Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

That David Manning became a prisoner of the Japanese during World War Two at all was as much down to bad luck as to the general ebb and flow of history.

Doing a gunnery training course as part of his naval officer training on the light cruiser HMAS Perth, the 17-year-old midshipman found himself part of an action that became known as the Battle of the Java Sea.

“It was supposed to be a fairly short sojourn,” says Mr Manning, now 93.

“The executive officer of the ship came around and spoke to me just a few days before (the engagements) and told me I’d be heading back to the FND (Flinders Naval Depot).

“Didnt happen. We got sunk.”

On February 27, 1942, a combined flotilla of Dutch, US, British and Australian ships engaged a far larger Japanese invasion force acting as a screen for a convoy of troops heading to Java.

HMAS Perth was the sole representative of the Royal Australian Navy.

Outnumbered and massively outgunned, it was a devastating defeat for the Allies. Only Perth and the destroyer USS Houston escaped the battle relatively unscathed and fuelled. Karel Doorman, the Dutch admiral commanding the force, was killed when his flagship De Ruyter was destroyed by a Japanese torpedo.

Perth’s captain Hector Waller ordered the two remaining ships to withdraw to Tanjung Priok, on the island of Java. After their arrival, refueling but not rearming, orders came to sail through the Sunda Strait. They expected to encounter nothing more than Australian corvettes patrolling.

Instead, in another stroke of unbelievable bad luck, the two ships ran straight into 78 Japanese ships – an Imperial convoy escorted by the 5th Destroyer Flotilla and the 7th Cruiser Division.

At 11 o’clock in the evening, Perth opened fire on the Japanese destroyer Harukaze, drawing down the fire (and 87 torpedoes) of the enemy fleet. David Manning was on a 4-inch anti-aircraft gun mounting when the action, which lasted just over an hour, began.

“It was more of a dogfight than an action,” says Mr Manning.

“It was very close. On occasions our machine guns were firing at Japanese destroyers, it was that close.

“(The end) was inevitable. It took them an hour and a half to sink us; we had no ammunition left. We were firing star shells on a low trajectory in the hope of starting a fire.”

Mr Manning was blown into the water when a fourth torpedo struck the Perth. After hours in the water clinging to wreckage, he was picked up by other crew in a Japanese lifeboat from a sunk enemy troopship.

Told by the Japanese they would not be rescued unless they discarded their oil-soaked clothes, the 40 men in the boat stripped naked, “except the padre couldn’t bear to take his shirt off.”

The survivors then watched aghast as the rescuing destroyer steamed away. The next 27 hours they spent fighting strong ocean currents with four tiny oars, before beaching on Java.

“The first thing everybody did was dug for a bit of water in the sand above the high-water mark, and then they just… crashed. Two blokes died overnight.”

The group split and Mr Manning headed south. Still naked, a villager gave him some cloth to cover himself. Told the Dutch army were in the West Java hills, the sailors marched up, only to discover the Japanese.

“We were herded into the local gaol by the villagers, and I fell asleep straight away, bang,” says Mr Manning.

“I was awakened by a gentleman screaming at me in a language I couldn’t understand and poking me with a bayonet.

“And my first thought was, ‘he’s not yellow – he’s brown!’”

The prisoners were taken to a town called Serang and crammed into a picture theatre from which the seating had been stripped.

“That was a hell on Earth. We had to squat all day, not allowed to talk, not allowed to move, one meal a day.

“The Japanese army counted us four times a day and got a different answer every time. Toilets were a hole dug in the yard.”

Like many prisoners, David Manning was set to work on building the Burma railway for the advancing Japanese army. Here he met the famous journalist Rohan Rivett, and the pair became close.

Their sense of priority in the face of hardship is reflected in Manning’s recollection of a bombing raid.

“We were bombed out of the base camp for building the railway line in Burma, after we’d been shifted there by three Japanese ships, passenger liners.

“On the second raid quite a few Australians were killed, and Nippon said, all men go, all men go, and they shifted us, no matter how sick you were, you got up and walked, and we shifted out to a camp at the 7 kilo mark. It was being reclaimed by the jungle and we had to set to and rebuild it. The bombing continued on another week on a daily basis. We took no notice until we heard the planes, then we’d move into the jungle.

“One day I finished up with Rohan. It was raining cats and dog, bombers overhead. We got into a – not a heated argument, you don’t have heated arguments with friends, but into a difference of a opinion that was never in a lifetime of friendship resolved: he was silly enough to say Haydn Bunton was a better footballer than Dick Reynolds.”

Mr Manning today reflects upon his treatment as a POW. Time has allowed him to see how a dictatorship can distort a country’s values.

“They (the Japanese) were under a dictatorship, and like all dictatorships, they made their own rules. 

“It was aggravated by the Japanese mentality and system of discipline. It was accepted in the Japanese army that one form of punishment was being belted across the face. I mean a captain could belt a sergeant; a sergeant would belt a private; a private would belt a Korean; who did the Koreans have? They were very liberal with it, I don’t think there’s doubt the Koreans were doing their best to curry favour. I don’t blame them for that.

“At the time, of course, and for the next three years, my viewpoint was the same as everybody else: ‘when this finishes I’ll kill one of the little bastards’. And then at the finish, after it was all over, suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. You're just glad it’s over.”