The killing of the missionaries was ‘very brutal’; and ‘a little cruel’ on the part of the battalion commander
—Japanese POW to Allied interrogators
No one could have guessed the fate of the Anglican missionaries by observing the Japanese treatment of the Papuan people. Initially, the invader dealt with the local tribes firmly, but not brutally. There is no evidence that the Japanese raped the Orokaivan women or bayoneted the men when they landed at Gona.
On the contrary the Japanese came ashore presenting themselves as freedom fighters, sent to avenge the cause of Asian liberty on behalf of the struggling Papuan. The troops were told by their superiors to behave as though they were the natives’ ‘equals’.1 No Japanese soldier believed this, of course. Nor did such crude propaganda persuade the Rabaul natives press-ganged at bayonet point into labour columns and shipped to Gona. Even so, a Japanese–English phrase book found at the beachhead gives an idea of the intention:
Japanese army has come here with the view of restoring your freedom and giving you independence.
It is for the purpose of restoring liberty for the races in Asia.
There is nothing for any of you to get scared at.
Whenever we use your property, you shall be well paid for it.2
Not all of this was nonsense. Japanese veterans insist vigorously that they did not mistreat the local people in Papua.3 And this was, to some extent, true: the Japanese rewarded Papuan collaborators and those willing to work with food or cash. It was deemed expedient to get on with the natives—the Japanese relied on them as guides and carriers. A few friendly relationships flourished between the invading army and the coastal communities. One involved the future Prime Minister of New Guinea, Michael Somare, who remembers the benign influence of the Japanese on his village near Wewak, largely through the enlightened influence of one man, Lieutenant Shibata Yukio, who built houses and helped to educate the children (in one lesson, they learned how to use bamboo sticks as spears). He appears to have been an exception.4
Most New Guineans had a different experience of Japanese occupation; they saw their villages destroyed and their plantations plundered—largely through the severity of the Japanese supply failure. As the war in New Guinea progressed, the tribal communities experienced a catastrophic rupture. But at that early stage Japanese intentions were relatively benign.
Major-General Horii Tomitaro himself issued instructions before the invasion on how to deal with the indigenous population: ‘Do not wantonly kill or injure them,’ he wrote. ‘In battle we must overwhelm and destroy the enemy…however, the natives are those whom we must lead in the future in order to rebuild East Asia. Wantonly to kill…unresisting natives is to mar the honour of the Imperial Forces…’ He appealed to the troops not to treat the natives as ‘pigs’.5
A phrase-book of Japanese orders in English perhaps more truthfully reflects the Japanese army’s methods of dealing with the natives. The orders listed below were translated from Japanese and handed out to officers in Papua. The subordination of the tribes to the status of slaves is revealing:
Hey! Call one hundred of the villagers together.
Dig in along this line.
Dig a little bit deeper.
Put the sand in [the bags].
Pile them up here.
Bring the stone.
Bring shovels.
Bring here pick axes.
Fifteen minutes rest!
Bring bamboos and logs here.
Try harder.
You carry the gravel.
You carry the pebbles.
Take off that big stone.
Build a new road here.6
The road to Greater East Asia was going to be long and hard.
The Japanese found no such uses for the white civilians in New Guinea who, whenever caught—with rare exceptions—were ritually slaughtered. The fate of Benson’s party served a grisly early warning of the treatment Australian troops could expect from some Japanese officers. After several days in the jungle, they were betrayed to the Japanese by a Papuan collaborator named Embogi, the village councillor at Upper Dobodura. Embogi was later captured by the Australian army and hanged.
The Japanese caught Benson and incarcerated him in Rabaul for the duration of the war. The Australian soldiers and wounded American airmen were shot, and May Hayman and Mavis Parkinson received no clemency either. Imprisoned for days in a coffee mill near Popondetta, they were taken to a plantation near Buna on 13 August and bayoneted to death.
‘Mavis was the first to die,’ wrote Dr Tony Matthews. ‘A Japanese soldier grasped her from behind and attempted to embrace her; she struggled, almost managed to break free, but the soldier took a step backwards and plunged his bayonet deep into her side. She screamed and sank to the ground. May was ordered to cover her face with a towel; as she was doing so she was bayoneted in the throat.’7
When they heard of the ritual slaughter of defenceless women the Australians struggled to articulate their hatred and incomprehension. Padres and chaplains wrestled with their deity to account for such arbitrary cruelty.
Canon Charles Sherlock, an RAAF chaplain who’d known Mavis Parkinson at university, said: ‘One found a sense of hate coming in your own mind. One couldn’t help feeling a sense of revulsion, and I suppose hatred, because you’d known those two people…And one wouldn’t be human I suppose if one didn’t have that kind of reaction.’8
The murder was not an isolated incident. The Japanese bayoneting of civilians—and prisoners, as the murder of 160 Australian troops in Rabaul bears witness—was common in the Pacific War. On 12 August, the same fate befell another Anglican mission party, from Sangara, betrayed to the Japanese by people of Perambata village.
The Rev. Henry Holland and Rev. Vivian Hedlich, two teenage girls and two half-caste mission workers were beheaded one by one, with a single stroke of the sword, on Buna beach. ‘Before they were killed their grave was dug. The prisoners were made to kneel down by the grave, and were killed one by one,’ said a witness.9 A six-year-old boy and his mother were near the end of the line. The little boy buried his face in his mother’s breast. Both were shot in the head, perhaps a merciful concession to the child’s terror. The execution of one girl, aged sixteen, was bungled, according to several Japanese witnesses. ‘They held her down screaming and crying out while they cut off her head,’ said Sato Toshio, a translator attached to the Sasebo 5 Special Naval Landing Party. ‘The soldier who told me this said the sight was more than he could stand.’10
Such massacres were perfunctorily entered in Japanese diaries; for example, that of first-class seaman Shin Shunji was typical:
‘13 August: Natives brought Australian prisoners—five men, three women and a child.
14 August: About 8.00 a.m. decapitated or shot the nine prisoners.’11
Junior officers eager to show off their credentials as compassionless warriors tended to perform these executions; the ordinary troops were expected to stand and watch their performances. But many were privately ashamed of such cruelty. One POW who witnessed the killing told his Allied interrogators that he thought such treatment very brutal. The death of the child, in particular, was pitiful. He said he thought it a little cruel on the part of the battalion commander.
Many Japanese troops witnessed these events, as their diaries attest. Yet no War Crimes Tribunal punished the perpetrators and the Japanese Government has paid no compensation to families. One reason is that those responsible were part of the unusually brutal Sasebo 5 Special Naval Landing Party (5SNLP) led by Tsukioka Torashigo, most of whose troops later died in the Pacific War, making identification of the culprits difficult.
The naval landing parties were the Japanese equivalent of the marines or the commandos—crack troops of exceptional courage and strength. In the Japanese case they were often men of innate callousness rendered monstrous in the hands of training officers brutalised beyond redemption. The Japanese commando was trained to think little of human life; any act of cruelty was justified in the name of the imperial will and the rehabilitated Code of the Warrior.
Such were the methods deemed acceptable by many, but by no means all, of the Japanese officers who led the invasion of Papua and New Guinea—and who, borne along on the mantra of the Imperial Rescript, their swords dangling by their sides, drove the Nankai Shitai from the Kokoda plateau into the heart of the Owen Stanley Range.