Rabaul was, until its destruction in a volcanic eruption in 1994, the administrative capital and main town of New Britain, a large island to the north-east of the island of New Guinea. Its main asset, from both a strategic and aesthetic perspective, was Simpson Harbour, an excellent natural anchorage ringed by mountains. It was built during German colonial rule (1884 to 1914), which ended when Rabaul was captured by the Australian Army and Navy at the start of the First World War. Under Australian administration, it became the capital of the territory of New Guinea.

Recognising the importance of the town and its harbour, Australia deployed the 2/22nd Infantry Battalion and supporting arms to the area in 1941. This 1,400-man contingent was called Lark Force. Rabaul came under Japanese air attack from early January 1942 onwards, and on the morning of 23 January an elite Japanese unit of between 3,000 and 4,000 men called the Nankai Shitai, or South Seas Force, began landing on the coral beaches. The Battle for Rabaul was over in a few hours, and the Japanese secured the town and harbour with only minimal losses.

The survivors of Lark Force retreated to the south, but without adequate supplies and water, many surrendered over the coming days. Some 140 surrendered Australian soldiers, including men from an ambulance unit, were massacred by the Japanese at the Tol and Waitavalo plantations on 4 February. Most of the massacres of surrendered troops were then unknown in Australia, but some survivors of New Britain escaped and returned to Australia by boat. Their accounts were published in the media.1 In response, the Australian Army launched the Allen Inquiry into Japanese war crimes.

The Japanese decided to send almost all the remaining Western prisoners back to Japan rather than hold them on the island. They were transported on the Montevideo Maru, which was torpedoed and sunk by an American submarine near the Philippines on 1 July 1942. Around 800 Australian prisoners of war and 200 civilian internees perished, in the biggest loss of life in a maritime disaster in Australian history.

The Japanese turned Rabaul into a formidable fortress, the centre of their operations throughout Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In late 1942 it became the headquarters of the newly formed Eighth Area Army, and General Imamura Hitoshi was sent to command it.

Imamura, a tubby man with a fondness for gardening, did not look the part of a Japanese general. He had been born in Sendai, northern Honshu, in 1886. His father was a judge. Imamura graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1907 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Sent as a military attaché to the British Army during the First World War, he served on the Western Front with the East Lancashire Regiment. After the war, he rose steadily through the ranks to a staff officer and then commander of a division in China.

The Allies did not attempt to recapture Rabaul, but instead isolated and bypassed it. It was bombed heavily during the last two years of the war, and was often used for target practice by new Allied bomber crews. Cut off from the rest of the Japanese Empire, Imamura had his men cultivate land around the town to grow food, and dig tunnels into the volcanic rock to shelter from the bombs. He kept fit by working in his garden, three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. He encouraged his soldiers to do the same, and despite their parlous situation the Japanese at Rabaul remained fairly healthy and in fairly good spirits to the end of the war.2

On 6 September 1945, Imamura surrendered to Sturdee aboard a British aircraft carrier, the HMS Glory. He held out his sword for Sturdee, who didn’t take it, instead making him place it on the table. It was a snub. Imamura expected to have his sword returned, but Sturdee sent it to the War Museum in Canberra. In the following weeks, the Australian Army sent 2,700 men to re-occupy Rabaul. It was a gamble, as there were still 89,000 Japanese soldiers there. But Imamura proved co-operative.

‘For three years and eight months Rabaul had been a place of mystery,’ wrote reporter Eric Thornton. ‘Unlike other Japanese held areas almost nothing was known of the fate of the prisoners of war.’3 An immediate priority was to search for survivors of Lark Force, or any of the Australians captured in Papua New Guinea who might have been removed to New Britain. None were found, but there were large numbers of Chinese and Indian prisoners, along with twenty-eight mostly British POWs who had been captured in Malaya or Singapore and shipped to the island. They had been too sick to move before New Britain was cut off and so were left there.

‘For the last 18 months they made me work in the jungle without boots, but what a change there was when their Emperor announced defeat,’ one said. ‘They crawled to us then, and treated us like millionaires. They gave us fish and their primest chickens; in fact anything we wanted; there were strange scenes when Tokyo surrendered. The Japanese cried bitterly and one cut his throat on parade.’4

Brisbane Telegraph war correspondent M.C. Warren noticed a similar attitude when he arrived. ‘Thousands of bowing, saluting Japanese greeted us on a 50-mile tour of General Imamura’s area,’ he wrote. ‘Japanese jumped off bicycles, slithered off trucks or raced to the side of the road to salaam our jeep convoy . . . some Japanese presented arms with shovels and sticks.’5 They had moved out of their tunnels and were now living in huts. He described them as ‘plump, well-conditioned’ and ‘very polite’, but said it was hard to banish the picture of ‘their starved, emaciated victims’ from his mind. He noticed enormous stockpiles of arms and ammunition, which made him realise how much of a fight Imamura could have put up had he been attacked.

Major General Kenneth Eather, the commander of the 11th Division and the leader of the occupation force in Rabaul, followed Sturdee in taking a tough line with Imamura. When Imamura sent Eather a case of Japanese crab as a gift, Eather returned it with a terse note saying that when he wanted crab he would order him to produce it. When Imamura offered his slightly battered staff car to Eather, the Australian told him to find something better. Additionally, Eather also compelled Japanese officers to salute all Australian officers regardless of rank, so Imamura was compelled to salute Australian lieutenants.

Still, Eather found himself grudgingly admiring of how well Imamura had kept his force fed and their morale up. Even under constant air raids he had maintained 14,000 acres under cultivation, and the soldiers appeared to be cheerful. ‘Imamura had prepared them to stay here forever, if necessary, and they accepted his edict without question,’ Eather said. ‘No Australian or American soldier would accept complete isolation and the probability of future annihilation so blandly.’6

The town, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing, needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The Japanese soldiers were put to work clearing away rubble and jungle areas for parade grounds and building compounds. There were some 20,000 Japanese in hospital with malaria, but the others were working twelve-hour days.

‘Major-General Eather . . . has wisely allowed the Japs to conduct their own administration, and is receiving the utmost co-operation from General Imamura, Jap commander,’ wrote C.A. Burley, Sun correspondent, in November. ‘All Jap slackers are handed over to their own officers for punishment, under a code which is notoriously harsher than ours.’7

One example of that was three men caught stealing food, who were sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. And whenever men were caught stealing, their officers were also punished. One major general, two colonels, five majors, four captains, one lieutenant, and a score of other ranks were sentenced to between two and twenty days’ confinement for this reason. The force remained self-supporting with food.

Rabaul had a number of advantages as a trial location. It was on Australian territory, so Australia did not need to deal with any foreign government. And because the town had been destroyed, it was kept under army control and not immediately handed back to the civil authorities like the rest of New Britain. Its central location and excellent harbour and airstrip also made it fairly easy to assemble suspects, witnesses and resources. At the end of the war there were still 151,677 Japanese scattered throughout New Guinea, New Britain, the Solomon Islands and Nauru, most of them part of Imamura’s command based in Rabaul.8 And the convicted war criminals could be put to use rebuilding the town.

For these reasons, Rabaul quickly became the most important of the Australian war crimes trial locations, and two-thirds of the class-B and -C trials were held there, most in the first round, from 12 December 1945 to 31 July 1946. Many defendants convicted at other locations were also imprisoned or executed there. A gallows was built, which was handed over to the civilian authorities once the trials ended, and there were enough men to form firing squads. In total, eight squads were assembled at Rabaul, mostly for eleven death sentences handed down at Morotai and one at Darwin. These executions were conducted in May 1946, August 1946, and over three days between September and October 1947.9

The firing squads at Rabaul were plagued by problems. Prosecuting officer Kenneth Wybrow observed of the May 1946 execution that the ‘drunkenness of the officers carrying out the executions could be explained by their nervousness at performing that unwelcome work, and their brutality to the Japanese by the drunkenness. Their conduct and bearing were a conspicuous contrast to the dignity and courage with which the Japanese met their end.’10

On one occasion, every man in the squad failed to hit his target, even though all had been approved as good marksmen. The condemned men then had to be shot in the head by the commanding officer with his pistol. It was, perhaps, issues like these which encouraged the courts to hand down death sentences by hanging rather than shooting.

In mid-February the Australian Army had quietly recruited Majors Thomas Upson and Ronald H. Hicks as hangmen. Both men had experience in the colonial administration of Papua New Guinea before the war, and both proved efficient and discreet. Although not all the hangings went smoothly, as the executions of the Sandakan officers showed.

Those awaiting trial at Rabaul, and those sentenced to imprisonment, were put in the war criminals compound, which was ready by December. Under Major Upson’s command, the Japanese lived in timber and canvas huts roofed with iron, and were guarded by native police. At night, floodlights were used to watch for escapees.

By January 1946, 930 suspects were in the compound.11 Most of the cases at Rabaul concerned war crimes against civilians or Chinese and Indian prisoners of war, and only a minority of the victims were Australian. This meant that the trials tended to attract less attention than those at Labuan, but they did demonstrate the Australian government’s commitment to prosecuting war crimes regardless of the victims. I will now look in detail at two examples from the first round of Rabaul trials, from December 1945 to July 1946.

The first case tried at Rabaul (R1) concerned the rape of a Chinese woman, Betty Pang Woo, by a Kempeitai sergeant, Yaki Yoshio.12 Woo was twenty-five at the time of the offence, and was described in the press as ‘a pretty Chinese woman’ and ‘the wife of one of Rabaul’s most respected Chinese citizens’.13 The trial went from 12–13 December 1945, with the court closed for much of the proceedings, and there are only a few pages of transcripts. The case is worthy of attention because, while sexual violence against Asian women by Japanese soldiers was common, prosecutions for rape were rare. R1 is one of the few examples. A social stigma in many cultures pressured women not to talk about rape, but Woo was willing to speak out, and her mother-in-law was also willing to corroborate her account.

Woo had been employed by the Japanese in the kitchen at Massowa Plantation, about 30 miles (50 kilometres) from Rabaul. She testified that Yaki kept making unwelcome advances to her in pidgin English, which she always refused. In October 1944 he escalated his demands, saying her husband would be beheaded if she continued to refuse him. Then he tied her to a tree, put ants on her face, and left her there for three hours. Later he forced her to drink sake and dance, painted her face with powder and make-up, and raped her. Afterwards Woo avoided Yaki, and she told her mother-in-law about the rape a few days later.

Yaki was charged with two separate offences, rape and torture. In his defence, he did not deny a single sexual encounter with Woo, but insisted it was consensual; he also denied torturing her in any way. When asked why, having found a willing partner, he did not go back to her, he replied that he ‘did not think it was [in the] military spirit’.14

The prosecution called two additional witnesses – Woo’s mother-in-law, who confirmed that Woo had told her about the rape a few days after it happened, and Lieutenant Herbert Charles Gridley of the Royal Papuan Constabulary, who gave evidence as to Woo’s good character. Gridley had been based at Rabaul from 1927 until the outbreak of the war, and knew Woo and her husband.

‘I know the standards of the Chinese women better than any person at Rabaul,’ he said, and stated she was ‘an excellent character’ and ‘there is no doubt whatever as to her morality now’.15

He and his wife had invited Woo and her husband to afternoon tea, which apparently was a significant endorsement of their place in the Rabaul community.

In a common law court, the evidence from Woo’s mother-in-law would have been difficult to admit because of the rule against hearsay evidence (although there are, and were, exceptions). Providing character evidence for an alleged victim, however, was in line with contemporary standards for prosecuting rape – a woman of good character would not consent to adultery. The defence warned of the danger of accepting uncorroborated evidence, particularly when the issue was one of consent, but the court accepted the prosecution’s evidence and Yaki was convicted on both charges. He was sentenced to death by hanging. As no reasons were given, we do not know how they weighted the rape and torture conviction when deciding on the sentence. At the time, the death penalty in Australia was reserved for murder, piracy and treason; it was not handed down for rape or torture, so Yaki’s sentence was significantly harsher than one an Australian civilian court would impose for the same offence.

Yaki’s sentence was confirmed by the First Army Headquarters on 24 December 1945 and by Judge Advocate General Wilson on 5 March 1946. Unlike most of the condemned men, Yaki did not petition his conviction or sentence. According to the defence counsel, General Imamura thought his crime so shameful that he forbade him to do so.16

Yaki was the first prisoner to be sentenced to death at Rabaul, and he went to the gallows on 18 April 1946. According to the reporter of the Townsville Daily Bulletin, he died ‘a cringing coward’. He had to be assisted up the stairs of the gallows and showed great reluctance to stand on the trap. He tried to shout ‘Tennō Heika Banzai!’ but found he had lost his voice, and his words ‘drifted to a wheezing splutter’ as the noose was pulled over his head.17

A number of trials at Rabaul dealt with crimes against Papua New Guineans and Pacific Islanders, referred to collectively as ‘natives’ in documents of the time. Five of them (R51, 52, 53, 68 and 70) related to the massacre of the civilian population of Ocean Island after the war, on 20 August 1945.

Ocean Island, modern Banaba Island in Kiribati, is a small coral atoll near the Gilbert Islands of Micronesia, about 6 square kilometres in size and rich in phosphate. The phosphate attracted the British, who colonised the Gilbert Islands in the nineteenth century. At the outbreak of the Second World War the nearby Marshall Islands were already a Japanese mandate, and Japanese forces from there occupied the Gilberts almost immediately. Ocean Island was occupied by the Japanese Navy from August 1942 onwards. Most of the prewar population of 2,500 was moved away, but 200 workers were retained and the island was garrisoned by 500 Navy personnel. The Americans captured the Gilbert and Marshall Islands in 1944, but bypassed Ocean Island and did not attack it. The garrison was therefore cut off.

The first trial, R51, was held over one day, on 26 April.18 The president was a major, and there were three other officers and a judge advocate. Counsel for the prosecution and defence were both AALC officers. The principal witness for the prosecution was the only survivor of the massacre, a 28-year-old man from Nikunau Island named Kabunare. He gave testimony in Gilbertese through a translator.19

Before the war, Kabunare had signed up with the British Phosphate Commissioner to work on Ocean Island. During the Japanese occupation he remained on the Island and was employed by the Japanese as a fisherman. The terms of this ‘employment’ were unclear – the Japanese took all the fish the Islanders caught, only sometimes leaving some for them to eat, and slapped them in the face if they failed to catch any. The Islanders were forbidden to speak to the few European residents, none of whom were still alive at the end of the war. Kabunare believed they either died of malnutrition or were killed by the Japanese, but he didn’t actually know this and was going on rumours.

One evening, one of the Japanese officers told the fishermen to come back early from fishing the next morning. At 9 am, about a hundred of them assembled in the billiard room at the base, where nine Japanese soldiers were present with fixed bayonets. Quickly and without explanation, one of the soldiers began tying the Islanders’ hands behind their backs with string. They were then tied together in groups of about eight. Kabunare’s group was led out of the room and along a narrow track beside the sea. The track climbed steadily and eventually led to a cliff dropping down to the breaking waves on one side. There they all stopped. The Islanders were blindfolded and directed to stand at the edge of the cliff. By this stage, they knew what was going to happen.

‘Are you ready?’ the man next to Kabunare asked him, an Islander named Falailiva.20

‘Yes, I am ready to die,’ Kabunare responded.

‘Do you remember God?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

As rifle shots rang out, they fell off the cliff into the water, and Kabunare felt Falailiva land on top of him. Kabunare found himself unharmed, although he was still tied up underneath Falailiva. He lay in the water, breathing each time a wave receded. He bit Falailiva’s shoulder to see if he would respond – he was dead. Kabunare lay still for an hour, then struggled free and removed his blindfold. The Japanese were gone but the water around him was bloody. He cut his bindings on a sharp rock and went to each of the other Islanders in his group, but found them all dead. He then moved along the base of the cliff until he discovered a cave and hid there.

The next morning, he found two bodies washed into the mouth of his cave. They had swelled up under the tropical sun. Kabunare stayed in the cave for the day, while the Japanese came in canoes and towed the bodies away. That night, Kabunare left the cave and found a hiding place where he was able to forage for coconuts. He stayed in hiding for three months. When he saw the Union Jack flying over the police station, he thought it was a Japanese trick and did not come out. Finally, one day in December, he met some other Gilbert Islanders who told him the war was over and the Japanese had gone.

The first defendant was Lieutenant Commander Suzuki Naōmi, commander of Ocean Island. He did not deny that the Islanders had all been shot on his orders, but mounted a defence of military necessity. He argued that the Islanders were plotting against the Japanese and planning to rise in support of the Allies should they land on Ocean Island. He cited cases of weapons going missing and later being found in hidden caches, of men taking canoes and escaping, and one of his men being killed in mysterious circumstances. In July 1945, Suzuki noticed an increase in American air activity and feared the island was about to be attacked. He also saw some of the Islanders cheering the American planes and concluded that the garrison was in serious danger. ‘I made up my mind to execute [the] natives for self-defence of the Japanese,’ he told the court.21

Suzuki called together his four company commanders, told them he intended to kill the Islanders, and asked for their opinions. This was unusual, as the Imperial Japanese Navy was certainly no democracy and Suzuki, based on the testimony of his men, was not known for a consultative style of leadership. None of the company commanders wanted to kill the Islanders, who had been their employees for years, and they asked if there was another way to suppress the potential revolt. Suzuki deliberated further, but in the end concluded he had no choice. He felt ‘very unpleasant and pityful [sic]’ at the thought of killing the Islanders but could not forgive them for treason ‘in spite of the last two years’ pacification’.22

On the night of 19 August, he once again assembled his company commanders and ordered them to shoot the Islanders, keeping it as discreet as possible in case any of the men had reservations. He also ordered them to charge with disobedience anyone who failed to comply. In his defence, Suzuki referred to naval land regulations issued pursuant to the Emperor’s order in August 1930, which told naval parties operating on land to be on guard against hostile inhabitants and to ‘drive out and exterminate’ any anti-Japanese riots.23 He further claimed that when he had first taken over the post on Ocean Island, he was given orders by Rear Admiral Shibazake to kill the natives if they posed a threat. Suzuki denied the prosecution’s allegation that the natives were killed because they knew about the killing of the island’s European residents, and he also denied any knowledge of the fate of the Europeans.

In his testimony, he further denied knowing that the war had ended four days before the massacre. His only communication with the outside world was through an unreliable radio connection with his superior on Nauru. On 17 August Suzuki was told that the Japanese government was negotiating with the Allies, but he heard nothing further from Nauru until 22 or 23 August, when he was told about the surrender.24

The other defendant in R51 was Lieutenant Nara Yoshio, in charge of payment and food supply on Ocean Island. He was accused of murder for his part in gathering the Islanders together and dividing them up into parties for execution. He had received his orders with the others on the evening of 19 August. He claimed he had opposed them, due to ‘humanitarian feeling’, but felt he had no choice as he would be charged with disobedience otherwise.25 The next morning, he assembled and divided up the Islanders as ordered, then went back to his office. Later, he heard the gunfire.

Under cross-examination, he maintained that he felt sorry for the Islanders but did not think the order was wrong or unlawful:

Q: Do you not think the mass killing of 200 natives would be a cruel and brutal act?

A: I did not think the act was brutal because we had been trusting the natives but they had double-crossed us by making treason.

Q: Do you think it was justified?

A: Yes.26

Asked if he knew anything about international law, Nara said he had studied it as part of his commerce degree at university.

Summing up their case, the defence counsel said the Islanders were effectively in rebellion, having ‘made all sorts of threats against the Japanese, carried out acts of sabotage and committed war crimes’.27 Therefore the killing of them was in self-defence, and was also in accordance with Suzuki’s orders. In Nara’s defence, he argued he was not involved in the actual killing.

‘The death of so many natives [is] necessarily abhorrent to members of the court,’ the defence counsel concluded. ‘The court must disregard personal feelings in the matter and judge the accused according to the evidence and the appropriate rules of law.’28

The court was not persuaded, found both men guilty of murder, and sentenced them to death by hanging. It was unusual to impose a death sentence on a defendant not directly involved in killing, but Nara’s attitude had probably not counted in his favour. Both men petitioned, and on 11 June 1946, Judge Advocate General Simson upheld the verdict and Suzuki’s sentence, but recommended Nara’s be commuted. Sturdee accordingly commuted his sentence to twenty years’ imprisonment. Suzuki was hanged at Rabaul on 23 July 1946.

In the subsequent trials relating to the massacre, the four company commanders (lieutenants) and three of the platoon commanders (sub-lieutenants) were sentenced to death. Of the remaining platoon commanders, seven received twenty years’ imprisonment, three received fifteen years, and one was acquitted. Two men of other ranks (petty officers and warrant officers) were sentenced to seven years, and one was acquitted. All pleaded the defence of superior orders.

One of the company commanders, Lieutenant Sakata Jiro (in trial R53), said he hated the idea of killing the natives and tried to talk Suzuki out of it, but Suzuki wielded ‘absolute power’ and once he gave the order ‘my brain was no longer mine’. Sakata had called together his subordinates, drawn his sword to show his resolve, and ordered them to shoot the Islanders. The junior officers protested, but he insisted on the validity of the order, while ‘keeping back my tears’. In order to ensure a fast and merciful death, Sakata had arranged for more than two soldiers to each Islander. After he had confirmed they were dead, he buried them at sea while praying for their souls.29

Under cross-examination, Sakata confirmed that he had told his subordinates that any who disobeyed would be shot.30 In response to a question from one of the judges, he admitted he had studied the Geneva Convention ‘but had forgotten the details’.31 He was sentenced to death.

Further down the chain of command was Sub-Lieutenant Hanawa Eiji (R70), a platoon commander, who was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. He too maintained that he hadn’t wanted to shoot the Islanders, but couldn’t see that he had any choice: ‘My parents were farmers and I only graduated from the primary school with difficulty, helping my family. I was appointed to be an officer in November 1944, about four years after I was called only for the reason officers’ shortage, no replacement, so I was not regularly educated as an officer. And my duty was the same as when I was a P. O. [Petty Officer], though I became an officer, and I do not know about the international law and so on at all. Execution of the order was absolute as usual. Especially I was unwilling to shoot the natives to death, but obliged to do it.’32

Ocean Island provides an interesting example of how the courts in the early Australian trials dealt with a fairly large-scale war crime involving a hierarchy of defendants. The courts did not accept the defence of superior orders, but did not extend responsibility all the way down to the ordinary seamen who actually did the killing. This was different from the approach at Labuan, where the Formosan guards were held individually responsible for the killing of prisoners of war. There, Sticpewich, who had watched the events unfold over several months, was able to testify to the culpability of each defendant. Making a similar assessment for all 500 Japanese Navy personnel on Ocean Island would have been impossible.

In line with Nuremberg principles, the Rabaul court did consider the defence of superior orders in sentencing – the more senior officers received more severe sentences. Interestingly, it also probed the defendants on their knowledge of international law and appeared to deal more harshly with those who admitted familiarity with it.