Cruiser (65 page)

‘
Kurra! Kiotski! Kasira migi!
Stop! Attention! Eyes right!' Suddenly, a snarling voice would be upon you, then a stab from a bayonet or the thud of a rifle butt in the stomach. More worrying still, men were suddenly dragged away to be interrogated about what they knew of fuel installations in Sydney Harbour, or roads and railways in the Australian bush. This was a war of nerves that heightened the prisoners' ever-present worries of an imminent Japanese invasion of Australia and incited their darkest fear of all, the rape of their wives, girlfriends, sisters.

The puzzling thing about the Japanese was their sheer unpredictability. You never knew what would happen next. A random act of humanity one day could be followed by a vicious bashing the next. On 20 June, they summoned Rohan Rivett, a civilian journalist from Adelaide captured after the fall of Singapore, and told him he could write a letter home for broadcast from radio studios in Batavia. At first, Rivett held back, concerned that anything he said might be twisted into propaganda, but, on second thoughts, he realised that at least some news of the prisoners' plight might reach Australia. So he wrote a description of his own capture, which included these words:

It was not much, but it was enough. The broadcast was monitored in Australia. It was the first indication that some men, at least, had survived
Perth
's disappearance.

But, a week later, the Japanese turned feral again. Brigadier Blackburn was told that the prisoners must swear an oath of obedience to the IJA. He refused. So did everyone. The stand-off simmered until the first week of July, when, suddenly, the Japanese erupted. With a more than usually ferocious round of bashing and kickings, they called a parade, and the officers were threatened with execution if their men did not sign a document of allegiance. Blackburn realised that further resistance was pointless and he gave the men permission to sign under duress. This they did, but four officers still refused to: three Australian Army captains and Frank Gillan, the Engineer Lieutenant from
Perth
. For the rest of that day, 4 July, until nine o'clock that night, they were forced to kneel before the guardhouse, in the heat and dust. Near collapse from hunger and exhaustion, blinded by the light, drenched in sweat, they were ritually bashed by every passing Japanese, including Suzuki himself, and then tossed into some cells. Then they did sign, but only after a direct order from Blackburn.

The months at the Bicycle Camp passed in endless tedium. A radio secreted somewhere gave them a smattering of news of the war, but even that knowledge was carefully limited. Possession of a radio meant summary execution. But in this way they heard of the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, the first real check to Japanese expansion in the Pacific, and then in June of the great American victory at the Battle of Midway. Rumours spread. Buzzes multiplied. Things were looking up. At any moment, the Allies would recapture Java. The optimists began to predict they would be home by Christmas.

That all changed in the first week of October. There
was a flurry of activity through the camp, and they were all inoculated against typhoid and cholera. Then they heard they were being moved, to a rest camp, they were told, where conditions would be even better. Apprehensive, they packed their few belongings: rags of clothing, a pair of rough sandals, eating utensils, perhaps a treasured family photograph and some Dutch guilders, or, more dangerous, a contraband diary. It was surprising what you could conceal in a G-string – an art they had perfected while pilfering on the wharves.

The journey began, as always, with the
tenko
, the head count. This was almost a standing joke for the prisoners because the Japanese could never get it right at the first attempt, sometimes even at the third or fourth attempt. Furious, the guards would begin all over again. ‘All men back, one big mistake!' After more confusion, they were marched to Batavia's main railway station and transported to Tanjung Priok, where two ships were waiting for them, the
Kinkon Maru
and the
Dai Nichi Maru
. To more shouts and curses, they were ordered into the holds – hot and airless steel prisons where they could only squat or lie with their bodies crammed together. Fred Skeels was on the
Dai Nichi
:

After five days of this purgatory, they arrived in Singapore. Clambering on deck, helping the weak and the sick as best they could, they saw Keppel Harbour laid out before them, crowded with vessels big and small flying the Japanese flag, or ‘the flaming arsehole', as they called it. Trucks were waiting on the docks and they ground through the city, past shops and buildings still showing signs of bomb damage and gunfire, and then at breakneck speed along the island's east-coast road until they stopped outside the forbidding concrete walls of the Changi Jail. This looked like being their next home, but, after half an hour of the Japanese guards milling in confusion, the trucks ground forward again. Ten minutes later, they lurched to a halt outside Changi's Selarang Barracks.

The name Changi has become synonymous with the worst atrocities of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. The image in the minds of most Australians is of a rank and crowded prison where men, reduced to little more than skeletons, were trapped like rats and brutalised by bestial guards. Movies and television programs have portrayed Changi as a hellhole, where atrocities and executions were a daily occurrence.

It was not like that at all. Changi today is the site of Singapore's international airport, but before the war it was a picturesque fishing village and a residential dormitory suburb, home to a British Army base set in green lawns and manicured tropical gardens with pleasant views of the Johore Strait. The Selarang Barracks, a modern and well-built complex, had housed the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. It was here, not the Changi Jail, where most of the 18,000 Australians who surrendered on Singapore were imprisoned. When the first of them arrived there, they were astonished to find that their guards were not Japanese but Indian Sikh soldiers who had deserted from colonial regiments and gone across to the enemy.
You could actually go for days without even seeing a Japanese person.

Some of the more adventurous prisoners found it easy to slip out of the camp at night to forage for food or whatever else might be useful on the black market, and Singaporeans, especially the Chinese, ran a thriving illicit trade at great personal risk. Later, men who survived the Burma–Siam Railway or the coalmines of Japan would look back on the Changi Camp with something like nostalgia. After those horrors, the Selarang Barracks seemed almost like a holiday resort, where, overcrowded though it was, you were left pretty much to your own devices.

The
Perth
men and the Java diggers with them saw a broad parade ground bordered by barracks of three storeys, with colonnaded verandahs and high ceilings. In the high noon of the British garrison, they had been a sparkling white. Now, they were a dingy charcoal colour, which had apparently been a futile attempt at camouflage, and pocked with bullet and shell holes. Almost all the windows had been blown out. But after the misery of the ships from Priok, the place looked like paradise. Best of all, they could see it was teeming with Australians, most of them still wearing their khaki-uniform shorts and slouch hats, some of them even playfully knocking a football around.

In their G-strings or sarongs, the odd straw hat and homemade sandals or bare feet, with their few belongings bundled under their arms, the new arrivals felt like scarecrows, but they were warmly greeted by the soldiers, who were quick to offer food and whatever spare clothing they could scrape together. Space was found in one of the barrack blocks. Some men stretched out on charpoys, low wooden-framed beds strung with rope. A few piled into bunks, while others curled up on the concrete floor, where it was at least a little cooler. The nights were made miserable by bedbugs and mosquitoes. There was no electric light, only intermittent water from a few taps and the toilets had stopped working. The latrines, or the bore-holes, as they came to be called in prisoner slang, were trenches dug out
the back. But, for Blood Bancroft and all of the Java men, to be among other Australians was a genuine pleasure:

Others didn't do so well. Elmo Gee, in the agonies of dysentery, was helped along by a mate, Petty Officer George ‘Slim' Hedrick, another member of the Portsmouth commissioning crew, who had a wife at Mordialloc on the bay in Melbourne:

The rank-and-file diggers in Changi made them welcome; the officers were another matter. The Australian Army brass were doing their best to preserve military discipline – an entirely proper aim if the place was not to descend into anarchy, but many took it to absurd lengths. For every officer concerned with the welfare of his men and respected for it, there seemed
to be dozens of the tin-god variety. Swagger sticks tucked under their arms, insisting on smart salutes, they protected their privileges jealously. Private soldiers were ordered to hand over items of clothing so their superiors might be better dressed, which caused intense resentment. When these same superiors were asked to contribute a portion of their officers' pay to buy black-market food and medicines for their men, a good many declined. Staff officers of the 8th Division Headquarters carried on as if their defeat and surrender had been only a momentary diversion from the far more important business of sending each other orders, memos and requisitions. Some who had seen no fighting whatsoever strutted about the parade ground as if they were conquering heroes off to drinks in the mess at Sydney's Victoria Barracks. Inevitably, these blimps were mightily offended by the navy blow-ins from the Bicycle Camp. ‘The Java Rabble', they called them with a sneer, and it did not take long for the insult to get around.

Matters came to a head when the powers-that-were decided to call a formal parade in the barracks to mark Armistice Day, 11 November. The senior Australian officer in Changi, Brigadier Frederick Galleghan, not unreasonably believed that such things were good for morale. Imprisonment was no excuse for not having some well-drilled spit and polish. Universally known as ‘Black Jack', Galleghan had fought with distinction in the First World War, ending it as a sergeant. He should have been offered a commission but it was whispered that he had West Indian blood – hence the nickname – and was therefore not entirely the right sort of chap to wear officers' pips. Service in the militia between the wars took him to lieutenant-colonel's rank, though, and in Malaya he had commanded the 2/30th Battalion, where, again, he had fought well. As the senior Australian officer in Changi, he had been given the temporary rank of brigadier in April 1942.