Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  The man was Captain Mizusaki Shojiro, the new hands-on commanding officer of the 81 Naval Garrison Unit that was now in control of the area. The Japanese Navy had taken over Rabaul, and the fate of the Harveys was no longer in the hands of the army and the Kempeitai, but the navy.

  In Rabaul, at the prisoner of war camp on Malaguna Road, Ted Harvey, Marjorie and Dickie, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were kept separate from the Australian soldiers, but shared latrines with the captured civilians, including Philip Coote.

  From behind the barbed wire of the military part of the prison, Captain David Hutchinson-Smith was among the Australian soldiers who saw them arrive.

  ‘They were not supposed to speak to anyone,’ said Hutchinson-Smith, ‘but the lad was allowed out now and then and played ball with the guards, with whom he was apparently a favourite.’

  The family were sometimes seen leaving to have their tropical ulcers treated, but were otherwise kept in the storeroom and rarely seen. Unknown to them, the Japanese Navy’s lawyers were considering whether to try them all for espionage.

  It would have been hot in the storeroom, although it was close enough to the road to be shaded by trees for part of the day. Inside, Ted Harvey was talking to himself and Bill Parker might have been dying. Jimmy and Marjorie had to work hard to steady their own nerves. The guards wouldn’t talk to Marjorie. No-one could explain why she and Dickie hadn’t been sent to Kokopo. This festering camp was no place for a mother and her 11-year-old boy.

  The prison compound on Malaguna Road at that stage held 1200 men. The latrines — shallow holes dug into the ground — overflowed when it rained; the place smelled foul, and diarrhoea and dysentery swept through the camp. Most of the captured troops and civilians had malaria and tropical ulcers. Some had beriberi, but nearly everyone was sick with something. To make matters worse, the volcano showered the town with ash, making the food gritty. It even smelled like the end of the world, which added a strange credence to Ted Harvey’s rantings.

  The Japanese Navy was now in Rabaul in a big way. Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi had just arrived from Truk on his flagship Kashima to oversee MO Operation, the invasion of Port Moresby. Inoue was commander of the Japanese 4th Fleet in the South Pacific and had been one of the architects of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had turned the Japanese Navy into a mobile attack air force relying on airpower and blitzkrieg-type strikes from aircraft carriers.

  A week earlier, Inoue had issued Secret Operational Order No.13 to the carrier task force to sortie from Truk to support the invasion of Tulagi and then Port Moresby. Unknown to Inoue, the Americans had broken the Japanese code and were sending their own fleet to intercept them. The Battle of the Coral Sea was about to begin.

  A few days after Marjorie and Dickie arrived in their prison storeroom, the ships they’d seen in the harbour left and the carrier forces of the American and Japanese navies started smashing each other with their warplanes.

  The US sank the Japanese light carrier Shoho. The Japanese sank a US destroyer and heavily damaged an oil carrier. The next day, the Japanese carrier Shokaku was hit, the US carrier Lexington crippled and later scuttled, and the Yorktown badly damaged.

  It was a naval battle fought in the air, and in the end it was a bruising tactical draw. For the Japanese, it was also a strategic disaster. Without air cover, Inoue decided to call off the invasion of Port Moresby. The navy’s lightning run of victories had ended, and the Japanese commanders were stunned.

  The navy’s lawyers held Marjorie and Dickie’s fate in their hands, and the Japanese mood towards their prisoners in Rabaul had just soured.

  CHAPTER 29

  I have written to various people about my family in Rabaul. I am quite prepared for any news, it’s with a very sad heart I write this letter and my heart goes out to everybody who have lost their loved ones. Do you advise me re my family? I hope I haven’t worried you too much writing to you if only I know what has become of them.

  — Phyllis Manson’s letter to the Minister for External Territories, Edward Ward, 6 October 1945

  There is one person still alive today, one survivor of Marjorie’s family who remembers them as they were. Graham Manson is a fit 94-year-old who lives in a small 1960s redbrick house in Sydney’s western suburbs with his wife, Jackie.

  It’s taken me months to meet Graham. Jackie has been worried about him; worried I’ll ask him to remember what happened in the war, because Graham is still traumatised. He rarely speaks about his sister, Marjorie, brother Jimmy and nephew Dickie, and he never speaks about what happened to them in the war. It’s not because he doesn’t want to. It’s because he can’t. The pain of remembering is so great he can’t talk about it.

  When I arrive, Graham has just pranged his car driving back from the bowling club. Nothing serious: a side mirror torn off, some scrapes down the side, some dented pride.

  ‘Have you had any prangs in the past?’ I ask.

  ‘Not really, no.’

  We sit in the front room and drink tea and eat a lemon cake that Jackie has made.

  Graham is a tall man, ‘six foot one and a half at one stage’, but not as big as his brothers, Jim and George.

  ‘Uncle George was a very big, big man,’ says Graham’s daughter, Lisa, who had picked me up from the train station and brought me over. ‘He was taller and broader and a much bigger man.’

  ‘He’s wider than you, lovey,’ says Jackie to her husband.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘My other brother, Jim,’ says Graham, ‘he was terribly tall, wasn’t he, hun.’

  ‘He was a yard o’ pump,’ says Jackie.

  ‘He was a what?’ I ask.

  ‘A yard o’ pump. They’re all a yard o’ pump.’

  ‘Tall and skinny,’ explains Lisa. ‘The expression is “as skinny as a yard of pump water”.’

  ‘Yeah, tall and skinny,’ says Graham.

  It was George Manson’s daughter, Bev, who told me that Graham was the one survivor of Marjorie’s family who still remembers. Graham has never spoken in detail about what he remembers, and I was told he might not want to, or be able to, speak to me at all.

  As a result of Graham and George’s inability to talk about what happened to their family, their wives and children are also in the dark about this catastrophic event in their family history and have learnt not to ask. In the past Graham would try to say something, he’d start to talk and then he’d choke up and everyone would cry, not sure what exactly they were crying about, just that something terrible had happened. It was distressing for everybody, and the subject was avoided.

  As Phyllis Manson said in 1946, when it became clear that her children and grandchild would not be coming home, ‘I feel to let it all die with them.’ Phyllis never spoke about what happened, but it consumed her for the rest of her life. She committed suicide in 1956.

  Graham still grieves for his mother, his father, his spirited sister Marjorie, his tall skinny brother Jimmy, and his courageous nephew Dickie who fought back. In his memory, they are still alive.

  ‘I’m the last one left,’ he tells Jackie and Lisa.

  ‘There’s us!’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Graham was 15 in 1937, when Marjorie left for New Guinea. By the time George and Jimmy left in 1941, Graham was an apprenticed fitter and turner with Scott Bonnar Ltd, makers of lawnmowers, in Adelaide. He tried to enlist in the AIF when he was 18, at the start of the war.

  ‘I was mad to sign up,’ says Graham. ‘But we were apprenticed and they wouldn’t take us. Scott Bonnar was a protected industry.’

  ‘Lawnmowers?’

  ‘Torpedoes.’

  The lawnmower factory was retooled to make munitions for the war, and Graham was making torpedoes when Rabaul was invaded. His parents had heard nothing from Marjorie, Jimmy, George and Dickie since before Christmas 1941, and Phyllis was frantic, but what could Graham do?

  Then George returned, out of the blue, in the middl
e of 1942 and told his story of escape from Rabaul.

  ‘Living off grass, he told me, my brother,’ says Graham. ‘He spent weeks and weeks in a hospital in Melbourne, the military hospital, I can’t think of the name of it now.’

  ‘Heidelberg?’

  ‘Yes, he was there for about seven or eight weeks and then I remember he came home to our house in Prospect and, oh God, he was shockingly thin.’

  But George couldn’t tell them what had happened to Marjorie, Dickie and Jimmy. Phyllis prayed every day that they had also, somehow, escaped.

  Graham’s parents waited and in their own way tried to cope with not knowing and not being able to do anything about it.

  ‘I think they probably kept a lot of things from me at the time,’ says Graham. ‘Probably didn’t want to upset me any more than what there had been.’

  And then a year after two of his children had disappeared, Joseph Manson had a heart attack sitting in his chair in Gordon Road, waiting for word.

  ‘I was there,’ says Graham, remembering it was three weeks before his 21st birthday. ‘In those days . . . if it had been now, he wouldn’t have died. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was there, you just sat by them. Towards the end, they couldn’t do anything for the heart.’

  Joseph was buried in Cheltenham Cemetery at Woodville, not far from his first wife, Harriet. The last time Graham visited his father’s grave, the headstone had gone. When he asked, he was told that other people had been buried in the same plot. It didn’t make much sense at the time, and Graham hasn’t been back; there’s nothing to see any more. It’s as though the world has conspired to forget what the war did to this family. None of them has a memorial.

  ‘I am the last one,’ he says.

  There’s nowhere for Graham to go to remember them. He has to keep it all in his head.

  At the end of 1945, Graham and his mother were told that Marjorie and Dickie had gone down in a prisoner of war ship, the Montevideo Maru. In June 1942, more than a thousand captured Australian civilians and soldiers were herded aboard the Japanese prison ship to be taken to a labour camp on Hainan Island, off China. Eight days after leaving Rabaul, the American submarine USS Sturgeon fired four torpedoes and sank the ship. Only a few Japanese guards survived.

  ‘Well, we thought that they were [on it], but apparently they weren’t,’ says Graham.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jackie.

  ‘Rumours went around. That’s what we thought in the first place.’

  When they were told Marjorie and Dickie weren’t on the ship after all, no-one explained why. After the war, as Phyllis prayed for their return, the rumours came and went, and it was all relentlessly grim. Graham was told by someone (he can’t remember who; perhaps it was George) that the family had been beheaded and, until recently, he thought that might have been true. Seventy years is a long time to grieve and never be sure what truly happened.

  Graham goes to his bedroom and returns with a small black photo album that he puts on the coffee table, bending over to open it. He shows me each of the small black and white prints, some yellowing with age, glued to the pages.

  ‘That’s my father and Dickie.’ They’re standing side by side, leaning companionably towards each other, in the backyard of Gordon Road, in front of a roughly sawn paling fence covered with flowers and vines. Joseph Manson wears his large drooping Henry Lawson moustache. Dickie is in a suit with short pants that his mother made him. He can be no older than eight, but he looks bigger, the image of his father, Jack Gasmier.

  ‘Did he prefer to be called Dickie?’

  ‘It was always Dickie,’ says Graham. ‘The last time I saw Dickie, he would have only been, I don’t know, eight or nine, I suppose.’

  Graham turns the page. ‘That’s Dickie in a cowboy suit.’ He’s pointing a cap gun straight at the camera. ‘That’s Dickie again. There’s a lot of Dickie in there. He’s a beautiful little boy.’

  The photos could be of any Australian family. Days at the beach, Dickie in a swimsuit with shoulder straps. Pictures that Graham took of Dickie with the Skinner boys down the road, arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing. Dickie aged about three with a cricket bat.

  There’s a photograph of Jimmy, ‘a yard of pump water’, shirtless, in his early 20s.

  ‘We always called him Jimmy. Jim or Jimmy. Never James,’ says Graham. ‘One of the things I remember about Jim was, he took me up to Murray Bridge by train, and we stayed with Auntie Rose and Auntie May. They had moved up there. They used to live just around the corner from us in Prospect.’ Rose and May were two old maids who used to live nearby, not really aunts but great friends of the family during the hard years of the Depression. ‘We were invited up there for a holiday and we went on the milk boat.’

  Pictures of Dickie in his Cub Scout uniform. Family anniversaries with everyone standing stiffly to attention. Picnics.

  ‘That’s one of my sister, Marjorie.’

  This is the photograph of Marjorie Manson from the late 1930s, staring straight into the camera, wearing that woollen skirt suit that’s probably a season or two old, high heels, stockings, gloves.

  Top left: Dickie Manson and his grandfather Joseph, in the backyard of their home in Gordon Road, 1938 or 1939

  (Manson family collection)

  Top right: Dickie in his Cub Scout uniform

  (Manson family collection)

  Jimmy Manson with Dickie, early 1930s

  (Manson family collection)

  ‘God love her, she . . . she was . . . Marjorie, she, like a lot of girls in those days, she fell pregnant with her boyfriend. So-called boyfriend. I wasn’t aware of this, I was only very young, and my sister, she went away to the country.

  ‘When she came back, I heard this crying, and she came back into the hallway with this baby in her arms, you see. We all loved her and the baby, it didn’t make any difference, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s a photograph of Phyllis standing on the front verandah at Gordon Road. The house, too, has now gone, pulled down and rebuilt into something more modern. The original house had been built of a type of sandstone that they call ‘freestone’ in Adelaide. The freestone house had a hallway down the centre that led to a dining room. Marjorie and Dickie had a front bedroom when they lived there. The three boys shared another room. Further down the hall was their parents’ bedroom and, at the back, down a couple of steps, was the kitchen. On the right was a small room they called the breakfast room. In that room, there was big trapdoor that led to a cellar, cool and dark in summer, and damp in winter, but used for storing food before refrigeration.

  In the front room, Marjorie had set up her dressmaking business.

  ‘There would be yards and yards of material in her bedroom and people would be coming in being measured up and all the rest,’ says Graham.

  This was before Marjorie took Dickie to Kalgoorlie in 1934 and secretly married Jack Gasmier.

  ‘Gasmier, he was a wrestler,’ says Graham, who has never mentioned Jack Gasmier to his family before. But in all these years, Graham never knew that Marjorie had actually married Gasmier, and he still doesn’t quite believe it. Large pieces of family history were never spoken about, because of what happened later.

  ‘She was determined. She took her boy with her everywhere she went, because I remember [when Marjorie came back from Western Australia, in 1936] Mum said, “Marjorie’s coming back home.” I remember going down to the wharf at Adelaide, Port Adelaide. Waited for the ship to come in and she got off with young Dickie.’

  The last Graham saw of Dickie was in 1940, when he went to Rabaul to be with his mother. Even today Graham still can’t quite believe what happened in Rabaul. It’s as if he’s half-expecting them all to walk back through the door.

  ‘Victory in the Pacific. 1945. I remember all the people were cheering in the streets,’ says Graham. ‘But Mum had been praying every day. She kept saying, “Where’s my famil
y?” We never ever heard through the whole war, and the most heartbreaking thing was . . . when peace was declared we waited and waited and waited . . .’

  ‘But you have us, love,’ says Jackie.

  ‘I know, hun, I’m very lucky.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Richard Manson, also known as Richard Harvey, formerly of Lassuls Plantation, New Britain, Territory of New Guinea, became missing on the thirty-first day of May 1942 and is for official purposes presumed dead.

  — Certificate of death issued 4 July 1947 under the National Security (War Deaths) Regulations

  As Marjorie and Ted Harvey were driven along Malaguna Road to the Kempeitai headquarters in downtown Rabaul, they would have been astonished at the town’s transformation. What had been an Australian town was now a Japanese one. All English signs had been plastered over with Japanese characters that presumably said the same thing. The motorcars were mainly Japanese, the people in the street were Japanese, the food and equipment unloaded from the cargo ships were Japanese.

  The rising sun of the Australian Imperial Forces had vanished. The rising sun of the Imperial Japanese Navy was everywhere.

  When the Kempeitai had arrived in Rabaul, the commanding officer looked at the available real estate and decided to make his headquarters at a shopping complex of four connected buildings on Casuarina Avenue in Chinatown. It had been owned by the businessman Aloysius Akun and included the Ah Teck tailor shop.

  The complex was close to the Pacific Hotel in the busiest part of town. The Kempeitai officers had taken over the top floor and the bottom floor was a series of cells and interrogation rooms surrounding a courtyard.

  Marjorie had shopped there in happier days, and when the car stopped at the complex, the centre of town would have looked familiar yet alien. On the verandahs of the grand hotels nearby, Japanese officers lounged in the cane chairs where white men had sat weeks earlier.