But the Dutch persisted, keeping a dead hand on the Malay language broadcasts with their constant vilification of the Indonesian leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, as traitors and quislings. The Dutch officers attached to FELO, de Bruyn and Quispel, were starved of useful information by their own authorities. When FELO sent a reconnaissance team into the villages around Hollandia ahead of the invasion, van der Plas’s commission had the Dutch air force unit at Merauke halt any re-supply drops to them. Proud had to fly up himself and get an Australian air force squadron to take over, without telling the Dutch. Later, when FELO wanted to send in a mobile propaganda unit to win villagers over to the Allied side with picture and gramophone shows, the Dutch objected to that: the demonstration of American power was enough, they said.
Down at the shortwave service in Melbourne, William Macmahon Ball was irked when a witchhunt was started by the Dutch against the Siamese agent-turned-broadcaster Luang Sarabhaya, over a suspicious document relating to ‘Netherlands’ issues that was found in his studio. The Dutch had offices in Capel Court, just above the radio station. Quispel started an investigation without clearance and told Sarabhaya he was suspended. Both Proud and Ball intervened to assure the Thai he was completely in the clear.
Eventually, Ball and the army planners in a unit run by Colonel Alf Conlon, who dropped in at Kirkton sometimes, persuaded the external affairs minister, ‘Doc’ Evatt, that Asia would not happily revert to the status quo ante when the Japanese were defeated. Paul McGuire circulated a suggestion to the new Post-Hostilities Planning Committee in Evatt’s department, suggesting a ‘wider intelligence picture’ about the Netherlands East Indies would ‘help inform Australian policy’.
Another awkwardness in the propaganda campaign, as the war front moved closer to Japan, was in the Allied intentions towards Japan, and in particular, the position of the emperor and the future of the Imperial system. Would the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ force a diehard struggle to defend the Hirohito?
By this stage, the question was officially off the FELO agenda. When the fighting moved into the Philippines and the invasion of Japan was looming, MacArthur left the unit behind, except for several of its specialists he attached to his command’s new Psychological Warfare Bureau. Aside from the constant supply he demanded from the FELO printing press in Brisbane of 800,000 leaflets a week, and copies of a ‘Free Philippines’ newspaper in which he featured constantly, FELO was left to handle the restive empires of Europe.
That did not stop its members watching developments in Japan very closely, and debating how it might all end. In March 1945, they heard the Japanese broadcast announcing suspension of all school classes except the first grade from the beginning of April, so that all could help produce food and munitions and join the new volunteer defence corps for the coming decisive phase of the war. Japanese companies and their staff were withdrawing from Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong.
They heard of the great incendiary raid on Tokyo that produced a firestorm in Charles’ beloved shitamachi, the low-lying eastern side of the city where he’d had his last tryst with Suga. He wondered, not for the first time, how she was faring, if indeed she had survived.
They heard and logged the desperate efforts of Japan to draw up its defence. Landings were to be expected, but the Japanese had been united by the indiscriminate bombings of the Americans. Belatedly, Tokyo tried to deliver the Asian liberation it had promised. Independence was announced for Annam and Cambodia. Ambassadors from the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere discussed independence for Java, promised a year earlier by then prime minister Tojo. The authorities would raise the ‘political status’ of Koreans and Formosans. It was better not to instil Japanese culture by fear. Filipino ‘pensionados’ were being brought to Japan for special higher education to prepare for leadership positions. For Australia, there were taunts about being relegated to a minor role in the Pacific War, uncomfortably close to the truth.
President Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, and the new Japanese prime minister, Admiral Suzuki, bizarrely sent a message of sympathy to the American people, while insisting there would be no change in Japan’s policies. Kurusu, his foreign minister, thought Truman would be a weaker leader, less able to make bold decisions and overrule his generals.
The landing on Okinawa seemed to confirm the worst fears about what lay ahead in terms of popular resistance on the main islands. Charles felt a pang at the nobility of the last sally by the great battleship Yamato. Surely this symbolised the end of the Japan they all knew? Neither he nor Inagaki could share the triumphant mood around them, especially among the naval men thinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales.
The FELO analysts learnt from new prisoners and captured diaries about the desperate defence measures. A pilot, captured after his plane crash-landed in Mindanao, told his interrogators how flyers were pressured by their peers into volunteering for kamikaze missions. In Luzon, an instruction was given that the seriously wounded should be given a day and night to meditate before being expected to commit suicide ‘so that each man may attain for himself the determination of gladly sacrificing himself for his country’. A broadcast praised the Giretsu special forces and the Jinrai piloted bombs which would, it said, turn the tide against American sea and air power.
The capitulation of Nazi Germany was preceded by Moscow’s withdrawal from its neutrality pact with Japan. The events were discussed with obvious nervousness in Japanese broadcasts, while FELO played them up in its leaflets. Suzuki admitted they would add ‘untold difficulties’ to Japan’s pursuit of the Great East Asia War. But the bombers used in Europe would not be suitable for the Pacific, he said, and the Soviets would now have to face an anti-Bolshevik line-up of the European and American powers in the West. In a turn of desperate flattery, the Soviets were praised for eschewing the reckless bombing tactics of the Americans, and the Germans were now said to be starting to realise that warnings about Soviet atrocities were pure propaganda.
Access to Germany gave Allied intelligence a new window into Japan, through the reports from its German residents. FELO learnt that the former Nazi embassy staff had been told to stay in the mountain resort of Karuizawa. One resident bemoaned the ration of two bottles of beer a month, and the closure of restaurants and geisha houses so Hitomi (his wife) ‘could be without fear as I have to be good even though not of my own choice’.
Asia was in ferment, its peoples waiting for the moment to break loose from their political restraints. Korean prisoners began to give FELO details of the communist underground in Japan and North China, spreading rapidly in Korea and among the Koreans following the Japanese army as photographers, merchants and prostitutes. The Korean independence movement or Chosen Dokuritsu-dan had its headquarters in Manchuria just north of Mount Hakudo [Hokkoda], or Paektu in their language, under a leader called ‘Kim Imil Sohn’. They wore dark blue uniforms and were armed by the Russians.
A Filipino taken to Japan as a pensionado told the Americans how liberal Japanese were shocked to hear of the face-slapping of local people by Japanese soldiers and officials and the routine expropriation of property in the occupied lands. Even so, unconscious of other races’ sensibilities, the same Japanese still talked of their own superiority. He and the other Filipinos were allowed to attend church but were still expected to bow towards the emperor when receiving their salary. The Japanese were stoic, but sobbed uncontrollably watching patriotic movies and at the farewell parties for sons being called up.
Bandung Radio discussed the propaganda war relating to Indonesian independence, promised by the Japanese in September 1944, and attacked the counter-proposal of the Dutch leader Dr van Mook for a strong multi-racial state that avoided the word independence. ‘The enemy is now copying us in referring to Indonesians, not inlander [islanders, or natives]. It’s always Long Live Queen Wilhelmina, the coat of arms of Dutch Kingdom and its motto, Je Maintiendrai …’
The FEL
O staff followed the efforts of their American ‘psywar’ counterparts in trying to persuade the hold-out bands of Japanese in the hinterland of Saipan and Guam to surrender. They sent their own FELO teams into the little campaigns that occupied the Australian forces in the last months of the year, the landings in Borneo and the mopping-up of isolated Japanese forces in Lae, Wewak and Bougainville.
At the beginning of May 1945, FELO had the crowning moment of its once hopeless-looking campaign to induce surrenders. One of its units in New Guinea found a FELO leaflet left on a stick in a jungle path. On the back was written: ‘We intend to cease fighting. Send an officer to this place.’
An officer went with an escort the next day, but no one appeared. A native soldier was sent with a white flag to seek out the Japanese, then he led them back. The group was an entire unit of 41 men, remnants of an original company of 120 soldiers, led by a lieutenant-colonel, and including a captain, two first lieutenants and four warrant officers.
The commanding officer, Takenaga Masaharu, frankly admitted it was his decision to surrender to save the lives of his men. He had manoeuvred away from the main body of Japanese to enable them to do so safely. His one wish now was to be allowed to stay and become a farmer in Australia. He would be in disgrace if sent back to Japan, and then would have no option but to commit suicide.
A civilian working for the official news agency Domei, captured at Tarakan at the end of that month, told his captors that all thinking people in Japan now realised the situation was hopeless. ‘The army is holding a pistol to the head of the Japanese people, forcing them to go on with a hopeless war,’ he said.
Abandoned military records told them of dissent surfacing in the Japanese ranks. A report on a court martial of an officer-candidate named Tajiro Tomoo in Luzon revealed him to have been a secret communist, once belonging to a study group smashed by the police, who had shown his true nature by having ‘reviled the dignity of the emperor’ and insulted his commanding officer. A corporal captured by the British in Burma had been a member of a ‘Red Spark Society’ active in the Kyoto and Osaka area, who had been trying to revive contacts among disciples of Osugi Sakae, the murdered anarchist. He also talked of the Suiheisha, a 300-year-old organisation of the Japanese untouchable caste, active in several centres.
In June, Allied leaflets, including many produced by FELO, were cited by Admiral Suzuki as a reason for introducing an extraordinary war measures bill in the Diet, instead of invoking existing provisions for emergency rule that would in effect, have meant martial law. He said his move was designed to counter ‘frantic propaganda to drive a wedge between Japanese people and the fighting services’. Back in Australia, Proud was elated to hear this news.
There were increasing references to leaflet drops, and warnings to the population to hand them in or face severe punishment. Then there came an admission by a commentator on the national broadcaster, NHK, that a few, probably anarchists and communists, had surrendered and ‘lost the characteristics of the Japanese’. The great majority of the 70 million Japanese still held to the ideal of fighting to the end, and believed the prisoner of war was a dead man who could not return to his country.
The end of the war was coming. But Suzuki was still insisting that unconditional surrender as defined by the Allies would mean the end of the Japanese race and the death of the entire population. Seizing Okinawa was one thing; taking the main islands would require two to three million troops. All Japanese would wait to deliver the decisive blow.
It had become very personal. Charles and Naka had heard nothing about Eddie since they left Singapore, though they always thought he’d charm his way through anything. At the end of August 1944, when he had turned 18, their quiet son John gave them another surprise.
Chapter 16
END OF EMPIRE
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
— The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Bougainville 1945
Brisbane was a raucous, dissolute town between 1942 and 1945, or at least more than usually so. Extra water pipes were laid along the gutters, initially as a precaution against fire-bombing in the first fearful months, and air-raid shelters were built on the pavements. The latter turned into urinals for the drunken troops wandering the city, the former became sluices to wash away the overflow. The Australians shook down the better-paid Americans for drinking money, fought them, and were occasionally shot by their US army provos. Trainloads of experienced whores arrived from the south, supplemented by eager local teenage amateurs. Charles saw several women with the copper-coloured sores that had signalled the ignominious end of his own military career in the First World War.
Their youngest boy, John, had stayed close to home, not surprisingly as with his spectacles, slight frame and studious look he fitted the local stereotype of the Japanese quite well and was often the object of remarks and taunts when he went out. He was a dutiful member of his father’s office at FELO, keeping to himself. At home he was close to his mother and became a regular churchgoer. Neither he nor Charles talked much about their work. For a long while, Naka didn’t seem to grasp that they were part of an alliance making war against Japan.
But at the end of August 1944, John turned up in the khaki serge and slouch hat of the Australian army. He had enlisted on turning 18. Brookes had already singled him out for future duty in the field with FELO, and persuaded the army medical board to overlook his flat feet. He was recalled for a second medical examination. ‘Hmmm, they’re not too flat,’ one doctor said.
John went off for three months of basic training at Cowra, falling badly during an obstacle course and dislocating his shoulder. When he wrote home about it, Charles reprimanded him for having let go of his rifle in the fall.
On 31 January 1945, John flew in a Dakota transport to the advance airstrip at Torokina, on the west coast of Bougainville island. The aircraft bumped down on a landing strip of crushed white coral, edged by tall palm trees, with mountains and a smoking volcano in the distance. With his companion, an older signalman named John Iles, John supervised the unloading of their equipment: a petrol-driven generator, an amplifier filled with large valves, a gramophone, two huge loudspeakers with two-metre directional horns and a thousand metres of electrical cable. A truck turned up with six island men on board to heave the boxes of gear aboard.
By the time the heavy rain started later in the day, they were under canvas in a camp between the airfield and the sea, signposted as belonging to the Allied Intelligence Bureau. The two spent their days watching the comings and goings of the New Zealand air force Corsairs and Beauforts on their bombing and strafing missions inland, and observing the bustle of landing ships nosing in to the narrow beach and disgorging trucks, jeeps and tanks onto the steel-mesh ramps.
Four days later their officer, a 40-year-old lieutenant named Robert Heanly, arrived by air. The team began practice broadcasts, connecting their equipment to the generator and reading announcements to the bedraggled coconut trees. Already, the amplifier and speakers were plagued by short-circuits resulting from the damp tropical air.
At the beginning of March, the No. 3 Front Line Broadcasting Unit of FELO marched out to battle. Heanly, Iles, John and the six native constables, plus their gear weighing a third of a ton, boarded a truck and headed up a muddy trail alongside the Laruma River, which they crossed and re-crossed 23 times in one and a half hours. The flat coastal plain gave way to steep hills, covered with magnificent jungle.
At the road-head, powerfully built local men with black skins loaded the equipment on to shoulders and slings. They set off up a steep narrow path of slippery clay between exposed tree roots. The three soldiers and six constables followed, hauling themselves up by grabbing branches and saplings. Quickly they were soaked in sweat. The climb up to Barges’ Hill took several hours. Before dark, they set up a bivouac and went to sleep soon after eating, listening to the heavy rain drumming on the c
anvas over their heads.
In the morning, the unit plodded on to the forward position of the Australian force, and set up the speakers on Pearl Ridge, facing across a valley to the Japanese lines on Smith’s Hill. Far beyond they could see a thin line of sea on the east side of Bougainville.
Iles tapped the microphone, and nodded to John. He picked out a record from one of the boxes and put it on to the whirling turntable of the gramophone. The lilt of a Japanese enka, a nostalgic ballad of separation from home and family sung in a plaintive tone, seeped into the twilight and steadily grew in strength as Iles turned up the volume. Several of their own soldiers down the hillside turned to look.
When the record ended, John cleared his throat and leant over the microphone. He began to speak in Japanese:
Your position is hopeless. You have been abandoned. Is it of any service to your country to throw away your lives uselessly in the jungle? Your families constantly pray for your return. You have fulfilled your mission of strategic and protracted resistance, but owing to lack of supplies and the difficulties of the jungle, if you continue to resist you will all perish …
And so began John’s attack on Japanese morale. A scout unit crept up the opposing hill to within 75 metres of the Japanese position and reported the broadcast could be heard clearly in the still evenings, when sound carried twice as far.
The unit settled down to a daily routine of morning and evening broadcasts, each a sequence of news announcements, surrender exhortations and instructions, quotations from Japanese prisoners about their correct treatment, and music from home.
Leaflets were carried up from Torokina, and stuffed into special shells which the gunners fired from their 25-pounders to burst open above the Japanese positions.
But it was the evening broadcasts, when soldiers had eaten their rations and were dispersed into their foxholes and shelters, the deep darkness of the jungle cutting them off from the scrutiny of their officers and comrades, that got into the innermost thoughts of the Japanese soldiers, unlocking memories of home, mothers and sisters, the yearly cycles of rice growing, the temple visits, the summer festivals when the young men stripped down to loincloths and carried the portable shrines through the villages. The broadcasts played shamelessly on this nostalgia.
War of Words Page 24
