Line of Fire Read online

  The Japanese flag and the swastika hung on flagpoles side by side.

  Up the steps, onto the verandah and through the door were desks with soldiers at typewriters. She and Ted were marched into one of the hot, dim interrogation rooms, where a neatly dressed young man was waiting for them. Takebe Ken politely introduced himself as an interpreter with the Japanese Navy’s 8 Communication Unit and asked them to please sit.

  Takebe had been a teacher from the city of Moriya, just north of Tokyo, and had been called up six months earlier and assigned to the Naval General Staff to translate wireless messages. He had been sent to Rabaul specifically to question prisoners of war, and he was intensely interested in this couple accused of being spies.

  A Kempeitai and a navy officer sat opposite, and Ted Harvey and Marjorie were questioned about laying stones on the beach near their plantation in an effort to contact planes. Harvey might have attempted to explain that he was simply trying to get his family back to Australia.

  But you admit to laying stones on the beach to contact enemy planes?

  Yes, yes, of course, said Harvey.

  I was told, said Marjorie, that my boy and I would be taken down to the Vunapope Mission.

  Your boy? Is he a native boy?

  No, no, I’m talking about my son. I have my son with me at the camp. He’s 11 years old.

  Takebe translated and told her, No, the officer is not aware of this. In any case, such a thing is not possible.

  ‘I remember that they confessed only to laying stones on the ground,’ said Takebe in 1950, in an interview in Tokyo with Australian war crimes investigators. ‘They also stated at the time that they had children. It seems that the interrogation was simple and did not take long.’

  The Kempeitai had a reputation for brutality, but in Rabaul they had recently found themselves under the control of the Japanese Navy’s 4th Fleet. The interrogation was on behalf of the navy and the prisoners were to be tried by the navy. In any case, they seemed cooperative. There was no need to extract more information; the Japanese had a confession, a letter, a radio and a hidden revolver. There was plenty of evidence against them.

  The couple was ushered out, into the stinging sun and a waiting car, and taken back to the storeroom prison.

  While Marjorie and Ted Harvey were being interrogated by the Kempeitai, the commander of the Japanese 4th Fleet, Inoue Shigeyoshi, was on his flagship Kashima in Simpson Harbour coordinating his forces as the Battle of the Coral Sea raged. Five days later, playing ball with the guards, Dickie would have seen an aircraft carrier limp back into the harbour, battered and dirty, the flight deck empty and the hull pitted.

  Other ships arrived still smouldering, down by the stern, some listing, many filled with ragged holes, fountains of water streaming from the sides as the pumps tried to keep them afloat. The guards looked shaken, were suddenly serious and stopped playing with him. When Dickie came in to tell Jimmy and his mother about the damaged ships, Jimmy and Ted shook hands.

  Marjorie, though, didn’t believe it was good news at all. She might have sensed that their position was precarious, that their fate relied on the Japanese feeling magnanimous. She had pinned her hopes on the Japanese changing their minds again and sending her and Dickie to the Catholic nuns at Vunapope. She had planned to beg for mercy, for Dickie’s sake. A change in mood now . . . well, anything might happen.

  In fact, the Japanese Navy’s lawyers had already decided that when the fleet returned from the battle, the entire family would be tried for espionage. The man who would convene the court martial, Vice Admiral Inoue, was in a very bad mood because he was about to lose his job. Even though the Battle of the Coral Sea was being publicised in Japan as a victory, Inoue’s boss Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku knew it was a lost opportunity that might prove fatal for the war effort. With the invasion of Port Moresby delayed, the US would be able to pour men and equipment into Australia and Papua. Without Port Moresby, the Japanese at Rabaul would be forced to defend rather than attack. Japan had lost the initiative.

  From the day the Japanese came ashore at Rabaul, everyone who lived there had been subject to Japanese martial law and anyone who broke those laws could face a military court, or court martial.

  If Ted Harvey thought, as many did, that war was fought by empires that to some degree respected each other, and that conventions of war offered some vague protection to civilians, then he was wrong. Even if the Japanese had ratified and respected the Geneva Convention, there was no protection for spies.

  Ted Harvey, Marjorie and Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker had been caught red-handed with a hidden radio transmitter. Marjorie had a concealed revolver. These were serious enough offences under military law to warrant a court martial, and Harvey had admitted in his letter to Hugh Scott that he had a radio with which he tried to communicate with Port Moresby. The Japanese squadrons based in Rabaul had been complaining that someone in the Bainings was trying to signal enemy planes, and Harvey had admitted to laying stones on the ground. There was plenty of evidence against him.

  The only question was what to do with 11-year-old Dickie, who had been in his mother’s company and had punched a Japanese soldier. In the end, he also would be charged with espionage.

  The day after the surviving ships started limping back into Simpson Harbour, an operations conference was held on Inoue’s flagship, Kashima. Inoue, stricken by the failure to achieve his goal, probably wasn’t paying too much attention when he signed the document convening the court martial of the Australians. If he’d asked about it, he’d have been told the case was cut and dried. He appointed the commanding officer of the local garrison as president of the court.

  The commanding officer of the 81 Naval Garrison Unit, Captain Mizusaki Shojiro, had a habit of making solo visits to the prisoners’ compound, and was curious to see the European spies when they arrived. Mizusaki was 53, a career naval officer who had recently suffered his own military disaster. Several weeks earlier, US warplanes near Lae had sunk from under him his armed cruiser, the Kongo Maru. Mizusaki was humiliated, a captain without a ship, and when he took command of the Japanese guard in Rabaul, he was eager to make a big impression so he could push for a new command at sea. He took his temporary role ashore as seriously as a combat command and made a point of knowing everything that went on under his command. That included meeting the prisoners, and he became a familiar face to most of them. He was tall, spoke careful but broken English, and when he inspected the female prisoners at Vunapope, he surprised them by saying, ‘Please, just call me Michael.’

  With Vice Admiral Inoue anchored in the harbour, he was keen to show that he could run a tight ship, and that included strict naval discipline.

  On 11 May 1942, the town was particularly unpleasant. On the south-easterly wind came a constant rain of fine volcanic ash. It brought the smell of sulphur from the volcano, which mixed with the acrid smell of burning rubber and oil from the ships.

  The four European adults charged with espionage were collected by truck and taken to an empty building in Chinatown. Dickie remained behind.

  The military court martial wasn’t based on principles of natural justice; it was meant to impose military discipline, and to serve as an example to others, to deter acts of resistance, sabotage and other anti-Japanese activity. At the time of Marjorie’s capture, the war had been going well for the Japanese. That had changed in just a few short days.

  The commander of the 4th Fleet’s 8th Base Force in Rabaul, Vice Admiral Kanazawa Masao, had also been receiving complaints from the Naval Air Force that their attacks were being anticipated, and it could only be because of spies. The pilots were convinced Europeans were signalling the enemy and might even have tipped off the Americans about MO Operation. How else could the Americans have known where the Japanese invasion force would be?

  ‘Therefore, everyone was ordered to locate these spies,’ said Kanazawa after the war. ‘I have believed since then that Matsunaga [Matsunaga Keisuke, head of the 8th Special U
nit in Rabaul] and other staff officers under my command were under considerable pressure to catch the spies and make an example of them.’

  Under these circumstances, the accused prisoners didn’t stand a chance, but the ceremony and authority of the court was impressive. The illusion of justice might have made Ted Harvey, Marjorie, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker think they were getting a fair trial. They were not.

  When they arrived at the building, they were shown into a large room, empty except for tables and chairs. The interpreter Takebe Ken was waiting, but this time he was wearing his crisp white naval uniform.

  Sitting at a long table in front of them were naval officers also in white. Takebe, serious and solemn, explained that this was to be their trial by a specially convened court, Gumbatsu Shobun Kaigi, a Japanese military court martial. He introduced the members of the court. In the middle of the long table sat Captain Mizusaki, commander of the naval garrison and now president of their court martial. On Mizusaki’s left was Lieutenant Commander Ozawa Oshio, the legal officer from the 4th Fleet. He had come ashore from the fleet’s flagship, Kashima, as the representative of the fleet’s commander, Vice Admiral Inoue. The Kashima was due to leave on 14 May, so the trial had to be finished by then. On Mizusaki’s right was the third judge, Sekiguchi Kozo, a signals officer from the 8 Base Force headquarters. On the right of Sekiguchi was the court’s prosecutor, Lieutenant Endo Yukio. There was no defence counsel.

  Mizusaki, with Takebe interpreting, explained that the court had been convened on orders from Vice Admiral Inoue, after consultation with the commander of the 8 Base Force, Vice Admiral Kanazawa Masao. This was a very serious matter.

  Mizusaki told them the charge was espionage, and he asked the accused to state their names and nationalities.

  Alfred Arthur Harvey, British.

  Marjorie Jean Harvey, Australian.

  James Joseph Manson, Australian.

  William Henry Parker, Australian.

  Richard Harvey’s name was taken down as well, although he wasn’t required to attend the court.

  The details of the charges were read, stating that the group had communicated with the enemy by radio telegraphy and other signals.

  The accused weren’t allowed legal assistance; the power rested completely with the military. They did have the opportunity to speak in their own defence, and Marjorie would have spoken in Dickie’s defence, but the outcome had already been decided.

  The trial proceeded in Japanese. The room was hot, and the polite man Marjorie thought of as Ken tried to keep up, telling her what the prosecution would be using as evidence. But she was tired and the voices would have been lulling her to sleep. Ted Harvey might well have been muttering to himself, sometimes interrupting, sometimes repeating something Ken said, and would have been told to be quiet.

  Apart from Marjorie, Jimmy was the only other one who seemed to be trying to concentrate on what was going on. Bill Parker, still very ill, had his chin on his chest.

  And then the court adjourned. Ken asked them to stand while the judges left the building, and they were released into the choking harbour breeze that now seemed glorious. Marjorie didn’t mind the smell of war; she was just thankful to be out of that room.

  The next morning, when they were brought in, another man was sitting in a lone chair behind them. Yamakawa Kioji was 24, and like Takebe he was a translator in the 8 Communications Unit. Yamakawa’s job was to intercept enemy radio signals and, after the war, he remembered ‘three or four’ prisoners at the trial, including Marjorie and a man born in Melbourne. This was Bill Parker, a former court clerk himself.

  Bill Parker had lived for half of his life in New Guinea, ever since he returned from the Great War, and today there is little evidence left of his life there. The New Guinea Administration records were destroyed when the Japanese invaded, and American bombing, volcanic eruptions and the tropical climate finished off the rest. The Japanese also destroyed their own military records at the end of the war, including the court martial documents, erasing nearly all evidence of what happened.

  After the war, Australian war crime investigator Captain Murray Tindale tried to reconstruct the events, and he questioned the few Japanese survivors who’d been involved in the case. Mizusaki Shojiro was one of them; he’d become an insurance broker in Tokyo. Mizusaki told Captain Tindale that only Ted Harvey, Marjorie and her son were on trial. Another judge of the court, Sekiguchi, said the same thing. But Tindale thought they were lying, because of Yamakawa’s recollections of the trial.

  ‘As Yamakawa was positive at least three men and one woman were tried at the court martial he attended,’ he said, ‘it now becomes apparent that Staff Officer Sekiguchi of 8 NBF and Captain Mizusaki lied to interrogator when they said only the Harveys were tried on that occasion.’

  It’s hard to say why they might have lied about Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker not being present. Perhaps they just forgot, recalling only what made this trial poignant: a man, his wife and their son facing death.

  In any case, the trial of all five was over in three days. There’d been two days of questioning and evidence. The judges deliberated and delivered the judgment on the final day, Wednesday 13 May, just before Inoue’s ship was to sail. The reading of the judgment took two hours.

  Mizusaki asked the four adults to stand and then delivered the verdicts on each of the charges.

  Guilty.

  Takebe then interpreted as accurately as he could.

  ‘At the very end the commander said something very difficult in Japanese, so I asked him how I should render it into English,’ said Takebe. Lieutenant Sekiguchi Kozo, next to Mizusaki, said to tell them ‘a very stiff and heavy sentence will be meted out for the crime you have committed’.

  Takebe Ken repeated it in English.

  And then Harvey told the court he was grateful for the fair trial. Marjorie also thanked Mizusaki, who must have realised that the Europeans didn’t understand that the sentence meant death.

  Even Takebe Ken wasn’t sure; he later said that he thought it had meant death. The sentence had been passed on all of them, including Dickie, who wasn’t at the trial. Marjorie and Ted Harvey went back to their storeroom prison believing that, at worst, they’d be prisoners for the rest of the war, which was what they expected in any case. How bad would that be? The war couldn’t last much longer, given the state of the ships in the harbour. Perhaps Marjorie and Dickie would now be sent to blessed Vunapope to live with the blessed nuns.

  As soon as the trial was over, the result was sent to Vice Admiral Inoue, who confirmed it and passed it on to Vice Admiral Kanazawa, who also signed off on the sentence.

  ‘As commanding officer of 81 Naval Garrison Unit, I was ordered by Commander Matsunaga to carry out the death penalty,’ Mizusaki told war crimes investigator Captain Tindale in August 1949, ‘so I in turn ordered Lieutenant Endo to dispose of them by shooting.’

  But when questioned by Tindale in Tokyo two months later, Matsunaga denied having signed or even seen the order. ‘I firmly believe that I had nothing to do with these incidents,’ said Matsunaga in October 1949. A few days later, another of the court judges, Sekiguchi Kozo, said he couldn’t understand why Matsunaga would deny it; it was true.

  It’s difficult to imagine what Marjorie and Dickie, Ted Harvey, Jimmy Manson and Bill Parker were thinking in those few days after the trial. Was it later explained to them they were to die? The Japanese officers may have believed the death sentence had been implied by the verdict; they didn’t have to spell it out. Mizusaki’s chief concern was security; he didn’t want trouble in the prison camp. If the Europeans knew they were going to die, they might resist, or try to escape, or somehow incite unrest. That wouldn’t look good on his record. And wasn’t it kinder if they didn’t know?

  On Monday 18 May 1942, five days after the court martial, in the late afternoon, trucks arrived outside the POW compound.

  Marjorie and Dickie were put into the back with Ted and Jimmy and Bill, an
d then six guards climbed aboard. Hamada Diazo, a senior guard at the prisoners’ compound, climbed up behind them. Marjorie thought he might be sick with something. Served him right. The truck drove down Malaguna Road, past the Freezer, where the former editor of the Rabaul Times, Gordon Thomas, was working. She took Dickie’s hand in hers and held it tight.

  The truck parked briefly outside the 81 Naval Garrison Headquarters, the old Rabaul courthouse building, to collect the master of arms at the 81 Naval Garrison Unit, Warrant Officer Fujisaki Kunihei, who climbed aboard wearing a long sword. Marjorie tried to catch the eye of the guards, but none looked at her.

  From base headquarters the truck headed south-east along Mango Avenue, and turned onto a dusty road that curved under the Mother volcano, leaving the last of the European houses behind, heading towards the lower airfield.

  Thick groves of palms and frangipani hid the harbour until the truck burst into a clearing where palms framed a blue sea, revealing the dull hulls of warships, dented and scratched, already starting to rust under the rain of ash and sulphur from the volcano.

  Marjorie may have convinced herself they were being shipped back to Japan, to some labour camp. This was obviously what Mizusaki had meant by ‘a very stiff and heavy sentence’. But then they had passed the wharves and she could think of no reason to be heading into this, the most desolate part of the harbour shore. There was nothing here but the stinking volcano.

  A new track, bulldozed by the Australian military a year earlier, took the truck around a shallow bay. The road went past Repindik village, and they might have heard chickens scattering from the road.

  They passed Lakunai aerodrome, where fighters were lined up beside the runway. After two soldiers handed them the red lap-laps and motioned that they were to cover their eyes, Marjorie held Dickie’s hand so tight he squirmed. But she couldn’t let go.