Cruiser (73 page)

The guards at Ohasi were occasionally brutal, capable of beating a prisoner for no apparent reason, but there was no
comparison with the systematic savagery of the railway. The level of abuse varied from camp to camp, often depending on the personality of the men in charge.
Perth
's young assistant surgeon, Sam Stening, arrived in Japan in May 1942 and the next year found himself both the senior officer and the only doctor at the Oeyama Camp near Osaka, whose prisoners were forced into slave labour at a nickel mine.

The inmates, clad in threadbare garments, carried out heavy work in rain and slush; when they returned to camp at night, wet to the skin, they had no change of clothing. One gang worked for more than a week up to the knees in icy water. Work bosses pushed the men to the limits of their endurance, and often the sick were forced to work, thus contributing to the death of many of them. Food, though good at first, soon fell off in quantity and quality. The lot of the workers was improved by the medical officer's decision to give them 360 grams of grain-ration daily, although this meant cutting down the ration of resting men to 250 grams, plus what additions could be spared.
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Perhaps because he was not sent to the railway, which looms so large in the Australian story, Stening's years as a prisoner have been little recognised. He deserves better. This young paediatrician from Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, only newly married, went about his duties with a devotion to his patients and a courage in confronting the Japanese on their behalf that saw him frequently beaten for his pains. At the Taisho Camp near Osaka, he was savagely bashed with a length of rubber hose when he refused to send sick men out to work, and was then ordered to shovel coal himself.

As the IJA was ground down by the American juggernaut, more and more Japanese males were conscripted into uniform. In mines and factories, they were replaced by Allied prisoners of war. The mines were the worst. Ray Parkin and his two petty officer shipmates, Horrie Abbott and Harry Knight,
were taken with the other Australians from the
Byoki Maru
to the Ohama Camp on Japan's Inland Sea, some 125 kilometres south-west of Hiroshima. This was a grim straggle of pine-board huts commanded by a sergeant universally known as The Ape. It was September 1944. At first, they felt they had landed well. In their huts, there were tatami mats to sleep on and doonas covered in floral silk, and they were issued with clothing unimaginable on the railway: rubber-soled boots, a heavy coat and trousers made of something like hessian, and a cap to hold a miner's lamp. For the first few weeks, they worked above ground, digging roads or carrying timbers, but eventually they were sent down the mine itself, into long shafts deep under the Inland Sea. In a ragged line, they plodded along tunnels lit by dim yellow bulbs, sloshing through mud and water, sometimes getting a jolt when they brushed against a naked piece of electric wiring dangling from the roof.

Their first task was to shore up a low spur with baulks of timber – back-breaking work that went on for ten days before they were permitted a
yasume
. Often, the batteries on their lights would die, leaving them only the faint glow at the end of some distant heading to indicate the way out. Rats scuttled between their legs. When the snow lay deep on Ohama and the north wind whipped up icy flurries, it would be dark when they finished work. The third book of Ray Parkin's trilogy,
The Sword and the Blossom
, paints a stark picture:

Bill Bee and Fred Skeels spent Christmas Day with some 500 prisoners crammed into yet another hell ship, the
Awa Maru
. On Boxing Day, they sailed from Singapore in a convoy that hugged the coast of Indochina, then China itself. Allowed on deck one day, Buzzer was thrown off his feet when the ship suddenly turned hard to starboard and two torpedo tracks boiled down either side of the hull, but they made it to Japan on 15 January 1945. Standing in the snow on deck, they were ordered to drop their pants for a glass tube to be shoved up their anuses to check for cholera. It was not a promising introduction. Ashore, they were sent to different camps, which meant farewelling comrades whose most intimate moments they had shared for years.

Skeels and about 120 men, including ten
Perth
survivors, were put on a train for the Fukuoka 22 Camp on the island of Honshu. This camp sprawled beneath a big slag heap. It comprised the usual rows of wooden barracks with a central kitchen and eating area, and even a hospital. The night they arrived, they were fed hot rice and steaming vegetable soup, which Fred remembered as ‘a beautiful meal, indescribably warming'. It was not enough. Three days later, on 18 January, Leading Seaman Allan Hawke, from Mount Barker in South Australia, died of pneumonia. Just 26, he had been a fit young footballer and tennis player in his schooldays at Adelaide's Prince Alfred College, but the cruel Japanese winter destroyed him.

The Australians were hurried down the mine the day after
their arrival. They were given pneumatic drills to bore holes for explosives, two men struggling to position each drill into the rock, and everyone deafened by the noise of the air compressors hammering in the enclosed space. Fred Skeels found it frightening and exhausting:

Of the dozens of camps scattered across Japan, none was more sinister than Fukuoka 17, usually known as Omuta, after the coastal city nearby. On the southern island of Kyushu, Omuta housed the prisoner workforce for a coal mine and a zinc smelter run by the Mitsui Company – one of the four infamous corporate giants, the Zaibatsu, that controlled the Japanese economy. The commandant, a sadist named Asao Fukuhara who was eventually executed for war crimes, ran the camp with premeditated brutality through a platoon of guards known to the prisoners by such nicknames as The Screamer, The Bull, Devil, Billy Goat and The Pig. More sickening still, Fukuhara was aided by an American collaborator, a certain US Navy Lieutenant-Commander Edward N. Little, whose position in charge of the camp kitchens allowed him and his associates to run an extortion racket: extra food for money. The Australians called him Skoshi, which was the Japanese word for his surname, and they loathed him. There were allegations that information he gave to the Japanese led to the torture and death of at least two of his fellow Americans. After the war, he
was tried in secret by a US Navy court martial but, to the anger of his accusers, he was found not guilty due to lack of evidence.
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The Americans had arrived first at Omuta, mostly men captured on Bataan or at Corregidor, followed later by Dutch and British prisoners. Bill Bee's group of some 200 Australians from the
Awa Maru
reached the camp on the bone-chilling evening of 16 January. After a few days of basic instruction, they too were sent down the shafts in
kumis
, toiling in shifts that could stretch out to 12 hours to fill the quotas. The first
Perth
man to die at Omuta was Able Seaman Eric ‘Chesty' Bond, of Queenscliff in Sydney, who caught pneumonia after being made to stand for hours at attention in the snow as punishment for some crime real or imagined. He succumbed on 22 January, exactly one month before his 30th birthday. Buzzer, fearing the same fate, eventually escaped underground work by claiming he was a skilled welder, which got him a job in a workshop above the surface. There, he struck up something close to a friendship with his new
bunti-jo
, or supervisor, a middle-aged engineer named Hakimoto who had been a merchant seaman, who spoke a little English and treated his charges decently. Sometimes, Hakimoto would share food with them.

As that northern winter turned to the spring of 1945, and then summer, the war was moving to its tumultuous climax. In the western Pacific, the Americans were closing in on Japan, thrusting ever northwards on their campaign of island-hopping. At each stage, the Japanese grew more desperate and fanatical, and the fighting more bloody. Japan itself was bombed in rivers of falling fire. In January, General Curtis ‘Old Iron Ass' LeMay arrived on Guam in the Marianas and ordered the XXI Bomber Command of the US Army Air Force to adopt new tactics of low-level night bombing with phosphorus, magnesium and napalm weapons specifically designed to incinerate the flimsy timber and paper buildings
of Japanese cities and the civilians who dwelt in them. On 10 March, 325 B-29 Superfortress aircraft firebombed Tokyo itself for more than three hours, killing more than 100,000 civilians and reducing some 40 square kilometres of the city to smoking rubble, over which hung the sickening stench of burned human flesh.

Frank McGovern, Vic Duncan and another
Perth
shipmate, Keith Mills, witnessed that inferno and were nearly consumed by it. They were at a camp at Kawasaki, near Yokohama, where they worked at the Shibaura Engineering Works, a forerunner to today's Toshiba Corporation. On the night of the firebombing, crouching behind a low brick wall, gasping for air, they saw a wall of flame roaring down a street towards them, consuming terrified women and children in its path. Running for higher ground, they escaped that horror, but two months later McGovern was not so lucky. On 13 July, Superfortresses of the USAAF's 315th Bombardment Wing mounted Operation Eagle 6, dropping 452 tons of high-explosive bombs on the Kawasaki petroleum dump next door to the camp.
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The blast tossed him like a rag doll. McGovern recalled: