Pete ‘Sparky’ Tait lived up to his name and began to monitor the war from his top bunk in Hut 68 using the radio he had cobbled together. In the middle of the night, and with the transmitter’s aerial scraping the hut’s roof, he managed to make notes on a BBC foreign service program. In between whistles and crackles that kept the entire hut awake, Tait learned that the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, had spoken to parliament about a ‘great naval battle’ that was taking place off Queensland’s coast. The outcome would be of ‘crucial importance to the conduct of the war in this theatre’. The BBC broadcast picked up some of Curtin’s actual speech. His words moved Tait to tears. He reported that Curtin sounded stoic and strong.
Tait climbed down from his bunk and sat on the floor with the radio still broadcasting. All the sailors, aroused from their slumber, sat with him as the report said Curtin mentioned that Australian and American servicemen were sacrificing their lives at that moment.
Each man in the hut felt a mix of emotions, from impotence to exhilaration. Here at last was a glimpse into the status of the war. Curtin’s words presaged a win. After months of isolation and idleness there was some hope. The Japanese had chided all the Allied POWs with propaganda at every chance. Now the sailors pondered what the Japanese reaction would be if they had a loss at what was being called the Battle of the Coral Sea.
At the end of the next day, 8 May 1942, Tait was conveying the result of five days of battles between the Americans, supported by the Australians, and the Japanese. Due to the continued propaganda both sides were reporting victories. Tait had scribbled the information on a piece of paper that would be down the toilet moments after it had been talked about in the hut. The Allies had had one carrier destroyed, one almost crippled. One oiler and one destroyer sunk, 66 aircraft lost and 543 men killed or wounded. The sailors could hardly contain their joy as Tait read out the Japanese ‘scores’. They lost one carrier and had one crippled. One destroyer and three small naval ships were sunk. Seventy-seven of its aircraft went down. A cheer went up when Tait told the others that 1074 Japanese were either killed or wounded.
The Allies had delivered the Japanese their first major defeat of the war. In so doing they prevented the enemy landing a force in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It was a setback for the enemy. The Japanese had been shown to be less than invincible.
‘We’ve gotta let the Yanks know,’ Tait said.
‘Surely their guys have radios,’ Nadler said.
‘I’ve spoken to their sparks. They haven’t got the equipment I have.’
Bolt told them not to get cocky or say anything to the Japanese guards.
‘I’ll drop over to see Burroughs and let him know this evening,’ he said.
Tait loved being the centre of attention. He doled out data on the hour from the battles and from Australia, and became the chief communicator of information among the Australian sailors and soldiers. Unless the radio was found, the Allied men in the camp would have vital news. Tait let everyone know that the American general Douglas MacArthur had been in Australia for weeks after fleeing the Philippines, where he had been Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, a big fish in a small pond, for several years.
MacArthur’s braggadocio manner was scorned in some quarters but he oozed military superiority in the few broadcasts from Melbourne that were picked up by Tait. MacArthur vowed to ‘return’ to the Philippines a victor, which under the circumstances seemed highly unlikely and was in contrast to Curtin’s solemn declarations about battling on. It was what troops wanted to hear and none more than the Allied POWs stuck in an Indonesian camp.
Tait picked up comments from Curtin to the effect that a big naval battle—‘of unsurpassed significance’—was looming in the Pacific. These words excited the sailors, especially the Americans. The latter were most confident in the strength of their naval arm. They predicted they would ‘clean up the Japs’ in the Pacific.
American ‘sparks’, with Tait’s guidance, were beginning to pick up reports from the US, as well as the BBC. On 4 June, the Japanese Navy struck at the American Pacific stronghold at Midway Atoll. The enemy’s aim was to attack and take that base and then move on to acquire Hawaii, which they had softened up with a huge attack in the previous December. That would give the Japanese total control of the entire Pacific Ocean. From Australia’s point of view, this would cut off the support of their big ally, and allow the Japanese to attack and take Australian territory at will.
Nobody knew anything more than rumours in the Batavia camp until 8 June when ‘results’ of the massive 72-hour Pacific battle became apparent. The Japanese lost four irreplaceable fleet carriers; the Americans lost one. Japanese air attacks damaged the US Midway Atoll base, but it remained operational. The casualty figures told a further encouraging story for the Allied POWs. The Americans lost 340 men, the carrier USS Yorktown, the destroyer USS Hammam and 145 aircraft. The Japanese had nine times as many men killed: 3057. Apart from the four aircraft carriers that were sunk, the heavy cruiser Mikuma also went down and they lost 228 aircraft.
The American sailors were excited, although many were concerned about losing close friends in such a huge battle. Overriding everything was the sense that the war had taken a sudden change. The Allies could not contain their delight. The Japanese guards, who had for weeks dished out abuse about the destruction of the US, were now chided about Midway.
The reaction was one of fury. Two hundred guards searched the camp for radios, promising the owners would be beheaded. Tait used some duct tape to attach his equipment to the rear of the hut’s toilet cistern. He sweated, as did everyone else in Hut 68, when Sergeant Hoto, unseen for months, swept in with twenty guards, including his vicious corporal Little Hitler, who again made a point of seeing that each man was given a jab with a rifle butt. The corporal was more than six feet tall and strongly built, and he enjoyed dishing out bashings. But they found nothing. Despite the bruises, the sailors remained upbeat, which was not lost on the Japanese.
After the Battle of Midway, four US naval commanders were summoned to Bandung to face further interrogation from the Japanese intelligence operatives, who were every bit as ruthless as their German counterparts, the Gestapo.
On 12 June, the US navy commanders were escorted by a Japanese guard contingent in a convoy of cars from Batavia to Bandung. Captain Brett Paul noticed an animal on the other side of the road just outside Bandung. It was heading on the side of the main thoroughfare to Batavia. He asked for the convoy to be halted. Paul, with Japanese guards watching, got out of his car and said to an aide, ‘I think that’s the cat from Perth; the one that can swim!’
‘Red Lead!’ the aide said. He dashed across the road and tried to grab the cat. It was quick to disappear into the bush.
A week later the convoy was returning to Batavia and was a few miles from its destination at the military barracks when the aide spotted the cat again. She was ill. Her coat was dirty. She had two scars on her side. She made to limp away but the aide jumped from the car and this time managed to grab her. He returned her to the convoy. Red Lead did not protest. She seemed too weak.
‘My god!’ Commander Paul said. ‘She’s come about 40 miles in a week!’
They drove on. The aide gave her some water from a bottle.
‘She was headed towards our barracks, sir,’ the aide noted.
‘I had a cat like that once,’ Paul said. ‘She disappeared for two weeks. They say cats have a homing ability like birds. They use their biological clock, the angle of the sun and the earth’s magnetic field. They know where home is and can travel long distances to the location.’
‘She’s been gone for weeks!’ the aide said, stroking Red Lead.
‘How the hell did she make it to Bandung in the first place?’
‘Sir, I think she was stolen, and she escaped from wherever she was taken.’