The Sportsmen of Changi

By Kevin Blackburn

Australian prisoners of war playing sport, at times with their captors, does not fit the picture embedded in the popular imagination of horror and suffering in Japanese POW camps during WWII. But incredibly, sport flourished amidst the hellish conditions in these camps. The Sportsmen of Changi is a moving account of diggers for whom sport was not just a means to boost morale and an escape from a dreadful reality, but a way of feeling human in the face of inhuman suffering. Captives played Aussie Rules football at the infamous Changi Prison, and tennis on the Burmese side of the Burma-Thailand Railway. They played soccer, cricket, baseball or basketball and sometimes their prison guards even joined in for a game. And there were many elite sportsmen in these ranks who were intent on reviving their sporting careers after returning home at war's end. What did sports in captivity mean to these soldiers? Did it prove that they were still tough fighting men despite defeat? Or was it their one link to normalcy, a poignant attempt to instil order in a maelstrom of humiliation, disease, violence and despair? The Sportsmen of Changi considers these questions with clarity, delving into the diaries of prisoners and other historical evidence overlooked until now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742241005

Book preview

THE

SPORTSMEN

OF

CHANGI

KEVIN BLACKBURN is an Associate Professor in History at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he has taught since 1993. With British historian Karl Hack he wrote Did Singapore Have to Fall? (2004) and co-edited Forgotten Captives in Japanese Occupied Asia (2008). Growing up in Australia among the cattle properties around Rockhampton and the pineapple farms of Yeppoon, Kevin Blackburn heard an older generation tell stories of how they had fought the Japanese military in far-off places. Since finishing his studies at the University of Queensland, he has traced this wartime generation’s experiences: walking the battlefields and visiting the places of captivity, trying to uncover what did happen and what did not.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Kevin Blackburn 2012

First published 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose

of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without

written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Blackburn, Kevin, 1965–

Title: The sportsmen of Changi/Kevin Blackburn.

ISBN: 9781742233024 (pbk.)

ISBN: 9781742241005 (ebook: epub)

ISBN: 9781742243290 (ebook: Kindle)

Notes: Includes index.

Subjects: Changi POW Camp (Changi, Singapore).

Prisoners of war – Sports – Singapore – Changi.

Prisoners of war – Recreation – Singapore – Changi.

Sports – Singapore – Changi.

World War, 1939-1945 – Singapore – Changi – Prisoners and

prisons, Japanese.

World War, 1939-1945 – Social aspects – Singapore – Changi.

Dewey Number: 796.095957

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover Nada Backovic Design

Cover images Australians playing cricket on an improvised wicket in Malaya, 1941,

Australian War Memorial (AWM09963); iStockphoto

Printer Everbest

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Introduction

LEAVING HOME

1 An army of athletes

2 The sports war of 1941

BATTLE

3 The Battle of Malaya

4 Singapore falls

CAPTIVITY

5 Changi POW camp and its cricket ‘Tests’

6 Changi’s football season

7 Changi guards versus prisoners games

8 Sport and captivity in the worst camps

HOME AGAIN

9 Resuming sporting careers

Conclusion

References

Bibliography

Index

Glossary

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many veterans and members of their families whom I interviewed and corresponded with while doing research for this book. There have been so many that it would be difficult to mention all of them here, so they are listed in the bibliography. In the text of the book, at many places, they are quoted and described. I would also like to thank colleagues who helped with the research and gave advice on the manuscript.

Historians Nick Aplin, Bernice Archer, Peter Cochrane, Peter Horton, Hank Nelson, Dave Park and Wang Zhenping at times read parts of the manuscript or helped with the research. Mark Dapin gave helpful advice. Glenda Lynch and Roger Nixon provided excellent research assistance in Canberra and London. I am grateful to Jeff Leng for drawing the maps.

Thanks should also go to the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia, and the National Library of Australia for giving permission to use their collections. In the United Kingdom, their counterparts, The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum also need to be thanked for allowing me access to their collections. In particular, Rod Suddaby gave invaluable suggestions.

The book was made possible by a research grant from the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Thanks also to Phillipa McGuinness, Uthpala Gunethilake and Heather Cam at NewSouth Publishing, and to editor Sarah Shrubb, for helping turn the topic of sport and Australian prisoners of war under the Japanese from an idea into a book.

Above all, I would like to thank my wife Tan Swee Ngin and our children Emily and Nicolas, who have often been with me on the journeys that have helped produce this book, from the jungles of the old battlefields and camps to the suburban homes of the veterans who fought in these battles and were imprisoned in the camps.

Introduction

Night falls over the Changi prisoner of war (POW) camp on 15 August 1945. A Japanese commander announces to the guards and prisoners that the war is over and the prisoners will be killed in the morning. Japanese officers start burning their records, while guards commence rounding up POWs and shooting them. Guards sadistically bayonet the POWs who are wounded. Panic spreads among the POWs as they flee the camp. This is one of the last scenes of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s television series Changi, shown on the evening of Sunday, 18 November 2001.

For many Australian viewers, the ‘Changi massacre’ they saw that night on television seemed realistic and in keeping with stereotypes of Japanese guards. They were prepared to believe it. But it never happened. The truth is that the POWs and the guards simply waited for the Allies to return. The Japanese at Changi, when they learnt of Japan’s defeat, made no official announcement of the surrender. The POWs knew from their secret wireless sets that the war was over. Instead of shooting the POWs, the Japanese merely handed over to them the large number of Red Cross food packages and clothing supplies that they had denied them for years.

Just as stereotypes make it easy to believe fictitious events that could have happened, they can also make it hard to believe events that did happen, even if there is film footage. Every year, the Anzac Day Australian Rules football match between Essendon and Collingwood goes through the usual homages to the Anzac tradition that we have come to expect. However, in 2008, the Ten Network chose to broadcast Japanese propaganda film footage of the POWs playing Australian Rules at Changi before the start of play to establish the connection between the game and the Australian soldiers, or ‘Diggers’. The footage was part of the Australian War Memorial’s collection of artefacts on sport and war, from which an exhibition was created in 2006. This exhibition, which had a section on Australian Rules at Changi, was called ‘Sport and War’, and travelled around Australia from 2006 to 2008. The images from the film did not match the stereotypes that we have of the POW experience under the Japanese. They seemed hard to accept. Viewers asked: did this really happen at Changi or were these men just acting for the Japanese propaganda cameras? The answer is, Australian Rules was played seriously by the POWs – they even had a league of teams named after Melbourne clubs and their own Brownlow Medal for the ‘best and fairest’ player. The film footage was one of the few times Japanese cameramen did not have to stage events to show POW life.

The playing of Australian Rules at Changi was soon described – two years later, in 2010 – in a popular book by sports journalist Roland Perry, appropriately called The Changi Brownlow. He wrote it through the eyes of the player who won the Changi Brownlow, ‘Peter’ Chitty. Perry gave a compelling and fascinating picture of Australian Rules under the Japanese. But he resorted to stereotypes to tell his story: rugged Australians played footy in shadow of the ‘trigger happy Japanese and Korean guards’ armed with machine guns.

In reality, Changi guards were far from ‘trigger happy’. First, there were very few guards inside the camp area. None went around with machine guns. The few guards patrolling Changi carried either captured British rifles or Japanese standard issue Type 38 bolt action rifles, not machine guns. Cocked guns were a rarity compared with using the butt of the rifle to beat up prisoners. Second, at Changi, order was not kept by guards. The Commanding Officers (COs) of the POWs mostly ran the camp. They even established their own provost patrols of military police, or redcaps. The prisoners of Changi had considerable autonomy. The huge amount of sport played was a sign of how they ran their own lives in the camp.

In his story of football in Changi, Perry leaves out accounts of guards playing against prisoners in games of soccer, baseball and basketball. ‘Gritty’ Australians defying the Japanese by playing footy is one thing, and can be accommodated by stereotypes, but ‘Japs’ playing sport with their prisoners is too much to explain.

Many find it hard to accept that sport was played at all by the POWs, let alone with their guards, such is the power of the stereotype of them as passive victims doing the bidding of their Japanese captors rather than active individuals intent on maintaining their physical and mental strength through organising their own activities despite the weakened condition of their bodies.

The playing of sport by the POWs under the Japanese during World War II was an important part of maintaining morale. For the POWs, sport was an expression of nationality when that nationality had been crushed in humiliating defeats: it was both an escape and a determination to recreate a desired normality. Playing sport was also an essential part of asserting the masculinity of POWs who were questioning their abilities as fighting men after being defeated by the Japanese and held captive. In the male world of the POW camps, physical prowess was a vital way for individuals to show that they were still tough men.

Despite the significant role sport played in captivity, it has often been left out of accounts of the POW experience under the Japanese. When reading the published memoirs of these POWs, the sports played in captivity are rarely, if ever, mentioned. Listening to oral history interviews with ex-POWs often produces a similar result. However, when reading the diaries of those POWs who wrote every day, surprisingly, sporting events in the camp are mentioned regularly. Even the details of the scores and the best players have been carefully recorded in those diaries.

Rowley Richards’ well-written book on his experiences as a prisoner, A Doctor’s War, never once mentions sport being played by the prisoners. Yet his diaries, from which he wrote the book, give fascinating, but brief, accounts of Australians organising competitive tennis matches and soccer games during February and March 1943 at Thanbyuzayat, the Burmese beginning of the Burma-Thailand Railway. He even describes a lively soccer match between the Australian prisoners and the Japanese guards. This match was organised on 15 February to mark the fall of Singapore. The prisoners defeated the Japanese 3–1. He recorded that the POWs were told by their own officers to take it easy in the second half so that the Japanese would not lose face.

Diaries kept by the prisoners are not based on memory of the past; they are the events as they occurred. POW memory of the past is influenced by present-day perceptions. Playing sport in captivity is often not mentioned, perhaps bcause it does not easily fit into the stories found in memoirs of suffering and enduring.

For many prisoners, sport is simply forgotten because it is overwhelmed by these other memories. This can produce some puzzling paradoxes when interviewing POWs. Merv Neil was a player in the team that won the Changi 1942–43 rugby league competition, the Queensland 2/10th Field Regiment. He remembers the rugby league he played, as he was in one of the teams. I had contacted him through Dr Bob Goodwin, an ex-POW of the regiment who wrote its battalion history. I asked Neil about the Changi Australian Rules matches that are claimed to have been watched by up to 10 000 prisoners. His reply: ‘I don’t recall any Australian Rules games at Changi … But when I was talking to Bob, he said he could not remember any rugby being played at Changi. Our team won the competition!’ Thus what really happened in the POW camps can sometimes be obscured. Memories that fit more readily with the stereotypes are easy to recall. Those that do not are harder to remember, if they can be recollected at all.

Sometimes the POWs’ memories of sport in the camps are triggered by recalling elite sportsmen who were prisoners. The 50 000 Australian and British soldiers captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942 included many elite sportsmen, some of whom had played internationally. This book identifies them and tells the stories of how they went from top players in their sports to soldiers, then into captivity, and finally after the war to survivors attempting to resume their careers in sports.

I myself was astonished to find so many sportsmen in the ranks and that so much sport was played in captivity. I started forming my impressions in the 1970s and 1980s, growing up in the cattle-grazing and pineapple-growing countryside of Rockhampton and Yeppoon. Many of the veterans living there had served in New Guinea, but there were others from the fall of Singapore and the Middle Eastern campaign. Behind the doors of simple old wooden homes were extraordinary stories. Some veterans had their health badly affected by the war and suffered from chronic illnesses that seemed unbearable. I shall never forget visiting one widow who calmly told me when introducing herself: ‘My husband, he killed himself in the garage years ago.’ On the other hand, there were veterans I met who prided themselves on their fitness, told stories of how they had been active sportsmen, and suggested that they could hit for six whatever I could bowl them. These impressions never left me. When I moved to Singapore in the early 1990s, I soon found myself walking battlefields and places of captivity pondering, among other questions, how did active sportsmen behave in both battle and captivity?

This book uses their lives to question the stereotypes that have surrounded sport and war. Was the image of the Australians as better athletes and soldiers than their British counterparts little more than propaganda? Did playing sport make for better ‘fighting men’, as the Australian and British commanders hoped? Were the Australians better able to endure captivity because they were brought up in a land where there was plenty of sunshine and bountiful good food and they had developed ‘superior physiques’?

But first, who were the sportsmen among the soldiers defending Singapore?

Leaving Home

1

An army of athletes

As the afternoon sun wore on, the hot and humid air of Singapore started to penetrate every room of the large military transport ship that was making its way to the wharf at the Sembawang naval base on 18 February 1941. The brief showers of rain that had fallen on the ship as she came into dock only increased the humidity, as the sun soon came out again. On board this converted passenger ship, the Queen Mary, were soldiers wearing slouch hats. To ease the boredom of their two-week voyage, they had staged boxing bouts on the open deck. Champions and money wagered came and went as they moved inexorably towards their destination. They were anxious to get off the Queen Mary. First to disembark were the officers. The Singapore Straits Times journalist waiting at the wharf reported that ‘a senior ranking officer’ was ‘delighted with his men and pointed proudly to their healthy, bronzed physique’. He told the journalist, ‘They don’t look so big from here as they really are …Wait until you see them on the same level as yourself.’

These were the men from the Australian 8th Division, sent to shore up the defence of Malaya and Singapore. They were 6000 Australian soldiers of the 22nd Brigade, which had as its core three infantry battalions. The 2/18th Infantry Battalion had recruited 60 per cent of its men from the country towns of northern New South Wales and the rest from Sydney. The 2/19th Battalion was drawn mainly from the Riverina district of New South Wales. The 2/20th Battalion was raised in Sydney. Recruits from the tough working-class area of Balmain in Sydney were so prominent in the 2/20th Battalion that a common Balmainaccented expression became their greeting: ‘Howya goin’ mate, orright?’

Many of the local population were happy to see reinforcements against a possible attack by Japan arrive. They also knew about the magnificent performances of Australians in the heady days of interwar sport, symbolised by their dominance in cricket under Don Bradman. There were hopes that the local sports scene would be enlivened by the traditional British and Australian rivalry. The British Army had already been playing a lot of sport – to encourage discipline and to acclimatise its troops. No one could open a local newspaper without seeing a story on the mixed fortunes of the British Army in the local Malayan competitions. A few days after the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) disembarked at Singapore, the Malaya Tribune correspondent with the AIF in Malaya, G.S. Hammonds, reported that the Australians would soon be receiving their sporting equipment, and ‘it is believed that at cricket, if not at other sports, the men of the Australian forces now in Malaya will give a very good account of themselves against any opposition Malaya can provide’.

An idea began to take root: the Australians, because they had done so well in interwar amateur sport, were an army of athletes. The Penang Straits Echo & Times of Malaya welcomed the Australians by acclaiming them as men in the ‘Peak of Physical Condition’. This image soon led to the belief that each Australian was so fit he was worth two or more ordinary soldiers. The welcome given to the Australians by the Singapore Free Press seemed to suggest this:

It is not just that the garrison has been greatly strengthened in points of numbers and equipment, but that the reinforcements comprise many thousands of the famous ‘Diggers’, the great fighting men of the commonwealth who have these past months in the Middle East revived the prowess and achievements of the A.I.F. of the last war.

Later, Lance Sergeant Kenneth Ignatius Harrison, of the Victorian 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, was flabbergasted to read in a local newspaper that the 8th Division’s commander, Major General Gordon Bennett, was reported to have said, ‘One AIF Man is equal to 10 Japs.’

One Australian needed to be worth several Japanese. Military officials were desperate to hide the weak defences of Singapore behind such rhetoric. The British Chiefs of Staff estimated that they needed 48 infantry battalions and two armoured brigades to adequately defend Malaya and Singapore. They only had 31 infantry battalions when the Japanese attacked, and of those, just 17 were ready for battle. While the public knew there were lots of Australian soldiers, they did not know exactly how many there were in comparison with their British and Indian counterparts. When the Japanese attacked on 8 December 1941, there were eventually 15 200 Australian, 19 600 British and 37 000 Indian soldiers, with 16 800 local part-time volunteers.

Australian ‘brown giants’ versus

British ‘stunted half-toothless lads’

So how accurate was the propaganda image of the Australian soldiers as being of the finest physique, especially when compared with other soldiers? The Australian Army wanted to quickly demonstrate to the local population that they were indeed an army of athletes, so they organised an exhibition game of Australian Rules football on 21 February 1941 between the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and themselves. It was to be covered extensively by the press. A game of Australian Rules rather than rugby union would put some of the tallest and most agile of the Australian soldiers on display, reinforcing the image of the Australians as ‘brown giants’. The Australian Army, though having two Victorian Football League players in their ranks, fielded neither of them. Corporal Leslie Allan ‘Peter’ Chitty had played two games for St Kilda in 1936, and Private Harold Charles Ball was a ruckman who had played in Melbourne’s 1939 and 1940 premiership victories. Chitty and Ball were available to play, as they had both disembarked on 18 February with the ambulance and medical units they had joined up with, but the army felt confident enough not to call on them.

The Australian Airmen had been stationed in Singapore and Malaya since July 1940 and so were much more acclimatised than the ‘Diggers’ of the army. But the Airmen had less talent to draw upon: they were a small group, only three squadrons. Astonishingly, the Airmen led every quarter of the game and won against the Diggers, 8–10–58 to 5–7–37. The attempt by the Diggers to demonstrate their fine sporting prowess by having an Australian Rules match so close to their arrival had backfired. The army press release described the match in the best way it could:

There was little to choose between the two sides in the first three quarters, but the tropic conditions exacted a rather heavy toll of the AIF in the last quarter during which the Airmen scored frequently to win by a comfortable margin.

Despite the inauspicious beginning, the Diggers quickly acclimatised to the tropical conditions. The fitness of the Australians in Malaya during 1941 impressed Major General R.M. Downes, the Australian Inspector-General of Medical Services. He was on a four-month tour of inspection of the Second AIF (the first being that which fought in World War I).

In his report, Downes concluded that the Second AIF was fitter than the First AIF. He praised the emphasis being placed on recreation and sport as a way of keeping the soldiers healthy and fit. In Malaya, Downes observed, ‘The general appearance of the troops is excellent.’ He was astonished that ‘the trying nature of the tropical climate has had surprisingly little effect on health with the exception of troops over 35 years of age. There has been little serious illness, especially of the varieties that are common in tropic climates.’ Parts of Downes’ reports were made public and used by the Singapore Morning Tribune to express delight that they were now being defended by Australians who were fitter than those of the First AIF, who were renowned for their ruggedness in World War I.

Bennett, as the commander of the AIF in Malaya and Singapore, felt strongly that playing sport was good for his troops’ fitness and morale. He saw the value of having sports grounds near where the men were stationed and encouraged them to actively participate in sport. Bennett was noted for rigorous training which emphasised both readiness for combat and physical fitness. He quickly dispensed with any activity that did not contribute to his troops being able to fight well – this included ceremonial drills and inspection parades.

Diet, according to Bennett, was also crucial to his troops’ fitness and ‘superior physiques’. The press reported that the Australians’ physiques were maintained by rations that had ‘rather more meat’ than their British counterparts had. Bennett was determined to keep it that way despite pressures from the British Army to reduce the Australians’ meat rations. He wrote to Percy Spender, the Australian Minister for the Army:

Many attempts have been made in the past by the British Military Authorities here to have the Australian scale of rations reduced to the level of the British scale. All these endeavours have been rejected by me, and will continue to be opposed. It is my firm belief that we should make our men as fit as it is possible to make them, if we expect them to fight the battle they will be called upon to face should hostilities ensue. It is better to have too much than too little.

The press lapped up the idea that the Australian reinforcements sent to defend them were extremely strong and fit, more so than the British troops already stationed in the country. The Penang newspaper, Straits Echo & Times of Malaya, when introducing the Australian soldiers to its readers, republished the actual words of C.E.W. Bean, the Australian official historian of the First AIF, that ‘it was a certain quality of Australians that, having lived a largely outdoor life, many of them were half soldiers before enlisting’. Bean’s mythology of the Australian soldier as a rugged character shaped by the Australian bush was reproduced without comment or criticism. English soldiers were described as having bodies crippled by growing up malnourished in the sunless urban slums. The Australians were eulogised as tall and fit men who grew up eating meat every day in a healthy outdoor environment.

The Pinang Gazette and Straits Chronicle drew upon English writer Charles Edward Montague. During World War I, Montague wrote of British ‘battalions of colourless, stunted, half-toothless lads from hot, humid, Lancashire mills’, comparing them with the Australian and Canadian Dominion ‘battalions of men startlingly taller, stronger, handsomer, prouder, firmer in nerve, better schooled, more