Treason And The Traitors Post World War Two – Judith Keene

Judith Keene is Associate Professor in History at the University of Sydney, where her work focuses on the twentieth century European cultural and political history and Inter-war Europe and European cinema. Among Professor Keene’s numerous publications areFighting For Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain During the Spanish Civil War (Continuum, 2001) and her most recent book, Treason on The Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War II, (Praeger, Westport, Conn, 2009). On Tuesday 15 June 2010 Judith Keene addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss her new book.

TREASON AND THE TRAITORS POST WORLD WAR TWO

JUDITH KEENE

The talk tonight is based on my book Treason on the Airwaves that came out late last year.[1] The three subjects of the book were Allied citizens who became broadcasters for the Axis (on Germany and Japanese short wave radio) during World War II. And, with varying outcomes, all three were tried as traitors at the end of World War II. They are the Englishman John Amery, the Australian Charles Cousens and the American of Japanese descent, Iva Toguri, probably more familiarly known by the sobriquet of “Tokyo Rose”. I will talk particularly about Charles Cousens but sketch in the other two as part of the triptych before focussing on the Sydney-sider Cousens.

John Amery, an English civilian, was the son of Leo Amery, a senior figure in Churchill’s cabinet. Leo’s eldest son, John had been part of a coterie of proto fascists who had circled around General Franco’s headquarters in Burgos during the Spanish civil war. It was in the archives dealing with Nationalist Spain that I met John Amery (not in the flesh of course) and was intrigued by the presence of an Amery as part of this nefarious crowd.

Once World War II was declared and after France had fallen, Amery hooked up with a number of these extreme rightists whom he knew from Franco’s Spain and who were part of fascist networks dealings across the borders between Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Southern France. (He was close to certain associates of La Cagoule, the group that assassinated the Rosselli Brothers on whom Bertolucci based The Conformist; and Louis Malle in Lacombe Lucien evokes this disreputable crowd in the South of France). Through these connections Amery was invited to join Goebbels short wave broadcasting unit in Berlin, broadcasting back to Britain. It hardly needs to be said that this was a terrible trial and extremely humiliating for his parents. Even worse was John’s intemperate language in the broadcasts, railing against the “Jew-Lover Churchill” and the “stuttering idiot” King George. Eventually Amery joined the motley cavalcade of anti-Semites and pro-Nazi ideologues that travelled throughout Occupied Europe propounding the glories of the New Europe that they predicted would soon unfold under Nazi auspices.

When the Axis collapsed, Amery was picked up by the Italian Resistance outside Milan as he sped north on the autostrada with the cavalcade of Mussolini’s court, fleeing with the Duce as he attempted to escape into Switzerland. Amery had been on the Allies Wanted List of renegades and very swiftly was brought back to England by MI5. Arraigned in July 1945 at the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court, he pleaded guilty to treason (as I argue in the book in order to save his family the embarrassment of going through a full traitor’s trial). John Amery was executed on 19 December 1945 and buried in an unmarked grave in Wandsworth Prison. He was 33 years of age.

Iva Toguri, better known by the sobriquet “Tokyo Rose”, perhaps most familiar of all three, is also the figure about whom there has been the most misinformation. Iva Toguri, a young Japanese American and a new Biology graduate from UCLA, was on a gap year in Tokyo when war was declared. Along with some 50,000 other young Nisei, that is second generation, American-born of Japanese-born parents most of whom were living on the West Coast of the US, Iva had been sent by her American family to meet the Japanese relatives and learn the language. This finishing year in Japan was a common convention among Japanese Americans, attested by the presence of the great many other young North Americans doing the same thing.

With Pearl Harbour, of course all shipping and connections between Japan and the US was severed. Iva’s parents and brother and sister in fact had been interned during the war and her mother died the year after they entered the camp. Iva was stranded: unable to get home and with little money. Her Japanese relatives were embarrassed by her presence in their family and eventually Iva moved into accommodation on her own. She found work as an English-language typist on Japanese Broadcasting Corporation, NHK, short wave radio station where she met Charles Cousens and eventually was chosen and trained by him to act as a disc jockey on his very successful short wave program “Zero Hour”.

When the war was over, just as did most of the Nisei who also had been stranded in Japan, Toguri applied to have her passport renewed so that she could return to her family in the United States. During the war she had married a Portuguese of Japanese descent and was pregnant with their child. Unlike the other Nisei, whose passports were issued without question, she was interrogated by US Military Security, released and re-arrested. Caught in the cross current of post war politics, which I elaborate on in the book but is not relevant here, she was brought back to San Francisco in Sept 1948 and between July to Sept 1949 was tried for treason in San Francisco.

Iva claimed at the trial that she had helped the POW broadcasters, had never resiled from her American nationality or her support for an Allied victory.  Nor had she ever called herself or been called “Tokyo Rose” it being an epithet that was coined by Time Magazine.Equally, she denied ever having made salacious broadcasts or having taunted her listeners among Allied fighting men with stories about their wives and loved ones at home. It is the case that there were at least 30 other Japanese-American female broadcasters in the Pacific working on Axis short wave during the war and it probably is the Manila broadcaster (the so-called “Manila Myrtle”) who most closely fits the descriptions that were attributed to Iva Toguri. She was found guilty and given a ten-year prison sentence with hard labour. Her sentence was commuted to seven years but she spent the next decades in a series of wrangles in which the US Immigration Department attempted to deport Toguri. In January 1977, on his last day in office, Gerald Ford granted Iva Toguri a full presidential pardon.  She and died (aged ninety) in Chicago in October 2006.

Against the background of Amery and Toguri’s experiences, I want to focus on the Australian Charles Cousens whose rich and mellifluous voice was familiar to Radio 2GB listeners in Sydney in the 1930s. When the war was declared, Cousens enlisted in the 2nd 19th of the AIF and was part of the defeat that the British and Australian forces suffered in the fall of The Malaya Command and the collapse of Singapore in February 1942. As a POW in Changi, Cousens was identified by the Japanese as someone with radio skills that would be suitable to assist Tokyo in its push to expand and professionalise the propaganda arm of Japanese short wave broadcasting. Between the wars there was a great belief shared by nations across the board – in what would become Allies and Axis – in the efficacy of radio propaganda in assisting military victory.

The Japanese military referred to propaganda as “winning the thought wars” and considered it an essential part of the military effort. From Malaya, Cousens was sent alone to Tokyo to establish effective short wave broadcasts to be beamed back into the Pacific and to the home fronts in Australasia and the West Coast of the US. By the end of the first year some thirty allied POWs (Dutch, British and mostly Australian and Americans) had been identified in the Japanese camps and holding pens and brought to Tokyo to work on English-language short wave radio.

Cousens clearly had no choice in where he was sent and in what he was asked to do. As a prisoner of war he was powerless, though he led an easier life than did the POWs sent to labour on the Burma Railway or the men who faced probably the most horrendous fate of all, working in the mines in Northern Japan. It is also the case that Cousens was a gifted radio man with a real vocation for radio and a passionate interest in what was the new mass medium of the inter war years. Broadcast House in Tokyo where NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Commission, produced short wave programs hummed with activity day and night. Though English broadcasting occupied most airtime, there were programs in Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, German, Italian, Chinese and Russian. These were transmitted on a twenty four hour schedule that fitted the peak listening times of the destination audiences. The people who worked at the radio station were professionals with great enthusiasm for the medium.

It is part of the tragedy of wartime that in the normal conditions of peacetime these Allied POWs and Japanese at NHK would have had much in common. Indeed even with the exigencies of being wartime enemies, they worked harmoniously together. POWs were treated well at station, not bashed and not humiliated because they were perceived by radio staff as skilful in their vocations. The camp that was created in the city of Tokyo to hold the radio POWs was another story, with bashings and deprivation. At Broadcast House, Cousens trained a number of the on air Japanese broadcasters and, though he claimed later in his trial that he had tried to imbue them with bad on air techniques, the staff themselves who received his instruction felt that their broadcasting techniques had been much improved.

Shortly after his arrival in Tokyo, Cousens was joined by two American POWs. Like him, they had been in pre-war radio stations, in those cases in Manila. The threesome created what became the station’s most popular short wave program.  “Zero Hour” (began 1 March 1943) became the flagship program followed by two spin-offs “Postman Calls” (which read POW messages to their families at home) and “Humanity Hour”. The term Zero Hour refers to the anticipatory moment immediately before the attack in battle as well as carrying a powerful patriotic association for Japanese, as the pride of the Japanese air force was the Zero.

Iva Toguri, with her American accent and Californian slang, provided the patter between the music and the program played American swing, pop, hot and cold jazz and the foot tapping rhythms of the big bands. The signature song was the Boston Pops playing Gershwin’s “Strike Up the Band”. Nelson Eddy and Deanna Durbin received much air time as did Rudy Vallee and Paul Robeson whose “Old Man River” was a perennial favourite. As a consequence of the skill of these POWs who had been radiomen pre-war, “Zero Hour” became immensely popular in the Pacific. In fact years later when a survey was done American sailors could remember the music very clearly.

The program used messages from POWs, usually read by “Zero Hour” announcers but occasionally with the voices of the POWs themselves, as the hook to draw in the Allied home-front listeners. In fact, my own grandmother listened most evenings to Tokyo short wave in the hope of hearing something of her son who unbeknownst to her had been sent to the Burma railway. The program began as a twenty minute slot in March 1943 and grew within a year to an hour and quarter each day transmitted in the early evening, timed to attract attention of Allied fighting men just after “chow”. By the end of the war it used some thirty POW script writers housed in Bunka, a special POW camp set up in Tokyo and at Broadcast House with Japanese support staff of around 100 people mostly English-speaking Nisei that had come to Japan from North America before the war.

When Japan surrendered, Cousens, who was on the Allied Wanted List of Suspected renegades, was arrested and brought back to Australia under guard to be arraigned in Sydney Cental Court at the end of July 1946. It is worth noting that only one other individual (an Australian civilian John Holland who was an avowed pro-Nazi and had worked for Germans in Shanghai and then Japanese in Tokyo) was charged as a traitor. None of the POWs Australian or American who was associated with Radio Tokyo and had broadcast with Cousens was charged as a collaborator.

The Australian federal government took advice on Cousens’s legal culpability from four eminent legal practitioners at the Sydney Bar. W R Dovey, R Windeyer, Garfield Barwick and Rex Chambers were unequivocal in their assessment that evidence against Cousens was sufficient to indict him as a traitor. And these four provided (long and very expensive) legal opinions at each of the steps in Cousens’s arrest and the preparations for the trial. (The Sydney papers were agog at the cost of the trials– this of course was a time of post war rationing when it was common still to see men on the Sydney streets wearing miliary coats and mixed civilian and army kit because of poverty and the general scarcity of new clothes).

The Commonwealth’s counsel as the Prosecution maintained that Cousens had collaborated willingly with the Japanese and had an “easy war” in comparison with the “boys on the Burma Railway”. The Commonwealth brought two Japanese witnesses from Tokyo to testify to Cousens’s having enjoyed his job and his having been well treated in Tokyo. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Japanese sentiment and at a time when there were soldiers and POWs still being repatriated, the presence of these Japanese citizens coming and going every day to court evoked intense hostility.

Cousens always maintained that he had acted under duress and that his efforts as a broadcaster and scriptwriter were aimed at getting disguised information back to the Australian government about the Japanese war effort. The difficulties of this position were obvious and made very clear in the courtroom. Cousens made his first broadcast at the end of July 1942. At the trial, the prosecution produced 50 transcripts of the broadcast commentaries he had made, or more commonly written to be read by other Japanese or POW announcers. In some he had talked about the need for co-operation with a prosperous post-war Japan in a South East Asian economic zone. It is a notion that today would raise nary an eyebrow but in the 1940s suggested collaborationist ideas that resonated with military Japan’s trumpeted Asian Co-Prosperity Zone, a feint for Imperial Japanese expansion.  Cousens also claimed that his talks carried disguised information.

On this fraught question, my reading is that as prisoners of war, they were cut off from the outside and had no real idea of what going on in the war. When Singapore fell, the families of the defeated soldiers had no idea what had happened to their men. In turn, many of these newly captured men were in a state of disorientation. Kent Hughes for example observed in 1942 that many of the Allied soldiers were in profound shock as a result of the defeat and struggled to grasp the reality of their predicament. In his view, some of the men recently placed in captivity were “mentally unbalanced” and in first months in Changi there was constant talk that they would be soon rescued and how the POWs could assist. Kent Hughes noted the poignant fact that when the first “Burma Party” was sent off a number of them were firmly convinced that rather than going north they were to be repatriated.

In what strikes me as a similarly disoriented frame of mind, Cousens imagined that official listeners at home would comb his every word for his messages whereas the reality was that the war effort was focused on much larger issues and spread across the globe. For Allied military officials prisoners of war were much like defeated chessmen off the board and out of the game. The Listening Posts that were set up were primarily to gather evidence about survivors and more pointedly to keep track of individuals for possible treason prosecutions at the end of the war.

The Cousens prosecution highlights the complex imbrication of the legal systems of the Commonwealth of Australia and the Australian states and as such it delineates an important strand of Australian legal history. Section 24 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act defined treason as an offence committed within Australia’s borders or within the territories under the control of the Australian Commonwealth. Because the traitorous acts of which Cousens was accused had taken place in Japan, prosecution under federal law would normally be precluded. Therefore, if the cases were to proceed, charges could be brought only under the jurisdiction of the Australian states, in this case the state of New South Wales, which continued to rely on received British common law.

In the Cousens case, although the legal officers of the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department pressed for a charge of treason and undertook much of the preparation to bring it to court, in the end, it was the decision of the New South Wales Attorney General that determined how the case would proceed and in which jurisdiction. For these state officials, the priority of retaining a clear jurisdictional and administrative demarcation between the New South Wales and the federal legal systems and the officers responsible for each of them was as an important factor to weigh up as was the evidential assessment of the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Cousens’ arraignment before the Chief Magistrate of New South Wales, Herbert Farrington, began on 20 August 1946, with the Prosecution presenting their evidence. It occupied eight days, brought by the Commonwealth Attorney General with Dovey KC, Barwick KC and J W Smyth appearing for the prosecution. The defence, instructed by T J McFadden and robustly led by Bradley KC and J B Shand KC, argued that Cousen’s intention, whether successful or not, had only ever had been to transmit information that was useful to the Allies and therefore his actions could never be construed as aiding the King’s enemies. The heart of the defence, however, was that whatever Cousens might have done as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, it was carried out under extreme duress. Shand and Bradley hammered home the fact that the prosecution’s case rested on the word of “Jap” witnesses against the testimony of Australian and American soldier-prisoners who had suffered unimaginable brutality in Japan. In Shand’s summation: “It would be as absurd to convict Charles Cousens of treason as it would be to convict the men who helped build the Burma Railway.”

On 4 October 1946, after seven and a half weeks that occupied 24 full sitting days, Farrington SM handed down judgment. It was that on the evidence presented there was a prima facie case for the prosecution of Charles Cousens on the charge of treason. This meant, of course, not that the defendant was guilty, which under law could only be decided after the case had been heard before a jury, but that on the evidence presented at the preliminary hearing, it would be “not unreasonable for a properly-instructed jury in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to find that Charles Cousens had given aid and comfort to the King’s enemies.” In the normal course of events, the next step would have been for the case to proceed to a higher jurisdiction, in this case the Supreme Court of New South Wales with the state Attorney General presenting the indictment. In the event, however, the New South Wales Attorney again declined to do so. The outcome was that the treason charge against Cousens was not billed.

Internal correspondence between law officers within the New South Wales Crown Solicitor’s Office sheds light on the decision to decline to proceed with Cousens’s prosecution. The New South Wales Attorney’s decision had less to do with evidential matters in relation to the treason trial than it had to do with the perception that the course that federal law officials were proposing appeared to compromise the autonomy of state law officers. To raise a bill in a case in which the states would be no more than the feint behind which the Commonwealth pursued its legal objectives plugged into a long-standing tension between the Australian federal government and the Australian states.

On 6 June, offering advice to the New South Wales Attorney General in response to the Commonwealth Attorney General’s request, the Solicitor General, C E Weigall KC, had written a crisp rebuttal to the unanimous legal opinions provided by Counsel to the federal Attorney. Weigall first set his sights on the core argument that treason against the King outside the realm could not be tried under the federal jurisdiction of the Australian Commonwealth courts. As part of this line of reasoning Weigall took strong exception to the notion that a prisoner of war being held in captivity by the Japanese could ever constitute “living” in Japan in the true sense of the meaning, with the consequence that their identity and place of living remained within the homeland of Australia which brought their actions back under the jurisdiction of Australian federal law.

In relation to what Weigall categorised as the “practical question” of what the New South Wales Attorney should do, his directions were strong and clear. He rejected outright the Commonwealth’s suggestion that the New South Wales Attorney take up the prosecution in a spirit of treating the “filing of the indictment as a merely technical matter” that New South Wales would willingly carry out “on behalf of their Commonwealth colleagues”. To accept the Commonwealth’s offer of funds and their consequent interference in the appointment of their own counsel could be described as a “lend lease policy” with all the drawbacks that were implied. Overall, and most emphatically, the state’s Attorney should resist any steps that could suggest that New South Wales is a “subordinate branch of the Department of the Attorney General of Australia” and that in instituting criminal proceedings, the state of New South Wales would never act on instructions received from the federal government.

[1] Judith Keene, Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War Two, Praeger 2009, short listed for the Premier’s Prize in General History in 2009.