Tokyo calling: The Charles Cousens case - Softcover

Chapman, Ivan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0868063665 ISBN 13: 9780868063669

Publisher: Hale & Iremonger, 1990

Synopsis

Australia was divided about Charles Cousens. Was he a traitor who collaborated with the Japanese, broadcasting and writing treasonable scripts for Radio Tokyo, or was he, as he claimed, simply a prisoner-of-war, forced to cooperate with his captors under threat of torture and death?

When World War II ended, in a case unique in Australian legal history, Major Charles cousens, 2/19th Battalion, AIF, was charged with high treason. The fact that before the war he had been one of Australia's most popular radio announcers made the case all the more sensational.

The Prosecution argued that he had been a willing tool of the Japanese and had led an easy life in Tokyo. It attempted to liken the scripts he wrote to those broadcast by Lord Haw-Haw' from Nazi germany and alleged that Cousens has trained 'Tokyo rose', the best known radio voice in the Pacific war.

Cousens himself maintained that wherever possible he had sabotaged Japanese propaganda and intruded information useful to the Allies. And others saw no difference between what Cousens did as a POW and what 15,000 others did for the Japanese in building railways and roads and working the docks. As Brigadier Harold Taylor said, "We all had the same choice of not doing what we were told, or being shot."

To write this, the first critical assessment of the case, Ivan Chapman followed Cousens' career from radio to television. Chapman also sifted the evidence presented in court, examined copies of Cousens' radio scripts, interviewed fellow POWs, and traced Japanese with whom Cousens was forced to work at Radio Tokyo.

About this title

About the Author

Ivan Chapman is a military historian with a background in radio and television journalist, both in Sydney (ABC) and London (BBC). His own wartime captivity attracted him to the Cousens case.

The first of Ivan Chapman's four books on military themes - Details Enclosed - dealt with the four years he spent in various German prison-camps. Private Eddie Leonski: The Brownout Strangler (published by Hale & Iremonger) probed a series of murders by an American soldier that terrorised war-time Melbourne. Chapman has also written Iven G. Mackay: Citizen and Soldier. His next work will be another biography - of Major-General Sir Nevill Smith, VC

Edition details

• Publisher: Hale & Iremonger
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0868063665
• ISBN 13: 9780868063669
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 388