Each of the prisoners was asked to state, one by one, his birthplace, his unit, rank, name and age. To what extent the not yet identified Stockholm syndrome was at work in Leo and the others, I have no idea. They were human, after all. That growth of solidarity between captor and captive, particularly when exalted by the solemn ritual of a trial and the prospect of a formal execution, probably works even on heroes. Was Leo still looking for, grateful for, signs of humanity even in Sakamone the presiding judge or in Minatoya the prosecutor, or perhaps even from the real presiding presence of the general in the gallery?
Lydon later told me that the Japanese came to trial only when they felt the case was eminently provable against the accused. Their inquisitorial process was begun that afternoon, and to match the prosecutor, Minatoya, there was no corresponding defence counsel.
Minatoya, I also knew from briefings by Tom Lydon, had set out to prove the men were both perfidious and heroic – that was always Hidaka’s claim, anyhow. The ‘stratagem’ of which they were guilty was that except for a few commissioned officers, the party willingly refrained from wearing badges or caps to show their ranks, so that they could not be recognised as fighting members of the armed forces to which they belonged. They had used camouflage dye on exposed skin surfaces. Doucette and Leo and six other members had worn sarongs! A Japanese national flag was flown by them, and a further Japanese flag was painted on the stern of Nanjang.
On October 10th of the previous year, the party under Lieutenant Colonel Doucette had launched a sudden and heavy fusillade at a Kaso Island police boat containing five Malay policemen. Four of the crew of the police boat were killed. By December 1944, the time of apprehension of all the accused persons standing before the court, they had confronted Japanese garrisons on a number of islands and killed Captain Matsukata, Lieutenant Hiroshi, along with some fifty-five other army personnel. Thus they had engaged in hostile activities without wearing uniforms, and had also used the vessel as a stratagem of offence and penetration.
The second charge was espionage, the accusation that various of the party had collected intelligence to take back to Australia, information on the strength of garrisons, movement of shipping, docking arrangements at Bintang and Bukum, bauxite mining at Lingaa Island, etc., etc. While waiting for the party to return to NE1, my cousin Mel Duckworth had made notes on the passage, frequency of military aircraft, anti-aircraft defences and shipping. Now they brought these forward and questioned the Englishman Filmer, the man who had landed on D-Day but then blundered into Memerang.
The prosecutor held up one Japanese flag, one notebook, one sketchbook, one camera, seventeen negatives. Yes, all that property belonged to Memerang, said Filmer. The flag had been waved, the photographs taken.
In lonely years I would complain savagely to myself about Filmer. I had thought him a dupe – he reminded me of the British commander at Singapore, Perceval, who was foxed into surrendering by the Tiger of Malaya, Yamashita, even though many officers under him wanted to fight on. The pattern, I believed, was repeated in a modest but terrible way by Filmer. My thesis had been that Filmer, the professional officer, blinded by fatuous codes of military behaviour – or, to invoke it again, the Stockholm syndrome – failed to attack the charges head on. In a strange way the fool felt honoured by them. Combine this with the fact that he was probably the one who opened fire on the Malay police boat off Kaso, and thus gave their presence away, and you have the reason why, whenever I’ve encountered Major Filmer in dreams, I’ve torn the flesh from him and flayed him with bitter Australian insult. Basically, my grievance against him was that he was the first to accept the Japanese charges, and he laid down the pattern for his men to do the same. Major Minatoya asked him, Did you commit these crimes, and Filmer said yes without qualification. When he was asked how long his group had plotted their attack, he said he only knew the details of it a few days before he left Australia, a statement which shows that compared to Leo he was one of those ring-ins Doucette had a weakness for, that he was brought along by Doucette on impulse, or because he pleaded. And yet here he was talking on behalf of the whole party, and impervious to the wrongness of that, as only a professional officer could be. He agreed with Minatoya that rank should always be worn, so that the enemy could identify officers. That was an asinine thing to say, as our side had little training in their badges of rank, and I bet their side had little training in ours.
Did Leo resent him giving it all away like this, or was he resigned, or was he stuck by now into some grotesque officer code of honour too? Had all the Bushido nonsense got to both of them, so that they were competing for honour with the Japanese? I don’t want to mock that, since they were willing to die for it. But men become dupes for codes of honour which any sensible woman could see through in a second. Yes, said Filmer, they had a Japanese flag on the junk and were thus sailing under false colours. But no, they had not themselves painted the Japanese flag on the stern of the junk. It had already been put there by the Malay owner. At least five silenced automatic weapons on the junk opened up on the patrol boat at Kaso, he admitted. He didn’t mention it was almost certainly he who first pulled the trigger. He began shooting because others did, he said. As the police vessel approached, everyone thought it was Japanese, he said, not Malay police, and they yelled, Patroller, patroller! They did not know it was an unarmed vessel. No, no British or Australian flag was hoisted on the junk before they opened fire. There was barely time. Doucette did not directly order them to open fire.
The affidavit of the surviving Malay policeman from the patrol boat was read to Filmer. Poor fellow, a local mixed up between two powers, seeing his fellows on the launch cut to pieces, and then himself diving, bleeding copiously, into the water. But it strikes me that, abstracting from race, Leo and all the other Australians had a lot in common with that Malay cop. Like the policeman on the patrol boat who was a servant of the Japanese, they were also caught up in other people’s Imperial dreams, doing for Churchill what Churchill never did for us, with all his talk of Australians being of bad stock and bound to cave in to the Japanese anyhow.
Leo was the next brought forward before the court, and he accepted the charges just as Filmer had. He offered the information that Doucette had worn his badge of rank while on the junk but he himself had not. He had shot at the patrol boat, and had also resisted the landing by the army at Serapem, but he was not sure if he had killed any Japanese soldier. He admitted he had sketched and photographed islands and shipping, and made notes. That is all that’s in the record – no pleading, no mention of a young wife and of her hopes and rights and expectations. In that regard, I suppose, he had nothing exceptional to plead. He had worn commando grease to colour his face and had stopped wearing a beret after they all got on the junk.
In turn, each of the other men admitted the same, in their peculiar and grievous honour.
The afternoon showers stopped, Hidaka told Lydon, and the sun came out with its afternoon intensity, and then yielded to shadows from the foliage of the Raffles College garden. The cocktail hour. All the accused were asked to stand. Each one was asked did he have anything to say in his defence. The judge urged each of them to point out anything in their evidence which was to their advantage. None of them said anything. The silence of honour locked the tongues of Leo, Hugo Danway, Jockey Rubinsky, Chesty Blinkhorn, Sergeant Bantry, the naval rating Skeeter Moss, Mel Duckworth, Major Filmer. Each of the accused was asked if he had any objection to the statement of any other member of the party. One by one they said they didn’t. You can imagine a robust fellow like Chesty Blinkhorn thinking, Wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction. Each was asked if he wanted to alter any part of his statement to the Suijo Kempei Tai or the prosecuting attorney, and they all said no. Thus, bridges burned, they all turned their inner eye to the sword’s edge.