With the collapse of the Japanese empire in August 1945, investigations expanded enormously, and commanders in the field were asked to make preliminary interviews of freed Allied personnel. All records found in Japanese POW and internee camps were retrieved and examined. A team of investigating army officers was created to inquire further into war crimes, and a War Crimes Act was passed by the Federal government.
On 26 November 1945, the first trial of a Japanese suspected war criminal was held before an Australian military court at Wewak in New Guinea. Trials were also ready to commence at Rabaul, at Labuan in North Borneo and at Morotai, where the 2nd Japanese Army had surrendered to General Blamey and war atrocities were reported to have been committed. On Morotai, 148 war criminals were tried, of whom sixty-seven were acquitted. Twenty-five sentences of death by firing squad were imposed. At this stage, 1045 Japanese suspected war criminals had been arrested by the Australian military forces, and administrative and investigative war crimes sections were created at army headquarters in Singapore and in Tokyo, at the headquarters of the 8th Military District, and elsewhere in Japan. In Tokyo, an Australian military forces officer from the directorate was appointed as liaison officer to General MacArthur’s headquarters.
War criminals held by the Australian military forces included Category A, those suspected of and charged with the commission of a war crime solely against Australian nationals; Category B, those suspected or charged with the commission of a war crime against both Australian and Allied nationals; and Category C, those charged with the commission of a war crime solely against Allied but non-Australian nationals.
The evidence presented against those who faced the military courts were war crimes questionnaires, statements, affidavits, diaries and reports from recovered prisoners of war and internees. Further evidence came from war graves personnel, who were exhuming headless bodies; from the RAAF, who were looking into crimes against their own personnel; and from captured official and private enemy documents. Sometimes there was photographic evidence as well. A great number of Japanese were named and accused of war crimes by various parties. In many farms and suburban houses across Australia, returned POWs signed their affidavits of witnessed atrocity for investigating officers.
In October 1945, Judge Kirby of the New South Wales District Court, then a member of the War Crimes Board of Inquiry, agreed to remain in Singapore to assist in the investigation and prosecution of war crimes there, and to protect Australian interests. He worked with the Number 1 Australian War Crimes section of Singapore, which would later move to Hong Kong.
So the extent of investigations covered Malaya, the Burma–Thailand Railway and the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesian) areas. In Singapore alone the Australians tried sixty-two men accused of war crimes, of whom eleven were acquitted. Fifty-one were convicted, and death by hanging was imposed on eighteen of those. In Japan no Australian military courts sat but intelligence was gathered. Investigations in Java were dangerous because of the war between the Dutch and the Indonesian rebels and the peril of investigators being caught in the cross-fire. Flight Lieutenant McDonald of the RAAF, who was with the Number 1 War Crimes Section and was travelling to collect evidence, was shot to death by the Indonesian rebels in Java.
The headquarters of the Timor section of the 8th Military District (itself headquartered in Japan) finished its last war crimes trial at Darwin in April 1946. The 8th Military District was the only Australian military formation (apart from the Number 1 Australian War Crimes Section at Singapore) outside the mainland of Australia that had the necessary staff and organisation to investigate war crimes and to arrest and try war criminals.
The court the accused faced generally consisted of a lieutenant-colonel as president, assisted by a major and a captain. The accused was entitled within fourteen days of the end of the court proceedings to submit a petition against the finding or sentence, or against both.
The work continued for years. In 1950, Cabinet gave approval for an Australian War Crimes section to be set up on Manus Island, and ninety-three Japanese suspected war criminals, together with a Japanese defence team and a number of Japanese witnesses, were moved from Japan to Manus, where trials would run for ten months.
In all, just under a thousand Japanese were tracked down by investigators. Many of them were passed over to the British-led Army of India or, when Britons themselves were involved, to the British authorities. At Labuan, seven Japanese were condemned to death amongst the 128 sentenced. At Rabaul, eighty-seven out of 266 convicted were executed by shooting or hanging. In Darwin, one convicted war criminal was shot. In all, 644 Japanese were sentenced by Australian military forces courts.
Amongst those sentenced to death were Lieutenant-Colonel Kazuo Masuji, who had ordered the execution of three RAAF personnel in Java; Lieutenant-Commander Nadomi Suzuki, who had ordered the shooting of Australian nationals at Ocean Island, west of the main Gilbert Islands; and Lieutenant-General Masao Baba, who had ordered the Sandakan death marches.
THE RETREAT OF WOMEN
Were women’s opportunities as cancelled by the onset of peace as is generally argued? Australia’s participation in World War II led to a wide-scale mobilisation of ‘manpower’ with an effort to woo and then conscript women into industrial labour. To deal with the grudging attitude of trade unions about suitable levels of wages for women, the Curtin Labor government had established the Women’s Employment Board in 1942 to regulate the wages and conditions of those women doing work for ‘the duration’ only.
A number of women benefited under the new guidelines and received double the income of those who were stuck in traditional female jobs in the textile or clothing industry. With higher wages, and fulfilling men’s work while male relatives were away at the war, young women felt a new sense of independence and self-governance. Clarice, a writer in the Labor Digest in 1945, likened these women to ‘the lion that tasted blood’.
Judge Alfred Foster, chairman of the Women’s Employment Board, wrote, ‘To all of us it was an amazing revelation to see women who were yesterday working in beauty salons or had not previously worked outside their own homes or who had come from the counters of retail stores or a dozen other industries . . . who now stood behind mighty machines operating with a skill and mastery that was little short of marvellous!’
It is generally taken as a given that, the war over, women were pressured to return to traditional roles, just as advertising was offering them a new kind of domesticity, one far removed from either the misery of the Depression or the dourness of continuing post-war rationing and—in the case of loyal wives of absent soldiers—enforced celibacy.
Advertising was by now in its frank modern phase in which men and women were promised consumer goods as a path to sexual attractiveness and pleasure. So, if women were to yield the factory floor to returning soldiers, they were not going home to become quite the same women their mothers had been. The Women’s Weekly close to explicitly instructed them on how not to be. The movies also promoted this image of the woman who is mother, wife and temptress and who is never a frump. Myzone, for example, was a pill marketed as ‘beauty tablets’, but its purpose was to prevent menstrual cramps. The chirpy girl got the job and then the man. Betty Bright, a modern business girl, was depicted as being able to keep her job, thanks to Myzone. Femininity was synonymous with youth and the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics company ran a sinister slogan that went, ‘Pretty women die twice. The rose dies in its fading, as well as in its fall.’ Even as early as the end of the 1930s, Stay-Blonde shampoo advertisements claimed, ‘Recent scientific tests show that light fair-haired girls have 47 per cent more sex appeal than the dark “fairs”.’ As for Odo-Ro-No: ‘Just the girl that I’ve been waiting for!’ men thought when they first saw Marion. They would cluster around for introductions but they’d rarely dance more than one dance. For though Marion carefully bathed and dressed, she neglected the simple precaution of deodorant and trusted a bath alone to keep her safe from underarm odour. ‘Fat
al error!’ said the advertisers.
By war’s end, women were concerned to limit the number of children they had. An invitation from the National Health and Medical Research Council asked girls to say why they wanted it thus. One answer cited ‘the desire to retain the companionship of their husband and the happiness of married life, and the desire to see that the two children are properly equipped for their later life’. One woman frankly declared, ‘I believe a happy marriage is based on a happy sexual life between husband and wife.’ Some young women feared ‘the disfigurement’ that came with pregnancy.
Dame Enid Lyons, in a radio debate in 1944, regretted that sex had become the objective, not the child. But young women saw the feminism of Dame Enid, of those who campaigned for the government provision of childcare, and the Women for Canberra movement whose aim was to increase women’s numbers in the parliament—all of these being superbly motivated movements—as old-fashioned and unglamorous. The National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the United Associations of Women were not much listened to by these young women who had once ‘made love’ to Yanks for the novelty of it but were now seeking to found an Australian home. Young married people who had been promised such fulfilment in the women’s magazines often had to live with parents, or occupy a tent or shed on their land while the building materials slowly became available to make an occupiable house.
THE POST-WAR NIRVANA
Dr Kevin Fagan’s prognostications about the condition of former prisoners of war and their fitness to re-enter society did not quite apply to Gunner Russell Braddon. First, Braddon had been appalled when in Darwin the pay books stained with blood and sweat from the Burma Railway, which he had kept for the families of men who had died there, were taken away and burned by the military authorities. His mother had remarried during his imprisonment and now lived in Brisbane, and so that was the city to which he returned. On his way in a convoy of ex-prisoners through cheering crowds, he saw fifty or more four-year-olds ‘lined up on the pavement, shouting a shrill welcome and waving with their children’s clumsy wrists. Every trace of our composure vanished. Here was a part of Australia we had not seen before—the new generation; healthy, wholesome, guileless and guiltless.’ For some reason that caused a profound grief, a painful nostalgia.
Braddon’s repatriation, and that of other former POWs, was in the hands of the Rehabilitation of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees Commission, a somewhat more compassionate body than the post-World War I repatriation authority. Ultimately he would more or less successfully yet joylessly attend Sydney University, and endured three years of depression and bewilderment. Like many others he had to reaccustom himself to sleeping in a bed rather than on the floor as the camps had conditioned him to.
Back in Sydney, in residence at St Paul’s College, studying law, Braddon had time for a prank. He dressed himself up and acted the part of a member of a visiting ‘Iranian Barter Commission’ occupying a suite at the Australia Hotel. Yet he was plagued by recurring malaria, felt disengaged from the world, and even perhaps felt himself an internal exile because of his homosexuality. His academic career was undistinguished and like many a former prisoner he felt that he was being helped along to a degree. He became the sub-warden of St Paul’s but, he said, ‘disintegrated as a person’.
So he attempted what was then the statutory crime of suicide. He took an overdose of pills but was found before they took his life. He was comatose for four days. The results were punitive. He was transferred to the psychiatric wing of Concord Repatriation Hospital. Here he found many of his fellow former prisoners stumbling through the corridors, and discovered that in spite of the public’s respect for POWs, here they ran the risk of being treated as miscreants. Those men who resisted the psychiatric regime were threatened with electro-convulsive therapy. Former prisoners suffering shock and out of their mind, temporarily or permanently, were thrown into padded cells where they would howl and yell, ‘straitjacketed in their own filth’. An orderly asked Braddon to fellate him and threatened that he would be put on the shock-treatment list if he didn’t comply. Braddon characteristically threatened to ‘bite it off ’, and also informed a medical officer. Finally he signed an undertaking not to attempt suicide again and was released.
His former fellow prisoner Syd Piddington, and Piddington’s wife Lesley, had left for England. After an impoverished beginning, Piddington—who had practised telepathy in Changi—embarked on a series of radio shows for the BBC, transmitting phrases and concepts into the mind of his wife and of other people. Braddon arrived in 1949 and became something of an agent for the operation, particularly after the couple decided to take the show on the road to variety theatres throughout Britain. Piddington must have been one of the most famous ex-prisoners of war in the whole of Britain. In one spectacular show he transmitted concepts from a studio at the BBC to his wife Lesley, who was locked inside a room in the Tower of London. Braddon continued with the Piddingtons until he began a successful writing career, his first work being a biography of the Piddingtons, and his classic the 1951 account of imprisonment, The Naked Island. He had survived by fiction and showbiz. Other ex-POWs did not always have such exotic recourse.
BRETTON WOODS AND ALL THAT
Chifley had not attended the event but was keen to press his colleagues into ratifying the Bretton Woods Agreement. The momentous agreement, signed in July 1944 by Western nations at bosky Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on a cosy rural laneway named Crawford Notch Road, would have Australia and other nations join the newly formed International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, later to be called the World Bank. Bretton Woods established the US dollar as the standard of currency, but Australia responded indirectly by keeping its primary relationship to the British pound and, via it, to the dollar. Chifley was attracted by the idea that an IMF and a World Bank would stabilise markets and forestall world depressions. Never did such a massive world restructure arise from such a backwoods locale.
There was considerable opposition within the Labor Caucus to the agreement, so Chifley delayed first broaching Australia’s approval until late 1946. Eddie Ward, that nuggety and acidic tramway man from inner Sydney, had been particularly vitriolic in his denunciation of the agreement, having already claimed in a radio broadcast in March 1946 that it gave up too much power to the IMF and threatened the ‘very sovereignty of Australia, and would allow for its domination by international financial interests’. Bretton Woods would, according to Ward, ‘enthrone a world dictatorship of private finance, more complete and terrible than any Hitlerite dream’. It is up to later generations to decide if in fact this arguable point of view is correct. Bretton Woods, argued Ward further, would destroy Australia’s democratic institutions, ‘pervert and paganise our Christian ideals’, and endanger world peace. Ward’s criticisms had some public credibility because they accorded with long-held Labor views about the so-called ‘money power’ of the Federal government, its power to print more money to allay hardship, even if it did drive up prices; which had become entrenched doctrine during the 1930s Depression.
However, Chifley saw that Australia had to align itself with the rest of the world. He believed Bretton Woods, and its worldwide management of economic forces, would end depressions like the one of the 1930s. In the meantime, Australia would show itself to be an outward-looking country that engaged with the world through trade diplomacy and economic aid, and an exporting country, not only to traditional markets and not only primary products but manufactured products as well. He also believed that Bretton Woods could stabilise currency markets, promote full employment and raise living standards, even though he was wary of the Wall Street capitalists and their concentration on those ‘dollar profits’ which Ward and others claimed were the sole motives behind the Bretton Woods International Monetary Agreement.
It was possible in those hopeful days for the idealist Chifley to see the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstru
ction and Development as based, as he said, on ‘brighter and more humanitarian’ objectives. But the Caucus at first managed to prevent Australia from agreeing to Bretton Woods, and it was only in November 1946 that Chifley narrowly convinced the Federal Executive they should go ahead. After the summer break, though Eddie Ward and Arthur Calwell dissented, the close vote in Cabinet showed that Chifley would have an even tougher time in Caucus.
To argue the proposition through, Chifley asserted that international financiers should not take all the blame for Australia’s depression in the 1930s. Part of it belonged to the Commonwealth and its failure to use the monetary machinery it had available. He admitted there were some risks associated with joining the IMF but believed the advantages far outweighed them, since the organisations were ‘an attempt for the first time in history to grapple with world economic problems by concerted action on a world scale for the common good’. Members of Parliament, he said, had to put aside any misgivings and place their faith in such organisations if they were to ‘free future generations from the terrible happenings of the last thirty years’. He saw the IMF and the World Bank as Keynesian, pump-priming bodies, not as the instruments of erosion in social spending they would become in later decades.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 52