Father James Benson, who was the sole survivor of the three principals of Gona Mission, finished the war as a Japanese POW, and when Rabaul was liberated, he walked free. He eventually made his way back to the ruins of the Gona Mission and and began to rebuild it. Once it was established again, he handed the running of it to his nephew and concentrated his energies, and considerable artistic talents, painting a mural in the nearby cathedral at Dogura. In 1955, he returned to England and for six months was the presiding priest of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, before dying in September of that year. He was sixty-eight. At his request his ashes were sent back to Gona, and scattered in the rich fields around.
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Key did not emerge from imprisonment in Rabaul, and it is presumed that he died in Japanese captivity. On the subject of Key, Brigadier Potts wrote to his wife: ‘It looks as if Key is gone. Oh hell. And he did such a good job and made his battalion for all times. Makes me want to howl like a kid…’
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The end of the war found Doc Vernon working in the main native hospital at Port Moresby. He left the army in March 1946, and died of tuberculosis and a stroke just two months later at sixty-five years of age.
General Douglas MacArthur stayed on in Japan for six years, entirely undisputed as the most powerful man in the land. At one point it looked like he might become the most powerful man in the world when he stood for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, but when that fizzled with a bad showing in the Wisconsin primary, he returned his attention to purely matters military.
Though MacArthur’s benevolence had spared the Emperor, the American general showed no leniency at all to longtime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. When the American forces came to take Tojo into custody, just a little over a week after the surrender documents were signed, the prime minister tried to commit suicide by shooting himself. The Americans, though, would allow him no such easy exit, and considerable resources were put towards ensuring that he survived… for the moment.
He was to be the star turn at the forthcoming trials for war crimes, and from that point on Tojo was placed on suicide watch. Only when the United States was ready would he be allowed to die, and that day came just before Christmas 1948.
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Of the many charges for which Tojo had been found guilty, the catch-all was that he had promoted a scheme of Japanese conquest that ‘contemplated and carried out… murdering, maiming and ill-treating prisoners of war and civilian internees… forcing them to labour under inhumane conditions… plundering public and private property, wantonly destroying cities, towns and villages beyond any justification of military necessity; perpetrating mass murder, rape, pillage, brigandage, torture and other barbaric cruelties upon the helpless civilian population of the over-run countries.’
Tojo was dressed in US Army fatigues with a large capital ‘P’ for prisoner on his back, when the trapdoor dropped beneath him in Sugamo Prison just after midnight on the rising day of 23 December. As the son of a samurai, who had built his career on espousing the values of the samurai, Tojo met his fate calmly, seemingly fulfilled by dying bravely at the hands of an enemy who had defeated him.
Six decades on from that death, it is his principal biographer, Edwin P. Hoyt, who notes—as an example of how much Japan has changed since that time—that the ‘name of Hideki Tojo is anything but a household word. Indeed it is scarcely recognised by three new generations of Japanese.’
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In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur while still the Military Governor of Japan, fell out with the man who had replaced Franklin Delano Roosevelt as President of the United States, Harry Truman. The two men had disagreed from the beginning of their professional relationship, which culminated in Truman summarily dismissing MacArthur from his post.
Truman later explained why, precisely, he had taken this extreme action. ‘I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son-of-a-bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.’
Despite his dismissal, MacArthur remained as a kind of
éminence grise
of the military establishment, though he never again held command. He died at the age of eighty-four on 5 April 1964 in Bethesda, Maryland, and his body now lies in a veritable MacArthur shrine, situated in Virginia.
Chester Wilmot’s career continued to prosper after the war, in no small part on the basis of his wide experience in the European theatre of war. His extensive work covering the Nuremberg trials had unearthed a lot of valuable documentation, and in 1952 he would publish a highly acclaimed book about the campaign that confirmed him as one of the most distinguished correspondents of the day.
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One of his innovative ways of presenting history was to constantly change perspective in his narrative, interweaving what was happening in Germany and Britain at much the same time, to tell the whole of the story and not merely a part. Writing in the London
Daily Telegraph
on 21 January 1952, Malcolm Muggeridge enthused that Wilmot had ‘[put it all together] so brilliantly, so conscientiously and so imaginatively that the result, published today—
The Struggle for Europe
—becomes at once a classic of contemporary history.’
It was at the height of his career, then, that in December 1953, Chester Wilmot visited Sydney to anchor an around-the-world radio program that preceded the Queen’s broadcast on Christmas Day from Auckland. From Sydney, Wilmot introduced speakers from all parts of the British Commonwealth, before heading north, back to his wife and two young daughters at the home the family had settled into in Buckinghamshire.
Just a few days later, a fisherman by the name of Giovanni di Marco was pulling in his nets in the Mediterranean waters just south of the island of Elba when he heard three quick explosions and looked up to see on his far horizon a seeming silver meteorite flashing out of the clouds and heading to the sea, where it disappeared in an enormous spray of water. It proved to be a BOAC Comet jet airliner, which had, for reasons unknown, just twenty minutes after taking off from Rome on its last haul from Sydney to London, exploded in mid-air. By the time the fisherman arrived at the point of impact all was calm, and all he could do was retrieve some of the floating bodies from the water. Chester Wilmot was one of the thirty-five passengers killed. It was the third such accident involving a Comet since they had been introduced into service just two years before.
Of the three journalist friends who had forged their way across the Owen Stanley Range to the front in mid-1942, only Osmar White would live to make old bones. After the New Guinea campaign, White covered the Allied action in the Solomon Islands in 1943, until wounded when he was travelling in a landing craft that was bombed. From there he went to cover the less physically strenuous European campaign, and stayed with General George S. Patton’s Third Army as they invaded Germany, liberated concentration camps and stormed first into Berlin. Later he remained close to his great friend Chester Wilmot as they covered the Nuremberg war trials. In his post-war career he continued with journalism initially, but then expanded his interests to books and writing screenplays, including episodes of the television series
Homicide
. In 1957, he was the only Australian journalist to accompany the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition and his work was so valued that there is an Antarctic island named after him. He died in May 1991, at the age of eighty-eight.
Bert Kienzle, who had done such a sterling job ensuring that the supplies got through—and who was awarded a Member of the British Empire for his trouble—returned to New Guinea’s Yodda Valley after the war was over, and started running three thousand cattle on a property just fifteen miles to the west of Kokoda, which he continued until 1980, when he retired and moved to Queensland. Aged eighty-three, he died in January 1988 in Sydney.
There was a postscript to the murders of Sister Mavis and Sister May. On a morning in September 1943, at a time when the village that had betrayed the Sisters was back under Australian control, the ANGAU officer in charge of the district, Tom Grahamslaw, did what he felt had to be done. Accompanied by a large group of native policemen and several other ANGAU officers, he had gathered the villagers of Higaturu, together, so they could witness it. ‘It’ was the hanging of the seventeen men, including the original traitor, Embogi, who had reported the presence of the Sisters and the other white men to the Japanese. The natives had to be given a strong message that this would not be tolerated by the Australian authorities, and as a large group of village women and men wailed, the job was done. Seventeen traitors were left twisting in the wind. After the war, Tom Grahamslaw moved to the Central Coast in New South Wales, where he took up life as a farmer. He survived until the late 1990s.
A few of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels survive. One of them, Ovuru, is now the Headman at Nadi village, at the approximate age of ninety-two. With his son, he was brought to Sydney in 2002 by the Australian actor and film producer Yahoo Serious, himself a devotee of the Kokoda story. Yahoo and his wife, Lulu, took Ovuru to, among other places, the Imax Theatre in Darling Harbour where the older man donned special three-dimensional glasses and watched a film about travelling in space. Ovuru returned to the highlands, thrilled, his proud boast to his villagers and fellow chieftains that he was the first man from their parts to have travelled to the heavens.
Okryon Park, the comfort woman from Rabaul, finally made it home to Korea on New Year’s Day of 1944, but not until she had suffered another ill-fated trip, when yet one more ship she was travelling home on was bombed and sunk by Allied planes. When she did make it back, it was to find that her parents were still alive, but her son was back with his father. Her mother prevented her going to her son for fear of what her husband would do to her. She became the mistress of a man who worked for the town office and twice fell pregnant to him, bearing him two healthy babies. This man was under the impression that she had worked as a nurse in Rabaul.
When her parents died and this man fell bankrupt, Okryon became effectively a ‘non-person’, shunned by what was left of her original family, though still supporting her children. She found some domestic work, and sold vegetables at the markets, but ended up living on welfare. She survived at least into the 1990s, when the issue of ‘comfort women’ was acknowledged for the first time, and she told her story. ‘Our country should never be controlled by anyone in the future… ’ was one comment she made to the journalists who interviewed her.
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And Kohkichi Nishimura, the Japanese soldier who made the pact with his fellow platoon soldiers that whichever of them survived would return to retrieve the remains of the others and bring them back to Japan? For three and a half decades after the war ended, Nishimura worked as a successful businessman, without ever forgetting his promise. Sometimes in the middle of an important business meeting, the memory of that day on Mission Ridge would suddenly come back to him, and he would again remember the vow that they had all taken. He would hear the grenades exploding, see the Australians charging, watch his comrades fall and die and think of them still there, see their faces beneath the sod, lying, waiting for him to return. Waiting. Waiting for him to fulfil his promise. He would have wanted them to do it for him, had he fallen. And he knew they wanted him to do it for them. That he
had
to do it for them. He could bear only so many of such thoughts.
In 1979 Nishimura could bear it no longer. He knew that he must redeem his vow—whatever the cost. Despite the protestations of his wife and child, he sold his land and all his assets and at the age of sixty-eight left his family to return to Papua New Guinea to search for his fallen comrades. Certainly it was a tremendous wrench to do so, but knowing that the task ahead of him would take years— and that he had no choice but to do it—he felt it would be the best thing for his wife and son in the long run.
Basing himself at Popondetta, he became a familiar figure to the natives along the track, who always saw him using a kind of silver stick to probe the ground, looking for bones. And over fifteen long years he found them, too. Most of them, at least. Strangely, four to five decades on, the upper bodies had disappeared and all that remained was the legs, with their boots on, ready to go home with him. He took them, as promised, for a proper Shinto funeral. Home, home to Japan, and most particularly the beautiful city of Kochi, surrounded by its high mountains, on the wondrous island of Shikoku. ‘Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea.’
Very shortly after the war ended General Sir Thomas Blamey lost his position as head of the Australian Army and, after a brief reign by General Sturdee, was replaced by… Sydney Rowell, who went on to hold the post from 1950 to 1954.
Nevertheless, one day in late 1950, the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Victoria received a very important visitor, no less than the Governor General, Sir William McKell. He was there with a delegation of official guests, including Prime Minister Robert Menzies and the Minister for the Air, the Minister for the Navy and Army, to present Blamey—who had just suffered a stroke, and also had pneumonia—with his field marshal’s baton. This was a great honour, largely pushed through by Menzies, but the role was effectively ceremonial only. Rowell now ran the show, and Blamey never recovered his health. He died on 27 May 1951, and was accorded a state funeral. Rowell, as the army’s chief of the general staff, had the official role of chief mourner at the funeral, and one can only wonder what went through his mind as Blamey was at last lain to rest…
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