J Force Formation

AS I REMEMBER IT

Noel Cochrane 1947 - 1948

ARRIVAL

Staggering number of sunken ships in the harbour. The unsavoury smell of the morning in the Orient. Amusing, because women at home in NZ were using a new cosmetic called Orient Morn!

Marched from the ship to the train. Train was mobbed with black-marketeers trying to buy anything and everything.

CHOFU

Arrived by train at Chofu camp. Rice paper windows and rice paper doors. You couldn't see through the windows of course. "Honey carts" were used to collect the human effluent and to take it to the rice paddies. The weather was extremely hot. A few months later it was snowing.

OZUKI

When Chofu Camp was abandoned we were moved up to Ozuki. It had been a Japanese air base but a new Army barracks had been built by the Allies and we were based there. It had a camp movie theatre which was still in the Japanese barracks and when it snowed the snow came in where the windows had been and you had to sit with your Army greatcoat buttoned to the neck to keep from freezing.

CHOFU FIRE

On October 19, 1947 the town of Chofu, only five miles away, caught fire through a spark from an old man's welding set. The Army rushed all its appliances to the town but the fire spread too fast. All the housese were tiny split bamboo and plaster and paper places and they were so close that in most streets they were actually touching each other. The most the Army could do was to help people to move their belongings to safer ground. I remember seeing Japanese bucket brigades from the tide to the town over half a mile long. It was useless. Water was almost non-existent. We were there for 12 hours saving people and possessions. In the end it was stopped from spreading by the bulldozers cutting a firebreak.

HIROSHIMA

We went on leave to Tokyo, stopping on the way at the site of the town of Hiroshima. It was 2 years after the bomb had been dropped but no-one really knew much about radiation or the likes. People were still living there in patched-up shacks and lean-tos built out of the rubble.

The Army had men there cleaning up the rubble using bulldozers and they wore only shorts and boots. The train would take us to the WNCA which was run by the British. You went over a very creaky bridge and the train used to just crawl at snail's pace. No-one was allowed out of his seat while the train was going over this very high bridge.

TOKYO

It was a massive city. Most of the place had big wide streets. Of course we went to the Ginza where there were stalls and shops as far as the eye could see.

They used to say that you could buy anything from a pin to an elephant. You could shop there for a month and never go in to the same shop twice. The shops were open 24 hours a day - a great thing for boys from New Zealand at that time. Everywhere you went in Japan people wanted to buy things from NZ. They wanted anything: clothes, cigarettes, food, etc.

OZUKI FIRE

There was another fire at Ozuki. It was behind the barracks. It started on Guy Fawkes in a barracks occupied by Jap squatters. We raced up there but there was no water so we couldn't do anything. There was a crippled boy in a wheelchair on the top floor. We couldn't get to him and he burnt to death. The sound of his screams haunted me for years after I came home.

The Japs set fire to the Engineers workshops. Just an act of rebellion but that fire was huge, too. It burnt several trucks and several Jap firemen burnt to death in that fire. Several NZ boys were injured, too. The blast from one of the explosions blew me through a window, luckily on the ground floor. I hobbled around the camp for a couple of weeks before I could get back to work again.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

Generally speaking, most of the people were friendly to the boys.

NV Cochrane
December 1998