Kokoda (68 page)

The sequel was beautifully described by Damien Parer’s principal biographer, Neil McDonald, in his book
War Cameraman: The Story of Damien Parer
.

‘Six days later, Marie’s mother and her sister, Doreen, came over to the flat in Wollstonecraft on Sydney’s lower north shore. “I’ve got some bad news,” Agnes Cotter said.

‘“He’s dead isn’t he?”

‘“Yes.”

‘Tears started to run down Marie’s face. She thought, “I’m crying and my life’s over.”

‘Two hours later [the] telegram was delivered. Marie’s father had worked at the cable company so they had known where to contact her parents before sending out the notification. Still the young girl who made the delivery asked first whether Marie had someone with her before handing her the envelope.’
³⁰³

It was an agony that would not pass. Even twenty years later, Marie was quoted in the Sydney
Sun
: ‘I would give the whole of my life for another five minutes with Damien…’
³⁰⁴
That life was a long one. She lived quietly in suburban Sydney, with the support of her son, the baby she was carrying at the time, Damien Parer Jnr, himself now a film-maker, until she died, in December 2003.

John Curtin continued in office working as hard as ever, but in November 1944 he suffered a heart attack that was serious enough to put him in hospital for two months. Though he was able to return to his duties in January 1945, and was mightily gratified to be in office when Germany unconditionally surrendered on 7 May 1945, Japan was still holding out and Curtin’s overall health continued to spiral downwards, as he paid the toll for the crippling workload he had taken on over the years. By early July 1945 he was clearly ailing badly and had been put to bed.

On the night of 4 July, his driver, Ray Tracey, to whom the Australian Prime Minister was very close, went up to Curtin’s bedroom in the Lodge to wish him goodnight. Curtin had just enough consciousness left to ask who had won the football. Alas, there had been no football. It was a Wednesday. But Tracey didn’t care and told his boss what he wanted to hear.

‘Fitzroy won, Sir,’ he said, nominating the team that Curtin had followed all his life.

‘That’s fine,’ Curtin had replied. ‘A very good team, Fitzroy.’
³⁰⁵

Just before midnight his wife, Elsie, took a cup of tea into him, and had a cup herself, sitting quietly by his bedside until just before midnight when he said to her: ‘Go on, Mrs Curtin. It is best that you go off to bed now.’ She got up, gave him his nightly sedative and he said to her, ‘I’m ready now.’ A final kiss, and she left him. Just before dawn, she was summoned by a nurse to come back to be there with him as he passed away.

From the Philippines, where he had now successfully returned, General Douglas MacArthur issued his last communiqué on the subject of the man who had become his friend.

‘Mr Curtin was one of the greatest of wartime statesmen, and the preservation of Australia from invasion was his immemorial monument.’ To Elsie Curtin personally, MacArthur sent a telegram stating: ‘He was of the great of the earth.’

The prime minister’s funeral was held in Canberra with great pomp and ceremony and two of his pallbearers were Artie Fadden and Robert Menzies. Just after they had put the coffin down on the gun carriage Menzies said to Fadden, ‘I don’t want all this fuss when I go, Artie.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Fadden assured him. ‘You won’t get it.’
³⁰⁶

From there, Curtin’s casket was slowly taken to Canberra Airport, where an enormous Dakota aircraft awaited, with six Kittyhawks and six Boomerang fighters for escort. The planes took off. The Dakota, on a brief solo excursion, circled Parliament House twice slowly, and then headed west, with the other planes moving into respectful formation behind. John Curtin is buried in Perth’s Karrakatta Cemetery.

Did they look up? Unlikely, but had they, some of those few Japanese soldiers from the 144th Regiment who’d managed to get back alive from the Kokoda Track to recuperate at home on the island of Shikoku, might have just been able to spot a few flashes passing high above. For at that moment, at an altitude of some 28 000 feet, three American planes were on their way to complete what would ever after be noted as the most important mission of the war. The lead plane was piloted by one Paul Tibbets—flying his soon-to-be-famous
Enola Gay
, named for the mother who had encouraged him, against the wishes of his father, to pursue a flying career with the American Armed Forces. Yes, his father had wanted him to be a doctor in a hospital and save people’s lives, but that was not the way it had turned out… not by a long shot.

Only shortly after crossing Shikoku, the planes traversed the Iyo Sea and then, up ahead, at last came into view the city of Hiroshima, gleaming in the morning sun. It was coming time to drop the cargo in
Enola Gay’s
bomb-bay, a bomb the likes of which the world had never seen—the culmination of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project. It was an atomic bomb, which they called ‘Little Boy’, capable of delivering a blast the rough equivalent of 20 000 tons of TNT.

And now the men could see the curious T-shaped bridge which they knew to be the effective cross-hairs of their target in downtown Hiroshima. Tibbets flicked the switch and reminded all of the crew to quickly put on their heavy dark Polaroid goggles to shield their eyes from what was coming. No one could quite believe it, but the scientists had said this thing was going to go off with an intensity the equal of ten suns.

Lining it up, lining it up… lining it up and…
now
.

The bomb doors opened and Little Boy hurtled down onto the oblivious city below. At the instant of release—suddenly unburdened of 10 000 pounds of weight—
Enola Gay
lurched upwards, and Tibbets quickly put into effect long months of training. In as tight a turn as
Enola
could manage without breaking up, he immediately put as much distance between them and the coming explosion as possible. And sure enough just forty-three seconds from the moment of release, as Tibbets would describe it later, ‘I look up there and the whole sky is lit up in the prettiest blues and pinks I’ve ever seen in my life. It was just great.’
³⁰⁷
The other thing he noticed was the tingling in his teeth, as his fillings interacted with the bomb’s radioactive pulses. When the shockwave hit them from the mushroom cloud billowed up behind them to an altitude of 45 000 feet,
Enola Gay
again briefly lurched, but steadied and then continued on its way.

The bomb was only slightly off target. Instead of exploding above the Aioi Bridge as planned, it vaporised the Shima Hospital, some three hundred yards to the southeast. Some 140 000 citizens of Hiroshima were all but instantly killed. One of the few in Japan who was not entirely overwhelmed by the news when it got out, was the recently deposed prime minister, Hideki Tojo. According to his biographer, while all the rest of Tokyo and most of Japan was panicking in the face of the bomb, Tojo calmly said to his wife: ‘Our ancestors must have lived in caves at one time. So can we.’
³⁰⁸
If the worst came to the worst and Tokyo itself came under attack, Tojo’s simple plan, he said, was to live underground by night, and forage for sweet potatoes by day.

And so, it had come to this…

In 1853, it had been the great American naval officer, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, who on his flagship USS
Mississippi
had steamed into Tokyo Bay, and become the first to forge a genuine passage through centuries of splendid isolation and open negotiations with Japan for trade. From that point on, Japan had indeed opened itself up to the West, but for the most part it had been on Japan’s terms. This however, was very much the reverse.

For this was the ceremony of Japan’s surrender, and the same flag that had flown on that day on the USS
Mississippi
was on this morning of 2 September 1945 framed in the boardroom of the mighty warship USS
Missouri
, also moored in Tokyo Bay. There assembled on one side were many Allied commanding officers, including General Sir Thomas Blamey of Australia and Lieutenant General Arthur E. Percival of England, the latter of whom had surrendered Singapore and had now just been released from a Japanese POW camp. On the other side of the room, representing Emperor Hirohito, was Japan’s Foreign Minister, while the Chief of Staff of the Army represented Imperial General Headquarters.

Presiding, of course, was General Douglas MacArthur, gazing imperiously as one by one, the representatives of each nation signed the documents that formalised the terms of surrender. After weeks of negotiations, Japan had fully accepted all of the West’s conditions, with their sole demand in return being that their Emperor should survive and not be tried as a war criminal. Though there was a strong view among some of the Allied leadership that this condition be refused, and Hirohito tried for war crimes, MacArthur—now installed as commander of the Allied powers occupying Japan—had overruled them. MacArthur allowed Hirohito to remain Emperor, as a symbol of continuity and cohesion for the Japanese people, his only insistence being that the Emperor acknowledge that he was indeed mortal and
not
a divine being. This admission was contained in the surrender documents, and they were now signed. After all the blood, all the tears, all the lives lost and families torn apart, it was over.

On the day that Damien Parer was killed, his great friend Chester Wilmot was in France, in the thick of action himself. After losing his accreditation at the hands of Blamey in the spring of 1942, Chester had spent all of 1943 writing a book about the valour of the Australian forces at Tobruk, before the BBC had invited him to join them in early 1944. Even then, General Blamey had tried to block the appointment, sending a cable to the British War Office asserting in the strongest of terms that Wilmot simply was not fit to be a war correspondent
anywhere
.
³⁰⁹
Even the Australian Government initially denied the necessary permission. Eventually though—with the help of political pressure applied by Robert Menzies, whom the well-connected Chester had known since he was a child—Wilmot prevailed and joined the BBC, moving his young family to Britain.

It was to be a very propitious appointment for all concerned. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, Chester was with the Sixth Airborne Division as it landed at Normandy, and remained with the Allies all the way to Berlin over the next twelve months. Right at the death of the Third Reich, Wilmot achieved his greatest scoop. It so happened he was at Field Marshal Montgomery’s HQ when the word came through that the Third Reich’s General Jodl was ready to sign the surrender terms, so long as it was first approved by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.
³¹⁰

When Montgomery organised to send one of his senior officers to see Keitel with these surrender terms, Wilmot talked his way into being allowed to accompany him. They made their way through the mass of armed sentries into Field Marshal Keitel’s headquarters, and the highest ranking surviving German officer did indeed sign the terms. On their way out, there was only one sentry still on duty, and he was eating an apple. The world had changed. Wilmot had a scoop to beat all scoops, he thought as he raced away to write it. Unfortunately, the army censor didn’t allow a word of it to be published.