Remembering the war in New Guinea
WATANABE Tetsuo: Naval Surgeon (People)
Module name: Operations (Japanese perspective)
This page was contributed by Ms Vanessa Johnston (Australian War Memorial)
WATANABE Tetsuo was a naval surgeon who served in the South West Pacific and survived the overland retreat from Sio to Wewak during which tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers perished, mostly as a result of sickness and malnutrition. New Guinea was the place, “where soldiers are sent into the jungle without supplies.” This seems to have proven the Japanese saying that, “Java is heaven, Burma is hell, but you never come back alive from New Guinea.”
The New Guinea experience was highly distressing for a surgeon. Tetsuo’s role was frequently just taking the pulse of dying soldiers, as there was nothing more he could do, and then to “beg forgiveness for my uselessness”. Basically the problem revolved around the fact that,“[m]ore soldiers were suffering from malaria and malnutrition than from injuries.”
One of Tetsuo’s early experiences in New Guinea was aboard a ship carrying troops and provisions from Rabaul to Lae. A torpedo sank one of the other ships in the convoy and Tetsuo witnessed the process of collecting the survivors. The crew first picked up those swimming and then those on rafts. Men who had swum all the way to the side of the ship, only to stop in relief beside it and then sink into the water particularly affected Tetsuo. He also found it distressing to see those who, once pulled up onto deck, broke down in tears with the realization that they had lost a limb. Recovery of the survivors left the deck washed with dark blood that would change direction with each wave that hit the ship. As the surgeon, Tetsuo spent an entire night cutting bones and stitching wounds while those still on rafts sang war songs right through the night.
Tetsuo was later posted to Sio in time to be part of a massive Japanese retreat, one that required the men to climb mountains even steeper than Mount Sarawaket. Added to this was the impossibility of air or sea supply drops. The route was too difficult for the sick and wounded to be taken, so Tetsuo was responsible for selecting those who were to be left behind. On 22 December a unit of two hundred left Sio under the leadership of Captain Ukai. After only a few days troops increasingly started falling behind and by the end of the first week the unit had already lost one tenth of its men. The retreat continued on past Gali and there was very little food to be found along the way. By the end of December there were no rations left and the troops were usually eating unripened fruit. Deaths from sickness increased daily, mainly from malignant malaria and diarrhoea. Even as a qualified surgeon there was nothing he could do for the sick.
By mid January Tetsuo was suffering from the lack of food, dizziness had progressed to incessant thoughts about death and he struggled to continue. He kept his perspective though, “no-one was as miserable as the patients near the front without supplies. They just had to wait for death when they got too sick to walk, as nobody would look after them.”
In late January the patients unable to walk were left behind. “Some seemed to have realized what was going to happen to them. The adjutant covered each patient with a new blanket. I left a grenade by the pillow of each patient as I was ordered to. I could not stop the tears coming out of my eyes; I lamented such a duty for a doctor.”
Immense hardship brought out special qualities in individuals. Tetsuo saw a nineteen-year old boy bite off his tongue to kill himself after he collapsed. He had realized his fate and did not want to burden his comrades. Tetsuo also saw a wounded army soldier carefully pick soiled grains of rice off the ground, one by one, from where somebody had dropped them. The soldier had missed out on the last issue of supplies, so he had gone without rice for weeks. That same soldier had maggots in a wound barely covered by a dirty bandage. Tetsuo reduced the man to tears by giving him one of his rations. A survivor from the retreat over Mount Sarawaket quickly advised the surgeon that he would never survive if he sympathized with every soldier. This seemed the general consensus as, “[b]y the track dead bodies were scattered, reeking a horrible putrid smell. Maggots were wriggling in their eyes, ears and mouths although some soldiers were still breathing. This area literally looked like hell. Those who had perished on this climb must have exhausted their last strength...”
By the end of January there were only 50 members of Tetsuo’s Garrison left. By this stage he was just following the soldier in front of him with his head almost touching the buttocks of the man in front. By the time they reached Madang the survivors had been reduce to just 36. By the time the retreat was completed there were only 3 survivors from the 200 members of the 82nd Naval Garrison- Lieutenant Kakiuchi, Petty-Officer Wada and Tetsuo Watanabe. “Excluding a few soldiers who had been transferred to other areas most soldiers had just vanished in the jungle.”
Despite it all though, Tetsuo describes his time in New Guinea as “a great experience - just repetition of hardships after hardships. There was not a single day of comfort.” Tetsuo believed there could be no greater hardship that he could possibly experience in his life.