War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  The plan, as it evolved, was to recover the remains of Japanese dead where they still lay in their bunkers and foxholes at Buna, Gona and Sanananda, cremate them, place the ashes in individual urns, and parachute them back onto a Japanese base. Many of the FELO staff had their doubts. The submariners’ funeral in Sydney had not been executed as a propaganda tool. Proud’s suggestion was a very calculated and transparent gesture – that could look like the remains were being dumped back. For Charles and the staff who knew anything about Japan, this proposition made them dubious.

  Nonetheless, Proud sent a field party up to the battlefields, and almost immediately they were met with practical difficulties. There were hundreds of bodies, most of them greatly decomposed. Only a few had a disc or other items to identify them. In the exchange of signals, it was agreed that only a selection of remains, including both officers and other ranks, would serve the purpose of the operation. As such, the FELO party simply gathered the remains of about 50 bodies that did have identity discs, and cremated them together. The collected ashes were flown down to Sydney in one container, the discs in another.

  Proud took Charles down to visit an undertaker in Sydney who had agreed to help in this macabre secret operation. They duly went to the Kinsela’s Funeral Parlour, where the director showed them his range of urns and boxes, some of them already filled and waiting for collection by families.

  The director ran his fat, pale fingers lovingly through the ashes in one box. ‘This is a fine quality,’ he said. ‘I think something like this would go down well for your little scheme.’

  They decided on a simple white cardboard box that looked a little like the container used in Japan to transport human ashes, and ordered 50 of them, with the ashes to be dispersed evenly among them, and the names and service numbers on the discs engraved at random. ‘Might as well be blood-and-bone mix from Australian Fertilisers Ltd,’ said Paul McGuire, who was up from Melbourne.

  The filled urns, referred to as ‘laundry baskets’ in their cables, were packaged and flown up to Port Moresby. On 1 September, one of the FELO staff, Flying Officer Gerry Keogh, helped load them aboard a Liberator bomber, to be dropped by parachute over the enemy-held airstrip at Lae.

  The aircraft crashed soon after take-off. Everyone on board was killed, including Keogh. The ashes were scattered irretrievably in the Owen Stanley Mountains.

  By then, Charles realised that generals only listened to advice when it fitted their existing ideas and came from trusted loyalists. It had been drummed into his mind again that his ideas did not fit, and that his loyalty was doubted.

  Soon after FELO took shape in the middle of 1942, Proud and McGuire had tried to make his status more secure. His certificate of British naturalisation obtained at the last minute in Singapore was as ‘local’ as the one he had been given in Melbourne in 1914. The two FELO officers put in a request for it to be ‘Imperialised’ in view of his important contribution to the war effort.

  At first it seemed to go well. The security service gave a ‘no objection’ letter which was passed on to the Immigration Department. But this was a false start. The director-general of security, Brigadier Simpson, called for inquiries about him and a Major Roland Browne, inspector of the Commonwealth Investigation Branch in Melbourne, asked McGuire down to his office at Post Office Place to show him a file on Charles.

  McGuire read from the notes he had taken when Browne had left him in the room to read the file.

  In 1915 reported as being a Japanese spy and was placed under observation. Nothing was discovered but it was alleged that he had plenty of money although only employed as a handyman at one pound a week. He also at times, prior to this accusation, did Japanese translations for the Defence Department. However was considered harmless. Later joined AIF and served at Gallipoli but was returned to Australia in 1915 under suspicion of being enemy agent. Exact nature of this suspicion was not known. He was discharged from AIF.

  Bavier apparently had a military education as the communication from the IB also states that during his service with the Chinese Army from 1917 to 1918 he taught tactics in the Cadet Academy at Swatow. If he were acting as a Japanese agent at this time he would have had a wonderful opportunity of observing the Chinese Army for the benefit of Japan. Although the Navy Authorities want Bavier naturalised it is suggested they could not state definitely that he is not still a Japanese agent. If he is, he is certainly in an excellent position to obtain information for Japan.

  ‘Seems like you’re a Japanese spy!’ McGuire said with a smile, when he returned to Good Rest and called Charles into his office.

  Proud continued to pursue Charles’ case in Canberra, but was very gloomy about it on his return to Brisbane. ‘They are now deciding that as your Singapore papers don’t have any effect here, your nationality as far as Australia is concerned, is Japanese,’ he said. ‘They’ve decided you’re an enemy alien. But I don’t think they’re going to do anything about it.’

  Simpson had called the bluff of Proud and McGuire, and asked the naval headquarters about the application. They said it had only personal backing from the FELO commander, and was not an official request from the navy. A few weeks later Proud showed Charles a handwritten letter he’d received from one of the security officials, signed as B.R. Watson:

  Bavier may be rendering good services to the FELO because of his Japanese associations but taking into account that he forfeited his British nationality to become a Japanese national, that he has spent most of his life in Japan and married a Japanese woman, and his past career generally, it is suggested that said service does not merit his case being given special treatment. Judging from his career it would seem that Bavier is of the type that seeks the highest bidder, irrespective of other considerations and that he would be just as willing to service a Japanese master if it suits his ends to do so.

  So that was it. The suspicion in Melbourne and at Gallipoli, lived on in these files. Suspicion created more suspicion. The removal of his Australian citizenship by the official process in 1927 was now turned against him as a sign of fickleness and disloyalty.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the mentality here, Bavier,’ Proud said. ‘We’re fighting against that almost as much as we’re fighting against the Japanese.’

  Chapter 15

  TERMS OF SURRENDER

  Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

  — The Art of War by Sun Tzu

  Brisbane 1943–45

  At the beginning of 1943 in Brisbane, Charles’ preoccupation had turned from the last of his childhood dreams of military glory, to a direct attack on what increasingly seemed the essential resource of the Japanese war machine. His little personal war manual was still in his pocket at all times, and was still well-thumbed. Instead of the passages about intelligence, surprise and various manoeuvres, he read and pondered Sun Tzu’s precept about how the superior commander could render an opposing army helpless without fighting, by dispiriting its soldiers ahead of any actual battle. There were similar passages from his revered Clausewitz, who’d landed him in such trouble during the previous war. The Prussian strategist had written about the ‘immaterial forces’ which could not be counted but still constituted ‘the spirit which permeates the whole being of war’.

  Charles and the staff at FELO had by then heard the stories of MacArthur’s vainglorious efforts at projecting himself to greatness, the crowning moment being when he put out a press release claiming to have led ‘from the front’ the costly attacks on the Papuan coast. MacArthur had never actually gone closer to the action than Port Moresby, where he had taken over Government House as his field billet. Ian Morrison told them of the banishment threatened to any war correspondent who diverged from the GHQ’s official line. Charles suggested that MacArthur was no great strategist, that his retreat into
Bataan had been a classic blunder: he’d have done far better had he taken his soldiers into the jungles and fought a guerrilla war. One of the FELO group commented that what Charles said was ‘lèse majesté’.

  Just a few days later, Charles had a chance to show his contempt. He was walking along to catch the tram home and came to the front of the AMP Building just as MacArthur emerged, greeting his usual small throng of admirers gathered on the pavement before climbing into the back of his large car. As MacArthur sat waiting awkwardly in the vehicle for a staff member to come down, Charles caught the general’s eye. Charles insisted that MacArthur blushed and looked down.

  It was clear that image mattered. Charles reflected on how Japan’s generals and militarist societies had elevated their soldiers’ damashii, or fighting spirit, to an importance that would have seemed almost supernatural, had it not already achieved the task of seizing Singapore from a much superior enemy. The Japanese had read their Sun Tzu. For decades, the Bushidō had been distilled into a military code that automatically transformed soldiers killed in battle into war gods enshrined at Yasakuni, that equated capture or retreat with dishonour. It was designed to produce soldiers who had overcome all instincts of self-preservation: soldiers who could achieve the impossible. It was much more than what the Allied officers called ‘morale’. It turned patriotism into religion, in which glorious death in battle became the ultimate stage of life.

  For the first months of the Pacific War, there seemed little they could do at FELO to instil any doubt about victory or the point of self-sacrifice in the minds of the Japanese soldiers. The early FELO leaflets were mostly factual summaries of war news, putting an account of the decisive moments in a way that contradicted the version appearing in Japanese broadcasts, but always on a basis of verifiable truth. It meant they left a lot of unfavourable news out, but at least the pamphlets were honest, as far as they went.

  They’d also managed to persuade their top commanders that insults were counter-productive. The Americans’ first steps into propaganda had been quite inept. Someone, for example, had thought up a parody of Basho’s famous haiku about a frog jumping into a pond: The Pacific Ocean, a monkey jumps in …

  In particular, the FELO staff and the Japanists at the British Foreign Office with whom Proud kept contact, and then the American linguists who arrived with Colonel Sidney Mashbir, were adamant that attacks on the emperor would only unite the Japanese rank and file, and stiffen their will to fight. Loyalty to the emperor was a double-edged weapon, Charles strove to explain to Proud. It had been used by the militarists to justify all kinds of disobedience to proper authority. At the right moment, they could be convincingly portrayed as betrayers of the emperor’s trust. Charles made sure that all references to Hirohito in their leaflets and Japanese-language news-sheets were prefaced with the correct honorifics.

  Gradually there came a sequence of events that should have made the better educated Japanese aware that their run of swift conquests was coming to a halt and that their European allies were quite unreliable: in the Pacific, the American naval victories at the Coral Sea and Midway, the Milne Bay battle, the Australian advance back across the Kokoda Track, the mop-up at Buna and Gona, the seizure of Guadalcanal. And then came the big reverses for the Axis powers in the European theatre, the victories in North Africa, Stalingrad and the collapse of fascist Italy.

  Alongside this factual literature, Charles persuaded Proud to develop a line of propaganda that came to be classified as ‘nostalgia’. He started with a simple drawing of a leaf from the Paulownia tree, the large heart-shaped leaf whose fall is traditionally the first hint of the coming winter and the symbol of December in the traditional hanafuda (playing cards). He wrote a little essay with it, leaving the reader to draw the obvious analogy. This was followed up with photographs of homely scenes, one of a farming husband and wife winnowing their rice, with a text reminding soldiers of events happening back home.

  What effect they had could only be supposed at first. Then from September 1942, the first Japanese prisoners started arriving in Australia and New Zealand, just three dozen or so in the first weeks, then a similar batch from Buna. Most had not been captured willingly, but had been just too far gone with injury or illness to keep fighting or commit suicide.

  Early in 1943, Lieutenant Inagaki Riichi of the Imperial Japanese navy joined the staff of FELO in Brisbane. Inagaki had been left delirious with malaria and starvation on the Papuan coast, and had walked towards an Australian patrol calling out ‘Shoot me, shoot me!’ The soldiers recognised him as an officer and carefully brought him back for medical attention. Inagaki regained consciousness in the military hospital in Port Moresby. Instead of being summarily finished off, or brought in for more vicious torture, as he had been conditioned to expect, he was being well cared for by Australian doctors and nurses.

  Fortunately, one of the better interpreters in Colonel Mashbir’s outfit, a Nisei or second-generation Japanese-American named Tsukahata was around to watch over him as he recovered. In February 1943, he and a captured Japanese army lieutenant, Fujita Ichiro, were flown up to Buna to certify the cremation of the Japanese remains at the start of the ill-fated scheme to airdrop funeral urns back on Japanese lines.

  That was as far as Fujita was prepared to go in cooperating with his captors, and he was sent down to the large prisoner-of-war camp at Cowra. But Inagaki revealed himself as thoroughly disenchanted with his country’s war and ready to help bring it to the speediest possible end. Tsukahata escorted him to Brisbane, where he was billeted under guard in a safe house close to Kirkton, rented from an elderly lady, a Miss Dowie, who was assured of a steady income and sworn to secrecy about her unusual tenant.

  Charles talked with Inagaki during many long visits to the safe house. The young Japanese spoke about his family, a very cultured one with a long history, his father’s position as head of the education department in Nagoya, and his own studies in economics at the Tokyo Imperial University. He was a quiet, studious young man by then in his late twenties.

  At the beginning, it was Charles who did much of the talking, about his days with the China ronin, his long friendship with Miyazaki, their hopes and dreams of an Asia run by the Asians where the ancient civilisations could revive the trade and intellectual discourses of old and look the Westerners directly in the eye. He spoke of the openness and moderation of so many of the great leaders of the Meiji reforms, and how steadily their successors had succumbed to the temptations of conquest and exploitation, how belief in Japan’s uniqueness had turned into a poisonous belief in racial superiority. He spoke of the betrayal of China’s own revolutionaries in the Twenty-One Demands and the Versailles Treaty.

  One morning, Inagaki started speaking of his own experiences. He talked about his privileged childhood, and the way his elitist education had developed a conflict in his mind with the public temper of the times, its wilful irrationality and stirring of atavistic national loyalty. At school in Nagoya he had been shocked by news of the 26 February incident in Tokyo. The army officer attached to the school had tried to play down its significance and explain it away. Inagaki had argued with him bitterly that it was treason, and against the Meiji rescript enjoining the military to keep out of politics. The flustered and angry officer harangued the class about their ‘lack of martial spirit’ and told the boys: ‘Only the military possesses the real soul of Japan, the rest of the population are scum.’ It was one of many arguments. His father’s position probably saved Inagaki from something more serious than rebukes.

  After finishing at the No. 8 High School, Inagaki had gone up to the Tokyo Imperial University to study economics. He’d read widely, and travelled in his vacations, including a trip to Sydney in 1938 aboard a Mitsui steamer, spending a week ashore visiting the university and other sights. But people like Inagaki were under mounting pressure, as the military side of politics stepped up their nationalist propaganda, drowning out the few brave figures who war
ned against alignment with the fascist European powers and who tried to preserve the remains of Anglo–Japanese respect. Inagaki had looked at Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and tried to point out to his fellow students its lack of logic, the incompatibility of Hitler’s race theories with Japan’s own.

  In China, he could see Japan’s hooligans and bullies lord it over the local people, who no doubt thought they were typical of all Japanese. The initial reception for the Japanese among the Malays and the Netherlands East Indies people had been favourable. ‘I wonder how long that will continue, once they realise we are hopelessly ill-equipped to run the economies developed by the British and the Dutch?’ Inagaki remarked.

  It was a wonder Inagaki wasn’t taken in for correction of his thinking by the Special Higher Police. Somehow he remained at the university until his graduation in March 1941. When military enlistment loomed, Inagaki’s family pulled strings for him to enter the Imperial Navy’s Paymaster School at Yokosuka, a haven for the intelligent sons of the well-connected. There he spent six months studying the logistics of the navy, in a batch of classmates that included the son of the Diet speaker Hatoyama and several other political scions. In November they graduated; after a month’s leave Paymaster Lieutenant Inagaki reported for sea duty on the ship Katori.

  In April, Inagaki returned to Tokyo to help form a pioneer unit to support army expeditionary forces. The No. 15 Setsuei-tai comprised 130 naval personnel. In the middle of the year, they sailed southwards to Rabaul with their construction equipment and were joined by 1500 unruly Korean labourers and 500 aboriginals from Formosa. In August, the unit embarked on a transport ship. Escorted by destroyers, it sailed in a small convoy to Buna on the north coast of Papua where General Horii’s South Seas Force had landed and was driving the Australian defenders back from Kokoda into the Owen Stanley Range.