Cruiser (69 page)

Loneliness was another burden – that and an aching longing for home and family. Sometimes at night, McGovern would find himself staring beyond the jungle canopy to the stars above, hoping that those he loved back in Sydney might be doing the same, making a connection with him across time and space.

Ray Parkin assiduously kept his diary on whatever scraps of paper he could lay his hands on, written in a tiny hand, and he found time to sketch or to paint with some watercolours he had kept by him through all the searches. In conversations long into the night, he formed an enduring mateship with Weary Dunlop – an unlikely meeting of the minds of a self-educated seaman-philosopher and a Melbourne surgeon, officer and sportsman. Parkin relished their talks, on everything from Greek philosophy to Rudyard Kipling, and jotted his impressions of Dunlop in his notes:

Remarkably, Ray could find beauty in the midst of the horrors. His artist's eye and well-furnished intellect found consolation in solitude and the study of nature:

At the Hintok Camp,
Perth
's Chief Telegraphist, Chief Petty Officer Harry Knight, who had been in the steel lifeboat on the journey to Tjilatjap, risked certain execution by keeping a radio. He had made it from parts gathered at the camp in Bandung on Java, a miracle of miniaturisation concealed in an old jam tin. Only a trusted few prisoners knew he had it. He would lie awake listening to the BBC, allowing some of what he heard to get out as rumour to raise morale.

Another radio, hidden in the hollow bamboo of one man's artificial leg, was almost found by a searching guard. Macca McQuade won himself considerable fame for his desperate solution to the problem:

Sometimes, just sometimes, things went right. Gavin Campbell found his older brother Ian, a signaller in the army who had been taken at Singapore. The two had last seen each other back in Australia. Ian had no idea that Gavin had been in HMAS
Perth
, let alone that he had become a prisoner. When he arrived at Thanbyuzayat from Changi, Gavin asked if anyone had seen his brother and was told he might be found at the 15-Kilo Camp. So far so good. Gavin's next stop was at that very camp, in a truckload of prisoners heading further along the line. The guards shouted at the men in the truck to keep silent, but Gavin whispered to another Australian, ‘Tell Ian Campbell his brother went through.' It worked. A few weeks later, Gavin got an army paymaster, Lieutenant Harry Farmer, to carry a note, and Ian attached himself to one of the ration parties that brought supplies along the railway workings. Eventually, they met up at the 40-Kilo mark, a poignant family reunion.

At the 100-Kilo Camp in Burma, Fred Skeels and Wally Johnston celebrated their 21st birthdays together:

On 17 October 1943, the line was joined. The northern section from Thanbyuzayat met the southern track coming up from Ban Pong at Konkoita, in a jungle clearing about 40 kilometres from the Burmese border, and a final spike was driven in, to shouts of ‘
Banzai!
'. A week later, the Japanese command staged a formal opening ceremony. The colonels of the 5th and 9th Railway Regiments proudly drove in two more spikes and, with much bowing and clicking of heels and barking of compliments, reported duty done in the Emperor's sacred name to their superior, Major-General Eiguma Ishida, Commanding Officer of the 2nd Railway Administration. A long bamboo screen shielded the General from the unpleasantness of a camp for Asian coolies nearby, and a military band brought in from Saigon banged away at Japanese patriotic songs and, bizarrely, Mozart airs, and
tunes from the opera
Carmen
. Locomotive No. C5631, in gleaming black and red paint, bedecked with Japanese and Thai flags, chuntered along the line from the south, towing three open carriages filled with a gaggle of army officers in dress uniform.

Hypocrisy piled upon irony, insult upon injury. Sake toasts were drunk. A Japanese film crew recorded the festive scene, including a sequence in which carefully chosen prisoners of war were dragooned into performing for the cameras. One of them was Chilla Goodchap, who was ordered to strip off his G-string and to dress in a freshly laundered shirt and pair of shorts, with boots and sun hat. He was filmed shaking hands with a beaming Japanese officer and then led into a tent, where the camera captured him holding a tray laden with tropical fruit topped by a pack of cigarettes, the grateful gifts of generous Nippon. Show over, the film crew took the fruit back, and the clothes, and Chilla was ordered to don his G-string again. Along the line, Colonel Nagatomo ordered a special day of celebration and, ludicrous to the last, issued a ‘Letter of Condolence on the Occasion of the Memorial Service for Deceased POWs':

The accepted estimate is that some 330,000 souls were employed on the Burma–Siam Railway, including 61,000 Allied prisoners of war. There were 9500 Australians,
of whom 2815 would die along the line. Of
Perth
's ship's company labouring in Burma and Thailand, 58 men would never return from that jungle via dolorosa.

Engine C5631, still gleaming, is now on display at that notorious temple to Japanese militarism, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where a sign in English explains, in grisly understatement, that it is dedicated ‘to memory of numerous casualties during the railway construction works in war time'.

As the months ticked by and the seasons changed, the families and friends of
Perth
's ship's company could only wait and hope. Rohan Rivett's broadcast from Java had informed them that there were survivors, but no one knew who or how many. Joan Lewis feared that Jack, her engine room artificer husband, had been lost, but she carefully saved her money in the hope of gathering the deposit to buy a house when he returned. The vacuum of unknowing most deeply touched wives with children to nurture, women such as Reg Whiting's wife, Allie, or Nancy Waller, both of whom had young boys feeling the absence of their fathers. Added to that was the strain of life in a nation wearied by the demands of war and the threat of invasion, although that danger had receded by the middle of 1943.

In August, the Curtin Labor government was triumphantly re-elected with a gain of 17 seats in the House of Representatives. But life on the home front had become a struggle, a tangle of red tape and ration books and petrol coupons and regular government exhortations to fiery patriotism in the daily newspapers:

The flag-waving was probably necessary. Some families had not seen their fighting men for years. The Japanese allowed the POWs to write the occasional letter or to send pre-printed postcards, forwarded by the International Red Cross, but few seem to have been delivered and those that were arrived months and even years late. There was a pre-printed postcard that read:

Elmo Gee sent one of these back to Silver Creek, adding the words ‘and my thoughts are with you all. All the best for New Year. Remember me to all …'

Frank McGovern also wrote one in October 1942, addressed to his father, James, and his mother, Minnie, in Sydney:

It did not reach Taylor Street in Paddington until December 1943. Arthur Bancroft's family, and his girlfriend, Mirla Wilkinson, heard that he was alive just by chance:

The families wrote in the hope that their menfolk might be alive, although never knowing where they might be or if the letters would reach them. They sent parcels of food or clothing – a lovingly baked cake, a book, fresh underwear – but if these ever arrived at the camps they were invariably kept by the guards. Some letters got through to be read and reread a hundred times, no matter how stale they were. Occasionally, a man would learn from a well-meaning friend that his wife or girlfriend had gone off with another man. Others received no mail at all. Their isolation was complete.

But, with the railway built, life began to look up. Some of the prisoners were kept along the line as maintenance crews, but after the Speedo days their work was not so arduous and their rations improved. With the end of the monsoon, the threat of cholera faded and their health was better. Many of the
Perth
men were gathered at the 105-Kilo – which, they agreed, was almost a holiday resort after the ordeals they had endured. And on the first Tuesday of November 1943, being Australians, they staged their very own Melbourne Cup.

The surviving stories of this event are extraordinary. The officers convinced the Japanese that this was an occasion of great national importance, and they were promised a
yasume
, or rest day. The men went about it with all the solemnity of the Victoria Racing Club itself, with a committee nominated to draw up a program of six races, bookmakers to be licensed, a Clerk of the Course and Stewards appointed, ‘police' to control unruly crowds. A track was cleared in the dirt. Horses, like children's hobby horses, were knocked up from bamboo and named for the champions of the day – Phar Lap, Peter Pan,
Rivette – and jockeys were chosen from the smaller men. More implausibly still, the committee announced there would be a fashion parade, with prizes. Some men spent weeks gathering scraps of fabric and stitching frocks and elaborate hats, and on the day itself sashayed onto the course with all the aplomb of Toorak social butterflies, on the arms of their gentlemen friends.

The day was a howling success, despite the on-course commentator collapsing with a sudden bout of malaria and unseemly suggestions that S.P. bookmakers, unlicensed by the committee, had fixed the races. The Japanese commandant got so carried away with the gaiety that he danced on the concert stage whirling his sword aloft and demanded that the whole thing be repeated the next day. With great difficulty, they talked him out of it.

Christmas Day, their second in captivity, was not so good. The buzz, carefully filtered from the secret camp radios, was that the war was going well for the Allies. They vaguely knew that the Blitz on London had finished, the Germans were on the back foot in Russia and were being heavily bombed at home, Mussolini had fallen and the Allies had invaded Sicily – all cheering news. There were reports that the Americans and the Australians were rolling back the Japanese in the Pacific, which was even more encouraging. But there was no sign of the war ending and still less of their release.

The Japanese granted another
yasume
on Christmas Day itself. The canteen scraped together funds to buy two pigs, which were set aside as food for the sick, and the cooks concocted a rice pudding flavoured with shindegar, a dark and sticky native sugar. The men sang carols and wished each other a Merry Christmas, but the message of the birth of Christ had little meaning for those who felt that God had forsaken them. It was a melancholy bunch who turned in for sleep that night. Perhaps things would improve in the New Year. There was a buzz that they might be sent back to Singapore.

Ray Parkin and a smaller group of
Perth
survivors were at the Hintok Road Camp for Christmas and New Year. Their
festive season had a little more zing to it. There was a Christmas concert and another on New Year's Day, and the men in his tent made a pudding of rice, eggs, palm sugar, wild ginger roots and peanuts, which they boiled in an old singlet and ate with relish. They, too, had heard a buzz that they were on the move and, better still, another rumour that a Japanese officer had admitted to some of the prisoners the war would soon be over. It seemed too good to be true.

For all the triumphant celebrations at the opening of the railway, there was little joy elsewhere for the Japanese Empire. As 1943 became 1944, the over-reaching folly of the Greater South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was being exposed layer by layer, like a peeled onion. Admiral Yamamoto's remark to Prince Konoye, that he would ‘run wild' in the first year of war, had been spectacularly vindicated, but his fear that Japan could not sustain a prolonged conflict with the United States was now proving equally prescient. And Yamamoto himself was dead. By late May 1942, Allied cryptanalysts had broken the Imperial Japanese Navy's main code, known as JN25. In April 1943, American listening stations picked up a long signal detailing a flying inspection tour the Admiral would make from Rabaul to Bougainville. On 18 April, the Mitsubishi Betty bomber carrying Yamamoto was ambushed by a squadron of US Army Air Force P-38 Lightnings and shot down over the Bougainville jungle, where, according to the official Japanese report, the Admiral's body was found still upright in his seat and grasping his samurai sword in a white-gloved hand.

Yamamoto's death was a heavy bruise to Japanese morale, and more of these were to come. The fatal flaw in Nanshinron was now exposed. Japan could only maintain its empire in South East Asia with a fleet of merchant shipping sailing behind the protective shield of its navy. After the American victory at Midway, that shield had begun to disintegrate – slowly at
first, but by 1944 with increasing speed. Increasingly, far-flung land armies and island garrisons and the ships of the IJN were finding themselves short of food, fuel and ammunition.

The Allies were on the front foot, led by three able commanders burning to take the fight to the enemy. In the west, they set up a South East Asian Command in October 1943, to which Churchill appointed the energetic Lord Louis Mountbatten with orders to throw the Japanese out of Burma, Malaya and Singapore and to beat them in China. In the South-West Pacific, the Americans and the Australians under General Douglas MacArthur had begun to roll back the Japanese in New Guinea in some of the most bloody fighting of the war. And in the Pacific proper, the American Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, as Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas, led a resurgent United States Navy towards the series of tumultuous sea battles and island-hopping invasions that would bring Japan to its knees. The might of American industry was turning out new battleships and aircraft carriers to more than replace the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor. By the middle of 1943, the United States Navy's fleet of carrier-based aircraft was three times the size of the Japanese naval air fleet, and American submarines had at last emerged as a potent weapon after their hesitant beginnings with inexperienced captains and faulty torpedoes.

After Christmas 1943, most Australian prisoners of war along the railway, including many of the
Perth
survivors, were transported to another camp at Tamarkan in Thailand, near Kanchanaburi and the so-called Bridge on the River Kwai. This caused some nervousness, as Fred Skeels put it:

The trains ground their way south, wheels and brakes screeching in protest. As they passed the old camps, the prisoners saw rows of graves marked by bamboo crosses in clearings where jungle was beginning to close in again. So many good men had been left behind.

They found that Tamarkan was an oasis compared with what they had known. There were some 6000–7000 prisoners there, British, Dutch and Australian – most of the Americans seemed to have been separated out – and the food was better and more plentiful. You could actually detect meat or vegetables in the evening stew, and for those with money there was a canteen selling such luxuries as bananas or duck-egg omelettes for a few cents. There was not much work to be done, and only light supervision. Some prisoners actually volunteered to go on working parties outside the camp, to collect fruit and vegetables. A few of the guards, a far cry from the sadists on the railway, would permit their charges to go swimming. And, as Elmo Gee found, there were shipmates to catch up with, close friends such as Slim Hedrick: