Military Collector Group Post,
WW-II ISLAND SURVIVORS TELL STORY;
A new book, mentions air dropping radio to downed aircraft survivors.
Bill Howard
Decades later survivor, savior meet
By AMELIA DAVIS
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 1, 1998
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<Picture: B>ELLEAIR -- Fifty-three years ago on an island halfway around the world, Lt. John McCollom and two other survivors of a military plane crash were waiting in a jungle for a savior. It was World War II, and there was everything to fear: the Japanese, an unfamiliar, treacherous terrain, native tribesmen said to practice cannibalism and the worsening of injuries suffered in the crash that killed 21 others.
Three days passed and finally the survivors were spotted by a military search plane in part of New Guinea called Hidden Valley. A young Army Air Forces officer, Ed Imparato, now of Belleair, was told to figure out a way to get them out. Forty-seven harrowing days later he did.
Imparato and those he rescued never met -- until noon Monday. That is when McCollom drove from his home in Delray Beach to shake Imparato's hand.
"It's good to see you Ed, finally after all these years," McCollom said. Over lunch, the two men talked of the May 13, 1945, crash and its permanent effect on their lives. McCollom, who suffered only a broken rib, had a twin brother who died in the crash. Like the others, Robert McCollom is buried at the crash site. Imparato wrote a book about the incident. Titled Rescue From Shangri-La, it was published last year.
McCollom, 79, told Imparato, 81, and three friends who joined them Monday, that he had kept in contact with the other two survivors through the years. Cpl. Margaret Hastings, who was severely burned in the crash, died of cancer in 1978, he said. Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Decker, who came out of the crash with a deep head gash, broken elbow and severe burns, lives in a retirement home in Seattle. McCollom said he will join Decker for his upcoming 87th birthday.
As Imparato was preparing to write his book, he traced McCollom to his winter home in Delray Beach. "I never knew who Ed was until he called me up one day," McCollom said.
Imparato's book describes the 47-day ordeal before the three were air-lifted in a glider from a clearing the size of a football field. It tells how they existed on hard candy and water for five days until canned tomatoes, a radio and other supplies could be airdropped through the jungle foliage. It also tells about their first encounter with the island natives.
McCollom talked about that meeting Monday.
"We looked up and there over a ridge were about 30 of them lined up,"
McCollom said. "We smiled. They smiled. We moved a little closer. They moved a little closer."
Finally, McCollom stepped forward and offered his hand to the nearly naked man who appeared to be the leader. As it turned out, these islanders were not the headhunters they had feared. They were a friendly tribe who over the course of the next weeks traded them sweet potatoes and pigs for colorful shells McCollom had requested in the airdrops. Two shells got them a pig. One shell, enough sweet potatoes for a meal.
While Imparato planned their eventual rescue, military medics who parachuted into the jungle treated their injuries. Other paratroopers arrived to clear the strip of land for the glider. When McCollom and the others were well enough to hike 47 miles to the takeoff site, the rescuers were ready.
"I never doubted we'd get out," McCollom said Monday. "At least I knew I would. I figured if Maggie and Ken didn't make it, I'd build a raft and float out. I'd seen a river."
Now there's talk of a movie. Imparato has an agent and reported there is some interest in his book. So who would McCollom choose to portray him in a film?
"Me," McCollom said. "I still have my hair."
Submitted by
THE WILLIAM L. HOWARD ORDNANCE TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE MUSEUM
e-mail wlhoward@gte.net Telephone AC 813 585-7756
Ed) It would be very interesting to know what the radio was that was dropped to them?
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I WAS THE RADIO OPERATOR; By Lt. Robert D. Gibson
Forward,
- The following two part series is a true story written by (then T/Sgt.) Robert D. Gibson. It was originally published in "Air Force Magazine" sometime during WW-II, and subsequently was published in a pamphlet by the Training Literature Division Scott Field Illinois "in the hopes that it might impart on the student radioman the great importance and responsibility that would be his as a flying radio operator". I reproduce it here, word for word, as it was written, for the same reasons, and to further enhance our knowledge of the events and procedures of the period. Also of interest is the stile of writing, terminology used, and the "Go Gettum Boys" sentiment the story obviously conveys.
Dennis Starks; MILITARY RADIO COLLECTOR/HISTORIAN
military-radio-guy@juno.com
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You Can't Ride the Beam in Combat,
- We flew against the Japs over Bali and Java. They chased us out of Singapore. We ran into them again flying ammunition from Northern Australia to Port Moresby. We were always outnumbered in those early days of the war and, all in all, we took quite a licking. But even then we were sure the Jap Air Force would get a good drubbing before it was over.
- My job was radio operator. And I know first hand that a radio operator is a mighty important man on every combat mission. If that sounds like bragging it isn't meant to be. I don't mean just me: I mean every radio operator. And I can show you what I mean. But that's getting ahead of my story--about seven months ahead to be exact. Back in November, 1941, we left the United States on what was to have been a three-week survey trip of the Ferry Command's southern route to Africa. Seven months and 696 hours of flying time later we arrived back in the United States by boat from Australia. Meanwhile, we had been in India, Singapore, New Guinea, Australia, Burma, Java and Bali.
- We were in Egypt when we first heard of the outbreak of war. Instructions came through to pick up Lieutenant General Brett in Cairo and take him to wherever wanted to go. And the only places he wanted to go were where the fighting was the thickest. Before I got into the Army I used to think that Generals stayed a comfortable distance away from the actual fighting. But after being with General Brett, I changed my mind. He is the "goingest" man I've ever met.
- We took the General to India and then to Australia where he left us and we went to Java. That's where the going really got tough. It's always tough taking a beating. But for the number of planes we had down there, we did a lot of agitating.
- As radio operator (I was a Technical Sergeant at the time), it was my responsibility to guide our plane in and out of the combat zones. The Dutch and British who were operating the anti-aircraft guns had very itchy fingers. If the radio man didn't send in the right recognition signals at the right time, he and his crew would probably be cited for valor, but posthumously. Some of the time, particularly when flying ammunition from Australia to Port Moresby, we flew without a navigator so we could get the maximum amount of cargo into the plane. It isn't cheerful flying without a navigator, but sometimes you just have to do it. And with air raids occurring very often, it was up to the radioman to determine whether we would be coming in under a bombardment.
- Ther were three signals we paid special attention to. One was QQW which meant that the sending station was having an air raid alert, The second was a QQQ which indicated that an air raid was in progress. And the most looked for was the QQZ, or "all clear". If the radioman wasn't on the beam all the time, he would be bringing his plane into his station with anti-aircraft firing at him from beneath and Jap bombers greeting him from above.
- Even with all our preparation and the constant watching of our assigned frequency, we got into a lot of trouble. I remember when we were trying to get from Rangoon, Burma to Bandoeng, Java. We told Batavia that we were on our way to Bandoeng. But when we got over Bandoeng we were met with some of the most terrific ack-ack fire we had ever experienced. Bandoeng didn't have a radio, no one had told them we were coming, they just weren't taking any chances. They let us have it. The only thing we could do was turn around and go back to Singapore. But that meant danger and it would probably have meant the end of us if I hadn't been luck enough to have picked Singapore's radio frequency before we left Rangoon. Actually, there was no official reason why I should have known Singapore's frequency but I had found out long before that you can't know too much when you're in the combat zone. Without those signals, Singapore would have brought us down so fast it wouldn't have been funny. Any unidentified plane, no matter what insignia, was fair bait.
- But to get back to the Japs and the reasons why we think we can take them. First of all, about the much talked about Jap Zero planes. I'd be a fool to say that they aren't any good--they gave us too much trouble for that. They climb at a terrific rate of speed and maneuver with precession. But a couple of burst and they fall apart... the Jap plane makers apparently don't have too much regard for their pilots. They were giving them practically no protection and very little fire power. The boys in the later model B-17s don't bother much about the Zeros. What's more, the Zeros don't mess around with the 17s. Those Japs look mighty good when they have you out numbered, but when you are strong enough to fight they often run like hell.
- Once over Java we were flying a heavily armored LB-30. Fifteen Japs came down us and our gunners opened up. All but three of them left in a hurry, and those didn't hang around very long. The japs seem to like being heroes but they don't like getting bullets tossed at them.
- The Zeros I saw were not particularly fast. One time in an armed B-24 on the way to Rangoon, we saw three Zeros about five miles away. Major Paul F. Davis for my money the hottest pilot in the Far East, pushed the plane down to tree-top level and we started running. They chased us for 50 miles and were still five miles away.
- Up in the high Altitudes, around 30,000, the Zeros don't have enough soup to make more than two passes at you. They don't like to dive because it's tough pulling their flimsy planes out.
- Over Bali one bright morning, a lot of Japs jumped one of our ships out of the sun. Just as one of them came in on their rear gunner, his gun jammed. So he fired his flare gun right in the Jap's face. They never saw one guy get out of a place in such a hurry as that Jap did. On another occasion, the blankets they had piled in the back of the ship accidently caught on fire. They tossed the burning blankets out of the ship and the Japs high-tailed it for home. They must have thought we had a new kind of secret weapon.
- One thing the Japs could do well was strafe our planes on the ground. In the early days, communications were pretty bad and we got a lot of surprise air attacks. It was especially bad around Port Moresby. That New Guinea town is located in a sort of valley with mountains around it. The Japs could come tearing over the mountains before we had an inkling that they were around and they'd give us hell on the ground.
- The Japs did very little night bombing and their bombers seemed slow compared to our models. They invariably flew with a lot of pursuit protections. Their pursuit planes looked mighty potent from a distance--lined up and flying in smart style. But when you went in with our heavy bombers and started blasting away. it was "you take high road and I'll get to Tokyo before you."
- I don't want to sound as if we can wipe the Japs out of the skies with two 17s and a 24. Many Japs are hard, fearless fighters. But when we get anything near numerical equality down there, I'll bet a ten-day furlough that they'll be easy pickings.
- Does a radio operator need gunnery training? The answer is that in combat you are a gunner first and a radio operator afterwards. You can't fight this war with dots and dashes. On a tactical mission, you can't have a weak link because the Japs will find it soon enough. Gunnery means self-preservation.
- Next to being able to man a gun, the most important job the radioman has to do is to pay strict and constant attention to his assigned radio frequency. This can't be over-emphasized. You have to glue yourself to that frequency even if there is a complete silence. And you have to take it fast. When the sending stations shoot out the information, they don't take a long time to do it. In many cases, they don't have a chance to repeat their instructions, especially when they're telling you there's an air raid in progress.
- One day we were peacefully flying from Soerabaja to Bandoeng. The radio had been dead for a long time. Suddenly, and for no more than a second, the flash came in that they were having an air raid. We had to turn out to sea and wait for the all clear. If any radioman had let his attention wander from that frequency for just a split second, the plane would have come into Bandoeng under Jap bombing.
- Here in the States it's quite different. You can ride the beam and somebody gives you the weather reports. But in combat, you're on your own. And the more able you are to adapt yourself to all sorts of new conditions, the longer you are going to live. Every time you get in a new country, you get a new code to work with. And you have to know it cold. You can have the best damned fighting crew in the Air Forces but if you don't know your code and recognition signals, brother, you're through.
- And the business about adapting yourself to new conditions is mighty important. We left early one morning to go from the Gold Coast to El Fasher, Egypt, and we didn't realize we were losing time going east. Before we got to El Fasher it was dark. I took three first -class bearings and El Fasher was completely blacked out two miles away. They were taking bearings on us but our radio compass wasn't designed to pick up C.W. If he was shooting bearings on us, I figured, why couldn't that situation be reversed? So we turned the plane to the right and our indicator moved to the right. That showed we were going away from the station. We made a 180-degree swing back on coarse and came right in.
- Another time, going from Australia to Port Moresby, we were given just enough gas to make the 800-mile jump in a heavily loaded B-17. It was the radioman's job to bring the plane in. If we varied from the course to any extent, our gas would run out over the ocean. In cases like that the radioman has just got to be on his toes.
- Generally speaking, it's a smart idea to have your plane identification down pat. In the South pacific, some or our planes were scaring hell out of our own boys because they looked like Zeros.
- But it wasn't all work. You get your share of laughs. One day off in Darwin, for instance, when we decided to go to the movies. They showed us a James A. FitzPatrick travelogue about Bali. Filmed in peacetime, it ended with the usual--"and now with fond reluctance we take leave of the sunny isle of Bali." Fond reluctance, hell, we took leave of sunny Bali 10 minutes before an air raid.
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MORSE TRIVIA, S O S?
What does S O S stand for?
The Answer:
Believe it or not, S O S, the international distress signal, doesn't stand for anything. Some people think that it stands for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls," but it's just not true. Those famous three letters don't stand for a thing. In fact, they were only chosen to indicate distress because they're easy to communicate in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, three dots, and because of their distinctiveness.
(Source: "Knowledge in a Nutshell" by Charles Reichblum)
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MORE TRIVIA, "MAYDAY";
Why do pilots say "mayday" when they're in trouble?
The Answer:
You see it in movies all the time. A plane has some technical trouble and starts to nosedive, so the pilot grabs the radio and shouts "Mayday! Mayday!" leaving the audience wondering what the month of May has to do with the plane's predicament.
Actually, the word "mayday" has nothing to do with the month of May. Instead, it comes from the French word "m'aidez," which means "help me," an appropriate thing to say when your plane nosedives.
(Source: The American Heritage Dictionary)
Neat. The actual pronunciation for "aidez" is... ay-day. "Help me" is...ay-day MWA (Aidez-moi)
Actually, I like the French version of what to say when your airplane takes a final nosedive... MERDE! (aka the 4-letter word that starts with S and ends with T, and is often the last thing a pilot is heard to say in the "black box" voice cockpit recorder...)
We now continue with the petty bickering of the proposed FCC reclassification of our licenses. :-)
_Ray_ KB0STN
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Cracking the Japanese Purple Code; by Fred B. Wrixon
The following is taken from the November 1997 issue of WORLD WAR II magazine. Several weeks ago I accidently sent a MIME encoded version of this excerpt to the list (I was sending it to my little brother as he wanted a copy to show our grandfather). Although I requested that this posting be ignored, some backchannel traffic expressing interest in this article has prompted me to repost it. This excerpt is my Holiday gift to those on the list. I have found this magazine to be a valuable resource for those who have an interest in World War II, and would urge list members to subscribe. As always, questions or comments are welcome. This will be my last excerpt for a good while as I have now finished my graduate work and am beginning the great job search. Happy Holidays to all!!!
Edward Wittenberg
ewitten507@aol.com
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Undercover American cryptanalysts successfully cracked the Japanese diplomatic code known as 'Purple.' By Fred B. Wrixon
- The efforts by U.S. cryptanalysts to break the Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939 especially the diplomatic code nicknamed "Purple" by the Americans, were called "Magic." Cracking the Japanese code was one of the crucial factors in the Allied victory in World War II. Once deciphered, the code provided the Allies with invaluable details on Japanese movements and attack plans.
- The coded messages were originally produced by a Japanese cipher machine called 97-shiki O-bun Injiki, or Alphabetical Typewriter 97. The name was based on the year of its invention, 1937, which was year 2597 according to Japan's ancient calendar. The 97 was better known as the Purple machine because the code it generated was called Purple by the Allies; the choice of that code name has yet to be fully explained.
- The Japanese had every reason to cover their dispatches with cryptic shields in 1937. They were deeply involved in a war with China, were forming alliances with bellicose Germany and Italy, and were rearming their Pacific island possessions in anticipation of a large-scale expansion. They had also been jolted by revelations that the United States had been reading their private telegrams for 16 years before the 97's creation.
- Americans first began reading Japanese messages during a naval disarmament conference in Washington, D.C., beginning in November 1921. During the meetings, diplomats from Japan and other nations conferred by cable with their overseas capitals. Those exchanges were not confidential, and they had been read, in a number of instances, by Herbert Yardley and his Cipher Bureau staff.
- Yardley was a World War I Army veteran of the Military Intelligence Division, MI-8. After the war, he began working for the newly formed Cipher Bureau, which was created in 1919 as a joint operation between the U.S. State and War departments. The bureau came to be known as the American Black Chamber, named after the European mail-interception rooms of earlier centuries. Yardley had the secret cooperation of cable companies in New York City, a key junction of world communications. The bureau's discoveries were sent to U.S. diplomats in Washington by a daily courier service.
- When he had first begun trying to break some sample Japanese communiques, Yardley had not found it easy. After months of painstaking study, however, he had awakened from a fitful sleep and realized that he finally understood a group of two-letter code words.
- Yardley and his bureau associates were then able to read many of Tokyo's messages, which discussed numbers and types of warships, how Japan would negotiate at the 1921 disarmament conference and what limits she would accept. That specialized knowledge was very helpful to U.S. negotiators. They used it to gain a clear advantage over Japan in the limits placed on ships and tonnage by the Five-Power Treaty, which also was signed by Great Britain, France and Italy in 1922.
- Throughout the 1920s, the United States and Japan warily observed each other's naval maneuvers and conducted audio surveillance with improving radio technologies. From the Philippines to Guam, Hawaii and Puget Sound in Washington state, the U.S. Navy had set up listening posts to monitor the airwaves for military and diplomatic communiques. The U.S. Army called their stations monitor posts. They included Fort Mills in the Philippine capital of Manila, Fort Shafter in Hawaii and the Presidio in San Francisco.
- The monitor posts and their operations did not meet with everyone's approval, however. By the late 1920s, domestic cable companies were becoming uncooperative. Also, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson cast airwave eavesdropping and deciphering activities in an unfavorable light. In 1929, Stimson stopped State Department funding for the Cipher Bureau, which then closed. About that action, Stimson later said, "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail....The way to make men trustworthy is to trust them." But when Stimson served as Secretary of War in the 1940s, he reversed that opinion and began to read decoded intercepts.
- With no steady employment to support his family in the Depression-dominated 1930s, Yardley made a desperate decision. In serialized Saturday Evening Post articles and a book, The American Black Chamber, he wrote a controversial expose of his code and cipher breaking. The book caused a sensation in Japan, which then followed the lead of other countries and adopted a new coding system using devices that provided multiple choices of alphabetical replacements. Mechanical shifts and electrical impulses greatly varied the alphanumerical substitutions for original letters.
- One such machine was built to cover two primary foreign office channels, one for world capitals and the other for the Far East. Some historians refer to it as the Angoolki Taint A, "Cipher Machine Type A." While there is some uncertainty about the machine's actual name, all agree that it was certainly technically advanced for the 1930s.
- Cipher Machine Type A was connected to electric typewriters for plain message input and for encrypted output. A wired disk called a rotor (some accounts say there were two) provided multiple alphabet substitutions. The rotor principle employed an insulated substance like rubber that was formed in a circle 2 to 4 inches in diameter. Around its circumference were electrical contacts linked randomly with wires that were connected to other contacts on the rotor's opposite face. The rotor was positioned between insulated plates implanted with contacts to match those on each disk's face. One plate was connected to the input typewriter keys representing plain letters, and the other plate was linked with the output cipher typewriter keys. Each touch of an input typewriter's key sent an electric current through the contacts on each face of the plates and rotor to the output cipher key. At one time in the machine's early years, a list of 240 indicators provided many choices for the rotor's starting position.
- The electric circuit routes were varied in two other ways. First, a device called a pinwheel with 41 pins, some movable, altered the rotor's rotations and thereby its contact points. Second, a plugboard with double-ended plugs was entered twice by the encrypting current -the first at the keyboard and rotor input and the second at the rotor exit and the output typewriter. This resulted in a form of inverse substitution with concealing letters.
- There are also some descriptions of a Cipher Machine Type A with a "half rotor" process. In this version, a rotor had a fixed shaft bearing 26 "slip rings," linked with the electrical contacts and slipped around the shaft, maintaining the electrical circuits when the rotor was moved.
- In the full- and half-rotor versions, a central purpose was to encipher separately a six-vowel and 20-consonant division of letters. These were the 26 letters of Romaji, a Roman alphabet. Though an awkward system, it was used by the Japanese for easier transmissions of their ideographic writing. The resulting ciphertext crossed the airwaves as groups of five letters preceded by sets of five digits.
- This system was a dauntingly complex challenge for the U.S. Army code-breaking team in 1936. The code-named it "Red" and used statistical and alphabetical charts, lexicons, stacks of graph paper and mostly pure brainpower to try to break the code. The team belonged to the Army Signal Corps' new Signal Intelligence Service(SIS), which worked in the Munitions Building in Washington, D.C. Led by famed cryptologist William F. Friedman, the team included among its more prominent members Frank Rowlett, Solomon Kullback, Abraham Sinkhov, Robert Femer, Genevieve Grotjan and Albert Small.
- From the letter and number pattern of the dispatches, the SIS staff discerned the six-and-20 division of vowels and consonants that identified the Romaji style. They also applied lessons reamed from U.S. Navy analysis of a Japanese navy machine that enciphered the syllables of kata kana, a type of Japanese code similar to Morse code. It was Rowlett who first lifted the Red code's cover. He put together some unusual aspects in a series of three transmissions. When he mentioned his ideas to Kullback the following morning, the two began to make headway. According to historian David Kahn, they had found parts of plain text that spelled "oyobi"ÄJapanese for "and." By early 1937, full decryptions were available to the resident and top policy-makers.
- Then in 1938 intercepted dispatches indicated that a new mechanism would supplant the Red code machine. The SIS learned in February 1939 that the new process was about to be activated for Tokyo and its embassy exchanges. The use of the Red system to make this announcement and others was a crucial mistake, since decipherable Red messages included phrases that were repeated in text sent by the new Alphabetical Typewriter 97. The first of those new dispatches was intercepted in March 1939.
- The 97 was developed by naval Captain Risaburo Ito. He had also helped design the Red code machine and, ironically, had translated Yardley's articles about his code- and cipher-breaking successes. It no doubt tried to make the new mechanism impenetrable.
- The 97 operators also used electric input and output typewriters. They applied a three-letter code for numerals and punctuation and had two code books, the Ko for basic instructions and the Otsu for special plugboard settings and switches. The plugs provided wiring variety like the Red system, but the switching arrangement was new, a special adaptation of telephone technology.
- Rotary-type phone equipment was arranged in banks of six-level, 25-point stepping switches (also known as uniselectors). Their main function was to direct incoming current from an input terminal to one of a series of output points. The outgoing terminals were usually in the form of a fan-shaped arc. The input-output current contacts were made by a device called a wiper.
- Each stepping unit was a switch with six levels, and each level had 25 steps. Every level operated independently, though the connecting wipers all had coordinate movements. Thus input current was sent a choice of 25 potential output points by stepping the wiper on that level to the point of the output terminal. With each wipers having multiple "arms," the process could repeat itself if the switch was a rotary type. When a wiper arm left terminal 25, another arm moved to the first terminal on that level.
- Such automatic systems for linkages between phone lines were a standard process by the 1930s. Ito and his associates made them a primary cryptographic aspect of the 97 by having the switch banks replace the rotor system. Instead of the rotor and pinwheel movements, message input impulses were substituted (enciphered) as the uniselectors, and wipers sent the current among the multiple outlet terminals.
- Added complexity came from retaining the plugboard aspect and some of the six-vowel, 20-consonant arrangements. Later U.S. analysis found that the groups of six were not always vowels. The plugs were again double-ended (or inverted), and that brought the current through the board twice. The plugs were also assigned vowel and consonant positions. A vowel impulse entered the input terminal and was sent to one of the 25 output points. Then each of the levels of the switch had six output wires linked the plugboard's inverted vowel positions that were themselves purposely rearranged or permuted. The consonant letters had other routing varieties too, with different numbers of switches affecting the input-output patterns and the plugboard order.
- The SIS team compared Red and 97 intercepts and tried to discover the latter's new secrets. For a time, the Navy's OP-20-G code-breakers capably aided them until concerns about Japan's naval cryptosystems required their full attention. Two pivotal SIS discoveries eventually helped pierce the Purple haze.
- The staff had determined that Purple had aspects of the Red's six-and-20 letter divisions, but the efforts to define these arrangements were time-consuming. Then, in 1935 a new team member from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leo Rosen, found a faster way to test possible letter substitutions and variations. He used telephone selector switches the very process fundamental to the unseen 97!
- Another major cryptanalytic breakthrough was made in September 1940 by Genevieve Grotjan, who identified pivotal intervals between message letters and their ciphertext equivalents. Locating such patterns helped reveal how the positions of letter replacements were advanced in the Purple code. Grotjan's discovery formed a real foundation upon which the other staff members helped build. Their combined efforts led to the first two solutions of Purple on September 27, the same day that the Tokyo-Berlin-Rome Tripartite Pact was signed.
- The next advance involved building analogs of the Alphabetical Typewriter 97. Two were constructed by Rosen at a cost of $684.65 in the autumn of 1940. Each was a maze of wires and clattering relays inside a black wooden box, and they did indeed speed solutions. Other analogs were built by the Navy, and some were given to tin British to avoid decryption transfer delays
- Though Tokyo's foreign office communiques carried many clues about impending conflict with the United States, no known Purple decryption conveyed specific facts about Pearl Harbor as a certain war target. But the December 1941 disaster did lead to a greatly increased demand for signals intelligence. (Some credit the term "Magic which refers to U.S. efforts to break Japanese codes between 1935 and 1939, to Friedman who called his team magicians.)
- Germany had warned Japan that some Japanese codes had been compromised before Pearl Harbor. It seems incredible that Japan's leaders failed to alter the 97 significantly or replace it at some point after full-scale hostilities began. Of course, embassy traffic was not intended to convey active military details. But skilled analysts could learn much from such clues as the sites contacted, number of messages exchanged, policies discussed and even offhand opinions about current events in different combat zones. Indeed, Purple experts gained immensely valuable information from a diplomat at the highest Axis levels. He was Hiroshi Oshima, Japan's Berlin ambassador and a former military attache. His careless communiques divulged top Nazi secrets. Oshima's Purple coded cables to Tokyo provided details about many political, economic and military matters during the early war years.
- In late October 1943, Nazi concern about an Allied invasion of Europe was increasing. Oshima toured Germany's own defense line, the Siegfried Line, and its European Westwall fortifications. Oshima's lengthy comments about defensive preparations were coded and radioed to Tokyo. The intercepted messages revealed facts that combined - with information from spies, resistance groups, aerial photography and intelligence gained from the Ultra operation that broke German ciphers directly benefited General Dwight Eisenhower's plans for the June 1944 D-Day invasion.
- Oshima continued his reports as the war dragged on, trying to make the best of the Reich's ever-worsening prospects. When returned to Tokyo after the war, he reportedly denied that he had sent messages detailing German defenses. Interestingly, the only intact portion of a 97 ever found was located in the ruins of Japan's Berlin embassy.
- When hostilities ended in September 1945, the facts about Purple's solution gradually emerged. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall wrote that it "contributed greatly to the victory and tremendously to the saving in American lives."
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CONSTRUCTION OF A RADIO IN A JAPANESE POW CAMP;
By Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Wells
This is a transcript of a recording by Lieutenant Colonel R G Wells, on the construction of radio equipment whilst in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp after the fall of Singapore.
PART-I
- It was about the beginning of 1942 when I was a prisoner of war of the Japanese, when I was ordered to go on a working party which eventually finished up in Sandakan in British North Borneo. 2,000 odd of us were on this work party and it wasn't long before we noticed the absence of information as to the international situation, what was happening in the outside world, and the whole camp had a real craving to get news by whatever means.
- Escape parties were being organised, but none of these was very successful. The next thing people turned to was a means of getting some radio news, and this is where the building of a radio set became an urgent requirement. The main thing, of course, was that we didn't have any components and although we had some contacts outside which later on were helpful in the building of this receiver, it limited our requirement to a regenerative receiver as distinct from a superheterodyne receiver and the decision to do that was borne out by the results.
- The high frequency spectrum during that time of the war was fairly quiet in that part of the world and the BBC, we hoped, would be able to be received. This was aided by the fact that the Japanese in their wisdom called a friend of mine out one evening to repair their radio set and he took the opportunity, of course, to switch over to the short wave bands, with headphones while doing that, and picked up the BBC successfully. That day was memorable because it was the day that the BBC broadcast the death of the Duke of Kent in an aircraft crash. That was the only news we had of the outside world for something like six months.
- The problem building the set, of course, was the need to build components, so until we could build some components there was nothing much we could do. A look at the circuit diagram of a regenerative receiver indicates a number of capacitors - about two or three are required - low capacitors to make the oscillating part of the system work, and in fact from memory we needed in the grid circuit at least one .01 microfarad capacitor and there was no chance we could get this anywhere, or any other components. So we hit upon the idea of taking some tin foil or aluminium foil from the tea chest which the Japanese supplied with the rice rations, then by the well known equations for calculating capacity and the relationship of the distance between the plates and the area of the plates we built a capacitor or, at least, I built a capacitor which according to calculations should have been about .01 microfarad. If I could put an aside here, I built a replica of this capacitor some years ago, and it went out to Simpson barracks where we had some friends in the testing laboratory, and with great excitement the Warrant Officer concerned said "We will see how good your calculations were"; so he put it on his equipment which was accurate to many decimal points and read on his display unit .009 microfarad, so we thought we were pretty good. I said "Touch " to him because he didn't think we could do it. I made two or three of these, and I still have one of them that would work if I built the receiver again, which I have been thinking about doing but there's always something else, like a lot of other projects which one has as one gets older.
- The resistors were another problem. We found out that we could use the impurities in some of the tree wood and the bark, particularly cinnamon bark which was available by getting through the wire only about 2 feet, and we could normally pinch that while the Japanese sentry was moving around. We used a piece of string with the material rubbed on it from the burning of the cinnamon bark which had some impurities in it (we didn't have a chemical analysis); we weren't very fussed because most grid-leak resistors were about a megohm or thereabouts and we had no means or any way we could measure a megohm, so it was largely a trial and error thing to see if it would work. We made a number of these bits of string and tied them round different things to dry them out to get the thing going. Eventually about an inch, three quarters of an inch to an inch, was about the right order of things to get about a megohm resistance. There were the two main things. Now the things we couldn't provide, couldn't do. We had to make coils; they were largely trial and error, one could calculate the inductance of these if one had access to some means of measuring the wire gauge and the space between them. So that was largely a trial and error business. The two biggest components, or two biggest requirements, were we needed some headphones and we needed a valve, and I thought that the rest could be made locally with a bit of luck. On the question of the headpiece an outside contact smuggled in one headphone, which was better than no headphone, and a valve · no valve holder but one can't have everything in this life.
- The other trouble was the power supply. The Japanese main around the camp which provided the power was 110 volts roughly according to the power station meter which we couldn't help but see, because we delivered the wood there while the power station was running; I switched over when no one was looking and the frequency was about 60 Hz, not 50 Hz as we thought, not that this worried us anyway but to know that it was manageable. So two problems remained for the power supply. The first one was the A- battery or low voltage supply necessary for the filament of the valve. We started with a couple of dry cells, but these didn't last very long and we had to make something then. Through being friendly with the pharmacist with the party, we got some potassium bichromate and made up a bichromate cell, which is probably well known in the text books but not of very practical in use. It's fairly hungry for zinc and it needs some sulphuric acid which one can't throw around or hide easily. But it served for some time and was quite successful but, in the end, had the operation lasted very long, we would have been in trouble for that. Two of these cells provided about 3 volts to 4 volts, and 6 volts was a bit too much because each cell was running at a bit over 2 volts, about 2.2 volts.
- The biggest problem was a rectifier to rectify the AC into DC without dropping it to a low voltage, because remember in those days we needed high voltages for the B supply, or anode supply, but in these days we bring everything down to small DC voltages; we needed to get them up as high as we could. That was a partial failure in that using aluminium foil again and oxidising one piece of it, or length of it folded over, with some weak acid. Then using the two electrodes, one of clear aluminium and one of a zinc salt and aluminium, we could make a rectifier. We wouldn't be so audacious as to call it a rectifier now, because it had a reverse voltage of something like 30 or 40 volts, which wasn't exactly ideal, but for DC we had no option. The result was that I made a bridge rectifier but the only problem was that after 15 minutes the electrolyte began to boil, so it was really passing current in both directions but a little bit more one way than the other.
- So a single cell, an extra rectifier cell, was the only way I could close this down a bit, and some smoothing. This we achieved with part of a fish plate from the railway line which was being used at the aerodrome to move the dirt from one place to another by man-power. About six men on these, and the odd fish plate used to disappear anyway for various reasons. I dropped one off at the power station and asked the Chinese under my breath if he could cut it into three little sections which he did. He didn't want to know why! Then again using some palm oil and some bee wire which was in fairly plentiful supply, which we stole - it was a bit risky because the Japanese were cultivating a couple of beehives outside the wire and of course this wire used to disappear for various things unrelated to radio. We put the palm oil along the wire stretched out and rubbed this palm oil on it, thickening it with a little bit of flour and then heating it. The flour bound the palm oil together and formed a fairly good insulation over the wire. Good, but lucky, and with a lot of travelling. I should come back to the capacitors on that, because we had to insulate the layers of those which we did by putting a layer of newspaper (a few people had newspaper and various things, for other reasons than newspaper of course, but then we had no other toilet requisites in the party) and by soaking this in some coconut oil we could insulate each layer after we wound it, and with a piece of this bee wire - we had something like fifty feet of it - wound round this part of the fish plate, we made a fairly good choke coil.
- And then a bigger capacitor, which was no trouble, having had success with the small one, to just wrap as much tin foil as we could round another sheet of newspaper which finished up about 18 inches long by about three quarters of an inch in diameter. We didn't even try to measure the capacitance of it, because we couldn't do anything about it anyway, except put more wire on.
- And that in effect was a fairly good rectifier, a very dangerous one because we had the 110 all right but we had a bit over that by the time we had rectified it, and we don't know because we had no means of measuring it.
- Finally, the valve; we joined the valve by winding the clean little bee wire around it and then plugging it with any insulating material we could get to make it stick, - no valve holder, of course. So eventually we produced a receiver of sorts, except it wouldn't oscillate. We tried building more, another choke coil, and this went on for ages; there was no possibility we could get this valve to oscillate. I think it's recommended according to a friend of mine who had an amateur licence, he thought that about 120 volts was the best we could get and there was no way we could get that by trying to smooth this any more. So the only avenue open was to bribe one Chinese working at the power station who was very much our way, and of course in those days was a nationalist Chinese. The capital of China in those days was Chungking, and I told him we could get him some overseas news from Chungking if he would slowly wind his field coil power up on the generator every night starting at about 9 o'clock bit by bit, and get it up to about 130 on his meter. He understood, and after that I said half an hour to drop it again, very quietly and slowly because it may affect the lights "....and you no speak about that because you get chopped, you know, and we will give you Chungking news...." This was duly done and for about six months we had reliable communication.
- The first trial on air had too much hum, and we had to modify a few things two or three times in attempts to get it right, and in the end we had a workable situation which was worth exploring. Capacitors right, choke coils right, one head phone, we had some old rag so we tied it round the head and tied it on, or string, or whatever we could get. With the hope of recording something we took some paper, which wasn't in plentiful supply, but the odd piece of paper we could get. Running notches down the left hand side, about a quarter to a half inch apart down the paper, and bending it over so that these little pieces stuck up in the air, and in the pitch darkness one could then put the headphones over one's head with eyes looking out for possible interruption by the Japanese · we had some lookouts, or cockatoos as the Australians called them, around the place to warn us at the oncoming of the Japanese - and with great trepidation we heard Big Ben chiming one night. Of course only one of us heard it but we were so full of enthusiasm. It was the BBC all right; it was quite a clear signal but it was somebody talking about growing hops in Kent. This broadcast went on for something like three quarters of an hour without any interruption, but ultimately the signal faded out and I was very annoyed.
- I was asked the next morning by my senior officer what was the news, and I said "we've got good news; I can't talk here, come this way." So he came along and said "what's this news you're talking about." I said I didn't actually hear any news, and he became very annoyed with me and said what the hell did I mean, and I said "if the British primary producing experts are capable and able to spare the time to talk about growing hops in Kent, Britain must still be alive and floating with their thumbs up, and as far as I'm concerned that's the best news I could hear!" That's the outline and maybe there are some questions I haven't covered properly.
PART-II
BJ: The first question I would like to ask you is: What did you have in the way of tools, if any, and how did you connect the components of the wireless without, presumably, a soldering iron?
RGW: No soldering iron, no solder of course, and no other system really available but to twist and wrap with some coconut oil paper, or cardboard or something, and very gently lift it. It was on a platen of wood we obtained somewhere; it was about a foot by a foot or something, so we just mounted the components on that. A meat skewer on the capacitor - oh, we had a capacitor too, a capacitor, a valve and a headphone, which were external to camp components we had. We didn't have any tools at all, except someone obtained the use of a sledge hammer - for what purpose I don't know because one of those would not be needed to escape; other than cutting up the soft iron of the fish plate which was about the only reason we needed anything, the rest were just twisted wires. We just wanted to get one usable because we didn't know whether it might be blown up or captured; we weren't worried, the main thing was initially a short term aim (as well as a long term aim) that it might last. Fortunately, it lasted for over a year – sixteen months until the arrests took place, but that's another story.
BJ: Can I just ask you - the components for the low voltage battery cells that you produced, where did you get all the components from?
RGW: Well, zinc wasn't hard, there was some sheet zinc lying on the aerodrome and we pinched quite a bit of that because that would be eaten away during the use of the cells for the low voltage. I don't know what would have happened if that ran out. I think someone produced two lantern cells which did for a while, but it was mainly on this home-made cell system, which wasn't efficient but nowhere near as inefficient as the rectifier was. We must have been consuming... Ah Ping said he had to turn up a lot of power to keep the lights what they wanted. We were dispersing such an amount of power in this four test tube rectifier for the high tension.
- A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible. We had to take two plates off the one we had to get a high enough frequency. Yes, I can't remember why we didn't go up a bit in inductance; it was largely a trial and error business really. Except that in a regenerative receiver you had some idea when you were near a station because the receiver was so sensitive as all regenerative receivers are. It had a piece of meat skewer type wood which I had a hole drilled in by a pen-knife, and we glued this in with some flour glue or something, into the capacitor shaft so that we could tune it by holding a little stick cross it, fixing it at about six inches because one couldn't get one's hands any closer to the set because it was in a state of very near oscillation where the maximum sensitivity is, just before it bursts into oscillation. With a fairly clear HF band, it wasn't long before we knew roughly, by putting a couple of marks on the stick, where it was.
- We knew that the Voice of America was about a quarter of an inch away from the BBC - I don't think we ever knew the frequencies because the BBC didn't announce frequencies, they just came on the air and broadcast.
BJ: What did you use for an aerial?
RGW: A clothes line. All the huts had a clothes line of some sort so we just took a thin wire from that and wrapped it round the edge, knowing that a normal sentry wouldn't take any notice of it. We just dragged that across the side of the hut and brought it in, and odd people with our permission would put their loin cloths out and hang them over this when they washed them so it looked as if it was being used.
- The toilet in the sleeping block was a hole in the ground and it was verboten to be used by anybody except to put our radio set in when it wasn't in use; everybody respected our wishes in that regard! I think the best thrill was, well two or three thrills, which were momentous I suppose and of great excitement, almost excitement of crying with excitement, and the first was I think when we heard a full news bulletin of something like 400 aircraft over Dresden or somewhere, pounding the place to pieces; we were very pleased about all this. But from the land point of view, from the beginning of '42 I think, I can't remember, but sometime just before the Battle of Alamein, and we heard some of the troop movements in preparation for that. The bulletins in those days were fairly long and gave a lot of detail.
- Unfortunately the first lot of rectifiers blew up about 2 days after this so we were out of business for something like 5 or 6 weeks. Of course, the rumours started to flood in as to what was happening, what wasn't happening, the war would be over in 5 minutes and all these mainly optimistic things; but there were a few super-pessimists who said we would never get off the island, and would die there, and that sort of thing. But the thrill, I think, was when reception was restored again and we had to do another little bit of fine tuning because everything you changed seemed to affect something else; the whole thing was very sensitive and wouldn't have stood up to present day quality assurance bump tests!
- So back there on the first night we missed the BBC for some reason, and the next thing was the Voice of America which had a headline which ran something like this: "The war is over in North Africa, Rommel is knocked to pieces, he's out of the Middle East and the Middle East is finished, the future for this and that............" That was the end of the American news in about three sentences! No other detail, so I said we would go back at about 12.30, and hope that Ah Ping hadn't pulled the voltage down too far, to see what we could hear. Again, the BBC was a little low but it suddenly came quite bright and lifted in volume, and Big Ben chimed again and there was a voice in the wilderness calling. It was a lovely sensation to hear Big Ben playing in those days, and every time I hear it now I become excited. The announcement, initially in a most depressing vein, described all about the 8th Army's movements, and it was here that it did this, and this regiment drew up and did that, on and on this went for something like 15 to 20 minutes, and we tried not to follow it because we had our eyes on too many other things, look-outs and so on. But a lovely flow of English and if you had a tracing board you could have traced out exactly where everything was in situ, but of course that wasn't the aim of our exercise which was to get news. At the finish of the news the polite sentence said "It must be considered now that as all resistance in North Africa has been overcome the Allies victory must be assured" or something like that. And that was all he said, but he took a few minutes to describe everything that happened, so you had a clear picture. But the Americans seemed to be creating for a public that just wanted the headlines, three headlines and that was all; no other interest in anything else. That was one of the happy moments of the system.
- We had the problem, of course, of writing the news because naturally a lot of people wanted to know it and a lot of people could be told it without its origin. This is why we used the piece of paper we took with us (Gordon Waite and the other officer who used to share some of the work), and as soon as we heard about 30 bombers over Dresden or something, you just put 30 BD, or B for Berlin, and feel the paper down when you felt it coming to the end, and pick up the next little bit of bend and write along that in the pitch dark, hoping that you've got something in the morning. Surprising how legible it was, just triggered a couple of words like that.
- Unfortunately, I was in deep custodianship with the Kempitai when the Atom Bombs were dropped and I didn't hear that news on the BBC; it was relayed to me. We didn't keep these things, of course. Getting off the technical side now, the radio set didn't betray itself. Some criticism could be levelled at us I suppose. We trusted too many people; we had no intelligence training then, of course, or anything like that and we were inclined to trust every Asian we met who smiled at us and who said he was one of us. Anyway, while this was going on at the aerodrome and once the troops heard, we had to tell the troops the good news of course. We said we had heard from an unknown source that the war is getting better, or something like that - we had to give them a sanitised version. It was probably all they wanted but, naturally, two or three senior officers wanted to know as much as they could because they may be the ones who would have to make some decisions one day about it.
- Unknown to us an Indian - I don't like saying this and I'm not being racist, it could have been any nationality - blackmailed a Chinese who was helping us on the aerodrome picking up bits of iron for us and various other things. He blackmailed him but the Chinese wouldn't talk, so the Kempitai arrested the Chinese and put him on a rack; he mentioned in the course of his cries for help - which was not a nice thing to think about but I don't blame him - he mentioned Captain Matthews and a couple of other people; I think I would have done the same thing at that stage.
- The Japanese then decided to make a raid on the camp, which they did, and I was then charged and taken away by the Captain; he wanted the receiver and I gave it to him in the end after a lot of leading him round the camp with his soldiers. I could almost laugh at some of the things that happened. He must have told them he was looking for a radio set; a Jap soldier came running up to him with a piece of metal which looked like a piece of horse harness or something; the Captain almost kicked him and told him what to do. So in the end I decided that I couldn't talk to anybody before the rest of the troops on this parade ground, and I felt so conspicuous. He walked Back and said "Are you going to tell me because we want the wireless set?", so I said "Yes, I've just thought where it might be". So I went across and told him where the hole was, and they dug the hole up and, of course, there was the transmitter. He said "Ah, you've been sensible at last", so he took the transmitter and they took it away. From that day on, I wasn't worried about this because I knew the receiver was OK and the troops would be happy about that; they would still be able to get news. And then he took me up to the platform where he stood and addressed everyone. All he said in English was "You all look at this man, you will never see him again" and led me off.
- I had a sort of a dying wish, going in on the vehicle to Sandakan to be interrogated, that somehow or other this set could be preserved and, of course unknown to me, it was. They continued using it but not until after about a week or so - their nerves were a bit shaken. But they used it for some months afterwards until the big moves came and it was a successful source of morale lifter.
- During the trial, that was when the shock came to me when this transmitter was brought out by the prosecution as evidence that we had been using a receiver, but the Court accepted it. It was never mentioned after that because had it been, I don't think either of us would have been alive, because we had planned to get some crystals from the Philippines and try and fit them in this set. Then we could call them on CW and give them some news about ourselves. But we did get some news out by other means, via an agent taking a sandalwood vessel across, that the British and Australian authorities knew where we were, and it was proved at the end of the war that they knew exactly where to come for us. They had guerrilla parties in behind the lines, but they couldn't contact us and they had to watch some of our people just die virtually, because they were there and there would have been trouble otherwise.
BJ: Could I just take you back and ask you to fill in a few details about the transmitter. You talked a lot about the construction of the receiver and I would be very interested to know where the transmitter fitted in to this; were you developing that longside?"
RGW: "No, the receiver first; we had that, and then we started the transmitter as a rather low priority of course, but one it would be nice to have. I had finished the two 6L6G's to make a push-pull amplifier that was the RF output to be, and the oscillator, and we had the capacitor but were missing a few more components and that was about where we were. In other words, in the course of events, had he been an expert with some sort of knowledge of electrical engineering, we would never have got away with two 6L6's sitting up on a block of wood with a few capacitors and things hanging on them, but obviously the Court Martial officers were normal, without disrespect to Infantry Officers, and they had no knowledge of telecommunications.
BJ: Again, the valves you used in the receiver were...?
RGW: Only one, that's all we had, which was brought in by Mr Mabey. He smuggled in a pipe to me, a smoking pipe, with some tobacco. Lovely gentleman. Unfortunately, I never had long with him, he died soon after being arrested. His widow lived at Hove with her sister; the two are deceased now.
Ed) The above account was received curtesy of Bill Howard as one continuous, very long, sentence. I sincerely hope that I was able to provide it with sufficiently coherent punctuation to do it the justice it deserves. I do not know the original source of this material, nor who "BJ" the interviewer was.
Dennis Starks; Collector/Historian
Midwest Military Communications Museum
email: military-radio-guy@juno.com
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MORE POW RADIO; Sandakan POW Camp, From Ray Robinson
- I visited Borneo in June last year, went diving in the coral waters at Sipadan Island amongst the hammerhead sharks, turtles and Maroi wrasse, stayed on Turtle Island and watched the Hawkbill turtles laying eggs on the beach, and thousands of baby turtles rushing for the sea to escape the diving seagulls, visited the Orangutan sanctuary and saw the human like eyes of the "old men of the forest", climbed Mt Kinabalu for the sunrise, visited the caves under showers of bat dung and watched the swifts soaring amongst the ladders of the locals gathering birds nests, went up the Skrang river in canoes to visit the head hunters and used blow pipes to shoot darts. The only reminders of War are the hot baths built by the Japanese (they still work), the sunken wrecks off Labuan Island, and Sandakan.
- I visited the Sandakan POW camp site. There is little there now, just a field where the airstrip was, an old boiler, a pond, and a plaque to the people who died there. There is a memorial cairn "where Gunner Cleary was chained to the ground, and then excreted and urinated on for 11 days before he died." Sandakan POW camp was a very unhappy place.
- Here is some additional information about the POW radio, some of it a little different. It doesn't have the technical details of the BJ account, but covers the human side. It is from the book:
SANDAKAN under Nippon: The Last March, by Don Wall, published August 1988, ISBN 0/73116/3748/8, printed by Wm. Brooks & Co., Waterloo, N.S.W.
After 70 days, "The Fortress Singapore" surrendered on February 15 1942. In July 1942, 1494 Australians (from the 2nd AIF) were moved to British North Borneo (now called Sabah) to Sandakan Camp, to build an aerodrome.
They were joined by a further 500 in June 1943 (mostly British). The Sandakan Camp was originally built by the British to hold 200 Japanese prisoners. All the officers were moved to Kuching, about 600 miles away in Sarawak, where they remained with minimal losses.
"Those left at Sandakan were systematically and deliberately starved to death." Near wars end they were marched 100 miles through the jungle to Ranau.
There were 6 survivors from the "death march". Keith Botterill, Nelson Short, Owen Campbell, Dick Braithwaite, Bill Moxham, W. Sticpewich.
Page 19
"A wireless set began operation on November 4. It was constructed by Cpl. Richards, Small and Mills under Lt. Weynton's supervision. In order the set could be used with the camp power an ingenious chemical rectifier, using a test tube wire supplied by Sgt. McDonagh of the Hospital, was used to convert the AC to DC. Primary coils provided the low tension." "It was kept in false drawer in the carpenters shop"
Page 21
"Even while the radio watch was being kept throughout the night other PWs were still receiving punishment from the Japs and Lt. Wells, who assisted in the wireless watch, often walked back to his quarters at 2 am and saw PWs standing to attention as punishment while guards watched from a nearby hut"
Page 32
A search of prisoners arriving in Sandakan turned up some interesting personal possessions, a "radio transformer", a "pistol and ammunition", a "Bofors shell".
Page 35
As food in Borneo became scarce, some of the local population went to small islands nearby to purchase rice. Joo Ming and Dominic Koh had an argument, which resulted in resentment. Because of this, the Japanese were told that the others had been helping the PWs. Joo Ming was arrested and tortured. From this, more were arrested, both locals and PWs.
Page 37
A camp search was made which found maps, compasses, a pistol, and a diary. "Hoshijima (the camp commander) later gave his account when questioned about the beating he gave Wells. 'I found Lt. Wells' diary. In it it said there was a wireless set in the compound. So after the wood cutting party had finished their work I lined them up and took Lt. Wells to a spot 30 meters from the wood party and I accused him through the translator of having a wireless set in the compound. He denied this so I repeated the question and asked whether he was absolutely sure of this and he said there was definitely not a wireless set, then I told him if he was lying I would hit him and he d "that will be alright". At that time I had Lt. Wells diary in my pocket. I took it out with my left hand and showed it to Wells, and with my right hand I hit him. I only hit him once. I did not hit him repeatedly. "Despite Hoshijima's statement, Lt. Wells received severe punishment. Hoshijima continued "I told him to take me to the spot where the wireless was. He took me into the carpentering room and we look for the set in this room and could not find it, after this he took me to the office, this was the technical section office of the PWs and Wells opened a hidden compartment under a desk and even there there wasn't a wireless. At last after further investigations two Captains told me the following: On a previous night they saw Captain Mathews coming back from latrines with a shovel. This was about 11 o'clock at night. I went there and near the latrine saw some overturned earth and digging at this position I found the wireless."
Page 38
Lt Weynton .... Corporals Richards, Small, and Mills were also arrested. Wong Tun Siow was arrested and tortured for supplying valves.
Page 41
The Japanese finally settled on fifty-two civilians and twenty PWs as the total required for the trial of those concerned in the 'Sandakan Incident'.
Page 44
Sapper Keating died at Kuching before he stood trial, on 11 February 1944, from beri beri, malnutrition, and amoebic dysentery. Capt. Mathews and 8 loyal Asiatics faced a firing squad on 2nd March 1944. The others were imprisoned. Lt. R.G.Wells got 12 years. Some of the Asiatics wives, relatives and children died while their husbands were in prison.
The Remaining Chapters
The airfield was straffed by P-38s and bombed by Liberators, and put out of commission. Borneo was cut off as the Japanese crumbled. They were worried about the prisoners they had, but the PWs were too weak to escape. By 10 January 1945, of the original 2700 men, 650 had died, and 700 were fit to work. They were down to 4 ozs of rice per day. Because of the threat of invasion, the PWs who could walk were marched through the jungle and the Maitland Ranges, inland to Ranau, carrying 40 to 60 pounds of ammunition, rice, and Japanese officers gear. Anyone who fell out, was shot or bayoneted. Others died of exhaustion and disease. The PWs remaining at the camp were shot. The camp was burned.
I found this book depressing, and not very well written. It contains lots of detail, a list of the prisoners with many photographs, and coverage of the war trials. There are 2 other books on this subject, that I have not read.
WALLACE, W. Escape from hell. The Sandakan Story. 1958 Lond.
WALL, Don. ABANDONED ? Australians at Sandakan 1945. D Wall, Sydney. 1990.
Ray Robinson VK2ILV
<robinson@srsuna.shlrc.mq.edu.au>
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The preceding was a product of the"Military Collector Group Post", an international email magazine dedicated to the preservation of history and the equipment that made it. Unlimited circulation of this material is authorized so long as the proper credits to the original authors, and publisher or this group are included. For more information concerning this group, the use of our material, or membership contact Dennis Starks at:
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