Remembering the war in New Guinea
Where most of them perished: Indian POWs in New Guinea (Longer text)
Module name: Groups (Indian perspective)
This page was contributed by Dr Peter Stanley (Australian War Memorial)
Over sixty thousand Indian troops were among the Indian units captured by the Japanese in south-east Asia in 1941-42. Though up to 40,000 joined the pro-Japanese Indian National Army, about 20,000 endured a captivity as bad as that suffered by the better-known European prisoners of war.
More Indians were transported by the Japanese to New Guinea than anywhere else. They reached New Guinea and its islands by various routes. Most were shipped in mid-1943 to Wewak or New Britain and dispersed from there. Others came from Banjermasin via Batavia to Surabaya and to Biak, others continuing to Hollandia. Some went from Singapore to Palau and on to Hollandia. It seems that up to 8,000 Indians were been sent to New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville, with smaller parties in the Admiralties, Timor and New Ireland. A small party was sent to Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands, where they were used as labourers. An account of these men's experience as prisoners remains overwhelmingly concealed in the primary sources, mainly compiled shortly after their liberation. It is barely treated by the histories of their units. Some simply omit reference to those captured, others dismiss three-and-a-half years of captivity in a few lines: "disease, privation, and inhuman cruelty took a heavy toll".[1] The history of the Frontier Force Rifles, for example, merely records that "the Sikhs and Dogras were sent to New Guinea, where most of them perished". [2]
Conditions for Indian prisoners of war were at least as severe as those encountered by Allied prisoners of war elsewhere in the Japanese empire. On Bougainville, for example, Naik Gopal Pershad Jha, a clerk and storeman of the Indian Army Ordnance Corps, carefully documented the diminution in rations. In Malaya in 1942 he had received 16 oz of rice or wheat a day. On his arrival on Bougainville in mid-1943 he had received 14 oz. From November 1943 the ration gradually fell, to 9 oz in May 1944, 4 oz in July, 2 oz in August until in 1945 the prisoners were surviving on plants they could forage from the jungle. [3]
Unlike most European prisoners, Indians faced particular religious constraints. Men observing strict religious dietary rules endured particular distress under such a regime. Indeed, Japanese guards were alleged to have deliberately violated religious scruples, such as cutting the beards of Sikh soldiers. [4] Objections to these infringements brought brutal retribution. In an army organised along communal lines with a quartermaster system specifically catering to dietary preferences and prohibitions, the impact of captivity could be profound. Instances occurred where guards offended caste or Q'ranic rules. Naik Khuda Baksh of the Bahawalpur Infantry, for example, described how at Hollandia in April 1944 a Lance Corporal KOBAYASHI ordered a group of Moslem prisoners to pick up some pork. They refused, "saying it was against their religion". KOBAYASHI beat them, striking Naik Baksh until he fell unconscious. [5] Just as captivity threw prisoners of different nationalities together, so Indian prisoners became mixed up. Gopal Pershad Jha's list of 240 prisoners on Bougainville includes men of more than twenty units, evidently including Sikhs, Moslems and Hindus and from a dozen ethnic backgrounds. How such mixtures affected men's ability to survive remains to be investigated. For example, were the few men of the 2/10th Baluchis at a disadvantage compared to the large contingent of the Hong Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery? On who could the single member of the 2/16th Punjabis depend? These and many other questions deserve to be investigated, offering significantly different challenges to investigations of relatively homogenous groups of, for example, Australian prisoners of war.
Every liberated prisoner who was interrogated was asked whether he had suffered or witnessed maltreatment or atrocities that might be referred to various war crimes tribunals. While this might suggest that investigators and intelligence officers trawled for such incidents, it is also abundantly clear that they did not have to dig deep. Virtually every prisoner had been beaten or had witnessed severe beatings. The interrogation reports of liberated prisoners include many accounts of routine brutality. For example, Lance Naik Shadev Singh of the 2/16th Punjab described how at Hollandia he was a member of a fatigue party unloading boxes of dried fish. Another prisoner slipped and dropped his box. A Lieutenant SATO "became very angry, removed his belt and started hitting Ragunath Singh so that he became unconscious for about half an hour." Ragunath Singh lost two front teeth in this incident. [6] Among the few Gurkha groups was one recovered in New Guinea led by Subedar Chumbahadur Mall. He was "the sole survivor of a group which had been shot down in cold blood". Mall's face had been bashed with a rifle butt and he suffered from tuberculosis.[7]
After their liberation, prisoners of war on New Britain demonstrated the treatment they had received for a visiting Australian general. Denied by the absence of a shared language the opportunity to convey to their Australian liberators what they had experienced, they donned Japanese uniforms and ragged uniforms and acted out the beatings to which they were routinely subjected. [8]
Recovery of Indian prisoners
The first indications that Indians were to be found in New Guinea came in March 1944 when 69 Indians liberated on Los Negros by the United States 1st Cavalry Division. [9] Though these men were the first Allied prisoners of war taken at Singapore to be recovered by advancing Japanese forces, almost exactly two years after their capture, little publicity seemed to have ensued. The survivors were taken to Australia and left Sydney by ship for India in October 1944. It is apparent that the presence of Indians on Los Negros came as a surprise to Allied authorities. Neither American nor Australian formations had any experience of Indian troops - who largely spoke Urdu rather than English. Passed along a medical chain of evacuation by unfamiliar personnel, they evidently repeatedly encountered difficulties in cultural and religious sensitivities. For example, even in October 1944, men of the 1st Bawalpur Infantry were offered a meat curry by well-meaning Australians as they waited on the wharf to board the SS City of Lincoln to carry them home. The men refused the meal because the meat had not been killed by one of their own. [10]
In New Guinea the 6th Australian Division took over responsibility for operations in what became known as the Aitape-Wewak theatre in December 1944. Its units immediately began encountering sick and starving prisoners, often wandering in the bush. On 10 December a patrol of the 2/4th Battalion found two emaciated Indians who had been travelling from Wewak for forty-five days, the first of many Indians recovered by the 6th Division in the Sepik campaign. The histories of several Australian battalions refer to their encounters with liberated prisoners. Men encountered by the 2/1st Battalion in March 1945, for example, were described as "very weak but morale still high". In July sentries from the battalion fired on figures they saw in the jungle, inadvertently wounding mortally one of three men of the 4th Punjab Regiment. They were "fine men" but "in a desperate state". [11] More followed: in mid-May, for example, 88 prisoners were recovered by the operations following the landing of "Farida Force" east of Wewak.
Meanwhile on Bougainville the Australian offensives north of Torokina brought more Indians into contact with Indian prisoners. In December 1944 a patrol of the 2/8th Commando Squadron operating on the coast north of Torokina recovered three Indian prisoners of war who had escaped from north-east Bougainville. Later that month a force of Bougainville scouts under Lieutenant K.W.T. Bridge, RANVR, found sixty at Tanimbaubau, at the neck of the Bonis Peninsula. The Japanese had shot forty others as a deterrent after the escape of the smaller party. [12] As the testimony of Jemadar Chint Singh suggests, Indians felt a profound gratitude toward their Australian liberators.
Repatriation of liberated prisoners of war
By November, the numbers of Indian prisoners of war recovered in the Australian area of operations in south-east Asia numbered 6,344. The great majority (5,674) had been concentrated at Rabaul. Australian units also recovered Indian prisoners of war in both British and Dutch Borneo and the remainder were mainly in the Netherlands Indies (390 on Morotai and 190 at Balikpapan) with 90 on Labuan in British Borneo. [13] All of these men were to return to India. They were brought from temporary camps in the islands to detachments of the Indian Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees organisation (RAPWI) Mission. The Mission's tasks were to document and re-equip liberated prisoners and despatch them to India "rehabilitated both mentally and physically to the utmost extent in the time available". Many Indians from New Guinea and the islands passed through a depot in Brisbane before being repatriated by sea. With shipping in such demand in south-east Asia (and indeed, across the world) the transport of Allied troops, liberated prisoners, surrendered Japanese and displaced civilians presented huge problems. In the case of prisoners of war, liberated Australians needed to be transported south-eastwards, while Indians in New Guinea needed to be carried north-westwards. Accordingly, some of the shipping used to repatriate Australian prisoners to Australia was then used to carry Indians home on the return journey. [14]
Indians and indigenous people
The reports of interrogation of Indian prisoners include questions and responses on the relationships between prisoners and "natives", whom the Indians, adopting contemporary European terminology, usually referred to as "kanakas". The evidence of the prisoners' interrogation statements is ambiguous. On the one hand some prisoners complained of "Kanaka kempei" working for the Japanese, and of "natives" disclosing the location of prisoners trying to escape. On the other, prisoners who succeeded in escaping and reaching Australian lines on Bougainville gave details of, for example, nine "natives" from six villages who helped Naik Gopal Pershad Jha escape from Tanimbaubau in 1945. [15] At the same time, many interrogation reports disclose that "natives" delivered escapers to the Japanese. [16] The tension within indigenous communities is apparent from the testimony of Jemadar Nand Singh of the 5/2nd Punjab Regiment. [17] A member of Number 16 Indian Working Party, he had worked along the Sepik coast from Hansa Bay to Wewak to Maprik after arriving in New Guinea in mid-1943. In February 1945 Japanese troops massacred up to forty prisoners at Nungagua, apparently after a raid by Australian-led indigenous troops. Nand Singh escaped and after several days contacted an Australian patrol. Nand Singh's observations on the attitude of indigenous people are revealing. He reported that "the kanakas have no respect for the Japanese". They helped them under duress, a "support entirely based on force and fear". As a result, they were unwilling to give produce from their gardens to passing prisoners, having been ordered not to do so by the Japanese. At Nungagua the tension was personified by the leadership the Japanese had installed. The "Captain No. 1", the village leader, was helpful to Indian prisoners of war, while his deputy, the "Captain No. 2" was "hostile and co-operated with the Japanese". The presence of the Indian prisoners of war could only sharpen the dilemmas faced by all indigenous people whose land was occupied by the Japanese.
Further research
The experience of Indian prisoners of the Japanese, of whom the greater proportion was held in New Guinea, have been inadequately investigated. The research materials, while incomplete (notably excluding the oral history which has been such an important part of the exploration of European prisoners) exist in feasible quantities. The conditions of captivity under the Japanese, including the decisions they faced over collaboration or loyalty, relations within camps and between prisoners and indigenous people, present different challenges to those which have been considered among European prisoners. This essay has sketched out some of the story and some of the issues, drawing upon a small fraction of the possible sources. The challenge to complete the story is compelling.
Notes
1. Geoffrey Betham and H.V.R. Geary, The golden galley: The story of the second Punjab Regiment (Oxford, 1956): 247.
2. W.E.H. Condon, The Frontier Force Rifles (Aldershot, 1953): 174.
3. AWM 54, 423/9/34, ""Information obtained from Indian Army soldiers, captured by Japanese in Malaya & Bougainville [sic] and recovered by Allies"."
4. See the interrogation of Cpl MORISAKI Takeichi of the 20th Special Sea Duty Company, 1 July 1946, AWM 54, ""War crimes trials by Military Court at Rabaul accused ... charged with ill treatment of Indian prisoners of war"."
5. AWM 54, 779/3/46, "Information obtained from Indian Army personnel ... recovered by the Allies"
6. AWM 54, 779/3/46, "Information obtained from Indian Army personnel ... recovered by the Allies"
7. G.R. Stevens, The 9th Gurkha Rifles 1937-1947 (np, 1953): 208. Most Gurkha prisoners remained in Singapore, Malaya or Thailand. As Nepalis they lacked any interest in Indian national appeals, and after 1942 the Japanese desisted from suborning them. Relatively few were sent to New Guinea.
8. Photograph AWM negative number 098229
9. B.C. Wright, The 1st Cavalry Division in World War II (Tokyo, 1947): 24; photographs on 52. The Sikhs made their way into the perimeter of the 12th Cavalry Regiment on the afternoon of 8 March and were evacuated on 9 March. Photographs taken by Australian official photographers "at an Australian base" in New Guinea in May show them in Australian uniforms except for turbans; see AWM negative numbers 017107 and 017103.
10. Photograph, AWM negative number 081621.
11. Unit History Editorial Committee, The first at war (Parramatta, 1987) 400, 415.
12. Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns, pp. 106, 127-28
13. Rajendra Singh, Post-War occupation forces: Japan & south-east Asia (New Delhi, 1958) 190.
14. Singh, Post-War occupation forces, 183.
15. AWM 54, 423/9/34, "Information obtained from Indian Army soldiers, captured by Japanese in Malaya & Bougainville [sic] and recovered by Allies".
16. See several testimonies in AWM 54, 779/3/102, "Copies of purported atrocities and acts of brutality. Interrogation of Indian Army personnel", such as Gunner Mohd Hussain and Sepoy Inayat Allah.
17. AWM 54, 1010/3/109, "Information obtained from an Indian Army officer captured by the Japanese…"