Australian POWs in Japan

Arrival in Japan

While all our hopes during the long years of captivity had been to see an Allied victory, we were apprehensive about our chances of surviving an invasion of Japan.

[Hugh V Clarke, Last Stop Nagasaki! Sydney, George Allen & Unwin, 1985, p 83]

The Japanese captured several thousand Allied prisoners in South-East Asia between 1942 and 1944. Many of these prisoners were taken to Japan. Among them were nearly 3,000 Australians.

The first group of 60 officers and 19 women were shipped from Rabaul in New Britain in July 1942. This group included 6 nurses from the Australian Army Nursing Service.

Like most prisoners, they travelled in small stifling cargo ships, known as 'hell ships'. In this instance, the men and women travelled together.

Many other groups of prisoners, usually of mixed nationalities, arrived over the next 2 years.

In 1942 and 1943, 3 main forces came from Changi in Singapore:

• C Force (2,200 strong including 563 Australians) in late November 1942
• G Force (1,500 including 200 Australians) in late April 1943
• J Force (900 including 300 Australians who were mostly convalescent) in mid-May 1943.

They were followed in June and July 1944 by:

• a group of 267 Australians shipped from Java and Timor
• a further 2,250 prisoners, including 1,000 Australians, from Singapore
• a force of 2,300 prisoners who survived the building of the Burma-Thailand Railway, in September 1944.

By this stage, US submarines dominated the seas between South-East Asia and Japan.

Only 73 of the 267 people in the first convoy survived when the ship on which they were travelling, SS Tamahoko Maru, was torpedoed.

Some 1,650 British and Australians on SS Rokyo Maru and SS Kachidoki Maru were also sunk in September 1944, with the loss of 540 Australians including the commander of A Force Brigadier A Varley.

The third convoy took 70 days to reach Japan, stopping at Borneo, the Philippines and Formosa (now Taiwan) en route.

The last party arrived in Japan in January 1945 after a long voyage, which involved sheltering in many small harbours along the way. The group included 600 Australians who had been brought from Tha Markam on the Burma-Thailand Railway to Singapore via Saigon.

Camps in Japan

The Australian women transferred from New Britain spent the war at Totsuka, about 30 km south of Yokohama. They were tasked with:

• digging air-raid shelters
• carrying wood
• cutting trees
• making small items for pay.

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Once in Japan, the rest of the Australian POWs were broken into small groups and scattered across many camps, including:

• Akanobe, Ikuno, Kobe, Naoetsu, Oeyama, Ohama, Osaka, Sakata, Taisho, Takefu, Tokyo and Yokohama, on Honshu Island
• Zentsuji, on Shikoku Island
• Moji, Fukuoka, Hakarta, Omuta and Kanoya, on Kyushu Island
• Nisi Asi-Betu, on Hokkaido Island.
   

The POW workforce was used in Japanese industries. Mostly they worked in:

• coal and copper mines
• iron and smelting works
• shipyards- welding, riveting and painting, and as riggers.

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Differing conditions at camps

The range of the camps and locations across Japan makes it difficult to generalise about the prisoners' experiences.

In some camps - for example, Yokohama and Naoetsu - the treatment was brutal and there were many petty restrictions. Within the first 13 months at Naoetsu, 20% of the Australians died.

In contrast, at Totsuka, none of the Australian women died.

Wherever they were, prisoners endured:

• long working hours
• flea and lice infestations
• bad health resulting from a poor diet.

The Japanese winters were particularly severe. Some prisoners died of pneumonia.

However, some of the deprivations they suffered were also experienced by the wider Japanese population as the US blockade strangled the Japanese economy in the later years of the war.

Conditions were alleviated a little by the fact that many camps received some supplies of Red Cross parcels. This was a privilege rarely granted to prisoners in South-East Asia.

Red Cross parcels included sugar, bully beef, meat and vegetables - essential supplements to the starvation diet provided by the Japanese. Some camps received warm clothing.

At times, the prisoners in Japan also received mail from home and were allowed to write to their families.

As the Allies advanced closer to Japan in 1944 and 1945, air raids became increasingly common.

Some POW camps were hit by conventional and incendiary bombing, and the men became increasingly exhausted as they were moved from camp to camp to evade the bombing.

Adding to the tension was the fact that the prisoners feared a Japanese massacre when an Allied invasion occurred.

At one camp, a tunnel was dug leading to anxious speculation as to whether the prisoners were digging their own tomb:

All they would have to do would be to herd us inside and blast the two entrances.

[Quoted in Clarke Last Stop Nagasaki!, p 85]

But then in early August 1945, news was received of a 'burning' bomb. On 9 August, prisoners working on the ships at Nagasaki saw a B-29 circling:

There was this almighty flash like lighting, then an orange explosion, then the blast. I was thrown right across the bridge, covered in dust and glass, and a couple of my mates took me to the big air-raid shelter in the dockyard. When I was told that one bomb had killed 100 000 people and that Nagasaki had just disappeared I could only say 'bullshit'.

[John King quoted in Hugh V Clarke, Twilight Liberation: Australian prisoners of war between Hiroshima and home, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1985, p 119]

Commemoration of those who died

Those Australians who died in Japan were later buried by the Australian War Graves Group in the Yokohama War Cemetery.