On a cold night in February 1970, a group of British sailors gathered for a reunion in the proud naval city of Portsmouth, England. They had all served in China in the 1930s, on the Yangtze River, part of the gunboat fleet that served the interests of the crown in that faraway land. As they got to reminiscing, they began to talk incessantly not of adventures on the high seas or especially rowdy shore leave, but of their ship’s mascot.
After much consumption of spirits, they decided to find out more about her life, beyond her service on the gunboats. As dogs don’t write memoirs, they decided the least they could do was to pen one for her. The mascot, Judy the pointer, left such an impression upon them that even after the men sobered up, they pressed on with their project.
So several of them hunted down more information about Judy’s life. They talked to old mates who served with her, wrote letters, scoured the archives. When they were finished, they handed over their findings to an editor named Edwin Varley, who assembled them into a small book called The Judy Story, which was published in Britain in 1972.
Thanks to these men—George White, William Wilson, Les Searle, and Vic Oliver—the full measure of Judy’s adventures and extraordinary life, in war and out, found its way out of the murky backwater of untold history. And it is thanks to them that this book is possible.
But there were numerous gaps that needed to be filled in, in order to properly account for Judy’s full story. Her “best friend,” Frank Williams, as mentioned in the narrative, wasn’t the most forthcoming of men when it came to his experiences during the war. While he could have written a fascinating memoir, he chose to remain mostly silent about his life with Judy, at least publicly. He made two exceptions: a long letter he wrote to the Dutch authors H. Neumann and E. van Witsen for their 1984 book about Pakan Baroe called De Sumatra Spoorweg (The Sumatra Railway), a work not translated into English, and a chat with the gunboatmen who put The Judy Story together.
As such, some but not all of Frank’s experiences and innermost thoughts, in particular the many decades of his life that didn’t involve Judy, are something of a cipher. I filled in the gaps as best as possible through archival and obituary material, but there are some things that, alas, went to the grave with him. Exhaustive efforts to contact his surviving family in Canada, including the hiring of a private investigator and cold calls in the hundreds, were unsuccessful. Hopefully this book finds them, and Frank’s descendants will help to complete the picture of their extraordinary father.
Otherwise, source material and asides to the narrative are as follows.
Information on Judy’s adoption, episode on the streets of Shanghai, and early days aboard the HMS Gnat is from the memories, diaries, letters, and ship’s logs collected by Vic Oliver, Les Searle, George White, and William Wilson in The Judy Story.
The story of the Japanese sailors’ attack on Mr. Soo’s shop and the punting of Judy is likewise from The Judy Story.
Famine has visited China in outbursts great and small throughout its history. The 1928–30 famine, brought on by severe drought in the north, killed an estimated three million people. In 1936, drought was again the cause of vast famine across the nation, made worse by severe flooding when the rains at last came. Five million people were estimated to have perished in this single, horrible year. In both cases, the poorly coordinated relief efforts served to exacerbate the suffering, rather than end it. The Three Years of Famine at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, from 1958 to 1961, was even worse, killing anywhere from fifteen to forty-three million people, depending on various estimates.
The saying “If its back faces the sun, it can be eaten” has a southern Chinese, or Cantonese, origin. Denizens of northern China, such as those in Beijing, say of their southern cousins, “The Cantonese will eat anything that swims, except the submarine. Everything that flies, except the airplane, and everything that has legs, except the table.”
After their stunning victory over the Russian fleet in 1904, the Japanese set their sights on creating a navy capable of defeating the U.S. fleet in the Pacific. A key thinker was Admiral Satō Tetsutarō, who came up with the “70 percent doctrine”—Japan should have a fleet 70 percent as large as the American Navy, one capable of winning an engagement against the enemy Pacific forces, as well as a follow-up battle against American ships from the Atlantic that would inevitably be sent to reinforce. Soon, Japan was eagerly involved in the dreadnought arms race that swept the great sea powers in the decade before World War I, one that began with England and Germany but expanded to include not only Japan but the United States and France.
Shanghai’s Bund (rhymes with fund) is known locally as the Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, or the Zhongshan East First Road. Upon the advent of the British settlement in Shanghai, the Bund was paved and its banks reinforced to keep the Huangpu River at bay, which gives the Bund its name (a bund is an embanked levee wide enough for commercial or pedestrian use). It swiftly became the heart of the city, economically as well as culturally. The area was picturesque, with a radical mix of architectural styles thrown together, and romantic, with lovers strolling arm in arm along the water or canoodling against the floodwall. Commercially, the Bund was home to bank and trading company headquarters, consulates and embassies, and newspaper and publishing houses. Today, it is the first stop for tourists of all nationalities, and while much of its old-world charm has been leached away, it is still a symbol of the city.
Japan invaded Manchuria, the huge region in far northeast China and far eastern Russia, on September 18, 1931. The area swiftly fell under the control of the aggressors, but when the fighting slipped south to the Shanghai area, Japan pulled back, and a United States–brokered peace proposal quelled the fighting for a few years.
Shanghai, which translates to “city on the sea,” was a sleepy fishing village until the British named it a treaty port in 1842, after the First Opium War granted the empire access to trade concessions in the Middle Kingdom. After that the strategically placed city’s status grew exponentially in both population and import.
Vital statistics on the gunboat fleet, including the specifications, are taken from Angus Konstam’s invaluable monograph Yangtze River Gunboats.
There were twelve Insect-class gunboats in the Royal Navy on station in China. In addition to the Gnat these included the Aphis, Bee, Cicala, Cockchafer, Cricket, Glowworm, Ladybird, Mantis, Moth, Scarab, and Tarantula.
The Second Opium War is also called the Arrow War. It was much the same as the First Opium War, in that it pitted western commercial interests, chiefly English and French, against the Chinese rulers, in this case the Qing Dynasty, who chafed under the foreign influence over its trade. The Arrow was a British ship seized by Chinese officials in Canton, an incident that precipitated the war, which swiftly escalated out of control from the Chinese perspective. The Qing military was routed, and the sacking of the Forbidden City discussed by the western powers, who settled instead on the burning of the Summer Palaces in Beijing. The Treaty of Tientsin (also called Tianjin) was ratified in 1858, opening the way for the gunboat navy to be deployed on the Yangtze.
The Sand Pebbles was a classic novel written by Richard McKenna before it was turned into a Hollywood production. Paul Newman turned down the starring role of Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles, which was taken by Steve McQueen and resulted in his lone Academy Award nomination for best actor. The movie also features a nineteen-year-old Candice Bergen.
In recent times the use of the term warlord to describe the regional strongmen of this period has fallen into politically incorrect sand traps. But that obscures the basic truth that these men were motivated by money and territory, and were not freedom fighters in any capacity, as some revisionists would paint them.
Yang Sen may have been a provincial warlord, but that only scratches the surface of his remarkable, and long, life. He was loyal to Chiang Kai-shek and served in various roles in the Kuomintang regime, mainly as a military governor. During World War II, he was a deputy commander in chief and fled to Taiwan with Chiang after the ascension of the Communists under Mao Tse-tung. A humanist despite his fearsome reputation and activities, Yang believed in the arts and higher education, only hiring college graduates for his staffs and funding parks, museums, and schools throughout his fiefdom. Yang was a dedicated mountaineer and sportsman, and carried the Taiwanese flag into the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City during the Opening Ceremonies of the 1968 Summer Games. He also became a Taoist master and a bigamist, believing men should have as many wives as they wished (he had at least five, and multiple children from each). He encouraged these women to get an education and become active in community affairs outside of the home. Yang died in 1977 at the age of ninety-three, extraordinary longevity for a man of his time and career path.
The Wanhsien Incident was triggered by Yang’s objections to English and American gunboats denying him and his soldiers passage upriver on their ships, a service the Italian and Japanese boats provided for him. English and American skippers pled neutrality, which was rather hypocritical given their mission.
The history of the pointer breed, limned in the narrative, is told at length by Ernest Hart in Pointers.
Information on Judy’s adventures on (and over) board the Gnat is from the memories, diaries, and ship’s logs collected by Vic Oliver, Les Searle, George White, and William Wilson in The Judy Story.
The life of the average seaman on the gunboats is documented in Yangtze River Gunboats.
The concept of the umwelt began with Jakob von Uexküll but was pushed into the public arena by Thomas Sebeok, a professor of semiotics at Indiana University. Sebeok saw that the German’s work concerned “biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human animal,” not to mention other animals. Where umwelt is specific to canines is well described by Jennifer Arnold in Through a Dog’s Eyes.
Judy’s love of shore leave, including her induction into the Strong Toppers’ Club and her difficulties in training to be a hunting dog, come from memories, diaries, and ship’s logs collected by Vic Oliver, Les Searle, George White, and William Wilson for The Judy Story. More general stories of shore leave and hijinks along the river are from Yangtze River Gunboats.
After nearly four decades of sterling service in the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Charles Little took over as commander in chief of the China Station in 1936. His next posting, in 1938, was as second sea lord, one of the top positions in the Admiralty. Little was also head of England’s staff mission to Washington in 1941, when joint sea operations were discussed, and took over command of the fleet at Portsmouth in 1942.
The idea that it was sound vibrations from an airplane that Judy picked up on aboard the Gnat isn’t necessarily true. Dogs, like most animals, are indeed better equipped than man to detect vibrations; for example, they are often credited with sensing earthquake tremors in the ground before we do. But airborne vibrations operate at a different pitch. It might have been that Judy was picking up on the airplane engine’s whine at a distance far greater than our capacity to hear. The auditory sense of a canine can capture sounds at far higher frequencies than human ears, hence the high-pitched dog whistle. It stands to reason that Judy simply heard the plane before the Gnat’s crew.
The term gwailo stems from the Cantonese gwai lo, or “ghost person.”
Gould Hunter Thomas was a New Yorker known to his friends as Jim or Tommy. He graduated from Yale in 1934 and traveled to China shortly afterward. He meant to continue on an around-the-world journey, but a steamship strike marooned him in Shanghai, where he found work with Texaco, selling oil for lamps. While there he kept journals of his three years in Shanghai, which were collected in his wonderful book An American in China: 1936–39.
Information concerning the Gnat’s operations after the eruption of the Sino-Japanese War is from memories, diaries, and ship’s logs collected by Vic Oliver, Les Searle, George White, and William Wilson.
The Marco Polo Bridge predates the famous explorer of China. Built about fifteen miles southwest of modern-day Beijing, it was first constructed in 1189. The simple stone affair built over the Yongding River was washed away and rebuilt in time for Polo to see it and declare, “Over this river there is a very fine stone bridge, so fine indeed, that it has very few equals in the world.” Recent rerouting of the Yongding means that at present there is little to no water under the bridge.
Notes on Shanghai during the Japanese onslaught come from contemporary sources, including Gould Hunter Thomas’ An American in China: 1936–39 and Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China, as well as various quotes gathered by English writer John Gittings at johngittings.com.
Further reading on the breadth of Japanese atrocity in Nanking is available in Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
The interplay between the HMS Gnat and the USS Panay is revealed in The Judy Story. Movement of the gunboats prior to, during, and after the Panay bombing comes from The Judy Story and Yangtze River Gunboats, as well as information from the Naval History and Heritage Command website (history.navy.mil) and multiple contemporary accounts.
Judy’s friendship with local Chinese and details of her love affair with the pointer on the Francis Garnier are courtesy of the memories of Vic Oliver, Les Searle, George White, and William Wilson in The Judy Story.
The Flying Tigers, officially the 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force (CAF), began when Claire Chennault, a retired Army Air Force officer, accepted an offer from Madame Chiang Kai-shek to make a confidential survey of the CAF on the cusp of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Chennault went on to organize a web of airfields and an early-warning system that allowed the CAF to stay competitive in the air with the far superior Japanese Air Force. “All over Free China these human ant heaps rose to turn mud, rocks, lime and sweat into 5,000 foot runways to nest planes not yet built in Los Angeles and Buffalo factories,” Chennault wrote in his memoir, Way of a Fighter. Of the alarm network he helped form, he wrote, “The Chinese air-raid warning system was a vast spidernet of people, radios, telephones, and telegraph lines that covered all of Free China accessible to enemy aircraft. In addition to continuous intelligence of enemy attacks, the net served to locate and guide lost friendly planes, direct aid to friendly pilots who had crashed or bailed out, and helped guide our technical intelligence experts to wrecks of crashed enemy aircraft.”
American pilots began to arrive in China to fly for Chennault in July 1941. They made the American Volunteer Group famous due in part to flying skill (they were credited with downing 296 Japanese airplanes to only 14 lost pilots) and in part to painting their P-40 Curtiss Warhawk airplanes with the ferocious fangs and stripes of the tiger. “Our pilots copied the shark-tooth design on their P-40’s noses from a colored illustration in the India Illustrated Weekly depicting an R.A.F. squadron in the Libyan Desert with shark-nose P-40’s,” Chennault wrote. The Flying Tigers disbanded on Independence Day 1942, replaced by the 23rd Fighter Group, also under Chennault.
Stanley Cotterrall’s story, as well as the story of Jack Law throwing a Japanese soldier into the Yangtze, are related in The Judy Story.
The Gnat wasn’t sent directly to beach defense in Egypt—she was hit by a torpedo first. At half past three in the morning on October 21, 1941, the gunboat was nearly destroyed by the German submarine U-79 off the North African coast, near the border between Egypt and Libya. The bow was blown away, but her forward gun still functioned, so the badly damaged vessel was towed to Alexandria’s harbor and used as an antiaircraft weapon until she was scrapped in 1945.
Judy’s seasickness and recovery en route to Singapore is recorded in The Judy Story.
In the seventh century, around the same time dogs were being used in combat by the Magnesians against the Ephesians (in what is now Turkey), war dogs also were used by the ruler of the Kingdom of Lydia, Alyattes. He reportedly had his soldiers release the hounds upon troops from Cimmeria in a battle. One contemporary source recorded that the Lydian attack dogs were especially effective against cavalry. Some historians believe this occurred before the Magnesians set their dogs upon the Ephesians. Others believe that Hammurabi used dogs as early as 1760 BC, though there is little evidence for this. Alas, there is no single “bible” on the subject of war dogs.
The Spanish conquistadors brought battle mastiffs to the New World. Fully armored and with teeth bared, they served some battlefield functions against the Aztecs but were mainly used to cow the local citizenry. According to Cynthia Jean Van Zandt in Brothers Among Nations, the Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando de Soto used his mastiffs “by pretending to release Indian captives, only to let the dogs loose to hunt them as hounds would chase a fox or other game animal in Europe.” Juan Ponce de León used the animals to assist in the quelling of slave rebellions, while Vasco Núñez de Balboa took the mastiffs to Panama, having them rip local chieftains to shreds as an example to others not to resist.
Sallie the Boston terrier was given to the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers as a puppy and took part in all the regiment’s battles, standing on the end of the battle line and barking furiously at the enemy. Wounded at Gettysburg, Sallie was separated from her unit but was later found, weak but alert, standing vigil over several of the dead and wounded from the 11th. She was killed at the Battle of Hatcher’s Run in February 1865. Despite heavy Confederate fire, members of her regiment stopped fighting to bury her.
Sallie is one of two dogs depicted on memorials at Gettysburg. The other is an Irish wolfhound that symbolizes the bravery of the Irish Brigade, a group of five regiments—three from New York, one from Pennsylvania, and one from Massachusetts—that fought valiantly at Gettysburg despite heavy blooding in previous engagements at Antietam and Fredericksburg.
War dog service during the American Civil War is nicely chronicled on the website the Loyalty of Dogs, loyaltyofdogs.com.
The Battle of Shiloh is also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, due to the fact that the North tended to name battles after local landmarks or bodies of water, such as Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, while the South named them for the closest town or rail junction, in this case Shiloh, Tennessee. The more commonly used name is generally determined by popular usage; in this case, Shiloh apparently was more memorable or sounded better than Pittsburg Landing. Both General U. S. Grant and General William Sherman refer to “Shiloh” in their respective memoirs, for example.
The Battersea Dogs Home honored the dogs that served from their kennels in World War I at the Collars and Coats Gala Ball in London on October 30, 2014.
Information about Stubby, the World War I hero mutt, comes from several sources, including an article in the New York Evening World of July 8, 1921, called “Stubby, Hero Mascot of Seventeen Battles, Showing Decorations for Bravery,” as well as a profile on the website Badass of the Week (badassoftheweek.com/sgtstubby.html), information from the History Learning Site (historylearningsite.co.uk/sergeant_stubby.htm), and the children’s book Stubby the War Dog by Ann Bausum. The dog is often referred to as “Sergeant Stubby,” but actually he was never promoted.
A great deal of information about war dogs during World War II can be found in the overview and history Dogs and the National Defense, written in 1958 for the U.S. Army by Anna M. Waller.
William Putney’s memoir about serving with the war dogs of Guam, Always Faithful, provided information about not only the heroism of the dogs but also the bond they formed with their marine handlers, Putney in particular.
Putney’s efforts to detrain the war dogs of Guam and place them into civilian homes is mirrored by modern treatment of military dogs that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until very recently, such animals were considered “surplus equipment” and put down after their service. It wasn’t until President Bill Clinton signed into law H.R.5314, aka “Robby’s Law,” that suitable homes for MWD, or military working dogs, were required to be facilitated. Robby was a Belgian Malinois who served in the U.S. Air Force for eight years as a patrol and detection dog. Increasingly arthritic, Robby was scheduled for euthanasia. His handler pleaded with the brass for him to be spared and took his fight public when they refused. The matter came to the attention of the U.S. Congress, resulting in the new codicil enforcing adoption when possible. Unfortunately, the law came too late to save Robby, who was put down in early 2001.
Despite Robby’s Law, military dogs remain difficult to place into civilian homes. Anyone interested in adoption of these animals can learn more at websites such as Pets for Patriots (petsforpatriots.org) and the U.S. War Dog Association (uswardogs.org), among others.
Sinbad’s heroic, if oft-drunken, service is recounted thanks to an article in the U.S. Coast Guard Retiree Newsletter from July 1988 called “Sinbad the Four-Legged Sailor,” and the USCG website (uscg.mil/history/faqs/sinbad.asp).
Gander the Newfie’s story is told in loving detail in Isabel George’s book The Dog That Saved My Life.
George White recounted his tale of boarding the Grasshopper for the first time and of meeting Judy the pointer and Mickey the monkey in The Judy Story.
The chronology of the Grasshopper’s bridge officers can be found, ironically enough, at the website uboat.net (uboat.net/allies/warships/ship/13127.html).
Frank Williams’ background is, alas, only partially known. Much information can be gleaned from the memorial website his family prepared upon his passing in 2003, frankwilliams.ca. The Portsmouth in which he grew up is detailed through tax, death, and voting records held at the Portsmouth City Archives, as well as The Portsmouth That Has Passed by William Gates; Sunny Southsea by Anthony Triggs; “People of Portsmouth,” a collection of oral histories by John Stedman; and Wally Greer’s oral history “Pompey Boy in the 1930s and ’40s,” the latter two held at the Portsmouth City Archives. The author’s visit to the seaside city also informed the passage.
Information about Frank’s Merchant Navy (MN) service is likewise scant. The basic information comes from his official MN records held at the Southampton Government Archives. Further details were provided by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and by Frank’s memorial website.
When Frank referred to his complexion as “fresh” in his Merchant Navy records, he most likely meant it as a synonym for “Caucasian.”
The SS Harbledown, upon which Frank served in the Merchant Navy, came to an unfortunate end during World War II. On April 4, 1941, she was sunk by the U-boat U-94 off the Icelandic coast while in a large convoy bringing wheat from Portland, Maine, to England. Sixteen men perished, while twenty-five more were plucked from the sea and brought to safety in Liverpool.
John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham became a national hero thanks to his performance in the skies during the Battle of Britain. When he told reporters his success was due to eating carrots, a generation of kids began to eat their vegetables.
In addition to radar, the Tizard Mission to Washington passed several other advanced scientific programs across the Atlantic, including Commodore Frank Whittle’s jet engine idea; designs for gyroscopes, gun sights, and plastic explosives; and the Otto Frisch–Rudolf Peierls memorandum, which outlines the technical possibility of the atomic bomb. Yes, Frisch and Peierls were Germans, but they had immigrated to England and conducted their research at the University of Birmingham.
The particular breakthrough shared in the radar realm during the Tizard Mission was the cavity magnetron, a high-powered vacuum tube that created microwaves by blasting electrons past a series of open metal cavities, creating an effect not dissimilar to sound waves emanating from an electric guitar. It was invented in 1940 at the University of Birmingham in England, but since the United Kingdom was prostrate from fighting the Nazis, it was given to American scientists by Tizard. The magnetron was enhanced and mass-produced, and its performance was significantly greater than that of more rudimentary German and Japanese radars.
Frank Williams’ precise military service history cannot be known without obtaining his service records, which can only be done by family members. But the important movements can be determined by his recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen, as well as remembrances from other members of the RAF radar units in Singapore, mainly Stanley Saddington and Fred Freeman. The former’s memoir, Escape Impossible, is held at England’s National Archives; the latter’s private papers are at the Imperial War Museum.
The history of radar operations in Singapore comes from RAF files held at the National Archives, in particular “Signals Vol. IV—Radar in Raid Reporting” (RAF AIR 41/12), “RDF Stations Overseas Policy” (RAF AIR 20/3032), and “History of the RDF Organisation in the Far East” (RAF AIR 20/193).
Memories of prewar Singapore come from various contemporary sources as well as the private papers of J. Cuthbertson, held at the Imperial War Museum; Cecil Brown’s memoir Suez to Singapore; and Singapore’s Dunkirk by Geoffrey Brooke.
Details of British overconfidence vis-à-vis the Japanese threat come from Brown’s memoir as well as John Dower’s War Without Mercy.
On May 23, 1941, the German super battleship Bismarck, the pride of the Kriegsmarine, had made its attempt to break through the Royal Navy blockade of German ports and wreak havoc in the Atlantic. Stationed off Iceland for just such an engagement, the largest British battleship, HMS Hood, steamed to intercept, along with Prince of Wales. The ships exchanged heavy fire with Bismarck beginning a few minutes before six a.m. The Hood was destroyed in a matter of moments, exploding with the loss of all 1,419 on board save but three lucky survivors.
Wales sustained several hits as well, and Captain John Leach, an austere, rail-thin forty-seven-year-old Australian, made a controversial decision to break off and recover, rather than continue the fight. It was the proper move, given the damage she had suffered, the strength of the enemy force, and the deflating sight of the Hood’s demise moments before. Yet some in the Admiralty felt Leach should have been court-martialed.
Dozens of warships and planes chased the Bismarck, which was damaged in the Hood/Wales encounter and was racing to safety. A torpedo from a warplane destroyed Bismarck’s steering gear, and a sustained bombardment from British ships finished her, killing all but 114 of 2,200 crewmen.
The concerted attack upon the Bismarck is the stuff of naval lore. There was a popular film based on the engagement, Sink the Bismarck!, released in 1960, which led to a country music hit of the same name (except the ship was misspelled as Bismark) by Johnny Horton and Tillman Franks, which reached number three on the charts. A particularly good documentary on the sinking aired on the Military Channel series Dogfights, which provides a three-dimensional perspective.
The British experiences with their war dogs are reported in the American War Department’s official history Dogs and the National Defense, written by Anna M. Waller in 1958.
In addition to Pearl Harbor, Singapore, and Siam, the Japanese struck several other places on December 7 (or 8, depending on the international date line), 1941, including Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, and, most infamously, the Philippines. Several hours after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese destroyed the U.S. Army Air Force B-17 bomber fleet at Clark Field in the Philippines on the ground, as well as a third of the fighters based there and the lone radar system. Why the planes hadn’t been scrambled or sent to safety upon word of the Pearl Harbor attack reaching General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters is a subject of much controversy, then and now.
The incredible story of Ian Forbes comes from his private papers held at the Imperial War Museum, as well as “The Real-Life Uncle Albert,” a piece in the London Daily Mail published June 14, 2013. The Uncle Albert in the headline references a character on the popular BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which aired between 1981 and 1991. On the show, Uncle Albert Trotter served during World War II on seven different ships that were sunk by torpedoes or bombs, including two during peacetime. But he lived on to pursue a lucrative postwar career staging falls down the cellar stairs of pubs across London in order to collect insurance claims.
Cecil Brown’s extraordinary experiences aboard the HMS Repulse are recounted in his memoir, Suez to Singapore.
Personal details of Brown’s life are further pulled from his Los Angeles Times obituary from October 27, 1987. Brown had left his newspaper job in Ohio for the sea, craving adventure and the salt-packed life. He worked on a freighter for a spell, but when his ship sailed into Soviet waters in the early 1930s, he felt the old twitching of the reporter’s urge to share what he witnessed with the world. Besides, there was money to be made. So Brown filed several stories from the Black Sea ports he visited, commenting acidly on the Communists, who had closed themselves off from the world.
Upon returning to the States, the lanky, long-faced Brown (who bore a resemblance to the actor Anthony Edwards) fell back into reporting, and when conflict began bubbling to the surface in Europe, he returned as a freelancer. In 1940, CBS hired him, at Edward R. Murrow’s urging (Brown was one of the fabled Murrow Boys), and he covered Mussolini’s Italy from Rome. Typical of Brown’s commentary was his observation of “a comic-opera army preparing for slaughter under orders of a Duce with a titanic contempt for his own people.”
Brown was disappointed he wound up aboard the Repulse rather than the Prince of Wales, and gloomily assumed he would miss all the real action taking place in Siam and Malaya. The Repulse too had an animal mascot—a black kitten, which was weakened from rickets but playful. Brown dangled a string over her head as he moaned to a Royal Marine, “What the hell are we going to do for four days?” “Oh, we may have something,” the young lieutenant answered. “We might even have movies. We had a picture last night—Arise, My Love, with Claudette Colbert.” Instead, Brown witnessed history when the Japanese attacked.
Even as the race to construct ever-larger and heavily armed battleships gripped naval departments from Washington to London to Berlin and Tokyo, U.S. Army General Billy Mitchell and British Air Commodore Charles Rumney Samson were early, and loud, proponents of the changing doctrine in naval warfare. Both men spent the years after World War I proselytizing on the way airpower would utterly transform oceanic combat. Both were, in the main, ignored. And both would wind up resigning their commissions in order to make plain their beliefs (Mitchell labeled the American investment in battleships rather than aircraft carriers “almost treasonable administration of the national defense” and was court-martialed for his trouble). The action of December 10, 1941, would prove them utterly correct.
The aircraft carrier meant to be sent with Force Z to Singapore was the HMS Indomitable. She served in the Indian Ocean; the Mediterranean, where she was slightly damaged; and finally in the Pacific, where she was hit by a kamikaze attack on May 4, 1945. Indomitable survived and went on to support the liberation of Hong Kong, her final action of World War II. In 1947, she carried the British national rugby team to a series of test matches in Australia, thus giving the team its nickname, the Indomitables.
In response to the arrival of Prince of Wales and Repulse in Singapore, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto deployed an extra three-dozen medium-range Mitsubishi bombers to the landing force he planned to use in an invasion of Malaya. The pilots began training specifically for a potential attack on the capital ships.
The poor performance of the radar systems is illuminated by Frank’s recollections to Neumann and van Witsen, along with Stanley Saddington’s memoir and the RAF report “Signals Vol. IV—Radar in Raid Reporting.” A Chinese businessman offered British pilots a bottle of champagne for every Japanese plane they shot down. He gave few away.
The loss of Singapore remains a tremendously controversial episode in British military history. Scapegoats abound, as in any colossal battlefield failure, although in this case one may have to tip the cap to the attacking Japanese under General Yamashita before calling out any of the British commanders or even Winston Churchill. Even a better-prepared British defense would almost certainly have been forced to surrender eventually, especially once Japan took control of the skies over Singapore and Malaya.
For more reading on the British side of the disaster at Singapore, pick up Singapore Burning by Colin Smith, The Fall of Singapore by Frank Owen, and Singapore: The Chain of Disaster by S. Woodburn Kirby. Geoffrey Brooke also provides some interesting perspective in his memoir, Singapore’s Dunkirk.
The majority of operational details about the Grasshopper’s movements in the days before the fall of Singapore were destroyed in the Japanese onslaught. Some information is related in The Judy Story by George White and Les Searle. More comes from other Royal Navy files held at the National Archives, including “HMS Grasshopper Packet” (WO 361/404), although the larger segment of this information concerns the actions of Dragonfly and Scorpion.
Details of Singapore’s last days before the fall come from multiple contemporary sources, the books about Singapore’s loss referred to above, and official reports written by the War Ministry held at the National Archives.
Frank’s escape to the docks, along with the general chaos of those last days, is informed by his recollections to Neumann and van Witsen, as well as Stanley Saddington’s Escape Impossible, Arthur Donahue’s Last Flight from Singapore, and Geoffrey Brooke’s Singapore’s Dunkirk.
C. Yates McDaniel’s final filing from Singapore appeared across the United States and elsewhere under the Associated Press banner on February 12, 1942, with the headline “Last Message from Singapore.”
The Vickers Vildebeest (often Anglicized as Wildebeest) dated to 1928. The ones McDaniel saw flying were among the last ones to see combat with the RAF.
Details recounting the hellish scenes at Keppel Harbor as the British abandoned Singapore are from multiple sources, including Frank’s recollection to Neumann and van Witsen; George White in The Judy Story and in an interview he gave to the Portsmouth Evening News on July 27, 1945; Leonard Williams’ (no relation to Frank) obituary in the Times of London of January 22, 2007; Geoffrey Brooke’s Singapore’s Dunkirk; contemporary accounts by C. Yates McDaniel and Athole Stewart; Stanley Saddington’s Escape Impossible; Frank Owen’s The Fall of Singapore; and Colin Smith’s Singapore Burning, along with dozens of accounts collected by the Ministry of War in documents stored at the National Archives, and the private papers of J. A. C. Robins (5153) and Ian Forbes (18765), which are held at the Imperial War Museum.
Needless to say, accounts concerning numbers and identities of the people embarking on the rescue ships vary wildly. I have quoted those whose accounts are most trustworthy and, as the British themselves did in the postwar aftermath, gave rough figures where no precision exists.
Wong Hai-Sheng’s famous photograph is also known as “Bloody Saturday” and “Motherless Chinese Baby.” Wong owned a camera shop in Shanghai, and on August 14, 1937, he responded to particularly heavy bombing by racing out to capture the carnage. At about four p.m., Japanese planes attacked Shanghai’s South Station, ripping apart refugees trying to escape the city.
Wong told competing versions of how his photo came to be, leading some (especially in Japan) to claim it was faked or staged. In August 1945, Newsreel Wong shared the story of his famous shot with syndicated columnist Lowell Thomas. In this account, Wong was at the station under bombardment and noticed another wave of Japanese planes coming:
I only had about fifty feet of unexposed film left, and thought I’d better use it up and put in a fresh roll to be ready to shoot when the bombs fell. So I pointed my camera at whatever happened to be nearby, and shot the rest of the film. Nearby was the track, covered with litter, wreckage, and horror, and I pointed my camera that way. I didn’t notice anything in particular.… As it happened, the plane that approached did nothing in particular, so my hurry was needless.
Wong sent the film undeveloped to his usual newsreel company in the United States, the Hearst Company, and forgot about it. “Weeks later,” Wong continued to Thomas, “an American officer I knew came over and remarked, ‘Say, Newsreel, that baby picture was sweet.’”
“What baby picture?”
“The one you made at the Shanghai bombing, the one at the railroad track.”
I couldn’t remember any such thing.
The American pulled out a copy of Life magazine and showed it to Wong for the first time:
I looked at it and still scored a blank… obviously I had shot the picture… quite by accident the camera had happened to make a perfect shot of a crying child, which in the haste and chaos of the horror, I hadn’t noticed.
It really is quite a picture.
But years later, the National Press Photographers Association put out a book called Great Moments in News Photography, compiled by John Faber. In this version, Wong states that he was photographing the bombing with not only his movie camera but also a Leica still camera, and saw a man place the crying baby on the platform. The man then moved off to rescue another child, at which point Wong snapped the image. “I ran toward the child, intending to carry him to safety, but the father returned,” Wong said. He then took the film to the offices of the China Press and excitedly pointed out the baby image to an editor there, exclaiming, “Look at this one!”
Whatever the genesis of the shot, it remains one of the definitive war images of the century. Estimates of how many people viewed the baby wailing amid the nightmare range from 80 to 136 million. Frank Capra used the film in his 1944 documentary The Battle of China. Andy Warhol painted a version of the image in the 1960s. Lowell Thomas himself compared the image to that of Joe Rosenthal’s fabled photo of marines raising the American flag over Iwo Jima. Wong survived the war and died at his home in Taiwan in 1981.
The image is easily found on the Internet—an example is at oldhistoricphotos.com/bloody-saturday-a-crying-chinese-baby-amid-the-bombed-out-ruins-of-shanghais-south-railway-station-saturday-august-28-1937/.
Details of the incredible story of the Vyner Brooke are from Ian W. Shaw’s On Radji Beach, Noel Tunny’s Winning from Downunder, Barbara Angell’s A Woman’s War, and Betty Jeffrey’s memoir White Coolies, as well as numerous contemporary articles in the Australian press.
There is no relation between Sir Vyner Brooke, the last rajah of Sarawak, and Geoffrey Brooke, the naval officer who escaped death aboard the Prince of Wales and while escaping Singapore.
The liner Empire Star carried well over two thousand people out of Singapore on February 11, despite having cabin accommodations for just sixteen. Most were military personnel and nurses, but roughly 135 were Australian army deserters, who shot and killed the Royal Navy Captain of the Dockyard, T. K. W. Atkinson, and forced their way on board at rifle point. The Empire Star was attacked by Japanese airpower on the twelfth but survived the damage and made it to Batavia, where the Aussies were arrested. After repairs, she sailed for Fremantle, Australia, on the sixteenth, bringing those on board to safety.
The name of the capital city of Java, Batavia, was also in its final days. When the Japanese conquered the Dutch, Indonesian nationalists joined with their fellow Asians in a propaganda triumph for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and tossed aside the colonial name in favor of the pre-Dutch nomenclature, Jakarta. Actually, the original name of the city was Jayakarta, but it was shortened for modern times.
The story of the sinking of the Grasshopper and her sister ship Dragonfly is informed by George White’s, John Devani’s, and Les Searle’s recollections in The Judy Story; Ian Forbes’ (18765) and J. A. C. Robins’ (5153) private papers at the Imperial War Museum; Forbes’ statement held at the National Archives (ADM 1/30/600); Geoffrey Brooke’s Singapore’s Dunkirk; and dozens of accounts held at the National Archives, notably “Various Reports on Sinkings of HMS Grasshopper and Kung Wo” (ADM 199/622A), as well as collected at kinnethmont.co.uk/1939-1945_files/thos-ingram/hms-grasshopper.htm.
At the outset of the war, there was great confusion in identification of Japanese planes, as there was no standard set by the Allies. Each country had different names for enemy planes, and even the American Army Air Force and U.S. Navy used different verbiage. Finally, an Army Air Force intelligence officer named Captain Frank T. McCoy simplified and unified the identification effort. Fighters were given boys’ names, every other type of plane given girls’ names. A Tennessean, McCoy livened up the process by using hillbilly names, like Rufe and Zeke, the original name for the fabled Mitsubishi A6M navy fighter, better known as the Zero. Few in the military cottoned to calling such a potent weapon by such a goofy name, so Zeke was put out to pasture. McCoy used a personal touch when possible, naming planes after his friends; for example, the Mitsubishi G4M bomber, whose large gun turrets resembled female breasts, was called the Betty after a busty pal of McCoy’s.
Lieutenant Sidney Iley’s death remained unannounced and unofficial for a long period. His wife, Betty, a reserve in the Women’s Naval Service back in England, only knew that her husband had gone missing in the mad race away from Singapore. Betty attempted to maintain her poise, aware that loved ones were missing all over the world. For more than a year she woke up in the morning expecting to find out the truth about Sidney, one way or the other. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. On July 28, 1943, Betty placed an ad in several newspapers across England begging readers for information.
ILEY, Sidney L, Lt RN; missing since the fall of Singapore. Any information gratefully received by his wife, third Officer Betty Iley, W.R.N.S. 22 Barkston Gardens S.W.5.
(Australian papers please copy)
Alas, no one taking the paper in either England or Australia had been in the Lingga Archipelago that fateful Valentine’s Day of 1942. It wouldn’t be until December 8, 1945, that the death notice was released by the military into newspapers across the United Kingdom:
ILEY Missing since fall of Singapore now officially presumed killed in Feb. 1942 Sidney L. Iley Lieut., Royal Navy, H.M.S. Dragonfly, beloved husband of Betty (nee Foulk), Stokesley, Middlesbrough, Yorks.
The details of the sinking of the Tien Kwang and the Kuala are taken from Frank’s recollections to Neumann and van Witsen, Stanley Saddington’s Escape Impossible, Geoffrey Brooke’s Singapore’s Dunkirk, the private papers of John Williams (no relation to Frank or Leonard) held at the Imperial War Museum (17378), and dozens of accounts held at the National Archives, especially “Various Reports on Sinkings of HMS Kuala and Tien Kwang” (CO 980/237). As the Tien Kwang carried far more military personnel than the Kuala, especially RAF servicemen, the majority of accounts pertaining to her sinking are from documents prepared for the RAF; others are in more general files. Also helpful was the remembrance of Brian Napper, a boy at the time of the flight from Singapore, who told his story to the BBC website bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/55/a7697055.shtml.
The story of the massacre of the Australian nurses on Bangka Island is recounted in On Radji Beach, Winning from Downunder, White Coolies, Singapore’s Dunkirk, and multiple news accounts in the Australian press. Good details come from an account at angellpro.com.au/Bullwinkel.htm#Massacre. Also helpful is the Australian War Memorial account of Vivian Bullwinkel’s life at awm.gov.au/exhibitions/fiftyaustralians/5.asp.
The Bangka Strait was nicknamed Bomb Alley due to the huge number of ships destroyed there by the Japanese—some seventy boats of varying sizes and flags were sunk in the area in the forty-eight-hour period from the morning of the thirteenth.
Amid the civilian refugees on the Vyner Brooke were a sprightly four-year-old boy named Mischa Warman and a haughty woman who called herself Dr. Goldberg. Both were Jewish refugees of the war in Europe. Mischa was beloved by the nurses for his eager energy. The Warman family had fled Poland ahead of the Nazi onslaught, traversed the Soviet Union, come down through China to Shanghai, and fled to Singapore roughly one year after Judy and the Grasshopper had traveled the same route. Now they were fleeing war once more, hoping to get to Australia. He survived the sinking, and the war, and afterward was sent to Shanghai, where some relatives had stayed.
Dr. Goldberg, by contrast, was full of attitude, and her strong Berlin accent didn’t win her many friends. Rumors abounded that she had been detained by the British on suspicion of spying in Singapore, but obviously she had been cleared, given her evacuation permit and presence on the ship. Upon jumping into a lifeboat, the pompous Dr. Goldberg remained arrogant as ever, insisting that she was “a mother of three and therefore more important” than anyone else on the raft. A nurse named Veronica Clancy couldn’t stand any more of this attitude and began raining blows upon the astonished doctor. At length they were separated, and an uneasy peace settled in. The boat carrying Dr. Goldberg and her pugilistic enemy thought rescue was at hand when a small launch carrying, astonishingly, two Australian airmen, pulled up and took them aboard. They offloaded at a small jetty on what appeared to be a deserted stretch of Bangka. One airman went ahead for a look, only to come tearing back to the launch. He and his buddy cast off and disappeared into the murk, leaving the nurses, most of them either stark or nearly naked, to be captured by a Japanese patrol almost as nonplussed as the group they had just taken into custody.
Captain Borton was also taken captive, having not gone down with the ship.
The possibility that Vivian Bullwinkel and the other nurses on Radji Beach were sexually assaulted before they were slain is the subject of intense study by historian Barbara Angell in A Woman’s War. Clues in the damage to Vivian’s uniform are part of her argument, as is a Japanese soldier quoted in an Australian War Crimes inquiry by a Captain James G. Godwin. The soldier said the nurses had been “raped incessantly” before they were herded into the water and executed. And later in life, the surviving nurses would obliquely mention a secret never to be revealed. While there is no definitive evidence, this particular horror certainly wouldn’t be surprising. Soldiers sexually assaulting captured women is an abuse of power and a terrifying aspect of war that has been going on since the dawn of conflict.
Geoffrey Brooke passes along the detail that the Japanese officer responsible for the massacre killed himself in Manchuria later in the war in Singapore’s Dunkirk.
Much of what happened on Posic comes from George White, John Devani, and Les Searle’s memories recounted in The Judy Story; Ian Forbes’ (18765) and J. A. C. Robins’ (5153) private papers held at the Imperial War Museum; Singapore’s Dunkirk; and multiple accounts given to the Royal Navy in documents held at the National Archives.
Canine licking behavior stems from pups cueing their parent to regurgitate freshly killed meat, a scientific fact George White likely cared not to know as Judy happily licked his face.
An account of Judy’s water-finding heroics appeared in the September 1975 edition of Look and Learn, a British periodical aimed at young adults. In this article, the story of Judy’s discovery of water on the island is told this way:
Each time the men asked her to search she ran down the beach barking excitedly. Eventually one of the sailors grew so intrigued by her curious behavior that he dug a hole where Judy was scratching in the sand. As the hole deepened it began to fill up with water and more water.
Dogs have a sense of smell that is estimated to be millions of times more sensitive than that of humans. The skin tissue inside the nose of a dog is replete with receptors that identify smell with far greater detail than we are capable of, as we have nowhere near so many receptors. According to experiments, a dog can sniff out a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water, roughly the equivalent of two Olympic-size swimming pools.
Of course, water is odorless, at least to humans, and if Judy could truly “smell water” she would have been overwhelmed by the fragrance at all times, especially given that she had spent most of her life to that point aboard boats (and the Yangtze was a particularly smelly body of water). Indeed, it was probably her long experience and familiarity with the smell of organisms that live in water that allowed her to so readily find it underground, in particular fresh water that clearly smelled different to her than the seawater in which she had just been immersed.
The Spanish Civil War of 1937 was fought in a crucial commercial location, lying astride major trade routes, and both the Nationalists and the Republicans ignored maritime law when it suited them, often capturing internationally flagged vessels and relieving them of their cargo. In response, much of the British Home Fleet and the French Navy took up operations off the Iberian coast. George White probably served on one of the five class B destroyers the Royal Navy sent to the area, though precisely upon which one he delivered an infant isn’t exactly known—unless one of his descendants steps forward and contacts the author to allow his service record to be closely examined.
The doings on Pompong Island are taken mainly from Frank’s recollections to Neumann and van Witsen; Escape Impossible; Singapore’s Dunkirk; John Williams’ private papers held at the Imperial War Museum (17378); and multiple accounts in National Archives documents, in particular “Report of Charles Baker” (NA 199/357) and “Various Reports on Sinkings of HMS Kuala and Tien Kwang” (CO 980/237).
Molly Watts-Carter’s statement on her incredible survival at sea is recounted in the National Archives document “Singapore and Far East Personal Experiences” (WO 106/2550).
William Caithness would make it all the way back to South Africa, managing to avoid the fate of so many others who jumped off his boat at Pompong. After the war, one Royal Navy officer commented, “If ever a man deserved a distinction it was Lieutenant Caithness.… He was responsible for the lives of more than six hundred men, women and children. Despite agonizing wounds and partial paralysis, he directed the rescue of the survivors and the treatment of the wounded. Unfortunately, the custom of the Service in these circumstances is that the Captain remains silent. Deeds and not words.” When victory was at hand in 1945, his esteem in Singapore was remembered. He captained the flagship of the Straits Steamship Company that led the Royal Navy ships back into the recaptured island harbor, and he was accorded the honor of leading the victory parade through the streets of the Lion City.
Other ships to take survivors of the Tien Kwang and the Kuala sinkings were the Plover, a small log-burning launch, the junk Hung Jao, the coastal ship Numbing, and the barge Heather.
Details of the various mad dashes from Singkep to Padang are taken from a legion of materials, including Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; George White’s, John Devani’s, and Les Searle’s accounts in The Judy Story, Singapore’s Dunkirk, and Escape Impossible; Peter Hartley’s Escape to Captivity; the private papers of John Williams (17378) and Ian Forbes (18765) held at the Imperial War Museum; and myriad documents stored at the National Archives, in particular “Evacuation from Singapore Across Sumatra” (WO 141/100), “Far East Anglo Dutch Operations” (HS 1/272 and 1/273), and “Report of Charles Baker” (NA 199/357).
Thorium (atomic symbol Th, atomic number 90) has been eyed by countries, in particular the United States, for decades as a wonder fuel. Thorium atoms don’t split but absorb neutrons when irradiated. A tiny fraction of the material then becomes fissionable (as uranium 233) and can be used for nuclear devices. But it never did work well enough to replace plutonium as the more reliable activator of nuclear chain reactions, a fact that cost the United States untold millions in research and development programs, and continues to hemorrhage waste-containment dollars. Alvin Weinberg, the longtime director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, lost his job in large part because he favored thorium over plutonium. The element remains a holy grail for dreamers and thinkers in the scientific realm; “Thorium-Fueled Automobile Engine Needs Refueling Once a Century” reads a recent, wondrous headline in an oil industry newsletter (industrytap.com/thorium-fueled-automobile-engine-needs-refueling-once-a-century/15649).
The Battle of the Java Sea was the largest naval engagement since the Battle of Jutland in 1916, but unlike that stalemate between British and German navies, the combat of late February 1942 was one-sided. Japanese forces sank two cruisers and three destroyers, including Stronghold with Hoffman and Forbes aboard, and killed twenty-three hundred sailors. Japan suffered only light damage to a single vessel. The victory paved the way for all of the Dutch East Indies to fall rapidly into the expanding Empire of the Rising Sun.
George White tells of his miraculous journey across the Indian Ocean to safety in an appendix in The Judy Story, as well as in an interview in the Portsmouth Evening News of July 27, 1945, entitled “Portsmouth Petty Officer’s Escape from Singapore.”
Unbeknownst to White, he had been listed as missing in the Portsmouth-area press since the sinking of the Grasshopper. Shortly after he arrived in India he managed to get word to his wife of three years and his parents that he was alive and well, a fact that also appeared in the local newspapers.
Captain William Bligh was set adrift by the HMS Bounty mutineers on April 28, 1879. Bligh navigated the twenty-three-foot launch with nothing but a quadrant (an instrument that measures angles) and a pocket watch, with no charts or a compass, for an incredible 3,618 nautical miles. Forty-seven days after being cut loose, Bligh piloted the boat into the harbor at Timor in the Dutch East Indies, the island on the western edge of the archipelago, closer to Australia than Sumatra or Singapore. Bligh returned to Britain and reported the mutiny to his superiors, just over two years after he set sail from England on the Bounty.
Details of Judy’s trek across the Sumatran interior come from Les Searle and John Devani in The Judy Story and by Taff Long’s recollections in Singapore’s Dunkirk.
Incredibly, the multiple rescues in the waters around Sumatra weren’t the end of Bill Reynolds’ contributions to the war effort. In the fall of 1943, he helped conceive and lead an attack on Japanese warships docked in Keppel Harbor called Operation Jaywick. The invaluable Krait, perfectly camouflaged as a Japanese fishing vessel (which it was), slipped near the harbor and put ashore several commandos, who used canoes to row to the warships and attach limpet mines to their hulls. Seven ships were sunk or seriously damaged, and all the raiders got away scot-free. Unfortunately, the Japanese assumed the mission had to have been carried out by local saboteurs, and began a wave of reprisals on the Chinese and Malay inhabitants of Singapore, as well as Allied POWs held nearby. The resulting deaths and torture took place on October 10, 1943, a date that ensured it would become known as the Double Tenth Incident.
The details of the chaos at Emmahaven Harbor in Padang and the wait for Japanese capture are sourced by Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; Escape Impossible; Singapore’s Dunkirk; Escape to Captivity; John Williams’ private papers held at the Imperial War Museum (17378); and multiple documents at the National Archives, in particular “Personal Statement RAF F/O R. Knowles” (RAF AIR 20/5577), “Evacuation from Singapore Across Sumatra” (WO 141/100), “Far East Anglo Dutch Operations” (HS 1/272 and 1/273), “Various Reports on Sinkings of HMS Grasshopper and Kung Wo” (ADM 199/622A), “Singapore and Far East Personal Experiences” (WO 106/2550), “HMS Grasshopper Packet” (WO 361/404), and “Various Reports on Sinkings of HMS Kuala and Tien Kwang” (CO 980/237).
The account of the ship captured by the Dutch and returned to Padang comes from John Purvis, who over a ten-year period in the 1950s recorded his wartime experiences on a tape recorder, which his secretary typed up. It was recovered in 2011 by Purvis’ son Malcolm and subsequently passed along to Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Peter Winstanley, who maintains the website pows-of-japan.net, which is where the author saw it.
Many of the pertinent details about Walter Gibson’s incredible story of survival after the sinking of the SS Rooseboom are from his memoir, The Boat. Others come from the National Archives document “Far East Anglo Dutch Operations” (HS 1/272 and 1/273) and from Singapore’s Dunkirk.
Geoffrey Brooke was among the last men ordered to leave Padang by Colonel Warren. “Personally, I think you have a sporting chance,” Warren said before the men left on the fishing ketch, straight into the teeth of the monsoon season and Sumatra’s notoriously tricky-to-sail west coast. For weeks they sailed in much the same direction as George White would shortly afterward, and were plagued with difficulties. A waterspout tossed their boat; two “immense blue-nosed whales” nearly rammed them, missing the vessel by a few feet; and they were strafed by Japanese airplanes. The sails tore, batteries died, passengers fell ill. Finally, after nearly a month and 1,690 miles of sailing, the helmsman called out with serious understatement, “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed if you come up here and see what I see.” It was land, Ceylon, and salvation.
Another ship was sent from Ceylon to pick up the remainder of those stranded in Padang, the steamship SS Chilka. But on March 11, 1942, about 340 miles away from Emmahaven, a Japanese submarine surfaced and sank the Chilka with shell fire from her deck guns. Seven men were killed; around a dozen more, including the wounded ship’s captain, Walker Bird, survived five weeks at sea before being rescued by a Greek freighter.
John Williams noted the earthquake that hit Padang before the Japanese arrival in his private papers (17378), held at the Imperial War Museum.
Key sources for this chapter include Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories collected in The Judy Story; Escape Impossible; Escape to Captivity; the private papers of A. B. Simmonds (21578), J. A. C. Robins (5153), J. E. R. Persons (18760), and John Williams (17378) held at the Imperial War Museum; and the oral history by John Purvis reprinted at the website pows-of-japan.net.
While the Germans treated escape attempts by POWs quite harshly, in general they were kept in somewhat humane conditions in the stalags. Malnutrition was the general complaint, but there was relatively little torture or beatings. Of course matters were far different in other camps operated by the Nazis.
Main sources for this chapter include Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Escape to Captivity; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; the private papers of A. B. Simmonds (21578), J. A. C. Robins (5153), J. E. R. Persons (18760), F. G. Freeman (14046), W. R. Smith (8443), and John Williams (17378), and an oral history recorded by John Hedley, all held at the Imperial War Museum; Captain Edward Porter’s biography as it appears at roll-of-honour.org.uk/p/html/porter-edward.htm; John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net; and the National Archives document “Evacuation from Singapore Across Sumatra” (WO 141/100).
Most of the details concerning the temple building project at Gloegoer come from Hartley’s Escape to Captivity.
What Les Searle unscientifically called a radar system wasn’t far off, in that Judy was able to “see” things from far away, and in ways we humans not only cannot match but can scarcely fathom. Her sensitive nose could sniff out subtle changes in emanations from people; as the bromide goes, dogs can indeed “smell fear,” along with pressure, anger, depression, and joy.
The item about the depressing sameness of many diary entries from the POWs comes from the author’s conversations with Lizzie Oliver, the British historian who carefully studied written records of the Sumatran prisoners.
The idea that Judy could understand what Frank was thinking isn’t especially surprising, given the subtlety and complexity of social interactions between man and dogs. The canine species evolved from its wild lupine state specifically because it was able to persuade the human who had the regular food supply that dogs were worth keeping around and even feeding. That was a special and unique display of cross-species communication, and as any dog lover will tell you, it is their ability to understand, and act upon, our actions and desires that separates them from other domesticated animals.
The main sources for this chapter are Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; Escape to Captivity; the private papers of A. B. Simmonds (21578), J. E. R. Persons (18760), F. G. Freeman (14046), W. R. Smith (8443), and John Williams (17378), and an oral history recorded by John Hedley, all held at the Imperial War Museum.
Tick’s sad tale was recounted by Frank to Neumann and van Witsen.
With the survival of five puppies in the Immaculate Conception at Gloegoer, Judy was now the mother of fifteen offspring.
Judy’s pregnancy was also unusual in that dogs who imprint early in life onto adults, rather than other dogs, as the kennel-escaping pup had done in Shanghai, are often ill-equipped to socialize and breed properly. Back on the Gnat, Judy had displayed this wasn’t an issue, at least once. But it is rare for such dogs to successfully mate multiple times, especially when factoring in the hunger and exhaustion she suffered in the prison camp. Throughout her life, save the episode with Paul, her French suitor, Judy seldom had the opportunity to “practice” social behavior with other canines. So the fact that she found a way to reproduce in the POW camp was even more exceptional.
Lizzie Oliver showed me the sketches her grandfather, Stanley Russell, drew in his diary but, citing privacy concerns, preferred they, along with any quotations from the diary, not be reproduced in this book. The sketches that appear in the photo insert are an exception.
Hirateru Banno’s story is informed by details from Robin Rowland, a scholar of the Japanese prison camps. His book A River Kwai Story and paper “Sugamo and the River Kwai: The American Occupation of Japan and Memories of the Asia-Pacific War,” presented at Princeton University on May 9, 2003, were invaluable, especially concerning Banno’s command of F Force and subsequent war crimes trial. Conversations with Robin further assisted the author in filling in this fascinating officer’s background. More on Banno comes from The Judy Story; Frank’s letter to Neumann and van Witsen; Escape to Captivity; an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of September 24, 1945; a file on Banno held in the U.S. National Archives, “Banno, Hirateru,” 8th Army Sugamo Released Prisoner 201 Files, RG 338, Folder 20, Box 4, 290/66/21/1; and the UK National Archives document “Hirateru Banno and Six Others” (CO 235/1034).
The plane crash that prematurely ended Cyril Wild’s remarkable life is shrouded in controversy. Some historians speculate his plane was sabotaged, either by sympathizers to the Japanese on trial (reams of records and documents pertinent to the cases were destroyed in the crash) or perhaps even by Americans, who didn’t want the earnest Wild to secure lighter sentences for the Japanese they wished to see given death for their crimes. Such theorizing is commonplace with tragic and random deaths, and there is no evidence that points to anything other than an accident.
Main sources for this chapter include Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Escape to Captivity; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; and John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net.
Captain Nishi appears as “Nissi” in The Judy Story, but most other sources use Nishi. There is precious little about this officer in the historical record, so his name isn’t known for sure, but Nishi is a common Japanese surname, while Nissi is rare, so it seems more likely the former is correct. Probably the most well-known Nishi is Colonel Takeichi Nishi, who won an Olympic gold medal for Japan at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles in the equestrian competition. He was killed during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.
The death of the Van Waerwijck and the scenes at sea are recounted by Frank in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen, by Les Searle and John Devani in The Judy Story, Peter Hartley in Escape to Captivity, Edward Gibson in The Boat, John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net, Captain Edward Porter’s biography as it appears at roll-of-honour.org.uk/p/html/porter-edward.htm, and Captain J. G. Gordon’s testimony in a document “Statement by Capt. J. G. Gordon” (WO 361/1592), held at the National Archives. The accounts of multiple Dutch survivors are recounted in The Sumatra Railroad, whose author, Henk Hovinga, goes into great detail about the tragic voyage.
Willem Wanrooy’s Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (written under the pen name Van Waterford) is not only a key source for information about the hell ships, but also a testimony to survival, as Wanrooy wrote the book several years after surviving the sinking of a hell ship, the Junyō Maru, off Sumatra.
By some estimates, the Japanese used more than two hundred hell ships to transport POWs during the war, though a precise number is impossible to figure. Besides the Van Waerwijck and the Junyō Maru (see chapter 23), at least eight were sunk by Allied forces:
Arisan Maru—carried 1,781 POWs, mainly Americans; sunk by submarine USS Snook; only nine people survived.
Asama Maru—sunk by submarine USS Atule in South China Sea.
Chichibu Maru—sunk by submarine USS Gudgeon while carrying approximately 2,500 Japanese troops and civilians; 465 were rescued from the wreckage.
Chuyo—sunk by submarine USS Sailfish while carrying 1,250 POWs, many of them Americans. All perished.
Oryoku Maru—carried 1,620 American POWs along with 1,900 Japanese; sunk by American bombers from the carrier USS Hornet. Two hundred men died at the scene, and the rest were brought to the Philippines, where hundreds more died of mistreatment and neglect. Several more were reportedly beheaded and thrown in a mass grave.
Enoura Maru—carried the survivors of the Oryoku Maru bombing. Bombed in harbor at Taiwan; 350 more POWs died in the attack.
Hofuku Maru—carried 1,289 POWs, mostly British and Dutch. Sunk by carrier-based planes off of Corregidor; all but 242 killed.
Awa Maru—Carried 2,004 passengers, some of them POWs, though on this trip the number is unknown and thought to be relatively few. She was rumored, however, to be carrying billions in gold, diamonds, plutonium, and other precious metals. She was sunk by USS Queenfish on April 1, 1945, in the Taiwan Strait—only a single survivor was pulled from the water, Kantora Shimoda, who also had survived two other sinkings at sea, making him a Japanese counterpart to Ian Forbes. In 1980, the Chinese underwent a massive salvage operation to try to recover the supposed fortune that went down with the Awa Maru, but found nothing. A later investigation by the U.S. National Security Agency determined no treasure had been loaded aboard the ship, but a large cargo of gold and diamonds left by road just before the Awa Maru departed Singapore, bound for Japan.
The voyage of the submarine HMS Truculent and her fateful encounter with Frank and Judy’s transport vessel is detailed at the website uboat.net:8080/allies/warships/ship/3514.html and in her daily logs for those critical days, accessed in documents at the National Archives, “HMS Truculent Patrol Report, 12th June to 5th July, 1944” (ADM 199/1868 Pt. 1).
HMS Titania was a submarine tender between the wars, operating mostly out of Hong Kong.
Information about the tragedy of the HMS Nova Scotia can be found at wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?16429.
The amazing reappearance of Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, the hero of Pompong Island, to save yet another life in the wreckage of the Van Waerwijck is recounted by his close friend Geoffrey Brooke in Singapore’s Dunkirk.
The main sources for material about the River Valley Road prison camp are Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; Escape to Captivity; George Duffy’s Ambushed Under the Southern Cross; John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net; and Captain Edward Porter’s biography as it appears at roll-of-honour.org.uk/p/html/porter-edward.htm.
The ship that sank George Duffy’s Merchant Marine vessel American Leader was a “raider,” a German ship called the Michel that flew a false flag. The Michel appeared to be a neutral cargo vessel until moments before an attack, when the German crew (all trained members of the Kriegsmarine) would hurriedly drop the false flag, raise the Nazi swastika, and capture or sink the enemy.
The Allied version of these decoys were called Q-ships. These were cargo ships that pantomimed un-navylike panic on deck in order to lure German U-boats into surfacing and commencing an attack. The Q-ships would then turn their camouflaged weapons upon the subs. But they were essentially defensive, whereas the German raiders actively sought prey.
Michel was commanded by a notorious figure, Hellmuth von Ruckteschell. A highly decorated seaman during World War I, the German was one of the raider fleet’s most successful captains in terms of gross tonnage sunk. But he was alleged to have repeatedly fired upon ships that had already surrendered, and in the wake of the Axis defeat von Ruckteschell was brought before a war crimes court. He was found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison; he died in jail in 1948.
Ironically enough, Duffy’s weeks aboard von Ruckteschell’s ship would lead to lifelong postwar friendships with some of the enemy crewmen.
After internment on the Michel, Duffy was moved to Java, where he was held at camps in Tandjong Priok, the so-called Bicycle Camp, and Soni before being transferred to Singapore aboard the hell ship Chukka Maru, which made it safely to port, unlike so many of her counterparts.
Details about the steamship that ferried Frank and Judy back to Sumatra from Singapore are from The Sumatra Railroad.
The soldier protest song “Bless ’Em All” is actually a cleaned-up version—the original title is “Fuck ’Em All,” which neatly captures the average grunt’s viewpoint about war, the enemy, and his superiors since the dawn of conflict. The song began its life among RAF personnel serving on the Indian North West Frontier in the 1920s. Singers such as Gracie Fields and others released it commercially, using the bowdlerized title, subtly changing its meaning to imply patriotism. But British and Commonwealth soldiers sang the original version throughout World War II, using blue lyrics:
Oh they say there’s a troopship just leaving Bombay
Bound for old Blighty’s shore
Heavily laden with time-expired men
Bound for the land they adore
There’s many a twat just finishing his time
There’s many a cunt signing on
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean
So cheer up my lads fuck ’em all!
Fuck ’em all!
Fuck ’em all!
The long and the short and the tall
Fuck all the Sergeants and WO ones
Fuck all the corporals and their bastard sons
For we’re saying good-bye to them all
As up the CO’s arse they crawl
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean
So cheer up my lads fuck ’em all!
American soldiers had their own versions, including one that went:
They called for the army to come to Tulagi
But Douglas MacArthur said no
They said there’s a reason
It isn’t the season
Besides there’s no USO
Fuck ’em all!
Fuck ’em all!
The long the short and the tall
Fuck all the Pelicans and Dogfaces too
Fuck all the generals and above all fuck you!
So we’re saying good-bye to them all
As back to our foxholes we crawl
There will be no promotion on MacArthur’s blue ocean
So cheer up Gyrenes fuck ’em all!”
The main sources for details of Pakan Baroe are Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s, Tom Scott’s, and John Devani’s memories in The Judy Story; Escape to Captivity; Ambushed Under the Southern Cross; The Sumatra Railroad; the private papers of J. F. Fitzgerald (8209), Ken Robson (11338), W. R. Smith (8443), J. D. Pentney (20664), and F. G. Freeman (14046), and John Hedley’s oral history (23219), all held at the Imperial War Museum; National Archives documents including “Recommendations for POW Awards” (RAF AIR 2/3775) and “POW Information Cards” (WO 345); the author’s interview with Rouse Voisey; Leonard Williams’ obituary in the Times of London on January 22, 2007; Harry Badger’s oral history, as captured by his son Rick Badger and published on the website pows-of-japan.net/articles/63.htm; and John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net.
Preparations for the use of POWs and slave labor to build the Death Railway at Pakan Baroe are described in War, Nationalism, and Peasants, as well as in numerous contemporary accounts, mostly in the Australian press.
After the war, Rolex built a worldwide advertising campaign around Edward Porter’s story to show how it lent testimony to the power of the Rolex trademark.
Geographic and camp details are mostly taken from The Sumatra Railroad, as is information about the forgotten holocaust of the Indonesian romushas used as slave labor by the Japanese.
Wing Commander Patrick Davis kept something of a low profile at Pakan Baroe, and afterward as well. He never left a service memoir or anything other than his turgid reports that chronicle the organizational life at the railway, which are kept at the Hague Historical Museum in the Netherlands. This is unfortunate, as he seemed to have been a brave and competent officer. Those who worked with him in the camp command structure praised him for his ability to negotiate with the Japanese. But many others, in particular those out on the railway, found him “haughty,” in Henk Hovinga’s words. This likely stems from the fact that Davis, quite naturally, tended to favor the Brits over the Dutch when issues between POWs of the two nationalities arose.
The report Davis filed to South East Asia Command is held at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, document IC 072256.
The chief Dutch officer at Pakan Baroe was Lieutenant Colonel W. C. M. Slabbekoorn. According to Hovinga, he was sickly, “an old, conservative gentleman, totally worn out and showing early signs of dementia. He even had to be bathed by his aide Pinchetti, who was so badly disfigured during an air raid on Surabaya in 1942 that he even scared the Japs.” Soon enough, a much younger man, Lieutenant Henk Vennik, took over as the Dutch top kick. Other Dutch officers outranked Vennik, but the lieutenant’s natural command authority cowed all save Captain De Vries, who also plagued George Duffy. One day, Vennik told the tetchy De Vries, “If you know it all so damn much, here is my chair. Take my seat and do the work. If you do not want it, then keep your mouth shut and find yourself a place in the barracks.” De Vries meekly complied.
Each POW was required to detail his attempts at sabotage, along with his escape attempts, upon release on his POW Information Card, a remnant from the European POW experience, where such resistance was expected. Many of the Sumatran POWs left this part blank (or wrote “nil,” like J. G. Gordon did), as there was little effective resistance possible. Frank was an exception in this case. The sabotage attempt by the Australian POW Slinger is detailed in The Judy Story.
In some of the more outlying camps at Pakan Baroe, the strict adherence to Tokyo time was relaxed.
Judy’s ability to navigate the jungle was due in part to her keen vision. Dogs see the color green (and blue) exceptionally well. Red presents far more of a problem—dogs don’t see that color well at all.
For the curious epicurean, dog meat is very lean and chewy, somewhat similar to goat.
The original Camp Three drowned when the Kampar Kanan River overflowed. The replacement, built on higher ground, was populated on November 8, 1944.
The main sources for this chapter were Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Tom Scott’s and Les Searle’s memories in The Judy Story; The Sumatra Railroad; Escape to Captivity; Ambushed Under the Southern Cross; the private papers of J. F. Fitzgerald (8209), Ken Robson (11338), W. R. Smith (8443), and J. D. Pentney, (20664) and John Hedley’s oral history (23219), all held at the Imperial War Museum; and the author’s interview with Rouse Voisey.
There were roughly three thousand Koreans working as guards in POW camps across the Pacific theater. Hovinga and Smith are the sources for the repository of nicknames the men had for the guards.
Details of the Japanese conscription and mistreatment of Koreans is taken from several sources beyond those listed above, including Gavan Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese and Blood Brothers by Eugene Jacobs. An example of the Koreans’ sabotage from within was the planned mutiny of the 30th Korean Division against the Japanese in 1944, details of which can be found in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus online at japanfocus.org/-Kiriyama-Keiichi/3151.
One sidebar to the Korean conscription into the war was the Japanese goal of reducing ethnic Koreans. A school of thought in Japan was that the deaths of so many ethnic Japanese would open the door for the Koreans “to pose a serious threat in the future,” especially given “their formidable power to reproduce,” according to An Outline of the History of the Army System by Masao Yamazaki.
Information about the Koreans continuing the odious policy of ianfu—comfort women—even after World War II has been highlighted in recent years by the scholarship of Korean sociologist Kim Kwi-ok, who closely studied the South Korean military official record, Hubang Chonsa (War History on the Home Front), as well as the memoirs of many retired soldiers and officers for a paper entitled The Korean War and Women: With a Focus on Military Comfort Women and Military Comfort Stations, presented in Japan in 2002. According to Kim, the Korean military used specially designated units of comfort women, along with mobile units and local prostitutes.
Jan Eggink remembered the poignancy of the playing of “Silent Night, Holy Night” on Christmas 1944 in the documentary Eindstation Pakan Baroe 1943–1945, which aired in Holland in 1997. The poem he dedicated to his wife is reprinted in The Sumatra Railroad.
At one point, a touring Japanese military band arrived at Pakan Baroe. All were invited to witness them perform in a nearby village. This invitation was universally declined, so some men were ordered to go, including Peter Hartley. After a typical backbreaking day of work, the concertgoers crossed a river by ferry and trekked a long way to the village. A large bamboo shelter had been erected for the musicians, but the men sat on the ground. Japanese officers surrounded them on chairs and benches.
The band had just picked up their instruments when an ominous crash of thunder rolled over the village. The band went on, playing “strange Jap compositions which were supposed to tell the story of the [Japanese] Air Force dropping bombs on New York,” Hartley would write in Escape to Captivity. Then the storm broke with a fury. Huge lightning bolts struck all around, but the men were ordered to remain in place until the concert finished. The grass where they sat quickly became a pond as the monsoon came down, and the music could barely be heard over the downpour.
At last, with everyone drenched and shivering, the festivities came to an end. The POWs slogged back through a sea of mud. When they reached the river, it was churning even faster than before, and the ferryman had disappeared. With no other choice, the men risked their lives and piled into the boat, managing to get across to the other side without flipping. It was past midnight when the prisoners returned to Camp Five, soaked, muddy, and freezing. They were greeted by peals of laughter from the other POWs who had stayed behind.
Elsewhere in Sumatra the importance of music among POWs was underscored by the women and children held at the prison camp at Palembang, including Helen Colijn. Six hundred prisoners were crowded into the barracks there; some two hundred would die of starvation and disease before liberation. To fend off misery and hopelessness, these POWs turned to music. They formed a large choir, arranging the vocals of famous works from memory. They had no instruments, so they simulated the sounds of the various sections with their voices. “It seemed a miracle that among the bedbugs, the cockroaches, and the rats, among the smells of the latrines, among the fever, the boils and the hunger pangs, women’s voices could recreate the surging glorious music of Debussy, Beethoven, and Chopin,” Colijn wrote in her memoir of the camp, Song of Survival. When the Japanese discovered the secret rehearsals, they were furious, but punishment soon gave way to collaboration, and by war’s end some of the guards sat in with the choir to perform. Colijn’s memoir was turned into a 1997 movie, Paradise Road, starring Glenn Close.
The most famous example of musicality among POWs is undoubtedly the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) by Frenchman Olivier Messiaen. Imprisoned by the Germans at Stalag VIII-A, Messiaen, a composer and organist before the war, found among other POWs a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote a quartet of movements for the group to play behind the barbed wire, and they practiced under trying conditions and frigid weather. Performed originally for an audience of POWs and prison guards, the quartet has become an acknowledged masterpiece of modern European classical music.
The main sources for this chapter were Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Tom Scott’s and Les Searle’s memories in The Judy Story; The Sumatra Railroad; Escape to Captivity; Ambushed Under the Southern Cross; the private papers of J. F. Fitzgerald (8209), Ken Robson (11338), W. R. Smith (8443), and J. D. Pentney, (20664) and John Hedley’s oral history (23219), all held at the Imperial War Museum; the author’s interview with Rouse Voisey; and John Purvis’ history as reprinted at pows-of-japan.net.
Frank and Judy’s movements up the railway are approximates in terms of timing—men were forever being shuttled between camps for various reasons. In the main, man and dog stayed at Camp Five until it was closed and the majority of men were moved to Camp Six, then Camp Eight. Joe Fitzgerald was among a group of men who detoured to Camp Seven first, there to help complete a bridge across the Kampar Kiri River. Work began in mid-December, on the cusp of the monsoon season. By Good Friday, heavy rains had washed the bridge away. Frank never talks about working on the ill-fated bridge built there, so presumably he wasn’t in the subsection of men sent to Camp Seven.
Exact locations of the Pakan Baroe camps are finely detailed by Hovinga in The Sumatra Railroad.
The Junyō Maru was sent to the bottom of the ocean on September 18, 1944, by the submarine HMS Tradewind, skippered by Lieutenant Commander Stephen Maydon. Junyō Maru carried some 6,500 POWs, including Americans, Brits, Dutch, and Aussies, plus a multitude of romushas. But Maydon was unaware of her human cargo, and slammed two torpedoes into the steamer. At least 5,620 people went down in the disaster. Maydon didn’t find out about the human cost of his action until over two decades had passed, when he had retired from the navy and become a member of the British Parliament. The discovery that he was responsible for the deaths of so many innocents on his side of the war would haunt him until he died in 1971.
Rouse Voisey was on the Junyō Maru when it was sent to the bottom: “I climbed up a rope ladder and jumped overboard,” he recalled to me of that horrible day.
I spent hours upon hours in the water, from Monday evening until Wednesday morning. I held on to debris, along with two Dutchmen. At some point both of them slipped away and disappeared under the water, and I was left alone. It all felt like a dream in a way. I hallucinated much of the time. At last a Japanese sub chaser drifted by and dropped a rope ladder over the side. They didn’t help you up, but if you could hang on they hauled you up and over like a net of fish. They gave me water and a sea biscuit. One Dutch survivor went berserk, so the Japanese simply threw him over the side to his doom. That was sobering, and made you behave yourself.
Rouse wound up at Pakan Baroe shortly afterward. He survived it all and still lives, at age ninety-four, on his own in Norwich, England. He is quite sharp mentally, as evidenced by his reaction when I mixed up a name or a date during our conversation in the fall of 2014. “Keep up, Bob!” he reprimanded me, quite correctly indeed.
Of the 114 men who died at Pakan Baroe in March 1945, 54 of them had survived the sinking of either the Van Waerwijck or the Junyō Maru.
The only American of the twelve at Pakan Baroe who told his story was George Duffy in his memoir.
The chief medical officer among the British was RAF Wing Commander C. W. Coffey. At some point during his headlong plunge into the miasma of disease and suffering at Camp Two he contracted beriberi. According to the citation later awarding Coffey the Order of the British Empire, Coffey “spent five months in the hospital, paralyzed below the waist. Immediately he was able to move, he volunteered to take over the daily British Sick Parade, which was attended by approximately 200 men. At all times Wing Commander Coffey showed a complete disregard of his illness and, through his untiring efforts and hard work, in spite of the extreme shortage of medical supplies, he did all in his power to alleviate the pain and suffering of the sick. His example in this connection had an excellent effect on the morale of the prisoners.”
Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, the man who dove into the unholy filth of the latrine to try to save the drowning Dutchman, among other wartime exploits, was also a close friend of John Purvis while at Pakan Baroe. His full name was actually John Sjovald Hoseason Cunyngham-Brown. He went on to become a government figure in the beautiful Malaysian city of Penang for years after the war. Sadly, SCB never wrote a memoir detailing his incredible story, but did pen a pair of books in the early 1970s, The Traders—A Story of Britain’s South-East Asian Commercial Adventure, and a novel, Crowded Hour.
The account of a Japanese officer ordering Judy’s death while Frank was sick comes from the December 1945 issue of Tail-Wagger magazine. The article, “Judy (Ex-POW Sumatra) Is Now in England,” goes on to declare that the Japanese officer “was the same as at Medan, who had forbidden the dog to go aboard” the Van Waerwijck, i.e., Captain Nishi. There is no evidence that Nishi was ever at Pakan Baroe, and the only Japanese officers in the camp with that high a rank are well documented. So while such an order is likely to have been given, there is reason to be skeptical as well. One presumes the fact-checking at Tail-Wagger magazine didn’t reach the standards of, say, the New Yorker.
Frank’s thoughts of killing himself and/or Judy come from his letter to Neumann and van Witsen. Interestingly, according to Lizzie Oliver, the Pakan Baroe historian, such contemplation wasn’t pervasive among the prisoners, many of whom essentially figured they were already dead, so why bother expending the energy to make it official? But Judy’s presence complicated matters for Frank.
The main sources for this chapter were Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; Les Searle’s and Tom Scott’s memories in The Judy Story; Escape to Captivity; Ambushed Under the Southern Cross; Harry Badger’s oral history, as captured by his son Rick Badger and published on the website pows-of-japan.net/articles/63.htm; the private papers of J. D. Pentney (20664), Ken Robson (11338), J. E. R. Person (18760), and W. R. Smith (8443) held at the Imperial War Museum; and documents held at the National Archives, including “Royal Air Force Operations Record Book” (RAF AIR 29/153), “Operations Birdcage and Mastiff Sortie Reports” (RAF AIR 23/2664–2667, 2669–2670, 4800), “RAPWI Sitreps” (RAF AIR 23/2669), “Operations Record Book Appendices Sept–Oct 1945” (RAF AIR 24/938), “Recommendations for POW Awards” (RAF AIR 2/3775), “Evaders and Prisoners of War” (RAF AIR 49/385), “Movement and Evacuation of P.O.W.” (WO 203/3800), and “Secret Supplement to Report to Combined Chiefs of Staff by Rear Admiral Mountbatten of Burma, 1943–46” (CAB 106/77).
George Duffy wrote movingly about his jealousy of those who remained free men in his diary/memoir Ambushed Under the Southern Cross. He also wrote about the poor Brit who passed away in front of Bernard Hickey, with liberation at hand, and the story of his not finding out he was free until close to a week after the other POWs.
Raymond Smith actually didn’t speak much Japanese, but the little he did understand put him head and shoulders above most of the POWs, thus Wing Commander Davis placed him in the key role of translator at Camp Three. At first, Smith told Davis he didn’t want the job. “I have thought it over, and I’m not going,” he told his superior officer. Davis replied, “I have thought it over too, and you are going.”
The exact number of deaths at Pakan Baroe in the final months is difficult to discern with precision. W. R. Smith, in his private papers, said thirty men died between liberation and evacuation. Other estimates run up to one hundred, which seems a bit high. The official War Ministry report says that “249 died of illness and malnutrition during the last three months,” though it isn’t known if that counts the men who died once rescuers arrived on the scene.
The guards had good reason to fear retribution, but as it happened, so did the Dutch. Years and years of colonial resentments had built up among the people of Sumatra, and while liberties were seldom taken while the Japanese held the island, its liberation ironically freed locals to take out their frustrations on their once and (hopefully not) future masters. In an internment camp in Medan, a howling mob stormed the fences and murdered twenty people, including women and children, believing them to be Dutch. In fact, they were Swiss.
Major Gideon François Jacobs came to Pakan Baroe on a near-solo commando mission called Force 136. There were only four other men with him: two Aussies, a Dutchman, and a Javanese originally from China. While sussing out the entirety and hideousness of the POW situation in Sumatra, they discovered a POW camp at Belalau rubber plantation, where sixty women, including two dozen Australian nurses, most notably Vivian Bullwinkel, were being held in secret. It was Bullwinkel herself who saw the two Aussies, identified only as Sergeant Bates and Sergeant Gillam, approach the camp. She yelled out, “The Australians are here!” The Japanese had taken the nurses from the camp at Palembang, where they had been held for most of the war, to the secret site at the rubber plantation in order to improve their physical condition before handing them over to the Allies. Gillam was so outraged at the condition of the nurses that he lined up all the Japanese guards in sight along a fence and threatened to shoot them all before he was talked out of it by Jacobs.
Airdrop memories come from Frank’s recollections as well as the private papers of J. D. Pentney, Ken Robson, W. R. Smith, and Harry Badger.
The press release announcing Operations Mastiff and Birdcage called the joint operation the “greatest mercy mission of the war.”
The leaflets dropped over the POW camps in Southeast Asia—more than thirty-three million of them in all—read as follows:
TO ALL ALLIED PRISONERS OF WAR THE JAPANESE FORCES HAVE SURRENDERED UNCONDITIONALLY AND THE WAR IS OVER.
We will get supplies to you as soon as is humanly possible and will make arrangements to get you out but, owing to the distances involved, it may take some time before we can achieve this.
YOU will help us and yourselves if you act as follows—
1. Stay in your camps until you get further orders from us.
2. Start preparing nominal rolls of personnel, giving fullest particulars.
3. List your most urgent necessities.
4. If you have been starved or underfed for long periods DO NOT eat large quantities of solid food, fruit or vegetables at first. It is dangerous for you to do so. Small quantities at frequent intervals are much safer and will strengthen you far more quickly. For those who are really ill or very weak, fluids such as broth and soup, making use of the water in which rice and other foods have been boiled, are much the best. Gifts of food from the local population should be avoided. We want to get you back home quickly, safe and sound, and do not want to risk your chances from diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera at this late stage.
5. Local authorities and/or Allied officers will take charge of your affairs in a very short order. Be guided by their advice.
Total stores dropped on Pakan Baroe during Operation Mastiff, according to the official Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees history, were 46,850 pounds of food, 4,820 pounds of clothing, and 1,350 pounds of medical supplies.
One airplane flying a mission for Operation Mastiff crashed, with all aboard killed, on September 1, 1945.
Many of the POWs were “distressed about ill-timed publication of Sumatra atrocities” by the press upon their evacuation to Singapore, according to an official Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees report. “PWs anxious consideration of their relatives,” it read. This tied in to the later reticence to discuss their experiences once home.
Details of the Allied effort to treat and evacuate the POWs in Sumatra are taken from the official Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees history written for the Ministry of War, as well as daily situation reports and official documents.
Lady Mountbatten’s visit was recalled by Frank, Badger, Robson, Voisey, Persons, Pentney, and Duffy, as well as in the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees official history and reports from the lady herself. Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown’s embarrassing story of greeting the lady’s plane in the buff is recounted in Forgotten Wars.
Smith, in his private papers, writes about the recovered Imperial Japanese Army documents that proved the POWs were to be exterminated if all was lost, but never specifies his evidence.
Athole Stewart documented the horror of the POW survivors coming to Singapore in the Melbourne Argus of September 17, 1945. G. E. W. Harriott’s articles ran in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 17 and September 18, 1945.
A monument to the men killed at Pakan Baroe was erected in 2001 in the National Memorial Arboretum at Staffordshire, near Lichfield.
Information about the sailing of the HMS Antenor comes from the recollections of Frank in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen; the author’s interview with Roise Voisey; and the oral history of John Purvis, along with records of the ship’s voyage kept at the National Archives (BT 26/1212/20).
Information about Hackbridge Kennels comes from Tail-Wagger magazine, the Illustrated London News, and correspondence with Bernardine Fiddimore, the daughter of Hackbridge’s former superintendent. Hackbridge closed in 1970.
The British Isles maintained its six-month quarantine policy for incoming animals until 2011. Animals landing on British soil from most countries now only require proof of a negative blood test for rabies before entry. Dogs from certain countries, including South Africa, India, and Brazil, still must be quarantined, though for only three months, not six.
The complicated pre-decimal pound/shilling/pence monetary system (or £sd) was used in much of the British Empire until the 1960s and early 1970s. Nigeria became the last country to abandon it in 1973. There were twelve pence to a shilling, and twenty shillings (240 pence) to a pound. The United States got rid of the system upon declaring independence in 1776.
The ceremony upon Judy’s release from Hackbridge Kennels was well covered by the press, in particular the London Daily Mirror and Tail-Wagger magazine.
Frank himself relays little about the death of his older brother, David, on D-day. The simple fact it occurred is mentioned by his family on Frank’s memorial website, and confirmed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website (cwgc.org/find-war-dead.aspx).
Information about the RAF refresher centers and Personnel Reception Centre 106 at Cosford is from RAF documents held at the National Archives, including “Repatriation of R.A.F. Ex-Prisoners of War from the Far East” (RAF AIR 49/386), “P.O.W. Resettlement and Refresher Course” (RAF AIR 49/388), “Report on the Recovery of Allied P/W and Internees After the Collapse of Japan, 1945” (RAF AIR 23/1980), “RAF Station Cosford 1940 Jan–1945 Dec” (RAF AIR 28/173), and “Personnel Reception Centres Cosford 106” (RAF AIR 29/1102), as well as the author’s interview with Rouse Voisey.
Fred Freeman’s account of postwar medical difficulties is from his private papers (14046) held at the Imperial War Museum.
The Portsmouth City Archives hold exceptionally detailed bombing maps, showing exactly where and when Nazi bombs landed on the city, and the damage caused. The Portsmouth and Sunderland newspapers put together a book, Smitten City, encompassing its coverage of the Blitz, which helped with details of the bombings.
The letter all returning POWs received from King George is reprinted in full on Frank’s memorial website.
Joe Fitzgerald talks about POWs being welcomed into the homes of locals living near RAF bases in his private papers (8209) at the Imperial War Museum.
Details of Judy’s Dickin Medal ceremony come from Frank’s memories in The Judy Story, his recollections to Neumann and van Witsen, and numerous contemporary news accounts.
There have been sixty-five Dickin Medal honorees in all, thirty-two pigeons, twenty-nine dogs, three horses, and a cat, Simon, awarded for his service during the Yangtze Incident of 1949, when the Royal Navy frigate HMS Amethyst was trapped and shelled by Chinese Communist forces for three months before escaping. Simon’s medal came for “disposing of many rats despite being wounded by a shell blast.” The most recent animal to win the medal is Theo, a springer spaniel with the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, 104 Military Working Dog (MWD) Squadron, an arms and explosives search dog killed in Afghanistan in March 2011. A full accounting of the Dickin Medal winners, along with the fascinating history of Maria Dickin, is available at pdsa.org.uk.
Judy and Frank’s appearances on the BBC were on June 10 and September 5, 1946. The host of the radio program In Town Tonight, Roy Rich, was renowned for being one of Britain’s first disc jockeys, hosting the show Housewives’ Choice in 1946. The host of the television show Picture Page was Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, one of Britain’s most famous broadcasters, akin to Edward R. Murrow in his excellence on both radio and TV and in covering topics both serious and light. Information about the shows and Frank and Judy’s appearances on them comes from the BBC Archives Center.
The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals remains the largest animal charity in the United Kingdom, carrying out more than one million examinations every year. My source for information on the organization comes from its website, pdsa.org.uk.
Frank discusses the backstage dog brawl between Judy and the borzois in his letter to Neumann and van Witsen.
The history of Britain’s paratrooper dogs, or the “Luftwoofe,” is well-chronicled by Andrew Woolhouse in his book 13—Lucky for Some: The History of the 13th (Lancashire) Parachute Battalion. The dogs that went in on D-day trained for skydiving by spending hours upon hours acclimatizing themselves to air travel and parachute jumping. They were coaxed from the aircraft by their handlers, who carried steaks to feed them upon landing. The dogs were very successful in sniffing out mines, booby traps, and enemy positions. A life-size replica of one paradog, Bing, an Alsatian-collie mix, in full jumping gear is preserved at the Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces Museum in Duxford, near Cambridge.
Information about Judy’s “hero tour” comes from Frank’s recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen, as well as contemporary news accounts in the London Daily Mirror, Evening Standard, Bath Weekly Chronicle, Bath Herald, Tail-Wagger magazine, Western Daily Press, and Bristol Mirror.
It should be remembered that Frank himself was largely unaware of Judy’s adventures in China and aboard the Grasshopper. He was briefed more fully about the details when he traveled to England and shared his stories with the gunboatmen who were gathering information for The Judy Story.
Voting records and household information in postwar Portsmouth are taken from the Kelly’s Directories and voting rolls, all kept at the Portsmouth City Archives.
Frank recorded his memories of postwar Portsmouth in The Judy Story. Other details on postwar Portsmouth are taken from various remembrances collected in the “People of Portsmouth” series kept at the Portsmouth City Archives, as well as The Portsmouth That Has Passed by William Gates and Sunny Southsea by Anthony Triggs.
John Hornley’s memory of encountering Judy after the war appears in The Judy Story.
Postwar malaise, be it PTSD or some other syndrome, was a common theme among returned POWs. Frank was typically mum about the subject, but his family talked of it on his memorial website. Lizzie Oliver discovered it often in her research of Pakan Baroe POWs. Rouse Voisey talked about it in an interview with the author. John Hedley’s oral history recording, which details his difficulty with postwar Britain and his salvation at returning to Asia, is kept at the Imperial War Museum, and is available online at iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80023021.
Most cases of canine PTSD come not from combat but from the everyday mistreatment, abuse, and abandonment of dogs everywhere. Medications such as Prozac seem to have a similar affect in alleviating the symptoms of traumatized dogs. Interestingly, according to research by animal scientist and psychologist Jaak Panksepp at Washington State University, rough-and-tumble outdoor play has been shown to vastly help as well. The action apparently releases large amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic factors (BDNFs), which are associated with new neuronal growth—replacing the part of the brain that houses bad memories with new growth, and hence, new memories. Lee Charles Kelley, a prolific author and trainer, has written extensively on the subject at canineptsdblog.blogspot.com.
The star-crossed Groundnut Scheme is finely accounted in Alan Wood’s The Groundnut Affair. Details of Frank’s experiences there come from his recollections in The Judy Story and to Neumann and van Witsen, as well as his memorial website, frankwilliams.ca.
The memorial to Judy’s service in 1972 at churches across Britain is recounted in the Times of London edition of February 28, 1972.
The information about Frank’s life post-Judy comes from his memorial website, frankwilliams.ca, as well as from obituaries in the Burnaby Now and the Vancouver Sun.