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| Margaret and John, Mum & Dad, Verbier, Switzerland, 1973 Dad acting the goat, as Sargent Sardoni, his army drill sarge |
George says it was all horridly racist. I wonder. Racist? After all, the government also interned Germans, Austrians and Italians, while the US was at war with their countries. That’s a pretty caucasian lot.
I first heard about George Takei and his fixation on the the internment camp on the Adam Carolla podcast. A pod I love, with Adam being “Mr Common Sense”. He’s had Takei on as a guest on his pod a couple of times, likes him, I think, but is also super frustrated because, says Adam, “all George ever does is bang on about the fuxxg internment camps, ffs!”.
Were that camps all as wicked and as horrid as George says?
Were they wicked? I’m not so sure. Imagine 100,000 people from the country that you’re now at war with. If just 1% are potential betrayers -- spies for example -- and that’s already 1,000 people. But, you might object, why punish all the people from that country? Well, because you don’t have time. You’re at war. A really, big, uuuge, World War. Best to play it safe and put them all out of the way, on a farm. I can understand that, even if George can’t or won’t.
Horrid? I doubt it. Today it looks pretty idyllic. Maybe then it was tougher, but then what they were living was a bucolic life far from the war. Kids going to school; parents farming. And I’m sure all the parents remember the experience, and I’m betting they don’t all remember it as horrid at all. These were not like Japanese POW camps. These were internment camps for the citizens of a country that the Utied States happened to be at war with. And at the end of the war they were all released.
I have a sailing friend here in Hong Kong who was interned with his parents, by the Japanese, at the Stanley prison facility here in Hong Kong, on the south side of Hong Kong island -- now a very upmarket tourist spot. They were treated pretty well, according to him, and he has strong memories, none really horrid. (It’s “John the Judge” and he’s still alive at last count, in his late 80s).
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John Ackland Forsythe
Anyway, what all this did was remind me that our father, in Australia, served for a short time at an Australian Internment Camp in Hay, NSW, then known as a Prisoner of War camp.
He got there in August 1945, close to the end of the war, as his enlistment wound down. He’d already served four years (8/3/41 -- 20/9/45) fighting the Japanese in the New Guinea Campaign.
He was in Hay as a interpreter of Japanese, as they had some Japanese prisoners of war, as well as some Japanese internees. They also had some internees from Germany, Italy and Austria. I found out that there’s now a museum there, the Dunera Museum, where I learned that the German internees were mostly Jewish and had been sent over by the UK! (Still sending its convicts to Oz after all these years).
As kids, if we asked our father about the war, it was always about his time fighting in PNG. Did you kill any Japanese Dad? Did they shoot at you? Were you scared? Did you get wounded? How was it to interrogate the Japanese prisoners? (He was an interpreter of Japanese, with Army Intelligence). I never asked him much at all about the six weeks he spent at the Hay pow camp. I wish now I had. The regrets. (Lesson: ask the questions now).
I found out the actual dates he was there at Hay via the open records on the Australian National Archives site. A very good, super user-friendly site. There I found 28 pages of records of our father, John Ackland Forsythe, Army number NX151703. He had served in the Army, then known as the Australian Imperial Forces. He was sent to the front fighting the Japanese in Papua New Guinea where he served, by the records at Milne Bay, Lae, Port Moresby and on the Kokoda Trail. All in Army Military Intelligence. The captured Japanese, he said, provided lots of good, actionable intelligence. The Japanese army didn’t have the “name-rank-and-serial-number-only” ethos, and when captured they were quite willing to divulge whatever they knew.
I also found out that he’d earned five Medals (!) which I’d never known about. He’d not collected them, according to these army records, until the late 90s, when he was in his mid 80s.
By the way, do we know how close the Japanese were to invading Australia? They were already in Lae, one of the places our father served, on the north side of the Island. They were on their way across the Kokoda Trail to capture Pt Moresby, the capital, on the south side of the island (another place Dad had served), just opposite Australia, from where they would have had a straight line to our land mass.
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| PNG and the four places Dad served in WW2 |
It was on the Kokoda Trail that our father saw action, was shot at, and captured two Japanese army flags, and interrogated Japanese prisoners they’d captured, and a big bag of Japanese war-time money. One of those flags, and the bag of cash, are now in the Australian War Memorial.
It was interesting to look at the old records, from the 1940s, written in nice fountain pen copperplate, but with military abbreviations, so not always clear. And some weird ones, like “STRENGTH” training, always in caps and which Dad seems to have done several times.
And to see that everything he told us as kids was all confirmed. Not that I ever doubted. But it was fun nonetheless to see it there in writing: that he was in Military Intelligence -- been trained up in Japanese, and would go on to interrogate Japanese Pow’s -- that he’d been to training to a Military Intelligence school, that he’d fought in all those places, and that he’d been awarded Gold Card treatment meaning free medical for him and Mum, for their lives, because he’d been shot at (that was the main criterion...).
And that on his enlistment application he’d written as Occupation: “Teacher of Languages”. Which I never knew. After the war, and his stint as Military Intelligence interpreting Japanese Pow’s intelligence, he joined the Department of Foreign (then External) Affairs and spent his career as an Australian Diplomat (“an oxymoron, surely”, as one of my droll pommie mates said).
And to see that there were things he hadn’t told us, perhaps because of he was a modest man: that he’d earned those medals. And that he’d been promoted quickly. Joined in early 41 as a private, promoted to Sergeant in later 41, then to Lieutenant a month later and then to Captain a year later. Also, he never made much of this, but he was medivacced out of the war zone twice to Townsville in Queensland, with serious Malaria. Which was to affect him for years after.
And I wondered about this: that it’s easy for me, or anyone, to find those details online, from nearly a century ago. But what about us, who haven’t been to war, or the armed forces? There’s nothing about us, unless we’ve done enough to be Google-able. But still that’s nothing like an official record, on actual paper, with an actual pen and an actual person’s initials signing off that it’s all true.
All that from listening to a podcast. Rivirina Weekender, September 24-25 2011:
