Cruiser (70 page)

The downside was the ever-present threat of Allied bombing. The Japanese refused to identify Tamarkan as a prisoner-of-war camp with markings visible from the air, and the site was ringed with anti-aircraft guns to protect the bridge. By night, they could hear the roar of aircraft engines as American bombers wheeled above on the approach to Bangkok, and there was the occasional attack on the bridge itself, which frightened the life out of everybody but seemed to cause little damage. At times, shrapnel from the Japanese anti-aircraft fire would fall in the compound.

But this relatively relaxed regime in Tamarkan was too good to last. In March, the camp commandant announced that fit men would be chosen and sent to work in Japan – news that landed like a bolt of lightning and provoked much debate about whether it would be better to stay or go. Some said they would travel anywhere to remain with their mates; others feared that a sea journey to the enemy's homeland would be infinitely more dangerous than anything they had seen so far.

It was a parting of the ways once more. Two years on from the loss of their ship, despite their best attempts to stay together, the
Perth
men had become scattered across much of South East Asia. A few were still in Java. Tag Wallace and his small group remained at their camp in Sumatra, wasting away from malnutrition, mistreatment and hard labour. Two men,
A.B. George Morriss and one of
Perth
's bandsmen, Henry ‘Ned' Kelly, had been transported from Changi to Borneo. Morriss, a champion swimmer from Frankston in Melbourne, and Kelly, English-born, would die in the infamous Sandakan Camp in 1945. Others, including several of the officers, were already in Japan. Some 70 men, among them Elmo Gee, whose sight was now seriously impaired, were kept in Thailand and sent to other camps further south near the Malay border. Others were ordered into separate
kumis
for the trip to Japan and were given tests for cholera and malaria and issued with boots and clothing that looked and felt almost new.

The difficulty for the Japanese was to get the prisoners through seas that were increasingly under Allied attack. The first plan was to pack them into trains in Thailand and send them across country to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, then down the Mekong River to Saigon. From there, convoys would ship them to Japan. On 1 April – they wryly noted the date – a trainload of prisoners, including Buzzer Bee and Frank McGovern, were bundled into hot steel boxcars to begin their journey. Others would follow over the next few days. These trips were largely uneventful, and some of them actually began to enjoy the scenery as they passed by the gold-domed temples of Bangkok and southern Thailand and entered Cambodia.

There was the usual confusion when they arrived at the main station in Phnom Penh. No trucks had been ordered and there was a lot of milling about in the dark, punctuated by angry shouts of ‘All men sit!'. At daybreak, they were marched through the city, admiring its broad boulevards and colonial architecture and delighting in the occasional friendly wave from French or Eurasian onlookers. They were back in civilisation again – an almost indescribable pleasure, although one that would not last long. After a meal of rice at a Japanese field kitchen and the inevitable chaotic
tenko
, they were hurried onto a steamer, the
Long Ho
, for the trip down the winding Mekong. Six days after leaving Tamarkan, they were in Saigon.

By now, they had become, if not connoisseurs, then at least
discerning tourists on the prison-camp trail. You measured the camps by several yardsticks: the cleanliness or otherwise of the accommodation, the food, the availability of medical care, the brutality of the guards, and so on. Saigon measured up well. Built of substantial timber huts with tiled roofs, their camp lay on the Rue Jean Eudel – a broad boulevard running parallel to the Saigon River, not far from the central business district. It had once housed troops of the French Foreign Legion. The Australians found that sailors from the
Houston
had arrived before them, along with a large contingent of British prisoners shipped there direct from Singapore and who, unknowing and unbelieving of the horrors of the railway, tended to look down upon their ragged colonial cousins as something akin to wild men of the jungle. The Australians thought it was the best camp since Batavia. Meat, eggs and vegetables were plentiful, and, miraculously, there was soap and even talcum powder in the canteen.

The local French were friendly, arranging for medicines and newspapers to be smuggled into the camps. They would flash a ‘V for victory' sign as the men were trucked to work on the docks or at the Saigon aerodrome. And there were European women – a sight for sore eyes and stirring loins if ever there was. Some of the British boasted that they could slip out at night to meet French girlfriends. And it was here, in June, that they learned of the Normandy invasion – the Allied bid to retake Europe. That was a huge fillip to morale. An end to the war was in sight, as real as it could possibly be, and, as ever, the optimists were talking of a return home by Christmas.

But Saigon was not to last either. Lieutenant Yamada, the officer in charge of conveying this group from Vietnam to Japan, was unable to find a ship to carry them. The United States Navy had thrown a lariat of steel around the South China Sea, gradually tightening the noose on the slow Japanese transport convoys. These waters had become a happy hunting ground for American submarine skippers; they called the area ‘Convoy College'. And, by the middle of 1944, there was
another bloody battle at Saipan in the Mariana Islands of the western Pacific. It ended in a Japanese defeat so devastating that hundreds of soldiers threw themselves off cliffs to avoid capture. Admiral Nagumo, who had commanded the carriers at Pearl Harbor, blew out his brains with a revolver in a cave. When the news of the catastrophe reached Tokyo, it brought down the government of Prime Minister Tojo.

At the end of June, the Australians in Saigon were ordered onto another river steamer to retrace the journey back to Phnom Penh. From there, a train took them through Bangkok and down the Malay Peninsula, and on 4 July 1944 they arrived at the Singapore Railway Station. Their spirits rose, for it looked as if they would be returning to the relative comfort and freedom of the Selarang Barracks in Changi, where they had left some mates and there would be other Australian faces to greet them. But no luck there. They were marched towards the docks at Keppel Harbour and into what they learned was the River Valley Road Camp – another all-too-familiar sprawl of dirty bamboo huts and a staging post for prisoners bound for Japan.

The group of Australians that included Ray Parkin and his shipmates Harry Knight and Horrie Abbott had left River Valley a few days before. On 1 July 1944, they were taken to the North Pier in Singapore Harbour for their sea journey to Japan – a horrifying ordeal in one of the worst of the hell ships.

The sailors were aghast at the sight that met them at the docks. The
Rashin Maru
had begun life in 1919 as the
Canadian Seigneur
, a coal-burning freighter of some 5500 tons, but, now owned by a Japanese shipping company, she was little more than a floating hulk. With her paint flaked and her plates buckled and weeping rust, she had obviously been bombed and set on fire on some previous voyage, for her bridge structure was a charred ruin. A temporary bridge for conning the ship had been jerry-built on her stern, for all the world like a wooden shed, and aft of that was an ancient muzzle-loading field gun with its ammunition, rusty lead cannon balls, piled beside it.

At the wharf, 1060 Australians were ordered into a shed and told to pick up an ingot of rubber weighing about 30 kilos, one for each man. Then, to the frenzied shouts and kicks of the guards, they were herded up a gangway and forced at gunpoint into the ship's holds fore and aft, a mass of writhing bodies. They thought the rubber might be some sort of life preserver kindly provided by their Japanese masters, but when some of it was quietly thrown overboard by night it sank like rocks and they realised it was cargo for Nippon.

That afternoon, the
Rashin Maru
limped into the outer roads, where she lay unmoving for three days, waiting for a convoy to assemble. With gallows humour, Ray Parkin and the
Perth
men gave their prison a new name: the
Byoki Maru
.
Byoki
was Japanese for ‘sick'.

She finally set sail on 4 July, in a convoy of 13 vessels that included other prison ships and a trio of small oil tankers, escorted by three anti-submarine corvettes. Day upon day, then week upon week, they wound a tortured course through the South China Sea, trailing clouds of coal smoke that were an open invitation to any prowling Allied attacker, for there was no visible indication that the ships carried prisoners.

The sailors prevailed upon the Japanese guards to allow them to practise an abandon-ship drill for the soldiers. The food was filthy, the usual lumps of congealed rice, and water was so short that sometimes they drank what they could gather of the morning dew. They trudged along the north coast of Borneo, through steamy calms and sudden rain storms, until they reached the Philippines and dropped anchor in Manila Bay beneath an exquisite sunset. There they stayed for another three weeks, many of the men in agonies of malaria, dysentery and beriberi, while the ship coaled from lighters and the convoy commander eventually summoned up the resolve to move again.

A couple of days out of Manila, wallowing northwards, the convoy was attacked. An explosion rang through the holds of the
Byoki
like a sledgehammer striking an oil drum, causing
something close to panic among the Australian diggers and the Japanese guards who had not heard that sinister clang before. The
Perth
men recognised the sound of a torpedo detonating and reckoned that at least one Allied submarine was after them. In a few minutes, there was another explosion. Two of the tankers were sinking in clouds of oily smoke and burning flotsam, and the escort vessels were charging this way and that, trying to depth charge the attacker. The guards, howling with rage, retaliated at this insult to Nippon's honour by rushing in among the prisoners and flailing at them with bayonets, but there were no more torpedoes fired and the convoy lumbered on.

Forty days from Singapore, on a voyage that should have taken perhaps a week, they were assailed by another peril. They ran into a typhoon. Parkin had chilling memories of the hurricane in the Caribbean all those years ago, but at least that had been in a well-found warship. The
Byoki
was a floating wreck:

The typhoon raged for days until eventually it blew itself out. Five other ships of the convoy were either sunk or driven aground, but, against all the odds, the
Byoki
made it. At the end of August, they dropped anchor at Okinawa for another moment of respite and finally, in September, they steamed in bright moonlight through the Kagoshima Gulf, past Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu, to anchor in a quiet bay at the port of Moji. It was their first glimpse of the Japanese homeland, their first encounter with an enemy country whose people had acted towards them with unmatched barbarism, but Parkin's artistic eye saw only beauty. It reminded him of a seascape by the celebrated painter Utagawa Hiroshige, who had died almost a hundred years before in an age altogether more gentle:

The next hell ships to leave for Japan began loading their wretched human cargoes on Tuesday 5 September 1944. There were 1600 British prisoners and 716 Australians, including 45
Perth
survivors. They collected more of those curious lumps of rubber given to the
Byoki
contingent and then filed towards two transports, the
Rakuyo Maru
and the
Kachidoki Maru
. Again, the
Perth
prisoners had been split up. Frank McGovern,
Blood Bancroft, Bob Collins and Petty Officer Vic Duncan, a Scottish-born electrical artificer from Marrickville in Sydney, were among those chosen to go to Japan. The three Turnbull brothers, two of them army and one of them a
Perth
man, also stuck together to make the trip. Buzzer Bee and Fred Skeels stayed behind in the River Valley Camp, Fred bidding a sad farewell to his old schoolmate Wally Johnston, who was on the departure list.