By August 1945, Australian troops had advanced along both coasts of the New Guinea island of New Britain.
But around Rabaul on the very north of New Britain there were still about 100,000 Japanese. Without aircraft or shipping, the Japanese were no offensive threat, but with their miles of tunnels and readiness to die for the Emperor, they were capable of fierce defence. No Australian wanted an assault on entrenched Japanese who were by-passed by a war now devastating their homeland.
On 11 August the Australian troops heard that surrender negotiations had started. At their headquarters at Jaquinot Bay,150 kilometres from Rabaul as the Corsairs and Catalinas flew, the men went into premature celebration: ships fired coloured flares, machine guns rattled, tracers streaked across the sky, horns sounded, bonfires consumed a couple of disused buildings, and men ate, sang and drank. They then had four days of hangover to wait until the formal surrender and Victory in the Pacific Day on 15 August.
A week after the surrender, the Japanese in Rabaul responded to repeated Australian radio requests and paid 'respects to your brilliant fighting to this day', but said they had no authority to negotiate on anything other than the ceasefire. Australian aircraft flying over Rabaul reported that the Japanese had taken to 'swimming and fishing in a big way' and smoke from fires rose from where the Japanese were thought to be burning records.
Determined not to have a variety of local surrender conditions — and not to be upstaged — General Douglas MacArthur ordered that no commanders take the surrender of field troops before his day of triumph at the formal surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. The Australians then acted quickly. On 6 September, the Japanese general in Rabaul, Hitoshi Imamura, handed over his sword on the deck of the aircraft carrier, HMS Glory, and, on radio instructions, Captain Bryce Morris immediately took the destroyer Vendetta, into Rabaul. He collected 28 prisoners of war, 18 British, seven Americans, one Australian, one New Zealander and one Dutchman.
The one Australian was John Murphy, a former government officer in New Guinea and a wartime coastwatcher. His name had been broadcast by the Japanese and so the Australians knew he was — or had been — imprisoned in Rabaul. The British prisoners were a surprise to the Australians.
They were the only survivors of 600 artillery men captured in Singapore and sent to labour in the Solomons and New Britain where they had died of malnutrition, disease and gratuitous killing. The Americans and the one New Zealander were airmen. Except for a few fortunate men shipped elsewhere, they were the only Allied airmen to survive capture in New Guinea. The Japanese claimed that some airmen — including Australians — had been killed in Rabaul by Allied bombing, but Australian investigating officers thought it more likely they had been executed. There were also, the Japanese admitted, civilian internees held a few miles inland, but many of them were German or neutral-nation missionaries.
The Australians were desperate to get back to Rabaul. The prisoners and internees that the Australians knew least about were those in Rabaul, the old capital of the Australian Mandated Territory of New Guinea. When the Japanese South Seas Force had landed at Rabaul on 23 January 1942 in the 'weird beauty' of a black night lit by flares, the glow of Tavurvur volcano and fires in the streets of Rabaul, they had engulfed over 2000 men and women, soldiers and civilians. Over the next six months, two main groups (on the Lakatoi and the Laurabada) and many small groups of determined survivors made their way to Australia. But by early August 1945 there were still about 1500 men and 90 women whereabouts unknown.
When it came to power in October 1941, John Curtin's Labor government had faced great and immediate danger. The troops were already in Rabaul and another 20,000 were in place or committed to the north. The Japanese launched their assault south on 8 December 1941. On the advice of the heads of the armed services, the government chose to leave the Australian troops in Rabaul knowing they would face an overwhelming force. Australia could scarcely withdraw its troops when it was urging the British, Dutch and Americans to fight. Australia evacuated white women and children (not Asian or mixed-race) from New Guinea and Papua, but failed to remove non-essential men.
Rabaul was the first domino to fall. Within weeks Ambon, Singapore, Timor and Java had gone and over 23,000 Australians were prisoners of the Japanese. Rabaul was special because it, the tactics and the people were Australia's responsibility, but it was also part of disaster on a grand scale.
Through the war, Australians picked up scraps of information. The men (and at least two women) who had escaped from New Britain said that at Tol Plantation, south of Rabaul, 160 men who had surrendered had been executed. Reports of the massacre were in Australian newspapers in April 1942.
A few days later, Australians learnt that Japanese aircraft over Port Moresby had dropped bundles of letters from 400 prisoners in Rabaul. It was a strange act of chivalry in a brutal war. A note with the letters said they were to "relieve anxiety". Some were from nurses, planters and missionaries as well as soldiers. One letter was from Tom Garrett, planter, and his descendent was to become a rock singer and minister in the Australian government.
Australians now had contradictory evidence: some prisoners had been killed and others had written letters giving evidence of good health and reasonable conditions.
Through the next three years Australian intelligence gathered evidence from Japanese captured on the Kokoda Track and in later campaigns; from New Guineans who had been in Rabaul and then joined the Australians; from a Swedish planter who had been treated as a neutral, and from "talk" and messages reaching coastwatchers. The consistent evidence was that Australian prisoners had been in Rabaul for several months, nearly all had been shipped away and some may have been on a ship that was sunk. None of it was conclusive.
Late in 1942, messages from men captured in Rabaul were broadcast from Japan. All were from officers, including some who were from the Independent Company captured on New Ireland. Soon more letters and cards were being exchanged with a few Rabaul men held in Zentsuji camp in Japan than with any other Australian prisoners of the Japanese.
For the Australian public, here was another puzzle: much news from a few who suffered no deaths and no news from most.
Privately and publicly through the Red Cross, the Catholic Church and Swiss diplomats still in Japan, Australians tried to find out what had happened to the rest of the Rabaul captives. The Japanese replied slowly, evasively and with lies. At one point they denied ever having captured some of those whose letters they had dropped over Port Moresby.
Some of the missing were well-connected. Harold Page, the long-term government secretary in Rabaul, was the brother of Sir Earle Page, briefly prime minister in 1939 and later representative of the Curtin government in London. Lieutenant Bruce Parkhill was the son of Sir Archdale, a minister in the Lyons government. Syd Beazley of the Methodist Mission was the brother of Kim Beazley senior who was to succeed Curtin in the seat of Fremantle. Institutions and individuals stopped any cover-up or decline in interest. And public servants were looking after their own – their fellow officers in Rabaul and the auditors sent north to make sure the accounts were in good order as devastation struck.
On 17 November 1944, Frank Forde, acting prime minister, announced in the parliament that perhaps 2000 Australians had died on the Burma-Thailand Railway. (It turned out to be an underestimate — it was close to 2800.) From that date no Australian friend or family of an Australian prisoner of the Japanese could rest easily. Forde could not avoid a public statement: other nations were also giving details and a variety of stories were circulating.
Then, just days before the Japanese surrendered, the Australian government was told by the Swiss that 18 Australian women captured in Rabaul were in Japan. They included seven nurses previously employed by the civil administration, six army nurses, four Methodist mission nurses and one plantation owner. They were malnourished, one would die soon after release, but none had died in captivity.
The scrapbooks kept by mothers and sweetheart are mementoes of hope and despair.
Soon after the Australian troops re-occupied Rabaul, on 13 September they found the interned missionaries, including nuns and they accounted for the missing women, and three civilians from the pre-war white community of Rabaul. One was Gordon Thomas, editor of the Rabaul Times, and he had known nearly all the pre-war community. He and others said that nearly all the captured civilians and the troops other than officers had sailed on the Montevideo Maru. It had been sunk and from memory he had tried to make a list of those who had sailed on it.
The sixty officers and eighteen women in Japan were able to say that the other ranks and civilians had sailed before them, and they themselves had sailed a fortnight later on the Naruto Maru. They too had heard rumours of the sinking of the first ship.
By 18 September 1945, Japanese officers in Rabaul had admitted that the missing men had sailed on the Montevideo Maru. With the officers and nurses from Japan about to land in Australia and rumours preceding them, the government was forced to make a statement. On 19 September, it announced that men had been shipped from Rabaul but their fate was unknown. A week later it said that the ship had been bound for Hainan, it had not reached its destination and between 700 and 1000 prisoners and internees had been on board.
The Australian business man and long-term resident of pre-war Japan, Major Harold Williams, was given priority travel to Japan. After persistent enquiries, he learnt that the Montevideo Maru had been "disastered" off the coast of the Philippines on 1 July and 845 prisoners of war and 208 civilians had died. About 20 of the 133 Japanese crew had survived the sinking and attacks by Filipino guerrillas. Williams saw documents showing the claims of the ship owners and reports of the submarine attack. The Americans confirmed that the submarine, Sturgeon, had sunk a ship of the appropriate type at the time and place claimed.
Williams had a 48 page roll of those on board, but it was in Japanese. The names had been recorded as the Japanese had heard them and now they were being returned to uncertain English. Also, it was unclear whether the roll was one taken in the camp in Rabaul or when the men stepped on the deck of the Montevideo Maru. On 5 October Eddie Ward, Minister for External Territories, made a public statement giving the numbers lost and naming the Montevideo Maru. He said that the roll was being translated and next-of-kin were being informed. But it was not until 22 November that the names of the lost civilians were published in newspaper casualty lists.
It had been a long wait for the scrapbooks to end in tragedy. The sinking of the Montevideo Maru was the greatest disaster at sea ever suffered by Australians.
Among the dead were six heads of department of the Australian administration of New Guinea; many representatives of the planting, trading and mission communities; the crew of the Norwegian ship, the Herstein, which had been bombed in Rabaul harbour just before the Japanese landed; many of the Brunswick Salvation Army Band whose members had served as bandsmen and stretcher bearers in the 2/22nd battalion; and so many others of the 2/22nd and other units of Lark Force.
Rabaul had contributed over 1000 servicemen to the 8000 Australians who had died as prisoners of war of the Japanese. New Guinea had been home to most of the Australian civilians who died as internees of the Japanese.
But both before and after the Montevideo Maru had sailed, there had been executions of civilian and military prisoners around Rabaul. Most moving were Japanese witness accounts of the shooting of Ted Harvey, a planter, his de facto wife, Marjorie, and her son, a boy of about eleven. The names of nearly all of those executed are known — but in the minds of many relatives the suspicion remains that a husband or son might not have been on the Montevideo Maru, but shot by firing squad on the bleak volcanic ash near Rabaul's Lakunai airstrip or cruelly executed elsewhere.
The Japanese language roll has been lost and the wreck of the Montevedeo Maru never found. As the American submarine gave the coordinates of where it fired its torpedoes, perhaps it can be located. More assurance, if not certainty, is possible.
Dr Hank Nelson is a historian with the Australian National University, specialising in Papua New Guinean and Melanesian history.
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