Read stories of the midget submarine raid on Sydney... Taking the ashes of the Sydney submariners home to Japan ... and the early friendship between John Curtin and the first Japanese ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai. [ Scroll down...]
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No Japanese threat......
Famous last words to a Bondi boy.
The wartime threat from Japan meant two unwanted stays in Cobar, in what is now called outback New South Wales, for Bondi boy Peter With, who was aged eight when war came to Sydney.
[Peter is pictured at the far right of this Daily Telegraph photo, left.]
Peter, now of Stanthorpe, Queensland, grew up in Bondi, living in Simpson Street, which overlooked the Rose Bay Golf Links.
Writing to the 1942 website, Peter said: “I remember when the two concrete promenades were demolished and barbed wire erected along the beach in 1941. Also a live firing exercise at night with tracers lighting up the coastline from Bondi to Maroubra.
“This all proved too much for my mother and in January, 1942, I was sent to
live at Cobar, which was a bit of a culture shock. My uncle returned from
the Middle East in May and wanted to know where I was. When informed, he said
‘Bring the kid home, as there was no threat from the Japanese.’Famous last
words.
“I was overjoyed to arrive back home and had barely unpacked when the subs
came into the harbour. A few days later, the mother sub shelled the Eastern
Suburbs, with one of the shells landing in our street, about 150 yards from
our house!
“The shell didn't explode and after being removed, the locals were allowed to
inspect the damage. I had just squeezed through a barricade of matronly
buttocks to have a look, when the attached photo was taken by the Daily
Telegraph.
" ‘Bloody Japanese’"! I thought, as I was back on a train to Cobar before I
knew it, finally returning in September to restart school at Bellevue Hill.
“I thought the location of one of the shells might be of interest to you, as
it was never revealed at the time, and now is largely forgotten. Congratulations on a great book.”
- Peter With, Stanthorpe, Qld.
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Research reveals:
Mother sub off Sydney in '42 saw huge explosion
Photo: Peter Luck Productions.
Japanese officers waiting in a mother submarine off southern Sydney briefly cheered the midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbor in 1942, thinking their midget submarines had scored a major victory.
In the book, 1942, Bob Wurth reveals for the first time the reaction of the officers who were waiting on the surface off Cronulla.
Elated Japanese officers in the sub’s conning tower off Sydney saw a great explosion and quickly passed news back to Japan that the midget submariners had scored a big success on the night of May 31.
In fact, the explosion was that of the old Sydney ferryboat HMAS Kuttabul, pictured below, used as accommodation for RAN seamen. Divers later recovered 17 bodies from the sunken vessel. 
The incident during the midget submarine attack on May 31, 1942, was obtained by the author researching records from the Archives of Industrial Society at the University of Pittsburgh.
The details were contained some of previously unpublished sections of the diaries of Admiral Matome Ugaki, who was chief of staff to the commander in chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Admiral Ugaki (below) received the message aboard Yamamoto’s flagship, the super battleship Yamato, which at the time was heading towards the decisive Midway battle zone.
In his diary Ugaki pondered the fate of the six submariners:
Big water spout signals 'daring attack'
“None of the midget sub crew who made a surprise attack on Sydney were recovered, and the mother sub suspended their search.
“As one of our subs staying south-by-southeast of the harbor noticed at 2200 [approximate Tokyo time] to the left of the harbor entrance light a big water spout almost three times as big as the light, which seconds later went down, it seems certain that our midget subs made a daring attack.”
But Admiral Ugaki added to his diary:
“On the other hand, the Australian defense headquarters announced that a torpedo hit a naval auxiliary vessel and another one exploded in her vicinity with a result that she was sunk … two sunken midget subs are possible to be salvaged, as their positions are ascertained. Searches are being made for another midget sub and their mother subs.
“Although they claimed that our attack was unsuccessful, their shock received from our attack must have been tremendous.”
The Kuttabul was sunk by the midget sub M-24 containing Lieutenant Katsuhisa Ban, 23, and Petty Officer Mamoru Ashibe, 24.
Their submarine was found off Long Reef, Sydney, in 2006. It is thought that Ban and Ashibe never left their midget sub. On escaping through the Sydney Heads, Ban and Ashibe had turned north rather than south where their mother sub, the I-24 was waiting.
In the early hours of Monday morning, June 1, 1942, the I-24 was spotted by a Sydney trawler.
Rear Admiral Gerard Muirhead-Gould in Sydney flashed a message to the Naval Board in Melbourne which should have been taken as the tip for major aerial searches close offshore from Sydney’s southern beaches:
“TRAWLER SAN MICHELE REPORTS SIGHTING SUBMARINE 4.5 MILES OFF CRONULLA AT 0106K/1 STEAMING SOUTH AT 2 TO 3 KNOTS. SUBMARINE CLEARLY OBSERVED IN MOONLIGHT APPEARED TO BE ABOUT 200 FEET IN LENGTH…”
But Sydney’s defences were poor and the mother sub was not attacked.
Ships sunk
A few days after the midget attack on Sydney, the Japanese began an intense campaign to wreak as much destruction as possible on commercial shipping along the east coast of Australia. Some of the attacks were so close offshore, people living along the coast would see and hear the explosions.
The first attack came on the night of 3 June. The I-24, which had carried Ban and Ashibe and their midget submarine to Sydney, was now 35 miles off Sydney when an approaching ship was spotted. The big sub surfaced. At 10.18 pm, using its deck gun, the submarine began to shell the coastal steamer the Age, of 4,734 tons, heading to Newcastle from Melbourne.
The Age sent out a distress message and immediately put on maximum speed. The Age managed to flee at top speed in heavy seas towards Newcastle, reaching the port the next morning without damage.
But disaster quickly struck. Sydney Radio received a signal from the Australian bulk carrier Iron Chieftain, pictured below, owned by the BHP steelmaker, carrying coke and ship building material south to Whyalla in South Australia.The ship had been torpedoed.
![IRON CHIEFTAN i.e. Chieftain [picture]](images/b41539.jpg)
The Iron Chieftain sank quickly, killing 12, including Captain L. Haddelsey, who was last seen standing on the bridge with another officer as the ship went down. Lifeboats containing 37 survivors landed on the beaches around Lakes Entrance, north of Sydney. Aerial searches were immediately carried out.
[Detail from the book 1942. The Sydney Harbour explosion record is not included in the edited version of Admiral Ugaki's diaries published as Fading Victory, University of Pittsburgh Press, edited by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon.]
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Japanese eyewitness account:
Newcastle gunners almost hit Japanese sub
The gunners at Newcastle’s Fort Scratchley in 1942 came closer to sinking a Japanese submarine that fired on the city than was ever thought, despite never actually seeing the sub.
In ‘1942, Australia’s greatest peril’, an officer standing on the deck of the submarine, who is alive and active in Japan today, described for the first time how close the Australian six inch shells came to the big sub:
[Picture: Pilot Susumu Ito in 2007 with a wartime photo of himself alongside his aircraft.]
In the darkness of Monday June 8, 1942, Lieutenant Susumu Ito, a zealous young flying officer, scrambled up into the dripping conning tower of the I-21, as soon as the sub, carrying more than 100 men, surfaced in Stockton Bight.
It was a week after the Japanese midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour and less than two hours after another Japanese submarine began shelling suburbs around Sydney Harbour. The I-21 had carried Susumu Ito’s ‘Glen’ float plane from Japan to Sydney in a specially constructed hanger on the deck of the submarine.
Ito had taken off from the mother sub before the midget submarine raid on Sydney and had conducted reconnaissance over the harbour without interception. But when he landed near the submarine in a rough sea, Ito’s aircraft flipped over and was badly damaged and had to be sunk by the submarine crew. Ito felt shamed and apologised to the sub’s captain submarine, Matsumura Kanji.
Ito, a strong swimmer, had almost drowned struggled in his jump suit loaded down with a pistol and many rounds of ammunition. Now off Newcastle, knowing that the six men who had manned the midget submarines at Sydney had been lost, the young flying officer was keen to see the enemy punished.
Gunners raced to the sub’s 5.5-inch deck gun and began firing the first of 34 rounds towards Newcastle, aiming at the shipyards at Carrington and at the steelworks at Kooragang Island. The Japanese knew Newcastle well as a vital industrial port.
[Picture: Susumo Ito with Bob Wurth and translator Kyal Hill in Iwakuni, Japan.]
Important documents had been recovered from the wreck of the midget submarine M-22 in Sydney Harbour. They included Japanese call sign lists, operational orders and code words. Japanese copies of British Admiral charts included photographs of important targets. There were shots of the Sydney Harbour naval base at Garden Island, the Hawkesbury River railway bridge and the steelworks at Newcastle.
The gunners on the I-21 were firing from a position of about 5,000 metres off Newcastle’s Fort Scratchley. Some of the shells failed to explode. Faulty shells and torpedoes were to plague the Japanese submarines in their subsequent attacks on shipping off the east coast of Australia, including Newcastle.
Some 24 shells fell in the area of Newcastle’s power station and customs house, causing minor damage. Faulty shells caused minimal damage when failing to explode. An unexploded shell damaged a storage shed at the steelworks.
The attack caused few injuries. One shell landed on an elevated park near the Parnell Place air raid shelter, sending jagged shrapnel in all directions. Two small boys were in a house and saw the gun flashes at sea from their bedroom window. Their mother raced upstairs and brought the boys to safety just before a shell exploded, wrecking their bedroom. Young Peter Wilson was photographed by the Newcastle Morning Herald beaming from the scattered window and was called “the luckiest boy in town.”
Until now the Fort Scratchley gunners have been dismissed as being ineffective, but the reality is a little different. After an unexplained delay of 13 minutes when the Japanese shells began to land, the gunners at Fort Scratchley (picture left) eventually fired on the enemy vessel with only four rounds from one of the six inch guns. Gunners in the fort could not see the sub but could see occasional flashes from the sub’s gun.
[Left: Model of a Glen float plane on the deck of a Japanese submarine on display at the Yamato Museum, Kure.]
Pilot Susumu Ito was on the conning tower of the 1-21 taking in all the action. I meet him in the summer of 2007 his four-storey office building at the city of Iwakuni on the Seto Inland Sea south of Hiroshima.
At 92, he still presides over his stationary and office equipment company, drives his own car to work and travels frequently. Ito prides himself of his mental alertness and fitness. He literally bounds up the stairs to his vast conference room, where he orders tea and casts his memory back to Newcastle, recalling how close the Fort Scratchley shells really came to the I-21:
“There’s a shipyard at Newcastle and they returned fire from the Newcastle guns. They fired shells at us and they came pretty close. We knew it [our gunfire] wouldn’t be very effective but we wanted to cause concern for the people and make them feel uncomfortable.
“I was on the bridge watching the gunfire. The enemy shells hit the water with a splash. That was scary. If they hit us we were dead. Even one would sink us. Usually if a sub comes up to fire guns, you don’t expect return fire.”
Ito could see the explosions ashore as some of the sub’s shells burst. But the submarine’s captain was cool and indicated that he was in no hurry to dive:
“Captain Matsumura Kanji was the most courageous of all the submarine captains. We did not dive and kept firing for a time. But I was thinking … we should get out of there.”
Eventually theI-21 submerged and was not damaged.
A great many Australians at the time believed that Australia now was ripe for invasion. Soon after the Newcastle shelling, one mother, Catherine Hitchcock, of Wallsend, slept with a carving knife under her pillow, determined to protect her clan should the worst occur. He husband was away in the RAAF and Mrs Hitchcock had responsibility for her grandmother Kate, 83, her great Aunt Maud, in her sixties, together with two boys, Phil, aged 10, and John, born at home 10 days earlier.
Revisionist historians in Australia in recent years have described the Japanese invasion threat in 1942 as a ‘myth’. The book 1942 documents the seriousness of the Japanese invasion threat to Australia, especially in the first few months of 1942, when influential elements of the Imperial Navy, including prominent admirals, actively debated invasion. However, the Navy was consistently blocked in its proposals by the Imperial Army, who wanted to go on the defensive and reinforce the huge new empire it had carved out for Japan.
Using Japan’s official war history, diaries, minutes of meetings, autobiographies and other Japanese sources, 1942 lists a string of admirals and captains who were keen to invade Australia.
Newcastle was listed as being a prime target for the Japanese. Australian defence chiefs as early as December 11 1941 in an assessment to Prime Minister John Curtin reported that Sydney and the wider coastal industrial regions of New South Wales, as well as the munitions producing city of Lithgow, were seriously threatened:
“The most probable form of attack on mainland Australia [is] naval and air bombardment of important objectives (such as industrial works at Sydney, Newcastle and [Port] Kembla by a fast capital ship and cruisers with or without aircraft carriers. Sea-borne raids against selected land objectives was possible.”
The chiefs thought the capture of any of the outlying islands would provide the enemy with bases for the development of attacks against the mainland of Australia. The greatest threat was to Darwin, with its naval and air force base and to the exposed northern coastline of Australia.
Early February 1942, General Iven Mackay, officer in charge of Home Forces, set out broad principles of action to be taken to meet an early invasion. He was concerned that Japanese aircraft from carriers might attempt to destroy the BHP steelworks at Newcastle and metal factories at Port Kembla.
In February 1943 Susumu Ito (pictured early in the war) took off in another float ‘plane bouncing over the sea in moonlight and circled Sydney. Clearly recalling the flight 65 years ago, he was still cocky:
“I took off in the middle of the night. I can’t remember the time. Our submarine had been in action against shipping in the Solomons and at Bougainville.
“I was trying to be careful to make sure no-one knew it was a Japanese plane. I thought people wouldn’t know its nationality. It was nearly a full moon. Sydney Harbour was very illuminated. I could see very well.
“When I got to South Head they began shooting at me, but couldn’t reach me. I was up about 2,000 metres and far out off the coast. So there was not a chance of them hitting me. I knew they wouldn’t hit me and so I wasn’t scared at all.”
Susumu Ito flew around for about two hours attracting the attention of anti-aircraft and searchlight crews. No aircraft challenged him. He was hoping to find large British and US warships in Sydney Harbour, but there were none. Ito eventually headed up the coast in the moonlight and landed on the water near an island which he described as being ‘somewhere well north of Newcastle’. The mother submarine quickly surfaced, recovering Ito and his floatplane.
In Iwakuni last year, Susumu Ito, still the proud warrior, has no apologies to make:
“I had a definite purpose for my reconnaissance flights. My role was to find warships … We in Japan have the warrior spirit. If I tell you my feelings it is respect towards the Royal Australian Navy handling of the situation [funeral honours for the midget submariners who were killed].
“All of us who participated in some way are extremely grateful. Because of that my feelings about Australians are that they are beautiful people. I appreciate what they did. You don’t see that very often at all.” #
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Ambassador Kawai took submariners' ashes to Japan; ostracised for his Australian friendship
The pacifist Japanese envoy who took home the ashes of four of the submariners killed in the midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour raid in 1942 was ostracised for preaching friendship with Australia in wartime Japan.
The envoy thought the midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour at the end of May 1942 was a brave but stupid bungle, writes Bob Wurth:
Tatsuo Kawai the first Japanese minister, effectively ambassador, to Australia sailed into Sydney Harbour in March 1941 as an ardent fascist. He was to become devoted to Australia’s wartime leader John Curtin.
(Kawai is pictured left proposing a toast as president of the Japan-Australia Society in the 1960s at a luncheon for the Australian minister, Jack McEwen.Photo, Kawai family photograph, in Bob Wurth collection, John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, Perth.)
Kawai wasn't always known as a pacifist. As spokesman for the foreign ministry in Tokyo in the late ‘thirties, Kawai had been Japan’s international voice of territorial expansionism. He soon met Opposition leader John Curtin at Government House in Canberra and became intrigued.
“Tatsuo was deeply impressed with Mr Curtin’s simple, unpretentious manner of speaking”, wrote his senior aide, Tsuneo Hattori, who was present when they met. He said Curtin also appeared to take note of Kawai’s solid character. “Before he left he made a promise to meet with Kawai soon. Following that the two men became increasingly close, baring their hearts to one another and exchanging opinions.”
(Diplomat Tsuneo Hattori, below right, is pictured in 1941 with Tatsuo Kawai at the ambassador's Melbourne residence, Carn Brea at suburban Auburn. Photo John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, Wurth collection.]
With the approval of the Menzies Government, Curtin met frequently with Kawai in to maintain the peace between Japan and Australia. Kawai sensed increasing nationalism in the Labor Party and hoped for greater Australian independence from Britain and a form of neutrality.
Their secret talks were not without rancour but as time went on, Kawai’s admiration for Curtin grew. Kawai mellowed under Curtin’s influence, smoothing the more abrasive edges of his character.
Kawai expressed great remorse at the outbreak of war. Writing eloquent tanka under house arrest at his Melbourne mansion, the diplomat lamented his diplomatic failure:
How quick one year went,
how fast time passes us by:
my footprints - despair
though I may - have started
to fade away
Kawai later would write that he did not know in advance of the attack on Pearl Harbour, nor of the raid by midget submarines on Sydney Harbour in May 1942.
When the submarines were discovered, the harbour became alive with searchlights and sirens, shells and depth charge explosions and the rattle of machinegun fire. One midget submarine, the M-24, commanded by Lt. Katsuhisa Ban fired two torpedoes at the US cruiser the Chicago.
(Chicago pictured below. Above: Letter declaring war from Australia's foreign minister H.V. Evatt to Tatsuo Kawai, who was under house arrest at his residence Carn Brea, in Melbourne.)
The first torpedo failed to explode. The second missed the Chicago, hit a seawall at Garden Island and exploded, sinking the Kuttabul, an old ferry used as a depot ship, killing 21 naval ratings.
Ban, 23,and his navigator Mamoru Ashibe, 24, after a terrible battering, managed to escape from Sydney Harbour. Their midget submarine was found in in November 2006 by a group of diversoff Long Reef.
Ban (pictured below, archival picture Rob Gilhooly, Tokyo) and Mamoru had sailed north in their midget after escaping the Harbour in 1942, rather than going south where their mothership the I-24 was waiting to pick them up. The midget submariners had a pact that they would never return to the mother submarines for fear of exposing more than 100 men and the submarine to attack.
On the night of the midget submarine raid, the British bornGovernor General of Australia Lord Sandy Gowrie watched the raid from Admiralty House, Kirribilli. He wrote to King George: “We couldn’t actually see the submarines, but we could see the small craft buzzing about dropping depth charges and searchlights moving all over the surface of the water.” Gowrie saw benefits in the Sydney raid. He wrote in a draft to the king: “One had long hoped that something of this kind would occur in order to bring home to the people of Australia the reality of the dangers with which they are faced.”
One submarine ran into a net strung across the harbour and the two young crewmen killed themselves by detonating a bomb. Another midget craft was pounded by depth charges. When two bodies were recovered, they had been shot in the head with a revolver. A third midget submarine with another two men aboard was never recovered.
The Nippon Times in Tokyo later dramatically quoted Tatsuo Kawai: “We gripped the paper tightly and were moved to tears by the news. Who would have thought that the brave men of the Imperial Navy would make such a thrust at the very heart of the enemy? The dauntless, invincible spirit of the Japanese Navy threw the 7,000,000 inhabitants of Australia into the depths of fear and despair.”
Yet Kawai’s truer feelings were quietly expressed in dark verse written at the time in Australia in which his conversation to pacifism began to emerge:
Deep under the water
they cannot come up;
they die there
regrettable – more good men
This clumsy surprise attack failed:
they died
fighting with the enemy;
astonishing
Bullets and blades
bloodshed and death:
now I know exactly how easy it is to die
Chief of the Navy Press, Captain Hideo Hiraide, had a warning on Tokyo Radio: “If Australia ignores Japan’s repeated warnings…a great and serious disaster will befall the peaceful land of Australia and… it will be turned into a veritable scene of dreadful carnage.”
On June 7 the Sydney naval chief, Rear Admiral Muirhead-Gould, informed Kawai that the bodies of the four submariners would be cremated in two days, “if he had no objection.” Kawai “deeply appreciated” the admiral’s courtesy. He asked that wreaths be sent in his name and that he be allowed to take the ashes back to Japan. The Curtin Government agreed.
Muirhead-Gould, seconded from the Royal Navy, ensured that Australia honored the Japanese as heroes. The bodies of the four submariners were laid in coffins draped with the Rising Sun and incongruously carried on the shoulders of Australian sailors. Another naval corps followed with guns pointed down and heads lowered in homage. 
The silence was broken by the salute of three minute-guns and the Japanese corpses were cremated to the reverberating peal of the bugles. (Pictured).
The rear admiral was criticised widely for according the military honors which came as Japanese troops were bayoneting Australian prisoners. Twenty days after the Japanese raid the Muirhead-Gould asked in a broadcast why Australians shouldn’t honor such bravery: “It must take courage of the very highest order to go out in a thing like that steel coffin…How many of us are really prepared to make one thousandth of the sacrifice that these men made?” Kawai was deeply moved:
Enemies they may be
but admirable they are
for which I offer my praise and gratitude
for the flag at half-mast
Admirable Gould
though enemy he may be
is a warrior who knows the pathos of things
The reality of war now entered the ambassador’s living room at his Melbourne mansion: “As I gazed every morning and night at the coffers containing the ashes of the heroes, the thought of their loyalty and bravery, transcending life and death, invariably overwhelming me with gripping emotion." (Left Petty Officer Mamoru Ashibe, who died in the M-24 with Lt. Ban.)
Kawai and his staff and hundreds of Japanese nationals were returned to Japan on the diplomatic exchange ship Kamekura Maru in August 1942. Four urns containing the ashes of the submariners were placed on an altar on the ship.
The Japanese exchange ship was the scene of several memorial services as the ship sailed to Japan in the latter half of 1941. The services were led by Ambassador Kawai and the ship's captain (pictured below, front left, during a service aboard ship.)
The Kamekura Maru (pictured below arriving at Yokohama port in October 1942) was met by relatives and friends of the four dead submariners recovered from Sydney Harbour when it docked at Yokohama port in October 1942.
'no bitterness in my heart...'
Leaving Melbourne, Kawai (pictured below in his formal diplomat's uniform) had made a remarkable statement for an enemy envoy:
“Those Australians who know how I struggled to avert war in the Pacific will understand when I say my spirit has been broken. The gods decreed that Japan and Australia should go to war, and it is a case of kill or be killed, but there is no bitterness in my heart toward Australia. When peace comes, the white man and the Asiatic must go hand in hand with each other in the Pacific.”
Captain Philip Proctor, in charge of the guard at Kawai’s residence and a frequent chess partner, wrote to superiors in Canberra that Kawai was most disappointed at the turn of events. “I am of the opinion that he, personally, is genuine in the expression of this sentiment, but that it is probably on the ground that he is by nature a pacifist.”
Back in Japan, the submariners were accorded national honours. Kawai met the relatives of the four young men aboard ship in Yokohama. After a service, Kawai invited the families to a lounge downstairs, as the Press crowded around: “Pray be seated” Kawai said. “Let me recount the scene of their heroic end. Glorious indeed was their end. Look at this photograph. It is of the naval funeral held by the Australian Navy. Even the enemy was moved by the daring of the heroes.” Mothers and fathers listened attentively with deep nods, tears filling their eyes, Kawai recalled. Even though Japan was at war with Australia, Japanese newspapers grudgingly acknowledged the chivalry of the Australians.
But Kawai quickly fell out of favor. On a return visit to see Curtin’s widow Elsie in 1959, Kawai recorded that in 1942 he resigned from the diplomatic service “after the preliminary honour of having lunch with Emperor Hirohito”. Kawai said he made one public speech in Japan trying to persuade the Japanese “not to hate Australians because their countries would become neighbours”, but made no more speeches because he had annoyed the military authorities.
Kawai was ostracised in wartime Japan and retreated at his little house at Manazuru (pictures below), on the bay of Sagami, south of Tokyo, to work his tangerine farm.
His neighbour and friend at Manazuru, Toshiro Takeuchi, (pictured), an innkeeper, in 2002 remembered Kawai as highly critical of Japan’s war, thinking it utter madness for Japan to “take on the world”, as he put it.
Towards the end of the war Tatsuo Kawai worked with the liberal Shigeru Yoshida, later peacetime prime minister, to bring about a Japanese surrender. Kawai secretly went to China and was in clandestine talks when the atomic bombs were dropped.
Immediately after the war Kawai became Japan’s vice minister for foreign affairs. Later as head of the Japan Australia Society, supported by local industry and commerce, he worked to re-start trade with Australia. During a trip to Japan in 1950 prime minister Robert Menzies visited Kawai at his Manazuru retreat house to discuss the resumption of trade.
Best friend
Tatsuo Kawai revered John Curtin, who had died just before the end of war with Japan in 1945. He told Elsie Curtin in 1959 that he regarded Curtin as “one of my best friends” and called him “a wonderful man.”
The Kawai and Curtin families resumed their friendship soon after the end of the war.
Kawai is pictured at the Curtin house at Cottesloe in 1959 with Curtin's widow, Elsie, whom he gave a drawing by his neice. (Photo The West Australian, courtesy of the J.S. Battye Library of West Australian History.)
The family relationship, which included the exchange of letters and cards, photographs and gifts, lasted until 2001 when the Curtin’s daughter Elsie went into a nursing home.
For many years after the war Kawai’s Japanese friends and colleagues in Australia would gather at cherry blossom time at Kawai's little house (left) at Manazuru overlooking the sea and would salute the Australians and the submariners who gave their lives raiding Sydney.
Kawai’s friends recalled in odes to the former diplomat that even on his deathbed in 1966, Kawai’s last words were exhausted in urging those present to do more for the Japan-Australia relationship.
- Detail from Bob Wurth’s Saving Australia, Curtin’s secret peace with Japan, Lothian Books, 2006. The midget submarine raid and the return of the submariners' ashes are also featured in 1942, Australia’s greatest peril, Pan Macmillan, 2008.
One young sailor's story:
In the middle of war in Sydney Harbour, 1942
Ernie Jamieson, left, pictured with his brother Frank in January 1942, was a lonely 19 year old able seaman in Sydney on May 31, 1942 attached to the training ship HMAS Bingera on Sydney Harbor. As he returned to his ship on a workboat via Garden Island, the American cruiser USS Chicago, below, opened fire on a Japanese midget submarine.
Ernie Jamieson had just stepped off the workboat when all hell broke loose:
“The workboat had taken off and the skipper found himself in the outer beam of the searchlight. He reversed hard, very hard, and hit the pontoon and bounced out again into the light with tracers zooming past him! We had a ringside view of all this and it was spectacular.”
Soon after the midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour, in which all six Japanese submariners died, Japanese submarines began an intensive campaign of sinking ships off the New South Wales and Victorian coast.
Ernie Jamieson, in his papers held at the Australian War Memorial, tells of being aboard the Bingera.
The training ship sent out in high seas to pick up survivors from the bulk ore carrier, the Iron Chieftain, which had been torpedoed off Lakes Entrance, north of Sydney. Twelve were killed and 37 took to lifeboats which made it ashore. When the Bingera arrives at the scene, there was one survivor in the sea, according to Ernie Jamieson:
“We found and rescued only one survivor. He was floating on a wooden door in the midst of a lot of wreckage.
"He was very lucky. As we hauled him aboard we saw a very large triangular shaped fin circling around the flotsam.”
A nephew writes:
Understanding what they went through
Ernie Jamieson’s story is included in the book ‘1942’. His nephew, Ian Jamieson, has emailed the following note :
“Dear Bob,
“My daughter gave me 1942 for father’s day and I want to thank you for giving me a better insight to my early years. My parents were married in May ‘42 and dad started in the Army in the 58th Battalion before switching to the RAAF. I think it was around 1943 he left for Gould airstrip near Bachelor, in the Northern Territory. He was a navigator in Beauforts which flew mostly over Timor.
“I was born in Sept ‘43 and lived with mum and dad's parents in Albert Park, Victoria, for the duration of the war.
“I now have a better understanding of what they must have gone through.
“What a surprise it was to come across my uncle Ernie Jamieson in your book. I had no idea he was close to the subs in Sydney harbour. I thought his wartime experience was solely on the Arunta. Sadly, Ernie is an 86 year old now living alone in Perth. His wife, son and daughter have all preceded him.”
Ian Jamieson
