Australians at War Film Archive

Yes certainly. I was born in Drummoyne which is a suburb of Sydney, and I grew

up in Gladesville Hunters Hill. My grandfather had emigrated from Ireland as a ten-year old with his uncle and his uncle had a bakery business down at the Quay in Sydney, and by the time he was seventeen, he had saved ten-pound sterling which he bought a ticket for his sister

to come to Australia. And it took about twelve-months for that sailing ship to go to England and he expected that his sister would arrive on it’s return journey. Apparently he and her family feared that she might fall off the edge of the earth, and the ticket was purchased by another family and when the sailing ship arrived in Sydney, my grandfather and his uncle

and family went out to the ship and they found a fourteen-year old young girl who couldn’t speak any English. She’d travelled alone, and two-years later my grandfather married her and they had a family of seven. My mother was the youngest. I was her only child

and I grew up in the atmosphere of a bakery business which baked bread, and delivered it in those days, and they employed about fifty people. It was anticipated that I would eventually take over that business which was the last thing in the world that I ever wanted to do. I was educated at Holy Cross College at Ryde, and I was gifted in mathematics

and when a matter arise of somebody being absent, they’d always call upon me, not to go to school but to work in the bakery. I did my leaving certificate and I found employment through a friend of the family at the Australian Glass Manufacturing Company, as my friend Charles York,

was their purchasing officer and I was understudying him. That didn’t suit me very well and I joined the army in 1942.

The people in Gladesville which was my experience were a large number of very unemployed persons and I know that my family assisted them in various ways by providing food and

bread in particular and there was constantly people calling into the bakery business, seeking help, seeking food and I was aware that the males of the family were given work about one week in three, or one week in four, doing sewerage and road building and things like that.

I think I was very fortunate to have a family who were considerate of other people and I hope that some of that benefited me in the rest of my life. I did enjoy being in the army and somebody discovered that I could add up and I was transferred to

an army group up in Dubbo and in some mysterious way which I can’t remember, I was put into the orderly room, that’s the area where the management takes place and from there I was sent to a school of military intelligence in Dubbo.

Yes, I was very anxious to do that. I knew that I was going to fit into that atmosphere and I didn’t have any other alternative, so if I didn’t join the

army I would be called up, and I was hoping that I may join the air force, but at that time we had so many volunteers for air force duty that it wasn’t possible to join the air force. So I joined the army and it was atmosphere that

I fitted into it very well and I enjoyed it, not everybody did. As I was indicating it was fortunate that I was sent to this school of military intelligence and there are only twelve people. There was a very significant change in my life at that time, as

the class was instructed by a person who had been in World War I, had joined in World War II, obviously putting back his age and he had been in military intelligence. Unfortunately I can’t remember his name, and after a couple of months we had a visit from a rather strange person who never introduced

himself but he examined each of the twelve students including myself and shortly after that I was sent by train to Brisbane alone, with no idea why I was being sent to Brisbane and housed in a boarding house in the centre of Brisbane city. I rang

my parents and my father said, “Are you in some sort of trouble because we’ve been having people from the military and the government calling here and they’ve been to your school, and they’ve been to the RSL [Returned and Services League], and they’ve been questioning neighbours about you, what’s your problem?” And I said, “I haven’t got a problem but I’m in Brisbane, but I don’t know why I’m here. And there are about twelve or fourteen other people

and none of us know why we have been transferred to a boarding house in Brisbane.”

In that school we did certain field work like for example, drawing the terrain for

defensive purposes or conversely for assembling the attacking forces. Also we were trained in the methods of communication with the military. It was really very interesting and we were all

reasonably intelligent. But I think obviously my selection came through my mathematical ability because that’s the key, or was the key of breaking codes, having in mind at that time of life, 1942, we didn’t have computers and we didn’t have

ball point pens, so most of the work was done with pencils and the brain.

I enjoyed the routine, I have always and remain very comfortable with men, I can say that I was a good soldier, that life didn’t suit everybody. It wasn’t very comfortable, but

I have, I know I have an ability to get along very well with men, and most people in my community now and in my past life, could I say that I was a natural leader. I also had advantage

in that growing up in my grandfather, with my grandfather and my uncles in a business with fifty people that I was educated in the office work of that business, and I simply didn’t know that I had that experience which was a great asset. I imagined that everybody could do the things that I’d grown up with but that wasn’t always the case.

However, it gave me an insight to management of people.

Well I certainly think that my natural state and ability to manage people was a great plus.

And one doesn’t gain experience and trust by forcing it upon other people, you have to earn that, and my past life I think, caused me to fit very well into a community of the armed services.

I had an uncle that was in World War I and he was returned as a young man in his twenties with injury and his health was affected by gas. He died very young

about twenty-six or twenty-eight, that was the nearest that I ever came to a person associated with the war. Not that there weren’t other people that were living in the district that had been to the war and returned in the same manner usually, usually been injured.

But of course the casualties of that war were extraordinary and it was a daily conversation, and the people would rush to get the paper to look for the names of their husbands or their family, the casualties were unbelievably high. My Uncle Michael was a nice and gentle

person. I had an aunt, my mothers sister, the eldest of the family, and I lived with her most of my life, as the family had a residence that adjoined the bakery premises which was on the main road in Gladesville, and it eventually became the

Rural Bank when the business closed down and all the family died off, including my mother, quite young. But my aunt was an extraordinary woman in those days, she loved motor cars and drove a car which very few women did. And they were generally big black Buick’s with a long radiator and

she, and I can remember she was very, very popular with people and a good manager. One of the things in my life I always remember she said, “Frank, always have the best, provided you can afford it.” And that’s not a bad start in life and she was well ahead of her times.

She had told me that she never married, never wanted to be married, and while she had a boyfriend who went to the war, he asked her if he was, if he returned to the war would she marry him, and she said, “I certainly would’ve kept my word Frank, but he was killed on the landing in Gallipoli.” And she was a treasured person.

I based, I know that my life’s experience had been established through her. As I said, she was the eldest of the family, she was the last to survive and there was no way on earth she’d ever tell anybody her age, or would she tell a lie.

Well the war was had started, the Japs were involved and that was an incident in everybody’s life in Australia, they’d attacked Pearl Harbor and it wasn’t very long after that, that they were

attacking Darwin. One doesn’t know when you suddenly find yourself in an armed conflict where you’re likely to go, I just think I was very fortunate to have the interest of being absorbed into Central Bureau Intelligence Corps, it was a turning point of my

life. And because of my maths, I fitted in there very well. General Douglas MacArthur had come to Australia from Corregidor, there was great rumours circulating that he’d left his troops behind to get to Australia. But that wasn’t the case at all because I

visited Corregidor some years ago, and got quite a lot of information and President Roosevelt had asked him, or demanded virtually, that he take his senior staff to Australia, on two occasions this happened, he refused to go. On the third occasion, they sent a

small craft, I think they call them sub-chasers, to pick him up with his staff, get him out and bring him to Australia. Well that’s exactly what happened. They had grave difficulty in, because of the presence of Japanese navy, and he came to Australia through Darwin. And he was then taken by road to Alice Springs,

there was a railway from Alice Springs, the Ghan, to Adelaide. And I have read that his wife insisted that they took that train because she believed he needed some rest. And they went to Adelaide and it took them about two weeks to get to Melbourne and he was then introduced to the Australian government because Melbourne was virtually the capital of Australia, and he, to his horror, he discovered that we only had

thirty-six thousand men under arms, a very small number. And most of them were in Europe but were on recall. The Australian government had decided to set a line of defence through Brisbane and I imagine that MacArthur who

was a great decision maker said probably, “Bugger being down here, I’m going to Brisbane, and that’s where we’ll defend Australia,” and that’s what he did. But he’d arrived here with a number of excellent staff who were very, very well experienced in code breaking, he believed that intelligence

was the way to overcome the enemy. He was an extremely intelligent man, a terribly difficult man and a very proud person, and if I may say, my criticism of what I saw of his activities that his pride caused him to use far too many

men in his plans. And the casualties of the United States servicemen was very high, but he had a great plan and the information he was getting from Central Bureau assisted him dramatically.

I have

absolutely no idea. I can’t remember, I don’t know, but I think I stood out because I was enjoying my experience in the army. My nature, I’m an organised person

and I think I would have my shoes highly polished, other guys wouldn’t do that, I kept my clothes in good condition and somebody, it must’ve taken note of that and put me in their orderly room, and suddenly they got somebody that can

virtually do the office work. I had referred to that, this was my unconscious knowledge that I’d gained as a young person living with my family who had that business, and working with fifty people was a great experience for a young man. They were wonderful employees and my

family were very good employers and they looked after their families and they got great respect out of them. And the baking of bread from the early hours of the morning when the dough is made for the bread was a daily exercise, it was a routine that you had tied to time

and I grew with that. So I had that experience and when they put me in the orderly room they soon gave me two stripes and made me a corporal. It was all a very interesting time and I’ve covered the fact that from there, somebody recommended that I go to the school of intelligence. So that’s about

it I think. But how fortunate to be chosen out of twelve people to join the Central Bureau organisation, a very secret part of Australian history.

Well one is rather a singular person in the army, everybody’s bought down to that level. I certainly made some good friends in Central Bureau. We weren’t then living in a hut or a tent, we were given the opportunity to seek out

accommodation in and around Brisbane, which I did and lived with a family at, not far away from Central Bureau, which was a huge house, and that was at an address called 21 Henry Street, Ascot, which is near Doomben Racecourse.

We didn’t know where we were going till one day a person came to that boarding house residence in Brisbane where we’d been for some two or three-

weeks and we were all, about fifteen of us, taken to this house at 21 Henry Street, Ascot, and introduced to several people. And then we were told that we had all been very carefully vetted, this was an intelligence organisation, we would be sworn to secrecy, which would be carried on in our lives

for thirty-years after the war, and we would be trained in breaking the enemy codes. It was explained to us that there were some two and a half thousand young Australian men and women who had been taught, what we would call Morse code, that was the major form of communications in the world in those years.

They were trained to listen into the frequencies of the enemy with a system called Kana, Kata kana, seventy-six symbols, as against twenty-four of Morse code, and the information that was being passed from point to point by the

Japanese, was sent to 21 Henry Street from different parts of Australia, Darwin, Townsville and Melbourne, and that is called traffic. The communications at that stage that I’m speaking of, the early days, the codes hadn’t been broken.

Yes I have an excellent photograph of that building which I’ll make available to you. It was a gigantic house, it was owned by the Bank of New South Wales and at that time, they used it for administrative

purposes and training. MacArthur took control of it. He was very advanced in those matters and he also took over the entire Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane, the only really decent and modern hotel at that time. He also took over a very beautiful building in Queen Street, Brisbane which was owned by the

AMP [Australian Mutual Provident Society] company, the building is still there and it’s now called MacArthur Chambers, and he personally occupied the eighth floor, and the eighth floor of that building has been preserved. That was his headquarters. As I previously said, he was a man of great power and confidence.

Yes, when I went there initially the American service people hadn’t arrived in any numbers, we were all Australians and we were divided

into different tasks and secrecy was paramount. One never discussed any matter that you may be working on with any other member of the organisation. That was very frustrating because lots of people including myself,

really didn’t know the overall progress that the organisation had achieved, you only were personally aware of what you were doing. And I was working with a man called Stan Clarke and he’d been the chairman and managing director of Macquarie Broadcasting, that’s 2GB now in Australia, he’d

joined as a private and went to Europe, and he’d served in Greece and Crete and North Africa. And he’d been commissioned in the field and he and a number of other people of that era were called back from the Middle East to serve with the code breaking organisation, because that’s what they’d been doing with the German communication. And whilst we weren’t,

breaking the codes in those early days, we would receive the traffic as it’s called, hundreds of sheets of paper that were coming from the communication groups, and we could read where the message originated and where it was destined for. And it was my,

my time was spent on that with two or three other people, working under Stan Clarke because we would make a record of the number of messages that were sent from say Manila or Singapore or truck or elsewhere, to their destination. It was significant because we would record by the hour and the day, the

number of messages. If you suddenly got an increase in messages coming from say Singapore to Rabaul going from say forty a day to a hundred and forty, something’s going to be happening at Rabaul, so that information would be sent to MacArthur, and he would send out planes from New Guinea to see if there was shipping arriving, troop ships or whatever it might be.

That was rather boring but it was significantly important to track down any activity that may occur in any specific place. At that time we had no idea what other people were doing, and they weren’t all service people. There were mathematicians out of universities from all over Australia. And they weren’t all males either, there were many

females and once again, mathematics was their forte. And we didn’t mix with, because of the secrecy set up, we didn’t mix with everybody in the building of 21 Henry Street. And in the meantime the Americans arrived with huge amount of equipment. We initially had a grave shortage of pencils, we couldn’t

get enough, they arrived with cases, huge cases like that table over there, full of typewriters that we didn’t need anyway. And at one stage, a very early type of computer that never worked because it had hundreds if not thousands of valves that we never saw it, because it was upstairs in 21 Henry Street and the Americans were working on that specifically

but never got anywhere with it. The computer, the first computer had been built by the telephone communication organisation in London and that was at Bletchley Park where there were ten thousand people working on Japanese communications. We

had about a thousand. Our life at that time was totally controlled ensuring that we are all doing our small tasks well. And gradually we were given an overall summary

of how we were progressing because we’d be leaving Brisbane and be going to New Guinea. That was rather exciting. The Japanese had stretched themselves from Japan through the Pacific Ocean but the

attack on Pearl Harbor shattered the American nation, they had absolutely no idea how strong the Japanese were. In your discussions you’ll probably speak with other people that are aware of Pearl Harbor, but

I have a document here that I’ll refer to. The attack on Pearl Harbor December the 8th 1941 was of significance to the American nation because they were taken by surprise. Now because of the difference in world time,

one’s inclined to think that what happened in other parts of the world was a day or more later, but given the attack of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese aircraft on the 8th of December 1941, given Tokyo time, they also

attacked Kota Bharu in Malaya at two-fifteen, Pearl Harbor at three twenty-five a.m., Siam at Singora at four a.m., Singapore at four-fifteen a.m., Hong Kong at eight-thirty. Within three-hours the

Japanese had planned all those attacks and they carried them out, very significantly entering World War II. I’ll give you those figures because very, very few people know how that was carried out in three-hours

because of the space of time and the importance that was attached by the Americans to Pearl Harbor. There were infinitely more planes, more bombing in Darwin than Pearl Harbor, and Australians were never told, only those people that were

living there at the time, and the casualties on the first day were almost four-hundred.

I believe that I was, I was in Dubbo.

I was having joined the army, was in the Sydney agricultural showground when the submarines entered Sydney Harbour. There wasn’t much communication, we were a very, very small

country, we didn’t have those gigantic bulldozers that the Americans bought with them, and in order to train their personnel they actually built the road from the escarpment at Wollongong, down into Wollongong,

the road

We had some exceptionally brilliant people, both men and women. Eventually we began to read the full text of Japanese codes. They weren’t all broken in the traditional manner.

There were code books found in ships that had been, Japanese ships that had been beached, I think these matters are of interest to you not generally known, for example, the coastwatchers who were navy, army, air force, traders,

individuals that lived in New Guinea for a long time. And they were placed all along the coast and on islands around New Guinea. One of those coastwatchers observed a Japanese submarine beached and the men came tumbling out the conning tower, and shortly after that there was an explosion in the submarine. So he viewed that for a couple of days and then he went down

one night, got into the submarine with his torch and he found some partially damaged and burnt code books, and we had it back at 21 Henry Street within twenty-four hours and that was significant information. Almost immediately we could start to read that type of communication. We hadn’t broken the code, we were given the code book.

That was a big breakthrough and I didn’t find that out until after the war. In terms of those communications, it could happen that we’d break the very common low grade code, so a message might be sent by the Japanese army or air force,

and perhaps the recipient didn’t have it, the code the high grade code up to date, because they would have an additive that they might a play, apply every seven-days or every thirty-days. And then when the additive is applied even if you’ve broken the code, you can’t read it until you’ve cracked the new additive which can be a very, very difficult job, it might take a month. But supposing that the recipient received a high

grade message, couldn’t read it, sent a message back “please repeat,” some idiot might send the same message in a very low grade code that you’re already reading. If that happens to be also received, you are then into from the low grade code the same message, into the high grade code, it gives you a start and when you’ve got a start, then you can, much easily get the best of it

until something happens, they change the code or they apply an additive. So that’s the sort of thing that was going on at 21 Henry Street, day and night endeavouring to read the communications, for example. And by the way, MacArthur attended his office on the eighth-floor of the AMP building in Queen Street, and every day at two-o’clock whatever information was

available was sent to him and he insisted on receiving it in his office without anybody else attending, except his 2IC [Second in Command] because he liked to make the decision if it was important. So we got a message which indicated that a very senior general

had ordered all the aeroplanes, bombers and fighters, removed from Hollandia airport which was the capital of Dutch New Guinea, he wanted all the planes removed immediately, more than four-hundred of them. So that message was taken to General Aiken who was the 2IC, an American, the 2IC

of the unit and this was very important. So he was asleep in the Lennon’s Hotel at two a.m. in the morning and was given the message, and he called in the interpreter to ensure that he was certain this was correct and it was. So he was standing in his pyjamas, he put on his military cap and ordered that immediately the

commanding officer in Port Moresby arrange to have all the available bombers and fighters hit the airport at Hollandia the next morning before they could take off. There were more than four-hundred planes, they were all destroyed, over three-days not one of those planes ever got into the air, and that was the air force of the Japanese that would’ve been

used to attack Port Moresby and Townsville and Brisbane, and possibly Darwin. Almost one can say, that was a turning point of the war, out of one message. It’s an enormous breakthrough. Now the commander and planner of most of the Japanese actions in the

Pacific was Commander Yamamoto, he was a brilliant person, a genius. His position’s equal to MacArthur’s in our force, one single message was picked up in Townsville by a person unknown and

it was sent to 21 Henry Street and they had difficulty reading it, they had broken the code but they couldn’t read the Japanese, and a brilliant young British linguist recognised it as being ‘food’. Somebody else decided that the food was also for a person who had ulcers and it was known that

Yamamoto had that problem. It was directed to Rabaul and some idiot had put on the bottom of it had put, “estimated time of arrival,” the time and the date, and the Japanese are very punctual on these matters, so it had to be somebody very, very senior. So that particular message was sent to

General Douglas MacArthur and he thought it might be a hoax of some description. And in further investigation he was satisfied and he instructed the commander in New Guinea to have all available fighter planes at that location, at that time, on that day, the next day actually. It turned out that

Yamamoto was travelling to Rabaul, he was shot down and also his entire staff who were in three other huge transports and all his plans, everything that he represented were wiped out in one day. Another unbelievable event. But individually

we didn’t know about that till the end of the war because of our personal security. I’ll give you another one of the very important matters that may be of interest to you in a moment.

Altogether in Central Bureau Intelligence Corps there were three hundred and twenty approximately, and four hundred and seventy Americans.

Now they all, well they weren’t all at Brisbane, they were placed in other locations as in Darwin, as in Townsville. In Townsville they built a receiving station in a suitable area and they made it look like

a farm house with hay stacks and things like that in case Townsville was attacked by the Japanese aircraft. Darwin is a significant location but the accommodation was absolutely dreadful and there were Australians and Americans there. Those two locations gave a cross to

a point of communication, it may well be a ship giving its location, north and south, east and west, which was a factor for all Japanese shipping, they had their own time to communicate their location every day. They had absolutely no idea that these communications were

being monitored, and it was a stupid thing to be doing because it gave the position of oil tankers, craft carrying rubber, ships carrying Japanese soldiers with all their equipment. And by beaming in on the

communication stating their position, in order to ensure that was correct you could get the beam electronically out of Darwin and Townsville. And where possible, that information would be given immediately to the American services and the Australian services and if there was a submarine handy, they’d be directed towards that shipping

and sink it. The result of that activity meant that generally the Japanese shipping was being sunk at a rate that they could never replace them with and then that was another very significant factor in winning and shortening the war. Overall after the war it was claimed

that the activities through Central Bureau shortened the war by two-years and that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Another significant event that was covered by Central Bureau was the knowledge that a very large armada had been,

had left Japan with about fifteen naval ships guarding it. And each of those ships, not the navy, those ships carrying the troops which were estimated to be about twenty-four thousand who were all experienced out of

China, were heading south down through the Philippines, and still, as I’ll repeat, each ship is calling in it’s position once a day. By the time that the shipping had reached the lower part of the Philippines, they’d all practically all been sunk, twenty-four thousand men and their equipment. They were going…

They would’ve been used to attack possibly Darwin and certainly north Queensland or maybe even New Guinea again at that time, that was called the Take, T-A-K-E, pronounced Tar-kay convoy. When the Japanese found that their naval ships and other

ships were being sunk, they put the unfortunate remnants of the Japanese into landing craft but they were then close enough for the American aircraft to destroy their landing craft with the men that were left in it. That entire convoy was wiped out. That is also a very significant turning point of the war.

Our personal communications with each other in Central Bureau amounted to friendliness involving those people who worked in certain groups, you rarely saw anything of the people who were working on other matters. And as I said some of them were

university students who, possibly too old even to be engaged in the air force or the army. We were also attached, we didn’t spend out time in 21 Henry Street. Some members were inevitably attached to the

American invading force as they landed on the various islands. Some members of Central Bureau would be attached to them with the people from the communications. So that they’d go in with the landing force, they’d be guarded by the Americans and they would then tune into the communications of the Japanese at that place. So the

American invaders are then getting the exact information that the Japanese who are calling for help of planes or ships or indicating a change of their range, of their defences. That provided incredible amount of intelligence

to the Americans, and once again the information saved a great deal of life and that’s pretty important. You only get one. As I indicated to your earlier, MacArthur used enormous amount of numbers in force when he was moving from island to island. While his objective was to cut off

the communications and the shipping that was needed to provide ammunition and particularly food to the remnants of the Japanese forces. Now Central Bureau moved out of Brisbane and we went to New Guinea and from there, we went in force to

Hollandia, which had then been taken by the Americans. From Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, we were broken up somewhat and some went to Truk, a very important headquarters that the Americans had taken back from the

Japanese and then we went to the Philippines, Manila. It was a very exciting time of life. The service people, the Americans, had been engaged in fighting in jungles, Manila was the first city, and it was a huge city, and it had been built by the Americans. So you had multi-storey

concrete buildings, then occupied by the Japanese, no determination at all to come out alive. They had to be destroyed in the buildings and the Americans were very, very, had great difficulty in taking Manila and they had high casualties.

And they used every possible means till eventually their decision was to destroy the buildings completely, and that’s about how they finished up taking over Manila, which was the Japanese headquarters. General Douglas MacArthur of course was very pleased to get back to the Philippines. His plan then was to

plan an attack on the Japanese at their homeland and that would’ve produced enormous casualties because we knew that the Japanese had planned that every man, every woman, every service person would move inland on the major islands,

there’d be no attempt made to any degree of stopping the landing forces. That would’ve resulted in enormous casualties of American forces. Now we were anxiously waiting for our instructions to move forward with the Americans,

we were then located north of Manila in the city of Tarlac in a plantation which had been occupied previously by a company that had a brewery, it was called the Barrio Mapaloxia, and the local people were very helpful, the

Philippinos, they built us huts out of bamboo and they even built a church like structure that we could use for, not only church services but some recreational matters. In fact a couple of the Australians married Americans WACs [Women’s Army Corps], the female service women.

No Australian women other than nurses, ever were allowed to leave Australia which was very disappointing for a lot of the staff at Central Bureau. In waiting for the impending attack on Japan as you are no doubt aware, they introduced the atomic

bomb on Hiroshima which brought about the end of the war for Japan, America, Australia. Already we had peace in Europe with a full view and fear that the Russians would reassemble and endeavour to go back through Europe where Hitler

and the Germans had left off, their intention being to take over the world. I think the news of the atomic weapon probably changed their plans.

What was the brief? Having in mind that this secret organisation didn’t give any details of where we were going and what we were going to do, we were then

quietly selected to work in different areas, as small groups of service people. Not all the people could fit into 21 Henry Street, Ascot, this huge house, so the arrangements were made to take over Ascot Park. And very quickly they

got the Queensland authorities to build concert huts, they’re readily demountable huts that were used mainly by the American forces, and they covered the whole of Ascot Park with these huts and built a large, high, barbed wire fence right around it.

We also had from the Americans, a machine that punched cards, before the machines arrived here, and I’m told by others that they’d been on the wharf in Sydney for

three-months and nobody had been advised that they were there. Anyway somehow or another the information got through and we got them brought up to Brisbane, and the systems that were used by hand were to record the Japanese numerals which formed the basis of their codes, mostly in

four groups of odd, all odd or all even numbers. Those four numbers could represent a word or a sentence and the system of coding and de-coding throughout the world goes back generations, hundreds of years, they’ve used all sorts of different systems to send

messages from one point to another. Sometimes they’d send slaves with information tattooed on their skulls, and we were past that I might say. But reading the Japanese codes of the numerals, we soon work out what the code itself represented, was it army? Is it navy? Is it air force? Is it high grade? Is it low

grade? And then the numbers as I indicated previously, from one point to another and then searching constantly for any change in the system, and a change can be devastating because you’re reading, well what’s happening day by day, then they introduce an additive and you’re back to square one. This was

a constant that was, we were never able to overcome. But the machines the Americans bought out, by punching in the actual numerals the machine would punch the cards which were retrievable by the machine and they would

also give you the repetition of that number as the messages came through, and by getting repetition you got some idea that that is the important word. As we know in English, it will be one of the vowels, can’t write in

English without using the vowels and you get the significance in the use of “e” in the English language and “a” etcetera. Well the Japanese is not quite the same as that because what they’re sending consists of sounds, and letters and numerals all represented by four, but sometimes three numbers,

very complex, and it’s a job that can take hours and days, weeks and months. This is still being done throughout the world, but they don’t have young people with their headphones any more. For example, down in Canberra there’s an organisation called

Defence Signals Division, Defence Signals Directorate. The British government was aware that during the war there was some significant leaks coming out of Australia. Communication during the war out of Australia to England, America, a lot of it went by cable, undersea cable. Now

you couldn’t get into the cable, so it was very safe. However you’re limited by time and volume, somebody, the Americans knew that somebody in Australia was leaking information. And briefly I read, “They threatened the executives of the United Kingdom that they would cease giving information unless they

found out where the codes were being broken down and causing grave difficulties here in the Pacific.” Well I since find that there was a young person named Frances Bernie who worked in the

office of Doctor Evatt, and her husband was a communist, his name was Clayton. As a young person she copied every item that went through her hands like a totally encrypted message coming from London or Washington. And sometimes she would

get the decrypted message and she’d copy that and she’d give it to her boyfriend, later her husband, Clayton. Clayton was giving it to the Russian embassy, they were sending it through, that information through to the authorities in Russia. The Russians were giving the information to the

Japanese because they wanted to weaken the Americans in the Pacific. This was an extraordinary event and it was, it is factual because the Australian government decided to clean up the Russian office headquarters in Sydney and it took many days to take the books,

all the information and take it down to Canberra where it lay for about thirty or forty-years. Frances Bernie married Clayton and I think they were divorced and then her conscience got to her because she got religion

and she went to ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation], and partially confessed what she had been doing. This was an extraordinary event, because the British MI5 [internal security and counter-espionage] and MI6 [foreign intelligence] sent their chief, Roger Hollis to Australia to find out what he could about the lead, didn’t find anything.

And it’s quite possible, when the Australians were sent to Borneo, it’s quite possible that the Japanese probably had all the information about the battle intentions before they hit the beaches, and there were significant casualties. Well that didn’t come from Central Bureau, it’s a part of now,

our Australian history, not known to very many people. I mentioned to you that the information you’d get would go to General Douglas MacArthur on the eighth-floor of the AMP building and that is now on the eighth-floor

a very fine educational museum.

I didn’t personally. He rarely moved elsewhere between Lennon’s Hotel and his office. He was a workaholic,

but he was brilliant. And for our country, it was most fortunate that he came here, because as I’ve indicated earlier in this discussion, we had nothing to defend ourselves from the might of the Japanese invasions. The Americans sent huge amount of equipment, hundreds of thousands of troops, planes, ships, we

were very fortunate.

Say that again?

It’s extraordinary isn’t it that we were able to do that and never communicate with other people. I think we were reasonable, intelligent individuals and we only had one task

getting rid of the Japanese, and frustrated because we weren’t getting back the information as it was occurring, and that was part of the secrecy. It was also very frustrating for a lot of people after the war because our secrecy carried over for thirty-years, we were excluded

from meeting as a group for thirty-years. We now have an association and a lot of the people died in that period, many, many more males and females never knew what their husbands or wives did during the war. The history of Central Bureau is about,

will be published in about two to two and a half years, the Australian War Memorial are making available one of their three historians to do that. We had a task of finding some funds to assist in travelling expenses of the historian because the War Memorial suffers from lack of funds, they’ve spent many millions on our War Memorial and left themselves deep into the

red. And I’ve been working on that for six-months, and last week I got the last ten-thousand to make the fifty-thousand, and Christopher Coulthard-Clark, historian, last week was appointed full-time to complete the history which he estimates will take him

two and a half years.

I was,

you were told, we were given the right to select a military group of AIF [Australian Imperial Force] that we belonged to, everybody did that and if you select, you make your own selection that’s the safest thing for the memory isn’t it, because you’re constantly asked, “What are you doing?” So you concoct

some story, everybody did that. They knew how important it was to avoid the leak.

I had a colour patch which soldiers wear on their uniform which indicated that

I was with a survey company and that was easy because you’re surveyors move all over the country and others did similar things. “What do you do?” “I’m a surveyor.”

Yes. Various things, all over the place.

But I’m in Brisbane now, and sometimes we might be called to go to New Guinea or up in Queensland, I’m all over the place. Yeah.

Well it was difficult, and as I said, lots of people died and they didn’t know what their husbands

or wives did during the…..

Yes. In Central Bureau a good memory was one of the essentials because you’re taking certain information aboard constantly, and by breaking in experience which continued

for quite a long time was called traffic analysis, and the job was to analyse the traffic, the communications that are going from point to point. Cause initially we hadn’t actually broken the codes, and traffic analysis can give you a great deal of information.

And to do that reasonably quickly and efficiently you do require a good memory. Now the Japanese would give the place names a series of four numerals. In some cases they would spell it out and they’d spell it out in the Japanese translation

and that’s a bit difficult. However my memory as I recall, enabled me to memorise the hundreds of place names that I could recognise as it’s coming through my hands. The traffic, the messages came from various parts of Australia in

ever increasing numbers and they were sorted by Australian girls who were employed to do the sorting, but they were never allowed inside the house there of 21 Henry Street, excepting girls that were doing significant work on the code

breaking. And they had to hand sort the traffic as it’s coming in large numbers to the different types of code which they would also recognise. There weren’t that many but they’d sort them in date order and time, order of time, and each different coding system comes separately and

some were hand written and some were typed, and they’d arrive by hand or they’d arrive by teleprinter. So with the two or three other people, the first thing to do was to log the point of transmission and the point of arrival and count them on an

hourly and daily basis, searching for some increase of activity. That was the alarm shall we call it. So that you may have a message that’s going from Manila via Singapore via Truk or Palau to another destination which it’s designed for. Because you can’t keep sending

the messages constantly over the same track. So you’ll get the same message several times so that that needs to be eliminated and that’s fairly easily recognisable. So with the traffic analysis that’s coming from ships in particular, and I’ll just deal with that. The Coral Sea battle was a

famous battle between the American navy and the Japanese navy, the Japanese had established themselves in Rabaul and that had a beautiful harbour, and they needed a large harbour for a take off point to invade Australia. And Port Moresby in New Guinea has a beautiful harbour and they were going to capture that by sea and by land.

By analysing the traffic coming from the ships we were able to determine just about every vessel that was heading for Rabaul, I’m sorry, Port Moresby. We were then able to advise the Americans, if they didn’t also have the same

information, because we didn’t communicate between the navy, and the army, and the air force, very well. The army and the air force worked together at 21 Henry Street, the navy did their own work. But from traffic analysis we could analyse the number of ships, the type of ship, but we’re still not reading the message but we did a study and we had a very good idea of just how many

aircraft carriers and other types of shipping were on their way. This gave the Americans and the Australian navies time to gather together sufficient aircraft carriers and other ships to meet the on-coming onslaught. They never really got very close together at the Coral Sea battle, it was mostly fought by aircraft carriers sending their aircraft over

to bomb each others ships and numbers of ships were sunk, and more were very badly damaged and what happened was the Japanese withdrew. Now that was also a turning point of the war because we knew from other traffic analysis that there were two or four ships, I’ve forgotten exactly, either two or four ships, north of

New Guinea at anchor. And they carried about four-thousand or so Japanese troops and their equipment who were going to come down, after the bombardment of Port Moresby they were going to come down and land and take over Port Moresby. At the same time other troops landed north of Port, the Owen Stanley Ranges and they were coming into Port Moresby over the

mountains and that’s where the Australians took a number of casualties, and that was the point where they turned back the Japanese at the first time of this war in the Pacific. The Japanese took a quite a beating at the Coral Sea Battle and they slunk back to their base and from

there they dispersed elsewhere. Certainly as I have indicated earlier, the airplanes at Hollandia which were bombed out of existence and the troops that would’ve been landing in Port Moresby was the major invasion force of Australia, so that was hit on the head, shall we say, that was stopped because we had information. Otherwise the Japanese

navy would have taken Port Moresby, would’ve been a really significant problem for Australians because even with the Americans then, we didn’t have sufficient strength to turn them back. OK. For myself that was a very enlightening, very

interesting time because I was aware, my other friends were aware that by presenting that information, how it was handled and what sort of a result that it had. Now working on that we might say it was very, very boring. But not everybody could do it because you can’t have different people doing it every day, you’ve got to know

the actual coded signs of all those places, and if you don’t know it, well you’ve got to start figuring it out from other sources, if it exists, just what destination or was the point of this signal in the first place. And in addition to that, we got to know that the high grade codes from the other codes, and the high grade

codes always indicate something of specific importance. Now eventually I was moved to New Guinea where we got so called traffic at a much lower base because it’s coming, it’s coming from people who were in the mountains out on the islands, getting close to the Japanese, and picking up their

signals which was to do with local activities. So by reading the messages which eventually we cracked into the low grade codes, we could advise the commanders of the intentions, the activity, their weakness and their strength and that’s good information for somebody in the field to have. That’s much better than

sending out troops to discover where they are, what are they doing and what is their strength. So that is intelligence. When we moved to Hollandia we were practically in full strength there. There was still activity in 21 Henry Street in Brisbane, but we gradually set up a total force in Hollandia with the intention of

following General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines which was going to be his take off point for the landing in Japan. That may not sound very exciting but when you’re doing something almost twenty-four hours a day over a long periods of time, you do become exhausted. In the meantime there were other groups like mine who were actually working on the decoding

of messages, whether they were coming from the ships that had been sunk and providing information from their code systems, or whether they were actually working on methods to break the codes. The

information going to Douglas MacArthur on a daily basis determined his plans. The urgency of them, the number of people that are to be provided, the number of aircraft, the number of ships that are going to meet the offensive and he was

extremely clever in this manner and very proud of his activities and the strength of his activities. But he was a very, very poor communicator, he didn’t get on with the Australian government, he didn’t counsel very well with the army who he had sadly

estimated their strength which they had gathered with their activities in Europe, where they’d been fighting for a couple of years. He was a difficult man but we were very, very fortunate to have him because President Roosevelt had great confidence in him. And when MacArthur needed equipment he got it, it was only a matter of asking and it would be delivered to wherever he wanted it. And in terms of

quantity it was infinitely greater than what we could provide in Australia with our small population. And we’d already lost a great number of troops in Europe, which is not to be overlooked, fighting the Germans. Now you had mentioned to me the secrecy. Well the same thing was happening in London at Bletchley Park where they were reading the German signals.

The Germans never had any idea, as with the Japanese, that their communications were being read. They thought that their enigma machine was impossible to crack, but not only did the English break the code they were also able to build an actual machine because they worked out what sort to thing would be required to send the messages in an

encoded manner by machine. And eventually one of the enigmas was given to them from Belgium or Poland, I’ve quite forgotten which country it came from, so that particular machine one of two types they had in England. Now they had infinitely more people than we had in Central

Bureau Intelligence Corps, they had ten-thousand people working at Bletchley Park on a twenty-four hour basis. And similarly they had some of the greatest mathematicians on earth working on that, but the Germans never had a clue. There’s also one other difficulty that to be experienced, you also have to be aware if you use the intelligence that you’ve got, do you make the enemy aware that you are

reading their information, their signals? Now in the case of Bletchley Park, they had some very senior people to whom the intelligence was provided each day, each hour if necessary and they had to decide whether they’d use that intelligence. And say for example, it’s known that an invasion is going to take place somewhere in Europe using

ten or twenty-thousand men, you suddenly get a message that is decoded which indicates that there are certain dangers there that hadn’t been considered. Now if you draw back on the intentions which your enemy might have already known might take place, if you suddenly draw back from that intention, do you

let the enemy, Germany in this case, know that the Brits had been aware of what they were doing, like moving a Panzer, a division, from one area to the landing point, and they had to decide which way to go, if they don’t invade they might save five-thousand or ten-thousand lives. So they know also that there’s going to be

a big defence, if they move and they do land they know they’re going to lose a lot of men, what do you do? Take the risk landing or calling it off. The decision of making a decision like that can be a terrifying experience for the individual, on the brain, and many of those people had nervous breakdowns because they’re

constantly aware that they’re sending out spies, their spies in Europe were being knocked off at such a rate, they were only living about five days and some of them were being met at the landing place coming in by parachute, obviously there was some leak and it was constant that was getting out of England, out of London which the Germans became aware of. And that must

do with spying and I regret to say, but the documentation is there, that the head of MI5, MI6 Roger Hollis, was very, very suspiciously suspect of being the spy between the English and the Russians, and the Russians were giving information to the Germans

in some mysterious way. I don’t think we had that sort of problem to deal with here. But we did have some people who became quite ill with the constant heavy activity of the brain, day after day trying to find the quotient to get you into the enemy

code, or the additive that they’ve just applied, and you don’t know where the additive starts in the message. It might start at the very centre of the message, it might start at the second-last part of that message. So you needed numbers of people that you can give some time for rest and a break

and be spared. Now some of the ladies who were extremely sensitive in taking down the Japanese communications in Kata kana, they could recognise the rhythm of the same person day after day whose sending messages. And if it happens to be the pilot, chief pilot of a group of

Japanese aircraft and you’re getting every day his position that he sends out and then the next day it’s another hundred or hundred and fifty-k or so, they know it’s the same pilot. Then he sends the same message at another hundred-ks the next day, same guy. So therefore that aeroplane are circling over the top of

craft that are carrying troops or oil or rubber or something. So you can then ensure that somebody gets that message, there’s got to be shipping there for the same aircraft to be sending out his daily location, and that’s a big break. Not only do you probably shoot down the aircraft, but you get the ships as well you see because you know where to go and it

was the same with those four-thousand or so Japanese north of New Guinea, we were able to arrange for those ships after the Coral Sea Battle to be sunk, but they were ready to come to Port Moresby, great advantage, you know you can’t create this, you’ve got to be there and you’ve got to be set up. And General Douglas MacArthur brought a lot a those systems with him because he was

aware of that and he’d been studying it all his life. We found him uncompromising and somewhat difficult, but I regret to say so did the Americans, particularly the generals, they hated him. But you couldn’t, hate didn’t take away his brain.

Very much so when you see this happening and I think I did indicate that I was working with Stan Clarke and he was a very much experienced because he’d been working in Europe, and he’d been working in the Middle East and elsewhere, and he had a good brain, he had a very, very good mind, we were lucky to have him. We didn’t have many casualties

as such which is quite amazing but when you’re in the tropics there are diseases there. When we were in Hollandia the WACs, who were very fond of the Australians because most Americans like Australians, and the WACs are the female so-called soldiers of the American Army.

They decided to give us a night of entertainment because they’d had somebody in the American group, had built a very large entertainment area, and we were taking off in a aeroplane or group of us the next day, the next morning and I can’t think where we were supposed to land. Anyway the next day, well

the night was great, absolutely marvellous and there was far too much grog, and the next day we were very sick, God, and we went down to the aerodrome in Hollandia and our plane had been loaded with WACs, three planes went out including our own, we had to wait a couple a days for another plane. Those three planes contained a very large number of

girls and they were never heard of again, no messages, absolutely nothing, they were either possibly shot down but unlikely, or they hit some sort of massive turbulence that put them into the sea. If you’ve never prayed, that’s a good opportunity to pray to think that we could’ve been on one of those three planes. But actually other than some

illness we didn’t have any number of casualties anyway. Myself and a fellow named Burgess who was a professor of mathematics at National University for many years, we were parted from our group in Hollandia, on a mountain called Mount

Cyclops for some days, and my friend Bill Rogers went with the search party and he accidentally fell over a cliff, and the cliff was actually about two-thousand feet above the river below, and he had his rifle over his shoulder and he was swept down into the stream

just above this gigantic waterfall, and the rifle caught between two boulders that was over his shoulder and he hung there. And the fellows that he was with called to him all night, they couldn’t get down to him, they had to go a long way around to make sure he didn’t fall asleep and accidentally fall over this two-thousand foot of drop. And they then sent

back for a rope and they were able to get down to the area and pass the rope across the river so that he got hold of it, and was able to tie it to his body, then they hauled him to one side to the bank. He’s still got a bad back as a result of this but he’s been a very successful solicitor in Melbourne, and he’s been the director of some quite large Australian companies, I’m pleased to say. He’s now

semi-retired doing pro bono work and we’ve both been working with the War Memorial to have our history written which will be another two-years in time.

Well I had been

sent to New Guinea quite early on and somehow or another I acquired malaria, dengue fever and some other dreaded thing, and I was flown back to Brisbane. And because of our classification I was put in a private hospital and

I was there about three-months because it was touch and go, and they even arranged for my mother to come up because I was in hospital such a long time. During the war we had trouble travelling from point to point, you needed a permit to get a train to Brisbane and I was a long time making recovery. That interrupted my activity to some degree until I eventually went

back to New Guinea by ship, an old Dutch barge thing called the [KPM] Van Swale and it was so low down in the water, I thought every day of our life that we were gonna go down with it. It was a dreadful old tank. But they were exciting days because the war was progressing in

our favour and we had peace in Europe, thing was to get rid of the Japanese and the problem there was they were all happy to die for their Emperor, that made life very difficult. But General Douglas MacArthur took the matter on then of course with his troops but Australian members of Central Bureau were the only Australians that General Douglas MacArthur took him, took with him

to the Philippines.

Nothing more than rumour and newspapers. I think you’re so involved with your own

activities and what information bleeds back towards a success, but I must repeat, the information didn’t automatically flow on to what was happening because you must not, you must ensure that one person, any one person doesn’t get too much information about what’s happening in case he’s captured and it can undo the whole

enterprise and the British had the same problem.

Yes if it was coming, if it was to do with traffic analysis we’d get the feedback because you do have to be enthused to some degree, but

it’s also very frustrating when you don’t know what else is happening cause you can’t tell everybody or anybody else, can’t tell you own family, you can’t tell other people working in Central Bureau as I explained.

Well there’s a certain amount of activity that you do become aware. We had some time to ourselves but we didn’t get leave of absence to come home. I think in two straight years I may have been home to my family in Sydney for one-week.

We just didn’t have enough people and it wasn’t encouraged either to be sending folk back to their home, back to their state, secrecy is absolutely important. You can’t afford to do anything that can cause the enemy to know their traffic’s being read.

I think that we knew that we were very fortunate and advantaged to be with the group, also there was not a great

likelihood of losing ones life unless you were in an aeroplane crashes, and that did happen with one of our senior people in it. There’s a determination to do whatever the best one can for success and one rarely even thinks that you’re not going to survive the war and come

back to your family, I don’t think anybody that I know was of the mind well I might get killed, the Van Swale might sink, I think there’s a confidence there amongst everybody that you’re not going to be the one that dies on the job. But whereas for the troops in the field in a, when they’re

attacking for example, you know that a certain number of people are going to get killed, but most people I think of the believe of, it’s not going to be me. That’s what, I believe that and I’ve been in a situation where fear takes over, can’t say that you’re not fearful when you’re in a certain dangerous situation, but you don’t necessarily think well I’m going to die now. I don’t,

otherwise you wouldn’t be crossing the road here, it’s dangerous enough in civilian life for the number of people that lose their lives driving a car, but you don’t think about that all the time when you’re driving, well it’s very much like that during a war. But you pray for peace if for anything, if you pray at all. You do want to have peace and you do want to have success over the enemy and we were in a very fortunate position

to provide some of that information without losing our lives.

Would be rumours did you say?

Well I can’t say that it didn’t happen, but not to my knowledge because you are in an exclusive situation, you know that what was being carried out was very secret and must remain so. I guess that’s the sort of discipline.

You also know the advantage that we had knowing, I mean we knew that the British were reading the German communications, we knew that. We also knew that the Japanese didn’t know that we were reading their communications.

Absolutely. They did some very stupid things and sometimes one’s inclined to think was the error made, you know it’s possible, was the error made by somebody later in the war who actually knew or hoped that the war was over

and the war was lost. It must’ve been evident to them when they didn’t have enough to eat and they were dying of starvation, they’d been overcome in their position and they’re dying in the jungle. I think I did tell you did I not, about the

code book that was discovered in Sio, no. Well this was during the Battle of the Stanley Ranges, the Americans and the Australians had driven the Japanese out of a village called Sio, it still exists. And after they’d driven the Japanese out an Australian or an American, but the Americans take

for granted that it’s always an American if it’s worth printing, were checking the area for land mines, those little things that people walk on you know, and they have an instrument that buzzes when it passes over metal. And they got a very strong signal in a low sort of creek, very loud and they carefully examined the area

and found an ammunition case, a big steel case, when they opened it, it was full of Japanese code books with the cover taken off, the Japanese instructions were in danger, that they are to burn their code books, so what they did pulled the covers off, maybe they burnt those, put the code books in a trunk and buried it quickly so that they could escape. We had those

that trunk via aeroplane back from Sio to Brisbane within twenty four hours, then we got people from the Brisbane Museum and elsewhere to come and take those code books, page by page, with their skills and turn them and dry them so that we could read them, and that code was actually the transport code

used by the Japanese. And from that day onwards till the rest of the war, we were reading communications to do with transport, very, very, very important. Gave you the location of ships, sometimes what it was carrying, the position of troops, an absolutely marvellous thing to happen. Cause a certain amount of luck in that. We hadn’t been reading the

transport code you see.

Our government?

They may have. We don’t think that they were reading our major codes, we had no reason to believe that they were. Have in mind, in the period that I’m speaking of, they were losing the war, it

was going against them, it was a matter of survival and they’d lost so much of their shipping, they were losing their means of communication, they were starving to death in islands and areas where they’d been by-passed and no ships existed to come through and feed them, they were dying by the thousands, and one must think also, how did they feel after the Take convoy?

I was going to also mention to you as a matter of interest, the, it’s called the Battle of Midway, a group of islands and the largest assembled number and strength of ships, Japanese and American, and probably some Australian, ever assembled

were in the area and there was great consternation of where were the Japanese going to strike. Somebody had an idea, and I don’t know whether it was American or Australian, that the Japanese had a name for Midway Island, so some bright spark sent out

some messages by plan, from Midway calling urgently for equipment as their machinery for desalinisation had collapsed and they didn’t have any water, they were making sure that somewhere the Japs are going to forget that. So they were obviously

reading the naval messages right. Next thing the Japanese are sending a message out to Manila or Tokyo or somewhere, for urgent application and transport of desalinisation equipment, well it’s got to be from Midway because the equipment hadn’t broken down but they’d,

the Allies had sent that out that their equipment had broken down, they then knew that the Japanese were going to attack Midway. So they assembled all the shipping to be in place around the area of Midway, that was an enormous battle at sea. And the Japanese navy was

decimated. Another unbelievable event, could’ve gone the other way, they could’ve been defending somewhere else where it wasn’t going to happen but they just thought it would be Midway. In the meantime of course, a lot of people get killed in these activities. Now nice to feel safe when you’re in 21 Henry Street or a nice comfortable

palm hut or something in Hollandia. But life in New Guinea was pretty, it was pretty tough, it was awful and particularly the disease, then you get typhus because huge number of dead bodies that are around the place.

Well

I suppose you, you’ve got no recreation, you spend your day keeping yourself healthy when you’re not working your shift, you do communicate there and then with the people that you’re with cause you’re in a relatively small group, not like being at headquarters.

We were fortunate also to be mostly with Americans where their food was so superb and always available, inevitably you got ice cream, you also got a bunk in your tent to sleep on and instead of being on the ground on what’s called a palliasse of straw which, the best that the Australian services could give us. They had marvellous equipment, great

communications. We wore their clothes because they were so much better than ours, but we stuck to our own Australian boots because they were infinitely more comfortable, and they were leather and the Americans always liked us. It’s nice to be liked. And they were interesting days and you

know the war is going our way and you’re hopeful, ever hopeful for peace, which we got with the atomic bomb.

Well when we moved from Manila,

which was heaven sent because the whole atmosphere of death was there, it was just terrible, the bodies of the Japanese in those buildings and the stench was awful, and the Americans were pretty laid back and on Rizal [Park] Parade, which was the main

area of Manila, there was a huge sign, big sign right at the end ,and it had dates across the top, and then it had down the side ‘death, paralysis, blindness and other problems’ and then the numbers, this is

referred to the Americans that had been drinking the hooch [alcohol] that was so readily available at the time. And whether it was death or blindness or paralysis or whatever it might be, it was pretty ghastly place to be in because they were rather inactive waiting for something to happen. We were pleased to get out of there and then when he got to Tarlac and out to the Barrio Mapaloxia, there were a lot of Japanese

who’d been lost or separated and too frightened to come near but night after night the, they were mostly black American servicemen, who were guards were found with their throats cuts and their boots and clothing and anything else they could get, taken off them, and it wasn’t a good place to be

at night time for quite a long time. We had not very much to do there because things were rather static but we were on a, more or less we were all together and we’re waiting to be moved forward with the Americans attacking Japan. We had no knowledge at all of the atomic bomb and

I think very, very few people in America had knowledge either. It was quite stunning when we got that information and some of our people, including Bill Rogers that I referred to, went down to Clarke Field and got on transport planes and went to Japan and there little or no troops there and the people in Japan were bowing

down to them and moving aside from them, but there was no danger at all what-so-ever, and a few other guys, knowing the war was over, went from Japan over to China and back again. We were moved by train in open carriages back to Manila and we were then put on the troop ship

The Francis N. Blanchett [USS Francis M. Robinson] and brought back to Australia, end of war. It was very nice to see Sydney Harbour. Great day.

Yes.

The thing is that we were the back up of the American forces. Not in large numbers but we were there to assist the commander of the forces as they were moving forward in the Pacific. Right. Well you’re life’s in danger, generally speaking

trenches would be built for the radio equipment to tune in to the Japanese communications at that point and pass the information on to whoever is in charge of that area. And you may then have warships off-shore sending shells over and if you do have a fear it’s two-fold, there’s going to be a break-out by the Japs or some of those shells are gonna

fall short. But I think it’s been stated more than once, the American guards were aware that the guys in there are a great asset to keep everybody alive because they knew what they were doing you see. Well that’s as near as you want to be to death because,

but much better off than the guys that are going forward and into the defending force yeah. Not everybody did that. Well they didn’t have to. As I told you before, all up Americans and Australians we were over a thousand people

all up yes.

Well it was necessary and it was always very low-grade code that is taking place

in the area of the battle and the point there was if they have a weakness and they’re sending out information of what they need, a back-up of ships, aeroplanes, equipment if you like and particularly the change of radius of their artillery if they are using it. Those,

Guadalcanal was a long serious battle, Americans only, who took enormous casualties because they were unprepared for jungle warfare. But in the case of some of those islands, well the casualties were pretty high too, but they were short and shift, they didn’t do on for weeks or months. Now the Australians of course weren’t caught up in any of those things.

They were left behind to, and in some cases quite unnecessarily, to clean up residuals of the Japanese. It was stupid, they should’ve just been left there to die, it was quite unnecessary. We’d finished the fighting in New Guinea and there were pockets of Japs in various places.

They bought about casualties but generally speaking they were dying of malnutrition, lack of food, and then of course, as I mentioned before, the Australians attacked Borneo, well we could’ve done without that too, just leave em there, they weren’t gonna do any harm at that stage of the war.

Not necessarily because I wouldn’t necessarily be getting that. That’s a matter of very close held information and some of the things that I’ve come today to tell

you, I’ve been told by others in our group and also some of the guys have published books, but what they’re publishing is what they experienced, they don’t know much else but it’s quite interesting to read. See the other thing is that you come back

from a war and you’re intent on establishing your life, not reliving those times, you want relief. That’s what I think.

It was very frustrating all the way through for everybody and those two and a half thousand young men and women radio operators, God, they just didn’t know, nothing got to them, all they could do is concentrate on getting those messages that are coming through as clearly as possible and

avoiding mistakes. And course one of the reasons that the messages are transmitted in even or odd numbers is to make it easier to pick up a mistake, and or not make an error, but that’s not unusual in communications. In Australia now and elsewhere the electronic equipment

used in code breaking between countries, having in mind that we are monitoring the signals out of Indonesia, Malaya, North China, North Korea, Japan, Russia, we share that information with the Americans and the British, those computers,

they’re not the fastest in the world but the most that Australia can afford, will compute at the rate of four-trillion computations in one-second. Now compare that with a brain or a hundred brains and wearing out several thousand pencils, it can go on for months.

Now they’ve got more complex codes to break but they break them and they also are responsible for ensuring that the communications of our country are kept safe, they also have the telephones that are used to communicate from and to Washington and or London or possibly Paris, I don’t know. And

as soon as those and they’re guarded twenty-four hours a day and as soon as it rings whoever it’s for chief of army, or chief of navy, the call’s put through.

Well I always thought some of the people were cracked. They were very intelligent and I probably said this before and no doubt some people thought I was cracked too. But what you’re asking, did we have nervous breakdowns? Not to my knowledge. No.

I think there was sufficient space to avoid that, but some individuals did terrific work in actually breaking the codes, I haven’t touched on that before and they can work at it for months on end, but maybe it’s just a bit of luck sometimes that they get into it, or as I

may have said before, a terrible mistake by the Japanese themselves in their communication, using the same communication in a lower grade code that had been sent in a high grade code. You see when I say high or lower grade code, if you’re in the field in an activity, you can’t have some

complex unravelling system to communicate, it has to be reasonably simple, page by page, otherwise by the time you worked it out, it’s too late, it’s happened already and you’re dead or something. But I’ll say it again, we were very, very fortunate to have

the Americans here in Australia.

I think I did mention before or before we were recording that I worked with an American who was extremely clever and his recreation

sometimes when he was tired to get these crossword puzzle and examine it and look at it, just put the paper down and fill in all the answers because he’d put them in his brain as he read it, and you know you got to have a big brain to do that. We had Professor Room from Sydney University

who was a great mathematician, he was a civilian, a pleasant man, totally uncommunicating I must say, he didn’t have to be secretive, he was already secretive. We had a couple of very, very intelligence females and

I must add two factors, for thirty-years after the war because of our secrecy we didn’t meet, didn’t communicate, didn’t publish and after our association was formed and we made contact with some of the people, most all of us are dead now, I’m just lucky, they were

dying after the war, right through to the present time and almost without exception, they’ve died of cancer. It’s just unbelievable, I’ve been to a lot of funerals in the last fifty-years and more now at a time in my

life when I was young, I used to think there was something wrong with my father, he was always going to funerals, well I’m at that point in my life now for friends and ex-army people but, the association I had with people has been astounding that they’ve died of cancer. And secondly they have gone into Alzheimer’s,

it’s quite extraordinary and I don’t imagine it. But and I mean men and women. It’s also I think rather strange and unusual that a number of wives and husbands, family just never known what their parents were doing during the war, thirty-years of silence and you don’t even

think about it.

I thought so but I only have the grounds of my thinking and my imagination, but because the Americans had such trouble capturing Manila and the fact that the Japanese virtually

buried themselves into those multi-story buildings, they had flame throwers and they had great cannons, they used everything that they could possibly use and I’ve often wondered whether they were using chemicals, I don’t know. It’s only my thoughts on the subject because it was so evident that cancer was the reason for death yeah. There’s not

a pleasure in war you know and it’s still going on.

Well I suppose it was made very plain to us at all times that we were special people and we had to guard the events on behalf of our country. You start to know that, but you’re just wishing to be given more information

so you know what else is going on, you don’t know, you don’t know what other people are doing, you haven’t got the overall picture, I didn’t know anything about the Take event till years after the war.

Did not have any idea, we just knew that we were going to Manila, no matter where we came from and in this case Hollandia and we went in small numbers,

and we knew that we were going to go north of Manila and we had a fair bit of equipment which had been loaded onto ships, or a ship and we were waiting on the vehicles that, the Jeeps and other

vehicles that are used in the communications. And they were unloaded at the wharf and what people thought were the wharf labourers were driving the vehicles off the wharf, but we never saw them again because they just kept driving them. Yeah, we were left without

any vehicles we had to get a whole new range of vehicle sent to us cause they were stolen. That wasn’t a very good introduction because you know the Philippinos are pretty smart people, they weren’t wharf labourers at all, they were just organised. Not only were they poisoning the American troops they

were stealing whatever they wanted, yeah. But underneath that they were very pleasant, especially in the country they were pleasant, very musical, very proud, they were nice. And they’re a sad sort of people too you know, I think

the Americans gave them baseball and sport and long before they gave them education. They don’t like the American people or the American government. I think

the British were much better in taking over and educating people in foreign lands, and India’s a good example of that, I think they did it very well.

Well you’re dealing with native people who’ve got some education, and they’re scratching to a living, and they’ve been decimated by the Japanese, and they were smart enough to know the American. So they’d thieve cases of whiskey as an example, and get a hypodermic needle and put it in through the seal, in through the cork

and siphon out the whiskey and put back either torpedo juice as they call it, out of stuff they’ve stolen from the navy, or water with some burnt sugar in it to keep it brown. And so they take out half or so of the Johnny Walker and they put back the torpedo juice which sends people blind.

But the Americans had plenty of money and they were buying it cheap and they weren’t getting it supplied to the same degree. Well the message was don’t trust that person or, can’t say Philippino but…

Some of them were doing that to stay alive and feed themselves I suppose.

Don’t think that you know I’m denigrating the Philippinos because we could have the same problem here, we were fortunate that we haven’t had a war here. But if you joined the army as young as I did and you are mixing with a group of people you meet some pretty awful

human beings, I tell you. In your lifetime you never have reason to find yourself associating with some of these people, they are Australians, and I think that happens all over the world. Even when you open the newspaper these days, you know there’s some pretty awful things. That’s always a surprise, you didn’t know, you don’t know these things till

it happens you know. But I don’t have any regrets, I think I did my best and I enjoyed it. I think I was fortunate and I came back to my country, very healthy.

Well we came home by ship and always held an ambition that I would like to do law and that was what I had intended to do, but before I was demobbed which is the

term used, I was amongst other people asked if I would go to Singapore for twelve-months as they were forming a war crimes court, and I took them up and I went to Singapore for three-years, I had a reason to do that and I’ll tell you later.

Yes, we had some good information about that and I had a cousin who was killed in Timor and that was my incentive, I thought twelve-months

would be a good opportunity to find out what happened to James Pollard, who was somebody that I had great affection for, was my cousin from Western Australia. And I made a point of finding out from other people and from affidavits, just what had happened to those Australians of, what was called Gull Force. He’d been

murdered in Dili. But I certainly never told his mother when I came back, and I didn’t intend or expect to be in Singapore for three-years rather than the twelve-months, and I’ll be happy to tell you about that experience, it’s quite

interesting.

Well if my memory serves me, and I may have some big,

I may have some big areas of loss of memory, we didn’t really know what may be happening elsewhere, and I didn’t know for some years after the war to be honest with you. Like we didn’t have daily reports or meetings giving

information of what had been achieved, what disasters may have taken place, we were certainly just focussed on our own, I was just focussed as with others, on our own activity. There was always some times a bit of a laugh about people, have in mind some of the individuals

that came later, for whatever reason I never did know or how it happened, they were inducted. But all I can say is that they were passing strange, and I, but I think the position arose they couldn’t get rid of them, so they just left them

behind doing whatever I don’t know, in Brisbane. Having been sworn to secrecy, they obviously didn’t want to just let them out and let them go, when we went overseas they just didn’t take them with us. Some very, some very intelligent people could be on the edge, quite strange.

That’s not unusual.

Well I think they were just moved aside and given something to do in one of the huts at Ascot Park

or transferred to a fire station that we’d taken over, because the IBM [International Business Machines] machines that I referred to earlier, were extremely noisy and nobody really wanted that. They’d put plugs in their ears and so on and they sound-proofed to some degree the brick building of the local fire brigade building which they took over.

And I know that a number of people were sent to work there because they weren’t doing anything much except putting the cards through the machine, and sending them back to 21 Henry Street. Nobody that I know of was actually released or transferred to another unit.

Well you don’t really think about it at the time, now there were guards on the gates there, but I was asked to give a speech on this, Betty had been telling, my wife Betty had been telling some people

that I’d been in Central and a secret organisation, and the person that runs it wanted me to give a speech and I then decided I’d do it. But I hadn’t thought about it for years and I had to think, well what am I going to say, and search back in my memory to do that. And

I, it was to do with, it was to do mainly with my time at, in the in Singapore with the war crimes, so I had to give them an explanation of how I got into the war crimes, talking about briefly Central Bureau and 21 Henry Street.

So also in my speech I dealt with the fact that fifteen-thousand men had been put into a court yard for three-days by the commandant at Changi prisoner of war camp, Fukuye Shimpi. So at the end of my speech two people walked up to me and it was received quite well and one of them said, “Frank,” he said, “I lived next door to 21 Henry Street when I was a young person, and I’ve

been wondering all my life, what was going on there, with the people coming and going and all the……”

No, I was chosen for the job at Central Bureau at Dubbo

at the small school of military intelligence, and transferred alone to be met by a person in Brisbane railway station and then taken to the accommodation which was provided, without any explanation other than the fact that we’d be, we would have a person contact us the next day, make yourself comfortable in this flea house.

That was the measure of it, and as people arrived one by one, they all came from different states and nobody knew for what reason we’d been sent to Brisbane until we’re picked up by a person from Central Bureau and taken to 21 Henry Street, where we’re then given an explanation. And

it was heavily explained that it was a very secret organisation, introduced to various people and also we got an explanation how the signals go from one place up into the ionosphere and back down to earth again, and about the skip distances and the fact that we would be involved in sorting out information of the enemy.

We were then sworn the oath of secrecy and explained that the, that any evidence that we were given, that we may print or reveal would carry a jail sentence of some twenty, twenty-two years. That was fair enough and it was further given some

explanation about encoding messages, how they’d be received and how they would possibly decoded, as simple as that and that was followed up by some days of further explanations about our individual duties, and we had to then also provide a background of our previous experience and work

habits if any.

Yes, as far as I remember, I was at Liverpool here in Sydney which had been a military camp from World War I, and

why it was I believe now, that we were given leave of a week or more and returned to the camp. Now have in mind that a number of people came from other states, so there were relatively few at the camp that day when we were visited by an officer who explained the need to commence this war crimes court, being the first after the

war, and as we had been shown to be reliable people, made reference to our oath of secrecy etcetera, “Would we like to go to Melbourne and then join the rest of the people there from other states, go to Singapore for one-year.” We’d be living at the Goodwood Park Hotel which was quite

luxurious and we’d be back in a year. We’d be travelling from Melbourne to Perth by train and then a boat to Singapore. I agreed. None of the others would, wanted to go. My specific reason was that I was aware of a number of army who had been

captured in Timor and executed in Dili which may have included my cousin James Pollard from Western Australia. He had an unusual designation in his enlistment number which was WX12341, and

with that in mind I advised my parents what I proposed to do, they were in favour of that. But generally speaking the rest of the family were disappointed because they thought I’d come back to the war to join the family company. Possibly that was another reason why I was happy to go to Singapore. I went to Melbourne, met a

group of people including a couple of drivers and we were advised that others would be arriving and then we would go to Perth by train. We did that and we were on a dreadful train which was held up by flooding as they’d had the first rain for seven-years somewhere on the track, and

we just made it in Perth to get straight on the train. And I was seen off by my parents and my Aunt Pollard who asked me if I’d find out what had happened to her son who she dearly loved, he was twenty-two years of age when he was fighting with the Gull Force,

an Australian group. We arrived in Singapore after the ship journey and driven to the Goodwood Park Hotel which had a magnificent garden, and there were native people there cutting the grass and attending to the flowers, dropped at the Goodwood Park Hotel,

which we discovered was almost demolished, there were no doors, no windows, no timber, anything that could be removed had been stolen by the Japs or the native people. But the original staff, the natives, were still living around in their quarters and maintaining the garden, cause there’s nothing else to do

I guess. This was extremely disappointing and rather critical, however there was a building locked up in the area of the Goodwood Park Hotel gardens, two-storey building in very good condition and we were advised that it had been maintained and used as a brothel for the Japanese officers during the war.

So that provided office space on the ground floor and some accommodation on the bedrooms above, and we arranged to get cleaners in and we also camped in a couple of the rooms of the old hotel, and

arrangements were made for the British authorities to send tradesmen and make some of the rooms habitable. So they put new doors on, glass wasn’t necessary in the windows, they put shutters on the windows which would’ve been there originally, set up a kitchen underneath in the basement which had been the original kitchen, made arrangement with some company to provide staff, we didn’t know

at that time that the custom was with staff, that you also provide them with food and sufficient food for their family and anything else they wanted they just took. The food was reasonable that they prepared and the principal officers

had arrangements for food, there was a kitchen and they engaged a cook. It was rather disturbing that we had four drivers and after some couple of weeks none of our equipment and vehicles had arrived, if ever they were sent, we don’t know. The British didn’t have any vehicles that

we could obtain, they helped in other ways with office equipment which was pretty scary, but we didn’t have any refrigerators, then we had a visit from a group of Americans who had flown into Singapore. They also drove out to the Goodwood Park Hotel, they were going to stay there, but one look at it, they decided they were going to go somewhere else,

and they eventually made some arrangements with another building in Singapore. And they were very friendly and they came to visit us each day and soon discovered that there was nothing there that they could find that was of particular interest to them, because there hadn’t been any Australian troops there, any American troops there, and very few American civilians.

Knowing our situation and the fact that they were then flying onto Manila, the American group gave us three Jeeps, a Chev car, two refrigerators, a complete kitchen mobile kitchen, all

their office equipment and copiers, everything they had, they gave us which was an exceptional generosity. However, I guess they’d fly onto Philippines and load up again. That made a great difference to settling in because we had the drivers there and gradually we made the

accommodation reasonable and got more carpenters on the job and created a recreational area. The roof was on it and it didn’t leak, we also had electricity connected and the cooks down below cooked with electricity and some wood. The food was scanty and

not so good until we discovered that we had to provide a lot more essentials for them because we had to feed their families. However, one of the early problems was that we Australians like tea very much and the tea that they were providing was absolutely hideous. You couldn’t drink it and it was very difficult

to buy tea in Singapore, it was much in demand and very expensive and one of the friends there, drilled a hole in the floorboards so he could look down and get some view of what was happening in the kitchen, and he observed that when they got the tea ration, the Chinese cooks steamed open the tea bags or packs

and poured the tea into a large boiling, boiling cauldron, then they evidently poured off the tea which they stored and that was the tea that we were getting, and then they dried the tea in the oven and they put it back into the packs when it was dry and they’d sell that for quite, it was quite valuable

item you see. So from there on we gave them the tea and retained some of it ourselves and when we went down for breakfast lunch or dinner, we made ourselves some tea out of the boiling water and that was a relief. They were Chinese, they had no respect for us, they obviously didn’t like

white Caucasian people and they were difficult. I think at one stage we might’ve got rid of the originals and got another group, I think we did. The people living around, the gardeners and, they were very pleasant, very happy individuals and they had, the men seemed to have very young wives,

if they weren’t with lots of little children, or they were pregnant, and we got to work with a huge quantity of affidavits. The prisoners were, the prisoners that were healthy enough, dictated their affidavits, their experiences of their capture, their location

and particular any events that may have lead to cruelty, or death and the names of any Japanese or Koreans guards or NCOs [Non Commissioned Officers], officers that may have been responsible. Now the Australian way of life in my generation was that everybody got a nickname of some description, and seeing that I had dark

auburn hair, they called me Carrots, everybody had a nickname it was awful, doesn’t happen these days I don’t think. So the Australians gave the worst of the Japanese and Korean guards nicknames, like Liver Lips, the Boy Bastard, and he was a bastard, and I was very happy

to see him hanged. So whilst they had names, the Japanese didn’t have any series of records like we have in the British system. So there were no records to rely upon but we had the men, they’re in jails, they’ve been,

they’re being cared for and it was their person was usually always referred to as in the affidavits by their nicknames, Squinty and things like that. The task ahead for the year was obviously going to be difficult and reluctantly the

Australian government gave us permission to hire three stenographers and a couple of male clerks. There was a good deal of travelling to be done because the first thing that had to be achieved was to take all the affidavits and correlate the names of the Boy Bastard and all these people

to get as much history as we could on each individual for trial. However bear in mind, if we’re going to try one of these Koreans or Japanese, we only need one specific event to take to court. If he beheaded eight people we would try him on a specific person that was

beheaded, certainly mention these accused of beheading eight at a certain place and time, according to affidavits of so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and we’d try him on one of those. We also had decided and it was obvious there’s so many that we will start the trials on a worse case basis, taking the worst

first. Lieutenant Colonel Fukuye Shimpi, the commandant of Changi prison camp was imprisoned and we had a complete history of him and he was going to be the first person tried. It was obvious and we had complete information of his

crime. He was the person that had decided that all the officers and other ranks would sign a document which was described as the non-escape pact. Any person escaping or attempting to escape would be shot. Nobody would sign.

The objective of every prisoner is to get back to your own country, to escape. He objected, all the officers objected including Colonel Pericaval and after some time week or more, I’ve forgotten

Fukuye had ordered that all the prisoners be gathered up from the prison and the camps. There were camps outside Changi prison cause there’s so many thousands of English and Indians, but they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Indians except as I now recall, they used them, tied to rubber trees, and used them for bayonet practice and

thousands of the Indians, thousands and thousands of them had just died of starvation, if they weren’t murdered. So we were to try Fukuye of, at his trial whereby he put fifteen-thousand four-hundred men into the compound of Changi prison which had very high enormous stone walls. That is a lot

of people and the area wasn’t that big, ninety per cent of them had to stand up, it was only those that were so sick that could be laid down, spaces were made in some of the footings of stone, the men pulled up and dug pits to relieve themselves. So for three-days and nights and the days there, of course, are

extremely hot and these poor unfortunate British and Australians are virtually bleeding in the heat and there’s illness there and very, very sick people, they had guards with machine guns on the wall, around the wall. And it was at some stage and how it was, I don’t know,

but they were able to get some musical instruments into the compound. So they’d play a little bit of music. It was feared that if they didn’t sign they were going to turn the machine guns onto the prisoners, and as I have read of the affidavits, at some

point they struck up the music of ‘God Save the King, God save our gracious king’, so you’ve got more than fifteen-thousand voices and they all know the words of that song, and that is an enormous sound and if the Japs could be terrified, they were certainly frightened

of this. They can’t understand the words but the sound is amazing, then there was dead silence and I’m told that they fully expected that the Japs were then going to start killing them all cause the machine guns were there. It was then decided by senior officer that they would sign under

duress. OK. So they were then allowed to come out gradually and sign a document, the non-escape pact, and names like Ned Kelly were constant and other awful expressions which made no difference to the Chinese, to the Japanese but

they’re Australians and very shortly after that a couple of British servicemen, and I think at least two Australians escaped and were recaptured. One, Corporal Breavington,

to make an example Colonel Fukuye ordered that they were to be executed at the usual spot, being behind a Changi prison wall, on Changi Beach, a sandy area with palm trees, with the sand floating down to the water.

Senior officers were present when the, the Brits and Breavington, I don’t know about the second Australian, were to be executed by firing squad. It so happened that the firing squad hit Breavington, mostly in the legs and didn’t kill him.

Breavington had already pleaded at his trial that he would take, he would take the execution but please let the others go, as he had organised the escape. They didn’t except that. Breavington is then reported by those officers present that he was in terrible pain and he cried out, “For Christ sake,

finish me off.” Remember what I’m going to say now. The Jap officer in charge of the firing squad went over to Breavington to shoot him in the head and his pistol didn’t work, it just clicked, it was reported that a Indian officer who had been a collaborator with the

Japanese carrying his side arms, went over to Breavington and shot him in the head. Fukuye was tried on the murder of Corporal Breavington. OK. It was the first trial and the court decided that as he’d been a very senior officer,

that other than this matter of the square and the non release pact, they would execute him by firing squad. All the Japanese thought that at trial they would be executed by firing squad, this was in their mind. For interests sake, we went

down to the beach that morning at five-o’clock or something, Fukuye was led down the steps by the British guards, the firing squad arrived and the firing squad of course know that one person has a blank bullet, so that no person of the firing squad can say, well I hit him in the head and I hit him somewhere else, they can’t say because somebody has a blank. Fukuye

asked for a, didn’t want to be hooded, but he was hooded. Being tied to the post at what was believed to be the same spot as he had murdered Breavington, he asked for permission to cry “Banzai,” being a part of the religion, the words are significant to Japanese, permission was given, the firing squad was set up,

young, lily white young British soldiers and the signal given by the officer in charge of the firing squad, and they hit Breavington everywhere but enough to kill him, and whilst he was moving he didn’t otherwise make a sound. Right. Now you know what happened to Breavington.

So the English officer in charge of the firing squad, went over to Fukuye and was to give him the coup de gras, and his pistol just click, click, click and there wasn’t a sound and it was just horrible. To think what had happened to Breavington, this is Fukuye. The sergeant major of the British Army went over and drew his pistol

out and shot Fukuye and on the spot it was decided that absolutely no firing squads. So.

I think it was our first trial, our first execution, it’s a matter of specific

interest because you were starting to build up, I have to say this, we were starting to build up a hatred to certain people because we are reading, we’re going through these thousands of affidavits, we are just starting to find out what had happened to so many poor unfortunate Australians that were murdered. They were starved to death, they were beaten, they were flogged and in

every aspect of life they were being degraded, particularly by the Korean guards. Now the Korean guard was the lowest element of the Japanese command, above him was the Japanese private, then the NCO, then the officers, then the officers in command, down the command from the officers to the junior officers, to the

NCOs to the non commissioned corporals and sergeants, down to the private were all bashed, it was part of their system. And the one at the bottom was the Korean guard, he’s being bashed by the privates of the Japanese in the system, he’s then going to take it out on the prisoner because he’s the lowliest individual on the earth, according to their feelings.

The Koreans were vile and enjoyed flogging, starving, crippling and killing and you’re starting to hate, why wouldn’t I want to see Fukuye shot? Because he’s a human being, he’s got to know what’s going on here and it was a morning that one could never forget, and you don’t

ever want to do it again. In the meantime our investigations were going and the Japanese are still in the belief that the guilt will bring execution by firing squad, so we might have four, six or eight individuals all claiming to be Liver Lips, they might look a bit like him,

and another half a dozen of the Boy Bastards you see, they all want to die at that point by firing squad, for their emperor because they should never be alive as a prisoner, it’s their religion. The execution of Fukuye went like wildfire through the jail and suddenly we haven’t got six Liver Lips

any more, maybe there’s only one, they don’t want to be hanged because that was now the decision, they’d all be hanged. The British had an English hangman on the way for their own purposes and ours, he’s a civilian.

In a building in Singapore,

in what had been a small court part of a complex which is still standing. We didn’t need much space, interpreters, members of the court, usually always a Japanese interpreter as well, and generally very short sessions, going back

to what I said, there’s one problem here, we are only taking them on a worse case basis, it’s a certainty that person’s going to be found guilty and committed to be hanged. It’s a long way down the line before they’ll be getting a jail sentence.

In view of what happened to Breavington and to see what actually happened, it was a carbon copy, it’s almost unbelievable that it could happen again, that the officer in charge had

a pistol that wasn’t set correctly and somebody else has got to finish Fukuye off, that’s what happened to Breavington virtually. You can’t believe it. You don’t even want to see it, you can’t imagine it could happen. So the event then, we haven’t got six Boy Bastards and Liver Lips

so they know they’re going to be hanged, and slowly and increasingly they started to commit suicide, by any means that they can. Some are in jail and some are elsewhere. A lot of our work immediately disappears because the

prisoner has committed suicide and we are getting into the fourth, fifth and sixth month. It’s also effecting the British because as that started, so their system of suicide increased, till it got to the point where they’d got hold of some razor blades

and they had broken them down to a minute edge, so you might get ten out of one ordinary razor blade. One night they passed these down the cells on the same floor naturally of Changi prison, one little blade to each cell,

at a given signal when the guard went by they used that little bit of razor blade to cut their wrists and or their jugular veins, and when the guard came back, there’s a river of blood, and there’s a huge number of dead and bleeding Jap prisoners of war. That created

a very significant problem of our trials because they, a number of those people, were would have been tried by the British or ourselves, or the Dutch and they then, the prison orderlies and management took action to stop

this sort of thing and kept these guys naked, and it wasn’t a very good start to what we’d gone there for, in the year. So it was all tightened and gradually the suicides were prevented and it makes you wonder

why not, they were all guilty and we carried on with the trials and the investigations which frequently meant going right up into Malaya, Burma as it was then called, Siam, where there’d been some major killing. We were

leaving Hong Kong till the last cause it was decided we’d go probably go home that way, and by the end of the year some of the people were sick of it and asked to be replaced and they were and that went on for quite a bit actually. And one of our drivers

fell madly in love with a Eurasian girl who worked in the bank and wanted to get married because she was pregnant, but under the system of the military that individual has to be returned to his own country first, don’t know how long that’s applied, but he probably hands down for British Army regulations. And he couldn’t write

nor read as it turned out, and I used to write some letters for him and read his letters, he was a nice man, snow white hair, very well built. And anyway the poor unfortunate girl was devastated, it was awful. But generally others that were there, had had enough of this and I suppose one of the reasons

is that you started, you start to build up a……

Unlike Central Bureau we did have a certain amount of time that we could spend and we had transport, we could relax somewhat and as the trials carried on

and quite efficient manner, we could see that we’re getting through the worst cases. In terms of the worst cases, I did go to the jail and see them hanged

on about three occasions and there were so many that this hangman from England started weighing them and dropping the prisoners three at a time. It was pretty awful really, but I’m pleased that I did it

and I took photographs of it there for posterity. The trials themselves were quite sad awful and it wasn’t something that we attended after having gone through the worst of it, except maybe once or twice when you’ve got a particularly bad case.

There was a good looking young Japanese who prided himself on his English as spoken by Australians and he was in charge of a squad of Japanese guards on the wharves at Singapore where the Australians were unloading cargo, and I must say that the Australians were

absolutely marvellous at stealing from the Japanese if they had the opportunity, all of which was to keep themselves and someone else alive of course. So they were losing quite a bit of stuff, and down on the wharf this day this young officer thought he’d vent his English on the guards and there was quite a group of them, twenty or thirty, and he

said something like this and the words were used in the court case in his Australian English, he said, “About his dealing, you think that I know bloody nothing, but I tell you I know bugger all.” And there’s

laughter erupted you see, and he got very angry and he ordered the guards to smash the Australian wharf labourers and seven of them were killed. Now there could’ve been other matters in which we could’ve tried him but that was the worst, and it was the only bit of humour

ever spoken in a court really. Now that’s an awful thing to happen but there were so many other cases where you had repetitive cruelty and flogging it was quite sickening. And I can

understand how some of the members were anxious to go home cause we signed up to go there for a year and into the second year, and I wasn’t there but I had on good authority of a young British fellow who

attended a British court and he had been caged in a bamboo and steel cage in the open for twelve-months and starved, and the reason he went to court was that the

chief of the Kempei Tai, that’s the Japanese police was to be tried and without any anger he carefully defended the, as a witness, the Japanese on trial

and then when he was found guilty and to be hanged on the, whatever account it was, he attended the jail to pacify this guy who was in absolute disgrace because he, firstly, was guilty and doing what he believed to be the right thing, and secondly he was going to be hanged,

and in the most merciful manner he assisted him all the way through to the trapdoor. Now that act of kindness was incredible in view of what else was around us, with all these dreadful things that were being

done to prisoners of war, by the Japanese and as I say, the Korean guards. And it’s a bit sad that there was so much hatred in the hearts of the Japanese, so much satisfaction from destroying lives and

killing them and starving them and bashing them, and so many of them were crippled, and not only were they starving but the flogging. It’s amazing that even any of them would’ve lived through this, such a terrible time of their life and I’ve used the word before that, about

hatred and we see it unfortunately in our country, in our parliaments where the members of one party can express and carry on a hatred for somebody else that doesn’t agree with them, for all their life, all their life in parliament, and I find that very difficult to understand.

Because it not, you know hatred and the expressions that go with it don’t really get you anywhere, they’re there to serve the country. And I was reminded when I think of that person who had such kindness in his heart after the way he’d been treated by the Japanese, of a story that Killen, the member

from Queensland told me years ago, he was a great student of Australian history, and I happened to say how it was strange that when I was young, people would say, “Is your father related to Billy Hughes?” Who was our prime minister at the time, “No,” I said. And he said,

“I can tell you something about Billy Hughes.” He said there was a little known meeting in World War I on a battleship which was attended by Woodrow Wilson and Billy Hughes and the prime minister of England at the time, and Woodrow

Wilson hated Billy Hughes, but he didn’t know that Billy Hughes was the greatest hater on earth and absolutely loathed Woodrow Wilson. So after the meeting on the battleship, Hughes went back to his cruiser and the next morning he called John Latham, his aide de camp, he was later

Sir John Latham of the High Court of Australia, Billy Hughes said to Latham, “Latham, have you heard the news?” “No sir.” He said, “It’s terrible, it’s terrible. Woodrow Wilson ship’s been sunk and he’s gone to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.” And Latham said, “It’s terrible sir, it’s terrible.” And Hughes said, “It’s worse sir, worse Latham, worse than that, it’s not true.”

And in his heart I think he meant it. Well that’s a bit of humour that I believe to be true, but to be involved with a war crimes court is not one of joy. There was a well known radio announcer, Australian

radio announcer and I think he’s been on the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], but I’m not sure about that, and he had been speaking on Japanese radio, getting a bit better life I suppose as a prisoner, and we had the information, and we sought guidance from the government what to do about

it. And we got a very quick answer that we do nothing because the country had never taken action of that nature against another Australian person and that was to be put aside, and it was. Secondly,

and possibly finally, there were twenty-two if not twenty-three Australian nurses that were murdered on Banka Island, you probably know of the event. We were aware of it through nurse Vivian Bullwinkel, who after coming back

to Australia married and went to live in Perth. Now the treatment of those unfortunate girls by the Japanese, we had in detail and in seeking guidance from the government again, the response was that under no circumstances are we to reveal their treatment

in honour and respect of their families. It wasn’t uncommon for the Japanese to give them a swim in the ocean some afternoons, which was their only pleasure and as the war was just about over in order to save themselves, the girls were taken down for their swim and they had two machine

guns on the beach and whilst they were in the water, they machine gunned them to death and by some extraordinary circumstances Nurse Bullwinkel’s body, hideously wounded, floated to an area of some native village, I don’t know how far, but it might have been as much as a mile, I don’t know, and they took care

of her and brought her round and saved her life. It was only through Bullwinkel that we knew how those poor unfortunate girls had suffered. We were then made extensive enquiries and it was decided that some of the officers involved in that treatment in Banka Island were being held

in Batavia, that’s Jakarta now, so three of our members were elected to go down and see if they could interview them and they flew down from Singapore, and under arrangements the Brits, the British had two vehicles ready for them with Indian drivers

to go out to the camp, the prisoners of war camp, to interview these Japanese officers. Hardly fifteen-minutes out of the airport, they, two of them were killed immediately in one car by some Indonesians who we think may have mistaken them for

Dutch officers because there was a war going on virtually, between the Dutch and the Indonesians, third person was very badly injured, and when taken away and searched he had some printed currency on him which was Dutch money I believe.

And that was a significant crime of the Indonesians, carrying a death penalty and in fact, whilst he had been wounded, they executed him. Now it’s getting on, time was getting on and we’d been

there just on three-years and time begins to tell in events of that nature, there’s no joy in it. So it was decided that we’d had enough, more trials are not going to bring back another life and

the general opinion broadened that as time went on that probably the Japanese were just being what they are, how they’d been educated, how it was that the kamikaze pilots that did so much destruction would give their life

for Hirohito which Caucasian people don’t do, and if that’s not the case, well they were just bred to hate their enemy and themselves for being a prisoner of war which is against their

faith. Things were changing because they’d begin to write letters home to their families and getting back pleas to come home, nothing to suggest that they should be dead, for example. We lose the life of three of our excellent people, one of them who had entered the war in Europe

very early and died in Batavia. So we advised the Australian government that we felt it was time to come home and to make some arrangement, we all thought that they’d fly us home, but

we got a ship up to Hong Kong and waited there for some days and we got the ship home to Sydney. And when the ship docked in Sydney Harbour, there was an urgent message for me to

come immediately as there was a car waiting for me and my father was there and he took me up to Ryde Hospital. My mother’s youngest adopted child, little girl of my

grandparents, had given birth the day before to her first child and she’d just died before I got there, and it was a very unfortunate happening because I was extremely fond of her, and her husband

died eleven-months later. He went into shock and he got some form of sugar diabetes and he had no desire to live. Anyway, and my mother then took the child and looked after him till he was five.

Well the trials were significantly the same, the same, the same, after the initial Fukuye incident, a hanging which was never going to be repeated under any circumstances

and it entered into an extremely routine practice because we were never going to get through the numbers that were in jail, and we’re only trying people that are guilty and will be found guilty and were hanged.

There’s a certain sameness there and an exceedingly awful burning feeling that you hate these people and you just wish they were all dead and it’s a very unhealthy state of life,

and I was very happy to get out of it. Now if I may finish on this note, the reason for me going there was to see what I could find about my cousin’s death. There was a lot of fighting in Timor and Australians were sent there but not in large numbers, and my cousin James Pollard

was one of them with a small group. And the major number of troops surrendered after some time, and a group which were being sent from Darwin were so bombed by aircraft and the officer in charge decided to go back to Darwin.

They wouldn’t a been able to do any good anyway, because the Australians that were there fighting the Japanese had surrendered, except the Gull Force who were in the mountains and they were carrying out a campaign against Japanese with the assistance of the Timorese.

And I had gone to Singapore to see what I could find out about the death of my wonderful cousin, he had an extremely wonderful voice this boy, and they’d lived on a farm in Western Australia and it was a pretty hard life for his brother who’d been hideously wounded in Darwin, with shrapnel

to the head and was never the same. And unfortunately he would’ve been better off dead, and then Jim had volunteered and gone to Timor and it wasn’t for some time that they were captured, in the mountains and the Japanese had put them in groups of five

and they’d passed piano wire or fencing wire through one wrist of each of the five, and then marched them over the mountains back to Dili and pretty rough terrain, and the problem there is that if one fell, they’d all go down because they’re dragged down by the wrists. And

the information that we had is that when they got back to Dili, the senior officer of the Japanese at that time immediately had them dig a shallow grave in the town, each of them and they were in a very bad state because their wrists were torn and bleeding

and had them as they finished their grave, digging, had them one by one bayoneted to death, and their bodies were then put in this shallow grave. And according to the priest that prepared the affidavit of this subject, it wasn’t long but a few days when the dogs start to dig up the

graves. So he, the priest, decided to get a group to remove them and give them a decent burial. Unfortunately he said, the Timorese were caught doing this

at night and they were all executed. Well the reason I went to Singapore with the war crimes court was motivated by my fondness for my cousin Jim Pollard,

my intention that I didn’t want to get mixed up with family business and I certainly never told his mother or anybody else, cause they’re all dead, and that was enough for me. That was awful, then when we lose three more Australians

and what have we achieved? Trying a hundred or more Japanese criminals and that was enough.

No, I just told, that was her question to me, when we met,

“What about my Jim?” And I said, “Well there’s nothing that I can tell you, but unfortunately he probably died like a number of others, very unfortunately one of the people that wasn’t repatriated home.” And that was the kindest thing that I thought I

could say because she’d had one son that was hideously wounded and the loss of her other one was such a blow, haven’t got any children yet so it’s a bit hard to understand, but she was a very, very unhappy, poor unfortunate

mother and I felt terribly sorry for her, and it wasn’t fair to tell her, she’d had enough, the loss of her son Jim and the wounding of Richard was as much as anybody could stand. She was a very nice person.

I’m sorry I just can’t get your point.

Have in mind that we are trying the worst of those that are known with

evidence coming from a broad number of individuals that are individually describing the cruelty and the, usually the death of some other Australian, I think that’s sufficient for him, whoever

he may be, to be executed under the law. And I personally have a similar feeling in regard to criminals who carry out crimes of that nature here in my country, like executing a police officer on duty

in cold blood, taking the life of a man who may have a wife and children, we don’t have the death penalty, but I never for one moment ever thought that any of the people that we tried didn’t deserve

what they were getting under that law. They had excellent defence, we had unlimited applications on the subject, if there was any doubt, we didn’t try them and we were giving our lifetime of almost three-years or more to do this on behalf

of the families of these unfortunate people that they had killed under the circumstances, they couldn’t defend themselves. And what’s more unfortunately, they enjoyed doing it. That was the, that in my opinion deserved the death penalty. It

was something that I don’t regret doing but it did change my life and my plans for my life, and I did other things and that was successful and I’ve now got all that behind me.

Well that was being done by affidavit, we didn’t call anybody back except Weary Dunlop came back, and

as I made remarks about my feelings of personal hatred, Weary Dunlop also came to defend certain of the Japanese because he couldn’t hate any living human being, after what he’d been through, and the

exercises that were made to kill him. He was a extraordinary man, a very brave one, and tall and heavy and powerful and, skinned down of course for want of food, but he saved the life and the limbs of many people and for him to

come to Singapore to defend some of the enemy was an extraordinary, extraordinary thing for a man to do. But that’s him and he felt he should do that I suppose, he didn’t have to, we didn’t call anybody else back. And those prisoners of war

had, all had their life shortened, very few alive now. I think the government gave them twenty-five thousand dollars last year, I don’t think I’m mistaken, I don’t think it was seventy-five thousand, but I think it was twenty-five thousand, not much. Wasn’t much when you’re being paid

about four-shillings and six-pence a day for your services.

Well it was all based

on the evidence of the written, of the translations of the individual servicemen. I kept about one hundred of the affidavits and there’s one over there, it’s rather brown, if you wouldn’t mind having a look, I’ll

show you what it looks like.

OK yeah. So if we have a large number of affidavits referring to the same event or the many events of this specific person, who we have no doubt who he is and, then

that is sufficient in my mind, it’s not as though he’s being tried on the evidence of just one distracted prisoner of war, that was our duty to go through all these thousands of affidavits, all made separately and in different places. It was a repetition of the facts and if you’ve

been caught in my opinion, first deal with facts and not fiction.

Not to my knowledge.

No, I’m certain that it wouldn’t have occurred and for a long time, part of two-years remember, they were still in a state of disgrace as a prisoner, they were then a prisoner of war, they weren’t the rampant invaders

of the country. It was the prisoner of war that they saw that shouldn’t be alive because they couldn’t understand why any person would want to continue in his life as a prisoner of war, it was just so contrary to their belief and their training. Then when they became prisoners of war, for a long time, they just wanted to die,

and probably ninety-per cent of them would have if they’d have had an opportunity. But they were being fairly closely held, the Japanese that were in Singapore were there after what, only roughly seventy or seventy-six days of active service

and handed Singapore over to them, it was defenceless. As you probably know, all those massive guns were facing the sea and the engineers and the army representatives that designed the

defence……..

Of the…?

Yes,

In terms of the Central

Bureau Intelligence Corps Association?

What was my job? Well I thought that I might of covered that. I was one of three-hundred and it was initially my job to be trained in traffic analysis,

I’m sorry. What was my job in the war

crimes unit, I misunderstood you. My job initially was to go through the affidavits, assist in correlating a card system of records for each individual that had been mentioned by a returned serviceman, record the

number of the affidavit and the person making the affidavit and the heading would be the name of the Japanese individual, like Liver Lips. If we did have a name, which frequently might have one name, first or second name, because by doing that through the thousands of affidavits, we get an idea of

the number of occasions and the number of individuals that had mentioned Liver Lips, so he becomes a suspect. If you’ve only got one or two names, well maybe there are only one or two people at a certain execution, but that could be very significant cause it might be the execution of six Australians for some small

real or imagined crime that they’ve committed. Beheading by Japanese officers they considered to be a great honour themselves. So that was what I was doing initially and I also spent quite a lot of time with one of the drivers travelling looking for specific individuals

who’d been mentioned as being present when certain crimes were committed. But that was an interesting time, it also got me and maybe one or two other people out of Singapore for a change, and we’d generally bring back some information, but we had plenty of cooperation from a number of Chinese. The Malays of course

they lent towards the Japanese, and even reading Bluey’s document there, the Chinese were helping him but the Malays were advising the Japanese of the presence of the escaping prisoners, and it was right through the whole venture that we couldn’t

trust the Malay individuals. Some of the Chinese were extremely wealthy, they in my memory, were disinclined to be involved, it was more the trader in one of the towns that had been a witness, which were most helpful.

They were interesting days. So there was a mixture then of office work and I also, because of my previous background when I joined up, I also maintained the company’s records and drew the wages every fortnight

and any other expenses, and filed the essential returns that had to be submitted every month or whatever, but there are a lot of records and in the movement of an individual, that has to be recorded, particularly if you’re going from Singapore to Malaya, Malaya to Siam or Burma, or something like that. And

I since noticed when I did go down to the records department in Melbourne, it was interesting that they held the records in my handwriting in a great file where I was recording the movements of people that were moving out of Singapore. I guess that’s because one could get

into an action, could get killed, could be killed or something like that, so the army in its wisdom records all those movements so there’s no doubts of, about where it happened and how it happened and when it happened. It was, that was a boring bit of activity but somebody had to do it and seeing that I’d done it previously in my early army life, I had a reasonable idea of how to do it. Nobody else wanted it.

The affidavit from

the priest that’s a good question. I had been searching for information and I can’t recall now whether the affidavit came up through a file or whether that priest responded because I put out plenty of feelers

to find out what had happened to the people in that Gull Force, cause a lot of them had been killed in the field of course, but I knew and I don’t know how I knew from previous information, that there had been killings in Dili of the Gull Force captured Australian soldiers

and that initial information, definitely I acquired when I was with the Central Bureau. I didn’t know, I really didn’t know the full details of how they were captured and how they were submitted to torture until I got the affidavit

from the priest. Now maybe some other person in Dili got the priest to send it to us, because I was sending out notices to endeavour to find out what happened, because there weren’t any significant affidavits in Singapore of what had been happening in Java, Sumatra as it was then called, now

Indonesia. Incidentally when I was over in Indonesia, our son Richard was working there, they then had two-hundred and twenty-million people and that’s three-years ago. We have nineteen million. No, that was a very sad event in our family history to

lose a young man like that.

We had an affidavit from Vivien Bullwinkel which was highly secretive and that would’ve been supplied to us from the

military I would say. Once she was brought back to Australia they would’ve been doubly assured that her information didn’t get out to the public. She was the only survivor, she was the only one except Japanese that would’ve known

of the mistreatment that those girls suffered and it was concerned, the concern of the Australian government and the instruction being never to be revealed.

Well her affidavit told the story,

in reading her affidavit, one knows exactly how they had been subject to indescribable conditions by the Japanese officers who were using a Dutch club

for this activity. I’ve never been to Banka Island and I don’t know anything about Banka Island I regret to say. It was a very, very saddening event those friends of mine being killed down there, because

I had offered to go cause they were sending two persons and I wanted to go, but it just wasn’t to be, it wasn’t my time. I suppose if I had insisted they would’ve sent me down, I don’t

know, but I felt very badly about it.

The reason was

that the Australian government made a decision that the girls had been subject to such treatment on a continuing basis, they had been murdered, it was well, it was known how it was that they

were murdered, but it was their maltreatment that was not to be revealed because it was so shocking and continuous that the government felt that their relatives, they’re all young, well all young, mostly young really, shouldn’t be burdened by that knowledge.

And Vivien Bullwinkel stayed with that, she made the affidavit for the government and in her life only, she only died a year or so ago, having married, in her life after the war she never made any public experiences,

or entered into discussions or went to radio or published an article for profit, she kept her secret in her heart, having in mind, she’d been spared, she may be religious I don’t know, she was Dutch and she was no doubt her

duty, having been spared death, it was her duty not to reveal. And I’ve got no doubt that that was an arrangement between herself and Australian government, that she was placed under an act of, and a request of secrecy. Ask yourself the question, the girls had been maltreated I’ll say it again, on a

continuous basis, is it any help at all for the parents, brothers, sisters to know about that? I agree with it. I’d never reveal it, Bullwinkel never revealed it and we were instructed

as members of the unit, that it should not be revealed. You don’t agree with that.

Yes.

I think the girls were I know hanging onto their life, nothing that they could do about it, they’re under great physical, mental pressure, surely I could say

in my imagination and afraid of death, hoping that they’d be relieved sometime, well there’s no doubt in my mind that the Australian prisoners of war in every aspect of their captured life,

their humour, their responsibility and help that they gave to each other, that they had a firm belief that they’d be relieved and that the Japanese would be defeated.

Certainly there was suicides but I can understand that, you’ve suffering form beri beri or tortured, ulcerated legs, you’re painful, hungry, deprived of any happiness, any part of your normal life, there were suicides.

I don’t think everybody could stand it and they were certainly all aware of the awfulness of the bashings and the ease with which many of them were murdered, struck down by Japanese officers, ghastly

situation. How do you live with that day after day? Particularly when you’re hungry and sick. So certainly yes, some of them took their own life.

No, I was in complete agreement with others that the subject was the Japanese treatment on a repetitious basis, must never be revealed in consideration of their

families and even though this time has elapsed, I still stand by that. I think it’s better, somebody else might, but I think it’s better left untold. My heart bleeds for them and then they were murdered, what a horrible death.

I was hoping to see some of the Japanese responsible tried on that basis, that would’ve been more satisfying. Probably if they’re still alive they’re probably back in Japan leading their lives. Maybe they always intended to kill them, if not one

by one, but certainly soon as they became aware that the war was going against them, they wanted to cover up the atrocities. Some of them may have died, some of them may have been killed, I don’t know. In circumstances like that anything could’ve happened. They only lived by supporting each other,

they were all nurses.

I don’t know how they discovered who it might be. It was

believed that those officers had come had been in Banka Island, that could’ve been revealed by other people, I don’t know because the subject wasn’t one to be opened up and discussed, we’ve got three dead bodies in Dili.

I was overcome with a dreadful guilt, I felt if I had pursued the matter to go, I wanted to go, well I would’ve been one of them and one other

could still have been alive. Guilt was the result of getting that information and we were all extremely devastated at their death. If it had been an air crash or something like that,

but it wasn’t, it was murder by a group of Japanese, and as in that report from Justice Kirby, the unnecessary shooting of one of them for a small localised matter of being in possession of the Dutch printed notes,

money, death. Terrible, and Kirby said it’s unfortunate because he would have known, he said he would’ve known, could’ve known. Goodness knows whether he took the money with him, he was, they were only there fifteen-minutes or something like that, then

they’re on their way to do the interrogation that they came for. It was tragic. The whole matter was tragic for those nurses and I’m pleased that that information isn’t around.

It was resolved with the murder of the three representatives, there was no way that it was worth, after what we had done in Singapore, there was no way that anybody there was going to

endeavour to unravel this and go searching, it was a tragedy and it was decided we’d given all that time of our lives and I think we did a good job, time to go home.

No I haven’t, I’ve never met her. In fact I was surprised that she was still alive but I didn’t know until three-years ago, a chiropractor in this town dislocated my spine and I had to have a spinal fusion, and the doctor that operated

on me, her father was with the war crimes court in Manila and we had a very interesting conversation. He’s a delightful young man, he’s part of the military service here and he’s been to Vietnam and he had a

photograph of Vivien Bullwinkel, his father was extremely interested in that matter and we talked about it. He has since operated on our son Richard who has had a spinal fusion. Most doctors of that type I find these days,

are not giving their time, they’re got money on their mind and every time I went to see him from the very first time, he sat me down, “Let’s have a good look at this Frank, now come back and see me so-and-so,

come back at five-o’clock so we can have some time to talk about that.” And I was very impressed. So he knew the history of Bullwinkel and I’m very pleased to say that I recommended him to Richard and he did a great job.

Well there were a number of courts in Singapore at, for some period of time, not as long as the British or the Australian.

I don’t know about the Indians what they were doing. I regret to say we had enough on our own time to look after the events of the Australians. The hangman, you probably saw a photograph of him there, well he was responsible for putting down the

individuals from other courts and I would think that he would limit himself to a certain number a day. It must be a great pressure for him anyway, no matter how long he’s been doing it and he must a been very experienced too, cause those people are weighed, you notice

that they are hooded, so the length of the drop determines, the weight determines the length of the drop, so that their neck snaps painlessly. Well he’s got to go through that and do all that, they’ve got to be taken to the trap-door. So I guess he was getting through three horrors at,

in the same time as one, cause he’s got assistants there to who are all members of the British Army. So he was virtually hanging people almost every day. I dunno and I can’t imagine that he would’ve been in the position where he’d been hanging three people at a time in his previous life, but I don’t know.

We never, we got no dealings with him, never sighted him except in those photographs, and those photographs were taken when there was a significantly interesting case that I was aware of for their conviction. I was not a sitting member of the court because they were three lawyers who took that in time. And

Colonel Jennings who’d been the senior people at law in this country, he was the judge of the court, yes. They got a very fine hearing, the cases were well presented, they didn’t take long, and they were guilty and they were hanged.

They were war criminals, ruthlessly sadistic standards, by our standard of life and I’m gravely disappointed that I didn’t have the opportunity of going to Dili as I anticipated I would,

and find out more about the death of my cousin, that being the reason why I went to Singapore. But that became second in my life when I was engaged and sorting out the paperwork, going through the histories of these people and assisting in every way I could.

No. I personally wasn’t doing that, one of the officers there took that on as his duty because he was a lawyer of our country

which would qualify everything that he did about those records and certainly those names of those tried by the First Australian war crimes court are computerised in Canberra War Memorial records. No readily available records are available of

the members of the court.

Yes.

Well the suicidal deaths of the first

surge of suicides after Fukuye had been executed by firing squad and the information became available that hanging would be the method used to, for termination of the Japanese and Koreans would be by hanging,

brought about large number of suicides. All the paperwork, all the records of the date were swept away, I shouldn’t say all, large majority of the records that we had prepared for trial were the people that committed the suicide. So that wiped out some

months of work. We’re still working on it, so we had to move the system up and we are getting infinitely more information than we ever expected. When they anticipated that this would take one-year, they had no idea of exactly how many deaths were

caused by the Japanese prisoners, the Japanese guards I should say and the Korean guards, plus the officers of certain material, certain Japanese units that took pleasure out of beheading prisoners of war.

It’s terrible, it’s extremely sad and the majority of those men were very young and in my opinion, they should never have been sent there.

If I could speak for other people

and if their feelings were like mine, they were angry. I’ve said today that I can’t readily understand how it is that the hatred of certain individuals takes place in government and other

institutions, but my emotions were running high because I was buried in the system of reading and knowing these awful crimes that were taking place, and how my fellow Australian prisoners of war were being maltreated.

It was awful. Now you don’t talk to your fellow members of the unit about how you feel about these things and continue it on day after day, you know how you feel and other people

are just as disturbed, and that’s why it was that numbers of people that came to the court, didn’t stay on even for twelve-months. It’s not a very pleasant undertaking but there was a motive to ensure that we took some action in

against the worst of these criminals. That’s what they are in my view, they are vicious, hateful criminals.

I was pleased that I had decided to go, nobody else did,

I had a reason to go there specifically as I was explained, I thought I’d have the opportunity of finalising for myself the death of my cousin and I became completely entrenched in my duties as a member of that organisation. I didn’t have much

feeling for the people that didn’t hang in, didn’t stay there, somebody else had to do it. But it was emotional and it was disturbing me but I was, I felt that I was doing some small part of a major job, to ensure that certain Japanese

and Koreans would die for their cruelty and their actions which caused the death of certain wonderful individuals because they were prisoners of war and the Japanese, I said it before and I can’t

deny….

Well strangely, the mail out of Australia to Singapore

was quite regular, and having in mind that I’d been away for some years I know that my family were anxious for me to come back, and they were very disappointed that I didn’t move in and take over the family business. Because I’ve been through this,

I had some very loyal employees and sons of employees and they would like me to have kept it going and it was a good property and it was a good business. But I wanted no part of that, and I understand it very well because as I said, I had a business starting with two people and finished up with three-hundred, and I mean three-hundred astoundingly marvellous

Australian employees, and from office staff to tradesmen and many of their sons, and I’d instituted a system that was probably twenty-five years ahead of itself but it provided the staff with a payment over and above their wages which was exceedingly generous. But it was based on productivity

and it was paid every fortnight, you didn’t have to wait for a profit at the end of the year or something like that, it was their activity and production. It was extremely successful and if wages were, at that time were say three-hundred dollars a week well, most of those men including sixty Germans that I had working for me, were setting themselves to earn a thousand, and that was a lot of

money, that was in pounds in those days. My family all, my employees always thought that my son Richard would take over the business, he was liked by them, he’d been through university, he’d work in the company on his holidays and when the time came, he said, “No I’m going to do my own thing.” And I thought he had rocks in his head and so did my accountant

because it’s very hard to start a new business, it’s not easy in any type of activity and seventy-per cent of all businesses started go into bankruptcy or liquidation and it was a great opportunity for him, my accountant summed that up for him and said, “Well if you’re not satisfied with this you got employees, you’ve got property, you’ve got turnover

and you can do something else with it, you don’t have to start from scratch.” OK so I know how it is, how disappointing it is.

Was I homesick?

No. I, in my personality and in my life I thoroughly enjoy being my own person, my own thing, it never worries me being alone, if I hadn’t met my wonderful wife, I don’t think I would have ever got married, but I do enjoy,

I did the right thing and I love my children, that’s a big part of my life, but not everybody has that type of personality, I’m never lonely. I have an extended group of friends and I’m loyal to them and they to me. With my family I treasured them all,

and I can’t say at any time that I ever felt really homesick for them. Now that probably sounds awful but it’s me and that’s my life. I love my children but I don’t live in their pockets and they know if they want something all they have to do is ring. Now being to the

war, I did care about my mother in particular, was an only son, must’ve been horrifying for her when I was reported missing for some days, and the telegram or somebody knocks on the door, that must’ve been awful. I regret that because she was such a superb woman. But you’ve asked me a question,

I love my family, but I don’t spend a lot of time with them, the main thing is they know I respect them and I love them.

Nothing. No, we were paid very lowly sum in the Australian Army, we never got very good conditions,

I’m happy to say it has improved but we just didn’t have the funds in our country, that’s the problem. Things have now changed and people in the military are more respected and their income is in consequence more beneficial to them than it was in times past, during World War

II and World War I, and Vietnam and Korea. Conditions were pretty bad, that didn’t worry me, it didn’t worry me. I had an understanding, that was the score and nothing was going to change it. But the defence of my country was uppermost.

I came to the conclusion that they were the product of their environment and they were being purely Japanese,

and they believed in their education, the examples of their family, cause they are family oriented, and the military training, particularly their duty to die for their

Emperor, not to be captured, that is a disgrace to your family. They had the belief, the prisoners as Japanese, had the belief that they had disgraced their family by being alive and I would think that was part of the motive of

destroying the prisoners of war who they believed should be dead because when they became prisoners of war, they were committing suicide at a massive rate. I said before, after some time, many months, they did start to get correspondence from

their families, things changed. You didn’t ask me this question, but what worries me is that I don’t know which way they would go, the Japanese would move in the event of another conflict in the world where

they may join with another country. We are a very, very large island, population nineteen-million, we can’t defend ourselves and without the help and consideration of the United States

we would be hopelessly defeated. Now, I’ve always believed that our problem will arise from Indonesia, I believe that, I just live in hope that I’m wrong.

Well my final conclusion if I hadn’t said it, was they were just being Japanese as they had been taught and instructed by the family and the military,

they didn’t know any better or anything different and you see that sort of activity in Korea and China, life’s very cheap, and you see it in South America. We have a very,

very, very wonderful country to live in and you are quite young and you are going to live to see the changes as I have, and I won’t bring into the subject the Muslim

people that are now evident in our country because I regret to say I don’t think they’re ever going to become active members of our society. I, we have had

and enjoyed a wonderful way of life and with our climate, our freedom, a country of great wealth and generally speaking, a community of very caring

individuals.

Yes I think that if they can get a better deal from the coal that we sell them and the iron ore that we sell them and probably

the cotton that they, we sell them and maybe the wheat, if we sell them wheat, I think if they can get a better deal they’ll take it. We buy of course from Japan, don’t forget that, we buy huge number of motor cars and electric equipment, we don’t manufacture

that type of article here any more. They’re our trading partners, I wouldn’t trust them, they’ll be trading where it suits them. Sorry to say, that’s what I think. I don’t hate them, I just have a certain fear.

It was difficult particularly as I had

stayed on after the end of the war and a lot of people had settled down during that period, and I could see it was too late to consider going to university, and I was determined to do something which I did, and it turned out to be very successful,

mainly I suppose because I was dealing with people. And for whatever reason it is I do get on well and I have been respected by my employees, but you win that otherwise you don’t get it, and that is a great asset in building a business, if you’ve got the employees

happy and successful and supportive cause you can’t do everything yourself. And I was very, very unhappy personally when I sold the business because I was unprepared for the life without the daily routines and having

the support of all those people that I employed, and somebody to wash the car when it needed it, and a few other assets but not unlike a lot of people, I was totally unprepared.

Well it was a peacetime era, we’d won the war, we’d been successful in that, the country was taking an upward turn, it was very exciting and I wanted to be part of that and when I got that business rolling,

for some years, I never told anybody this, but I frequently felt like some other person, sounds stupid, but the reality of the success, I wasn’t arrogant, I just felt that it was a very happy state.

And what’s more, I’d never ever contemplated failure. Never for one moment, and I was happy and pleased that I was taking other people and my family with me. That was a big plus. However the lesson in this is to be prepared for

retirement in your early life because your youth, I regret to say, doesn’t carry on and on, there comes a time when if you’re lucky, you get very old and life changes. I started the business with the belief that I would be successful, that’s all I can say.

Discipline is a great motivation for success. I believe that children must have a discipline and what’s more I believe that young children enjoy

it and I think that they are pleased when parents say “no,” in fact they’re half expecting it, and they’re somewhat relieved at times that the answer from their parent, if they respect their parents, is the right answer when they say no, or they’re given instructions that represent some form of discipline.

And there’s lots of discipline in the army and particularly under the British system, they’ve been developing it for hundreds of years and it works. And you saw what happened in Iran just recently, the British had very, very few casualties compared with the Americans and the Australians didn’t have any casualties at all, they’re disciplined, besides being clever.

And the…?

Yes.

Well the main thing after the thirty-years was that a couple of friends of mine that I hadn’t seen for thirty-years made contact

with me to say, “Time’s up, we can now meet as a group and I’m going to write all the people that I know, and have you got any addresses of anybody that you know and we’ll have a meeting and establish an association.” And we did and we wrote to people all over Australia and we eventually got quite a few hundred, but it’s down now to about two-hundred, and

that includes a number, a number of widows because the ladies live longer than men, right across the whole spectrum I think, so mortality has set in quite a rapid rate. There’s nobody around for Central Bureau whose not now eighty or more years old. Otherwise they weren’t in

Central Bureau because I was eighteen and that was the age, the bottom ladder, the bottom rung of the ladder eighteen, so the forty and fifty year old academics, they’re all dead.

Thirty-years after the war.

Well we do talk about what we did because during that period you never knew what the other person was doing unless he’s working with you, and it becomes quite interesting when some fellows and some of the females talk about what they did. But having

your tongue locked up for thirty-years and not having the documents available for, till 1987 after 1945, they were locked up, the documents were locked up and they just weren’t released so we talk about some of the things

that I’ve discussed with you today. And that’s probably all I know about them, because I wasn’t aware during that time what was happening right across the board, because you don’t talk about it, secrecy is paramount, cause you can’t afford for the enemy to know and I think the majority by far were intelligent enough to know that was the danger and

you don’t want to be involved, don’t talk about it. And I told you earlier, ten-thousand people in Britain working in the same circumstances, only a fraction of them knew what was going on, other people just sworn to secrecy, don’t talk about it, and they didn’t. Their life was in danger, they were being bombed.

Anyway, they cracked all the German codes with the Enigma machine, we got hold of all the Japanese codes and made very good use of it and I’m happy about that, that’s what we were there for.

Well just recently the Queensland government gave all the known ladies a medallion, in fact they started off through Mr Beatty giving the girls in Brisbane, or known in Queensland, and then some of the other ladies in other states found out about that and

they got up and wanted to know why they all couldn’t have it. And he went to some lengths to ensure that each lady was presented with a medallion and he also gave three-hundred and fifty-thousand dollars to the people in Melbourne [Brisbane] to help finish the establishment of the Douglas MacArthur War Memorial Museum in the old AMP building of which we

have a ninety-nine year lease and that’s an educational facility for young people and for young Japanese to come to Brisbane to have a look of it, and see an effigy of General Douglas MacArthur and other things like that. So there haven’t been any special medals

for people in the organisation. I’ve been stunned in that I went to such a lot of trouble to prepare what I consider to be an excellent document, approved and by some interesting people, to see that it wasn’t too long, too short, it was interesting which is was interesting, requesting some

tax-free funds to go to the Australian War Memorial with a very nice letter from General Gower indicating that they would make their historians available, the country that who actively shortened the war by two-years and saved hundreds of thousands of lives needs to have the history written for the benefit of new generations.

I can’t tell you how unbelievably disappointed I was with the response, incredible. Got fifty-thousand dollars, and ten-thousand last week from Defence Signals Division, which made the fifty-thousand, after the war,

all these years, people aren’t interested and I think it’s so easy to push something aside. If you want funds you‘ve got to get eyeball to eyeball with somebody and say, “Write me a cheque,” I think, yeah. Some money came back, not much.

Well it’s part of our country’s history, it’s our country and I don’t know what type of history is being presented to our children these days, but I don’t think it’s much. I don’t know but from my own grandchildren, they’re more interested in what they’re

doing themselves than anything else, and these events are easily forgotten unless they’re recorded. It will now be recorded, it was unknown for many, many years, the Americans wrote their history from the documentation that they swept away and took to America, taking all credit for everything that happened, never mentioned any Australian, or Australia.

And I think that’s rather sad, so it’s important I think that we do that now, at least it’s done, it’ll be in the War Memorial till kingdom come, and it should be in every library in Australia and it’s there established for people to read. A lot of people write

historical events and I don’t know how long and popular the books remain, there are an awful lot of books, I just felt that it was so secret, so successful, saved the lives of so many people and so many brilliant Australians were responsible for cracking those codes and making use of it, that it should at least,

be published. And Bill Rogers my great friend, we made a substantial contribution and we’ve done what we’ve asked to be done and I’m very proud of it.

In my life?

I would have to say that there is not.

I think that everything that was done in Central Bureau in the group that I worked with was achieved as a group, I think I made my contribution. There were one or two people that stand out that were actually able to crack some codes that nobody else was able to manage, I think there’s was an enormous

contribution. For most of us, I think we did what we did with some intelligence and grace, achieved it, sat back and forgot about it, truthfully. There are very few people in that organisation that stand out individually

because it was all manual and it is different now because you can do so much of this work with the modern computer, and there’s hardly a code except those that are called one-day codes

and that system is used, it’s put aside and it’s never used again. The recipient has got the system that it represents, reads it and puts it aside and it’s never handled again, you can’t break that. But it’s not suitable for more than average one to one

and it needs to be very important. One of the big problems about this is that you can have intelligence like advising the wing commander in Darwin that there’s about three-hundred planes heading in your direction and somebody says, “How do you know? That’s bloody stupid, if it was happening we’d know about it, who

are you?” And next thing three-hundred and fifty people are dead. OK it took a long time to get over that, where you’re sending information and they want to know, how do you know? Well you can’t tell anybody how do you know. You’ve got to get a situation where you’ve established confidence and then you tell them what you know and do something about it.

You understand that? Yeah that’s a major problem. We now have at the University of Technology in Brisbane an entire division of the university which has been studying for three-years, methods and systems of making and breaking codes, they’re getting people from all over

the Pacific and Australia. Those people when qualified will go and work for major companies and ensure that their systems are maintained and secret and the opposition doesn’t get hold of them. For many years the Russians, the British, the Americans had an

instrument that in a van, pointed it twelve-stories up to the window of your solicitor whose secretary is typing a letter to the government, and that machine will type out everything she’s putting into that computer, and it wouldn’t matter whether there was a concrete wall a foot thick, it’ll still penetrate it, but windows are much better.

Now that’s available to industry these days.

That’s a good question. There’s always mistakes, there’s always mistakes. Then again you see because we don’t know what’s happening, it’s not like

a business really, most people know what’s going on in a business except the directors and chairman who’ve got things to themselves around the table that aren’t always published, but it could well have been but I don’t know that I could say specifically they made a great mistake by doing something and not doing something else because of the

entire internal secrecy that was established. And I guess you’ve got the same thing down in Canberra today, everything’s so secret, including the fact it’s got ten-floors under the ground and if there’s a war tomorrow, there’s everything there to keep maintaining the activity.

I can truthfully say that considering that you have a new subject on your hands, that you’ve both been exceedingly accurate

with your questioning and suggestions and I think that’s a great credit to you both. You’ve been well chosen for your occupation and thank you very much.