William
(Bill) Atkinson was a most beloved Great Uncle, always kind, generous and a
great sense of humour. Although he
lived in New South Wales during the latter part of his life, he never failed to
make an annual pilgrimage to his hometown in Tasmania to visit family and
attend a reunion service for the battalion he served in during World War
II. Bill was not always
forthcoming with stories about the war, though he occasionally gave snippets
about his time in service, particularly if there was a good anecdote to be
had. After one particular reunion
he said that there had been a member of the group whom he had heard loudly
exclaiming that, “Bill Atkinson, he gave me a shirt once, but I’ll be damned if
I know where the bugger got it.” As
it turns out, there is quite a story behind how Bill came to give a fellow
comrade a shirt whilst they both floated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Bill
was brought up in during the height of the Great Depression and placed in
foster care when he was six years old; his early life was a trial in and of
itself. He recalls getting the
cane every day at school for not being able to produce a workbook or
handkerchief each morning, items he was never able to afford. By age 11 he had left school and was
labouring fulltime for a mere five shillings a week. While the rest of his
formative years were spent pursuing any employment he could find, the real
hardships in Bill’s life had barely begun.
On
the 22nd of October 1940, he enlisted in the 2/40 Infantry Battalion
of the Second AIF to, “help the other blokes out.” A mere 20 years old, Bill trained first in Brighton, Tasmania
before being shipped to regional Victoria for further training. The battalion was originally formed to
fight German forces in Europe, however by early 1941 it was decided to use the
men to garrison a forward airbase in Timor should Japan enter the war. Subsequently Bill was sent to Darwin to
acclimatise to the tropics before he was deployed to Timor. The battalion
included 795 Tasmanians in its complement of 919 men when it left Australian
shores in December 1941.
In
Timor, the Australians were told that the Japanese troops could only land in
one place, so they spent the next few weeks clearing land, building firing
positions and preparing for the invasion.
All of this effort was ultimately in vain, as the Japanese landed in a
completely different location, far sooner and in much larger numbers than had
been anticipated. Despite the
valiant efforts of the allied men, the Japanese forces outnumbered them more
than 22 to one. Whilst subject to
frequent Japanese air raids, the 2/40th Battalion attempted a
retreat to the hillside where more supplies waited for them. One night, while the men slept, the Japanese
surrounded the camp and gave the battalion the option to surrender. After days of exhausting defensive
combat, and with no food or ammunition remaining, the battalion was forced to
surrender on the 20th February 1942. In spite of this, Bill remembers the Japanese air force
actually bombed the defenceless soldiers after they had been captured, killing
several men.
Bill
worked loading boats from a Timor prison camp for six months before he was
moved to Java for about a year, where he did a variety of labouring work, from
planting trees to making string.
As a prisoner of war he had little or no access to medical supplies and
survived on insect-invested rice rations.
By June 1944, the work in Java had ended and Bill was to be shipped to
mainland Japan. The remainder of his battalion joined British, U.S and Dutch
POWs onboard the Japanese prisoner ship, Tamahoko
Maru. On the 20th of June, Bill recalls a conversation with his
two friends in which they tried to persuade him into joining them below deck to
get a decent night’s sleep. Instead he decides to sleep on deck, a decision that
ultimately saves his life.
At
11:50pm, some 40 miles South West of Nagasaki, the Tamahoko Maru was hit with a torpedo by a U.S. submarine. Once
breached, the ship sunk in under two minutes. Of the 772 prisoners onboard,
only 212 survived the attack by the allied forces unaware that it had been a
prisoner ship. As the attack had
taken place at night, the soldiers were not wearing clothes at the time. Bill found himself clinging to the
wreckage in the Pacific Ocean, in the middle of the night. Fortunately, a case filled with clothes
floated by and he was able to dress himself and he even threw a shirt to a
nearby comrade. The surviving men
remained in the water for some 12 hours before the Japanese forces rescued
them. After the rescue, Bill was
taken to Nagasaki to work in a factory before being moved to coal mine at
Omine, working in exhausting conditions, battling with fleas, malnutrition and
other diseases. During air raids
the prisoners were shoved into a crude bomb shelter in the side of a hill. If a prisoner looked up at the planes
they’d be beaten, and if Japan was ever invaded, the prison guards intended to
gas the air raid shelter to kill all of the prisoners. Bill remained at Omine until the end of
the war in 1945.
Some
50 years later, at a reunion for returned soldiers of the 2/40th
Battalion, Bill approached the man he’d been stranded in the Pacific with, and
politely asked if he could please have his shirt back. Great Uncle Bill will always be
remembered for both his service to his country and his truly inspiring
spirit. Although modern technology
is able to accurately preserve the events in warzones today, an entire
generation’s first hand experiences of war are at risk of becoming lost with
time. Thus the responsibility of
preserving these memories falls to the friends and families of the thousands of
Australians who have volunteered to serve their country. This is the story of Bill Atkinson and
how he survived as a POW for three years and returned home to even start a
family, although he has not eaten a single grain of rice since 1945.
Lest We Forget
