Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  Then it was another 11 hours to Mascot in Sydney. The crew told us they had permission to come down low in the Liberator. It was Monday 17 September – a beautiful spring morning, the most beautiful spring morning of my life. They did two circuits of Sydney Harbour, clockwise and anticlockwise, just so we could get a look. We went over Rose Bay and Watson’s Bay, then back down again, over Fort Denison and the bridge to Mascot. I got in the bomb bay down the back and had a good look through the Perspex, and it felt unbelievable. Any time it’s a good sight, but that was absolutely out of this world, on a sunny spring morning, the sun glistening on the harbour and … oh gee!13

  They were met at Mascot and driven out to the naval depot at Balmoral, set among the gum trees on the shores of Middle Harbour. His mother, Minnie, and father, James, were waiting for him, and they fell into each other’s arms. But the sheer ecstasy of that spring day was tempered by the overwhelming sorrow of knowing that his elder brother, Vince, had not made it. Engine Room Artificer IV Vincent Bernard McGovern No. 23276 lies, with so many of his shipmates, in a sea grave off Sunda.

  The official welcome was not so warm. Back in July, as the first Australians held captive by the Germans had begun to trickle back from Europe, the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, had asked the army brass what could be done publicly to acknowledge the prisoners on their return. Should there be a parade or some other sort of official greeting ‘similar to the American practice’?14 He had received a stuffed-shirt answer from the army’s Adjutant-General, Major-General Charles Edward Maurice ‘Gaffer’ Lloyd:

  The actual meetings of the repatriates with their next-of-kin is marked by emotions which have to be seen to be believed. My own personal view is that these reunions should be had in the homes of the people … such a course would avoid the contagious emotionalism approaching hysteria. The participation of the Commonwealth Government [in a public reception] should be carefully considered. There is a feeling in the Army, and I think in the country generally, that the flap concerning the repatriated prisoners is a bit exaggerated. The great bulk of them are fit and well, provided with large sums of money from their enforced period with no expenses, and now granted discharge from the Army. On the other hand the soldier who has borne the whole load comes from the still continuing battle in New Guinea, tired, diseased and NOT discharged and nobody but his next of kin are really very interested in him as an individual.15

  Lloyd, a moustachioed blimp renowned for his solemnity,16 had written that cruel dismissal from the comfort of his office at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. It is possible he had the surrender of the 8th Division at Singapore in mind – still a raw nerve for the army. When many of those men returned to Sydney on the troopship Manunda, General Gordon Bennett was there to meet them and got a rousing reception, although many of his former officers were disgusted at the sight of him revelling in the applause of soldiers he had deserted.

  The navy had no such difficulties, because no ship had surrendered to the enemy. But no one was at all certain how the prisoners should be dealt with. After he returned from convalescent leave, Blood Bancroft turned up at Flinders Naval Depot wondering what his next job might be. With stunning incomprehension, a petty officer ordered him to get a pick and shovel and join a work party re-ballasting the depot rail line. Feeling he had done enough railway building to last a lifetime, and with no intention of doing any more, Blood let the petty officer know what he could do with his pick and shovel. An ugly stand-off ensued until he was rescued by an officer with the wit to understand the situation.

  Bill Bee, too, managed to get a flight to Australia, shoehorned into an RAAF Catalina with Ron Sparks, Spud Murphy and another Perth shipmate, Bert Simons. They touched down in Darwin on 9 October and were trucked to the Larrakeah Army Camp, where, to some regret, they were stripped of their glamorous American uniforms and ordered back into pusser’s whites. Bill was reading a newspaper in the camp recreation centre when he glanced up and saw his younger brother Geoff walking towards him, in naval uniform. Bill had no idea his brother had even joined the navy, let alone that he was in Darwin working at the Boom Defence Depot. That night, they partied hard with Geoff’s mates in the depot sailors’ mess, on bottle after bottle of beer that had magically appeared despite the rationing. Three weeks later, the two brothers were heading south in another Catalina, equally crowded. They touched down in Matilda Bay on the Swan River on 24 October, where the family was waiting.

  Most of the prisoners returned by sea. HMS Speaker brought another load of men from Manila to Australia, including Fred Lasslett, Fred Skeels and Ray Parkin. After a lazy voyage, they were on the flight deck to see the sun rise over Sydney Heads on 15 October and to be met by a tumultuous welcome from ferries and small craft on the harbour and cheering crowds at the dock. People held up signs with a relative’s name scrawled on them. Fred Skeels was put on a train to Melbourne and then on a DC-3 for a flight to the west. To his intense dismay, he was hit by airsickness out of Kalgoorlie, which left him ‘crook as a dog’. But his memoirs paint a touching picture of the reunion with his family and with Bonnie Pettit, the slender blonde girl who had treasured the golden locket he had given her before he left and who had waited for him since 1942:

  Our plane arrived at Guildford Airport during the forenoon of Sunday, 21 October 1945 and my family were waiting for me: my mother and father, two sisters, a couple of other relatives and Bonnie, my girlfriend. It was a paradox for me to be facing my dream, my purpose for surviving all the horrors of the camps, but being anxious and not wanting to meet my family because I felt so crook and smelt badly of vomit.

  The importance of the occasion and the sickness blurred my vision of them standing in the distance waiting for me, but once they recognised me they ran towards me and I to them. We kissed and threw arms around one another and I felt very uncomfortable, because I knew I stank of vomit which made it awkward. They didn’t care how I smelled. I could have rolled in manure and they would still have held me close. I was a bundle of nerves, shaking with suppressed excitement.

  There was only slight awkwardness in our embrace as I don’t think they knew how to greet me. I felt as though they were sort of holding back, whether they might hurt me if they touched me. I sensed they were suppressing their enthusiasm as well. We were all a bit stilted in our embraces, but the embarrassment was short lived, replaced with tears, laughter, joy, much happiness and the relief of closure. I was home at last.17

  Ray Parkin was given a train ticket home to Melbourne – first class, he noted happily, and with a car to meet him at Spencer Street Station. At HMAS Lonsdale – the old navy depot in Port Melbourne – he was shown into an office to find his wife, Thelma, daughter, Jill, and son, John, and his parents, Arthur and Laetitia, waiting for him. John, seven years old then, remembers the day vividly:

  It was Bank Day at school, a Monday. You put threepence in the bank, and the manager was there to collect your money. And the word came through they were going to pick the Old Man up. But we weren’t allowed out of the school until the banking had been finished.

  Eventually, we walked home, got into the old 1928 Oakland, which was my grandfather’s car, and we drove down to HMAS Lonsdale at Port Melbourne. I remember looking at the cutaway section of a torpedo.

  We were in the commander’s office, and in he came. He was in uniform. I just thought, ‘There he is. Dad’s home.’

  Rationing was still on, of course, and, as we were leaving, the commander said, ‘Here, you might need these,’ and gave him a fistful of coupons.

  I can remember the house in Young Street in Ivanhoe, decked out with every flag you could think of on flagpoles, beautifully done. Australian flags were flying everywhere, and half the neighbourhood had turned out. There was food everywhere, too. One of the neighbours, Gunston the butcher, complained to Dad about the rationing. ‘You’ve got no idea what it was like here,’ he told Dad. ‘Even tea’s been rationed.’18

  For others, the welcome simply didn’t happen.
Gavin Campbell, still not quite believing he had landed in the lap of luxury at Bangkok’s Oriental Hotel, eventually got a plane that took him first to Borneo, then on the grinding flight to Australia:

  It was 15 November 1945, and it was freezing cold in Melbourne. When we arrived at Essendon Airport, there was no one there to meet me, so I went over to a Red Cross hut and a little old lady asked me if I would like a cup of tea.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked me.

  ‘Actually, I’ve just got home from being a prisoner of war in Burma and Thailand,’ I said.

  She looked at me as if I had leprosy. But she rang the navy at Lonsdale, and they sent a car for me.19

  With the war over, the Australian people wanted to get on with the peace. Returning to their homes, the Perth survivors found that news of the war and its aftermath was slipping from the front pages of the newspapers as the country slowly groped its way back to something approaching normality. Each day, the papers published lists of prisoners who had been located abroad or who were on their way home, but the coverage of their arrivals was often surprisingly low-key, rarely front page. In mid-October, the headlines in Sydney were all about a strike at the Bunnerong Power Station that caused blackouts throughout the city and, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, put 150,000 men and women out of work. Shocked to the core by this industrial anarchy, week after week The Bulletin magazine ran a series of frenzied editorial cartoons depicting Australia as a sleeping beauty about to be ravished by a snarling half-man, half-gorilla labelled ‘Communism’. On the lighter side, the entire country was either entranced or outraged by ‘the new French bathing costume for women’, a voluminous bikini that, according to The Daily Telegraph, caused a stampede of thousands of ogling young men when it first appeared on Bondi Beach. Mrs Florence Kenna, state superintendent of moral education for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, fired off a furious letter of protest. ‘A disgraceful display,’ she fumed. ‘We have been through a dreadful war and now, when we are trying to take our children’s minds off the unpleasant and unclean things of life, we should have more civic pride.’

  Public attitudes to the returning prisoners did not reflect Gaffer Lloyd’s lofty disdain, but there was uncertainty over how they should be treated. The concept of post-traumatic-shock disorder was unknown. The common, official view was that it would be best for the prisoners and their families if they could push the horrors into the background and get on with life again. Relatives were advised to avoid asking about what had happened in the camps and to try to keep life as ‘normal’ as possible. This attitude was challenged by Guy Harriott, a war correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, who returned to Australia in October with about 600 prisoners on the troopship Highland Chieftain:

  In Darwin I heard instructions or suggestions issued for the treatment of returning POWs. Seemingly, their families and relatives are advised to handle them with kid gloves – humour them, agree with everything they say, discourage any conversation which will recall what they went through in captivity.

  This is rubbish, and dangerous rubbish. It will not only be bitterly resented by the men, but will have a bad effect on them. The point their families should realise is that they are perfectly normal, ordinary Australian lads and expect to be treated as such.

  Talk to them about their experiences, ask them what things were like ‘up on the line’ or wherever the fortunes of war took them – they expect you to be interested in what they have been doing for the past three and a half years.

  If you do not show interest they are going to feel that somehow you are ashamed of them.20

  That was sensible advice. Harriott, though, could not resist gilding the lily. ‘Yes, these lads can still laugh,’ he explained. ‘When you hear them laughing there is nothing wrong that a month’s loaf on the beaches won’t cure … they are as normal and cheerful as you or I.’

  That cheery assurance was simply untrue. Most of the men, especially those who had been ‘up on the line’, were profoundly scarred, both physically and mentally. Travelling on a tram one day to visit his girlfriend Merle, Frank McGovern heard a sudden bang – perhaps an electrical fault in the wiring – and he dived in terror under a seat. A middle-aged man seated nearby, perhaps a digger from the First World War, said to him kindly, ‘Son, this will take a while; you should get treatment.’21 That story was typical. A crying child or a barking dog could snap frayed nerves. For a lot of ex-prisoners and their families, violence, or the threat of it, was never very far away. They all found it difficult, or, at worst, impossible, to share their memories with those who had stayed at home, or even with other service personnel who had not been captured. For a long time, Fred Skeels felt comfortable only in the company of other ex-prisoners:

  I would travel to town sometimes three times a week so we could talk about our common problems over a couple of drinks. I don’t drink alcohol so it wasn’t a matter of blotting out my feelings with drunkenness. It was simply a chance to mix with people who understood exactly what I was going through and it was the same for them. They knew exactly how I felt about Japanese brutality, how I was coping with readjusting to being back with my family, how I was coping with any physical or psychological problems.22

  Nights were often the worst. Then the hideous dreams would come. With a distraught wife lying beside them in the dark, men writhed in torment. They would wake shouting or weeping, exhausted and dripping with sweat. Their women and those others who loved them would do their best to console them, but they were often unsure how to go about it. Fred was typical in finding an emotional chasm that, at first, seemed impossible to bridge:

  There was nothing in papers or magazines to describe to the public how inhumanely the Japanese had treated their prisoners of war. We knew that they didn’t understand us and we did not know how to inform them so that they would see things from our perspective. How could we tell them that we felt ineffective to cope with life and work away from building railway lines and shovelling coal? How could we tell them that we felt unskilled, uninformed, uninterested in their problems while we tried to cope with the memory of bashings, disease and death? It took us a long time to get our confidence back in our ability as we had been treated with only threats and contempt for so long, and it was a hurdle that we all had to overcome in our own way.23

  It was common for the men to feel that life had passed them by, that the world had left them behind. They had so much to catch up with, but it was hard, so hard. They sought each other’s company, sometimes daily, for that way you had nothing to explain and nothing to apologise for. Inevitably, some men handled things better than others. A few returned POWs, tormented by the horrors they had known, took their own lives. Some sought release in alcohol, drinking to numb the pain. Others had difficulty establishing normal relationships with parents, wives or children. For years, Jock McDonough, the pilot of the Pusser’s Duck, nursed a resentment at his family’s willingness to talk about his two brothers’ more mundane war experiences while remaining strangely silent about his, as if there was some taboo. A lot found it hard to find or hold a civilian job when all they had known since leaving school was the navy at war.

  Throughout his captivity, Fred Lasslett had sustained himself by writing his love letters to Nola Caldwell, the ‘beautiful angel’ he had met at the ballroom in Prahran. When he reached Melbourne for a tearful reunion with his mother and father, they had to tell him that Nola had not waited for him. She had married and moved away. Fred tried to find her but she was gone.

  Elmo Gee and his bugler mate Tubby Grant, both with fading eyesight from the ravages of beriberi, were flown from their camp in Burma to Rangoon, and then on to hospital in Singapore, where, after the usual few weeks of nobody knowing what to do with them, they were found a place on a troopship, the MV Circassia, heading for Melbourne. That voyage gave them time to relax a little and prepare for the reunions ahead. Tubby met some fellow musicians on board, and they put together a four-piece band to play at dances wi
th the nurses. Elmo was at fever pitch when the journey ended early in November and he saw the crowds waiting for them at the Port Melbourne docks:

  I was aching to see my family. Little did I know the awful news I was soon to hear. When the ship berthed in Melbourne some of the family were there to greet me, which was wonderful, but I frantically searched for my mother’s face.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ I said, and then I got the dreadful truth that she’d died the year before while being treated by a dentist, a Mr Vandenberg. She was only 60, and hadn’t woken up after they gave her the chloroform. I was devastated. It seemed like the last straw. One of the few things that had kept me going in Burma was the thought of seeing Mum again. I loved her very much.24

  Elmo Gee was a sick man, in body and spirit. The vital youngster from Silver Creek who had so blithely sailed off to join Perth at Portsmouth in 1939 was now gaunt and frail at the age of 26, his best years stolen from him. The thought that his mother had died without knowing he was still alive weighed heavily upon him and almost certainly hampered his recovery, and although the navy gave him careful treatment at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, which restored some of his sight and put some meat back on his bones, the mental trauma was harder to erase. For months, he found it difficult even to sit in a chair, preferring to be cross-legged on the floor or to squat on his haunches as they had done in the camps, and he shunned regular food in favour of rice. There was another blow, too, when he found that his family, thinking he had been killed in action, had emptied his bank account to keep the farm going through the war. His salvation was Kath Brewer, the girl he had proposed to on the day he left in 1941. She had promised to wait for him then, and she had. Kath would take a lot of the pain away.