David Gormley-O'Brien's blog

David Gormley-O'Brien presents on Australia's first ever war crimes trials - Webinar on WW2TV 2025

Paper given at the Fighting to the finish: Australia in 1945 - Strategy, Victory and Legacy Conference, Melbourne 11 October 2025 = Military History and Heritage Victoria.

A remarkable young woman who would later be known as the godmother of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - Kathleen Muriel Butler.

At 1.50 am on 5 August 1944, almost a thousand Japanese prisoners-of-war interned at No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp, Cowra, NSW, staged a mass breakout. 22 Garrison Battalion was assign as the camp guard. Armed with improvised weapons including baseball bats and sharpened mess knives the Japanese stormed the prison barb-wire fences.

Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole survivor of the massacre of 21 nurses on Bangka Island in World War II. She spent the following three and a half years in Japanese internment camps in Sumatra. She appears in An Attractive Naivety, and in reading her diaries, notebooks, and her testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in December 1946, I was struck by her extraordinary courage and leadership. Her story is told in my historical novel, An Attractive Naivety.

Between November 1945 and February 1946, on the island of Morotai, Australia convened some of the first war crimes trials in the Pacific. These tribunals prosecuted Japanese officers and soldiers accused of atrocities against Australian prisoners of war, confronting unique legal and logistical challenges.

In Ashes and Sakura the Australian troops in Borneo and later in the occupation of Japan were sometimes depicted carrying Owen submachine guns. Not as famous as the British Sten gun or the American Tommy gun, the Australian Owen submachine gun was superior to both and the story of how it came into being is fascinating.

An Attractive Naivety and it companion novel, Ashes and Sakura, cover three generations of the Darcy family over a fifty year period. The following is a family tree to aid the reader.