arched: their shoulders rounded up and they collapsed onto their elbows, barely able to keep their faces clear of the deck as they retched. Chests tightened, squeezing the last gasp of breath out of them. Uncontrollably heaving, they were stricken with a horror that they would disembowel themselves through their throats …5
The typhoon raged for days until eventually it blew itself out. Five other ships of the convoy were either sunk or driven aground, but, against all the odds, the Byoki made it. At the end of August, they dropped anchor at Okinawa for another moment of respite and finally, in September, they steamed in bright moonlight through the Kagoshima Gulf, past Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu, to anchor in a quiet bay at the port of Moji. It was their first glimpse of the Japanese homeland, their first encounter with an enemy country whose people had acted towards them with unmatched barbarism, but Parkin’s artistic eye saw only beauty. It reminded him of a seascape by the celebrated painter Utagawa Hiroshige, who had died almost a hundred years before in an age altogether more gentle:
It was already idealised: a perfectly polished sea plain; reds, greens and greys; mountains, rocks, islets and twisted pines. It looked like one of those temple gardens of contemplation that show the universe in miniature.6
The next hell ships to leave for Japan began loading their wretched human cargoes on Tuesday 5 September 1944. There were 1600 British prisoners and 716 Australians, including 45 Perth survivors. They collected more of those curious lumps of rubber given to the Byoki contingent and then filed towards two transports, the Rakuyo Maru and the Kachidoki Maru. Again, the Perth prisoners had been split up. Frank McGovern, Blood Bancroft, Bob Collins and Petty Officer Vic Duncan, a Scottish-born electrical artificer from Marrickville in Sydney, were among those chosen to go to Japan. The three Turnbull brothers, two of them army and one of them a Perth man, also stuck together to make the trip. Buzzer Bee and Fred Skeels stayed behind in the River Valley Camp, Fred bidding a sad farewell to his old schoolmate Wally Johnston, who was on the departure list.
Most of the British were herded onto the Kachidoki Maru, an old American-built freighter, and all the Australians were forced into the no. 2 hold of the Rakuyo Maru, another single-funnelled rust bucket of some 9500 tons. The senior Australian officer was Brigadier Arthur Varley, who had been with them since the railway. Trooping on board, they saw painted on the side of each ship a ‘meatball’ ensign, the red rising sun on its white background. ‘It’s to help the submarines find the target,’ they joked. Again, there was nothing to indicate that the ships were carrying prisoners. But another sight amused them. Lining a rail above them was a bunch of Japanese or Korean ‘comfort women’, who, having done their sacred duty by the Emperor, were heading home. Some of them spat at the Australians and got some unfriendly sexual advice in return.
There was pandemonium in the dark hold of the Rakuyo Maru, with men literally forced on top of each other until the mass of them began to overflow back out onto the deck again like seething worker ants. This panicked the guards. Brigadier Varley convinced the ship’s Captain that seriously ill men should be allowed to stay on deck and that others should be rotated out of the ho
ld and into the fresh air in groups of about 400 each.
They waited in Keppel Harbour for another day, stewing in the heat, while a convoy came together. Two tankers and two passenger vessels joined them, with an escort of three small frigates and a fleet destroyer, Shikinami, and at seven o’clock in the morning of 6 September, a glorious sunny day with calm seas, the convoy sailed. Two seaplanes circled overhead, searching for Allied submarines in the clear waters below. For five days, they ploughed north-east on a course midway between the Chinese island of Hainan to the west and the Philippines to the east, directly into Convoy College. Another six ships, including three more frigates, merged into the convoy. On board the Rakuyo Maru, Vic Duncan, the senior Australian sailor, was asked by Varley to devise an abandon-ship routine in case they were torpedoed. Duncan found wooden rafts stacked on deck, and some kapok life vests, and explained what to do if the ship began to sink.
It was a wise precaution. ‘Ben’s Busters’ were waiting for them. As the convoy left Singapore, Commander Benjamin Oakley Jnr, skipper of the American fleet submarine USS Growler, was on patrol to the north of the Philippines, leading a wolf pack of his own boat and two others, the USS Sealion and the USS Pampanito. These packs, usually of three or four boats, were known by their commander’s Christian name – hence Ben’s Busters. On the night of 9 September, they surfaced to meet their regular radio schedule and were instructed by Pacific Fleet Headquarters to form a patrol line at a position in the middle of the South China Sea at 10 pm on the night of 11 September. The Americans had known before the convoy left Singapore exactly where to expect it. The listeners in Pearl Harbor had picked up a Japanese signal giving dates, times, course, speed, strength of the escort, the lot. The only thing the Americans did not know was that two of the transports were packed with prisoners.
Oakley ordered his boat to four engine speed. Commander Eli Reich, the skipper of Sealion, and Commander Pete Summers in Pampanito did the same, and by 9.30 pm on the 11th they were at their rendezvous, in a scouting line on the surface some 25 kilometres wide, radar aerials scanning beyond the horizon. They headed slowly south-west, on the reciprocal to the convoy’s north-easterly course, in calm seas under a sky dark with thunderclouds occasionally shading a quarter moon. Perfect submarine-attack conditions. Further to the north, another wolf pack of two boats, Barb and Queenfish, was moving to back them up.
Growler made the first contact a few minutes after one o’clock the next morning. Her radar operator reported a cluster of pips at a distance of about 17 kilometres, heading towards them at approximately nine knots, and Sealion and Pampanito quickly confirmed the contact. Each boat went to battle stations night attack, still on the surface but ready to dive in a hurry.
On Growler’s bridge, Oakley peered through the target-bearing transmitter – a set of powerful binoculars connected to a gyro-compass repeater that would show him where his quarry lay. That information would be fed below to the torpedo-data computer, a set of dials and knobs and switches looking rather like a jukebox, which would do the calculations needed to aim and fire his torpedoes. Shortly before two o’clock, he picked out a tanker in the centre of the convoy and was about to fire when, to his alarm, he noticed another dark shape heading straight towards him at speed, white bow wave gleaming in the moonlight. Jesus Christ, a destroyer! There was no time to dive. He would have to try a shot ‘down the throat’, which meant aiming at the impossibly narrow target of a destroyer’s bows coming at him straight on. Miss, and he would be dead meat.
Three torpedoes burst from Growler’s bow tubes. Then, Oakley flung the boat hard to port to gain some distance and to bring his stern tubes to bear if his first shots failed. Miraculously, they did not fail. One torpedo sent the destroyer heeling almost on her beam ends in a ball of fire. Yet still she charged on until, just 180 metres away, so close that the men on Growler’s bridge could feel the fierce heat of her fires, she plunged bow first and disappeared in a boiling sea. It was an act of historical symmetry: this was Shikinami, the ship that had fired the last torpedo into the sinking Houston at the Sunda Strait two and a half years before.
On the Rakuyo Maru, the men asleep on deck woke to see the fiery glare of the destroyer sinking in the distance. The Japanese guards panicked, trying to force everyone back into the hold, but when no further attack came things quietened down again as the convoy sailed on. The calm would not last long, only a few hours. Ben’s Busters were still on their tail.7
At 5 am, Eli Reich took Sealion to radar depth, which left his hull submerged but his radar aerial above water. He had four ships in sight on both his screen and his attack periscope, freighters or transports, not even zigzagging, perfectly positioned like ducks in a row.
‘Make ready the bow tubes!’
Sealion, a Balao-class submarine of 1500 tons, less than two years old, had six tubes forward and four aft, each loaded with 21-inch torpedoes with an effective range of 4115 metres at 46 knots and a warhead of 300 kilograms of Torpex, an advanced form of TNT.
‘Set gyro angles ten degrees!’
‘Set spread angle 20 degrees!’
Closing to a range of 2286 metres, he fired three of his bow torpedoes into the second ship in the line, a tanker. As those were running, he edged slightly to port and fired tubes four, five and six at the second-last ship, which was even closer at just 1005 metres. The first three torpedoes hit the tanker, which exploded like a blast furnace. There was a tense pause as the second salvo ran on, and then it, too, struck home: two of Sealion’s torpedoes slammed into the Rakuyo Maru.
The first one blew apart her engine room and all in it, and the second landed for’ard in her no. 1 hold, which was packed not with prisoners but those rubber ingots. The ship slumped and dug her bow in, sending a huge geyser of water and chunks of debris thundering over Frank McGovern, the army doctor Rowley Richards and other prisoners out on the fo’c’sle. A solid wave of green water washed down onto the men below, causing panic. They clambered, clawing and shouting, onto the upper deck. But the Rakuyo Maru did not sink. The rubber seemed to be keeping her afloat. Had that torpedo hit the no. 2 hold a little further aft, hundreds of prisoners would have been killed.
Many Japanese did die. Others, in mounting hysteria, struggled to lower the lifeboats or jumped overboard. A few Australians took the chance for some long-awaited revenge. A beefy corporal in the 2/2nd Pioneers, Frank McGrath from Melbourne, snatched up a piece of timber and bashed a line of cowering Japanese as they struggled out of a doorway onto the deck. Other blokes tossed them overboard. Vic Duncan, calm and measured, got his abandon-ship drill working, ordering men to find anything that might float and throw it over the side. As it became clear that the Rakuyo Maru was not in any hurry to sink, the panic subsided. Some men began to jump into the sea, but Duncan, Frank McGovern, and Frank’s mate John ‘Jerry’ Parks were in no hurry to leave, as Frank described:
The ship was on an even keel and the Nips had shoved off, so we went down to the galley to see if there was any food down there. But it was under water, so we came up onto the bridge, and I felt like having a bog. It was daylight by this time, and I took a bog in the corner of the wheelhouse, and I used a chart for toilet paper, which gave me a bit of satisfaction. Then we went down aft, past a couple of dead Nips, and saw some of our blokes were still there, trying to get a lifeboat away. The Nips had jammed it in the davits in their panic. And there was a Nip sheila there, one of their comfort women, crying her eyes out, poor bugger. And, looking at us half-naked and some of us bollocky, she didn’t know what to do. We got the boat out and tied a rope round her and lowered her down into it. But the blokes in the water all jumped into the boat, with only two inches of freeboard, so we held onto the side of it for most of the day.
We yelled out to the Nips in one of the other boats that we had a woman on board. ‘Presento!’ they said. ‘You can have her.’ We weren’t too grateful – she was taking up room in the boat. Eventually, they came over and took her, and one of the two
kegs of water we had. We covered the other one up with our legs.8
As daylight came, the Rakuyo Maru was still afloat but gradually foundering. A tanker was burning in the distance. The sea was covered in oil and floating debris and dotted with lifeboats – mostly full of Japanese – with hundreds of prisoners clinging to whatever flotsam they could find. Bodies bobbed face downwards in the swell, Japanese and Allied. There was still the intermittent shock of depth charges as the convoy escort searched for the submarines. As the morning wore on, a couple of frigates began to move through the mass of bodies alive and dead. Blood Bancroft thought he was about to be picked up:
Amongst our crowd in the water was a Japanese officer, all fully booted and spurred, sword and everything. We decided that he would help us out, so we got him up on the floating stuff and held him there and told him to signal a destroyer.
So they came over, dropped a boat and rowed over to him. But they held us off at pistol point and dragged him off to the lifeboat and then back to the destroyer. We said, ‘Oh, bugger that!’ The destroyer cruised around and came back again and we thought they were going to drop depth charges, but they started jeering at us.
We had a lot of Englishmen with us there and we all started singing ‘Rule Britannia’. But the Japs on board the destroyer just jeered at us and off they went. And we never saw another Jap ship at all.9
Frank McGovern also thought he was about to go back into captivity: