Etajima Island Japan 1946

My father's journey from Tokyo and then to Hiroshima was not a coincidence. It was always the intention that D Company of the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, in which he was a Major, would find itself on Etajima Island. The Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, which was founded in Tokyo in 1876, moved to the island of Etajima in the Inland Sea near the coast of Hiroshima City in 1888.

The Allied Forces closed the school in 1945 but it had played a significant role in the war as one of the Japanese Navy's most important bases and a centre of their operations. More than one ship had been scuttled in the harbour by the end of the war but, of greater significance to the allies, were the massive stores of explosives in the form of shells and other munitions.

When D company arrived they were billeted in the naval college. The picture below has "Main Entrance Etajima Barracks" written on the back:

My father was told that his first job would be to: “clear that the explosives from the island in one week”. He told me that the island was "virtually hollow". A network of underground caves formed a honeycomb under the island; indeed there were at least 28 separate caves each with its own jetty on the shoreline from which the warships would have been supplied with munitions.

My father told me that when he stepped onto the island the tunnels were full of 23,000 tonnes of weeping explosives, torpedoes and other armaments. Its removal would be a highly dangerous task as much of it was unstable and "could go up any minute". However, when he asked for volunteers his entire company stepped forward. "They were as tough as they were brave" he said.

The caves were serviced by an electric railway which was recommissioned in order to get the explosives out. I got the impression from him that the little trains were actually quite a lot of fun once they got them working. A lot of his men had some experience of working underground (in the coal mines back home) and took to the task with ease. They used the trains to take the explosives, bombs and other armaments out to the jetties where they were loaded into barges. The barges were towed 10 to 15 miles out to sea where they were used by the New Zealand navy for target practice. The explosions could be heard easily on the mainland.

The job was duly completed within the week but not without incident. There is a story about a group of Americans; believing that some of the caves held valuable items like binoculars, they had been trying to burn open one of the steel reinforced doors which provided the above ground entrance to the caves with a blowtorch. As soon as the door was breached the flame ignited the weeping explosives causing a huge explosion. My father recalls that, at that moment, he had been having breakfast with his commanding officer, Appreece-Jones “when the whole thing went up”. “What the hell was that" said the boss...

Another classic tale involves a scuttled Japanese battleship that was lying in the bay. He and his men decided to swim out to it (presumably unaware or unconcerned about the sharks). They went about exploring the ship and in due course they found a huge and very beautiful hardwood table bolted to the floor of the map room. After a brief discussion they decided to remove it; they unbolted it, took it apart and floated it back to the island where they reassembled it in the commanding officer's centre of operations. Everybody was happy until the (ranking) American commander saw the table during a visit and instructed that it should be brought to his headquarters.

Now nobody was happy including Appreece-Jones. After a conference they reluctantly decided that the Americans could have the table; with one small caveat. The table was then duly returned to the battleship and reassembled, piece by piece and in its entirety, back in the map room. A message was then sent to the Americans that the table was waiting (in the battleship) for them to collect at their convenience!

After the caves had been cleared there was another job to do. There were many Koreans in Japan at the end of the War. The majority had been taken as slave labour and, indeed, a significant number of the casualties at Hiroshima has been Koreans. There is a Korean shrine at the peace park in Hiroshima city. It is beautiful, poignant and sad. Like the rest. This was something that I knew little or nothing about until I visited the site.

There had been a number of Koreans on Etajima. At the surrender they had been angry and wanted to "even the score"; they picked up guns and other weapons and, as described by my father, had started "raiding all over the island". He was told by his commanding officer that he had to solve the problem and pacify them so that they could be repatriated. He had command of a company of battle hardened troops and, when he asked "Do I go in hard" Appreece-Jones had said, simply, "Yes". 

They armed jeeps with machine guns and began to patrol the island and round up the stragglers when and where they found them. He told of a chase along a river as a Korean and his men tried to to outrun them on a boat. They were in the jeeps and kept firing across the bows of the boat until it hove to and they were able to capture them.

He had been assigned a female Japanese interpreter (I got the distinct impression that they became firm friends). She said that he should ask the leader to take off his shirt, which he did. It revealed the tattoo of a dragon that wound its way across his torso and down to one of his calves. She said "Yakuza" a Japanese word that (simplistically) means gangster.

They finally tracked down the last of the Koreans to the mountains in the middle of the island. They were in two groups but to find them they would have to march on foot. When he described the situation I could tell that he had revelled in the challenge. "You've got to remember that we had been through the War to the end. We were the toughest troops you could imagine and we wouldn't take any nonsense. We were willing to take on anything or anybody. When we started the march up into the hills it had been raining hard for days. The mountain road we were walking up was like a stream.

"Eventually we came over a rise and there we saw a large clearing with a village. The village headman came out to meet us" here my father paused. "I had never seen anybody so terrified" were his exact words; "because the Yanks had been in before and had given them a pretty rough time". He speculated at this point in the story. His shared his feelings from his perspective at that moment: "Thank God. I don't want to see this in my country" were his thoughts. However, it soon became clear to him that there was another reason for the man's terror; the Koreans were in the village.

My father said that it was at this point that he bought his 'Japanese bear'. He bought if from the head man "to placate him" and calm him down, in doing so to show him that he had good intentions. The 'Hokkaido Bear' is a Japanese icon - a carved wooden bear with a fish in its mouth. This bear is more rough hewn with a similar basic stance, but with no fish. It was chewed by my parent's boxer dog Skipper when my parents lived in in Africa, but is still a magnificent carving and something I have always loved.

The Koreans were persuaded to give themselves up; by all accounts my father's men were pretty heavily armed and "looked like they meant business". They were marched back down the mountain and were eventually repatriated. He too went home and refused a full time commission in the army.

My father's commanding officer, Appreece-Jones, received a CBE for the successful completion of the removal of the munitions from Etajima; he sent a letter of thanks to my father who also received a mention in dispatches. Later this mention, which was kept on his civil service file, was a contributing factor towards his receiving an OBE during his career in Africa 15 years later. At about the same time that he received his OBE they received a visit from Apreece-Jones in Malawi (who by then had taken on an official position within the government) who said to my father: “if you'd stayed in the army you would have been ‘the next big thing’ by now Bryn”. Que sera sera as they say.

The base at Etajima was reopened in 1956. It now serves as the location for the First Service School and Officer Candidate School of the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force and is the home of the Japanese naval museum.