Uncover a story of determination and ingenuity as Shrine curator Neil Sharkey reveals the story behind these alimunium false teeth. With links to Ambon, this item tells an important story about the conditions that prisoners of war endured and the struggle to survive.
Music
On this Day - Richard Smithson
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: Welcome to the Shrine Stories podcast, a place where we take you through the stories behind the objects on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas, and in this episode, we’re going to explore an object that is peculiar in nature but acts as an important symbol of determination in our collection – it’s a pair of false teeth that date back to the Second World War. Joining me to unpack this story is Shrine curator Neil Sharkey. Welcome Neil.
LAURA THOMAS: The story behind these teeth is grounded on Ambon, so I thought before we get into the object, you could tell us a bit about that. Firstly, where is Ambon?
NEIL SHARKEY: Ambon is a tiny, horseshoe-shaped island in the Malaku island group, which is just off the coast of West Papua. It's today part of Indonesia but in 1941-42 was a part of the Netherland East Indies. So, well it was part of the Netherland East Indies until it was wrested from them by the Japanese.
LAURA THOMAS: What were the Australian troops doing there?
NEIL SHARKEY: Ambon was a strategic island because it had a flat section upon which there was an airfield, and Australian and Dutch officials had decided, even before the Japanese had begun this war of aggression in the Pacific, that in the event of such aggression, the Australian Government would send a task force to Ambon to help defend it against Japanese Aggression. And this task force was one of what were called the bird forces. One of those was sent to Timor. It was called Sparrow Force. One of them was sent to Rabaul on the island of New Britain, which is called Lark Force. But the force that concerns us today was Gull Force, which was to be sent to Ambon and Gull Force was built around the 2/Infantry Battalion, which was a Victorian raised battalion. And then there was some support elements that were attached to that. There was a field ambulance, there were engineers and signals and that kind of thing.
NEIL SHARKEY: So, Gull Force arrived on Ambon on the 17th of December 1941, and it comprised 1131 men. There was also a small deployment of RAAF aircraft, which were part of number 13 Squadron, RAAF. Now the Japanese invaded on the evening of the 30/31 of January, and there were two groups of Japanese that invaded. There were three army battalions that attacked one part of the island where the main town was, which was Ambon, and then there was another group of Japanese Marines, so part of the Navy, the Japanese Navy, that attacked the Laha airfield. Now, this was quite significant, because these Marines were pretty ruthless. They considered themselves a bit of an elite, and they didn't want to be on Ambon for any longer than they wanted to be. And so there was a short, sharp fight. There's some dispute as to how many Australian soldiers were killed in fighting, versus the soldiers that died later but over 200 Australians that fought and were captured at Laha at the airfield, were massacred by the Japanese between the 6th and 20th of February 1942 and that left about almost 800 Australians on the other half of the island in Ambon. There were a number of Australians that managed to escape off the island at the time of the fighting and then subsequently, but those 791 thereabouts that become prisoners of war in Ambon, and they're held at the old army barracks where they previously had been quartered, which was a camp which had been built next to a sort of a large mansion, type house that had belonged to a local Chinese merchant called Tan Tui, and the camp became known as Tan Tui.
LAURA THOMAS: What were conditions like for these men that became prisoners of war?
NEIL SHARKEY: To begin with, they weren't too bad, but what happened was that there was a small group led by a lieutenant called Bill Jenkins, who escaped the island, you know, escaped the camp, and the Japanese attitudes hardened a lot after that point. They started getting a lot stricter and more violent. Those Marines that I was telling you about before, they took on control of the garrisoning of the island and looking after the camp, and these Marines, as I said, really didn't want to be babysitting prisoners.
LAURA THOMAS: Yeah, pretty ruthless.
NEIL SHARKEY: They were ruthless guys, yeah. So, there was an English-speaking translator among them, who became absolutely notorious for the cruel punishments and tasks that he came up for the men to do. But look, put it this way, about how bad Ambon was, if we exclude the deliberate slaughter of the Australian and British prisoners on the Sandakan death march, and if we exclude the sinking of the Japanese prisoner of warship Montevideo Maru by an American submarine which was carrying the Australian men captured on Rabaul to Japan, which led to an enormous loss of life among those men. If we exclude those two episodes, then the mortality rate of the Gull Force prisoners was the greatest experienced by any group of prisoners of war in the Pacific so the number of men that were lost on Ambon was far greater than, for example, the Burma Siam railway, which is usually what people, you know, their imagination goes to about, you know how terrible a Japanese prisoner of war experience could be. So Ambon was far worse than that.
NEIL SHARKEY: The Australians endured very harsh treatment. You know, the usual things, inadequate rations, medical supplies, brutal treatment. All the rest. There was disease, of course, you know, insect born dengue and malaria. There was sort of diseases that are caused by dietary deficiency, like beriberi. There was a bacterial and anaemic dysentery and enteritis, all those sort of things. But in the tropics, I mean, even things like tinea and, you know, conjunctivitis, I mean, these become life threatening diseases in those conditions, your tropical ulcers, just horrendous stuff that we wouldn't even think of as being torturous for these guys.
NEIL SHARKEY: But in addition to those, there was a lot of other things that made Ambon really terrible. There was, there was a big breakdown in the relationship between the officers and the men. When the Japanese invaded, the fighting had been by the Australians had been pretty ineffectual, I guess, hadn't been well organized. So, there was a lot of, you know, sort of finger pointing around that as to why that had been the case. And also, I mean, this was true of most of the prisoner of war camps, but particularly the ones where conditions were really bad, is that military discipline completely breaks down because all of the men are in the same boat, and the sort of punishments the officers could normally use to discipline the men, they can't employ, like they can't dock rations, you know, they can't imprison men, you know, for long periods or or if they do, there will be repercussions. So, any of the normal military disciplines will actually endanger the men's lives, like if you take rations away from the men, and then, you know, you're further weakening them. If you imprison them they can't go out and get things that will help keep them alive. And in addition to that, you know, a lot of the other structures around the military that normally would enforce discipline go. The other thing with the officers too, under the Japanese, the Japanese didn't compel officers to do manual labour. So then there's another division then, whereas the other ranks and the you know, the soldiers, they do have to go off and do heavy labour and so forth. At first it wasn't too bad, but as shortages wore on and as conditions got worse and the men got ill, they started stealing from each other, and they started raiding one another's gardens, stealing one another's chickens. So, you know, all of these things just really led to this kind of breakdown where trust was lost between the men, or a lot of the men, not all the men. And so that kind of made things even worse and made survival even more difficult than it may otherwise have been.
LAURA THOMAS: And part of this as well, Neil was the split of Gulf Force in 1942. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how this again, impacted this low morale and the disease that came through the camp?
NEIL SHARKEY: Yeah, sure. So, in October 1942, 263 prisoners were sent to Hainan, which is quite a large island off China, and the remaining men stayed on Ambon. But among the men that had gone to Hainan was the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Scott, and most of the medical personnel, I think there was a dentist sort of left behind, and there was a Dutch doctor too, you know, because there were Dutch prisoners in with the Australians. So, you've got the majority of the men on Ambon, of these two groups with the fewest number of medical personnel. I mean, Hainan was no picnic. You know, it was one of the worst camps in Asia, and the death rate there eventually reached 30% so of those 263 prisoners I mentioned before, only 182 were still alive at the end of the war. But for comparison, of the 582 Australians that remained on Ambon, 405 of those died. So that's a death rate of 77%. 77 versus 30% and look, there were other things that happened. There were a couple of Allied air raids on the camp that were disastrous. One of the raids killed five officers, including the doctor. You know, the whole situation was just one bad thing after another, and each of these bad things contributing to the overall catastrophe.
LAURA THOMAS: So with all this in mind, as you said, these horrific conditions and then the struggle to survive. Tell us a bit about these false teeth. Firstly, who did they belong to?
NEIL SHARKEY: They belonged to staff's Sergeant Eric Kelly, who was a quartermaster of the 2/21st battalion. So he was, he was quite lucky. He attributed his survival in large part to the fact that he was in a position where he was able to avoid a lot of the heavy work details earlier on. Later on, he had to take part in them, but earlier on, he was just manning the supplies in the camp and dishing those out to the other men. So that made things a little easier for him initially anyway. I never knew him personally, but through his service record, I know that he was a skinny guy. He was about six foot tall. He had fair hair and blue eyes, and he was older than most of the other men, you know, other ranks. He was 27 and he was from Toorak. So, you know, I guess he was from a fairly sort of comfortable middle-class home. He also sort of took it upon himself to be the camp tailor. So because he was in charge of all the stores, he would make shorts and little lap laps for the men, you know, because they had a finite amount of material, so these uniforms would be cut up. So he was a very resourceful guy, and he was friends with an engineer, and the engineer, I don't, I don't know the engineer's name. I don't even know if he was Australian or Dutch, because whenever I've listened or read interviews with Kelly, he doesn't say anything more about this engineer.
NEIL SHARKEY: But this engineer was a very important guy. He built a lot of the or kept, like the sewing machines and so forth that kept Eric in the business of clothes making. He also helped build little secret compartments in the water bottles of a lot of the men with which they used to smuggle in food into the camp when they went out on work details. So this engineer was, yeah, really, really important guy. And the other thing the engineer helped with was the construction of the false teeth that we were talking about. What you've got to understand, because conditions on Ambon were so terrible, everything that you could do to give yourself a little edge over the conditions you were up against had the potential to save your life.
NEIL SHARKEY: Now, as quartermaster, Kelly saw a lot of men starve themselves to death by swapping food rations, for cigarettes, for example, things like that. But he was absolutely determined to live. Like a lot of young people in the '40s, in a way that we probably can't imagine much today, a very large percentage of young people in the '40s had false teeth, you know, because dental hygiene wasn't what it is today. And Kelly had a set of dentures, and the dentures broke. So for a man in a situation where he doesn't have much food to begin with, not being able to use your dentures is, you know—that's going to kill you.
LAURA THOMAS: It's life or death.
NEIL SHARKEY: Yeah, yeah, it's life or death. So this engineer, anyway, helped Eric build a new set. So what they did was they got the old dentures, and they pushed them back together again and placed them into a small box that was filled with wet sand. And that's what, you know, made the mould of the of the old teeth. And then into that mould, they poured molten aluminium, which was taken from an old Dutch Dixie that they found lying around. So they cut the Dixie up into little bits. They melted it down into, you know, a flux, and that was poured into the mould in the sand that they'd made with the old set of teeth. When the teeth dried, they came out, and they polished them up. And Kelly says they weren't the most comfortable set of dentures that anybody's ever had. And apparently every time he ate with a steel fork, he'd see sparks in the back of his eye, you know as the aluminium and the steel came in contact with each other, but they worked, and he was able to keep eating, and he was able to stay alive.
NEIL SHARKEY: So that's why the teeth, as well as being a great piece of ingenious technology in very trying circumstances. I mean, these are men with access to very little in the way of tools, but they're also a symbol of determination, you know, determination to live that you know you're going to when confronted with a life threatening problem, you then work out a solution, you know, work out a way that with the scant resources that you have to hand that you can actually build something that's going to keep you alive. And it's just, to me, it's very inspirational story. You know that so long as you've got will, so long as a person doesn't give up, they can move forward. There's always a hope until the very end. And not only is that an important lesson for military people, or, you know, people during wartime that are faced in these life threatening situations, but that's a lesson that we all can benefit from, that, you know, we can all take away something that will help us move forward in our own lives, you know, which are maybe not always, our lives aren't always threatened, but there are challenges that we all face, and knowing that within ourselves and within you know the people and the things around us that we can we can train ourselves and we can do things to improve our lives and improve our happiness.
LAURA THOMAS: And you mentioned that Eric did survive the war. Can you tell me a little bit about liberation and what happened to these men?
NEIL SHARKEY: Yeah, so the men were finally liberated on the 10th of September 1945. By then, as I said, there were not very many of them left. And those survivors were embarked on four Australian Corvettes, which were small, little Minesweeper type patrol boat. From Ambon, they were bought to the large Australian base on another Indonesian island called Morotai, and then from there they went to the Australian hospital ship Wanganella, and eventually back to Australia. But, you know, the men were in very poor shape. A lot of them actually weren't in a hurry to get back to Australia. They just felt that they were so damaged and diminished by their experience that, you know, it really took them a long time to psychologically prepare themselves to be back in the real world. I guess some of them felt guilt that they had survived. Some of them felt shame that they'd been captured in the first place and hadn't, you know, died in combat. And so there were a lot of conflicting emotions in these men. And yeah, I mean, a lot of them spent a lot of time at repatriation psychiatric hospitals in Bundoora and Heidelberg in the years after the war as well. You know, over time they formed an association, Gull Force Association, some of those rifts that had existed between officers and men and between individuals were healed. And I was lucky enough to meet a number of these men about 15 years ago. And it was, it was just good to speak with those men, and just to sort of see that many of them had had very successful lives and families and so forth after the war. And that was not the expectation of a lot of them at the time, you know, when they were first liberated, that's for sure.
LAURA THOMAS: It's a tragic story, but as you mentioned, Neil a story that teaches us a lot about the will of people and the hope so thank you so much for sharing it today.
NEIL SHARKEY: Thanks, Laura. It's been a pleasure to chat with you today.
LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of Shrine Stories. For more, make sure you subscribe to our channel wherever you listen.
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