War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  One afternoon, Charles was alone on the deck of the rolling, pitching vessel. All the others were down below, lying in their bunks. He looked out across the heaving water into the gloom, with a strange presentiment, Charles wrote decades later. Mentally, he appealed to ‘Moby Dick’ to show himself as a sign that his hopes of achievement had not ended, that even now, he could play some role, perhaps even a great one, in recovering from the present disastrous point of the war. And a whale did appear. Not a white one, but a dark grey-brown form that twice breached the surface a couple of kilometres off, then disappeared.

  The ship reached Fremantle on 4 March, by which time Java and the rest of the Indies had fallen. They stayed on board the ship until it was ordered to proceed to Melbourne. The ship wallowed through the great seas of the Bight that Charles had crossed in the opposite direction in the troopship Euripides so long ago. They had instructions to proceed to a boarding house in St Kilda. At the dock a car, evidently painted hastily with brown house-paint from the visible brush-marks, was waiting for them.

  Commander Proud had already arrived from Singapore. He sent a note asking Charles to make himself known to Professor Ball at the Shortwave Service in the city. William Macmahon Ball was by then a well-known commentator on international affairs and the first professor of political science at the University of Melbourne. About 10 years younger than Charles he still had his dark Irish good looks, and when Charles presented at Capel Court in Collins Street Ball immediately invited Charles to call him ‘Mac’.

  Charles started work in a section known as the Listening Post, tuning in to the familiar Japanese stations from Tokyo, Formosa, Shanghai and Manchuria, now augmented by Japanese broadcasts from Batavia, Bandung and ‘Syonan’ (as Singapore had been renamed, meaning ‘Light of the South’).

  His colleagues were a diverse group, men and women with different language skills: a pretty young Chinese woman who was the daughter of a Methodist minister, an older White Russian man, a Japanese civilian named Oki who was prone to alcoholic benders, a Japanese Christian called David Tokimasa whose Scottish wife Lebe also spoke Japanese, and the Siamese man Sarabhaya, whom the British had extricated from Bangkok after the failed coup effort against Pibul. And there were younger Australians, graduates in the European languages, along with a Dutchman and a Frenchman.

  As radio reception was better at night, they worked late hours. Charles jotted down the main points of Japanese news and commentary. He also translated and recorded scripted commentaries by Ball and others. Eventually he wrote his own talks, making points about developments in Japan that Ball approved.

  Charles kept to himself, trying to keep Naka and John away from the hostility that their emergence in the city was bound to attract. The crudity of the early response in Australian publicity to Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor and Singapore, when the Japanese had been portrayed as bestial sub-humans and ‘apes’, had been reined in, if only in the interests of lessening ill-treatment of the Australian prisoners of war. But it lived on, in remarks heard on the trams and the taunts of small boys.

  Melbourne, as he walked the streets and took the tram home to St Kilda, or ducked out from the studio for a quick meal, was a different place from the city he’d known in the first war and immediately after. It seemed an older, less modern place than cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Hsinking in Manchuria, and Singapore with their contemporary buildings. The jingoism and flag-waving was gone. In the autumn of 1942, a great fear had set in. The Imperial Japanese navy’s submarines were already ranging far down the east coast of Australia. It was feared the Japanese carriers might even reach this far. There seemed little to stop them.

  In the evening, a dim light suffused the streets, produced by the ‘brown out’. Shop windows were criss-crossed with strips of adhesive cloth or wire mesh. Sandbags were stacked around entrances to government offices. Posters warned that the Japanese would repeat the atrocities of Nanking, unless the public subscribed to the government’s war bond issues to fund Australia’s defence.

  Over the weeks, the streets steadily filled with uniforms as the Australian division returned from Egypt and the American marines arrived, stationed in camps at the racecourses and showgrounds. The American general Douglas MacArthur arrived with his retinue, after being extracted by submarine from Bataan in the Philippines where his soldiers were left to be taken prisoner, and was conferred the supreme command of Allied forces in the South-West Pacific. Military offices sprang up across the city and out past St Kilda Road, in commandeered mansions and apartment blocks. Cars and trucks painted a drab khaki bustled about. The trams filled to overflowing, with soldiers and civilians clinging to the steps and handrails. Long queues formed outside the cinemas and theatres. Rationing started with tea and sugar, and there was a run on dress-making fabric.

  Groups of soldiers staggered and lurched out of the hotels. Brawls broke out between Australians and Americans, and also between Australians in the Imperial Force who’d volunteered for overseas service and the conscripts of the militia who could be deployed only in Australian territory.

  With soldiers came the women, the girls in their teens ready to passionately kiss the eager American boys in the streets, and the older women from the slums and suburbs ready to make the most of the opportunity, after the years of poverty before the war. They seemed to justify to themselves what they were doing was part of the war effort. The swagger of the Americans in their well-cut uniforms, the pumping beat of the swing orchestras in the dance halls, the tawdry ‘nude’ revues at the Tivoli in Bourke Street, all signalled a surrender to desperate pleasure-taking.

  There was little the elders of Melbourne could do about it, except reluctantly agree to the setting up of prophylactic stations around the city and giving arrest powers to medical authorities over obstinate veneral disease cases. In their suburban homes, they listened to Vera Lynn, the ‘Watchman’ commentaries and the Dad and Dave comedy on their radios.

  At the shortwave headquarters the Japanese experts were called for an opinion when the London Gilbert and Sullivan Company, trapped for the duration of the war in Australia, decided to put on The Mikado. Would this result in reprisals, they were asked, against Australian prisoners? Charles and the others said it was highly unlikely.

  The weeks went on, with little good news to play up in their broadcasts until the Japanese fleet was hammered first in the Coral Sea battle in May, then at Midway a month later. There was much to play down or ignore on instructions from above, notably the serial sexual stranglings of Melbourne women by the American soldier Edward Leonski, who was hanged at Pentridge later that year.

  In July, Commander Proud got in touch with Charles and they met in an office on Domain Road. ‘We’re back in business,’ he said. ‘It’s been bloody tricky though,’ Proud went on. ‘When we got here in March, everyone was in a panic, drawing the Brisbane Line and about to tell people to head for the hills. Now it doesn’t look like the Japs have any invasion plans, though they’ve got their eyes on New Guinea, and the politicos and top brass are ready to look at offensive action.’

  Proud said he had convinced ‘Cocky’ Long, the director at naval intelligence, of the value of propaganda and subversion, and with his help got in to see General Thomas Blamey, the Australian chief of land forces under MacArthur. In turn, Blamey had sent him and other secret service heads up to see Frank Forde, the defence minister. It had not gone well when Egerton Mott, from the Special Operations Executive, mentioned assassination as one of his group’s fields. Forde terminated the meeting. But Blamey persisted, getting them to see General MacArthur and his intelligence chief, Colonel Willoughby, who seemed open to the idea. In the end, Blamey told Proud to re-form his old Singapore propaganda organisation, and report directly to him.

  That August, Proud began collecting his group at a sequestered mansion at the end of Toorak Road, named Good Rest. The eclectic crew that gathered were to operate under the title of the Far Ea
stern Liaison Office (FELO), a cover name chosen for its blandness. There was young Alfred Deakin Brookes, the 22-year-old grandson of an early Australian prime minister; Paul McGuire, a well-known writer of detective novels in his early forties; Victor Purcell, a Sinologist who’d been Protector of Chinese in the Malayan civil service but fortunately away in the United States when the Japanese attacked; and ‘Kassa’ Townsend, who’d been a senior district officer in the Papua and New Guinea territory, knowing the lingua franca and many local leaders. Irene Kenny, who had been Robert Scott’s secretary in Singapore, turned up in the administration, supervising a growing support staff of young male and female service personnel.

  The Dutch sent along Captain Kremer from the Netherland Indies army, and two naval officers, Lieutenant-Commander Quispel and Lieutenant de Bruyn, and eventually a courteous and affable old diplomat, Mr de Roos, who’d spent nearly 20 years in Japan as consul-general in Kobe and then commercial counsellor in Tokyo, whom the Dutch announced as their greatest expert on Japan. He was able to read Japanese, but neither Charles nor the other linguists at the Listening Post could understand a word of what he said when he tried to speak it.

  The Americans supplied an officer to run the finances, Major Allison W. Ind, who was the ostensible account holder at the Commonwealth Bank office. The Australian Treasury provided half the operating budget, and the Americans and the Dutch East Indies government-in-exile a quarter each.

  MacArthur was happy to let the Australians have the running, Major Ind explained to them. Already, the general had in mind an eventual run for the American presidency for the Republican Party; he regarded Washington’s new propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, as a ‘hotbed of New Dealers’ and would not let any of its personnel, nor its parent body, the OSS, anywhere near the South-West Pacific area he commanded. Proud’s operation would help keep it out.

  At that point, the team at FELO, as the unit became known, held out little hope of working on deflating Japanese morale or sowing the seeds of doubt about the purpose of the war or their eventual victory. The Imperial Japanese navy had been delivered a shattering reversal at Midway, but the army was still flushed with its rapid conquests and was knocking at the eastern gates of India. Instead, their operation initially concentrated on the native populations in occupied areas. It set out to plant subversive rumours, or overt leaflets, to induce the people to refuse labour for the Japanese where possible, or run away from carrier lines later, to deny food supplies, cut communication lines, and bring intelligence to the Allied forces.

  The first leaflet came out during their first month of operation. It was aimed at the native porters who had been brought from Rabaul by the invaders to the northern coast at Papua to haul supplies up to the Japanese troops who were pressing their way across the Kokoda Track towards Port Moresby. Proud persuaded the air force to lend a Wirraway spotter plane to scatter them at Buna.

  Late in July, MacArthur moved his headquarters up to Brisbane to be closer to the front line of battles in New Guinea and the islands, but with the comforts of modern offices in the AMP Building in Queen Street, and several residential suites in Lennons Hotel. Proud followed, securing an office for FELO just along from the General Headquarters in the T&G Building, and later a large two-storey house called Kirkton in the suburb of Windsor. Towards the end of the year, many of the other staff transferred north to join him, leaving McGuire to run the rear base at Good Rest and handle liaison with the government in Melbourne and Canberra.

  In July 1942, the battle for Papua began. A large Japanese force landed at Buna and began pushing Australia’s militia soldiers back across the Owen Stanley Range towards Port Moresby. At the eastern tip of Papua, the Australian garrison took on a large Japanese marine force at Milne Bay, and beat them back. Across in the Solomons, the American marines came up from New Zealand and the New Hebrides to seize the airfield on Guadalcanal. Over the second half of 1942 and into the new year, desperate fighting in the Pacific jungles and night-time clashes of vast naval forces saw the Allied battle turn to the offensive.

  FELO’s part in this epic struggle was very humble. At its insistence, the Australian government mint continued making and circulating, in the Allies’ limited territory, the silver shilling of Papua and the New Guinea mandate. Kassa Townsend advised that it was highly symbolic for the natives that the ‘gavmen’ had not gone for good. Later, reports from FELO’s behind-the-lines patrols confirmed this.

  The unit also began cultivating what, in later times, would be called its agents of influence, and actual spies in some cases. The field office in Port Moresby selected groups of the more impressive members of the native constabulary and auxiliary battalions and sent them down for guided tours of Australia, codenamed ‘circuses’. These groups, kitted out in warm clothing and unaccustomed shoes, were taken by officers familiar with New Guinea around such installations as the Newcastle steelworks, the tank factory at Chullora, the Slazenger factory where Bren-Gun carriers were being built, the tank training ground at Narrabri, the anti-aircraft battery on the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons and the Arnott’s biscuit factory. Their impressions were recorded for broadcast on the shortwave in Pijin and Police Motu.

  In March 1943, this pool of local influence came into play. George Kenney, the aggressive new American air force chief in MacArthur’s command, conceived the idea of luring Japanese aircraft from Rabaul into an ambush over Port Moresby. He had built up his force of fighters in New Guinea, but the Japanese had become wary of daylight attacks.

  ‘I told him we could bait the hook, but we couldn’t guarantee the fish will bite,’ Proud told his staff when he came back to Kirkton. Charles and others wrote and recorded commentaries for the shortwave that noted a fall-off in Japanese air sorties during daylight hours, and speculated that low morale, crewing problems and unserviceability of aircraft was starting to rob the Japanese ground forces of the air support they would need to press any advantage. The Rabaul air wing had failed to protect the Japanese troop convoy sent to reinforce Lae in early March, allowing Allied aeroplanes to sink all its ships and shoot its survivors out in the Bismarck Sea. Charles wrote one commentary stating that the arawashi (wild eagles), as Japan’s airmen had been styled, had now become a warawashi (laughing stock).

  Proud enlisted his friends and sometime collaborators among the war correspondents, Ian Morrison of The Times and Yates McDaniel of the Herald-Tribune, in what he called ‘Operation Poker’. The two asked leading questions at MacArthur’s next press conference in Brisbane, then put out reports that with the South-West Pacific neglected in its aviation resources it was therefore fortunate that Japanese air capability seemed to have deteriorated. The stories were picked up in newspapers as far away as Europe and Latin America.

  The Papuan sergeant-major Pogenau, one of the alumni of the FELO ‘circuses’, was sent to villages near the Japanese base at Lae to spread rumours that most of the fighters at Seven-Mile Field at Port Moresby had been sent across to Merauke, the last Allied foothold on the Dutch side of New Guinea.

  Still waiting, they got into the period of no-moon in the first ten days of April, when night operations would have been difficult for the Japanese and any response would have to be in daylight. Then on 6 April, they got the first nibbles on the bait. Tokyo Radio ran a commentary defending the role of its air units in Rabaul, and another one three days later about air operations in the South-West Pacific. On 12 April, Proud came into their room at Kirkton waving a cable from the field office in New Guinea:

  Dear Proud,

  Full scale raid on Moresby today. Congratulations.

  Regards,

  Roberts

  The Japanese had sent over a large bomber formation, and Kenney’s fighters had been waiting. They shot down 25 of the enemy aircraft and it was thought another 10 would have crashed on the way back to Rabaul.

  FELO’s next exercise in playing with the minds of the Japanese was much l
ess successful. The raid on Sydney Harbour by the Imperial navy’s midget submarines on the night of 31 May 1942 had produced only a short dilemma for the directors at the shortwave service. The Japanese had announced it as a successful strike deep into a distant and important base of their enemy, as indeed it was. So the news was out. On the other hand, all the small submarines had been either sunk or chased out of the harbour, and the only casualties on the Australian side had been the unfortunate sailors sleeping aboard an old ferry used as a dormitory that was hit by a stray torpedo. The British admiral running the Garden Island base had insisted on the full protocol of a military funeral for the dead Japanese submariners found in the wrecks: Rising Sun flags on the coffins, naval guard of honour firing a volley, and the ashes returned eventually to Japan through the Red Cross.

  Before FELO knew it, the affair had become a propaganda coup with a life of its own. Tokyo Radio had commentaries comparing the ‘chivalry’ that had shown itself at this moment of war with the Japanese warrior code of Bushidō. A long time later, it was learnt that Australian prisoners had received some temporary improvement in their treatment.

  As the fighting on the north coast of Papua came to its horrible end in January 1943, MacArthur and his staff conceived a scheme derived from the earlier funeral of the submariners. This was duly passed down to FELO.

  For some months, Proud had been voicing his irritation about the broadcasts from Japanese-occupied Batavia and elsewhere of short recorded messages from Australian prisoners, saying they were being treated well. Japanese leaflets dropped on the Allies’ front lines tried to play up the antagonism between Australian and American soldiers on leave back in our cities, with near-pornographic cartoons of Yankee soldiers bedding wives and girlfriends of the Australian soldiers while they fought in the jungle. ‘They’re getting under our skin,’ he would say. ‘I want to do the same with them.’