War Weariness in the Canadian Corps in the First World War:

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH: Sydney Whitehead a British aircraftman with No 52 Wireless Interception Unit, RAF in Singapore, Malaya and Java, Dutch East Indies, 2/1945-3/1945; POW in Bandung Camp, Bandung and Boei Glodok Gaol Camp, Batavia, Java, Dutch East Indies, 5/1942-9/1943, aboard SS Makassar Maru from Batavia, Java, Dutch East Indies to Singapore, Malaya, 26/9/1943-29/9/1943 and in Changi and Kranji Camps, Singapore, Malaya, 9/1943-8/1945.

(Courtesy of the IWM)

The Chaplains at Arnhem

On 29 September 1944 the Church Times wrote of the sorrow and disappointment of the nation on hearing of the withdrawal of Airborne Forces from Arnhem. The article concluded with these words:-
"One BBC correspondent, describing the escape, remarked that the men slipped off into the darkness after a prayer by the Padre. The Church may be proud of her clergy who go into the hazards of such battles with their men."

Fifteen chaplains were present at Amhem. On Sunday 17 September 1944, eight [nine]took off by glider and four [six] parachuted in.

The Rev John Rowell, with the Border Regiment took off in a thick mist from Burford. As they came out of the clouds they were so out of position in relation to their towing aircraft that the pilot had to cast off and the glider landed in a field of stubble close to Oxford. The rest all arrived safely.The Rev John Morrison, a Presbyterian Minister with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, was most heartened to hear the skirl of Pipe Major Laidlaw's pipes as he left his glider.

Late that afternoon the three Parachute Battalions moved off on their six mile approach to the bridge at Amhem. The Glider Borne troops were to secure the dropping and landing zones for the second lift. Already the chaplains were occupied in burying the dead and in assisting with the wounded. The 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment got through and held the northern end of the bridge until the Thursday morning. The fighting here was bitter, with lightly armed Airborne troops holding off repeated tank and infantry attacks. The Regimental Aid Post was set up in a cellar underneath the battalion's headquarters. Here Fr Bernard Bemard Egan SJ MC who had been the battalion's chaplain since 1941 assisted the two doctors. At one time there were over two hundred wounded in that cellar. On the Tuesday evening German tanks shelled the headquarters and the building was filled with acrid, choking smoke. Fr Egan was hit and was evacuated into captivity the next day.

The German respect of the Red Cross, even in the confusion of battle was of a high standard. The Rev George Pare on the second day went to some injured in a small clearing. A covering party was left at the edge of the clearing, and Pare, after committing himself to God, went out alone and then summoned his medical orderlies and their jeeps. As they left the clearing there was a fusillade of shots from the Germans on the far edge of the wood.

The other two battalions were increasingly pinned down on the outskirts of Amhem. Whole companies were wiped out and the situation began to be precarious. The Rev GL Phillips with the 3rd Battalion moved into the outskirts of Amhem. They went to ground and Phillips found himself in a house with the doctor, and their brigade and divisional commanders on the floor above. German tanks clanked along the sweet outside. On the Tuesday the doctor decided to visit a nearby hospital where there were British wounded. The chaplain went with him and they slipped in through the back door. A little later Phillips found that the Germans had surrounded the place, and he was taken prisoner. Fr D McGowan though, who came with the Parachute Surgical Team working In that hospital, was allowed to remain there throughout the battle. The Rev A Buchanan with the South Staffordshires was also taken prisoner in the vicinity of the hospital.

The second lift on the Monday met heavy opposition on landing. The Rev RF Bowers, with the 10th Battalion, broke his leg on the drop. He did what little he could with assisting the wounded and burials and then on the Tuesday tried to get a jeep loaded with wounded to a hospital. He came under intense mortar fire and had to turn back. He rejoined the Aid Post as it was overrun by Germans. Bowers, remaining with the wounded, found himself at the wrong end of a German bayonet and had to point firmly at his Red Cross armband. The Rev Alastair Menzies with 156th Battalion The Parachute Regiment also had the misfortune to be taken prisoner almost immediately on landing. The Rev HJ lrwin dropped with the 11th Battalion The Parachute Regiment. He moved with them towards Amhem, and ferried some wounded to a hospital set up in a hotel by the Divisional Headquarters. Here Pare encouraged him to wear a dog collar so that his men could immediately recognise him. He made one out of paper. A short time later he was killed by a mortar bomb.

By the Wednesday it was obvious that there was no hope of reinforcing the 2nd Battalion at the bridge and a perimeter began to emerge, just touching Arnhem and going to the bank of the Neder Rijn, about two miles long and half a mile wide. For the next six days this area was held by the 1st Airborne Division against continuous bombardment and repeated attacks. The Chaplains worked with the wounded with the exception of the Rev R Talbot-Watins, a Methodist minister with the 1st Battalion The Parachute Regiment, who had been with them, like Egan, from the beginning. Initially he assisted the doctor but after he was taken prisoner Watkins took over his duties. However, by the Wednesday the 1st Battalion was reduced to three officers and less than two hundred men. This remnant looked to Watkins for military as well as spiritual leadership. They were not disappointed.

By the Thursday nine chaplains remained with their units. This number was reduced to eight when a Tiger tank shelled the temporary hospital where Fr Benson was working. His right arm was shattered when he went to the help of other wounded. The arm was amputated immediately. When he heard that he would never be able to celebrate Mass in the usual way he lost the will to live and died two days later. His place in the hospital was taken by Pare, whose work typified that of the other chaplains. He constantly went round encouraging the wounded, helping them and the doctors, comforting the dying, scrounging food and water, and every evening taking a brief service on each of the packed wards.

The Senior Chaplain, the Rev AWH Harlow, was either at the Divisional Headquarters or assisting in an Aid Post. He was an older man with grey hair, whose calm and sense of humour gave a peace to those around him. Throughout the battle the chaplains reminded the others of normality. The prayers offered by those men were as much a part of that battle as each round fired. Harlow himself went into voluntary captivity on the Saturday. A truce had been arranged to enable the wounded to be handed over to the Germans, and Harlow was asked to accompany a group of these.

In the southern part of the perimeter the Gunners had set up their Aid Post in the house of a Dutch solicitor. His wife, Kate ter Horst, and their children remained there throughout the battle, living in the cellar. Eventually this was the only place providing medical care in the southern part of the perimeter. The house became so packed with wounded that it was only possible to move by walking on stretcher handles. The dead were piled outside. Mrs ter Horst never complained. Instead she offered every help possible. From the Saturday night onwards she went round even room reading the 91st Psalm from the Chaplain's Bible.

The Chaplain the Rev S Thorne was a quiet, shy man who never left the vicinity of the house and who was the exact opposite to Watkins and his more military approach. Mrs ter Host was surprised to see him clearing out a lavatory, a task which no German officer would have done. But this man had another side to him. On the second Monday German tanks broke into the perimeter and shelled the Aid Post. Thorne and a Bombardier Bolden went out and confronted the tank, holding up a Red Cross flag between them. The tank withdrew.

The withdrawal across the river took place on the Monday night. The Rev WR Chignell was the chaplain who said prayers in the cellars of The Divisional Headquarters. Then, with his boots bound to deaden the noise like the others, he joined the silent procession down to the river. It was a wild dirty night, ideal for a withdrawal, and Chignell was glad when he got to the bank of the river and found an assault boat, as he was a non-swimmer. The Rev J Rowell, who had reached Arnhem on the second day after his glider's emergency landing, took a party of wounded across the river. The Rev R Talbot-Watkins asked Bombardier Bolden to gather those wounded who could make it, and he took thirty severely wounded men across. Then he went back to look for more. He could find none on the other side but dawn broke, so he had to lie up during the day in the river bank, and swim across the river the next night.

Three chaplains remained with the wounded. The Rev S Thorne felt it his duty to stay, and once the withdrawal started he collapsed into a deep sleep. The Rev G Pare also fell asleep for the first time in days. He did not know about the withdrawal and was surprised at the silence the next morning. It was then his job to tell the wounded in the temporary hospital what had happened. The Rev J Morrison decided to stay with his wounded.

After the battle many of the wounded were moved to a converted barracks at Apeldoorn. Harlow, Pare, Buchanan and Thorne still had a vital ministry to perform. But eventually the numbers decreased and the chaplains themselves began to be moved into Germany. Thorne and Pare went together. Thorne decided that he should stay with the wounded but Pare jumped the train, and after several narrow escapes was sheltered by the Dutch underground. Fr McGowan was eventually moved to Apeldoorn from the hospital at Arnhem. Before moving  he literally buried two loads of arms which the Dutch underground later retrieved and then he escaped from Apeldoorn with a Dr M Herford. They took four days to reach the Rhine, but at the bank they got split up, and McGowan was stumbled upon by a German sentry, who almost bayoneted him, and was recaptured. He had come so close, it must have been a bitter disappointment.

On the 25th anniversary in 1969 twelve of those fifteen chaplains still survived. Five were parish priests, one a bishop, one a headmaster, others a school chaplain, a Circuit superintendent, a Benedictine monk, an Army Chaplain and one had resigned his orders to become a probation officer.

Reproduced from the Pegasus Journal December 1987.

Dutch woman who tended Scots soldier's grave dies

29 July 2020

For 75 years, Willemien Rieken tended to the grave of a soldier killed during WW2

A Dutch woman who had tended the World War Two grave of a Scottish soldier since she was a nine-year-old girl has died.

After the Battle of Arnhem in Holland in 1944, children who had lived near the scene of the fighting were given a war grave to maintain.

Willemien Rieken, 85, looked after the resting place of Trooper William Edmund from Musselburgh.

Her death has been announced by the Arnhem 1944 Fellowship.

She was one of the last surviving Flower Children, young people who laid flowers at hundreds of graves of Allied casualties in a ceremony after the end of the war.

“NINE MEN” is a British film that illustrates why training cohesiveness is important.  It is something the Chaplain needs to pay attention to when assigned a unit.  Other themes include attention to detail, obeying superior orders, taking care of one’s mates, and selfless service. Summary of plot from WIkipedia follows.

In a barrack room at a Battle Training Ground in England, a platoon of conscripts are complaining about blisters and are impatient to get into action with the enemy. Sergeant Jack Watson tells them that they need a little bit extra to be successful in combat, which he illustrates with a story from his experience in the Western Desert Campaign.

His story is then shown in flashback. Lieutenant Crawford, Sergeant Watson and the seven men under their command are travelling through the Libyan desert in an Allied convoy, when their lorry becomes stuck in the sand and the convoy moves on without them. As they work to free themselves, they are attacked by German aircraft, injuring Crawford and Johnson and setting fire to the lorry. Setting off on foot and carrying the wounded, they struggle through a sandstorm until they come across a derelict hut. Lieutenant Crawford orders them to hold out there until help arrives but then dies. With only a limited supply of ammunition and their own wits to help them survive, they are then besieged by Italian troops. By various ruses and skillful use of their weapons, they are able to hold out until the Italians make a final assault; as the British soldiers use the last of their bullets and finally resort to a bayonet charge, reinforcements arrive supported by tanks, whereupon the Italians surrender.

Back at the barrack room, Watson concludes his story as the bugle sounds for dinner.

The Australian troops (in the next photo below) of the 8th Division 2nd AIF with their equipment after disembarking at Singapore to strengthen the defence of Malaya against the Japanese, had no idea what they would face. The soldier third from the left is probaly VX21370 Corporal (Cpl) Laurits Theodor Larsen, 2/9 Field Ambulance. Cpl Larsen died of injuries in Ceylon on 12 April 1942, aged 36.

It is a copy of a detailed diary covering the fall of Singapore, Duncan-Wallace's imprisonment, and his liberation aboard a hospital ship bound for Madras. The circumstances surrounding the diary's composition are explained in a preface.

Alexander Munro Duncan-Wallace was sub-manager of an HSBC bank in Singapore. He was born in Scotland, met a lady from Troy, New York, and they were married in China before the war.  The diary was put into public domain by Cambridge University, England.

True Anzac spirit ignored

(Sydney Morning Herald, 2003)

Alex Bell, 29, of Ballarat, in country Victoria, was executed at Thanbyuzayat, Burma, on March 16, 1943. Bell was a sapper in the Australian Army. He'd been working in Malaya as a metallurgist when Japanese forces landed, following Tokyo's sneak attack on Pearl Harbour that brought World War II to the Pacific on December 7, 1941. Bell enlisted on January 27, as Japanese troops were sweeping down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, pushing 19,000 raw troops of the Australian 8th Division (among others) ahead of them. Bell was a soldier only three weeks before he became a prisoner of war for 13 months.

And the day he died at the end of that 13 months Alex Bell would shake hands with the Japanese officer of the firing squad about to kill him. He thanked the officer for unexplained "courtesies and privileges". Although wounded, Bell declined to kneel or sit, his hands bound. He would die on his feet, Bell said, and he asked that his commanding officer, Brigadier Arthur Leslie Varley, an Inverell stock and station agent with "keen blue eyes and a sparse frame", be told of his decision. Then they shot him.

Varley, a Military Cross winner, at 24, from the trench warfare in France and Belgium of 1914-18, was afterwards taken to Bell's execution ground. There the Japanese firing squad "presented arms" to honour the dead Australian's courage. Varley would write in his diary: "The whole of Bell's behaviour has been most gallant." And for what?

Bell's "crime" had been a simple one.

He attempted escape from one of the Japanese POW work camps established to build the 420 kilometres of the infamous Thai-Burma railway from May 1942 to November 1943. There were three in the escape attempt, all Australians. They'd become prisoners, with 17,000 other Australian troops, all ranks, including 1300 wounded, after the British surrender of Singapore, in February, 1942. That capitulation, after a Japanese campaign by 80,000 troops advanced 1100 kilometres in just 70 days, delivered 130,000 military forces - British, Australian, Indian and "local volunteers" - into Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many never to leave them alive.

A quarter of a million Australians were fed into the four years of war in the Pacific. A total of 21,600 became prisoners. More than one in three, or 7800 (36 per cent), died in captivity. A total 13,870 survived to return home. Only "about eight" successfully escaped in the four years. Twenty-seven others variously tried, were caught and executed. The official war history records that 193 others were "known" to have been executed for "other reasons" and a further 375 "believed" executed for "other reasons".

Bell was one of the 27 who died trying to do "his duty". That is, escaping, as all Australian servicemen were ordered to attempt if they became prisoners. The two men with him were, like Bell, citizen soldiers. Major Alan Mull, 46, a sales traveller, of Strathfield, NSW, had enlisted in Sydney on May 3, 1940. Gunner Keith Dickinson, 39, a West Australian living in Bendigo, Victoria, enlisted a year later - on June 4, 1941. In February 1943 they escaped from the Thetkaw railway work camp, 15 kilometres south of Thanbyuzayat. Their goal: to walk to India. They got 80 kilometres before Dickinson, exhausted, could go no further. The others went on, as agreed back in camp. The Japanese recaptured Dickinson. He was taken back to Thanbyuzayat and shot, on March 2, without trial. On March 10, a further 160 kilometres north, Mull and Bell clashed with a pro-Japanese "native patrol". Mull was killed and Bell "badly wounded". Like Dickinson, Bell was returned to Thanbyuzayat. He was shot six days later in the circumstances recorded in Varley's diary.

We know this because it is there in the official war histories. There is even more in the files of the Australian War Memorial. The service records of the dead leave you catching your breath. So can the prose and detail of the war histories. There are 22 official volumes covering World War II. Volume four of the seven-volume series on the army, entitled The Japanese Thrust, was written by Lionel Wigmore, a Sydney journalist and Canberra public servant who was in Singapore until just before its fall. He died, aged 90, in 1989.

But Wigmore did not chronicle the terrible ordeal of Australia's prisoners of war. That was done by A.J. (Bill) Sweeting, the last survivor of the war history unit set up in 1944 by the Curtin Labor government under Gavin Long, a former journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald. Sweeting, now 84, was with the unit its entire life, until the last volume was published in 1977. His harrowing, meticulously recorded 200-page chapter on Australian POWs, including appendices, is entitled, simply, Prisoners of the Japanese. It will stay in the memory and this country's heritage long after he, and the rest of us, are forgotten.

Varley, the dead Bell's CO, saw more than two of his men executed. He was there at the deaths of the Australians known as the Tavoy Eight, one of the more poignant of group "murders" (as the deaths are recorded on some of their individual army records).

All eight were Victorians. All eight were members of the same anti-tank unit, the 2nd/4th Regiment. Two even came from the same country town, Ouyen. One was a grocer's assistant. Another was a fireman. There was a truck driver and a railway worker and a farmer from a place called Fish Creek. Four were aged between 21 and 27. One man, Lance-Bombardier Aubrey Emmett, came from a family in Ouyen which already had lost two uncles, brothers (one a father of six children), in the trenches of World War I. Now the same grim outcome was replaying.

Aubrey Emmett enlisted just three months after he turned 21 on May 16, 1940. His brother Frank, two years older, had enlisted 15 days earlier. Aubrey was barely 23 when a Japanese firing squad executed him and his seven mates, all in a line, at Tavoy, on Burma's north coast, on June 6, 1942, just a month after they'd been shipped there as POWs from Singapore. Brother Frank was in the same anti-tank unit. And he, too, was a POW in Burma, and later in Japan. But, unlike his young brother, Frank never attempted escape. He went on to survive 3 years of depravity in captivity to return home to Ouyen in September 1945.

Of the eight diggers shot that June day in Tavoy, Varley, a witness to their execution, noted in his diary: "The spirit of these eight Australians was wonderful. They all spoke cheerio and good luck to one another and never showed any sign of fear. A truly courageous end."

There is a terrible irony about Varley's captivity. He survived Changi and 18 months in the death camps along the Thai-Burma railway, having returned home an honoured hero, at 25, from World War I 20 years earlier. Then, on September 6, 1944, a bit less than a year before Japan's surrender ended World War II, Varley was senior officer in a group of 1200 POWs, including 650 Australians, shipped out of Singapore for the Japanese port of Nagasaki. They never got there. Six days later, off the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea, their ship, the Rokyo Maru, was torpedoed by an American submarine.

More than 150 Australians survived. Brigadier Arthur Leslie Varley, with the "keen blue eyes and sparse frame", did not. He was last seen drifting, with a number of his men, in a lifeboat. His death is recorded as "drowned at sea". He was 50 years old.

I have written here of only 10 of the 27 "known" cases, officially recorded, of Australian servicemen executed during World War II for abortive escape attempts from the Japanese. The others involve similar extraordinary stories, including two diggers (a corporal and a private) who rowed 320 kilometres, only to be caught, starving, weeks later and returned to Singapore where they were shot.

It is to military authorities' everlasting shame that Australia has always refused to acknowledge the valour of such incidents. None of the 27 men received posthumous recognition, unlike those in some similar failed escape attempts from German captivity in Europe which ended in executions of both British and Australian servicemen, mostly air crew.

It is as if some sort of pariah status attaches to soldiers who surrender rather than "fighting to the death". Military authority seems embarrassed by them. So much so that official British war history ignores altogether their POWs, dead or surviving. In this country there seems a fear they might tarnish the bronzed Anzac image, irrespective of the years of starvation and bestiality in POW camps and the courage of those who survive them and those who give their lives in choosing to try to escape.

John Bradford, an Adelaide amateur naval historian, has been researching military archives, here and in London, since 1994 to build a case to get the Howard Government to review the issue. But a series of letters in the last three years to two junior defence ministers, the National Party's Bruce Webster and the Liberals' Danna Vale, has failed to get even a twitch from the dead hand (no intended pun) of political and military bureaucracy. The most recent letter advised Bradford the "matter is closed".

No, it isn't. Bradford got the attention of Labor's Graham Edwards, the legless Vietnam veteran MP from Perth. In a speech to Parliament before it adjourned for the autumn recess, Edwards acknowledged Bradford's tenacity and the rightness of his campaign. He added: "I am very keen to pursue this [matter] in an attempt to find some justice and to bring some closure to these issues." Twenty-seven dead soldiers deserve no less.

This situation was rectified in 2012:

If taken Prisoner, it is a soldier's duty to try to escape, and a group of 8 friends who were members of the 4th Anti Tank Regiment, made their plans for excape.

It was understood, that if any soldier did escape and was recaptured by the Japanese, there would be dire consequences as a result.

A group of 8 friends, had made plans to escape if the occasion arose, and this occasion arose on 3rd June 1942 at a Prisoner of War Camp at Tavoy.

Unfortunately,they were betrayed by natives and recaptured by the Japanese 0n the 4th, when they were confined to a Burmese native gaol until it was decided what their punishment was to be.

On 6th June, they were all bound with hands behind their backs and taken by truck to a cemetery just the other side of Tavoy airport, where they were blindfolded, and led individually to where 8 graves had been dug. Each grave had a stake place in front of it.

The men were made to sit upright against the stakes to which they were then bound and shot.

These men did not have any sort of trial and were refused last rites and final messages to their loved ones before being executed.

This group of men became known in Australian Military Circles as "The Tavoy Eight" and they, along with at least 12 others, executed as a result of being recaptured after trying to excape were in 2012 posthumously awarded "The Commendation for Galllantry for Service during World War 2."

These awards were presented to members of the families, who are in possession of the individual soldiers War Medals at Parliament House, Canberra in September 2012.