War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  A Japanese medical officer appeared early one morning, frantically waving a leaflet. It was one showing Japanese prisoners doing farm work in Australia. He told John the Japanese unit opposite lacked supplies. The troops had been authorised to eat the flesh of enemy soldiers, but not their own dead. Everyone felt the position was hopeless.

  The music broadcasts were especially moving to the men crouching in their dug-outs and weapon pits, the darkness isolating them from the gaze of the others, he said. Half the men kept leaflets on them, but it was difficult to do anything while officers were around. As well, crossing the lines was risky. He himself had been fired on three times by the Australians before making his intentions clear to them. There were still stories among the soldiers that surrendering Japanese would be run over by tanks. The lieutenant offered to help prepare a leaflet giving precise instructions on how to surrender.

  The unit moved on with the slow advance of the Australian battalions. It was not always welcome. ‘Here comes the artillery magnet!’ was the common greeting from the soldiers dug in around the broadcasting site. From the Japanese lines, the speakers attracted bursts of enraged firing and shouted abuse from time to time.

  As the arrival of surrendering Japanese turned into a regular trickle, John was able to get details of the officers and personnel in the opposing units, and incorporated these names into his broadcasts.

  Sometimes the intelligence got mixed up. A forward scout at Berry’s Hill was reported as seeing a six-foot tall Japanese who looked like a chicken. He had actually reported seeing a well-fed, clothed and equipped group of Japanese soldiers who ‘made a six-foot member of our force look like a chicken’.

  The Australian troops in Bougainville were truculent, well aware they were being sent into a campaign that had no bearing on the defeat of Japan. MacArthur had moved on, making it clear the smaller Allies were no longer needed. The American marines who’d seized the beachheads in the island had gone too. A new wave of 19-year-olds was being expended to rebuild Australia’s prestige in its South Pacific domain and show active participation in the war.

  The older officers and sergeants sometimes resisted orders to engage an enemy that still knew no defeat, fighting for every valley, making hopeless frontal attacks. They were replaced and sent home by commanders anxious to put victories on their service records before the war ended. Even the young soldiers were cynical. Outdoor cinema shows had to be packed up when a film of General Blamey exhorting relentless attack was met with jeers, catcalls about ‘brothel-creeping’ and objects thrown at the screen. But the men soon settled down to it, once they saw their comrades cut down by snipers hiding in the tall trees and by the slow beat of the Juki machine guns. Then a fire of revenge-seeking was lit.

  Back in Brisbane, Charles and Naka hoped and prayed it would all be over before John fell victim. The infernal war seemed intent on chewing up all that was loved and admirable before it ran out of momentum. In May, the word went around the Japan-watchers at Camp Tasman that Lieutenant Henry Wykeham Freame, the only son of the fabled half-Japanese scout at Gallipoli of the same name and later the spy who’d been garrotted by the Japanese secret police in Tokyo, had been killed in the fighting at Tarakan.

  In April, a younger officer, Stephen Wallace, took over John’s unit. In a truck journey that took five hours, including two hours stuck in a bog, it reached the forward battalion at the main ford over the Hongorai River, where a prisoner had said a number of Japanese were ready to surrender. The unit moved up to within a few hundred metres of the Japanese. Then it came under intense shelling with 155-millimetre guns and fire from machine guns as soon as the broadcasts began. One of the native constables, Ikum, was slightly wounded by shrapnel. Another crept forward and shot a sniper targeting the unit from a tree perch. Out in the nearby jungle, patrols were clashing in short, vicious fire fights.

  Everyone had given up hope of staying dry. The clouds hung low above the treetops and obscured the hills. The rain was incessant, causing electrical circuits to short and burn out. The wooden containers for the gear warped in the humidity. Keeping the broadcasts going taxed the ingenuity of Iles the signalman. When the last of the steel gramophone needles was accidentally lost, replacements were fashioned from bamboo slivers, but the resulting volume was lower and the unit had to set up closer to the Japanese positions.

  In July, John was in a forward position, playing a recording of a homily by Charles about the futility of resistance and the need for soldiers to return and help rebuild Japan, when a shell from a 155 landed very close, showering the foxhole with dirt and bits of foliage. The rest of the unit scattered, and ran back to the deeper trenches of the infantry. John decided that shutting down the broadcast would indicate to the gunners that they had found their range, and stuck to playing his father’s voice. Then he switched to a succession of music records. The shellfire moved further away.

  More surrendering soldiers crept up to the Australian lines over the next few days, waving leaflets. One told John that on surrendering, he had become ‘a new Japanese in a new skin’, minus the old spirit. A native man told the constables the position of the six 155 guns that had been holding up the advance at the Hongorai River. The New Zealanders sent in their Corsairs and blasted them from the air. Within two hours the Australians were able to move on to the next Japanese defensive line, the Mivo River.

  But an end did come. In the second week of August, word finally came down the chain of command that the Japanese government had agreed to surrender and was preparing to make an announcement. Orders went out to cease offensive action, and fire only if attacked. The rumour must have reached the Japanese, as a group of 200 came out to surrender on 12 August, only to be attacked by a confused Pacific Islands Regiment patrol.

  Back at base camp, John’s colleagues removed a square of linoleum from a sleeping officer’s tent and carved into it an announcement in reversed Japanese characters, making a simple printing block for leaflets. It gave positions where Australian officers would be waiting for truce parties. The undersides of four Beauforts were painted yellow with the words ‘Japan surrenders’ written on them in four large black characters.

  On the morning of 15 August, the day Emperor Hirohito’s broadcast was scheduled, John’s unit moved several hundred metres ahead of the Australian lines and set up its equipment on the bank of the Mivo facing the fjord. Every 15 minutes for four hours, John read out an announcement about the cessation of hostilities.

  The next morning, two Japanese approached the river and waved.

  ‘Are you an official party?’ John asked.

  They indicated with hand signals that they were not, and disappeared.

  At 11am on 16 August, an official surrender party appeared with a white flag on the opposite bank and were told to cross the river. Lieutenant Wallace and John walked down to meet them. The senior officer, Major Otsu, introduced himself, with John interpreting.

  The Japanese retired across the river to wait for the arrival of an Australian negotiating party. At 5pm, the two parties met on the riverbank to arrange the surrender.

  The unit spent several more days going out to contact long-range patrols of the Japanese, then returned to Torokina. At the end of August, John flew back to Brisbane and took off his uniform, after being told of a favourable ‘mention in dispatches’ for sticking to his microphone and record player under intense enemy fire.

  Naka wept. She was barely speaking to Charles by then, having woken up to his long deception when letters from John, requesting various items to be sent to him in Bougainville, made clear he was fighting against Japan.

  There was wild celebration in the streets of Brisbane at the surrender, then a steady slip back into civilian life. Members of the eclectic little band at FELO, which had grown to more than 500 personnel, including five Japanese, began calling round to say their farewells. Some returned to peace-time jobs, others to posts in Malaya and the Indies
to work on the restoration of British or Dutch government and the internment of Japanese soldiers.

  Inagaki came into the office one morning and told Charles he was leaving. A special military police escort would slip him into a prisoner-of-war camp, and he would be repatriated when a ship became available. ‘Now everyone has surrendered, including the emperor, I can go back,’ he said. ‘No one will know what I have done. I trust your government with my secret.’

  Charles started to say that he hoped they would not lose touch, and Inagaki cut him off. ‘Please don’t try to find me,’ he said. ‘And if we do happen to meet, we have never seen each other before.’ They bowed to each other. Charles’ eyes filled with tears. When Inagaki left, Charles went out on to the verandah of Kirkton, and saw him climb into the back of an army truck. A soldier closed the wire-mesh door and padlocked it. The truck drove off.

  Commander Proud spent much of the next month writing up an account of the Far Eastern Liaison Office and its achievements, calling the staff to refresh his memory. ‘It’s not a lot,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve totted up 4160 prisoners taken in our operational area in the three years since FELO started, as against nearly 57,000 Japanese who fought to their deaths. Quite a lot of our military colleagues say we’ve been waging a little private war, of dubious relevance to the victory.’

  ‘Sir, even that number of prisoners is something,’ Charles consoled him. ‘If people knew fully the indoctrination that went into the Japanese soldier, they would realise that. Every one of those 4000 Japanese, if they’d kept fighting, could have taken one or more of our boys with him.’

  ‘Quite true, Bavier,’ he said. ‘I’ll be mentioning your contribution too, in my final reports, both with us and before that in Singapore. We wouldn’t have done what we’ve achieved without your knowledge and understanding of the Japanese character.’

  Both Proud and Alfred Brookes were going up to Singapore to take positions in the Southeast Asia Command under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, once they’d wound up FELO. Proud asked Charles whether he’d like to return to Malaya, or seek a university position in Australia.

  After his sour experience with the security service about restoration of his British citizenship, and thinking of the life Naka and the boys would be forced to lead in Australia – the prisoners of war were returning from the camps in Malaya and Siam – he told Proud he belonged back in the East.

  At the end of October, Charles was paid off by the Department of Defence. The Ministry of the Interior issued him a certificate of identity. Proud had got him a job in Singapore with the rank of ‘honorary major’, to be a monitor of interpretations in the War Crimes Tribunals that were then being prepared.

  This secured passages for the three of them in one of the air force shuttle flights. Charles, Naka and John, with their few belongings, boarded a Dakota fitted with canvas seats in the cargo space. It bumped and lurched through the monsoon clouds, taking them back to a colony and a lost son whose experiences they were dreading to hear.

  Chapter 17

  EDDIE’S WAR

  He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.

  — The Art of War by Sun Tzu

  Singapore–Malaya 1942–45

  Singapore looked to Charles much the same as it had before the bombing started in December 1941. The same government buildings and English churches rose around the grassy maidan down near Collyer Quay, the same Chinese shop-houses lined the commercial streets, the harbour was full of anchored ships, launches and barges.

  On a closer look it was much shabbier, mildew staining the once gleaming white walls, potholes in the roads. Families camped in alleyways and on verandahs, cooking on small stoves, with ragged pieces of clothing hanging on lines overhead. There was a chronic shortage of accommodation for the destitute people who had returned from the agricultural settlements started by the Japanese up in the peninsula. Food was also scarce, after the initial supply from looted Japanese stores ran out. People hung around the markets waiting for a spill from a split sack of rice or beans. There would be a rush to pick up the grains from the filthy floors. The people looked thin; many had sores and rashes; they coughed and spat copiously.

  Upon returning to the city Charles and Naka searched for Eddie. They started at the house of Leonie’s parents. Leonie was there, holding a baby girl in her arms. It was their granddaughter Philomena or ‘Topsy’. They learnt that Eddie was alive, but had spent the last year of the war conscripted into the Japanese army, and was now interned. Leonie told Charles the pseudonym under which Eddie was enlisted and his unit name, and Charles went out to the internment camp across the causeway in Johor to find him.

  Once there an officer informed him that Eddie had been taken away by the British military police as a suspected war criminal. Charles learnt that before his son was conscripted, Eddie had been employed by the Japanese Kempeitai, or military police, as an interpreter. After the surrender and return of the British forces, former prisoners of the Kempeitai had lodged allegations against Eddie.

  Charles finally tracked him to the Outram Road jail. All the known Kempeitai members had been pulled out of the camps and made to march through the streets of Singapore, past the YMCA building and their other torture centres, to the jeers of rickshaw pullers and other passers-by, before being interned at the jail.

  Eddie was thin, but still his cheerful self when he was escorted by an Indian guard to the family meeting room. Over several visits, he told Charles the full story of his war.

  After the taxi carrying the rest of his family had disappeared around the corner that day at the end of January in 1942, Eddie wandered through the house, picking up discarded clothes, books and papers. A hot silence settled over the garden, broken only by the harsh cawing of the crows. Eddie picked up his autograph book with its embossed leather cover, and leafed through the valedictory messages from his classmates at the YMCA commercial college just over two years earlier.

  Albert Yeo, Goh Yong Siang, Boon Kin Kong, Annie Francis … He wondered what they were all doing. Were they all still in Singapore? He had an urge to ring them up and suggest a get-together. Then he remembered what was about to happen, and why he had chosen to stay. Even before the outbreak of war, some had shown a more guarded friendliness in their occasional chance meetings. Eddie had gone to work for the shipping line Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) and often moved around the city with his more obviously Japanese colleagues. He knew that the NYK office, like other Japanese commercial houses, was regarded as a nest of subversion and espionage, a subject of whispers among the local Chinese. After the landings, all the other staff, including his special chum Noboru Ikeyama, had been interned and sent off to camps in India.

  The afternoon clouds built up and dumped their heavy shower on the city. When a few rays of sun broke through before the short dusk, Eddie set out to meet Leonie at the flat where she lived with her brother, a first-aid dresser in a hospital, and her family.

  As he walked down to the main road, a continual low rumble came from the north of the city. Army lorries packed with dishevelled British and Australian soldiers, towing trailers and artillery, headed towards the sound. Eddie found a rickshaw puller willing to take him against the flow, and set out. He found Leonie and her sister-in-law dressed in faded print dresses, listening to the radio. Leonie’s black work dress hung behind the door.

  ‘The Japanese have reached Johor,’ she said. ‘The English have blown up the causeway – one of my father’s friends saw it.’ Everyone felt helpless, abandoned. The British were sending their dependants out, and the pretence that the jungles of Malaya would protect Singapore was now exposed. Water flowed sporadically from the taps. Formations of bombers droned over the city every day dropping their loads of destruction. With their English surname and Eurasian looks, the Wells family would be living reminders of colonialism in Japanese eyes.

  The half of him that was Japanese was all
Eddie had to offer. Eddie spent the next week going backwards and forwards between the family house in Wilkie Road, the flat, and the house of Leonie’s parents at Katong. He drew out his remaining savings and used it to build up a store of tinned food and rice. At night, alone in the house, Hinomatsuri, he moved the red needle in the illuminated panel of the wireless set. Malayan Broadcasting, only a few kilometres away in the Cathay Building where his father had worked, was still predicting a bloody defeat for the Japanese once they attacked the impregnable island. Japanese radio stations in Formosa and Saigon were deriding the shambles of headlong British and American retreat in Malaya and the Philippines.

  On 8 February the rumble of artillery increased in a crescendo, and military traffic pushed towards the northwest of the island. Ambulances and trucks carrying wounded soldiers came back into the city. Normal life stopped. Leonie and her brother’s family went back to Katong. Eddie stayed in the former Japanese consul’s house, waiting.

  Two days later, he put a parcel of cooked rice, his honseki identity card from Yokosuka, and his little autograph book in a cloth parcel, and set out towards the guns. Some kilometres on, a Chinese man came running down the street. He was tearing off the tunic of his air-raid warden’s uniform. ‘The Japs are coming!’ he shouted.

  Eddie waited in a doorway. A while later, short, crouching figures came warily up the other side of the road, rifles held at the ready. Eddie waved a white handkerchief, and called out in Japanese. Hands in the air, he walked towards the soldiers.