Line of Fire

by Ian Townsend

  Hugh Scott is included in the list of the Montevideo Maru dead, even though witnesses reported seeing him in Rabaul months after the ship sank. After the war, relatives of those civilians left behind in Rabaul called for a federal inquiry to establish their true fate, but it was never held. As a result, and despite the subsequent discovery of a Japanese list of those who were on the prison ship, families still have lingering doubts about what happened.

  Diana Martell (Coote) isn’t convinced that her father, Philip Coote, was on the Montevideo Maru either. ‘We’ve never known what happened to him,’ says Diana. ‘I doubt if they would want a 56-year-old man for their labour. I think they would have disposed of him.’

  Trilby, Rhoda Coote’s Pomeranian, escaped from Rabaul, carried by Lewis Froggatt, the government entomologist. ‘He walked down the coast with Trilby on his back,’ says Diana. ‘Not all the way. He tried. It was too much. He had to leave poor Trilby in a native village. It was all so sad. And so unnecessary, in the end.’ Lewis Froggatt escaped with George Manson on the Laurabada.

  George Manson married Nina Truss in 1948 and they moved back to New Guinea, where they had a daughter, Beverley. Beverley later married Bill McLean, and they have two children. Graham Manson married Jackie Lawson in 1951 and they have two children, Lisa and Mark, and six grandchildren. So, despite their terrible loss, Phyllis and Joseph Manson have eight great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. Dickie Manson had eight cousins he never met on his mother’s side of the family, as well as cousins on his father’s side that still don’t know he existed. George Manson died in 1990.

  Phyllis Manson never did learn the true fate of her daughter Marjorie, son Jimmy and grandson Dickie. ‘I have written to various people about my family in Rabaul,’ Phyllis wrote to the Minister for External Territories, Edward Ward, just after the Japanese surrender in 1945. ‘I hope I haven’t worried you too much writing to you if only I know what has become of them.’ She received no satisfactory answer. On 27 February 1956, Phyllis Manson put her head inside her oven and turned on the gas. A friend found her. She was 65.

  The execution of Marjorie, Jimmy and Dickie Manson, Ted Harvey and Bill Parker was the focus of one of the first war crime investigations at Rabaul when the war ended. An experienced prosecutor from Perth, Major Alex MacKay, was asked to look at the case and, in October 1949, he reported his decision: ‘A prima facie case of a violation of the laws and usages of war cannot be raised against any persons involved in this execution.’ MacKay said that their court martial had been properly convened, the accused were present, and the charge of espionage was one by which the laws of war can carry the death penalty.

  In formalities the trial appears to have been fair, and in accordance with the requirements of the Hague Rules and international justice . . .

  A special mention must be made in the case of Harvey junior in view of his age. The only evidence available on that aspect is contained in the sworn statement of captain Mizusaki Shojiro, wherein he claims that the boy was 12 years old. At that age there is a presumption of inability to commit crime, but such presumption is rebuttable on proof of the commission of the act alleged, together with malicious intent or a knowledge of doing wrong in the sense of crime. There is nothing to show whether such facts were or were not established at trial.

  Although it has been ruled that legal representation is not essential in a trial of this nature, it would, I believe, be considered most unfair for a boy of 12 years of age to be tried on a charge of espionage without adequate representation. However, as Harvey junior was tried with his mother and father, I consider that his interests must have been sufficiently protected.

  Phyllis Manson was never told of the investigation or its outcome. She never had the chance to point out that Dickie had only just turned 11, and that he wasn’t Ted Harvey’s son.

  Mizusaki Shojiro was questioned during investigations into war crimes, but was released. In 1950, the Adelaide Advertiser reported that 15 Australians were identified among bodies found in a mass grave at the base of Tavurvur. ‘A Japanese naval officer allegedly concerned with at least nine of the killings is walking around Tokio [sic] hale and hearty,’ said the Adelaide Advertiser, quoting an RAAF spokesman. ‘The Japanese officer in charge of the Matupi POW camp near where the bodies have been recovered was a Captain Mizusaki. Twelve months ago he was in Tokio and admitted having attended the killings, he added. So far Mizusaki had not been charged as a war criminal.’

  As many as 100 Allied prisoners were executed at the base of Tavurvur. Marjorie and Dickie Manson, and Ted Harvey, were the first, and their bodies remain undiscovered. The area around the Malay Hole later became a place where prisoners, most knowing they were about to die, would share cigarettes with their captors and some would shake hands with their executioners. Others would curse, a few would plead, but most remained quiet until the end. In later executions, Fujisaki Kinibei, an expert swordsman, would perform demonstrations in beheading, and deliver the coup de grace for the botched jobs of others. New recruits would be told to fix bayonets and charge rows of prisoners. In one case, captured soldiers were sedated and buried alive.

  Joe Roca was also investigated over his betrayal of Ted Harvey and Marjorie’s family, and the army compiled a case to take to the Supreme Court of New Guinea, to try him for treason and aiding the enemy. If found guilty, he would have faced the death penalty. In 1947, the case was dropped for reasons that were never explained. The following year, Joe Roca was taken to Rabaul’s hospital with stomach pains, and he died on 24 November 1948. People who knew Roca and his family believe he was poisoned.

  Victoria Eugenie Swan, who in London in 1905 had married Ted Harvey (then known as Alfred Bedford), remarried in 1918, believing her first husband was dead. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that she learnt that he had been alive all that time. Because they had never divorced, Eugenie was declared his lawful widow and she inherited his estate valued at £1337, 13 shillings and 10 pence. Realising that her second marriage was technically invalid, she married her husband, Thomas Howard, a second time a few months after the inheritance came through, in 1952. She died in 1961. (Little is known about Eugenie and Ted’s daughter Betty, born in 1906, but the family believes she died in 1924 from appendicitis.)

  Winifred Harvey (Murphy), who’d married Ted Harvey in 1932 and reasonably thought she was Harvey’s lawful widow, received nothing from the estate. She was allowed to keep a civilian war widow’s pension, as a female dependent. She died in Brisbane in 1964. Cedric Consterdine, Wyn’s brother, was captured on New Ireland by the Japanese and executed on the Kavieng wharf in 1944.

  Mercia Murphy (who believed she was Ted Harvey’s stepdaughter) married Alan Hornby in 1945, and they had one son, William. Mercia died from cancer in 1965.

  Norman Fisher became the director of Australia’s Bureau of Mineral Resources and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1976. The N.H. (Doc) Fisher Geoscience Library at Geoscience Australia in Canberra is named after him, as is a glacier in Antarctica. He died in 2007.

  Jack Gasmier drifted between jobs before moving in the late 1940s to Darwin, where he worked as a blacksmith. It appears that he never discovered what happened to his wife Marjorie and his son Dickie. He kept that relationship to himself. He and his second wife, Annie, moved back to South Australia and they died within a few days of each other, in August 1971.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘It is very regrettable . . .’: The National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA): MP742/1, 336/1/1955, Part 15, ‘Safe Custody — War Crimes Rabaul — Investigation Officer Captain Tindale.’ Sworn statement of Mizusaki Shojiro dated 19 October 1949.

  The sequence of events leading up to the execution is pieced together from individual witnesses, particul
arly from statements given to Australian war crimes investigators in Tokyo and Rabaul in NAA: MP742/1, 336/1/1955, Parts 3, 12 and 15.

  Australian War Memorial (hereafter AWM) MSS1534, David Hutchinson-Smith, ‘Guests of the Samurai’, manuscript held at Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

  David Hutchinson-Smith, ‘Rabaul — Yokohama: 14 February–14 July 1942’, copy of a draft manuscript held by Don Green.

  AWM127, 13, ‘Rabaul — Report on civilians and prisoners of war’, includes Gordon Thomas’s description of the family passing the Freezer.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘She was a good girl . . .’: NAA: A518, 16/3/316. ‘Manson, Mrs Phyllis — Inquiry re A.A. Harvey, wife and son — Missing civilians (1942–56)’. Letter from Phyllis Manson to James Halligan dated 20 November 1946.

  The description of Marjorie Manson’s outfit was provided by fashion historian Nicole Jenkins of Melbourne.

  Certificate of Birth, Marjorie Jean Manson, 12 February 1912, at 37 Thompson Street, Wellington, Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, New Zealand. The certificate shows that Phyllis gave her name as Phyllis Manson before she married Joseph Manson, but she did not record Joseph as Marjorie’s father.

  ‘Banned Babes’, NZ Truth, 8 December 1906, p.5.

  Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did, The Floating Press, Auckland, New Zealand, 1895 (gutenberg.org/ebooks/4396).

  Graham Manson said his mother, Phyllis, was working in a guesthouse when she met his father, Joseph. The ship Otway sailed at 1pm and boarding of the ship started early, and Joseph would have stayed at one of the Port Adelaide guesthouses, near the quay, the night before. The date of Joseph’s departure, rather than his return, coincides with the dates within which Marjorie was conceived.

  ‘Australia’s Forgotten Flag’, Henry Lawson, 1911.

  Graham Manson said his father, Joseph, sailed to the Coronation in 1911. This is confirmed in ‘Personal’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 8 April 1911, p.19.

  Certificate of Marriage, Joseph Manson to Phyllis Robison, 9 November 1912, Adelaide. Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Office, Adelaide.

  ‘Cricket Club Ball’, News (Adelaide), 16 November 1928, p.9.

  ‘First Aid’, The Register (Adelaide), 21 July 1928, p.9. The article describes Jack Gasmier’s job.

  The Adelaide newspapers in 1930 were full of stories about the sacking of railway workers, including ‘Notes from a Box Seat in Parliament’, The Register News-Pictorial, 6 June 1930; ‘Rail Losses to Be Cut by One Third, Minister Tells House’, The Register News-Pictorial, 10 October 1930; and ‘Islington Retrenchment’, News, 28 November 1930.

  ‘Railways Championships’, News, 17 September 1928, p.2.

  D. Van Abbè, ‘Kavel, August Ludwig Christian (1798–1860)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kavel-augustludwig-christian-2287). The arrival of Johann Heinrich Martin Gatzmeyer as one of Kavel’s people and the changes to the family name are also documented by the Gasmier family and in newspaper articles, including ‘Obituary’, Adelaide Observer, 14 December 1889, p.35, and ‘Family Notices’, South Australian Register, 17 October 1893, p.3.

  State Records Office of Western Australia (hereafter SROWA): ‘Edward Clarence Gasmier, Prisoner No: 17202’, Register of Fremantle Prison Inmates, Series 681, Consignment 4286, 1935. (Thanks to Tom Reynolds of the State Records Office of Western Australia.)

  Certificate of Birth, Richard Manson, 5 March 1931, McBride Hospital, Medindie. Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Office, Adelaide.

  ‘Looking for Gold’, News, 26 February 1931, p.12.

  ‘there are more hardships than nuggets . . .’: ‘State-Wide Search for Gold’, Advertiser and Register, 18 July 1931, p.18.

  ‘Managers Reports, Gasmier’s Option’, The Advertiser, 12 November 1931, p.7.

  ‘Apprehensions During the Week. Edward Clarence Gasmier, Alias Richard Harkness’, The South Australian Police Gazette, 1931, p.150.

  State Records of South Australia (hereafter SRSA): ‘Matters related to Catherine Davis and Edward Clarence Gasmier heard at Manna Hill on 24 March 1931’, GRG4/48/1 Manna Hill Court Records — Criminal Record Book, p.13. Gasmier was charged with false pretences, but the case was dropped.

  ‘Law Courts. Gasmier v Gasmier’, The Advertiser, 28 February 1933, p.4.

  ‘Undefended Divorce Cases’, The Advertiser, 8 March 1933, p.9.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘He was a “long skinny bloke . . .”’: Rabaul veteran Bill Harry describing George Manson in a letter to Hank Nelson, 2 December 1993, quoted in Nelson, ‘The Return to Rabaul 1945’, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 30, No.2, December 1995, p.149.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘It’s a country of red dust, black flies, and white heat . . .’: William Edward Leuchtenburg quoting Herbert Hoover in Herbert Hoover, Times Books, 2009 (from US Library of Congress catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1113/2008026456-s.html).

  SRSA: GRS/513, Unit 255 File 84/1933. Lodged company documents of defunct companies, ‘New Ora Banda Gold Prospecting Syndicate, No Liability, 1933–1937’.

  Gasmier and Fritz’s contract required them ‘on the 14th April 1933 proceed to the gold fields near Ora Banda’.

  The residents of Bardoc, including Fritz and Gasmier, are listed in Wise & Co., Wise’s Western Australia Post Office Directory 1934, p.229. (Thanks to Diana Stockdale from the Eastern Goldfields Historical Society.)

  Harriet Veitch, ‘Geologist Mapped Nation’s Path to Mineral Riches’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2008 (smh.com.au/articles/2008/02/17/1203190649398.html).

  Norman Fisher speaking to Bob Collins, ‘Escape from New Britain’, Harim TokTok, Newsletter of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and Papua New Guinea Volunteer Rifles Ex-Members Association Inc. Issue 80, June 2013.

  The copra industry in New Guinea and its history are well described in Peter Cahill’s publications: Peter Cahill, ‘A Prodigy of Wastefulness, Corruption, Ignorance and Indolence: The Expropriation Board in New Guinea 1920–1927’, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 32, No.1, 1997, pp.3–28; and Peter Cahill, ‘An Obsession of Coconut Planting: Expropriated Plantations on the Gazelle Peninsula of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, 1914–1942’ (thesis), University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld, 1987.

  R.C. Thompson, ‘Making a Mandate: The Formation of Australia’s New Guinea Policies 1919–1925’, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol.25, No.1, 1990, pp.68–84.

  Norman Fisher speaking to Bob Collins (2013).

  R.W. Johnson and Neville Threlfall, Volcano Town: The 1937–43 Eruptions at Rabaul, Robert Brown and Associates, Bathurst, NSW, 1985, p.2. ‘The Tolai called the mountain Kabiu, meaning “the pair of breasts”’.

  Iwamoto Hiromitsu, ‘Japanese Southward Expansion in the South Seas and its Relations with Japanese Settlers in Papua and New Guinea, 1919–1940’, South Pacific Study, Vol. 17, No.1, 1996, pp.29–81.

  Hank Nelson, ‘The Troops, the Town and the Battle: Rabaul 1942’, The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 27, No.2, 1992, p.204. ‘In 1941 gold exports were worth 10 times more than copra, which had gone from over 90% of exports to less than 10.’

  Norman Fisher speaking to Bob Collins (2013).

  NAA: A518, 16/3/316. Letter from Winifred Harvey to James Halligan, dated 17 January 1947, describing the gold mine.

  Mercia Murphy, photographs of Harvey’s gold claim (supplied by Julie Harris).

  ‘a small amount of gold . . .’: Norman Fisher speaking to Bob Collins (2013).

  Iwamoto (1996) describes the Japanese coastal trade in the South Pacific.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘Handles mercury like a white man . . .’: written by Mercia Murphy on the back of a photograph of A.A. Harvey (supplied by Julie Harris).

  NAA: A1713, S76. ‘Section B North Coast & Bay Lassul Plantation 1924–1954’. An affidavit signed by A.A. Harvey states when he arrived in Rabaul.

  Cahill (199
7), p.8. The Board gave preference to Australian returned servicemen.

  ‘truly unspeakable . . .’: Marnie Bassett, Letters from New Guinea, Hawthorn Press, Melbourne, 1969, p.58.

  ‘a third-rate plantation . . .’: NAA: A1713, S76.

  ‘Harvey Inquiry’, Cairns Post, 12 June 1929, p.5.

  ‘Asks to be indicted for murder’, Truth (Sydney), 12 January 1930, p.14.

  Ted Harvey’s affidavit in NAA: A1713, S76.

  Certificate of Birth, Aaron Arthur Bedford, 9 January 1888, Westerton, West Ardsley. General Register Office, England, United Kingdom.

  The National Archives, Kew, UK (hereafter TNA): MEPO 4/362/74577, ‘Israel Bedford, Warrant Number: 74577. Date of Joining: 24 June 1889. Date of Leaving: 5 January 1920. Last posted to B Division as a Divisional Detective Inspector’.

  Certificate of Marriage, Alfred Arthur Bedford to Victoria Eugenie Swan, 26 December 1905, Chiswick, Middlesex. General Register Office, England, United Kingdom. Charles Powell is named as a witness. He is listed in the 1911 England census as a verger and florist at Chiswick.

  TNA: Public Record Office (PRO), Census Returns of England and Wales, 1891 and 1901, describes Eugenie’s father as the Company Sergeant Major of the Royal Engineers (ancestry.com).

  NAA: A1713, S76. Affidavit by Alfred Harvey states he arrived in Australia in August 1906.

  NAA: A518, 16/3/316.

  TNA: Passenger Lists leaving UK 1890–1960. A. Harvey departed 19 July 1906 from London to Sydney on the ship China (findmypast.com.au).

  NAA: A1713, S76. Harvey in his affidavit details his attempts to enlist.

  National Maritime Museum (UK): RSS/CL/1915/3559/18E, ‘Crew List: Agreements and Official Logs for Ship Omrah, Official Number 108782’. Harvey is listed as a hospital attendant.