Voices from the Air (31 page)

T
he reckoning for Japanese atrocities during the war began in the months following the Japanese surrender. ABC correspondent, Talbot Duckmanton, covered the first war crimes trial by an Australian court, on the island of Morotai, which was now a transit point for the repatriation of POWs and soldiers. Australian trials of Japanese war crimes were also held at other locations throughout the Pacific theatre.

For five days now I have attended the sittings of the war trials court and on each of the five days I have listened to Japanese soldiers relate, without any sign of distress at all, the ghastly details of the bayonetting to death of Australian and American airmen.
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The war crimes trials lifted the veil from the dark truth about Japan's treatment of prisoners of war. Reporting of Japanese atrocities had often been constrained during the war for reasons of public morale and to protect next of kin, but they became increasingly widely reported as the war progressed.

Tales of atrocities and war crimes had begun to emerge as Australian and Allied forces won back territory from the Japanese in New Guinea and elsewhere,
²
but instances, including execution and mutilation were known to war correspondents as early as the Kokoda campaign. Bill Marien also came across evidence during his assignment to Timor at the end of 1942 – in one case, Japanese soldiers had bound the hands of four Australians, shot them from behind and then bayonetted the bodies. The information provided by Marien and another correspondent was apparently turned into a script by Army public relations, or the Department of Information, for broadcast in America under the title –
Japanese Savagery in Island War
.
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Like John Thompson,
Talbot Duckmanton
was a ‘post-war correspondent', but he had been recommended for a war correspondent role four years earlier, to replace Lawrence Cecil with the mobile unit in the Middle East. Duckmanton was a promising young broadcaster but he was only 19 at the time. Dudley Leggett was nominated for the position instead, though the field unit returned to Australia and the plan was abandoned.

Talbot Duckmanton studied at Sydney's Newington College as a scholarship student; he was the school's champion athlete and dux of the college. He joined the ABC as a cadet announcer and spent the first three months in the despatch department, running messages and operating the copying machine. He developed a pleasant and engaging voice, a relaxed and articulate skill for descriptive commentary and an authoritative but easy broadcast style, all of which gave him opportunities as an early field broadcaster. There was a break in his ABC career when he enlisted. He always wanted to join
the Air Force but he was under 21, the minimum age for air crew, so he needed his parents' permission, which his mother refused to give. Instead he joined the Army and was sent to Port Moresby where he was stationed with an anti-aircraft battery. When he reached 21, he joined the RAAF and trained as a pilot, ending up at the Advanced Flying Training School in Canada. He spent eighteen months in North America, mostly in flying boats attached to the Canadian Navy, flying from the east coast on coastal reconnaissance, before returning to Australia following the end of the war in Europe. By mid-1945 he was one of many pilots in Australia with little chance of an active operational role: ‘. . . knowing that I was doing virtually nothing in the Air Force, I was sitting around, pretty unhappy about the state of affairs – although not knowing at that time that the end of the Pacific war was imminent – the ABC got in touch with me and asked if I would like to become a war correspondent.'
⁴
The war finished very soon afterwards.

On VP Day, 15 August, when news came through of the Japanese surrender, Duckmanton was waiting to be posted overseas and he was sent into the streets of Sydney with a recording van, to describe the noisy, jubilant celebrations.

Hello everyone, this is Talbot Duckmanton speaking to you from Martin Place, Sydney, but I'm afraid that it's not the old Martin Place that you know so well. There's no bus outside the airways office here, there's no constable on duty at Pitt Street directing traffic, there are no office boys posting mail at the letter boxes. Instead, there are thousands and thousands of people, honestly I've never seen as many people in Martin Place before. They're packed tight from above Castlereagh Street, all the way down across Pitt Street, past the Cenotaph and way down here
to the George Street end of Martin Place, where we have the mobile studio parked. There are men, women and girls, lovely girls too, hundreds and hundreds of them. They've got paper hats on their heads, waving streamers, flags, Union Jacks, the Stars and Stripes, they've got whistles, those gas alarm rattlers, and they're just having one whale of a time . . . Over on my right and on one of the buildings at the back, someone has hung out a big dummy of Adolph Hitler with a great Swastika on the front of it, and to the cheers of the crowd he was lowered down from the top of the building and duly hung . . . This is a very happy crowd, they're mad with excitement. Yes, Sydney is gay today, but I must mention that with all this gaiety here in Martin Place there is a little bit of sadness too. You only have to look at the Cenotaph to realise that. The freshly laid flowers upon it and number of people who have taken off their hats and reverently gone and paid homage at the Cenotaph indicates to us that Sydney, despite all this gaiety and rejoicing at the news, the official news of the Japanese surrender, has not forgotten that our men and our Allies too have paid a high price so that we may rejoice in this way.
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The historic recording required several attempts as the excited crowd mobbed the recording van and even tried to push it over, but the final hurried recording was raced back to the ABC William Street studio and broadcast at 1 pm.

By September, Duckmanton was filing news stories and voice reports from Morotai. POWs were still transiting through Morotai on their way home to Australia and Duckmanton
recorded their stories on a wire recorder. He was one of the first ABC correspondents to regularly use the new type of recorder, which was much smaller than the older disc equipment, and recorded sound on to spools of thin wire filament. He was very taken with it, describing it as his ‘little box of tricks'.
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Duckmanton spent many hours sitting beside hospital beds or in one of the open huts at Morotai, crouched forward with microphone in hand, listening to the stories of the POWs. Some of his news despatches of these interviews have been preserved.

Sergeant Donald Woolley . . . and Private Charles Dodds . . . told the grim story of Japanese inhumanity at Macassar where there were eleven hundred POWs including American, Dutch and English . . . The Japanese were at first frightened by the POWs, and always carried rifles and threatened to behead ten prisoners for every one that escaped. Some escaped prisoners were caught and beheaded . . . The Japanese soldiers needed no reason to hit prisoners and did so whenever the mood suited them. Early this year two hundred men were beaten at one time. The padre was made to read the funeral service before the beatings and the POWs were made to bow their heads, shut their eyes and pray. Several died later. During the beatings the Japanese poured water over the men to prevent them from fainting.
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Duckmanton would spend about an hour making a recording and then up to six hours transcribing the text onto multiple carbon copies for the censor. Len Edwards was briefly in Morotai with Duckmanton, helping him record interviews and messages home from the soldiers stationed there, but, for
a time, Duckmanton was recording by himself using the wire recorder, and receiving advice from the ABC as he tried to make his own running repairs.

If wire breaks do not mend with cellulose tape but stop the recorder immediately. Heat both ends of wire with match and when cool, tie in a reef knot, cutting off the ends, leaving about one eighth inch, then heat again to set knot.
⁸

By late September, Duckmanton was the only war correspondent left on Morotai and he was considering ways to cover the issue of war crimes.

The life here I like and really have no complaints at all in that direction. The ADPR [Assistant Deputy Director Army Public Relations] and his staff are a good bunch of fellows and give every co-operation. I wish that I could do some actualities from the camps where they have the Jap war criminals working.
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Suspected Japanese war criminals were being interviewed by Australian officers, and Duckmanton and the recently arrived Bill MacFarlane recorded one such interrogation, which was part of the preparation of evidence for the expected war crimes trials.

In this small native hut at the headquarters of the 32nd Japanese Division, Major Thomas is about to question two suspected Japanese war criminals. Now these two men were at Ternate. One is a naval officer . . . and he was executioner really at Ternate, and the other . . . was the assistant to the secret service investigator at Ternate. This is just to give you
some idea how the Australian officers go about collecting evidence and information from these suspected war criminals.
¹⁰

Even today, despite the somewhat slow pace of the questions, answers and translation, the recording is compelling listening, in part for Duckmanton's calm, almost intimate introduction – a modern style that engaged with the audience as if they were there in the room – but mostly for the contrast of the discussion of execution, beatings and torture, set against the very ordinariness of the process and the sounds of daily life such as a rooster crowing in the background.

Other news and feature material on Morotai was drying up. All the POWs had been evacuated a month earlier and many of the last groups to pass through had already been interviewed by Fred Simpson in Kuching or Frank Legg in Manila. The strange transition period for many soldiers still overseas was also creating difficulties for Duckmanton.

I'm finding it rather difficult, to say the least of it, to get fellows to relate anecdotes and the like from their past Army experiences. Most of them are interested in only one thing and that is getting home as quickly as possible and since the shipping situation has to their way of thinking, been handled so badly, they are not in any way willing to relate such stories.
¹¹

Australian forces were assisting with the formal re-instatement of local authority in the islands after the end of Japanese occupation. The Japanese had displaced the Sultan of Ternate, the head of a small Muslim kingdom in the Moluccas (Maluku Islands), and Duckmanton and MacFarlane sailed on
HMAS
Bowen
for the official re-instatement ceremony, with an Australian surveillance party visiting the islands. Duckmanton met the Sultan at breakfast in the Ward Room. ‘He's a man in his forties – about five-feet tall and very thin. He speaks English fairly well and is deeply conscious of his responsibilities to his people, scattered throughout the Halmaheras and the Moluccas.'

When they reached Ternate at dusk, many people had come out to welcome the Sultan but most were kept back from the wharf, apart from a group of dignitaries and a few small, naked boys diving from the wharf into the water. That evening Duckmanton and MacFarlane attended a dance at the palace, where the band played ‘Colonel Bogey' and ‘The Hokey-Pokey'. ‘The windows and doors of the ballroom were all wide open and around them dozens of people – children among them – were crowding to watch the dance. The ceiling and all the glass from the windows had been blown out, but the terrazzo floor was intact.'
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They then moved on to Sanana Island for the re-instatement ceremony where Duckmanton recorded his commentary.

I'm speaking to you from just outside an old fort built by the Portuguese when they first came to these islands in the fifteenth century. It's now very dilapidated and there's moss growing on the walls. Protruding from the broken battlements are some old cannon . . . Out in front of the dais there is a guard of honour from the RAN and the AIF and also some Indonesian troops. On three flagpoles made of bamboo the British, Dutch and Australian flags are furled waiting to be broken at the top by three Naval ratings standing at attention at the foot of the pole.
¹³

To the sound of a children's pipe and drum band and the Dutch national anthem, the Australian representative read out the proclamation declaring that Australian troops under the C-in-C General Blamey had accepted the Japanese surrender, and would maintain law and order until the restoration of the Netherlands East Indies government.

Concerts and other entertainment were held at Morotai for the Australian former POWs and soldiers and at one concert Talbot met a young nurse's aide, Florence Simmonds. Talbot was somewhat shy but a connection was made and they later married and had four children: Christine, Susan, Craig, and Kim.