Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  With their genius for logistics, the Americans took control of liberating the camps in Japan. The Liberator bombers and Superfortresses that had devastated Japanese cities were now pressed into service as transports, their bomb bays filled with supplies that tumbled from the skies in such profusion that the prisoners could barely cope with the deluge. At Omuta, Bill Bee watched as parachutes of red, green and blue fell from the belly of a B-29:

  One parachute failed to open, allowing its load, a 44-gallon drum of foodstuffs, to hurtle to the ground unchecked. It burst on impact close to an air raid shelter, causing quite a commotion for those standing nearby. Food flew in all directions, with one unlucky Yank being hit in the head by a can of peaches. Unfortunately this guy didn’t make it back to the States, either.

  Another package burst in mid air, with the contents being scattered all over the camp. These items included footwear, clothing, cigarettes, reading material, etc., and even messages of greeting …

  Parachutes were gathered in abundance and very soon the local women were venturing into the camp to cadge the silk … a number of these women would offer to make us shirts and shorts in exchange for the material …5

  The prisoners had often talked with relish about the punishments and reprisals they would inflict on their captors when freedom came. In a few camps, this did happen: kangaroo courts were set up, and some guards who had been particularly vicious were strangled or drowned or shot out of hand. But this was far from the norm. The great majority of the captives had endured such brutality for so long that they wanted no more part of it, and when liberation brought the opportunity for vengeance they simply did not take it. ‘We won’t lower ourselves to the Japs’ level,’ they told themselves. Their one desire was to get home. Hesitantly at first, then with increasing curiosity, some of the Perth men in Japan would leave their camps and walk into nearby villages for a look around, revelling in the long-forgotten freedom of coming and going as they pleased. Ray Parkin got hold of a sketchbook and crayons and wandered along the shores of a little local harbour, drawing the boats and landscapes as he had so long ago in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Frank McGovern and Vic Duncan, at Kawasaki, were moved by the plight of the local people, who were bombed and hungry:

  There was that much food dropped to us we didn’t know what to do with it. So we got a few tins of fruit or something, put them in a bag and went out for a look around the joint. We went into one place where there was a woman and her husband and they had a photo there, edged in black, probably of their son who had been killed, just like any other family. We realised they’d been bloody well browbeaten and starved. They had a couple of mementos there and we were going to trade, but in the end we just gave them a couple of tins of fruit and left.6

  Buzzer Bee did something even more extraordinary. He decided to repay the kindness shown by his old bunti-jo, Hakimoto-san. Loading up a bag full of American supplies, he found the man’s house still standing in the ruins of a nearby village and turned up unannounced on the doorstep to a startled emotional welcome:

  After bowing profusely, he accepted the bag of sabis (presents) and then ushered me into what would be the family room where his wife and other members of the family had already gathered. Hakimoto’s short introductory speech brought a stunned silence from the onlookers who obviously had never expected a visit such as this. He then gestured that I tip the bag and empty its contents, which I promptly did because not only was I beginning to feel somewhat embarrassed, but I had hoped that the presentation could have been effected without too much drama.

  As cigarettes, chewing gum, chocolates, cookies, canned meat and fruits and also woollen socks spilled out onto the matted floor, muted feelings gave way to exclamations of curiosity and disbelief …

  I found it hard to contain my composure during all the arigatos (thank yous) and gestures of humility that were heaped upon me, so I decided to depart the scene as soon as the opportunity presented itself.7

  The conquerors began arriving at the Atsugi Airbase south-west of Tokyo just after dawn on 28 August, the US Army’s 11th Airborne Division touching down in wave after wave of C-47 transport aircraft. Two days later, a four-engined C-54 named Bataan, the military version of the Douglas DC-4 Skymaster, swooped low over Mount Fuji to land at Atsugi. From it stepped General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who, ever aware of the waiting newsreel cameras, paused theatrically at the top of the ladder to display his noble profile and to light his corncob pipe. A motorcade took him to the dilapidated splendour of the New Grand Hotel in the bombed ruins of Yokohama, along a route lined by a division of Japanese soldiers. From the sea, the US Navy’s Third Fleet, under Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey, began to enter Tokyo Bay, with an armada of ships from the Allied nations, for the formal surrender. Ten warships of the RAN, including the heavy cruiser HMAS Shropshire and HMAS Hobart, the sole surviving sister to Perth, took their places in the anchored lines of grey stretching out of sight.

  Early on Sunday 2 September, under a grey sky, a small fleet of destroyers came alongside the American flagship, the battleship USS Missouri, discharging Allied generals and admirals in glittering array. MacArthur would formally accept the Japanese surrender on Missouri’s quarterdeck, in a broadcast to be heard around the world. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, Commander of the British Pacific Fleet, would sign for Britain. Blamey was there for Australia. Britain’s General Arthur Percival, thinner than ever from his imprisonment after the surrender of Singapore, took his place not far from Vice-Admiral Conrad Helfrich, the Dutchman who had accused Hec Waller of failing to sell his life expensively at the Java Sea.

  At nine o’clock, the Japanese appeared. The new Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, in top hat and morning suit, limped along the deck with the aid of a walking stick, followed by the Chief of the Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu, a fanatic who had wanted to fight on but had been personally ordered by Hirohito to sign the document of surrender. A rather tinny recording of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ crackled from the battleship’s loudspeakers; then MacArthur appeared with his naval co-equal and rival, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. It was MacArthur who spoke:

  We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate.

  Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred, but rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to serve, committing all peoples unreservedly to faithful compliance with the understanding they are here formally to assume.

  It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past – a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance and justice.

  The ceremony took exactly 23 minutes. On cue, the sun emerged as first the Japanese and then the Allied delegates stepped forward to a rectangular table covered in green baize and put their names to two copies of the instrument of surrender, the gravity of the occasion only slightly marred by the Canadian participant, Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave, who literally made his mark in history by signing the Japanese copy on the wrong line. MacArthur had the last word, as sonorous as ever:

  Let us pray that peace be restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.

  High above Tokyo Bay, there was a distant rumble, then a roar of aircraft engines. Swarms of fighter aircraft from American carriers offshore, and squadrons of B-29s, the dreaded Bee-nee-ju-ku, flew low over Missouri in tight formation, wave after wave of them, in thunderous affirmation of final victory.

  Eventually, the great return began. For all its careful planning, in the first few weeks after the surrender RAPWI was almost overwhelmed by
the task of gathering up these tens of thousands of men scattered across Asia. The joke went around that the acronym actually stood for Retain All Prisoners of War Indefinitely. In some camps, it seemed that the Americans were being moved out first, because they had the ships and aircraft to do it, and this caused some envy for a while. As the novelty of plentiful food and medicine, newspapers and clean clothing began to wear off, the Australians became impatient, intent on striking out alone if nothing happened soon. At Kawasaki, Vic Duncan could hold his curiosity no longer. With a now subservient Japanese soldier to interpret and to protect him from any angry civilians, he picked his way to the shores of Tokyo Bay, to gaze with longing at the distant sight of Shropshire and Hobart at anchor in the line. Sadly unable to find a boat to get out to them, he went back to the camp.

  After a while, the RAPWI gears began to mesh. A train was sent to Omuta to collect both Americans and Australians, taking them on a roundabout route through the night of 16 September to Nagasaki, where Buzzer Bee and his fellow prisoners marvelled at the devastation wrought by the Fat Man bomb. No one seemed to have worried too much about any lingering nuclear radiation:

  None of us, Yanks and Aussies alike and there would have been about 400 of us altogether, had any idea of the reception that awaited us on arrival. Only the Americans could have staged such a show in so short a time. To the strains of a band playing stirring tunes, some that we had never heard before such as ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, we stepped onto the platform to be greeted by smiling American Army lasses handing out hot coffee and doughnuts. The sight of these fresh, vivacious girls, the first we had seen for three and a half years, will stick in my memory for all time. This was proof that we were now back among civilisation again.8

  To see and talk with Caucasian women was perhaps the greatest tonic of all. These were young men who, in a normal world, would have been at the peak of their sexual powers, but in captivity their libidos had become almost dormant, not so much through the obvious absence of available women but because hunger, disease and misery had gnawed away at their minds and bodies. It was hard to think of yourself as a sexual being if you were ravaged by malaria, beriberi or amoebic dysentery. When they dreamed or fantasised in the camps, it was mostly of food or family, rarely of sex. But with their return to health, their natural urges began to resurface. In Bill Bee’s train carriage heading for Nagasaki, an American had smuggled a Japanese girl aboard and they went for it under a blanket, to the amusement of the onlookers. On that same day, Tag Wallace, by now very much fitter, was taken from his camp in Sumatra to an airfield he had helped to build as a slave labourer, and he, too, marvelled at the sight that met him when a DC-3 aircraft touched down to fly him to Singapore:

  When at last the plane landed, out stepped a beautiful blonde nurse and our eyes almost popped out, for she was the first white girl we had seen for nearly three years. The Japanese had provided us with clean Japanese uniforms in place of our filthy rags, and were already mindful of the war crimes trials being conducted in Germany.

  Within hours we were in Singapore and as I stepped onto the gangway an airman grabbed me by the arm and shouted my name, but I was still in a sort of shock and did not recognise him. Red Cross girls waited in line with open suitcases of cigarettes and chocolates inviting us to help ourselves. The men stuffed their shirts full of the goodies, looking over our shoulders to see who would take them away. It was almost incomprehensible that some stranger would give us something for nothing.9

  Frank McGovern and Vic Duncan, with Ordinary Seaman Syd Matsen from Western Australia and Petty Officer Alf Thomas from Adelaide, were taken from the Kawasaki Camp to Tokyo Bay to meet an American landing craft. Going on board, they saw one of their former camp guards, a certain Sergeant Hino, waving a handkerchief in fond goodbye, occasionally dabbing a tear from his cheeks – final proof, they thought, that the Japanese people were utterly incomprehensible.

  The barge took them out to an American hospital ship, the USS Benevolence, where their camp clothes were stripped from them and taken to be burned. Again, there were women nurses, along with steaming showers where, most miraculously of all, they could take their time splashing under the hot water. Towelling themselves down, they found piles of freshly laundered US Navy uniforms to change into, and that night they slept under blankets. A day later, they were transferred to a British carrier, HMS Speaker, which had flown off her aircraft and transformed her hangar deck into a giant dormitory to carry hundreds of Australian and other Allied prisoners to the Philippines. Speaker was a small escort carrier, American built to a design they had never seen – another of the many surprises for sailors kept away from the world for so long. She was Royal Navy, not Australian, but for Vic Duncan, Scots born and eight years a matelot, to breathe again that heady aroma of steam and oil and to hear the familiar hum of machinery and the shrill of pipes was a homecoming of its own. He was delighted to be invited to the petty officers’ mess, where they fitted him out with a chief’s cap and badge.

  On 3 September – exactly six years to the day since the war had begun – Speaker weighed and began to steam out of the bay, with the prisoners lined up in ranks on her flight deck, as one of her officers recorded:

  It was 12 miles to the other end of the bay for which we headed, but it was soon seen that every ship from battleship to corvette had cleared lower deck and was standing by to cheer our passengers, and it would be most disappointing if we gave anyone a wide berth. So we circled in and out of the mass of ships at anchor, passing as close as we dared to each (in one case much closer than we meant), and receiving an ovation which will never be forgotten by any of us … There were few who had not a lump in their throats at the thought of these men’s restoration to freedom after years of virtual slavery.10

  Standing there in their American uniforms, feeling once again the roll of a ship beneath their feet, McGovern and Duncan searched the bay for fellow Australians. As they passed the corvette HMAS Pirie, they saw her crew lining the deck, some men waving an Australian flag, and they heard the heart-tugging strains of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ ringing out across the water. Then came Shropshire and Hobart, with another stirring greeting. Bursting with emotion, Frank made his way to Speaker’s bridge and asked the Officer of the Watch if he could send a signal – an unheard-of thing for a lowly able seaman to request. The British were pleased to oblige. An Aldis projector on the flag deck clattered out the message ‘Greetings from men of HMAS Perth’. The cheering rose to the heavens.

  David Manning and some other Perth men wound up in Rangoon, now back in the hands of the British. Nobody knew what to do with them for several days until an RAAF wing commander arrived, Vic Richardson,11 who took them under his protection and smuggled them on board a ship, the Highland Brigade, which was heading for Australia. The army threw them off that when they reached Singapore, which meant waiting around for another ship, and they did not reach Melbourne until November.

  The Americans turned Manila into a hub for returning prisoners, building a tent city on a scale astonishing to the Australians. There were movie theatres and canteens, drug stores with soda fountains and unlimited ice cream, and an issue of two cans of beer per day. Medical and dental treatment was free, and there was even an Australian Army pay office, which handed out an advance of ten pounds to each man. The comedian Bob Hope and the singing Andrews Sisters turned up to do a cabaret show. Buzzer Bee, arriving by ship from Nagasaki, joined the long queues at the telegraph office to send a cable back to his mother at Howick Street, Victoria Park, in Perth. ‘MANILA HOME SOON LOVE WILLIAM’, it said, dated 1 October. It was the first time his mother heard that he was alive and safe.

  Fred Skeels and his mates also turned up in Manila, and so did Frank McGovern and his. As ever, the Perth men stuck together, some of them borrowing an idle American jeep for a tour of Manila one afternoon. They had never seen one of those before, either. They were beginning to realise how much of life had passed them by. Fred, to his intense sorrow,
finally learned of the death of his schoolmate Wally Johnston, lost in the torpedoing of the Rakuyo Maru:

  The only really sad side to being in the camp in the Philippines was that I found out the truth of my mate Wally Johnston’s disappearance, and verified that he hadn’t been picked up by the Japanese or the Yanks as the lucky ones had been. No one had any knowledge of him. Some of the blokes who had been rescued at that time knew he had been on the ship, but no one had seen him since, at least those we were able to talk to about it. I was pretty devastated and torn between wanting to know if he had died or not, and of not wanting to know so that there was still some hope that he had survived. But I felt it was my duty to find out the truth, to verify in my own mind whether he was likely to be alive as I knew I would have to visit his mother when I reached home.12

  Leaving Manila was a lottery. Each day, they would check the camp noticeboards, hoping to see their names listed for a ship or an aircraft heading for Australia. Some had to wait a few weeks, others just a few days. Frank McGovern got an early ride on an RAAF Liberator to Darwin, and then on to Sydney:

  It took us 11 hours to get to Darwin, and the RAAF crew were good to us. My family knew I was coming, but one of the engines conked out before we got there, and we had to spend another day on the ground while they fixed it. When we got to Darwin, I just kissed the tarmac.