Australian went Into captivity 1941
Australian went Into captivity 1941
On 7 December 1941, Australian aircrew of No. 1 Squadron RAAF, flying Hudsons, reported Japanese ships in the Gulf of Siam approaching the Malayan coast. The next day, the first day of the war with Japan, the squadron was in action and suffered its first casualties.
Taking off from Kota Bharu, the Hudsons flew the short distance to bomb and strafe Japanese transports and landing barges. Flight Lieutenant JC Ramshaw and his crew of three were making their second attack of the morning when their Hudson was hit, and crashed into the sea. The observer, Flight Lieutenant DA Dowie, was the only survivor; he was plucked from the sea and became a prisoner of war.
Aircrew continued to be captured through the following weeks. Flight Lieutenant CH 'Spud' Spurgeon was in action on 8 December and saw some 'pretty damned magnificent flying'. On 24 January his luck ran out. The pilot of a Hudson, he escaped Japanese fighters by disappearing into cloud, but when he emerged a Zero was waiting and the opening burst killed the wireless operator.
Spurgeon was the only member of the crew to survive the attack, the forced landing on the waves and a night drifting at sea. Rescued and taken ashore by some Chinese, he was captured trying to make his way to friendly troops. The Japanese made him stand on the running board of a car, put his arms either side of the door post, tied his hands together, and with their prisoner trussed on the outside of their car, they drove him into captivity.
On a reconnaissance flight on 21 January 1942, Flight Lieutenant Bob Thompson was captain and Flight Lieutenant Paul Metzler was co-pilot of a Catalina. After sighting the Japanese fleet on its way to invade Rabaul, they shadowed it until attacked by fighters. Of the eight-man crew, one was killed in the air and two died of wounds soon after a crash landing at sea. The five survivors were picked up by a Japanese cruiser, and the doctor in the sick bay, Metzler said, was the 'soul of kindliness and courtesy', and through the next years he never met another Japanese like the good doctor.
The Australian ground forces fought their first significant action against the Japanese in an ambush at Gemencheh bridge in southern Malaya on 14 January 1942. With the Japanese continuing to move quickly south, the Australians were constantly in danger of being encircled or stranded. Many survived for weeks, suffering malaria and malnutrition, as they evaded the Japanese.
Several joined forces with Chinese communist guerrillas, but their death rate in the harsh jungle camps was higher than that of those who became prisoners. Three Australians survived with the guerrillas to emerge at the end of the war: Bill McCure, HR 'Bluey' Ryan and Arthur Shephard.
Ken Harrison lasted over a month in the jungle before he realised that with the bullet wound in his ankle he was becoming a burden to his three companions. But his three mates decided 'one in all in'. They shook hands, staggered and crawled to a road and waited for capture. They and about 160 other Australians captured on the Malay Peninsula were imprisoned in Pudu, the civilian gaol in Kuala Lumpur, then transferred to Changi in November 1942.
Of the dispersed Australian troops, Lark Force on Rabaul was the first to be attacked on 23 January. As they could try and escape south and west along the coasts of New Britain, the Australians did not surrender as a group but most were captured in small parties over the next weeks. With them were around 200 civilian men from the government, plantation and business communities; and seven civilian, six army and four Methodist mission nurses and one woman planter and business woman.
More civilians, particularly missionaries, were gathered up by the Japanese as they occupied the other New Guinea islands, Bougainville and the north coast of mainland New Guinea. The 1st Independent Company men on New Ireland were captured but most on the other islands escaped or retreated to continue to fight as guerrillas and coastwatchers. Gull Force surrendered on Ambon on 3 February—the Japanese had not waited for the fall of Singapore but were taking key points in the islands.
Singapore itself fell on 15 February, and in that greatest defeat suffered in the history of British arms, 15,000 Australians became prisoners. The Australians, then pushed back into a tight perimeter near Singapore city, remember the sudden silence when the guns ceased fire, and their own incredulity.
They had fought in hope—hope that re-enforcements would arrive, and hope that in a peculiarly British way they might escape as at Gallipoli or Dunkirk, and defeat would then look like victory. On the 17th they began the march to Changi on the north-west of Singapore Island. As they topped a long, low rise, Sergeant Don Moore looked back at the apparently endless line of troops and could not understand how they had been defeated.
Most of Sparrow Force, surrounded by a vastly greater number of enemy troops, surrendered on Timor on 23 February: a few evaders, the 2/2nd Independent Company and Timorese continued guerrilla operations. After tough fighting in the battle of the Java Sea, the cruiser HMAS Perth, in company with the American cruiser Houston, attempted to leave Java by passing south of Sumatra through Sunda Strait, but ran into the Japanese invasion fleet.
The Perth and Houston kept firing until they had exhausted ammunition, and both were sunk with shattering torpedo blasts. Nearly half of those on the Perth— 23 officers and 329 ratings—were thought to have been killed in action or drowned, and 320 were captured by the Japanese. When the Australians on Java surrendered on 12 March, the succession of disasters that followed the Japanese southward advance had ended.
In less than two months over 22,000 Australians had been captured. Of the men deployed to the north, only those in Port Moresby, a few in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles on mainland New Guinea who withdrew towards Wau, coastwatchers, guerrilla forces on Bougainville and Timor, some RAAF personnel ordered out just ahead of the ground fighting and a few evaders and escapers (including General Gordon Bennett of the 8th Division) were still free.
With the Australians captured in north Africa, Greece and Crete in 1941, over 30,000 Australians were prisoners of war. Nothing had prepared either the servicemen or the public for the disaster. In the First World War just over 4000 Australians had been taken prisoner and many had suffered extreme deprivation and 10 per cent had died after capture (often because they had been severely wounded in battle), but those casualties were so overwhelmed by the fact that more than 60,000 had died in battle that the prisoners of war were given slight notice in official and unofficial histories.
The prisoners of the Japanese were to say that they had thought about death and wounds, and they had worried about whether they would be able to uphold the traditions established by the diggers in the Great War; but that they would, so early in the conflict, be prisoners of war had not occurred to them.
Relief that they had survived their first battles was tinged by the humiliation of defeat, regret that they could no longer defend their homeland when it was under threat, and some apprehension about how they might be received at the end of the war. On 15 February Frank Christie of the 4th Anti-Tank wrote in his diary 'all over' and then added in capitals 'SURRENDER, CAPITULATE ... a terrible show'. Included in his next entry covering the first two days of captivity was the admission: 'all rooted slept where we could'.
Australians continued to be captured, but in small numbers. When the Australians were being pushed back on Kokoda a number of men, including Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Key, commander of the 2/14 Battalion, were captured. None survived. Similarly at Milne Bay, the Japanese killed the few men captured. Later in the war, some coastwatchers were captured, but only John Murphy, after extreme deprivation, survived in Rabaul. Aircrew remained at risk throughout the war.
The case of Flight Lieutenant William 'Bill' Newton brought the vulnerability of captured aircrew to notice. Shot down in a raid over Salamaua on 18 March 1943, Newton and one of his crew, John Lyon, swam ashore from their sinking Boston, were captured, shifted to Lae and there executed. Newton was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his 'great courage' and 'iron determination' in pressing home raids against intense fire, and later the advancing Australians picked up a diary with a vivid and disturbing account of his execution with a 'sweep' of the sword.
But other airmen, such as Harvey Besley (captured in April 1944) and Lionel Hudson (captured in December 1944) both survived their time in Rangoon gaol in Burma. Besley said he looked forward to being questioned. In spite of the bashings, it broke the boredom of his month of solitary confinement.
Pilot Officer Maxwell Gilbert, flying out of Tarakan on 7 July 1945, baled out of his Kittyhawk, was captured, and is thought to have died on 24 July, aged twenty, just three weeks before the end of the war. Some forty-eight members of the air force were executed while prisoners. If some of those who were known to be prisoners but who died in suspicious circumstances are added, then nearly half of the RAAF prisoners of the Japanese died by execution.
On 22 January 1943, the coastal supply ship Patricia Cam was travelling between Elcho Island and a coastwatching station in the Wessel Islands off the north-east of Arnhem Land. A Japanese float-plane strafed and bombed the Patricia Cam, sinking it. One crew member died immediately.
The float-plane landed, picked up the Reverend Len Kentish of the Methodist Mission, left the rest of the crew in the water, and flew off. Two more of the crew failed to reach shore. On Dobo Island, just across the Arafura Sea in the Netherlands East Indies, Kentish was interrogated, tortured and executed by sword. The Reverend Kentish was captured in Australian waters; he was a civilian, and he was the victim of random, misdirected brutality.
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