Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  One of the first Australian POWs Lennard met was a former newspaper journalist and now a public relations officer who had been interned in Changi prison camp, Captain Maurice Ferry. Ferry had been writing the story of the Australian POWs during his imprisonment and he recounted the shocking tale of the thousands of Australian and British troops sent from Singapore to work on the Thai–Burma Railway. Ferry told Lennard and other war correspondents of the forced march of more than 300 kilometres from the railhead in Thailand to the jungle work camps.

  There can be only one title for that march – it is the worst journey in the world. Hundreds of men collapsed on the first night and thereafter we toiled through the jungle in teaming monsoonal rain with half of the men being carried or dragged along tracks by their comrades. Frequently we walked through water up to our waist and at night had to prop exhausted men up against trees to stop them drowning. Half the men were without boots before half the journey was completed.

  The camp in which we were to live presented an appalling scene. Clustered on a steep hillside was a crude collection of roofless native huts, and it was here that cholera began to spread rapidly. One day after our arrival so many were dying that it was necessary to build funeral pyres to get rid of the dead, and those fires never stopped burning. They were still alight four months later. At least two hundred died from the dreaded disease but worse was to come. Though every man in camp had dysentery – and there were no exceptions – the Japanese put us to work, in spite of the protests of medical officers, carrying baskets of rock and heavy logs for building the railway embankment and road. It rained every day yet we worked fourteen hours a day – leaving camp in the morning in darkness and arriving back late at night. We never saw the sun in our camp for months. We arrived back in camp at night with nothing to do but sit up with rain capes over our heads trying to keep dry.

  Wounds from Japanese boots, cuts from their whips quickly turned into huge tropical ulcers which completely encircled men’s legs. Australian and British doctors in desperate attempts to save lives, were forced to hack off limbs with ordinary hand saws, but most men operated on in this manner died. The scenes in the hospital wards were indescribable. There were men suffering Blackwater Fever, malaria, ulcers, scabies, dysentery, and some were swollen to enormous proportions from Beri Beri . . . The death toll mounted each day and by the time we got out of that horror, thousands of men had died in the camps along the jungle railway.

  Eventually, following continued protests from our doctors, the Japanese agreed to move the sick to a new camp. They did this in open trucks and one in which I travelled had six dead when it reached its destination. The Japanese refused to allow burial en route. In all, hundreds died during the journey, and at each new camp each morning there was a stack of bodies outside each hut waiting to be carried to a communal fire. At one stage out of nineteen hundred in camp, including six hundred Australians, there were fewer than one hundred men fit enough to do camp duties of cremation and cooking. Sick, emaciated men lay on bamboo slats in gloomy huts too weak to brush off flies that tortured them, and I saw hundreds of men too weak to lift a spoon, being fed in the arms of their comrades.

  Ultimately there was such an intense air of melancholia over the camp that the Australian doctor in charge walked through the wards, shouting ‘For god’s sake men, fight for your lives. If you can’t fight for yourselves, fight for your women and children. Don’t leave your bones in this accursed country.’8

  The Nurses at Loebok Linggau

  In one of his first despatches from Singapore, Lennard reported the news that Australian women nurses were in a prison camp near Palembang, on the island of Sumatra. It had been known for a couple of years that a group of nurses was being held in a camp somewhere on the island but a rescue attempt had not been possible during the war. Lennard now confirmed that the nurses were the only survivors of a group of 65 from the SS Vyner Brooke, which had been sunk by the Japanese while fleeing the fall of Singapore.

  APPROX. THIRTY-FIVE AIF NURSES ARE NOW IN PRISON CAMPS AT PALEMBANG IN SUMATRA. THEY ARE SURVIVORS OF THE FORCE OF NURSES WHICH LEFT SINGAPORE ON FEB TWELVE FORTY TWO (CORRECTED), THEIR SHIP BEING TORPEDOED IN THE JAVA SEA. CONDITIONS IN THEIR CAMP ARE SAID TO BE BAD.9

  Lennard had long been interested in the story of the Vyner Brooke and the fate of the nurses, and he had picked up more information since his arrival in Singapore. However, more than a week after the liberation of the island, the organisation for the Repatriation of Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI), set up to recover, care, and account for POWs, was still dealing with the thousands of POWs on Singapore itself. RAPWI told Lennard they were unsure of the exact location of the prison camp but Lennard believed he knew enough to try to find them. He cabled the ABC the names of all 65 of the nurses who had been on board the Vyner Brooke, to be held until he could confirm the names of the survivors, and he then arranged an RAAF flight to Palembang. His following reports on the nurses were sent in a stream of cables.

  PROCEEDING SUMATRA IN EFFORT EVACUATE PARTY AUSTRALIAN NURSES. HAVE FILED STORY OF OFFICIAL REPORT. ALSO TWO LISTS NAMES ALL WHICH MUST BE HELD UNTIL RELEASE OK.10

  Several officials travelled with Lennard on board the plane but attempts to find out the location of the prison camp from the Japanese at Palembang were unsuccessful. Lennard and a Flying Officer Brown commandeered a Japanese car and drove around 200 kilometres to Lahat, where they finally found out that the prison camp was at Loebok (now Lubuk) Linggau, another 160 kilometres away. While the war was over, the disarming and containing of Japanese forces was still underway and Lennard and Brown found themselves mired in lengthy negotiations with the Japanese. Late at night, after five hours of talks at Lahat, they again set out – Brown by road with a fleet of Japanese cars and Lennard by train. Lennard arrived at daybreak and then pushed on by truck to the camp. They had telephoned ahead to say that they would take all the sick women and children from the camp and Lennard found the women waiting, some of the sick already loaded into vehicles.

  The move to the special hospital train was made over a muddy jungle track in heavy rain but even the stretcher cases were so overjoyed at their liberation I am sure they would have got up and walked the twelve miles from the camp if no transport had been available. We outfitted one carriage in the train with mattresses, pillows and sheets which we also commandeered off the Japs. When I saw the dreadful state of the some of the women, I realised this afterthought was one of the luckiest moves we made.

  As I was leaving this horror camp, the last words of the British woman doctor in charge were ‘Thank god, you’ve cleared all the sick out of the hospital.’ Brown arrived with cars in time to transport the last of the patients from the camp to the train. We set out with sixty-two on board – the critically ill, five children, including an orphan who had been picked out of the sea, and the nurses.11

  Lennard found the scenes inside the camp sickening and he was shocked by the emaciated condition of the women, and by how few of the nurses from the Vyner Brooke had survived.

  Out of a party of sixty-five nurses which left Singapore, only twenty-four still alive. Twelve missing, believed drowned, twenty-one massacred by the Japs, eight died in prison.12

  Lennard could now tell the story of the nurses after the sinking of the Vyner Brooke. They were among a larger group which had landed, exhausted, on the beach of Banka Island.

  Twenty-one Australian nursing sisters were murdered by the Japanese on Banka Island off Southern Sumatra shortly after the fall of Singapore. They were lined up on the beach with their faces to the sea and mown down in cold blood. The tragic story was released today with the rescue of survivors from a foul prison camp in the heart of Sumatra.13

  The Japanese had slaughtered a group of around 50 men further down the beach and then returned to the nurses and the other survivors.

  The Japanese returned, some wiping blood from their bayonets. They then lined up the remainder of the service personnel, including the nurses, and ord
ered the party to walk towards the water, facing the sea. A soldier with a tommy gun ordered open fire and the nurses, civilians and merchant seamen were shot down.14

  The only survivor of the massacre was Sister Vivian Bullwinkel.

  Bullwinkel was shot through the thigh, fell into the sea and was washed out thirty yards where she was left for dead by the Japanese. She staggered shore wards amidst the bodies of her comrades and then wandered in the jungle for two weeks before giving herself up through hunger and exhaustion. The whole story of the massacre has since been kept the closest secret because of fears that the Japanese would murder her as an eyewitness to their shocking atrocity.15

  Lennard returned to Singapore with the first of the nurses and the other women.

  When the nurses arrived in Singapore and were taken to the hospital full of AIF men who had been in prison camps in Malaya, there was a heartrending scene. As the nurses, some human skeletons and others like old women barely able to walk, shuffled up the stairs, there were cries from the men: ‘Give us guns. Let us at these B’s.’ Some AIF hospital patients, obviously becoming hysterical, had to be controlled.16

  Bullwinkel arrived in Singapore wearing the nurse’s uniform in which she was shot, and as she smiled, she showed me the bullet holes in her dress. She said ‘The Japs never even gave us needle and cotton.17

  The women in the prison camp at Loebok Linggau had already been contacted before the arrival of Lennard and Flying Officer Brown, but the action by Lennard and Brown ensured the earlier release and treatment of the women. It was characteristic of Lennard’s bloody-mindedness, his wilfully stubborn pursuit of a story, and a particular outraged sense of compassion for the plight of the nurses.

  Lennard’s historic reporting from Singapore included the Japanese surrender ceremony, in which radio listeners in Australia heard him describing the scene just before the historic words by Lord Louis Mountbatten. He also broadcast other talks from the press ship at Singapore, however some of his news coverage and longer copy for Talks never made it to air. His cables were so ‘profuse and frequent’ that they were delayed in transmission and sometimes hours out of date. In addition, the ABC’s limited and largely inflexible news programs could not handle the kind of coverage he was providing. The ABC news compiler who had complained about Lennard’s copy, informed the News editor, Frank Dixon: ‘With our scrappy bulletins we cannot handle anything like the length in which he is sending these takes – although they are of great general interest.’18

  It was too much for Lennard and his frustrations boiled over in a cable to Dixon.

  Worked under impossible conditions here first few days. No food, not even bed. Long cables intended for your perusal and handover to Molesworth. Surely subs are able to take a news paragraph out of them. I am incapable of doing impossibilities.19

  Singapore was Lennard’s last major assignment and within a few months he had returned home to Sydney and to the routine work of the ABC newsroom.

  Chapter 17

  SURRENDER

  Japan

  It was an uncomfortable seat but the view for Frank Legg was as good as that from the royal box at the theatre – and the scene below him on 2 September 1945 was history in the making. Legg was seated elbow to elbow crammed together with around fifty other correspondents on a gun turret of the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Just below him on the small veranda-deck of the battleship, Japan was formally signing the document of surrender, ending the war in the Pacific.

  The two generals, gaunt skeletons from Japanese prison camps, placed themselves, at attention, one on either side of the vacant chair. MacArthur strode forward, sat down, and taking up a pen, with a flourish signed the Allied copy of the surrender.1

  The weeks leading up to the historic moment on board the Missouri had been frantic ones for Legg and Bill MacFarlane. Legg was the only ABC correspondent at GHQ in Manila and covered all the final announcements from MacArthur’s headquarters.

  On 30 August Legg and MacFarlane touched down at Atsugi airfield, south west of Tokyo. Bill MacFarlane set up the recording equipment on the tarmac and Legg began recording the first Australian radio interviews of the occupation of Japan. They drove east to Yokohama and set up in the Bund Hotel, where they covered the GHQ communiqués and recorded interviews with the Australian C-in-C, General Blamey, and General Percival, the British commander in Malaya, who had been freed from a prisoner of war camp only weeks earlier.

  On the day of the surrender, MacFarlane was not allowed to bring his recorder on board the Missouri and Legg, who may have hoped that his luck as a correspondent was finally going to change, arranged for a complicated means of recording his report and getting it back to the ABC.

  The return journey after the ceremony would allow me forty-five minutes to type my eye-witness account of the proceedings. From the wharf a jeep would drive me to a GHQ press building, which by then would have been commandeered by the Americans, where MacFarlane would set up his recorder while the censors were dealing with my copy. Then I would record my story, take it by jeep the ten miles to Atsugi air-strip, and hand it to a courier who would be ready to board a plane, which would fly the story to Okinawa, nearly a thousand miles south of Tokyo. At Okinawa another courier would ‘rush’ my recording by jeep to the beach, from where a landing-barge would chug out to the GHQ press ship, Apache. From Apache, at a suitable time and on a suitable wave length, the ABC’s own story of the surrender would be shortwaved to Sydney.2

  It all went to plan and the recording of Legg’s report was handed over to the courier at Atsugi air-strip . . . after which it disappeared, never to be found. Legg’s recorded story that day of the Japanese surrender was never broadcast on the ABC. On a final assignment of such historic importance it was yet another blow for Legg and MacFarlane, after the misfortune that had dogged their earlier assignments. It may have been some solace that Legg’s news story, which was cabled as copy soon after the ceremony, did make it to the ABC.

  Borneo

  Shortly after the formal Japanese surrender at Tokyo, local surrender ceremonies took place throughout the Pacific theatre between Japanese and Allied field commanders. On 11 September, Fred Simpson and Len Edwards were at the surrender ceremony at Kuching on the Sarawak River in Borneo. Their recording of the event on HMAS Kapunda was broadcast on the ABC a month later. ‘This is the ABC Field Operations correspondent at the surrender formalities on the foc’s’le of HMAS Kapunda off Pending in the Sarawak River.3 Simpson’s voice described a simple scene with the Allied commander Brigadier Eastick seated in front of a small table with the Union Jack in front of him. Fred’s commentary continued and, understanding the importance of radio at such an event, Brigadier Eastick then took the microphone. ‘Major General Yamamura, you have come on board HMAS Kapunda today for the purpose of formally surrendering to me, as the representative of Major General Wootten, the General Officer Commanding the 9th Australian Division . . .’

  After the formal surrender documents were read, Simpson then described the final signing: ‘The ghost of a smile plays around the mouth of Major General Yamamura at one of the things that do occur – his pen wouldn’t write, and it blotted, and as it blotted that was the time for him to smile. He is now signing the three documents.’4

  Later the same day, Simpson watched another ceremony at Kuching.

  At a quarter to five on the afternoon of the eleventh of September, Brigadier Eastick told internees of Kuching prison camp that they were free people. There was cheer upon cheer. Women wept and men struggled hard to suppress their emotions . . .5

  Simpson and Edwards began recording messages home from the prisoners to be broadcast on the ABC, and on the first day alone, they recorded messages from one hundred people. Simpson and Edwards would report other stories in the aftermath of the war, and would go on to cover the Allied occupation of Japan.

  Chapter 18

  A MESS OF UGLINESS – RABAUL

  More than three and a half years after R
abaul fell to the Japanese, Australian troops landed to take back the town from a defeated empire. The Allied strategy through the war had been to isolate the Japanese base at Rabaul, and when the occupying forces landed on 10 September, they found around 100,000 Japanese at Rabaul itself, and 40,000 more on the surrounding islands.

  ‘We have unbottled a mess of ugliness by our entry to Rabaul,’1 wrote John Thompson as he saw the destruction wrought on the town and heard the tales of the ‘cruel suffering’ of prisoners of war and internees under the Japanese. This was the aftermath of war and, though it was confronting work, it was a different role from the ABC’s combat reporting of the last five years. Thompson himself described his role at Rabaul as a ‘post-war correspondent’2 – he had left the army only days before the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and less than two weeks before the announcement of the Japanese surrender.

  John Thompson was a gentle, literary man, a broadcaster and an accomplished poet. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne University, he spent several years in England, where he published his first book of poems in 1935, but it was a hand-to-mouth existence. Tall and handsome, he became an occasional bit-part actor to make more money, but he hated acting and was considered too tall for film roles. While in England, he married another young Australian, Patricia Drakeford Cole, and just before the outbreak of war in 1939 they returned to Australia.