Dr. Rosalind Hearder has taught at the University of Melbourne and worked at the Australian War Memorial, most recently as a member of an Australian National University-Australian War Memorial team writing the Official History of the Australian Peacekeeping and Post-Cold War Operations. She has received a number of impressive awards and grants including a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship in 2006-07.

Rosalind Hearder received her PhD in military history at the University of Melbourne in 2004, and won the inaugural C.E.W. Bean Prize from the Australian Chief of Army for her thesis. She was later a Fulbright scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is her first book.

Rosalind Hearder received her PhD in military history at the University of Melbourne in 2004, and won the inaugural C.E.W. Bean Prize from the Australian Chief of Army for her thesis. She was later a Fulbright scholar at the University of Wisconsin---Madison. This is her first book.

Keep the Men Alive

Australian POW Doctors in Japanese Captivity

By Rosalind Hearder

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2009 Rosalind Hearder
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-738-5

Contents

Author's note,
Introduction,
1 The road to captivity,
2 Changi: the beginning,
3 Making bricks without straw: the Burma–Thai Railway,
4 Untold stories: the other camps,
5 A complex relationship: doctors and captors,
6 Doctor and officer,
7 Beyond the call: coping in captivity,
8 The long shadow: after the war,
Glossary of medical terms,
Appendix A Australian POW doctors,
Appendix B Doctors' deaths in captivity,
Endnotes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

THE ROAD TO CAPTIVITY

When they joined up, few Australian doctors considered the possibility of spending the war as prisoners of the Japanese — at that time a largely unknown enemy. World War II saw many Australian doctors eager to enlist, for two main reasons. Those who had previous military experience, either in a medical or non-medical capacity, saw it as a continuation of duty to their nation. For many, this was partly out of loyalty to the British Empire. A sense of duty to their profession as caregivers also influenced their decision to join the war.

The 1933 Australian population census — the last before the outbreak of the war — counted 3,922 medical practitioners. Approximately 2,500 Australian doctors served in the armed forces during World War II — about one-third of the medical profession in Australia at that stage. Of these, 58 per cent were aged 25–44.Among the 106 Australian doctors who became POWs of the Japanese, 86 per cent were under 44, and over half were aged 35 or less. The relative youth of the POW group is also reflected in their rank on enlistment: 86 were captains or majors, the two lowest starting ranks for commissioned medical officers. In fact, over half had no military experience at all before joining up, and only ten had seen service in World War I.

The older group of doctors saw their World War II service as the continuation of a tradition that they had been a part of for many years, while the younger doctors sought to join that tradition themselves. A large component of this sense of duty was the doctors' allegiance, not only to Australia, but to Britain. Most lecturers in Australia's university medical schools were British, students' texts and journals were mostly British, and their 'courses were carefully constructed so that graduates would be eligible for registration by the General Medical Council in London. There was a romantic content in Australian medical attitudes to Britain.' During World War I, medical lecturers at Sydney and Melbourne universities often actively encouraged their students to enlist, usually telling them it was every man's duty to help Britain.

As in World War I, the cultural pressure on Australian men to enlist was intense:

These were men and women nurtured on tales of empire. They went to school when Empire Day was one of the two great celebratory days in the school calendar, and most believed, in spite of the evidence they could read in the newspapers, that Britannia still ruled the waves.

Many doctors remember the pressure of this legacy. When remembering his childhood during World War I, Dr Leslie Poidevin recalled that 'the relatives and others who came home horrified us with their stories, but at least they had gone to join in with England, which was the thing to do then'. Dr Edward Dunlop, who was seven at the start of World War I, wrote in his War Diariesthat 'Scores of sturdy, heroic men, including four Dunlops, donned the Anzac garb to seek high adventure or death.' This romantic notion of war service from his childhood spurred him into 'speedily obtain[ing] a commission' in the militia when he qualified in 1934. The outbreak of war saw Dunlop doing further medical training in London, where 'the British spirit was stirring to Churchill's growing bugle call to war'.

Dr Colin Juttner said, 'I suppose I didn't want to do what I did, but that seemed to be the only honourable thing to do.' He was also influenced by the fact that his brother, who had tuberculosis, said to him, 'Well, Col, one or other of us has got to go.' The importance of his role as a doctor in the war became apparent to Juttner later in captivity when he felt 'I was able to do something as a doctor'.

A sense of adventure and the chance to experience different types of medicine was also an attraction to young doctors thinking of enlisting. War provided opportunities for them to gain practical skills that they may never have acquired working in a hospital. It also provided an opportunity to work with senior doctors from a variety of specialties, and possibly to secure their patronage to further their future career. Some of the Australian medical officers who served in World War I were 'exceptionally fortunate in being able to use their wartime careers to secure training for peacetime medicine'.

Despite being driven by their sense of duty to enlist, the majority of POW doctors were entirely untrained in the ways of the Australian Army. Dr Des Brennan joined up in 1941 as soon as he had finished his year-long postgraduate training at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney:

I came up to Vic Barracks full of joy and happiness because I knew that the Dutch cruiser Oranje had been seconded to the Australians as a hospital ship and I could see myself in glorious surroundings out on the open sea patrolling along majestically ... I got up to Vic Barracks and [his superior] said, 'Captain Brennan, I'm sending you to Malaya ... to join a motor ambulance convoy.' And I said, 'What on earth's that?'

In 1940, in his second year of residency, Dr Lloyd Cahill recalled the moment when the war began for him: 'Paris fell, and before I knew what had happened, I was called up to go into the army. I knew nothing about the army at all.' He felt lucky that his unit, the 2/19th Battalion, was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Duncan S. Maxwell, a doctor who also had served in World War I. Cahill was made Regimental Medical Officer (RMO) and, despite his inexperience and a childhood desire to be in the air force, Cahill soon realised that he loved army life.

Poidevin, who graduated in 1939 and chose to study medicine partly to escape the poverty he and many of his peers had grown up with in 1930s Australia, felt a sense of obligation to join up: 'I felt I had to go to the war and my [medical practice] partner was married, so I was the one who could get away from the partnership and he was prepared to carry on and do the lot.' Interestingly, Poidevin was attracted to army medicine because 'knowing the history of the doctors in the First World War, it was the army doctors that really were the active medical people'.

The men who would become orderlies in captivity — in many ways the backbone of the POW medical services — similarly had a variety of reasons for joining up in a non-combatant role. Bill Flowers, a 'confirmed pacifist', initially refused to join up. When his best friend did, loyalty to his friend overcame his political sensibilities, but he found a compromise by becoming an orderly in the medical corps. His medical work in captivity, along with many other orderlies, would prove crucial.

Gordon Nichols, also destined to become a POW orderly, originally followed his brother's example and joined the artillery. At his training camp, a...