MARITIME DISASTERS
H.M.S. REPULSE and H.M.S. PRINCE OF WALES
(December 10, 1941) British warships sunk by Japanese naval aircraft off Kuantan, Malaya. The ships were spotted by the Japanese submarine I-58 just before dawn and attacked by a force of nine 'Betty' torpedo carrying planes of the Japanese 22nd Naval Air Flotilla from the Japanese base at Saigon and led by Lt.Haruki Iki. The battleship Prince of Wales was hit by four torpedoes and sank at 12.33pm. The cruiser Repulse was hit by 14 torpedoes and sank at 1.20pm.The death toll from both ships was 840 men (Repulse 513, and the Prince Of Wales, 327) A total of 2,081 lives were saved by the escorting destroyers H.M.S. Electra, Vampire and Express and taken back to Singapore. The day after the sinking, Lt. Iki flew over the grave site of the two ships and dropped a bouquet of flowers. The Far Eastern Fleet commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips went down with his ship. In this action, the Japanese lost only four planes. After this disaster, the dominant role of battleships in war came under grave doubt. The sinking of these two battleships left the door to the 'impregnable fortress' of Singapore, wide open.
ROKUYO MARU
(Sept. 12\13, 1944) On September 4th. 2,218 Australian and British prisoners of war, who had survived the building of the Death Railway, were marched the three miles from the Valley Road camp in Singapore, to the docks to board the two transport ships Rakuyo Maru and the KACHIDOKI MARU bound for an internment camp on Formosa. In the South China Sea, the convoy, consisting of three transports, two tankers and four escorting destroyers, was attacked by three American submarines, the Growler, Sealion and the Pampanito. The Rokuyo and Kachidoki were both sunk by torpedoes. A total of 1,144 British and Australian POWs lost their lives. Among those lost were thirty-three men from HMAS Perth. All told there were 1,074 survivors, 141 were picked up by the three submarines and the USS Queenfish which arrived later. The Japanese destroyers rescued 520 British prisoners from the Kachidoki and 277 British and Australians from the Rokuyo, to again become POWs.
TOYOFUKU MARU
(Sept.21, 1944) Japanese transport carrying prisoners-of-war enroute from Singapore to Japan was attacked and sunk by US torpedo carrying bombers. Loaded with British and Dutch POWs, it stopped at Manila to unload the sick and dying. It sailed again in convoy and was attacked again when only three days out. It took only a few minutes for the ship to go down drowning around 1,000 men who were trapped in the holds. Less than 200 survived.
AWA MARU
(April 1, 1945) Japanese passenger cargo ship of 11,249 tons, Captain Hamada Matsutaro, homeward bound after having delivered Red Cross relief supplies to American and Allied POWs in Japanese custody under an agreement between Japan and the US Government which guaranteed safe passage for such ships. The third ship to carry out this relief programme was the Awa Maru which picked up the Red Cross parcels from the stockpile at Nakhodka, one hundred miles south of Vladivostok. They had been transported there by five Soviet ships which had sailed from Portland, Oregon in December, 1943 loaded with 2,500 tons of supplies. The Awa Maru was painted green with large white crosses on her sides and funnel, all illuminated by special spot lights. Loaded with 175 tons of Red Cross supplies, the Japanese also loaded crates of aircraft parts, munitions and other commodities desperately needed by Japanese troops in Southeast Asia. This was in complete violation of the relief for POW agreement. After unloading her cargo at various stops on her journey south, the Awa Maru was now in Singapore preparing for the journey home to Japan. Before leaving Singapore on March 28, she had on board over 2,000 Japanese officials, diplomats, technicians and civilians, all eager to escape the Allied bombs that were now falling on the city. Calling at Jakarta, she took on 2,500 tons of crude oil, thousands of tons of oil drilling machinery, tin ingots, tungsten and rubber. Although the Americans knew what was going on they were reluctant to do anything about it in fear that the relief supplies would be stopped. Submarine commanders were ordered to 'let it go by safely'. However, April 1st. saw the US submarine Queenfish, Commander Charles E. Loughlin, on her fourth patrol, in the Taiwan Strait in an area near where the Awa Maru would have to pass through. At 11pm, a pip appeared on the Queenfish's radar indicating a possible target at 17,000 yards. Loaded far beyond normal limits, and travelling low in the water, the ship presented a smaller than usual radar image not unlike that of a destroyer. What happened next proved to be the greatest submarine error of the Pacific war. The Queenfish fired four torpedoes, all of which hit the target. As the submarine approached the oil covered spot where the target had sunk, the crew picked up one exhausted man from the water, the first class steward from the sunken ship, 46 year old Shimoda Kantaro, the only survivor of the Awa Maru.Drowned in this disaster were 2,003 persons including seventy -two Taiwanese civilians. On arrival back at base, Commander Loughlin was relieved of his command and faced court-martial the result of which cleared Laughlin of all charges of wrongdoing.
ASHIGARA
(June 8, 1945) The 13,380-ton Nachi class Japanese cruiser sunk by the British submarine H.M.S.Trenchant commanded by 'Baldy� A.R. Hezlet. (It was estimated that around 1,200 Japanese troops were on board on their way from Batavia to reinforce the garrison at Singapore). At the last minute the Ashigara had altered course and was hit by five torpedoes out of the eight fired by the Trenchant. In an effort to beach herself she headed towards Klipped Shoal near Sumatra but half an hour after being hit, the blazing Ashigara capsized and sank. A total of 853 survivors were rescued by the Japanese escort destroyer Kamikaze. Commander Hezlet was later awarded the DSO and the United States Legion of Merit.
lESS KNOWN FACTS
In February,1941, new recruits to the Australian 22nd Brigade (8th Division) boarded the liner Queen Mary anchored off Toronga Park Zoo in Sydney. Embarking more troops when the ship called at Fremantle in Western Australia, the ship left harbour and turned north. It was then that the troops were told that their destination was Singapore, not Europe where all the action was. To be used as garrison troops in this outpost of Empire was a bitter disappointment for the 5,750 soldiers on board. Two weeks later Japanese forces attacked Singapore and the garrison surrendered. The fighting in Malaya and in Singapore cost the Australians 2,178 killed. Two days after the surrender nearly 15,000 Australians and 35,000 British troops found themselves behind the walls of Changi Prison as prisoners of war.
Appointed Chief of Operations on March 18, 1942 and on August 25, 1943, appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. Received the capitulation of Japanese forces in Singapore on Sept.12. Became Viceroy of India and later the Governor General in 1947-48. Lord Louis Mountbatten, as he was then known, was assassinated by an IRA bomb placed on board his boat as he prepared to go fishing in Donegal Bay, County Sligo, in Ireland.
( St. Valentine's Day, Feb.14, 1942) On board the SS Vyner Brooke were 65 Australian Army nurses who, together with other civilian women and children, made up the 300 odd persons being evacuated from Singapore. In the Banka Strait, a narrow strip of water between the islands of Banka and Sumatra, the Vyner Brooke was bombed and sunk by Japanese planes. A few lifeboats managed to reach the mangrove lined shore of Banka Island. On advice from some islanders they were advised to give themselves up to the Japanese as there was no hope of escaping. That night another lifeboat arrived on the shore containing between 30 and 40 British servicemen from another ship sunk earlier. The civilian women, some nurses and children, then set out to walk to the nearest Japanese compound to give themselves up. When the Japanese arrived at the beach the men and women were separated, the men were marched into the jungle, never to be heard of again. The soldiers returned and forced the remaining 22 nurses to wade out into the sea. There, they were machined-gunned to death, leaving only one survivor, Sister Vivian Bulwinkle (1915-2000) who later managed to reach the island's Japanese Naval Headquarters where she was put to work in the hospital. For over three years she kept the secret of the massacre to herself and a few friends. To speak openly about it would have been a certain recipe for execution. Of the 65 nurses from the Vyner Brooke, 12 had drowned, 21 shot in the water at Radji Beach and 32 had gone into prison in Muntok before being shipped to Palembang in southern Sumatra to serve three-and-a-half years of privation and punishment as prisoners of war.
In January,1942, a company of Australian and Indian soldiers were captured by the Japanese and interned in a large wooden building at Parit Sulong in Malayasia. Late in the afternoon of January 22, 1942, they were ordered to assemble at the rear of a row of damaged shops nearby.The wounded were carried by those able to walk, the pretext being the promise of medical treatment and food. While waiting at the assembly point, either sitting or lying prone, three machine guns, concealed in the back rooms of the wrecked shops, started their deadly chatter, their concentrated fire chopping flesh and limbs to pieces. A number of prisoners whose bodies showed signs of life, had to be bayoneted. In order to dispose of the bodies, which totalled 161, the row of shops was blown up and the debris bulldozed into a heap on top of which the corpses were placed. Sixty gallons of gasoline was splashed on the bodies and then a flaming torch was thrown on the pile. Just before midnight, the debris of the nine shops had burned into a pile of grey ash two feet high, the 161 bodies totally incinerated. The perpetrator of this foul crime was Lt-Gen.Takuma Nishimura, 62, who later faced trial before an Australian Military Court. Nishimura was previously convicted of massacres in Singapore and sentenced to life imprisonment by a British Military Tribunal on April 2, 1947. After serving four years of his sentence, he was being transferred to Tokyo to serve out the rest of his sentence and while the ship stopped temporarily at Hong Kong he was seized by the Australian military police and taken to Manus Island where his second trial was held. He was found guilty and hanged on June 11, 1951.
In November, 1942, six hundred British POWs were marched from their prison at Changi to the docks at Singapore to board a 6,500 ton cargo ship. On the 5th Nov. the ship entered Simpson Harbour at Rabaul, New Britain. The POWs were transferred to Kokopo to start building a new airstrip. Three weeks later, 517 of the prisoners were shipped to a camp on Ballalae Island in the Solomons, there to start work on another airstrip for the Japanese. One prisoner died enroute. The 82 men left behind at Kokopo were very badly treated by their captors. Kicked, beaten, punched, thrashed and clubbed on a daily basis they were soon in a terrible state. Gravely ill with dysentery, malaria and berri-berri, they soon succumbed to death and by the end of February, 1945, only 57 were still alive. By April, only 21 of the original 82 were alive. Some had developed diphtheria scrotum which, because of a vitamin deficiency, causes the testicles to swell to the size of pineapples. Eventually the 21 sick prisoners were transferred to the Watom Island camp where they were made to dig tunnels to be used by the Japanese as air-raid shelters. Soon two more died and on September 6, 1945, when 89,291 Japanese military and civilian men and women surrendered to the Allies, the 18 survivors were freed and boarded the destroyer HMAS Vendetta for a hospital on Lae, then to Australia and then home. The surrender of Japanese forces in Rabaul and surrounding islands was formally signed on board the British aircraft carrier HMS Glory anchored off Rabaul. Meanwhile, on Ballalae Island, the prisoners suffered the same horrendous conditions as those at Kokopo. Sadly, not a single one of the 516 prisoners survived the war. In 1943, after the island was captured by the 3rd New Zealand Division, natives revealed that hundreds of POWs were killed during an Allied bombing raid and when the airstrip was completed at the end of March, 43, the remaining prisoners were lined up and executed by bayonet and sword. In December, 1945, an Australian War Graves unit exhumed 436 bodies from one mass grave and re-interred the remains in the Port Moresby War Cemetery.
A total of 188 War Crimes Trials were held at Rabaul after the war. The courts sentenced 93 Japanese war criminals to death, 78 were hanged and 15 were shot by firing squad.
Directly in the path of the invading Japanese hordes lay the Princess Alexandria Hospital in Singapore. Guarded by a detachment of Ghurka troops they were ordered by a Japanese officer to lay down their arms. The Ghurka NCO replied that this was not a military target but a civilian hospital. Angered by their refusal to disarm, the Japanese officer ordered his men to seize and kill two dozen of the Ghurka guards. This order was promptly carried out and the Nippon soldiers then entered the hospital. The wholesale slaughter which followed defies description, sick and dying patients being butchered in their beds. Some were just shot, others clubbed and bayoneted and not a few were beheaded by the sword. A number of the victims were survivors from the Prince of Wales and Repulse. The scene of carnage resembled an abattoir, disembowelled patients sprawled everywhere. Doctors and medical orderlies were then killed as were the nurses who were first raped in a most brutal fashion. A similar atrocity occurred in Manila when the Headquarters of the Filipino Red Cross in General Luna street was captured. Some seventy civilians, sick patients and a number of children were put to death in the same brutal and sadistic way. In Burma, on the afternoon of February 7, 1944 an Advance Field Hospital was overrun by the Japanese who first wiped out the protective guard of West Yorkshires then killed every doctor and medical orderly they could find. The sick and wounded were massacred where they lay after their personal possessions were stolen. In all, thirty-one patients, nine orderlies and four doctors were brutally put to death.
Collectively known as the 'Chinese Massacres', this peaceful city was subjected to acts of savagery, in many cases beyond anything the Nazis had dished out. The soldiers of Nippon had but one thing on their minds in Singapore, to exterminate the entire Chinese population of this great city. Reliable estimates put the final number killed at between nine and twelve thousand. After interrogation by the Kempetai they were obliged to hand over all their personal possessions, rings, watches, jewellery, money etc. before being forced on to captured British lorries and driven to the Tanjong Pagar Wharf where they were beheaded. The slaughter continued for twelve successive days as boats from Singapore Harbour brought even more Chinese civilians to the execution site. In the Geylong district, thousands of Chinese were herded into the grounds of the Teluk Kuran English School. Altogether, 3,600 persons were then interrogated by the Kempetai. In groups of two hundred, they were taken by truck to the crest of a hill off Siglap Road and there they were killed by shooting, beheading or bayoneting. All but one of the Teluk Kuran School victims, perished. In another massacre, seven hundred Chinese were taken to an area just east of Changi and murdered in the most disgusting manner. Their headless bodies were then thrown into already dug mass graves. The victims heads were piled up on the back of a waiting lorry and carted away. Next morning, the sight that greeted the Singaporean was something that they will never forget. Everywhere, mounted on the tips of long bamboo stakes, were the severed heads of the murdered Chinese. After the war, a British Military Court sentenced the commanding general of Japanese troops in Singapore, Lt.Gen.Takuma Nishimura, to life imprisonment, but at a later trial for other crimes, an Australian Military Court handed down a death sentence. He was hanged on June 11, 1951.
(1945) Sandakan, the prison compound in British North Borneo holding 2,434 Australian and British POWs. Captured when Singapore fell, they were transported in a decrepit tramp steamer, the Yubi Maru, to Sandakan to help build a military airstrip for the Japanese. When their labour was no longer required, they were confined to the prison compound where they slowly died from starvation, disease and brutalities. As the Allies approached the islands, over 1,000 prisoners, still alive, were force marched in groups of 50 to another camp in the jungle at Ranau, about 120 miles away. The 291 prisoners, including 288 stretcher cases, who were too sick to march, and left behind at Sandakan, were massacred soon after, many dying after undergoing diabolical torture. In June, 1945, of the 455 prisoners that left Sandakan for Ranau on the first march, only 140 reached Ranau alive, the remainder had died or were shot during the march. Prisoners were shot out of hand, their bodies littering the route. On the second inhumane death march, 536 POWs left Sandakan but only 189 were still alive when they reached their destination, 142 of these were Australians. The third march consisted of 75 prisoners, mostly British, all of whom died. During their short stay at Ranau, six Australians managed to escape, the rest were either shot or died from exhaustion, or illnesses such as malaria, beriberi, and dysentery. Of the six escapees, three died later and only three from the original 2,434 were alive to bear witness at the War Crimes Trials which followed at Rabaul and Tokyo in 1946 in which fourteen Japanese officers, convicted of war crimes in Borneo, were executed. Captain Hoshijima, the Sandakan prison commandant was found guilty and hanged at Rabaul on April 6, 1946. Altogether, 1,381 Australian prisoners-of-war died at Sandakan in the most heinous atrocity of the Japanese against Australian troops in the entire Pacific war. Of the British prisoners, 641 had died. The 4,000 imported Javanese slave labourers who worked on the airstrip, less than half a dozen were alive at wars end. Only 25 Australians escaped from Japanese prison camps to come home again to their homeland. These escapes were from Borneo and Ambon. Around the same number escaped but were recaptured and executed. Today, the Sandakan War Memorial Park, with its two Australian memorials, is beautifully laid out on the former site of the notorious prison camp.