Cruiser (72 page)

The sea was still strewn with survivors, many hundreds of them. After a long and frustrating search, the
Pampanito
had found and torpedoed the other hell ship, the
Kachidoki Maru
. Of the 900 British prisoners aboard her, 244 were killed in the explosion and fires that followed, leaving 656 to the mercies of the Japanese and the ocean. They, and the remaining Australians from the
Rakuyo Maru
, struggled in a scum of fuel oil and debris spread across an ever-widening tract of the South China Sea. Some hung onto a plank or a spar alone. Others put together makeshift rafts, where they would, at least, have company.

Into the second day and then the third, men started to go mad. And to die. Tormented by starvation and thirst, many succumbed to the temptation of gulping seawater, which plunged them first into hallucinations and then into the coils of insanity. They held rambling conversations with mothers, wives and children, cackling with laughter or moaning piteously. Others saw visions of desert oases or palm-fringed beaches, chimeras of ships with billowing sails come to rescue them, horses to ride away. Some men who turned violent in their insanity were either drowned or strangled to save others on the rafts endangered by their thrashing and raving.

Still more died alone and anonymously, out of sight. The Turnbull brothers from Queensland – Jack, Bill and Ken – were all lost in the South China Sea. No one ever saw Bill and Ken, the young soldiers, after the
Rakuyo Maru
went down. A few men recalled seeing Jack, the
Perth
stoker petty officer, in the water but do not know what happened to him. Florrie Turnbull, their recently widowed mother in Brisbane's West
End, had lost all three boys. Jack was the eldest at 32, married, with four children.

After a hurried dive to avoid a Japanese aircraft off Hainan, Commander Summers brought
Pampanito
back to the surface and resumed his patrol eastwards towards the Philippines.
Sealion
was with him, some 25 kilometres away over the horizon.
Growler
, her torpedoes expended, had already returned to Saipan. It was 15 September – three days after the sinkings. After the change of watch at 4 pm, the lookouts atop
Pampanito
's conning tower spotted what looked like rafts with men on them. Suspecting that the waving figures might be Japanese, Summers ordered a boarding party on deck with machine guns, then swept warily past the rafts, inspecting them through his binoculars. It was hard to tell who or what they were until
Pampanito
's Executive Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Landon L. Davis Jnr, heard someone shout, in English, ‘Save us, please!'

The first man they hauled on board was an Australian, Frank Farmer, an army private with the 2/10 Ordnance Workshop and a former schoolteacher from Black Rock in Melbourne. Landon Davis questioned him at the foot of the conning tower, and the Americans were stunned at the dimension of the tragedy that confronted them. Horrified, they realised they had caused the death and destruction. It was war, and the ships had not been marked as carrying prisoners, but that did not diminish the anguish they felt. Summers radioed
Sealion
for help and began to fish men out of the water, moving from raft to raft, volunteers diving into the swell to secure lines to those too weak to help themselves.

American submarines did not carry a doctor, just one pharmacist's mate or medic. As the wretched figures were lowered down the hatches,
Pampanito
's crew rallied around to tend to them. Gently, they swabbed their bodies with diesel fuel or raw alcohol to get the oil off, gave them shots of morphine if they were in pain, then laid them in bunks hastily knocked together on the racks in the after Torpedo Room. The cooks busied themselves with relays of beef broth, toast and cocoa, but some men could only suck on rags soaked in water.

Eli Reich and
Sealion
, travelling at flank speed, arrived at 6.30, an hour before sunset, and the rescue now became a race to collect as many men as possible before darkness set in.
Sealion
was the first to pick up
Perth
sailors: Redlead's keeper Bob Collins and A.B. Jack Houghton, a 23-year-old from Wynnum in Brisbane. Collins and an air-force mate, Leading Aircraftsman Noel Day, from Byrock in New South Wales, were floating on part of a hatch cover. Collins recalled:

As darkness fell, the submarine skippers called off the rescue with heavy hearts, knowing that they were abandoning men in the water.
Pampanito
had picked up 73 survivors, which meant doubling the number of bodies on board.
Sealion
recovered 54 men. Both boats bent on four engines and headed for Saipan. Questioned by Reich as they recovered in their bunks, Collins and Houghton told him of the loss of the
Houston
, the first eyewitness account the US Navy had received.

Blood Bancroft watched in despair as
Pampanito
vanished into the night, the throb of her diesels fading into the distance. Her departure left a terrible quiet, broken only by the slap of the sea. He was on a crude raft with five other men, and there were still dozens more in the water, including Lloyd ‘Darby' Munro, a
Perth
stoker from Byron Bay in New South Wales, 21 years old, who was hanging on to some wreckage not far away. Bancroft felt then that all hope of salvation had gone. The sun was pitiless by day and the nights were chilly. They were smeared with oil, blistered by sunburn, gasping to breathe, their tongues swollen in salt-caked mouths. They had no food or water. Some men tried collecting their own urine in cupped hands and drinking it. One knot of men attempted to open the
veins of others who had died, to drink their blood. The next day, the weather began to blow up, and by the evening strong winds and a heavy rain were whipping the wave tops white. Blood and his mates managed to collect some rainwater in a small wooden bucket they had found, drank from it greedily and lashed themselves to the raft as best they could.

But help was coming. Pearl Harbor had ordered two more submarines to head for the rescue zone.
Barb
and
Queenfish
, from the wolf pack Ed's Eradicators, were on the scene the next morning, 17 September.
Barb
's skipper, Commander Eugene Fluckey, conned his boat slowly through seas rising beneath a 25-knot breeze, the bridge crew sombre at the sight and stench of bloated bodies, both Japanese and friendly, drifting in the swell. There was no time to waste. The barometer was dropping sharply, with every sign of a typhoon approaching. At one o'clock that afternoon, Barb found her first survivors on a raft, and by the evening she had collected 14 of them, including Darby Munro. Fluckey, deeply moved like all his crew, noted in his log:

Early that same afternoon, as their raft rose on a crest, the six men of Blood Bancroft's group saw the conning tower of a
submarine heading towards them and they waved and shouted with all they had left. Again to their dismay, this vision of mercy also turned away into the troughs, but a few hours later she was back, and the men on her deck tossed a line to haul the raft towards them.

This was
Queenfish
. Her First Lieutenant, Jack Bennett, reaching down to help Bancroft on board, was amazed to hear the Australian insist that he would clamber onto the sub's casing under his own steam. Filthy with oil, his flaming red hair matted like old rope, eyes sunken in a haggard, straggle-bearded face, as skinny as a rake and nearly naked, Ordinary Seaman Arthur Bancroft RAN, Service Number F3239, drew himself up to his full height and snapped off a salute as if he was joining a ship at Garden Island.

‘Permission to come aboard, sir?' he said.

The Americans marvelled at his courage.

With night and the storm approaching, both skippers called off the search.
Queenfish
had taken 18 men on board. The two submarines set a course for Saipan on the surface, keeping watch the next morning on the chance of finding more men alive, but they had no luck in the peaks and troughs of waves tossed up by what was becoming a minor typhoon. The four boats of Ben's Buster's and Ed's Eradicators had rescued a total of 159 men, although seven of them died on the way to Saipan and were buried over the side, some anonymously, for there had been no way of identifying them. In all, 92 Australians and 60 British lived to tell their stories.
¹⁵
It was the war's greatest rescue at sea, succinctly summed up by Gene Fluckey's note in the log of the
Barb
:

Only at the end of the war could the final death toll be compiled. In all, 543 Australians were lost in the sinking of the
Rakuyo Maru
. Most were army, seven were from the RAAF, and 33 were sailors from HMAS
Perth
. Among them was Wally Johnston, the fresh-faced kid who'd been Fred Skeels's best mate since the age of ten at Perth's Inglewood Primary School.

The trip to Saipan took five days for
Sealion
and
Pampanito
and almost ten days for
Barb
and
Queenfish
, whose skippers had to slow down to batter their way through the storm. With proper food and care, most of the survivors began to make a slow recovery, regaining strength under the watchful eye of their sailor nurses, although some men remained too weak to leave their bunks. Asked what he would like for his first meal, Blood Bancroft cheerfully suggested sausages but was politely told that would be a little rich to begin with. After years of forcing rubbish into shrunken stomachs, the men had to be carefully re-accustomed to a normal diet with its fats and sugars, and the overworked pharmacist's mates had instructions from naval doctors ashore to take it slowly.

When they got to Saipan, the welcome was ecstatic. The word had gone around. As the subs tied up, ice cream and fresh oranges appeared from nowhere. The crews who had nursed them with such dedication did a whip around and stumped up hundreds of dollars for spending money. Dressed in US Navy dungarees, the men were met by cheering American sailors and army GIs, who tossed cigarettes and chewing gum as they were put into tenders and transported ashore to the US Army's 148th Field Hospital. It was there that the glorious reality of their liberation hit home: female nurses laid them between crisp white sheets with the tenderness of mothers. The sight, the smell, the sound, the touch of a woman after so long seemed
surreal at first and then just plain sublime.

The next days passed in a whirl, a dream, almost a fantasy. There were hot baths with fresh soap, three meals a day and movies at night. Yet habit died hard; the men wolfed down their food as if each meal was to be their last. Telegrams were fired off to Australia and Britain with lists of names. American intelligence officers questioned the men about their experiences, and a Royal Navy captain flew in from Hawaii to debrief the
Perth
sailors, firstly about the loss of their ship and then about the atrocities they had experienced. After that came the problem of getting the Australians back home. There was no RAN ship anywhere in the area, and the Australian Government had no way of providing transport, so the Americans once again stepped up to the plate.

A troopship, the
Alcoa Polaris
, took them south across the equator to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where they thrilled to the taste of a cold Australian beer again, and from there they were loaded on board a minelayer, the USS
Monadnock
. On 18 October, they sailed into Brisbane's Moreton Bay, lining the deck from before dawn, choked with emotion, bursting for that first glimpse of their homeland. As the
Monadnock
eased into the Brisbane River, a naval launch came alongside, and Bob Collins, leaning over the rail, saw his old foe Commander Charles ‘Pricky' Reid,
Perth
's former Executive Officer. The four ratings – Collins, Jack Houghton, Blood Bancroft and Darby Munro – were called to the captain's cabin to meet him. Reid greeted them warmly, even Collins, and pumped them with questions as the ship went alongside.

Their arrival was kept secret. An army band met them at the wharf and General Blamey himself was there to deliver a speech of welcome, but there were no crowds, no family or friends, no cameras whirring away for the newsreels. Nobody was quite sure what to do with them. The army survivors were marched off and held in seclusion at the Stuartholme Catholic convent in Brisbane for two weeks for medical check-ups and more interrogation by intelligence officers. Blood Bancroft
found that the RAN, for some reason, was more relaxed:

The WRAN was Betty Duncan, wife of Vic Duncan. Working in Naval Intelligence, she knew of the men's return and was desperate for news of her husband. With callous insensitivity, the navy did not permit her to see them, and she was turned away. As it happened, the four had no idea that Duncan's group had been picked out of the water by the Japanese, but it seems extraordinary that they were not allowed to speak to his wife. The navy, though, had other fish to fry. This was the first chance for the RAN, the Naval Board and the government to learn first-hand of
Perth
's last hours.

When the questioning ended, the doctor pronounced the four fit enough to be sent home. Quietly, it happened. Jack Houghton, a Queenslander, was shown into a staff car and driven to his home in Kingsley Terrace in the bay-side suburb of Manly. He knocked on the door. There was no one there. Still dressed in an American uniform, hovering on the footpath, not knowing what to do next, he saw his wife, Esma, walking down the street towards him. She wondered what the Yank was doing hanging around her gate. Jack was the first
Perth
sailor and the first survivor of the Burma–Siam Railway to be reunited with his family.

Bob Collins and Darby Munro were sent by train to Sydney. Blood Bancroft was put on a plane for Perth, where the Red Cross had arranged for his parents to meet him at the airport. And Mirla, true to her word, had waited for him too. Each man was given three months' leave and told that he was to lie
low and, for ‘security reasons', not talk about his experiences. On the flight home, Blood had bumped into one of his old school teachers, Dorothy Tangney,
²
by then a Labor senator, who gasped in surprise when she recognised the young sailor. ‘Arthur, you're supposed to be in a POW camp,' she spluttered.

The first news of the
Rakuyo Maru
survivors came in a few brief paragraphs in the newspapers on 17 October, the day before they landed in Brisbane. Quoting the British War Office, the article simply said that 36 Australians – army 31, navy 4, RAAF 1 – had been rescued from a Japanese transport torpedoed in the Pacific, that they were on their way home, and that next of kin had been informed. A demand had been made for the Japanese to supply lists of those aboard the transport and of any other survivors. And that was that. Without mentioning any names, it laid an added burden of hope and fear on thousands of families desperate for word of their prisoner husband, father, son or sweetheart.

The War Cabinet dithered for another month. The survivors' accounts of their imprisonment had some ministers determined to tell the world of the atrocities on the railway and elsewhere; others thought that might further distress the families and make things worse for the men still in captivity. A reporter from
The Sydney Morning Herald
, Tom Farrell, was allowed to interview the returned men, but on condition that their stories could be published only if the government permitted. The British and Australian Governments discussed the matter further and decided on disclosure, with carefully tailored statements to be made simultaneously to the parliaments in London and Canberra.

In early November, John Curtin, under ever more physical and emotional strain, suffered a heart attack and was confined to the Mercy Hospital in Melbourne for three weeks, leaving his deputy, Frank Forde, as Acting Prime Minister. On Friday 17 November, Forde read to the House of Representatives the most horrifying statement ever delivered to an Australian parliament. At last, the truth could come out. Dealing first
with the sinking of the
Rakuyo Maru
, he went on to draw a stark picture of the treatment of prisoners of war in Japanese hands, with the sombre estimate that perhaps 2000 men had died in Burma and Siam alone. On both sides of the House, members sat in shock, some with tears glistening on their cheeks, as he concluded:

Forde's statement was splashed across every newspaper in Australia the next morning, together with Farrell's graphic reports of the stories told to him by the survivors. The headlines were arresting. ‘Japanese Horrors. Many Deaths in Camps. Stark Story of Survivors of Sunken Transport,' said
The West Australian
, typical of most. Again, no names were permitted by the censor, the men being referred to simply as a North Queenslander or a Sydneysider, which caused further misery to those waiting and praying for news of a loved one. Melbourne's
Argus
newspaper summed up the mood of the nation in an editorial:

Blood Bancroft and all the survivors received a telegram from the King congratulating them on their deliverance. As their names became known on the grapevine, they were bombarded with enquiries from the families of missing men, and they gave what information they could. At best, though, it was patchy and unreliable, unless they had personally seen a man die. Then it was unbearable. By the end of the year, further questioning had given the Naval Board a better picture of who had survived
Perth
's sinking and who had not, and in early 1945, a letter went out to some of the families for whom there was little hope. For Reg Whiting's wife, Allie, the bleak official phraseology must have been heartbreaking.

Official sympathy was all very well, but it meant little to families longing to know what had happened to their menfolk. The pain of their uncertainty would linger long after the war's end.

Ray Parkin's admiration for the Japanese landscape was not shared by everyone. The Ohasi Camp, north-west of Tokyo, was a clump of rough timber huts huddled beneath a hillside near a coal mine. Fred Lasslett and the other Australian, Dutch and American prisoners were given shirts, trousers and boots and were even allowed the occasional hot bath, but the winter was a torment after so long in the tropics. They worked outdoors in temperatures well below freezing, shifting rocks and steel plates, and it was not long before men began to die of pneumonia, to be cremated at pathetic little funerals. By nights, in the relative warmth of the huts, where a coal stove burned, Fred continued writing his letters to Nola Caldwell, the girl back at the ballroom in Prahran.