War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  The disembarkation was a hurried shambles, with many supplies spoiled in the haste. The No. 15 Setsuei-tai moved all its equipment to Giriwa, along the coast, from where it had orders to construct a road up to the airstrip at Kokoda, the start of the jungle track over the mountains to Port Moresby. The civil engineer with the unit told the army commanders the task would take five to ten years with the equipment available. Soon the unit’s labour force was commandeered anyway by Horii to carry supplies up the trail beyond Kokoda on their backs. The food brought with the unit ran out after a month. Horii had planned for his army to ‘live off the land’. Instead of admitting setbacks and asking for reinforcements, he drove his men harder as if sheer willpower could achieve victory.

  Starvation and malaria started whittling down the number of men at Giriwa. Then the skeletal survivors of the push to Port Moresby started arriving back from over the mountain ranges, digging in for their desperate last stand in the dug-outs of Buna and Gona. ‘Yes, there were some who admitted having eaten flesh from Japanese as well as Australian corpses,’ Inagaki said, with his head down. ‘I’ve eaten meat from our pack-horses but I never saw cannibalism with my own eyes. Those who told me were very shamefaced. You can perhaps say in their favour that they were not in a normal state of mind. We had high fevers from malaria, we spent our days wading in swamp water up to our armpits, we were starving, and we had severe vitamin deficiencies – we couldn’t see very far except in broad daylight and our hearing was fuzzy. We just fired our rifles in the direction of sounds.’

  When a special message was addressed to the landing force in the name of the emperor himself, thanking all its members for their sacrifice, Inagaki realised they were being abandoned to their fate. They were all expected to die fighting.

  As Australian troops surrounded their position at Giriwa, the order was given to disperse. Inagaki went into the swamps with two more-senior officers; collapsing from illness, he told them to leave him behind. After wandering on his own for a day, he heard the Australian voices. He walked towards them, expecting a quick end.

  ‘So now I am a non-person. I feel no shame in my own mind, but if I write home or news of my capture gets out, my father will be forced to resign in disgrace,’ Inagaki said, with a sigh. ‘If somehow I went back I’ll be court martialled. Japan isn’t an educated nation in general, and it would be beyond any military court to judge a case of surrender on its merits. It’s been drummed into everyone that under no circumstance should an officer allow himself to be captured. There’s no point in returning home only to be shot.’

  Even at this point of the war, Inagaki saw that Japan could not possibly defend the vast territory it had seized. In Port Moresby and coming into Brisbane, he had seen the vast array of deadly machinery and supplies starting to arrive from the United States.

  Charles told him it was important for people like him not to despair, because they would be needed to guide Japan back to the more enlightened pathway it had abandoned between the wars. Inagaki asked him about his work, and Charles told him. Inagaki said he’d seen the Paulownia leaflet. It had puzzled him with its sophistication. Many of his fellow officers had kept one as a souvenir, after confiscating them from the men. ‘It made us think of home,’ he said. ‘But for the ordinary soldier or sailor, the language and the characters were too high-flown. It was over their heads.’

  As with many of the FELO leaflets, Inagaki felt that there was something strange about the language. It was in Japanese, but it wasn’t Japanese. It was like something written in a foreign language, and then mechanically translated. Which was true enough. Many of the news and information bulletins had been written and rewritten through various levels of authorisation at FELO and the Political Warfare people long before they were turned over for translation, with strict instructions not to sacrifice accuracy for ease of understanding.

  Large numbers of young American Nisei were arriving from the military language school in Wisconsin. They were competent speakers, and well able to handle the field and prison camp duties of interpretation, but they lacked the literary skills and vernacular to produce propaganda that read as if it came from among the Japanese themselves. They were already Americans in a Japanese skin.

  The same went for the small number of Australians able to speak Japanese, such as Algie McDonald, who’d studied under Murdoch’s successors at Duntroon then become a librarian at Melbourne University. There was also George Gregory, the half-Japanese son of an Australian businessman in Yokohama who’d gone to St Joseph’s on the Bluff, and Louwisch the rabbi who’d picked up Japanese and half a dozen other languages in his family’s flight out of Russia through Manchuria. They were all immensely useful, McDonald in Mashbir’s interpreter service, Gregory in military intelligence, Louwisch down at the POW camp at Cowra. But they were still foreign to the Japanese audience.

  As for Charles, he was a Japanese in a white man’s skin. To the extent he was trusted – and at least within the office and camps of FELO, Proud and McGuire assured him he was – Charles Bavier was a rare, possibly unique resource.

  But from talking to Inagaki, it emerged that he too suffered a disadvantage: his language and material was too erudite for the average young Japanese conscripts, and even for many of the younger officers. Charles asked Inagaki what he would put in a leaflet for his comrades. He said he’d think it over. At the next meeting he showed Charles a sheet of paper:

  Men of the Japanese Forces!

  Though your enemies, we being soldiers too have a profound respect and appreciation of your gallant and loyal efforts, amidst extreme difficulties. In spite of your gallant efforts, the Japanese forces find themselves in your present predicament simply because they could not get proper supplies and air cover …

  The decision rests with you. We sincerely hope that you will not destroy your lives uselessly but will save them solely for the sake of your country and true loyalty …

  Inagaki looked on quietly as Charles read, then spoke intensely. ‘Bavier-san, you know I can now never go back to Japan,’ he said. ‘Whatever my own thoughts now about being captured, it would bring utter disgrace upon my family to know that I had allowed myself to be taken as prisoner and continue to live in enemy captivity. I would be arrested and punished, certainly subjected to ostracism. That means that though Japanese, I am no longer part of Japan. But I see no point in suicide. I have been reborn, in effect, and must make myself useful in this new country where I must probably have to stay. If I can make the Japanese and Allied soldiers see each other as human beings and help bring this war to an early finish, this will be my new duty.’

  The next day, Inagaki formally signed a parole and joined Charles in his office at Kirkton to begin work on leaflets. He took the cover-name of ‘George’ and soon helped persuade a couple more prisoners to join the propaganda work. Their routine became a creative and interesting one, as Inagaki came out of his shell and argued more about the content of the propaganda. They were joined by Charles’ younger son John, who was employed as an office boy at FELO once he turned sixteen, and a cheerful young Melbourne girl in the women’s army, Renée Barclay, who typed up the English version of their material.

  Inagaki started to pick up more English. One day Charles heard Renée explaining to him the meaning in Australian usage of the term ‘galah’ and why the name of this parrot species was applied to stupid people. Inagaki became close friends with Alfred Brookes, the head of the army section, and would go out to the cinema with him.

  FELO was growing, expanding to a separate camp built at Indooroopilly in the grounds of a Catholic school, right on the banks of the Brisbane River. The Nissen huts of Camp Tasman contained classrooms, sleeping barracks and mess halls for the diverse groups of specialists, including Dutch officers as well as East Indies personnel, Australian servicemen undergoing language training, several recruits from New Guinea, and the little group of ‘tame Japanese’ (as they were often described).
Charles heard himself pointed out to newcomers as the ‘professor from Tokyo’. Around the camp, Australian soldiers could be seen squatting with the Indies personnel, practising their Malay. The canteen served nasi goreng routinely, alongside the usual army stews.

  The unit bought up a printing works in Adelaide, shipped its presses north to Camp Tasman, and put its manager into uniform to run them. The leaflets rolled out by the millions, and were bundled up to air force bases in the islands. With help from an engineering unit, FELO designed a special leaflet capsule to be ejected from aircraft and scatter its contents over the target.

  At the bottom of the camp by the river, FELO gathered a small fleet of motor launches, equipped with loudspeakers, for sailing around the coasts of New Guinea and the Indies to contact remote villagers and any isolated Japanese units signalling a wish to surrender. As its agents got bolder, small groups went deep into enemy-held territory to contact villagers and collect information.

  Compared to the piles of Japanese bodies left on the Pacific battlefields, the number of prisoners being taken was pitifully small, almost nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of Germans and Italians building up in camps around the Allied territories.

  There were many Allied commanders who wanted to make use of the Bushidō code of death rather than capture, effectively to slaughter as many Japanese as possible. The code could be used powerfully against an unprepared enemy, but lead to mass suicide of the Japanese if the enemy was well-armed and waiting. However, it also posed a threat to the Allied forces; if the enemy were prepared to die, then there was nothing to stop them taking the lives of Australian troops with them as they went.

  But from Rabbi Louwisch and others dealing with the prisoners of war, the FELO staff realised the code could be turned against the enemy in a different way. Proud went to Canberra in April 1943 and successfully argued in the Allied Political Warfare Committee that the existence of Japanese prisoners was something to be played up in propaganda, to show soldiers that they would not be alone if they took the option to surrender. Contrary to their indoctrination, they would be treated well if they did. It could have a snow-balling effect of inducing more surrenders, and undermining the will to persist in hopeless positions.

  Interrogators had also found that because of the inconceivability that Japanese soldiers could be made prisoner, the Japanese gave their troops no indoctrination about how to behave if captured, unlike the Germans and Italians. Isolated from their comrades, believing themselves removed from any future life in Japan, they talked quite freely to an interviewer who offered food, a hot drink and cigarettes.

  There were many obstacles to putting the scheme into practice. The Australian and American soldiers had to be dissuaded that ‘the only good Jap was a dead Jap’ and to desist from summary executions in the field. This had been a common enough practice in Papua and Guadalcanal, after the Allied troops had seen what had happened to their own men and civilians who had fallen into Japanese hands. Through the army command and education corps, they had to start a propaganda campaign among their own troops.

  Inagaki pointed out that the term ‘surrender’ was itself a barrier for the Japanese soldiers. It was agreed that the words ‘cease resistance’ should replace it. They started producing leaflets that doubled as a propaganda tool and an aide to surrender, with a message in Japanese about the war on one side and a largely white obverse side with an English notice under the name of Commander in Chief Allied Forces stating simply: The bearer has ceased resistance. Treat him well in accordance with international law. Take him to the nearest commanding officer.

  The notion of publicising the existence of Japanese prisoners in Allied hands and their conditions also became an issue of contention. All of those with knowledge of Japan and contact with prisoners realised the deep desire of those prisoners to keep their capture secret, for fear of stigma attaching to their families back in Japan. MacArthur himself worried that using statements by prisoners or showing photographs of them would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. Whether genuinely voluntary or not, any testimonies would be seen as coerced. The general even took the matter up with John Curtin, the Australian prime minister, to halt the enthusiasm among the political warfare lobbyists. In the end, FELO did use photographs of prisoners, but without names and with the eyes of visible individuals blacked out to prevent identification.

  Once the prisoners were in camps among other Japanese, there was also risk of indoctrination reasserting itself. Tension quickly built up among Japanese conscripts and civilian labour draftees captured in Guadalcanal, at their camp in Featherston, New Zealand. The small number of regular army and navy personnel tried to stop the conscripts undertaking corvees and workshop training that authorities encouraged to keep them occupied. They in turn taunted the regulars, asking why they did not immediately commit seppuku to obliterate their disgrace. When a work detail was blocked by the regulars in February 1943, a riot turned into a break-out attempt in which 48 prisoners were shot dead and 68 injured.

  It was a forerunner of the much larger break-out at Cowra in August 1944, which FELO had tried to prevent by shifting the officers and NCOs to a new camp at Hay, also in the New South Wales countryside. The news of this separation helped precipitate this desperate last attempt to follow the Bushidō, in which 234 died, including 48 by suicide.

  The only officer to die in the break-out was Fujita Ichiro, the lieutenant who had helped collect the remains in Papua for the early propaganda operation. He rushed out of his compound into a burst of machine-gun fire. He lay ignored in the grass as his life slipped away, looking up at the brilliant stars of the Milky Way in the freezing inland night.

  Inagaki and Charles were asked if there was a propaganda angle to be wrung out of this tragedy. Along with those Japanese advisors down at the shortwave service in Melbourne, they said it was best not mentioned at all. ‘Either way it would not look good for the Allies,’ Inagaki said. ‘Japanese people will think it is a cover-up for a massacre of prisoners, assuming they believe prisoners have been taken at all. Or they will think it a glorious act of redemption by the men who died.’

  But then the Japanese government contacted the Red Cross in Geneva with a request to send parcels to prisoners in Australia, and FELO was able to use this to good effect to reinforce awareness that Japanese soldiers were being taken alive. To rub it in, the propagandists discovered a reference to a prince of the Imperial line, Kitashirakawa Nagahisa, having been captured at the great but unpublicised battle between the Japanese and Soviet armies at Nomonhan, Mongolia, in 1939. They used this example in a leaflet to urge soldiers not to feel shame at becoming prisoners, once they had done all they could.

  The campaigns moved onwards from Australian territory, with MacArthur’s leap-frogging tactics taking his forces to Hollandia and Biak in Dutch New Guinea, and then further onwards via Morotai into the Philippines, the re-taking of which was his personal grail.

  The prisoner count rose: 3000 taken as the forces moved into the Dutch side of New Guinea with an estimated 15,000 Japanese killed. This was seen as a great vindication of Charles’ efforts by Commander Proud. He emphasised in his reports how many of the surrendering enemy had waved FELO leaflets or said they had read them.

  Yet at Camp Tasman, Inagaki and Charles often talked about a great gap in the propaganda arsenal. The Allies had little to counter the proclaimed mission of the Japanese in their conquest of Asia, that is, the liberation of the ‘yellow’ and ‘brown’ races from the white colonialists. There was the clumsiness and arrogance of the Japanese themselves, and their unselfconscious belief that other Asian peoples should accept their superiority. But nothing positive about postwar prospects.

  Meanwhile, Proud had gone to a couple of the first meetings of the Political Warfare Committee, and then had happily delegated his role at what he referred to as ‘Stoker & Co.’ (the committee was headed by a man named Stoker at the Department of Exte
rnal Affairs) to his deputy in Melbourne, Paul McGuire. When Stoker tried to take FELO under his direct supervision, Proud had quite easily rallied his sponsors, including General Blamey, to fight him off.

  The committee ceased to meet by mid-1944, and faded from relevance. The fact was that with the British, Dutch and later the Free French represented in the committee, it was impossible to recapture the moral initiative in Asia. All three powers were intent on recovering their lost colonies, and were wary of discussing their future with the United States, which had already promised independence for the Philippines within a year of the end of the war.

  The problem became more acute for the staff at FELO as activity moved from the Australian side of New Guinea into the East Indies. In 1942, the Australian government had naively allowed the Dutch to move their Netherlands East Indies authorities into Brisbane under the former governor of East Java, Charles van der Plas, and given them the running of policy and military activity into the Indies. The Dutch had even been allowed to evacuate their political prisoners from Boven Digoel in New Guinea down to a special prison camp in the north of New South Wales, until the Australian communists and trade unions got wind of it. At the time, the Australians had been grateful for all the manpower and assets that the Dutch had been able to bring.

  The colonial breed of Dutch administrator steadily wore out his welcome, with his arrogant manner and imperviousness to any suggestion that his rule had become intensely unpopular. At the end of 1943 Proud resisted suggestions from van der Plas that the time was ripe to start a sustained war of nerves and resistance in Java. What little intelligence Proud gained from his own sources suggested it was highly premature and could only lead to reprisals against the native peoples. A year later the Dutch commissioner was proposing leaflets be dropped promising arms to the Javanese for a revolt. Proud said it was a promise that could not be kept, and might only draw out resistance for the Japanese to snuff it out.