Harry Bernstein was born in London, England, on 20 August 1899, to Sarah Rebecca (née Michaelson) and Abraham Bernstein of Whitechapel. Harry worked as a clerk and briefly served in the British Militia, Royal Engineers. Aged 21, he sailed from Liverpool to Fremantle, WA, in January 1921.

At the outbreak of WWII in 1939, Harry was living in St Kilda, Victoria, working as a tailor’s machinist. In June 1940 he enlisted in the AMF Medical Corps, aged 40: VX28109 Private Harry Bernstein. At Puckapunyal in central Victoria, he was attached as a medic to the 2/22nd Battalion, which included two other Jewish soldiers: Private Leslie Pearlman and Signalman Issacher (Issy) Weingott. Over ten days in September – and in a portent of events to come - the battalion marched 240 km to Bonegilla near Albury-Wodonga, for further training in preparation for the North African campaign.

In March 1941, the 2/22nd embarked on HMT Katoomba with a fourth Jewish soldier, Private Albert Fernandez of 2/10th Field Ambulance. They arrived two weeks later at Rabaul, the administrative centre of New Britain, and combined with other elements to form Lark Force, an Army formation established that month to serve in New Britain and New Ireland under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Scanlan. but was ill-equipped and under-prepared to defend Rabaul against the Japanese threat of invasion. Nonetheless, they spent the next months constructing defences and training for the tropics, while more support units arrived to ultimately total 1,485 Australian troops, including another four Jews: ‘L’ Heavy Battery’s Medical Officer Captain Herbert Silverman; Fortress Signals’ Lance Sergeant Keith Levy; and ‘L’ Anti-Aircraft Battery’s CO Lieutenant David Selby and Gunner David Bloomfield.

On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, launching the Pacific War. Expatriate women and children were evacuated from Rabaul on the MV Neptuna and MV Macdhui (see separate entries of John and Henry Rosen), at which time Harry was hospitalised with malaria. The Japanese bombing of New Britain began in early January 1942 and steadily increased in intensity. As the massive Japanese South Seas Force - comprising more than 30 navy ships, aircraft, and nine troop transports - approached on the morning of 22 January, Lark Force destroyed its airstrips, unable to hold the garrison, and withdrew from Rabaul. Travelling further south, Lance Sergeant Keith ‘Bluey’ Levy managed to escape with 150 RAAF and Army personnel in three seaplanes.

The Japanese invasion commenced at 1:00 am on 23 January 1942. Communications failed and the overwhelming Japanese numbers - 5,000 troops increasing to 17,000 - destroyed the Australian defences. Colonel Scanlan ordered the withdrawal from Rabaul: "every man for himself.” Unprepared for retreat, chaos ensued and the force disintegrated. The fleeing soldiers and civilians broke into small parties fanning out over the rugged terrain and dense jungle of New Britain, untrained and without resources, while enduring heat, torrential rain and electrical storms. On 27 January, Captain Richard Travers, who was leading ‘D’ Company of the 2/22nd Bn 30km southwards near Toma, voluntarily surrendered with 100 of his men and was immediately murdered. His death was apparently intended as a warning by the Japanese to others contemplating evasion. Private Harry Bernstein – presumably caring for sick and wounded soldiers – was amongst those captured at Toma and taken back to a Prisoner of War camp at Rabaul, joining Private Albert Fernandez (see separate entry).

On 4 February 1942 at Tol Plantation 270km further south, the Japanese massacred 160 captive Australians, including Lance Corporal Leslie Pearlman (see separate entry). Having battled malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, leeches, exhaustion, malnutrition and crocodile-infested rivers, more than 300 soldiers and civilians still managed to escape on small boats over the following few months. The first-hand accounts of Lieutenant David Selby and Signalman Issy Weingott are given in Mark Dapin’s Jewish Anzacs. Another 43 men died trying to escape New Britain during this period, including Captain Herbert Silverman, who was executed by the Japanese when they refused to believe he was a doctor (see separate entry).

For five months, Harry, Albert and the other POWs laboured at Rabaul for food to stay alive in primitive conditions, subjected to brutalities, indignities, and even bombardment by the RAAF. Then on 22 June 1942, the Japanese loaded 845 POWs and 208 civilians - half-starved and ill - onto the MV Montevideo Maru for the island of Hainan. But she sailed unescorted and was not marked as a POW carrier. On 1 July, off the Philippines, the submarine USS Sturgeon pursued then attacked the Montevideo Maru, mistakenly believing her to be a Japanese troopship. Struck by two torpedoes, she sank in eleven minutes. 1,053 civilian internees and POWs, including Privates Harry Bernstein and Albert Fernandez, plus 88 Japanese crew died, while 18 crew survived.

This catastrophic event was the worst maritime disaster in Australian history and the greatest single loss of Australian lives in peace or war, the details of which were not fully revealed to the public until after the war. In 2003 an eyewitness, Montevideo Maru crewman Yosiaki Yamaji vividly recalled hearing the "death cries" of trapped Australians going down with the ship, and: “POWs were holding pieces of wood and using bigger pieces as rafts. Some were singing, and some had their heads down, silent. I was particularly impressed when they began singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a tribute to their dead colleagues. Watching that, I learnt that Australians have big hearts.”

Taken to Japan later in 1942, the six Army nurses along with 51 other officer POWs returned to Australia at the end of the war. After three and a half years with no news of the missing POWs of Lark Force, their next of kin, including Harry’s mother in the UK, Sarah Bernstein, were advised of their fate in October 1945: “For official purposes presumed dead on 1 July 1942.”

Private Harry Bernstein’s name is engraved on the Rabaul Memorial (Bita Paka) War Cemetery, New Britain PNG, and also on the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial at Ballarat, Victoria.

Of the total Lark Force of 1,483, tragically 1,093 men did not return to Australia alive, including four of its eight Jewish soldiers. Although January 1942 marked the first Japanese attack on Australian territory - one month before their bombing of Darwin - few Australians know about the fall of Rabaul, the terrible murders and sinking of Montevideo Maru, or this critical time in our history.

Harry Bernstein was born in London, England, on 20 August 1899, to Sarah Rebecca (née Michaelson) and Abraham Bernstein of Whitechapel. Harry worked as a clerk and apparently served briefly in a Pioneer Battalion of the Royal Engineers of the British Militia. At the age of 21, he sailed from Liverpool aboard the SS Zealandic and arrived in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 15 January 1921.

By the outbreak of WWII in 1939, Harry was living in St Kilda, Victoria, working as a tailor’s machinist and still single. On 14 June 1940, he enlisted at Melbourne Town Hall in the Australian Military Forces’ Medical Corps, attested he was 40 (i.e. born one year later than actual) and of ‘Hebrew’ religion. From No.1 Training Depot at Balcombe, on 17 July VX28109 Private Harry Bernstein was posted for further training to Puckapunyal, near Trawool in central Victoria, and attached to the 2/22nd Battalion as a medic. Raised two weeks earlier, it was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Howard Carr and included at least two other Jewish soldiers: Private Leslie Pearlman and Signaller Issacher (Issy) Weingott. As part of the 23rd Brigade of the 8th Division, they were soon training with another Victorian-based battalion, the 2/21st.

Japan signed a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, including a ‘New Order in Greater East Asia’ on 20 September. For ten days that month, in a portent of events to come, the 2/21st and 2/22nd marched the 240 kilometres from Trawool to Bonegilla, near Albury-Wodonga. They sang: ”It's a long way to Bonegilla. / It's a long way to go. / It's a long way to Bonegilla, / To see the Murray flow. / Goodbye Young and Jackson's, / Farewell Chloe too …. etc.”

Hank Nelson eloquently describes those days in The Troops, the Town and the Battle: Rabaul 1942: “At the main towns they were met by bands, people lined the streets, there was a formal salute, informal entertainment for the men and a civic reception for the officers. The small one-teacher schools passed along the way - Balmattum and Wooragee - made their own patriotic displays. The Tasmanian 2/40th arrived by train in December 1940. For the first and only time the three battalions of the 23rd ‘Birds’ Brigade were together. Equipment was sometimes short and out of date, but the training seemed tough and appropriate. So confident were the troops that they were on their way to North Africa that they imposed the language of the AIF in the Middle East on the upper Murray: even the creeks cutting through the white grass became 'wadies'.”

Soon, the sister ‘Bird’ battalions separated: the 2/21st would go to Ambon with Gull Force (see separate entries for Privates Leon Berliner and Samuel Lazarus); the 2/40th joined Sparrow Force on Timor; while Harry Bernstein, Leslie Pearlman, Issy Weingott and the men of the 2/22nd, now part of Lark Force, rode a troop train to Sydney on 11 March 1941, to embark the next day on HMT Katoomba for Rabaul, New Britain. Joining them aboard was a fourth Jewish soldier, Private Albert Fernandez of 2/10th Field Ambulance. Lark Force was an Army formation established to serve in New Britain and New Ireland, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Scanlan.

As the men on Katoomba sailed north, via Port Moresby, they would have had mixed emotions, as Hank Nelson remarks in The Troops, the Town and the Battle: Rabaul 1942: “None of the troops who went to Rabaul expected to go there, none were prepared for service in the wet tropics, and nearly all were from southern Australia. The 2/22nd had trained for longer than most battalions before it sailed for overseas, but the training had been for mobile warfare in open country where it would have been just one unit in an Australian division, and a British army. The men had been frustrated by rumours of shifts, and by units more recently formed taking pre-embarkation leave and photographs of crowded wharves and troop ships. When they learnt where they were going, they were uncertain in their reaction. They were glad to be on the move, glad to be going somewhere new, but, they asked, ‘were they on their way to war and were they on their way overseas?’ - in the way that Libya and Palestine were overseas, and Tasmania was not. Many, AIF and militia, thought Rabaul might be an interlude leading to something better. They knew little about the town, the country around it, or the people who lived there.”

On 28 March, the 2/22nd, the 1st Independent Company, nurses, smaller anti-aircraft and ambulance units disembarked Katoomba at the town of Rabaul. Located at the northern tip of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain, at that time it was capital of the Australian-administered Territory of New Guinea, having been captured from the Germans in 1914. Rabaul also happens to be in the caldera of one of the Territory’s most active and dangerous volcanoes. On Anzac Day, 25 April, another two Jews arrived: Captain Herbert Silverman, a doctor with ‘L’ Heavy Battery, and Lance Sergeant Keith ‘Bluey’ Levy with Rabaul Fortress Signals. Lark Force would later be supported by No. 24 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Its role was to protect the airfields at Lakunai and Vunakanau, and the seaplane base at Rabaul, as well as provide early warning of Japanese movements through the islands to Australia's north. A total of 1485 Australian troops would make up Lark Force - plus members of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles - to defend that eastern part of the Territory against the Japanese threat of invasion, with more than 1600 km of coastline. The reality was that, like the other two ‘Bird’ forces deployed to Australia's north, Lark Force was ill-equipped and likely to be overwhelmed by enemy attack. It had no sea support, poor air cover and little artillery. The infantry units were lightly armed and possessed few mortars or machine guns. The view of the Australian Chiefs of Staff was that, at best, this force could no more than briefly delay a Japanese advance. Nonetheless, the 2/22nd spent the next months constructing defences and training for operation in a tropical environment.

Hank Nelson observed: “With their main camp close to the centre of town and outnumbering the civilian whites, the troops dominated much of the life of Rabaul: the sport, the dances, the traffic and the crowd at the Regent Theatre. The band [of the 2/22nd Bn that was composed of Salvation Army members] played for civic, sacred and military occasions. The troops were sometimes turbulent. They brawled at the New Guinea Comforts Fund dance at the BP clubrooms, and the dances were suspended. Two drunken soldiers threw a New Guinean taxi driver from his car, and crashed it into a tree. They continued to wonder what they were doing in Rabaul when other Australians were in battle in North Africa, Greece and Crete.”

In August, Leslie was promoted to Lance Corporal, and ‘L’ Anti-Aircraft Battery, consisting of 54 militiamen, arrived in Rabaul. It included another two Jews: CO Lieutenant David Selby and Gunner David Bloomfield. As an AMF unit, like the ‘L’ Heavy Battery - not officially part of the AIF - they were also looked down on by some of the 2/22nd Battalion’s men as “Chockos” (i.e. “Chocolate Soldiers”), but that distinction ultimately blurred. Soon Lt Selby also recorded an eloquent description of the township: “The European population of Rabaul, amounting to about 1,000, was well served by two clubs, three hotels and three European stores, but the main shopping centre consisted of four streets of Chinese stores where the troops could spend their pay on a multitudinous variety of knick-knacks to tempt the eyes of the home-sick soldiery. In the centre of the two was the Bung, the native market, where the [native people] displayed and noisily proclaimed the excellence of their wares, luscious paw-paws, bananas, pineapples, tomatoes and vegetables. Among the magnificent tree-lined avenues strolled a polyglot population, the local officers looking cool in their not-so-spotless whites, troops in khaki shirts and shorts, the tired-looking wives of planters on a day's shopping, Chinese maidens glancing up demurely from beneath their huge sunshades, their modest-looking neck to ankle frocks slit on each side to their thighs, bearded German missionaries, hurrying Japanese traders and ubiquitous [natives], black, brown, coffee-coloured or albino, the men with lips stained scarlet by betel nut juice, the women carrying the burdens and almost invariably puffing a pipe.”

In December 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and Malaya, launching the Pacific War, and Guam was captured two days later by the Japanese South Seas Detachment under Major General Tomitaro Horii. It was then tasked with capturing Kavieng and Rabaul, as part of ‘Operation R.’ Meanwhile, the MVs Neptuna and Macdhui (see separate entries of John and Henry Rosen) evacuated most of the ex-patriate women and children from those towns’ encompassing islands of New Ireland and New Britain, respectively. They included German and Japanese sympathisers - some of whom had likely been supplying information to the Japanese - but not all of them. Also that month Harry Bernstein, suffering from malaria, was admitted for ten days to the town’s 2/10th Army General Hospital, likely also meeting Albert Fernandez, who had become an Orderly.

Japanese bombing of New Britain began in early January 1942, increasing in intensity as the month continued. By the morning of 22 January, RAAF No. 24 Squadron was virtually destroyed and its three remaining aircraft were withdrawn. With no use for the airstrips, both were demolished and Lark Force withdrew from Rabaul, waiting on the western shores of Blanche Bay for the inevitable Japanese invasion. The massive Japanese South Seas Force approached: a fleet of 40 ships, including twelve destroyers, eight cruisers, nine submarines, two aircraft carriers with 171 fighter and bomber aircraft and nine troop transports. Lark Force commander, Colonel John J. Scanlan, who had received word that the Japanese fleet had been sighted to the north, then made the controversial decision to inform his men they were going on a field exercise for the next two days. Perhaps he thought this would put the men on alert without destroying their morale, but it also meant that the men took only a light load of rations and other supplies with them. This would prove disastrous in the subsequent retreat into the interior. Preparations were further disrupted by the "rather botched demolition" of the airfield bomb depot, which levelled everything within a quarter mile, killed several civilians, and shattered the vacuum tubes in the force's radios. With communications thus cut off, it would be days before the Australian high command had any clear idea what had happened at Rabaul.

The landings began at 1:00 am on 23 January. By 9:00 am communication failures and the overwhelming Japanese strength - 5,000 troops growing to 17,000 compared to the 1,400 of Lark Force - destroyed the cohesion of the Australian defence. Colonel Scanlan ordered a withdrawal later that morning on the basis of "every man for himself". Unprepared for retreat, chaos ensued, and Lark Force disintegrated. Concurrently, a Japanese float plane dropped leaflets, with General Horii’s proclamation:
‘To the Officers and Soldiers of this Island!
SURRENDER AT ONCE!
And we will guarantee your life, treating you as war prisoners. Those who RESIST US WILL BE KILLED ONE AND ALL. Consider seriously, you can find neither food nor way of escape in this island and you will only die of hunger unless you surrender.
January 23rd, 1942.
Japanese Commander-in-Chief.’

Having been ordered to leave Rabaul for the village of Toma on 21 January, Lance Sergeant Keith Levy and half of the Fortress Signals were amongst some 150 RAAF and Army personnel, fortunate to be evacuated over the next two days by RAAF seaplanes further south, from the coastal villages of Sum Sum and Tol. Unable to be accommodated on the last, overloaded aircraft, his CO Captain Denny gamely set off from Tol in a commandeered boat for the Trobriand Islands. From there, after several adventurous voyages, the small party reached Queensland on 9 March – but that was not the last time that Tol would be heard of.

At Toma on 22 January, a mechanic with the Administration Wireless, Mr D. Laws, kept up communication with Port Moresby throughout the night and sent Lark Force’s last tele-radio message at 9am on 23 January, just prior to destroying the equipment and escaping into the jungle. In the following days, Lark Force parties, ranging from company-strength down to pairs and individuals, sought escape along New Britain's north and south coasts. Battling malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, leeches, exhaustion, malnutrition and crocodile-infested rivers, enduring heat, torrential rain and electrical storms, they took routes through the most rugged terrain and dense jungle imaginable. Some were also driven by rumours that the RAAF would return to Wide Bay and rescue them too.

On 27 January, Capt. Richard Travers, who was leading the rifle, ‘D’ Company of the 2/22nd Bn, 30km southwards also near Toma, voluntarily surrendered with approximately 100 of his men and was immediately murdered by the Japanese. His death was apparently intended as a warning to other Australians contemplating evasion. It is not known whether his executioners faced a War Crimes Trial (see Afterword). Private Harry Bernstein – presumably caring for sick and wounded soldiers – was amongst those who surrendered to the Japanese at Toma that day and taken back to Rabaul. They were held in a Prisoner of War camp, where Private Albert Fernandez, who was captured at Kokopo on the day of the Japanese landing, also found himself (see separate entry).

At Tol Plantation 270km further south, approximately 160 Australians including Lance Corporal Leslie Pearlman (see his separate entry) were caught while trying to escape, and then massacred by the Japanese on 4 February. Some men found small boats and got away under their own auspices; others were picked up by larger vessels operating from New Guinea. More than 300 members of Lark Force, most of whom were members of the 2/22nd, managed to return to Australia over the next few months, including Gunner David Bloomfield, Lieutenant David Selby and Signaller Issacher Weingott. The first-hand accounts of the latter two are powerfully retold in Mark Dapin’s Jewish Anzacs. Another 43 men died trying to escape New Britain during this period, including Captain Silverman (see his separate entry), a doctor who was executed by the Japanese.

Hundreds of men who remained on New Britain and New Ireland were taken into captivity over the ensuing months. They gave themselves up in small batches or eventually wended their way back to Rabaul, to be interned as POWs. Those soldiers who disregarded General Horii’s decree and were captured after fighting rather than immediately surrendering, were simply murdered. In March, during an air raid on Port Moresby, the Japanese dropped a bundle of hand-written messages from some of the military prisoners of war and civilian internees. They were allowed only a few words, so most letters were pitifully short: “Dearest this is just a line to let you know that I am a prisoner of war in the Japanese [censored] at Rabaul. I am well and uninjured and am very well treated. Love to my little one.” It was enough to give families, friends and comrades hope that the men and women at Rabaul were safe. But nothing more would be heard of their fate until after the war.

Harry Bernstein, Albert Fernandez, the other POWs and civilians endured five months of imprisonment under primitive conditions, labouring for food to stay alive and being subjected to brutalities and indignities. They also came under regular bombardment by the RAAF while at forced labour in the Blanche Bay area and in the unmarked compound. At the end of May, the Japanese Army handed the camp over to the Navy, in preparation for drill thought to be for the Japanese invasion of mainland New Guinea. In June and July the naval authorities made two attempts to transfer the prisoners to Japan.

At about 4:30 am on 22 June 1942, Japanese marines and guards roused the first group of male soldiers and civilians, and organised them into parties of 50. Some 60 Australian officers and a dozen or so civilian women were retained in the camp. It was learnt from one of the guards that the first transfer was planned to the Japanese-occupied island of Hainan, off the coast of China. Half-starved and ill, Harry Bernstein, Albert Fernandez and hundreds of other men marched from the compound at 9:00 am, “with a smile and a cheery farewell for those remaining; the stronger supporting the weaker, arm in arm as they boarded the ship.” Historically thought to include 853 POWs and 200 civilian internees left that day on the MV Montevideo Maru, a requisitioned cargo and passenger vessel of 7,270 Tons. Constructed in Nagasaki in 1926, she was used during WWII by the Imperial Japanese Navy as an auxiliary vessel transporting troops and provisions throughout South East Asia. As a part of the Kure Naval District, the vessel had participated in landings at Makassar in the Netherlands East Indies. After operating in the Japanese islands, the Montevideo Maru returned to Java before sailing for New Britain. But when she departed there, she was not marked as a POW carrier and sailed for Hainan Island unescorted, keeping to the east of the Philippines in an effort to avoid Allied submarines.

After completing three patrols from December 1941 to May 1942, the USA submarine USS Sturgeon was refitted at Fremantle, W.A., and then returned to sea on 5 June to patrol an area north of Manila, Philippines. She sighted the Montevideo Maru off the Philippine island of Luzon on 30 June, eight days into the freighter’s voyage. Believing it to be a Japanese troopship, LT CMDR Wright pursued her, but was unable to fire as the target was travelling too fast. However, the Montevideo Maru slowed towards midnight - according to crewman Yosiaki Yamaji, it was to rendezvous with an escort of two destroyers. So then, in the South China Sea off Luzon, the Sturgeon again spotted the Montevideo Maru. For approximately four hours the submarine manoeuvred into a position to fire its four stern torpedoes. The Sturgeon’s log of 1 July 1942 records an impact at 2:29 am, approximately 100 feet (30 metres) aft of the funnel. Minutes later, Jack Atkinson was one of several Sturgeon crew members invited to inspect the damage through the submarine's periscope. ''Captain let us come up and see this one that we hit. I had a look … and we thought it was a troop ship … We saw people jumping over the sides,'' he recalled around 70 years later at age 93, fighting back tears. ''I'm so sorry that it happened. But we didn't know about it. So I can't say anything else. It was just a terrible thing.''

Survivors from the Montevideo Maru’s Japanese crew reported two torpedoes striking the vessel followed by an explosion in the oil tank in the aft hold and that she sank by the stern in as little as eleven minutes from the impact. Although the Japanese crew were ordered to abandon ship, it does not appear they made any attempt to assist their captives to do likewise, resulting in the deaths of all prisoners and internees on board. The ship’s lifeboats were launched but all capsized and one suffered severe damage. It is believed that 1140 (including 88 Japanese crew) were killed while 18 crew survived. Some of the Japanese, including the ship's captain made it to the Philippines but most of them, including the captain, were killed by local guerrillas. Private Albert Fernandez, aged 43, and Private Harry Bernstein (see separate entry) died in this terrible mistake, the worst maritime disaster in Australian history and also the greatest single loss of Australian lives in peace or war.

Yosiaki Yamaji’s eyewitness account is the only one to ever emerge: by October 2003, he was the sole remaining survivor from the Montevideo Maru’s crew. Even after 61 years, he vividly recalled how he heard the "death cries" of trapped Australians going down with the ship and described the spectacle: ''We went back to the place where the ship sank to pick up Japanese crew members. There were more POWs in the water than crew members. The POWs were holding pieces of wood and using bigger pieces as rafts. They were in groups of 20 to 30 people, probably 100 people in all. Some were singing, and some had their heads down, silent. I was particularly impressed when they began singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as a tribute to their dead colleagues. Watching that, I learnt that Australians have big hearts.”

In July, a second group of about 60 Australian officers, including Colonel Scanlan, and 18 women were shipped from Rabaul to Japan on the Naruto Maru. The Japanese made Rabaul a South Pacific fortress from which they launched the Kokoda and Buna campaigns among many others, and the naval air Battles of Midway and Coral Sea. Up to 300,000 Japanese were garrisoned there from 1942 to 1945 and five airfields hosted 300 bombers and fighters. In November 1944, the Australian military returned to New Britain, relieving USA forces that had landed eleven months earlier, and then contained the main Japanese forces around Rabaul until the surrender in August 1945. There were still some 69,000 Japanese troops there, and it took another two years to repatriate them all.

Although the sinking of the POW transport ship was acknowledged in a letter from the Japanese Navy, dated 6 September 1943, as a result of enquiries by the Australian Government, the deaths of the men on the Montevideo Maru were not fully revealed to the public until after the end of the war. Most of the second group of POWs who were transported to Japan, including the six army nurses, survived the cruelty, cold and deprivations of their captivity and returned to Australia after the war. Small pieces of information had come from wartime sources such as New Guineans who had reached safety and from captured Japanese personnel and, after hostilities had ended, Japanese and surviving civilians in Rabaul, and also the POW officers who had returned from Japan. In September 1945, the Australian authorities sent Australian Army officer Major Harold S. Williams, a pre-war resident of Japan, to Tokyo as a liaison officer with No. 1 Australian Prisoners of War Contact and Enquiry Unit to investigate this and other POW matters. Williams received access to Japanese files which showed that the Montevideo Maru had been carrying Australian prisoners when it was sunk, and included a mimeographed 48-page nominal list in Katakana (Japanese phonetic script) of personnel on board. Nevertheless, the Australian Government chose not to hold a post-war enquiry.

After three and a half years of hearing nothing regarding the missing POWs of Lark Force, and two months after war’s end, their Next of Kin, including Harry’s mother Sarah Bernstein in London UK, were eventually advised of their fate in October 1945. In the same month, Private Albert Fernandez’s and Private Harry Bernstein’s service records were imprinted: “For official purposes presumed dead on 1 July 1942 (on Montevideo Maru).” Of the total Lark Force of 1485, it was revealed that 1093 men did not return to Australia alive. Neither did four of the eight Jewish Australian soldiers, known to be on Rabaul, return: Captain Herbert Silverman of ‘L’ Heavy Battery, Private Albert Fernandez of 2/10th Field Ambulance, Lance Corporal Leslie Pearlman and Private Harry Bernstein of 2/22nd Battalion. The 2/22nd was never re-raised.

As he has no known grave, Private Harry Bernstein’s name is engraved on Panel 19 of the Rabaul Memorial, Rabaul (Bita Paka) War Cemetery, East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The memorial commemorates more than 1,229 members of the Australian Army (including personnel of the New Guinea and Papuan local forces and constabulary) and RAAF who lost their lives in the area or the sinking of the Montevideo Maru in 1942, and from November 1944 to August 1945, and who have no known grave. The memorial was unveiled in October 1953 by Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Governor-General of Australia. Albert’s name is also inscribed on the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial at Ballarat, Victoria.

POSTSCRIPT

Nobody appears to have been aware that the six Army nurses had been taken to Japan. They were found by accident when General MacArthur's troops were on their march into Tokyo, following the surrender in August 1945, and returned to Australia.

The USS Sturgeon, in her eleventh and final active patrol, on 29 June 1944 south of Japan, fired four torpedoes at the 7,089-ton troopship Toyama Maru, sending her up in flames and to the bottom with 5,400 men. That sinking - one of the worst maritime disasters in history - had a sizeable influence on the battle for Okinawa, as the ship was carrying 6,000 troops of the 44th Independent Mixed Brigade that were on their way to the Island.

The Japanese attack on Rabaul of 23 January 1942 is regarded as their only entirely successful operation in the South Pacific, and the town’s fall, capital of an Australian Territory, was arguably the beginning of the country’s bleakest year of the war. "The battle for Australia has commenced," the Acting Prime Minister and Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, told the nation during an emergency national broadcast the day after the invasion of Rabaul. There have been national commemorations for the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin. But the fall of Rabaul was marked only by a few quiet ceremonies, attended mostly by families. Part of the reason this national disaster has never been part of the nation's story seems to be that there were relatively few survivors, and many of them remained so traumatised by what happened that they could hardly talk about it.

The number of Australians who subsequently died as a result of the fall of Rabaul and Kavieng in January 1942 is more than four times the number of victims in the first bombing raid of Darwin, which occurred nearly one month later, and double those who died in Vietnam. Yet, most Australians know nothing about the first Japanese attack on Australian territory, the terrible murders, the tragedy of the Montevideo Maru or this critical time in our history.

Only seven men of the Rabaul Anti-aircraft Battery returned to their homeland. After the war, David Selby rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and in 1956, wrote Hell and High Fever. In 2001 David Bloomfield published Rabaul Diary: escaping captivity in 1942 and was interviewed in 2004 by UNSW Canberra for the Australians at War Film Archive.

At the unveiling of a plaque at Subic Bay on 1 July 2009 to honour the men of the Montevideo Maru, Andrea Williams, grand daughter of a Rabaul civilian who perished, proclaimed: “Imagine the shock when, as war ended and the months still passed with no news, the grim realisation of the terrible tragedy unfolded. Whilst other families celebrated, hope turned into horror and, eventually, overwhelming sadness. Telegrams confirmed that over 1000 troops and civilians from Rabaul had disappeared with the Montevideo Maru. Questions were asked but not satisfactorily answered.”
In July 2010, after decades of lobbying by relatives and others of the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru Society, the Australian Government officially recognised:
- gratitude of the Australian nation to the military personnel and
civilians in Rabaul and the New Guinea Islands for their services in the
defence of Australia during World War II;
- regret and sorrow for the sacrifices that were made in the defence of
Rabaul and the New Guinea Islands after the invasion of 23 January
1942 and in the subsequent sinking of the Montevideo Maru on 1 July
1942;
- condolences to the relatives of the people who died in this conflict;
- thanks to the relatives for their forbearance and efforts in ensuring
that the nation remembers the sacrifices made.

On 1 July 2012, the Governor-General Ms Quentin Bryce, unveiled the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru memorial in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra (Image 12). At the time, the Japanese handed thousands of POW documents to the Australian government including the ship’s manifest, and Gillian Nikakis, whose father was on the ill-fated “hell-ship”, proclaimed:
“These young men gave their lives to fight for their country and protect their families. Grandchildren still feel the sadness of their parents’ and grandparents’ loss. I question why anyone would want to go to war if they know that sacrificing their life for their country will not matter to anyone but their family.”
“If men are sent to fight an unwinnable battle with obsolete weapons and abandon them and not even mention them in our history books, what sort of message does this give Australians?”
“Knowing soldiers are valued and honoured from previous battles must also help tremendously with troop morale, knowing that at least their own sacrifice will be honoured if they die.”

Another commentator concluded: “Some solace to the relatives and friends of the Montevideo Maru victims may be gained from their fate, for if they had survived the sinking, they would have endured 3½ years of sheer misery on Hainan Island. Indeed, they would have suffered unbelievable treatment as did those 263 POWs of Gull Force who had been transported from Ambon, Indonesia, and had suffered torture, beatings, near-starvation, disease (including beri-beri) while always slaving. Only 191 (72%) of the 263 prisoners from Ambon were still barely alive when the war ended, some even dying in a Morotai hospital on the way home.”

AFTERWORD

Australian War Crimes Trials

Alleged Japanese war criminals faced three levels of trials after the end of WWII:
A Class trials (conspiracy to wage and start war).
B Class trials (violations of the laws and customs of war).
C Class trials (crimes against humanity).
Australian B and C Class trials were conducted by military courts under the Australian War Crimes Act 1945 at Morotai, Wewak, Labuan, Rabaul, Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong and Manus Island: “In all, Australia conducted nearly three hundred trials, in which 924 Japanese servicemen were accused of war crimes. Of these, 644 were convicted and 148 were sentenced to death, although 11 had their sentences commuted.” See: https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au

Thus, 137 Japanese war criminals were executed by military firing squads or by hanging.

Australia maintained a prison on Manus Island, north of New Guinea, for Japanese prisoners pending returning them to Japan to complete their sentences in the early 1950s.