Wieneke Archive Book 4j : War Presscuttings

vi a:a tater. Inquest Incredble also. the Mid - Mks of a coroner's Inquest into the 23f, deaths were never made public. nor the fact that the only summing Japanese nnirleader WAS subsequently tried for mur- der, Seldom before could a true story of such horrific Impact have taken co long to he told In Ito entirety. For award -winning au thor Harry Gordon, whose curiosity had focused and fermented on this bizarre happening since he was an 1 8-y e a r -o I d Air Force rookie, and who had spas- modically pieced fragments of It together from time to tune, the final spur Was discovering the where- abouts of that prison -break ringleader, Akira Kana- zawa. 'This was the trigger," he relates, "I had studied all the records of that last, doomed banzat charge, talked with Just about ev- eryone else Involved In It ... oven the hit players like the doctor whn exam- ined all those corpses. the priest who performed the last rites, the coroner who conducted the civil inquest, the sentries who had guarded the prisoners, the farmers who had pursued the escapees, the relatives of those who had died. "Tracking down and talking with Akira Kana- zawa on his family farm 200 km out of Tokyo," he adds, "was for me the last important piece In the whole bloody jigsaw." The outcome, after all these Intervening years, is 1,1' Wife. "7 told my men to die like the carp:' he said to me. " 'We talked a lot In the minutes while we waited for that bugle call, and I told them about the spirit, the bravery of the carp which we Japanese hate traditionally held in refer- ence. " told them about the WAS' it battles against on- rushing currenta, the way the carp even swans up waterfalls. I told them and anyway they knew It well - that the carp was a symbol of a fine Japanese boy, that the true Japanese has to be able to fight and finally die like the carp.' Doomed "Then Sein added quite simply: 'I knew there was no chance that we would win this battle ahead, and that most of these young men would be dead very soon'." It was the mystery as much as the immensity of this doomed but desperate escape attempt that citing like a sliver while Mr. Gor- don was producing other books on other topics. His "An Krewitriest His- tory of Australia" won the Fellowship of Australian Writers award in 1977 for the best Australian book of quality writing first prize n the National Book Council of Australia an- nual awards, and later In that year the Shell Oil Company's major book award. His four previous publi- cations were "Young Men In A Hurry", "The Embar- rassing Australian" (the story of Reg Saunders,. the A JAPANESE survivor of the escape, Private Jokaha, carries home in March, 1946, memen- toes of a comrade who died in the outbreak. r news -garnering accounts for his persistence in pur- suing all the facts about Coate - despite the frus- trations. Silence In the beginning, man! flatly refused to talk. Oth- ers mere nary even to the extent of tearing riff "se- cret" and "confidential" la- bels from documents they passed to him. It took considerable cor- respor.dence and cajolery with people ranging from the then Prime Minister Menzies and Defence Min- ister Hasluck to the acting official war historian, and much to-and-froing be- tween Melbourne, Canberra and Tokyo to pan those first glints of Information. Finc.!'v, en route to a war correspondents reunion in Korea, came that 200 km trek out of Tokyo to the six -hectare family holding tieing !armed by former es- cape ringleader Akira Kanazawa. "We sat on a latami floor." Mr. Gordon walls. tie ai h portrait, of Kn ,news's mother, his fa- ther and his kamikaze pi- lot brother Kmau,il, whn died in one of the last mis- sions of the wan We were watched by brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts, un- cles and lots of children." A train strike which pa- ralysed transport out of Tokyo was overcome by Greg Lund, an officer with the economic and political division at the Australian Embassy there, and a for- mer Brisbane journalist. Lund spoke fluent Japa- nese, drove Gordon to his rendezvous with Kanazawa and acted as his Inter- preter. Says Mr. Gordon: "I showed Kanazawa pictures and maps, read hint ex- tracts front the report of the court of Inquiry, told hint some of the things his comrades had told me. And he began to talk . . ." Shame And In that fascinating flashback the mysteries were gradually unravelled. One of them. why those prisoners courted death with such careless rapture. "The shame of capture was unhearahle," the es- cape ringleader told author Gordon. "Our conventions, our histories are different. "We were shocked when we learned that American and Australian prisoners actually asked to have their names sent home, so that% the families would know they were alive. "We would never have Inflicted that on our fami- lies. We received no mail as prisoners, and we wanted none. We were dead men. We had been dishonoured, and we felt our lives as Japanese were over." So If their bid for free- d= was doomed to failure, then death was no lesser reward. 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