The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 13 | Issue 32 | Number 3 | Article ID 4358 | Aug 10, 2015

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Australian, British, Dutch and U.S. POWs: Living under theshadow of the Nagasaki Bomb

Mick Broderick, David Palmer

Australian POWs and the Nagasaki A-Bombing

Mick Broderick

David Palmer’s timely opinion piece in TheMelbourne Age on 6 August 2015 drawsattention to the little remembered history ofscores of Australian and other allied POWs whowere held as slave labourers in Japanese warindustries in Nagasaki before and at the time ofthe atom bombing. Aspects of this neglectedhistory also form a major component of myrecent multi-screen, hyper-visualisationexhibition “Fading Lights: Australian POW andB C O F T r o o p s i n J a p a n 1 9 4 5 - 5 2 ”(http://fadinglights.com.au), co-curated withStuart Bender (Curtin University).

In 1983 Former Australian POW and author Hugh V.Clarke (second from right) returned to the FukuokaCamp No.2, a site now occupied by the Koyagi JuniorHigh School adjacent to the former KawanamiBrothers Shipbuilding Company. Clarke isphotographed alongside three of the former Campprison guards, part of the Fading Lights exhibition(http://fadinglights.com.au/) backdrop incorporating

digital overlays with contemporary images of thecamp ground and school. [© Stuart Bender & MickBroderick]

Palmer’s efforts to have Australian soldier andNagasaki POW, Private Alan Chick, officiallyrecognized by the Japanese governmentashibakusha, is especially commendable giventhat the award and medical entitlementoccurred shortly before the former servicemandied last year. However, there was anotherAustralian POW granted this status more thanthirty years before.

At the time of the Nagasaki bombing SergeantPeter McGrath-Kerr (2/40 Battalion) was also inFukuoka Camp No 14 opposite the Mitsubishisteel foundry where he labored, alongsidescores of other POWs. 1 Earlier that morning heand six comrades had toiled outdoors to repaira bridge over the Mifune Canal that had beendestroyed in an air raid only eight days earlier(1 August). They had been sent back to thecompound at around 10am for a rest break.McGrath-Kerr recalls that he was on his bunkreading a book when everyone began to bolttowards the air raid shelters.2 He awoke fivedays later, lying on a stretcher and saw thateverything in sight was flattened. He hadamnesia, five broken ribs and various cuts andbruises on his hands and legs.

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Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr of 2/40th Battalion,who was taken prisoner by the Japanese and held inJava until May 1944. Sgt McGrath-Kerr was one ofseveral hundred Australian, British and AmericanPOWs aboard the Tamahoko Maru en route to Japanwhen the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the USsubmarine Tang on 24 June 1944. One of only 212survivors, he was transferred to the Fukuoka No. 12POW camp in central Nagasaki. [AWM 045190]

McGrath-Kerr, like Private Chick, was one of 24Australian POWs at Camp No. 14 only 1.7 kmsfrom the nuclear detonation. All miraculouslysurvived. Had they been exposed outsidedirectly in the line-of-sight of the explosioneach would have likely perished. Others werenot so lucky. At least four POWs were killedand around 30 seriously injured, mostlyDutch.3 A few others died as a result of theirexposure in the following weeks. War-timecorrespondent Denis Warner in a 1995 op edfor the International Herald Tribune(reprinted

in the New York Times) recalls speaking withMcGrath-Kerr in a Manila hospital shortly afterhis transfer from Nagasaki. Warner foundMcGrath-Kerr “emaciated and weak”, stillsuffering from his broken ribs and “radiationburns on one hand”.

Another injured Australian soldier in thehospital, Sergeant Jack Johnson, also spokewith Warner. Johnson had been between two ofthe camp buildings when the bomb struck.Looking for fellow survivors amidst the smokeand debris he saw a pair of boots jutting outfrom under the rubble. It was the unconsciousMcGrath-Kerr. With fires igniting all round,Johnson worked hard to extract his compatriotand left him in the care of Dutch orderlies. In1980 McGrath-Kerr returned to Japan as aguest of the City of Nagasaki where he wasentitled to free medical treatment and officiallyrecogn ized as an a tom bomb v ic t im(hibakusha). 4

Video testimony of five Australian POWs,including Chick, is on display at the NagasakiAtomic Bomb Museum. McGrath-Kerr’stestimony can be heard on the Australian WarMemorial website.5

Remarkably, Private Chick, who survived boththe harsh labor at Camp No. 14 and theNagasaki atom bombing, returned to Japan onlya few months after his liberation to be part ofthe British Commonwealth Occupation Forces.In 1948 he visited his former, now destroyedPOW Camp and the Mitsubishi Foundry, andposed in uniform amongst former workers. Hethen served in the Korean War in the early1950s.

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Private Chick (crouching) with some of his formerworkers at the Mitsubishi foundry in Nagasaki,photographed while on BCOF duties. [AWMP00208.003 photo: Alan Chick]

Like many of his generation, including amongsthis POW peers, Chick maintained in his 1995video testimony displayed at the Nagasakimuseum that the atom bombs were necessaryand entirely justifiable:

Well I’m all in favour of it, myself.As far as I’m concerned, it savedseveral million lives. I think that’sa very good argument in favour ofit. I think, since the advent of theBomb, we’ve had no more worldwars. Like, before the Bomb, theyhad two world wars in twenty-fiveyears. And now its fifty years[1995] and there’s been no worldwar. I consider it to have been agood thing, actually.

While not considered hibakusha, two otherAustralian POWs witnessed the Nagasaki

explosion. On Koyagi Island, south of Nagasakiharbor, the POW camp (Fukuoka No.2) wasadjacent to the Kawanami Brothers shipworks.In late-June 1945, most of the Australians weresent north of Nagasaki to work in the coal mineat Nakama, but two Australian soldiers, BobWatkins and Joe Flynn remained due toillness.6 Both saw the “great flash […] a feelingof heat, huge noise of explosion, followed soonby a great rush of air, dust rose knee heightcaused by […] shock of concussion transmittedthrough the ground”.7

Watkins recalls looking up from ten kilometersaway towards the mouth of Nagasaki harbor: “Iwas amazed to see this huge column of smokeand flame rising skywards forming into adistinct mushroom shape as it went”.8

These accounts and the Nagasaki POW historyremain little appreciated or recognized today.

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Similarly, the seven-year Australian BCOFpresence (chiefly in the Hiroshima Prefecture)where more than 16,000 Australian troopsrotated through Japan after the war, somebringing wives and families, is under-represented in military annals, especially int h i s c e n t e n a r y y e a r o f A N Z A Ccommemorations.

Recent developments during the course of ourresearch into and production of the FadingLights exhibition were fortuitous. We learnedduring pre-production that a Nagasaki CityCounciller, Mr Toyoichi Ihara (himselfa hibakusha) was spearheading efforts by thelocal community to recognize the former POWcamp on Koyagi. Mr Ihara, along with teachers,parents and students of the Junior High Schoolthat now occupies the site of the former POWCamp grounds, plan to erect a monument tothe 73 soldiers, including 6 Australians, whodied at the Camp during the war.9

Fading Light exhibition producers Mick Broderickand Stuart Bender in front of the current sign thatnotes the location of former POW camp No. 2 on theKoyagi Junior High school grounds. [© MickBroderick & Stuart Bender]

In April this year we sought permission to film

inside the Nagasaki Mitsubishi plant, rebuiltafter the atom bombing, on the location whereChick and 23 other Australian POWs survivedthe nuclear blast. Mr Ihara had informed usthat there was a small commemorative plaqueinside the plant attesting to the history of thePOW workers. Unfortunately, we were deniedentry to record at the factory for our exhibition.

However, a few months later in late July, newsreports emerged that Mitsubishi was formallybeginning the process of apologizing to POWswho were forced to work in their Nagasakifactories.10 A surviving American prisoner ofwar, 94 year-old James Murphy, traveled to LosAngeles to accept an apology from MitsubishiMaterials Corporation, describing what heendured as “slavery in every way”. A few dayslater, Mitsubishi’s spokesman Okamoto Yukioannounced to the media “If there is such anopportunity, we will do the same apology” toother allied POWs including British, Dutch andAustralian. Okamoto publicly admitted that hiscompany was “one of those [that] torturedPOWs most, so we have to apologize”.11

October 1945: former Nagasaki prisoners of war ontheir way home aboard HMS Formidable. Thosenamed in bold were survivors of the atomic bomb atCamp 14, Nagasaki. Back row, left to right: QX14889Lance Bombardier (L Bdr) Frederick Stuart Murray,2/10 Field Regiment; not identified; QX17410 Gunner(Gnr) Charles Frederick Hancock, 2/10 FieldRegiment; QX13595 L Bdr Garnet Johnson, 2/10 Field

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Regiment; not identified. Middle row, left to right:QX9907 Gnr Allan Richard Sidney Beitz, 2/10 FieldRegiment; VX45894 Private (Pte) William Cecil Reed,2/3 Machine Gun Battalion; TX3914 Pte Colin JamesGleeson, 2/40 Infantry Battalion; NX47101(246705) Lance Sergeant Ernest Roy Snowden, 2/12Field Ambulance; VX53494 Pte Bernard DanielO'Keefe, 2/40 Infantry Battalion; NX38456 L BdrFrancis William Fitzmaurice, 2/1 Heavy Battery;VX23630 Pte Eric Ernest Hooper, 2/2 PioneerBattalion; TX4878 Gunner (Gnr) Charles EdwardHoward, 2/1 Heavy Battery. Front row, left to right:QX17307 Bombardier Hugh Vincent Clarke, 2/10Field Regiment; next four soldiers are not identified;VX25508 Pte Eric Murray Jobling, 18 Australian AntiTank Battery; NX38462 Gnr Reginald McConnell, 2/1Heavy Battery; VX41147 Pte Leslie Prendergast, 2/40Infantry Battalion; VX25701 Pte Philip JosephSmythe, 2/3 Machine Gun Battalion. [Australian WarMemorial 045208]

Nagasaki POWs: living under the shadowof the bomb

David Palmer

On August 6, 1945, 70 years ago, the world'sfirst nuclear war began with the dropping of anatomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It unleashedthe ongoing threat of annihilation under whichthe world still cowers.

This short video, shot and edited in 3D and viewable here in 2D, features the reflections of MsKana Miyoshi, a third-generation survivor (hibakusha) of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Shedescribes her "before and after" experiences of entering inside the UN's World Heritageprotected Genbaku Dome (http://www.unesco.emb-japan.go.jp/htm/hiroshimaMemorial.htm)after producers Mick Broderick & Stuart Bender were granted special access in April 2015.

Twenty-four Australian prisoners of warsurvived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki onAugust 9, 1945. Private Alan Chick, ofSt Helens, Tasmania, was one of them. But onthat day when an American bomber droppedthe last atomic bomb in the first nuclear war, itdidn't matter i f you were Japanese orAustralian, if you were a child, a Japanesegeneral, or an Allied POW. Everyone withinrange of the bomb became a victim. More than74,000 people died out of a population of263,000, but some miraculously survived.

Chick and his battalion had been captured by

the Japanese in Timor. He was eventually puton a ship bound for Japan, but a US submarineattacked this ship, sinking it along withhundreds of POWs. Chick survived with a fewothers and was picked up by a Japanese fishingboat off the Kyushu coast. He was taken toNagasaki's Fukuoka POW Camp 14 and put towork at a Mitsubishi steel foundry. His campwas less than two kilometres from the atomicbomb hypocentre on August 9. Knockedunconscious, he awoke to a world of completeblack. When the smoke cleared he sawdestruction, fires, and death everywhere. Hehad somehow survived again.

To make the atomic bombings intosolely a national tragedy withoutreference to non-Japanese whoalso suffered is a grave error. Thebombings were an internationaltragedy.

By 1944, hundreds of Brit ish, Dutch,Australian and American POWs worked as slavelabourers in Mitsubishi's massive shipbuildingcomplex in Nagasaki. Mitsubishi's workforcealso included thousands of Korean labourerstaken by force from their homeland, whoworked under armed guard at the shipyard, itsmany factories around the city, and in thecompany's two coal mines on islands just offthe coast.

A photo dated September 1945 of the remains of the

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Prefectural Industry Promotion Building after thebombing of Hiroshima, which was later preserved asa monument. Photo: AFP

This month, three of these Nagasaki sites – theshipyard (still operating) and the coal mines(closed decades ago) – were approved byUNESCO for World Heritage listing. The listingof the shipyard and mines required extensivenegotiations between Japan and South Koreaon the Korean forced-labour issue, andagreement on a compromise historical wordingwas finally reached. Mitsubishi also publiclyapologised for its use of POW labour at itsmany mine sites, but has yet to apologise tothose POWs at other sites, including theNagasaki shipbuilding complex.

Atomic bomb victims, known in Japan ashibakusha, have been eligible for fullhealthcare and living expenses paid by theJapanese government, but Koreans whoreturned to their homeland after World War IIwere refused these benefits. Japanese andKorean peace activists and atomic bombsurvivors started a movement decades ago tochange this injustice, which has led to manysuccessful court cases in Japan.

In the last few years, Japanese researchers atthe Nagasaki Overseas Hibakusha Network, ledby Nobuto Hirano, have extended theirhibakusha recognition movement to AlliedPOWs. Like the Korean hibakusha of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki who also were forced labourersin Mitsubishi industries, Allied POWs weredouble victims: first as foreign forcedlabourers, and then as atomic bomb survivors.POWs were a substantial part of the labourforce in Japan's war production and coal miningfrom late 1944 until the surrender. WithinJapan there were 130 POW camps holdingmore than 32,000 POWs. Of these about 3500died in those camps and a further 11,000 dieden route to Japan when ships carrying themwere sunk by Allied submarines and planes.

The Nagasaki blast.

There were 884 Allied POWs in the Nagasakicity region in two main POW camps: KoyagiBranch Camp (Fukuoka 2-B), on Koyagi Islandin Nagasaki Harbour; and Nagasaki MitsubishiDockyard Branch Camp (Fukuoka 14-B) basedin Saiwamachi (Urakami District). TheMitsubishi camp held 315 POWs. Of these, 113died in the camp before the atomic bombingand seven died from the atomic bomb. Of the195 POWs who survived at the end of the war,152 were Dutch, 24 were Australian, and 19were British. Alan Chick was held in FukuokaCamp 14-B, next to Mitsubishi's steel foundry.

The researcher, Hirano, contacted me throughHideto Kimura, a Nagasaki colleague I'veknown for many years, to locate formerAustralian POWs who survived the bombing. Afew years earlier, Kimura and I had seen avideo interview with Alan Chick at theNagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, taped in the1980s. I found online documents in theAustralian War Memorial Archives and NationalArchives of Australia detailing 24 repatriatedAustralian POWs who were in Nagasaki. CraigCollie, author of Nagasaki: The Massacre of theInnocent and Unknowing, had interviewedChick in Heyfield, Victoria, which indicatedwhere he might still be living.

I contacted the Returned and Services Leaguein Heyfield and spoke with local RSLrepresentative Sue Artso. She had been visitingChick and his Japanese wife Anita (originally

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Hiroko) regularly in Heyfield's aged-care home.When we made the trip to Heyfield, weinterviewed Chick over three days.

An Allied correspondent stands in the rubble of abuilding that once was a movie theatre in Hiroshima,on Sepember 8, 1945, after the first nuclear weaponever used in warfare was dropped by the US onAugust 6, 1945. Photo: Stanley Troutman

I completed the necessary Japanesegovernment forms in English for him so hecould get atomic bomb survivor recognition andbenefits. I then submitted these to the Japaneseconsulate in Melbourne, which forwarded themto Tokyo for review. Within weeks, two officialsfrom Nagasaki City delivered his benefits bookdirectly to him – in Heyfield. Without theinitiative of Nagasaki peace activists andresearchers, Chick would never have receivedthis recognition. Chick was the only AustralianPOW of the surviving 24 incarcerated atFukuoka Camp 14-B to ever receive thecertificate from the Japanese government.Chick died in 2014, only a year after receivingthe certificate, but receiving the survivor bookand benefits was a final recognition of hisstatus as an atomic bomb survivor and a formerAustralian POW who was in Nagasaki.

Chick supported the atomic bombing ofNagasaki because he believed it ended the war.But many historians now argue that the bombswere not the major factor behind the surrenderbecause Japan's industrial capacity had

collapsed by mid-1945. The country had noaccess to raw materials, owing to Alliedblockades. Finally, the invasion of Manchuriaby the Soviet Red Army, the same day as theNagasaki bombing, destroyed the fightingcapacity of Japan's Kwangtung Army, endingthe power of the Japanese military.

Whatever position one takes, the legacy of theatomic bombings continues – through the manydiseases of survivors from radiation exposure,the genetic impact on the second generation,and the far greater danger of nuclear weaponshundreds of times more powerful than the onesused on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nagasaki survivor Alan Chick when he first entered

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the Army.

The world also needs to understand that thevictims of the atomic bombings were not onlyJapanese. In his Nagasaki address last year,Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated: "We whoexperienced the agony of atomic bombings notonce but twice have ... raised ourselves to ourfeet once more, rebuilding our homeland andrestoring Nagasaki as a beautiful city."

To make the atomic bombings into solely anational tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error.The bombings were an international tragedy,and the victims included Koreans and AlliedPOWs. Chick survived, and his survival istestament to the international character of thevictims.

Mick Broderick is Associate Professor of MediaAnalysis in the School of Arts at MurdochUniversity and Deputy Director of the NationalAcademy of Screen & Sound (NASS). Majorpublications include editions of the referencework Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991) and, aseditor, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima,Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in JapaneseFilm (1996, 1999). Recent co-edited collectionsinclude Interrogating Trauma: CollectiveSuffering in Global Art and Media (2011) andTrauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (2010).

Dr David Palmer is a visiting associate inhistory at the the University of Melbourne. Heis the author of Organizing the Shipyards:Union Strategy in Three Northeast Ports,1 9 3 3 - 1 9 4 5(http://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Shipyards-S t r a t e g y -Northeast-1933-1945/dp/0801427347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203510582&sr=8-1) (Cornell University Press) and works onKorean forced labor in wartime Japan.

Notes

1 Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V.Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaskai! Sydney,Allen & Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995.‘These Men Lived On to Tell a Ghastly Tale’(http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/09/opinion/09iht-edwarn.t.html). New York Times. 9 August.

2 Peter McGrath-Kerr, quoted in Hugh V.Clarke, 1984, Last Stop Nagaski! Sydney, Allen& Unwin, p. 96. Denis Warner. 1995. ‘TheseMen Lived On to Tel l a Ghast ly Tale ’(http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/09/opinion/09iht-edwarn.t.html). New York Times. 9 August.

3 Edlington, David. 1995. “An incandescentflash of death”, The Canberra Times, 27 July, p.11 .

4 Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai! p. 130. See also“Free medicine for POWs”, The CanberraTimes, 14 August 1980, p. 7.

5 “Peter McGrath-Kerr as a sergeant 2/40thAustralian Infantry Battalion and a prisoner ofthe Japanese, 1940-1945, interviewed by TimB o w d e n ”(https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/S02898/)

6 Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 105-109.

7 Clarke, Last Stop Nagaskai!, pp. 106.

8 Ibid.

9 Okada Gen, 2014, “Nagasaki residents seek toremember POWs who died in local camp”(http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201401290069), Asahi Shimbun, 29January

10 BBC News online, 2015 “Japan's Mitsubishim a k e s p r i s o n e r s o f w a r a p o l o g y ”(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33584704)

11 Associated Press, 2015, “Mitsubishi toa p o l o g i s e t o P O W s ”(https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/2899161

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7/mitsubishi-to-apologise-to-pows/), 22 July

Recommended citation: Mick Broderick andDavid Palmer, "Australian, British, Dutch and

U.S. POWs: Living under the shadow of theNagasaki Bomb", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol.13, Issue 32, No. 3, August 10, 2015.