I replied ‘yes I am ready to die.’
Surviving a World War Two Pacific massacre
I went to Tarawa looking for the bodies of a group of men from Aotearoa New Zealand who had been executed by the Imperial Japanese. Instead an 83-year-old man told me of his survival. It was 1999 when I flew in the 2200 kilometres from Fiji to Kiribati, one of the world’s vastest ocean nations, astride the Equator and the International Dateline. Tarawa is the capital, with an islet, 154 hectare Betio, scene of one of World War Two’s strategic battles. Thirteen months before the Americans arrived to defeat the occupying Japanese, 17 New Zealand coast watchers who had been captured, were beheaded. Their bodies were buried on Betio, never to be found.
Today Betio is densely populated but military detritus is commonplace. The US military are frequently on the atoll, sifting through the sands looking for human remains from their 1943 battle.
Former cabinet minister Raion Bataroma had been my host and guide on Tarawa and one Sunday he was keen for me to meet an old man with a great story. Betio is among the world’s most crowded urban settlements so finding any one involved much questioning and pointing in various directions. In a small open sided traditional fale, sat 83-year-old Kabunare Koura. Certainly he looked well weathered and battered, but he was healthy enough, adding he still cut toddy, although not from high coconut trees any more. He had fathered nine children, and at the time of my meeting he had 20 grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
His deeply lined face breaks into a smile and he laughs easily and loudly; and you wonder how he can after what he saw.
“The past is gone,” he says.
His Sunday afternoon conversation was translated by Raion, although it was not always a literal translation. At times Raion was so taken with the story he fell silent.
“He is a very wise man,” he said.
Kabunare was originally from Nikunau atoll, 500 kilometres south east of Tarawa. As a young adult he was hired by the British Phosphate Commission which, in one of the forgotten scandals of the 20th Century, plundered Banaba or Ocean Island, of its soils. They had tricked the indigenous Banabans of their land and resources.
Phosphate was then, as now, a strategic resource and as well as occupying Nauru, 700 kilometres west of Tarawa, the Japanese took Banaba on August 26, 1942. The Japanese moved most of the enslaved Banabans to Nauru or Kosrae in what is now the Federated States of Micronesia. They never returned, most of them ending up in Rabi, Fiji, after the war.
Left on Banaba were around 160 men from the Gilberts Islands (now Kiribati) and six whites, including a New Zealand coast watcher, Ron Third. Kabunare remembered seeing him on what he believed was the day he was to be murdered.
“There were two i-matang (white) people and they knew they would be killed, but we didn’t know how,” he said.
“They were being taken to Buakonikai which was where most people were killed.
“The i-matang shakes the hands of the i-Kiribati and they take off their hats and wave to the i-Kiribati.”
Kabunare had no doubt that Third and the other man, both well dressed, were being taken to their deaths.
“It was very sad.”
During the occupation the Japanese were cruel to the local population and many were executed.
Evidence to a Kiribati Te Maneaba ni Maungatubu (Legislative Assembly) select committee, which published its report in 1996, quoted Bauro Ratieta as saying when an islander committed a crime “he is beaten with a hard stick and tied up to a tree for at least two days.”
As part of their defences the Japanese erected an electric fence.
“When this work was completed, the Japanese, in order to test the efficiency of the wire, ordered some natives who had been prisoners, to run blindfolded towards the live wire. They were told that if they failed to comply they were to be shot at,” Ratieta said in evidence.
“The natives of course died of electrocution.”
Kabuanase later gave evidence that of the Europeans killed he remembered a Mr Cartwright had died of malnutrition. A Mr Cole had been stabbed. Third and a priest, Father Pujebet, were injected by “the No. 2 doctor.”
Japan’s Emperor Hirohito surrendered Japanese forces on August 15, 1945.
No Allied forces could reach Banaba so on August 20, 1945, the occupiers rounded up the Gilbertese.
Japanese Commander Naaomi Suzuki and his quartermaster, Lieutenant Yoshio Nara, addressed them.
“He told us that the war was over but we must still work for a while, and then the Japs would go away and leave us here,” Kabuanase would later say in evidence.
“We were too scared to show our happiness, so we just bowed our heads and went back to our houses. Then we laughed and talked of the good news.”
Interpreter Raion said Kabuanase described how the men feared what might happen.
The Japanese told them everybody should go to the meeting houses in either of the three villages. They gathered where the Japanese took their names and home islands.
Kabunare demonstrated as the Japanese drew pistols and began pointing the bayonets into them.
“We were made to sit down and the Japanese with the pistol, he put it into your back as they tied our hands.”
They were taken to a place close to the sea.
“If you fell off from there you would be killed, a very risky place.”
They were made to face the sea and their eyes were covered.
Kabunare says then the Japanese thrust their bayonets into the backs of men, and with the force of the blow pushed them off the cliff.
Kabuanase told of being beside an Ellice Islander (Tuvalu), Falailiva.
“He said to me ‘are you ready?’ and I replied ‘yes I am ready to die.’ Then Falailiva asked ‘you remember God?’ and I replied ‘yes I remember’.”
He described, by action, how the bayonet hit him in the lower back, but did not penetrate.
“Everything was quiet for a moment, and then I fell over the cliff. I did not try to, but just fell. Almost at the same time, I heard a scream, and someone fell on top of me. I think it was Falailiva. I heard others fall, but no more screams. Then I heard a lot of shots fired.
“Falailiva was still on top of me, and some of the bullets were close to me. This was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon.”
Kabunare counted the shots; 40.
He understood Japanese and could hear the guards saying they would come back the next day.
“The waves will kill them, the rocks are very prickly,” he explained one guard saying.
He heard them leave and carefully he tried to walk toward the cliff, still tied up. He found a sharp rock and freed his hands, then uncovered his eyes.
“Water kept breaking over us, but I could breathe as the water receded each time. I stayed there without moving till I thought the Japanese had gone.
“I bit Falailiva’s shoulder to see if he was still alive. He was still lying partly on top of me. Falailiva did not cry out, so I knew he was dead.”
Kabuanase believed that hitting the rocks with his left shoulder saved him.
“Everybody else, they hit on their heads and they die.”
He found a small cave nearby and hid there for a couple of days. The bodies kept sweeping into the cave.
“I try to push them off, very strong smell.”
He stayed hidden for four months. Dressed only in a sulu he finally left the cave and tried to go inland, nearly killing himself on a mine.
When he saw the Union Jack flying on the administration building he thought it might be a trick to make him reveal himself. It was the Australian Army and he was safe.
Kabuanase was taken first to Bougainville and then to Guadalcanal where he was shown prisoners and asked to identify the Japanese commander of Banaba. He picked out Suzuki and his deputy Yoshio.
The two men were put on trial for war crimes in Rabaul, New Guinea. They admitted they knew Japan had surrendered but by massacring the men they wanted to “inflict damage on the Allies.”
In interrogation, Suzuki said he did not receive orders that the war was over until August 24 or 25, 1945, when Truk (now Chuuk) radio came on the air. Before that date they had heard many rumours, but this was the first reliable information.
Suzuki said he gave the order to exterminate the 200 people on the island to four of his company commanders about August 18.
“It was a very brief order,” he said. “As far as I remember it was: ‘Shoot all the natives on the island’.”
Asked why he had given the order, Suzuki said: “We had heard rumours about Japan going down. We had decided to kill them…. These executions will be before the War Crimes Court.
“The other officers acted on my orders and the responsibility is mine, not theirs.
“I ordered the executions, believing it was the best thing to be done, as far as I was concerned as Japanese commander.”
Naoomi was sentenced to hang. Kabuanase watched the hanging.
“They left him to hang,” said Kabuanase who demonstrated what the body looked like, “and they let the people watch.”
Years later, Kabuanase would see Japanese in Tarawa and he recalled what happened.
“Sometimes I remember my friends who were killed.”
Kabuanase has since died, mostly of old age.
More Photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelfield/albums/72157624098239956
I REMEMBER watching a documentary on this gentle warrior...so inspirational and I reckon his story should in text for classes in the future to learn their plight which was also the plight of Pacific peoples being caught up in the cross fire of those idiots fighting for power
Falailiva mentioned in the story is from the island of Nukufetau in the Ellice Islands now known as Tuvalu. His father is Frank Resture a pastor in the London Mission and and was posted to PNG to a place with a river known as Farai and he named his son after this river. Falailiva has a sister Alieta and she named her son Falailiva who now live in the Marshall Islands.