by Mike Carlton
When the questioning ended, the doctor pronounced the four fit enough to be sent home. Quietly, it happened. Jack Houghton, a Queenslander, was shown into a staff car and driven to his home in Kingsley Terrace in the bay-side suburb of Manly. He knocked on the door. There was no one there. Still dressed in an American uniform, hovering on the footpath, not knowing what to do next, he saw his wife, Esma, walking down the street towards him. She wondered what the Yank was doing hanging around her gate. Jack was the first Perth sailor and the first survivor of the Burma–Siam Railway to be reunited with his family.
Bob Collins and Darby Munro were sent by train to Sydney. Blood Bancroft was put on a plane for Perth, where the Red Cross had arranged for his parents to meet him at the airport. And Mirla, true to her word, had waited for him too. Each man was given three months’ leave and told that he was to lie low and, for ‘security reasons’, not talk about his experiences. On the flight home, Blood had bumped into one of his old school teachers, Dorothy Tangney,2 by then a Labor senator, who gasped in surprise when she recognised the young sailor. ‘Arthur, you’re supposed to be in a POW camp,’ she spluttered.
The first news of the Rakuyo Maru survivors came in a few brief paragraphs in the newspapers on 17 October, the day before they landed in Brisbane. Quoting the British War Office, the article simply said that 36 Australians – army 31, navy 4, RAAF 1 – had been rescued from a Japanese transport torpedoed in the Pacific, that they were on their way home, and that next of kin had been informed. A demand had been made for the Japanese to supply lists of those aboard the transport and of any other survivors. And that was that. Without mentioning any names, it laid an added burden of hope and fear on thousands of families desperate for word of their prisoner husband, father, son or sweetheart.
The War Cabinet dithered for another month. The survivors’ accounts of their imprisonment had some ministers determined to tell the world of the atrocities on the railway and elsewhere; others thought that might further distress the families and make things worse for the men still in captivity. A reporter from The Sydney Morning Herald, Tom Farrell, was allowed to interview the returned men, but on condition that their stories could be published only if the government permitted. The British and Australian Governments discussed the matter further and decided on disclosure, with carefully tailored statements to be made simultaneously to the parliaments in London and Canberra.
In early November, John Curtin, under ever more physical and emotional strain, suffered a heart attack and was confined to the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne for three weeks, leaving his deputy, Frank Forde, as Acting Prime Minister. On Friday 17 November, Forde read to the House of Representatives the most horrifying statement ever delivered to an Australian parliament. At last, the truth could come out. Dealing first with the sinking of the Rakuyo Maru, he went on to draw a stark picture of the treatment of prisoners of war in Japanese hands, with the sombre estimate that perhaps 2000 men had died in Burma and Siam alone. On both sides of the House, members sat in shock, some with tears glistening on their cheeks, as he concluded:
The government regrets that these disclosures have to be made, but it is convinced it is necessary that the Japanese government should know that we are in possession of the facts and will hold them responsible. All the rescued men speak of the high courage shown by their comrades. Everywhere and in all circumstances, the Australians have maintained matchless morale. They have shown themselves undaunted in the face of death. The many who have survived privation and disease in the jungle have developed spiritual and physical powers to triumph over adversity and over their captors. Let us look forward to the day of their release.3
Forde’s statement was splashed across every newspaper in Australia the next morning, together with Farrell’s graphic reports of the stories told to him by the survivors. The headlines were arresting. ‘Japanese Horrors. Many Deaths in Camps. Stark Story of Survivors of Sunken Transport,’ said The West Australian, typical of most. Again, no names were permitted by the censor, the men being referred to simply as a North Queenslander or a Sydneysider, which caused further misery to those waiting and praying for news of a loved one. Melbourne’s Argus newspaper summed up the mood of the nation in an editorial:
It goes without saying that these happenings, these tested stories of eyewitnesses, have wrung the heart of all Australians and roused to new heat their indignation against the brown fiends responsible for the sufferings and death of so many of our British and Australian kinsmen; but anger is not enough. It must be accompanied by a new determination to defeat and punish this foul enemy within the shortest possible time, if only to rescue from their physical and mental agony at the earliest moment those Australian, British and American prisoners still in Japanese hands, of whose sufferings we now have such unimpeachable evidence.4
Blood Bancroft and all the survivors received a telegram from the King congratulating them on their deliverance. As their names became known on the grapevine, they were bombarded with enquiries from the families of missing men, and they gave what information they could. At best, though, it was patchy and unreliable, unless they had personally seen a man die. Then it was unbearable. By the end of the year, further questioning had given the Naval Board a better picture of who had survived Perth’s sinking and who had not, and in early 1945, a letter went out to some of the families for whom there was little hope. For Reg Whiting’s wife, Allie, the bleak official phraseology must have been heartbreaking.
1 March 1945
Dear Madam
I have to inform you that a further interrogation of repatriated Prisoners of War from HMAS Perth has recently been held.
It is regretted that these men were not able to give any information concerning the fate of your husband and therefore for the present he must continue to be regarded as missing.
The Minister for the Navy and the Naval Board send you their sympathy in your anxiety.
Yours faithfully,
Secretary, Naval Board
Official sympathy was all very well, but it meant little to families longing to know what had happened to their menfolk. The pain of their uncertainty would linger long after the war’s end.
Ray Parkin’s admiration for the Japanese landscape was not shared by everyone. The Ohasi Camp, north-west of Tokyo, was a clump of rough timber huts huddled beneath a hillside near a coal mine. Fred Lasslett and the other Australian, Dutch and American prisoners were given shirts, trousers and boots and were even allowed the occasional hot bath, but the winter was a torment after so long in the tropics. They worked outdoors in temperatures well below freezing, shifting rocks and steel plates, and it was not long before men began to die of pneumonia, to be cremated at pathetic little funerals. By nights, in the relative warmth of the huts, where a coal stove burned, Fred continued writing his letters to Nola Caldwell, the girl back at the ballroom in Prahran.
Thursday we were detailed to clear the road leading from Ohasi to Upper Ohasi, of a ten inch fall of snow. The work was easy but the 22 miles walk around the mountain was very gruelling.
The reason for this being our meals consist of a small bowl of rice. And a small bowl of radish stew. Needless to say, the first half-hour of work consumed most of the energy generated by those meals.
Friday evening we were issued with a packet of cigarettes, one flimsy, lady sized handkerchief and a small bundle of Nippon Times newspapers dated 18–23 January 1943.
As these were the first newspapers and magazines we had read for four months, they were eagerly scanned. Although they were full of anti-Allied propaganda, we were mighty pleased to read about the Allied force fighting 40 miles west of Tripoli, and also the invasion of Algiers and Morocco. The majority of men now hope to be free by Christmas … My, how I pine for that beautiful land of Australia.5
The guards at Ohasi were occasionally brutal, capable of beating a prisoner for no apparent reason, but there was no comparison with the systematic savagery of the railway. The level of abuse varied from camp to
camp, often depending on the personality of the men in charge. Perth’s young assistant surgeon, Sam Stening, arrived in Japan in May 1942 and the next year found himself both the senior officer and the only doctor at the Oeyama Camp near Osaka, whose prisoners were forced into slave labour at a nickel mine.
The inmates, clad in threadbare garments, carried out heavy work in rain and slush; when they returned to camp at night, wet to the skin, they had no change of clothing. One gang worked for more than a week up to the knees in icy water. Work bosses pushed the men to the limits of their endurance, and often the sick were forced to work, thus contributing to the death of many of them. Food, though good at first, soon fell off in quantity and quality. The lot of the workers was improved by the medical officer’s decision to give them 360 grams of grain-ration daily, although this meant cutting down the ration of resting men to 250 grams, plus what additions could be spared.6
Perhaps because he was not sent to the railway, which looms so large in the Australian story, Stening’s years as a prisoner have been little recognised. He deserves better. This young paediatrician from Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, only newly married, went about his duties with a devotion to his patients and a courage in confronting the Japanese on their behalf that saw him frequently beaten for his pains. At the Taisho Camp near Osaka, he was savagely bashed with a length of rubber hose when he refused to send sick men out to work, and was then ordered to shovel coal himself.
As the IJA was ground down by the American juggernaut, more and more Japanese males were conscripted into uniform. In mines and factories, they were replaced by Allied prisoners of war. The mines were the worst. Ray Parkin and his two petty officer shipmates, Horrie Abbott and Harry Knight, were taken with the other Australians from the Byoki Maru to the Ohama Camp on Japan’s Inland Sea, some 125 kilometres south-west of Hiroshima. This was a grim straggle of pine-board huts commanded by a sergeant universally known as The Ape. It was September 1944. At first, they felt they had landed well. In their huts, there were tatami mats to sleep on and doonas covered in floral silk, and they were issued with clothing unimaginable on the railway: rubber-soled boots, a heavy coat and trousers made of something like hessian, and a cap to hold a miner’s lamp. For the first few weeks, they worked above ground, digging roads or carrying timbers, but eventually they were sent down the mine itself, into long shafts deep under the Inland Sea. In a ragged line, they plodded along tunnels lit by dim yellow bulbs, sloshing through mud and water, sometimes getting a jolt when they brushed against a naked piece of electric wiring dangling from the roof.
Their first task was to shore up a low spur with baulks of timber – back-breaking work that went on for ten days before they were permitted a yasume. Often, the batteries on their lights would die, leaving them only the faint glow at the end of some distant heading to indicate the way out. Rats scuttled between their legs. When the snow lay deep on Ohama and the north wind whipped up icy flurries, it would be dark when they finished work. The third book of Ray Parkin’s trilogy, The Sword and the Blossom, paints a stark picture:
When they came up from the mine, wet through, they would have to stand about in this vindictive wind for sometimes nearly an hour, waiting for the last men out. With bare legs and thin short-sleeved coats and wet canvas boots they stood hunched, hugging themselves and shivering. The power lines were loaded with ice and down-pointed icicles in rows like the teeth of the wind itself.
They marched back to camp with cracking joints. After the afternoon shift, it was almost midnight before they got back. The concrete bath would have little more than a film of water on its bottom. It was pitch dark, with only the ghost of night outside looking disinterestedly through the windowed squares. Blackout precautions were complete. They would wipe off the coal dust with icy wet rags and pull on their camp clothes and make their way to the dining room. Here there was one miner’s lamp for the whole place, and it was placed by the scales. In a silent queue they filed past, sliding their dixies on to the counter and waiting for their rice to be dumped in impersonally by the server …7
Bill Bee and Fred Skeels spent Christmas Day with some 500 prisoners crammed into yet another hell ship, the Awa Maru. On Boxing Day, they sailed from Singapore in a convoy that hugged the coast of Indochina, then China itself. Allowed on deck one day, Buzzer was thrown off his feet when the ship suddenly turned hard to starboard and two torpedo tracks boiled down either side of the hull, but they made it to Japan on 15 January 1945. Standing in the snow on deck, they were ordered to drop their pants for a glass tube to be shoved up their anuses to check for cholera. It was not a promising introduction. Ashore, they were sent to different camps, which meant farewelling comrades whose most intimate moments they had shared for years.
Skeels and about 120 men, including ten Perth survivors, were put on a train for the Fukuoka 22 Camp on the island of Honshu. This camp sprawled beneath a big slag heap. It comprised the usual rows of wooden barracks with a central kitchen and eating area, and even a hospital. The night they arrived, they were fed hot rice and steaming vegetable soup, which Fred remembered as ‘a beautiful meal, indescribably warming’. It was not enough. Three days later, on 18 January, Leading Seaman Allan Hawke, from Mount Barker in South Australia, died of pneumonia. Just 26, he had been a fit young footballer and tennis player in his schooldays at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College, but the cruel Japanese winter destroyed him.
The Australians were hurried down the mine the day after their arrival. They were given pneumatic drills to bore holes for explosives, two men struggling to position each drill into the rock, and everyone deafened by the noise of the air compressors hammering in the enclosed space. Fred Skeels found it frightening and exhausting:
Once we had drilled the holes, the Japanese miners put in charges and blew that area. We’d have to follow the explosion and fight dust and falling rock to shovel coal from the face. We put it straight into a coal truck if we were close to one on the line, or moved it back a bit further where others could put it into the trucks. Once the trucks were loaded we had to push them by man power up winding bits of rail to the main line where they’d hook onto a continuous sort of train … as usual, the Japanese had a quota for us all, which was one hundred trucks a shift, with each truck apparently containing about a ton of coal ore.8
Of the dozens of camps scattered across Japan, none was more sinister than Fukuoka 17, usually known as Omuta, after the coastal city nearby. On the southern island of Kyushu, Omuta housed the prisoner workforce for a coal mine and a zinc smelter run by the Mitsui Company – one of the four infamous corporate giants, the Zaibatsu, that controlled the Japanese economy. The commandant, a sadist named Asao Fukuhara who was eventually executed for war crimes, ran the camp with premeditated brutality through a platoon of guards known to the prisoners by such nicknames as The Screamer, The Bull, Devil, Billy Goat and The Pig. More sickening still, Fukuhara was aided by an American collaborator, a certain US Navy Lieutenant-Commander Edward N. Little, whose position in charge of the camp kitchens allowed him and his associates to run an extortion racket: extra food for money. The Australians called him Skoshi, which was the Japanese word for his surname, and they loathed him. There were allegations that information he gave to the Japanese led to the torture and death of at least two of his fellow Americans. After the war, he was tried in secret by a US Navy court martial but, to the anger of his accusers, he was found not guilty due to lack of evidence.9
The Americans had arrived first at Omuta, mostly men captured on Bataan or at Corregidor, followed later by Dutch and British prisoners. Bill Bee’s group of some 200 Australians from the Awa Maru reached the camp on the bone-chilling evening of 16 January. After a few days of basic instruction, they too were sent down the shafts in kumis, toiling in shifts that could stretch out to 12 hours to fill the quotas. The first Perth man to die at Omuta was Able Seaman Eric ‘Chesty’ Bond, of Queenscliff in Sydney, who caught pneumonia after being made to stand for hours at attention in the snow as p
unishment for some crime real or imagined. He succumbed on 22 January, exactly one month before his 30th birthday. Buzzer, fearing the same fate, eventually escaped underground work by claiming he was a skilled welder, which got him a job in a workshop above the surface. There, he struck up something close to a friendship with his new bunti-jo, or supervisor, a middle-aged engineer named Hakimoto who had been a merchant seaman, who spoke a little English and treated his charges decently. Sometimes, Hakimoto would share food with them.
As that northern winter turned to the spring of 1945, and then summer, the war was moving to its tumultuous climax. In the western Pacific, the Americans were closing in on Japan, thrusting ever northwards on their campaign of island-hopping. At each stage, the Japanese grew more desperate and fanatical, and the fighting more bloody. Japan itself was bombed in rivers of falling fire. In January, General Curtis ‘Old Iron Ass’ LeMay arrived on Guam in the Marianas and ordered the XXI Bomber Command of the US Army Air Force to adopt new tactics of low-level night bombing with phosphorus, magnesium and napalm weapons specifically designed to incinerate the flimsy timber and paper buildings of Japanese cities and the civilians who dwelt in them. On 10 March, 325 B-29 Superfortress aircraft firebombed Tokyo itself for more than three hours, killing more than 100,000 civilians and reducing some 40 square kilometres of the city to smoking rubble, over which hung the sickening stench of burned human flesh.