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| Browse Island, Australia |
There is one verified landing of
Japanese personnel on the isolated coastline of Western Australia near Browse
Island. A 25 ton fishing vessel the "Hiyoshi Maru” carried army and
navy personnel from Timor, and it was escorted on the earlier part of its
journey by a Mitsubishi airplane, Type 99 light bomber. The names of the Japanese party aboard the
ship are given, and Lance Corporal Kazuo Ito was the radio operator.
During the early afternoon of
January 19, 1944 three separate parties from the "Hiyoshi Maru” landed and scouted the area at the very
northern tip of the Western Australian coastline, and they also filmed what
they saw with an 8 mm movie camera.
It is probable that Lance Corporal
Kazuo Ito did not use his radio transmitter while in Australian waters, though
there were rumors abounding back then that Japanese spies in Australia did
communicate critical information by radio.
Professor Hiromi Tanaka, professor of War History at the National
Defence Academy at Yokosuka in Japan, states that small bands of Japanese spies
lived on small outer islands off the coast of Australia for months at a time,
and they were then relieved by the arrival of a new party. It should be stated though that government
authorities in Australia have no tangible record of any such events.
However, there was one very
interesting story as to how a Japanese spy used a radio transmitter in
Australia during the Pacific War. This
is the story.
When the subversive had collected
the information he desired, he took a small boat out to a nearby island and he
tuned his small low powered transmitter to a frequency just under the edge of a
nearby mediumwave broadcasting station.
The spy then transmitted the information in Morse Code, and the heterodyne
signal was almost impossible to hear on the mainland, except by an astute radio
monitor with good receiving equipment.
This story could be true, and it was
accepted by the DX world in Australia at the time, but as it is told, there are
several strange anomalies. According to
the government report, the astute international radio monitor who discovered
this disturbing information was living in suburban Sydney and the transmissions
were said to be from an island location near Newcastle, a distance of some 75
miles north. Such low power reception at
such a distance would be almost impossible.
The callsign of the supposed
broadcasting station in Newcastle is given, but in reality that callsign
actually belonged to a mediumwave station located in Sydney.
The subversive is said to have taken
a small boat out to a small island near Newcastle, but the nearest island to
Newcastle is 200 miles further north.
The owners of the radio broadcasting
station in Newcastle were named as a particular religious organization; that
religious organization does own hundreds of radio stations around the world
these days, but never any in Australia back then.
The radio station in Newcastle that
was said to be the innocent culprit in these subversive events was off the air
before Japan entered the Pacific War; it was silent at the time when the spy
radio operator was said to be active.
We
are not listing any of the known identifications in this radio story simply to
protect the innocent. However, the name
of the government approved operator who discovered this interesting radio event
is known.
Was then the story really true, and
the informant was simply relying on a faulty memory? Or was it simply a wartime ruse, a
disinformation event that fitted the requirements for some unidentified wartime
circumstance?
(AWR Wavescan/NWS 247)
