Remembering Montevideo Maru

SEVENTY years to the day it plunged into the murky depths of the South China Sea, the tragedy of the Japanese transport ship, the Montevideo Maru, was revisited last Sunday when a memorial was unveiled to commemorate those who perished.
More than 1,000 people gathered at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra for a commemorative service to remember those who lost their lives in Australia’s worst maritime disaster.
Between midnight and dawn of July 1, 1942, the Montevideo Maru was torpedoed by the American submarine USS Sturgeon, whose captain was unaware there were prisoners of war on board.
The ship had left Rabaul on June 22, 1942, bound for Hainan Island and was not marked as a PoW transport.
Only a few members of the Japanese crew survived. The 1,054 prisoners, battened down in the locked hatches, went down to a watery grave. One can scarcely imagine the terror they would have experienced in their final moments.
Fires and explosions from the torpedo hit and sea water rushing into the ship would have caused chaos and panic in the pre-dawn darkness. More than 200 of the prisoners were civilians, while the rest were captured Australian service personnel.
Sunday’s service and the steel sea-themed memorial provided belated recognition for the victims, whose deaths were not known for more than three years after the ship went down, and their long-suffering relatives.
The Japanese government did not publicly reveal the tragedy until after the war, giving cause for false hope to relatives of the victims that their loved ones would return when the war ended.
The non-disclosure would probably have suited the allied governments as well. Such horrible news would have been catastrophic for public morale, when the war was still raging and Australia was bracing for a Japanese invasion.
After the war, the sinking of the PoW ship was overshadowed by the more “fashionable” tales of the sinking in naval battles of the HMAS Perth and HMAS Sydney.
Relatives of those who died on the Montevideo Maru have long campaigned for a memorial and would have felt a sense of satisfaction at achieving their goal last Sunday.
PNG High Commissioner Charles Lepani and Australian Education Minister Peter Garrett were among those who attended the memorial service, at which those who died were formally named for the first time. The full list of victims was among prisoner of war records recently provided to the Australian government by the Japanese government.
Garrett has a personal connection to the tragedy. His grandfather, Tom Vernon Garrett, went down with the ship.
“My grandfather was a planter in New Britain,” Garrett told the memorial service.
“Today is incredibly moving for me because it fills this big gap in my family history. It also opens up for us an understanding of what I think was one of the most important events in World War II in the Pacific theatre.”
Garrett said it had taken his family years to come to terms with the loss of his grandfather. “I think in part because there were no records,” he said.
He said families had suffered their losses in silence.
“It was quite a stoic generation. In my family, there was a bit of a stiff upper lip approach to all this but, beneath the surface, there is very clearly an aching sense of loss.”
He said the unveiling of a memorial to the victims would “close the circle to some extent on this extraordinary and tragic event”.
“The delay in formal notification both of those who lost their lives in the event itself and the subsequent response by Australian governments in the post-war period had paucity about it which is still puzzling,” Garrett said.
Australian army chief Lt-Gen David Morrison, who was the guest speaker, said the sinking of the Montevideo Maru was one of the most tragic events of Australian military history and was the culmination of a chain of disastrous strategic and tactical decisions.
“Far too many brave young Australians paid the ultimate price for it. The dead of the Montevideo Maru silently rebuke Australia and remind us some 70 years later of the consequences of neglect of the nation’s defence,” he said.
Donald Hook, from the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru Society, later told the ABC the memorial provided long awaited recognition and some closure for relatives.
“They have never been recognised. They were not treated very well by various levels of (the Australian) government,” he said.
“It gives them great pride at long last that they have been recognised. It is very significant, a sort of sense of finality to the whole thing.”
The commemoration service included a flyover of 1930s military aircraft including a Wirraway, Hudson bomber and a Catalina flying boat.
The Salvation Army brass band from Melbourne performed an anthem written by Catholic missionary nuns from New Britain. The anthem pays tribute to the Australian soldiers who liberated the nuns from Japanese internment.
The commemoration service and the memorial to the victims of the Montevideo Maru disaster serves to remind us of another, more recent tragedy – the sinking of the mv Rabaul Queen early this year.
The victims of that tragedy, too, deserve a memorial. It is to be hoped that the report into the sinking, which was handed to the government a few days ago, will be made public, and that any recommendations would be accepted and implemented as a matter of priority.
This would help prevent a similar tragedy from occurring in future, and the victims of the Rabaul Queen would not have died in vain.

Sanjay Bhosale,

a former associate editor of The National, is a Canberra journalist.