‘The danger of death and rape was real’: Nell Gould’s account of the Cowra Breakout

Lieutenant Nell Gould was thrust – unarmed – into the centre of one of the most chaotic and violent episodes of World War II. For the first time in 80 years her story can finally be told | Read her full account in her own words.

Nell Gould’s never-before-published account reveals in searing ­detail the little-known story of 100 women auxiliaries caught in the savagery of the Cowra breakout

Nell Gould waited until near the end of her long and eventful life to tell the story of what went on in the ­harrowing ­pre-dawn hours of August 5, 1944, at No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp near Cowra. Even then, she couldn’t bring herself to confide in her family. The confusion and carnage that had taken hold when nearly 1000 captured Japanese hurled themselves at the barbed wire and into the maw of chattering ­machineguns, ready to kill and be killed, was a chilling secret she’d carried for decades. Finally, Gould decided enough was enough: she sat down at a typewriter and poured her heart out.

Afterwards, she bound up the neatly ­inscribed pages and posted them to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The text is ­single-spaced and indented with the prim and proper finesse she would have demanded from those under her command as a lieutenant in the Australian Women’s Army Service. Her never-before-published account reveals in searing ­detail the little-known story of the 100 women auxiliaries who were caught up in the savagery of the Cowra breakout in central west NSW – one of the least understood episodes of this ­nation’s involvement in World War II.

Gould’s “girls” – in her mind, they would be ever-young in their itchy wool uniforms – lived in the draughty wooden huts comprising 42 AWAS Barracks where she was boss. They served as cooks, drivers, cleaners and orderlies, but also as signallers and cipher clerks at the big recruit training ­centre, five minutes’ by truck from the POW camp. The work was unrelenting and mostly thankless. But the young women told themselves they were in it for king and country, to help the boys fighting overseas. They were ­soldiers too, Gould would opine.

Some of them would visit the crowded POW camp in the course of their duties. The Italians would try to catch a girl’s eye or steal a flirtatious word in stumbling English. Everyone liked the smiling Italians, who had surrendered in their droves in the Western Desert and ­presented as comically unsoldierly. But the ­Japanese in Compound B were another story. They smouldered in their plum red fatigues, beset by the bitter shame of being captured ­instead of dying for the emperor. They saw themselves as ghosts in the belief there was no life waiting for them at home.

Nell Gould (left) with Sgt Joan Kennedy having a cup of tea the morning after they completed a night-time search for escaped Japanese POWs. Picture: AWM

Gould and the women were aware trouble was brewing. “It was not unusual for the girls to sit on a small hill behind the sleeping huts, look across at the lights of the POW camp and ­discuss the possibility of a breakout … there was always worry about possible escape and as far as the girls were concerned the danger of death and rape was more real,” she wrote.

More than 1100 Japanese, enlisted men and NCOs, were jammed into Compound B, twice its nominal capacity. They seemed to be even surlier than usual. The Australian officers were joking in the HQ mess about the prisoners’ heightened interest in baseball, a game adopted from the Yanks that they seemed to be obsessed with. (Too late, the penny would drop as to why the Japanese had requested extra bats and catcher’s gloves.) The sense of complacency that gripped the Australian guards and commanders held despite the warning signs.

It was shattered when a bugle sounded in the icy depths of night. Gould was jolted awake. A roar went up from the mutinous POWs; the first of hundreds to die fell. As she would ­recount, her girls were about to be swept up in a crashing wave of bloody horror.

As far as she could tell, they were on their own. Gould pulled on her uniform and roused the barracks. The rear-echelon troops patrolling the POW camp, deemed too old or infirm for frontline service, were now fighting for their lives. The garrison in the training centre where she was stationed – about 4km away, separated by empty, frost-dusted paddocks – was supposed to mobilise in the event of an emergency. But if there was a contingency plan for what was happening now, going on 2am, it wasn’t to hand as minute after critical minute ticked by.

Gould was 32, single, having joined up when the women’s auxiliary was activated in 1942. One of nine children raised by her English-born father in the course of two marriages, she had been a champion sprinter who represented Australia in international competition and ran the back office of the family’s brush factory at Rockdale in Sydney’s south. As a commissioned officer she was respected and generally liked by the women she led. They would grit their teeth and put up with the usual nonsense from the male soldiers, the wolf-whistles and suggestive asides, and slapped down the bolder types who tried it on after a drink too many at the pub. There was no point complaining in “this man’s army”.

Japanese prisoners of war practising baseball on their sportsground at the prisoner of war camp. Picture: Supplied

As the din of screams and gunfire from the POW camp mounted, Gould wondered who was going to take charge. “Never at any time had there been drill or orders given for such an eventuality and both camps were caught completely off guard,” she would write in January 1984, as the memories belatedly tumbled out. “Some personnel, in both camps, had not returned from nightly leave and the Training Camp was bereft of trained, capable men.”

Gould told the girls they shouldn’t expect help if the Japanese got loose: any “protection had to come from their own confines”. She swiftly ­issued orders – “harsh as they were” – that would stand for the duration of the emergency. There would be no shouting or running except as a warning of danger. The girls were never to be alone, not even to use the toilets and showers in the ablution block, and would go back and forth from the mess in groups. ­Unarmed, they would mount their own watch at night in the sleeping huts. Gould’s request to be issued a weapon was brusquely denied. In the event of trouble the women were to form up in small groups and “rush” to her quarters; they were “never to make investigations on their own”.

“They had to remember that they were ­soldiers … albeit female,” she would write.

The bitter irony was that the Australians had unwittingly lit the fuse. The Japanese uprising had long been in the offing; the spark came when Bob Ramsay, the army major in charge of Compound B, called in camp leader Ryo ­Kanazawa for an early-afternoon meeting on Friday, August 4. Ramsay revealed about 700 enlisted POWs were to be transferred the next day to a new camp, 500km away in Victoria.

The hope was that by easing overcrowding and separating the rank-and-file men from the troublesome non-commissioned officers the tensions in Compound B would ease. Instead, the enraged Japanese brought forward the breakout. It’s important to understand the context. Their aim was never to achieve freedom. The prisoners had no illusions about stealing a plane or boat to make for friendly territory to Australia’s north. The tide of war had turned decisively against their country, defeated on land and sea at Guadalcanal, pushed out of mainland New Guinea, and losing its central Pacific island fortresses one by one.

Nor was it to be an act of mass suicide. As war memorial curator Rachel Vaughan points out, the Japanese POWs mostly craved one last chance to redeem themselves after the dishonour of being captured. (Few had surrendered when taken prisoner: in most cases they were wounded, incapacitated by illness or pulled from the sea after naval battles.) “The oral history definitely records that these men weren’t necessarily 100 per cent sold on the idea of ­escape or as a means to end their lives,” she says. “Their duty, as they saw it, was to continue fighting. If they died in the process, so be it.”

Knives and other improvised weapons found in and around B compound of the Cowra POW camp after the mass escape in the early hours of August 5.

The planned clear out reflected the army command’s awareness that the security situation was deteriorating. Steps had been taken to strengthen the defences arrayed around Compound B. Additional sub-machineguns and grenades were issued to the 107 military guards patrolling that quarter of the 40ha camp. Two belt-fed Vickers machineguns were ostentatiously sited on the northeastern perimeter in what was meant to be a warning that the Australians meant business.

The Japanese were also making preparations that went into overdrive as night fell on August 4. They had registered the appearance of the Vickers guns all right – not as a threat, but an opportunity. The elevated position of No. 2 gun, on a truck trailer only 50m from the wire, was perfect for their purposes. They would seize it, kill as many guards as possible and ­occupy the other three compounds holding the Italians and Japanese officers. Then, if things continued to go their way, they would assault the training camp where Gould’s girls were.

One in five reportedly voted against the breakout, undercutting the enduring belief that the Japanese POWs were of one hellbent mind. Still, they sharpened knives and fashioned spoons into weapons, straightened fork prongs and hammered nails into the hoarded baseball bats. The hours seemed to crawl by. They would go at 2am sharp when naval airman Hajime Toyoshima, a fighter pilot who survived the crash of his Zero after the deadly February 1942 air raid on Darwin, sounded his bugle. (The ­instrument is now held by the AWM.)

The plan was to attack in four groups of 200-300 men, each surging in a different direction. Capturing the No. 2 machinegun intact was fundamental to Japanese success. The ­initially sporadic rifle fire from the surprised guards soon rose to a crescendo when sentries on the lookout towers brought their Bren light machineguns into action. The staccato bark of Thompson and Owen sub-machineguns joined the uproar, with muzzles flashing like killer fireflies.

But both of the Vickers positions were unattended. To make matters worse, Friday was army payday and, as Gould recognised, Australian soldiers from the POW camp as well as the training centre were off-base, drinking and gambling in Cowra.

Baseball bats and poles used as improvised weapons.

Baseball gloves, used as protection against the barbed wire fencing, found in and around the Cowra camp.

Bellowing Japanese charged the fences, clutching baseball mitts and blankets to negotiate the barbed wire, waving their homemade weapons. The gates on Compound B buckled.

Some of those physically unable to participate in the uprising had already taken their lives by hanging or ritual disembowelment in the huts, which were set alight, the flames ­creating an ominous backdrop to the life-and-death struggle. Japanese bodies littered the ­killing field of Broadway, the 40m-wide thoroughfare bisecting the POW camp from north to south, having been raked by Australian fire. A ­prisoner came at Major Ramsay with a knife and was shot dead by his clerk. Toyoshima took a bullet in the chest and crawled into a ditch. He lit a last cigarette before drawing a blade across his own throat.

Rushing to his post, private Charles Shepherd, a 31-year-old labourer from Sydney whose poor eyesight had made him ineligible for active service, was confronted by another knife-wielding Japanese. He was the first of five Australians to die.

The No. 2 Vickers gun crew, privates Ben Hardy, 42, and Ralph Jones, 44, didn’t have time to change out of their pyjamas. The WWI veterans each snatched up a khaki greatcoat and sprinted 100m to the position in a race with the oncoming Japanese. The POWs had closed to within 75m of the machinegun when Hardy reached it and squeezed the trigger, unleashing a hail of .303 calibre bullets. While a dozen ­attackers fell, there was no stopping the rest.

Jones leapt from the trailer in an attempt to clear the mob, but was bashed and stabbed. Astonishingly, he lived long enough to crawl away and be found by a team of reinforcements. “They got us,” he gasped before dying.

Sgt Hajime Toyoshima – the first Japanese prisoner of war – was the pilot of a Japanese Mitsubishi Zero B11-1 aircraft.

Aware of what would happen if the Vickers was seized in working order, Hardy selflessly removed the ammunition feed block, disabling it, before he too was killed. The Japanese ­realised their attempt to take the camp was doomed. Of the 950-odd men involved, some 200 were already dead and hundreds more had gone to ground, injured or hiding. But that left 378 armed and dangerous POWs to storm into the countryside. Gould wrote that this “struck terror in the hearts” of the young women waiting for the training centre to be hit next. The timing for the Australians couldn’t have been worse. The payday exodus from the garrison – normally 4000-strong, counting ­recruits – had been compounded by a “massive march out” of newly graduated ­soldiers, she wrote. These battle-ready men had been replaced by “raw recruits of only a few hours service and inexperienced in the use of weapons, particularly rifles”.

An overwhelmed local command would struggle for most of that long and confusing day to come to grips with the crisis. Inexplicably, soldiers were not sent out from the training camp to round up the escaped Japanese until 4pm – fully 14 hours after the breakout began, and with barely two hours’ of light remaining.

In another blunder, the platoon-sized search parties of up to 30 troops weren’t issued rifles, in accordance with a standing contingency plan that they be unarmed. The men would make do with bayonets, but their officers weren’t allowed even that meagre measure of protection. When the leader of one of the patrols, lieutenant Harry Doncaster, a tall and athletic stonemason from the Victorian town of Ballarat, requested permission to carry a firearm, he was sternly rebuffed. The 38-year-old veteran of fighting in the Middle East was told the men would keep him safe.

As night fell, he was leading the group up a stony hillside they had been ordered to sweep. Doncaster had no way of knowing that the Japanese lying in wait outnumbered the advancing Australians. But something must have tipped him to the danger: he told the men to unsheathe their bayonets and equipped himself with the only weapon he could lay hands on: a rock.

One prisoner emerged from the shadows and he let fly, missing. Doncaster dropped another with a powerful punch. By now, he was separated from the soldiers, alone and desperately vulnerable. The Japanese fell on the brave officer, who fought to the bitter end. The platoon fled and it wasn’t until 10pm that an armed patrol returned to recover his barely-recognisable corpse; the bodies of 10 Japanese were found hanged nearby.

Gould was doing the best she could to make sureher girls stayed safe. As usual, they were pulling the duties no one else wanted. One of the prisoners had been shot trying to break into the training centre, and ambulance driver Elva Trengrove was detailed to transport him to the infirmary at the POW camp, accompanied by two riflemen and a medical officer. They passed countless Japanese dead, piled in grotesque heaps where they’d been mowed down.

The body of a Japanese soldier killed during the Cowra breakout.

Trengrove was then tasked with fetching the bodies of the machinegunners, Hardy and Jones, and taking them to the morgue. Given they were wearing pyjamas, it was evident, Gould wrote, that the Vickers position wasn’t stood-up when the Japanese struck. “Why wasn’t it manned?” she wrote. “The heroism of Private Hardy and Private Jones certainly saved countless Australian lives and the gratitude of all Cowra should go to those brave men whose quick action kept the Japanese at bay long enough for the guards to get into action, but the Japanese kept coming in vast numbers and the two men lost their lives in one of the bravest acts ever recorded in Australian history.”

At 1.30am on Sunday, August 6, Trengrove responded to yet another call-out. Assisted by army nurses and staff at the 11th Camp Hospital, she loaded Harry Doncaster’s battered body into the ambulance and took the now-familiar route to the Cowra morgue. Fellow driver Esme Smyth conveyed four injured guards, some of them hit by friendly fire, to hospital in Bathurst. “On the journey she was accompanied by a sergeant armed with a machinegun,” Gould noted.

Returning to Trengrove’s experience, she questioned why security at the Japanese ­compound had been so lax leading into the breakout. The usual procedure was for the ambulance to be left at the gate, and the driver to walk in. But on this occasion, “just prior” to the onslaught, Trengrove’s vehicle had been waved through. “Although [the] guards had their guns trained on the ambulance and Driver Trengrove was unfairly reprimanded by a POW Camp officer, she was not questioned on ­entering the compound, which was gross ­carelessness on the part of the POW camp and Driver Trengrove’s life could have been put in ­jeopardy,” Gould wrote, her anger palpable.

Ted Wrighter as a child with his mother (left) and his aunt Nell Gould.

In her older days: Nell Gould

The senseless of the breakout was underscored when a group of ­suicidal escapees lay down on railway tracks and were killed by the approaching train. The death toll ultimately ran to 231 Japanese and five Australians, the final and often-unacknowledged victim being a member of the territorial home guard, sergeant Thomas Roy Hancock, 53, who was fatally wounded on ­August 7 when a squamate in the Volunteer Defence Corps accidentally discharged his rifle.

The roundup continued for weeks, and involved some confounding twists. The initially fearful locals soon realised they were not at risk; in fact, the Japanese were under strict ­orders to leave civilians alone. Their enemy wore an ­Australian uniform. Women fed the starving men tea and scones before turning them in, and farmers sometimes turned a blind eye to their presence.

None of this was revealed to the Australian public for decades. The heavy hand of wartime censorship clamped down, and witnesses such as Gould were given to understand that the ­secrecy would be enforced after peace came in 1945. The fix was in. No one with any exposure to the steaming mess of Cowra wanted the truth to emerge.

The military court of inquiry into Doncaster’s death was perfunctory. The blame was laid squarely at the feet of the Japanese who attacked him; the conduct of the commanders who had sent him out defenceless and that of the unarmed soldiers who ran away came in for criticism, but no one was formally reprimanded. Prime minister John Curtin told parliament that the bloodshed was characterised by a “suicidal disregard of life” by the Japanese POWs.

“At the beginning of hostilities Cowra was enclosed in a wall of silence,” Gould wrote. ­“Because of the possibility of the identity of the prisoners involved reaching Japanese sources early and reprisals occurring in respect of ­Australian prisoners in Japanese POW camps, censorship became very rigid, and every effort was made to ensure that no person in Cowra mentioned, in any way, the nationality of the prisoners involved in the breakout. The silence remained with the AWAS for decades, which is one reason the people of Australia were not aware of the part played by them.”

Gould was acutely aware of the toll the ­traumatic events exacted on her girls. Some were “sickened when captured prisoners were brought to their units and they witnessed ­suicide, usually with a knife-like dagger in the chest”, she wrote. At the height of the drama, her own request for a gun was refused and she would make a “lonely and somewhat frightening return” to the women’s barracks “not knowing what to expect”.

Yet none of them applied for a transfer when given the opportunity after the dust settled. They suffered for years to come, battling “the effects of the terrible” events of August 5, 1944. Gould knew this because she went to the trouble to reach out to all the girls she could find after they’d been left “to fend for themselves”. She wrote: “One wonders if, at some time, they were in a state of shock, so great was their ordeal.”

Gould didn’t say how she was “prevailed upon” to speak up, but it might have had ­something to do with Harry Gordon, a foreign correspondent and war reporter who went on to edit some of Australia’s biggest newspapers. He fought tooth and nail to puncture the veil of official secrecy around Cowra, producing an evocative 1978 book, Die Like the Carp. ­Gordon interviewed Gould and in 1984 the book was adapted for a hit TV miniseries, directed by ­future Hollywood A-lister Phillip Noyce.

Gould’s nephew Ted Wrighter, 83, believes it’s no coincidence that she turned to her typewriter at that point. “I think she wanted her voice heard,” he says. “We all knew she had been there during the breakout … but she never talked about it to me. I don’t know why. But I do know she was proud of her service, and proud of the women she served with … Sending that letter to the Australian War Memorial was in keeping with how she conducted herself. She would have seen it as the right thing to do.”

After the war Gould returned to her job at the brush factory, pragmatic as ever. She would never marry. Wrighter thinks the opportunity passed her by – as it did for many women of her stalwart generation who grew up in the shadow of WWI, endured the Great Depression in the 1930s and emerged from WWII on the wrong side of 30, as it was seen back then.

Gould threw herself into work, family and her enduring love of athletics. She had been a prodigy in track and field, donning the green and gold for Australia at the 1938 Empire Games in Sydney. She went on to coach the women’s relay team at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and was a foundation member of the NSW Women’s Amateur Athletics Association. Her name is on the recently-opened Blackshaw Gould pavilion at Hurstville Oval.

She became a second mother to young Ted, and they remained close until her death in 1995, aged 83. She marched on Anzac Day for as long as she was able to, and, in accordance with her dying wish, her ashes were interred in the military section of Woronora Memorial Park. “She was a proud soldier,” Wrighter says.

For all that, she was clearly disappointed that her girls didn’t get the recognition she thought they were due. They were the only members of the 24,000 enlisted by the AWAS to serve in a declared battle area, she wrote. “Despite this, it took many decades and ­painstaking work before the girls were granted their rightful benefits, and nearly forty years for their service to be officially recorded.”

That’s something else Wrighter learnt from his beloved aunt: persistence. A thoughtful man, he can’t say for sure why she maintained her silence about Cowra for so long. “None of her three brothers who served and saw active service talked much about [the war] either,” Wrighter ventures. “Partly it may have been that, as in her letter, she had ordered those under her command not to discuss it with ­anyone, and she was just following through on that even years later.

“But I think it may be mainly to do with the culture and character of that generation … the Great Generation. It was in their culture and character to think of others before themselves [in] an era of mateship, altruism and kindness to others.”

How fitting, on the 80th anniversary of the breakout, that the Australian War Memorial is digitising Nell Gould’s words so they can be read by all Australians. After all these years, one woman’s take on the futility and folly of war is more timely than ever.