MEMOIRS A STORY OF COLONIALISM AND WAR, PEACE AND RECONCILIATION IN THE PACIFIC Paul Couvret A collaborative project by Edith van Loo 1 After having survived an atomic bomb and three years as a Japanese POW, Paul Couvret believed God had given him a second chance at life. Determined to make the most of that chance, the book tells how he chose to make a new life in Australia over his Dutch and Indonesian past. Once there, he embraced life with enthusiasm, taking on anything and everything, like - building a family, becoming a qualifi ed pilot, a teacher, an education administrator and a successful civic fi gure as the Mayor of Warringah in Sydney. He brought optimism and positive thinking to everything he did, inspiring others and setting an example to all of what can be achieved by determination, hard work and an indomitable will. With this book, readers can learn of his deeds and draw inspiration from a life well lived. Oral historian Edith van Loo was born in the Netherlands and came to Australia in 2010. She has interviewed Dutch ex- servicemen and women and POW’s in Australia for the Dutch Veterans Institute and the National Library of Australia. Edith believes it is important to share the complete life stories of veterans. “These stories are being recorded not to glorify war, but to humanize military history, which is mostly about facts and fi gures, not about emotions or daily routine”. With this ‘community’ approach she hopes to reach a broad range of potential readers with an in interest in Dutch Australian relations and military history. ISBN 978-0-9925817-1-8 2 Compufax Publishing Company Pty Ltd 5 Meridian Court Mooroolbark VIC 3138 Australia Telephone (03) 9727 1285 First Edition © 2014 Compufax Publishing Company Pty Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: van Loo, Edith First Edition, 2014 ISBN 978-0-9925817-1-8 1. I. Title: Memoirs Paul Couvret Dewy Number 920.71 Printed in Australia by Digital Print Australia 135 Gillies Street Adelaide, SA, 5000 produced with the fi nancial support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. cover photograph: Conny Koenderink 3 Contents Chapter Page Introduction 13 1 Paul at high school 15 2 Tjisaroea – No Escape 20 3 Makassar 23 4 Asama Maru 27 5 Working for Dai Nippon 32 6 Food 38 7 Medical care 44 8 News and Sabotage 50 9 Keeping the Faith 54 10 A special occasion 59 11 Bombardments 63 12 The ninth of August 69 13 The days after…… 73 14 The last days in Nagasaki 79 15 Liberation at last! 84 16 Manila 90 17 The Philippines 94 18 The Naval Aviation Service in Sydney 111 19 The Naval Aviation Service at Point Piper 116 20 The Navy Solution 122 21 Back to the Netherlands 132 22 In the Netherlands 140 23 Back to Australia – and the Start of a New Life 147 24 Cowra Migrant Centre 153 25 No longer alone 158 26 A home and a new career 164 27 An Interesting life In Cowra 170 28 At last: a family 177 29 My career in education 183 30 The NSW Correspondence School 189 31 My Experiences as a Councillor 196 Epilogue 200 4 “I often asked myself: “why did I survive”? I believe I was spared to tell the world of the horrors of nuclear war and to warn the younger generations in particular that a nuclear war will mean the end of civilisation as we know it.” Paul Couvret 5 6 Preface I fi rst met Paul Couvret in August 2010 at a lunch with members of the Netherlands Ex-Servicemen and Women’s Association (NESWA) in Sydney. Paul was the National President of the association. I had heard stories from other Dutch veterans about Paul’s experiences as a Prisoner of War (POW) in Nagasaki during World War II. At the time the atomic bomb was dropped he was only kilometers away. Paul was a charming man and a fantastic host. I guess I expected to meet someone bitter and burdened by what he had to go through during the war. On the contrary, Paul had a twinkle in his eye and appeared very vibrant, looking rather youthful. For the occasion he wore all his medals. I remember thinking: ‘How did this impressive man cope with the horrors of war’? When I started interviewing in January 2011 for the oral history project titled ‘Interview Project Dutch Veterans’ I asked Paul to be my fi rst participant. The morning of the interview he picked me up at the hotel in his car and welcomed me to his family home. He was a bit tense at the beginning, leaning far over to talk into the recorder. I think he was trying not to be distracted by his wife Hilja, who was tip-toeing around the house. She was asked not to be in the same room or make any noise for the sake of good sound recordings. I was a bit nervous myself but once Paul relaxed he turned out to be a fantastic storyteller. The whole day he tirelessly discussed topics about his youth; education; wartime experiences; post war life and how he looked back on all that. He left me inspired by his resilience and ability to forgive. Quite frankly, before I started my research to conduct this interview, I had little knowledge about the history of the Dutch East Indies, let alone any insight into wartime experiences of the Dutch in the Pacifi c. That part of Dutch history had only been a small section of the curriculum for Dutch historical education. In late 2011 Paul had a stroke. It happened at home but he decided to just carry on and go on a hunting trip with his friend, Ron Humpherson the next day as planned. Soon after they left Paul ended up in the hospital. After a period of time during which he was in and out of several hospitals and a short time back home, he went to live in a War Veterans’ home in Narrabeen, NSW. He was later joined there by his wife Hilja when she was also assessed as needing high level residential care. With the family home now empty, the family set about clearing out the house their mother and father had lived in for 46 years and get it ready for sale to ensure there would be suffi cient funds to pay for their care. 7 Early in April 2013 I received an email from Paul’s eldest son, Paul Junior, regarding his father’s memorabilia. He and his brothers had been going through all his papers and had found a large volume of in- teresting items. The documents included wartime memories in Dutch, photos (some from pre-war life in Batavia) and considerable material about the Nagasaki atom bomb. Of all these, perhaps the most inter- esting appeared to be a cloth-bound diary, all handwritten in Dutch on the inside of cigarette packets. He had maintained this diary during his imprisonment in WWII whilst in a Japanese POW camp in Nagasaki. Paul junior felt the material could be of historical and general interest but he was concerned that if nothing was done, insights into a remark- able life would never see the light of day and asked my opinion of what to do. I felt that I had been given a great opportunity to share Paul’s experi- ences and insights with others and could fi nd a good home for Paul’s memoirs and papers. His life experiences are a testimony to an eventful life fi lled with seem- ingly insurmountable challenges. That would go for the life of many of his generation: their childhood years were affected by the Great Depression, they all went through WWII and many served post-war in the Netherlands East Indies. Between 1947 and 1960, 160,000 Dutch migrants came to Australia, quite a few of them just happened to be vet- erans. Paul’s life might have been representative in some ways of that of his fellow comrades; however everyone’s life story is richly unique. As mentioned before, Paul’s memoirs were in Dutch and unfortunately he did not live to fulfi l his long-cherished dream of publishing his book. He passed away on the 5th of July 2013. Paul had been very instrumental in promoting the Dutch veterans’ association (NESWA) and dedicated a large part of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons. It seemed only logical to ask members in and outside his community to help in translating his autobiography from Dutch to English. The idea was: many hands make light work. That way it could be done in a relatively short period of time without any costs involved. Ideally, all the people involved in this project would bring in their own network of potential readers. Most were asked to translate one or two chapters and try their best to keep Paul’s ‘voice’ intact. There were concerns about how to prevent some of the material getting lost in translation, espe- cially because there were almost 30 people involved, all with different levels of English language skills. Once it was clear that all Paul’s papers would go to the National Library of Australia (NLA), that seemed an answer to this problem.