Captain Sam Templeton-Nishimura

By Ilya Gridneff, Papua New Guinea Correspondent
PORT MORESBY, Jan 29 AAP - The remains of a fearless World War II Digger stabbed to death for taunting a Japanese officer may at last be laid to rest with all the reverence he deserves.
The real story behind Captain Sam Templeton's disappearance in the Papua New Guinea almost 70 years ago has finally emerged thanks to the selfless dedication of a frail old former trooper in the Japanese Imperial Army.
Ninety-year-old Kokichi Nishimura, known as the Bone Man of Kokoda, says it was he who buried Captain Templeton in a shallow jungle grave following his brutal summary execution soon after he was captured near the Kokoda Track.
According to official records, Capt Templeton, a World War I veteran, was a company commander with the famed Australian 39th battalion in New Guinea, when he vanished near Oivi village on July 26, 1942.
One report said he had been trying to warn reinforcements of the massive Japanese presence in the area.
Templeton was a soldiers' soldier, dismissive of rank and revered for his courage under fire.
Historians say he was technically too old for front line duty. He was born in 1900 - but lied about his age to qualify for combat.
Templeton's Crossing at Eora Creek on the Kokoda Track is traversed by thousands of Australian trekkers each year and this month Mr Nishimura teamed up with Kokoda Spirit trekking company operator Wayne Weatherall to locate the captain's crude bush grave.
Mr Nishimura says he still remembers where Capt Templeton is buried and the pair recently spent several days digging for clues and think they may have pinpointed the spot, but need to consult with the captain's family about what should be done next.
Mr Nishimura, who has spent the best part of 25 years recovering the remains of fallen Japanese comrades, was a member of the 2nd battalion, 144th Regiment of the Japanese Imperial Army that fought Australian troops in the same area.
Mr Nishimura told reporters in Port Moresby he buried Capt Templeton after an enraged Japanese officer killed the captured Australian.
"It seems Captain Templeton got lost, being pushed back by Japanese soldiers," he said through an interpreter.
Mr Nishimura said Capt Templeton was taken for interrogation and the Japanese commander became enraged when the Australian said there were "80,000 Australian troops waiting for the Japanese in Port Moresby?".
"How many of you will see out the day," Capt Templeton asked mockingly.
Mr Nishimura said that remark infuriated Japanese even more.
"The commander got angry at Templeton's answers and he stabbed him," he said.
"They (Australians) were all very brave soldiers with high spirits, therefore I don't want to leave this mystery open," added Mr Nishimura.
Late last year AAP visited Mr Nishimura at his home on the outskirts of Tokyo.
Humble, reserved and precise, Mr Nishimura recalled the closing stages of the New Guinea campaign.
"At that time (of the Japanese retreat) there was no choice (for the wounded Japanese) but to die, because there was no food or supplies," Mr Nishimura said.
"Those soldiers knew they were being abandoned and they were ready for what was happening to them.
"And knowing all that, they gave a smile rather than tears and crying."
Mr Nishimura promised that he would return one day to recover the bodies of his comrades. And as the only surviving member of the 2nd battalion, some 30 years later he kept his word.
"This is nothing special," he said
"It's my way of life, if I make a promise with somebody I keep it. Whatever it is I just keep my promises," he said.
Armed with a metal detector, a mattock and a shovel, a few language dictionaries and WW II battle plans, maps and official documents he secretly kept despite orders to destroy them, Mr Nishimura set out on a mission.
Over the years he found the remains of hundreds of Japanese soldiers.
Those identifiable were returned to families while the unknown were buried in Japan's official war shrine in Tokyo.
But while upholding the Japanese traditions of loyalty and respect, Mr Nishimura has also been a thorn in the side of a Japanese governments reluctant to acknowledge the past.
Indeed, his obsession often riled authorities on both sides, frequently involving him in controversy.
"I am sure I am a headache to Japanese government - I am sure on the black list as a dangerous man," he said with a laugh.
Mr Nishimura fought on every front line in Japan's Pacific campaign.
After PNG he served in Singapore and Rangoon in Burma then in August 1945 he returned to home with the remnants of the beaten Japanese forces.
On three occasions Mr Nishimura survived being shot, suffered just about every type of malaria and was once so malnourished he weighed around 30 kg.
He said the screams of an Australian soldier he killed in hand-to-hand combat still haunt him.
"My habit it is to avoid risk - I don't try to survive (in combat), I think my body naturally moves in the right direction," he said.
After the war he married and built up a multi-million dollar engineering company. But then, to his family's dismay, on retirement he sold the company, left his wife and two sons with the fortune and returned to PNG.
His only daughter Sachiko went with him and they still live together.
"I left my sons but never explained the reason to them," he said.
"I am sure they have a lot of resentful feeling to me, but still I don't care.
"They are strangers now. I am not interested in meeting them. I have more family in PNG. Not many in Japan."
In January this year Mr Nishimura returned to his adopted home in Oro Province on PNG's northeast coast to locate Capt Templeton's grave.
The Oro connection was established in WW II when a villager, Trofian Iewago, helped some Japanese soldiers, including Mr Nishimura. survive.
Mr Nishimura never forgot and when he returned to PNG to start collecting bones he lived with the Iewagos.
Trofian's son Romney remembers Mr Nishimura well.
"When he first came he would point at the dictionary and we would work out what he wanted," Romney said.
"He and Dad became very close and Dad said, 'I will make you our brother and you become a clansman'.
"We call him 'Ijiba Nishimura' as Ijiba is our clan name and he was initiated and became one of us."
Trofian's daughter Geraldine called her first-born daughter 'Sachiko' in honour of Nishimura's daughter. Journalist Charles Happell while walking the Kokoda Track literally stumbled on a small plaque Mr Nishimura erected in memory of Japan's fallen.
Happell researched and wrote a book: "The Bone Man of Kokoda."
"In piecing together his life story, what has been revealed is an epic tale featuring loyalty, determination and courage on a scale that is difficult to comprehend," Apollo writes.
Before returning to Tokyo Mr Nishimura admitted his most recent trip to PNG would be his last.
With his customary brevity, he dismissed talk about what will happen to his own bones.
"My daughter sometimes mentions that," he said.
"But once you are dead you can't do anything or say anything, so to say, 'I want this after I die,' that kind of thing is the most stupid thing you can do, so I don't have any idea."
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Captain Sam Templeton

Captain Sam Templeton – Hero of the Kokoda Track
Missing-in-Action for 68 years.The disappearance of Captain Sam Templeton, the Commander of B Company 39th Battalion, has been a great and enduring mystery in Australia, with plenty of speculation as to his disappearance and fate amongst historians and his fellow soldiers. Rumors circulated in Australia and PNG that Templeton may have been captured, interrogated and killed near Oivi or Deniki, or that he was captured and taken back to Rabaul for interrogation and then executed. Despite all the rumors and speculation in Australia the fate of Captain Templeton was known to many Japanese Soldiers and their families.

One Japanese soldier in particular, Kokichi Nishimura, (The Bone Man of Kokoda) (now aged 90) told me recently that Captain Templeton was executed, he had been one of the officers ordered to bury his body and he drew me a map of the burial site. This information was not only exciting to me but believable. Nishimura himself is the subject of a book, ‘The Bone Man of Kokoda’, which describes his 25 years in PNG locating the remains of Japanese soldiers and returning them to their families and homeland.

I believe Nishimura shared this important information with me as he knew that in 2008 I had discovered the complete graves of four Japanese soldiers and ensured they were returned home via the Japanese Ambassador to PNG. He understood my quest to find Captain Templeton so his family too could finally lay him to rest.

Captain Sam Templeton holds a special place in Australian history. He commanded the first Australian Company to cross the Kokoda Track and instilled in his men great confidence and resolve to repel the voracious Japanese tiger heading their way. Had the 39th Battalion and Templeton’s men in B Company failed, then the course of Australian history would be very different. They took on the might of the Japanese Army and inflicted physical, logistical and psychological wounds on them that would eventually become terminal to the Japanese.

My quest to unravel the mystery of what happened to Captain Templeton has involved a great deal of research, luck, fate and assistance from numerous sources in Australia, Japan and Papua New Guinea. I have been aided with entries from the 39th Battalions War Diaries for this period, translated diaries of some of the Japanese Veterans that were there, and interviews with Veterans from Australia, Japan and PNG.

The following pages tell some of the story of Captain Sam Templeton, the 39th Battalion and the Kokoda Campaign. The magnificent job the men of the 39th Battalion did in these early dark days on the Kokoda Track can never be forgotten.

The Australians fought a determined and ferocious enemy in the Japanese, their campaign is also described. My meetings with family members of those Japanese soldiers whose skeletal remains I discovered and returned during my investigation were insightful and rewarding. Meeting Kokichi Nishimura has been instrumental to this investigation.

My determination to locate Captain Templeton burial site has been an incredible journey. In revealing the fate of Captain Sam Templeton, missing-in-action for 68 years, it provides at last, the opportunity for this revered soldier to finally rest in peace. It also reminds us of the horror and futility of war.

Captain Templeton & the 39th Battalion

Captain Samuel Victor Templeton V50190 was born on the 28th January 1901 in Belfast City Northern Ireland. He was one of six children. He had a colourful history, enlisting in the Royal Navy at age 18 and served in WW1. On his discharge from the Navy he served with the Royal Irish Constabulary and was engaged in putting down a rebellion by the IRA. It is also reported that he fought in the Spanish Civil war as a member of the International Brigade, but this is certainly not true.

Captain Templeton arrived in Australia in 1920 and soon after joined the 5th Battalion of the CMF as a Private. He quickly advanced to Corporal then became a Sergeant.
Captain Templeton or Uncle Sam as he became known married his sweetheart Doris in 1925 and they had four children.

Sam tried to enlist in the AIF on several occasions but was rejected because of his age.
Captain Sam Templeton then joined the 2nd/7th training Battalion AMF (Militia) and then enlisted in the 39th Battalion on the 1st July 1940. He then received his commission as an officer to the 39th Battalion and then travelled to Port Moresby on Christmas Day 1941 he was 42 years old.

The 39th Battalion was very fortunate to have Sam. He was a strong, capable soldier and leader and his experience would prove invaluable as during the early days in Port Moresby the 39th Battalion was used mainly as labourers, unloading and loading ships and digging defenses.
Uncle Sam stood 5 ft and 9 1/2 inches tall, well built, strong and into everything. He was a quiet man, well liked but also liked his space. He was as straight as a gun barrel, if it was wrong, he would put it right.

Captain Templeton felt very strongly about the war, and was busting his neck to get into it

It had been a surprise to many of the 39th and 53rd Battalion that they were in PNG at all, as they were Militia, Australia’s home Army or the Reserves; their understanding was they were to be used exclusively for the defence of Australia. What the men in the Militia Battalions soon learned was that New Guinea was mandated territory of Australia and that they were being used to defend Australian territory.

Many of the early Company Commanders of the 39th and 53rd Battalion were older men who struggled with the tropical climate in Port Moresby. A number of these Commanders came down with tropical diseases, including Malaria and were repatriated back to Australia.

Captain Sam Templeton thrived in these conditions and took every opportunity he could to instill good military practice in his men. He paid particular attention to their health, hygiene and nutritional needs. This practice included regular teeth cleaning, regular washing of body and hair and the taking of appropriate Malaria precautions. He also ensured that they continued their physical and self defense training to ensure that they still had a fighting edge despite their use as labourers. These simple but effective practices contributed greatly to B Companies success in crossing the track and fighting the Japanese.


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The Bone Man of Kokoda

The Bone Man of Kokoda

War veteran Kokichi Nishimura
A Japanese soldier fought the Allies, then battled his government to honour not only mates but all the war dead in New Guinea.
As Kokichi Nishimura crept ashore at New Guinea's Salamaua Beach just before 1 am on March 8, 1942, he predicted that Japan was months away from capturing Australia and conquering the South Pacific.
The wiry grenade launcher and his comrades from Japan's 144th regiment had swept through Guam and smothered brief resistance at New Britain. Now they were about to storm Salamaua, allowing Japanese planes to head south unimpeded to Port Moresby and, before long, the vast continent below.
Corporal Nishimura was 21, and in his naivety could scarcely have imagined the torment that lay ahead on the treacherous Kokoda Track. Nor could he have contemplated the possibility that hellish fighting with desperate Australian troops would bind him to that precipitous mountain track for the rest of his life.
It was here in the rainforests of the Owen Stanley Range that he would return, much older, to honour a grim promise that would take him 26 years and 400 million yen in life savings and pension payments to carry out.
"I can never forget that pledge to my comrades," recalled the 88-year-old veteran, whose failing strength has forced him to abandon his one-man mission and return to Tokyo. "It was January 12 [1943], and our food had run out. By then I weighed less than 30 kilograms and, like the other troops, I was eating the flesh of dead enemy soldiers just to stay alive.
"Those who were strong enough were evacuating from the coast, deserting the weak and ordering them to keep the Australians and Americans at bay. So I said to the soldiers left behind: 'No matter what happens, if you die in this land I will come back for you, and I'll return you to Japan to rest with your families. This is my promise to you'."
Such was the old soldier's determination to make good on his word that he walked out on his wife and two sons in 1979 to do so, he did not stop to think about them once in the 2 decades he subsequently devoted to digging up and repatriating the remains of almost 350 Japanese soldiers.
"Why waste thoughts on something like that?" he told the Herald from his home north of Tokyo. "I don't know if they're even alive any more. They didn't approve of what I was doing, and nor did the rest of Japan. But I gave a pledge. How could I sit here in Tokyo while my comrades were lying forgotten beneath the dirt, so far away from the families that grieved for them every day?"
So 37 years after the troops in his battalion became the first members of the Japanese army to reach New Guinea, the 60-year-old retired mechanical engineer made his way back. This time he was armed with a landmine detector, a mattock and a shovel.
His solo quest consumed almost a third of his life - but he says he would still be digging if he had the strength.
With his savings he bought a hectare of land at Kakandetta, between Giruwa on the coast and Kokoda inland, built himself a two-storey house out of local hardwoods, and planted a vegetable plot beside it to supplement his simple diet. Then he set to work.
"I felt like this was my life mission," explained the proud nationalist, who says his family crest links him directly to Japan's imperial family and the Shinto gods who fashioned Japan from the elements.
The Australians and Americans had shown respect for their war dead, he said. Their remains were carefully interred at cemeteries across the countryside. The Japanese government, on the other hand, had "literally left thousands of Japanese soldiers to rot, as if they were an embarrassment that they preferred to forget about. So I took it on as my own duty. No one else would."
Not least among his objectives was a yearning to recover the bodies of close friends from his own platoon, all 55 of whom were killed on the Kokoda Track. Most of these soldiers, from Kochi or Ehime on the island of Shikoku, were killed by Australian machineguns in the Battle of Brigade Hill, on September 8, 1942. Seventeen days later, the Japanese retreated. It was a turning point in the Pacific War.
Despite being shot three times in the shoulder from almost point blank range during the battle, Nishimura survived - even chasing and killing his assailant, an Australian soldier who "looked to me just like a teenager". "Every day for many, many years I could hear the scream he made when I ran my sword through him. It was a horrible thing," he recalls.
On his return, he took his old diary and detailed notes he had smuggled out - against strict military orders - in the evacuation. By using those to supplement his fading memory of the year he spent in tropical hell, he mapped out land he thought most likely to yield the remains of fallen comrades.
First he searched for deviations in the earth that looked like the imprints of old foxholes - small pits dug by soldiers to hide themselves in battle. He would test the ground for mines, then use a stake to gauge how soft the soil was and therefore how likely it was to conceal decomposed human remains, his account of Nishimura's mission, he would go to work with his shovel and garden hoe removing sand and soil that had built up over 40 years.
"The bodies were rarely buried deeper than a metre. Often, soldiers just dropped where they were shot; occasionally they were spread-eagled on top of each other."
At Giruwa beach he found 120 bodies and at Buna and Gona, two small coastal towns not far away, 60 skeletons. At Waju he recovered a further 30 to 35 bodies. After just a few years of digging, his house became an ossuary for the forgotten Japanese soldiers of New Guinea.
As his work took him further afield, Nishimura was saddened to discover that in several places opportunists had assembled Japanese skulls and war effects in morbid displays to attract passing tourists. The Japanese government knew of this but had done nothing to stop it.
A Japanese professor of humanities, Utsumi Aiko, on a recent visit to the Indonesian island of Biak, was equally appalled to discover the amount of unclaimed Japanese remains being shown by small-time entrepreneurs.
Of the 2.4 million Japanese military dead, she wrote, "1,160,000 of them are still not repatriated. With close to half of the dead in overseas battle zones, we greeted the 50th, then the 60th year after the war.
"Even now some 600,000, it is said, are retrievable. Why in the world don't we retrieve them? Why aren't the bereaved families urgently concerned about the bones of their relatives?"
Nishimura was sure the families did care. But he knew most felt helpless to do anything without government assistance. That was where he planned to make a difference.
Occasionally dog tags, dental work and other unusual markers let him identify remains. Bones he could not identify he hoped to one day submit for DNA analysis - a fledgling science in the middle years of his work.
On frequent trips back to Japan, Nishimura would spend days tracking down relatives of soldiers whose effects he had found. "I can't describe the feeling I had at seeing tears of relief. They were finally reunited with the sons who had never come home from war," he said. Among the haul was a lunch box he had inscribed for his training instructor, Lieutenant Yoshiyuki Morimoto, 40 years earlier, which he had dug up in an empty field.
As the maverick crusader's reputation spread in Japan, he received more requests for help from families to recover their loved ones. One man, Kokichi Morimoto, travelled to New Guinea to search for his lost father Toshio and, when excavating a vegetable field, uncovered the remains of more than 100 Japanese soldiers.
"The skeletons appearing from the soil just broke my heart," Morimoto said afterwards. "Just imagine how it must have been to be abandoned for so many years in the middle of nowhere so far away from home."
It was not until 1988 that Nishimura finally returned to Efogi, the site of the Battle of Brigade Hill, where his battalion had been wiped out in some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific War.
With the help of curious locals, he spent several days digging the sticky, red Kokoda Track battleground.
"Finally I struck black soil and then I found some charred bones nearby. Then I realised what had happened; the Australians had burnt hundreds of bodies to stop the unbearable stench," he says.
"It was devastating. This had been a special mission for me. All I could do was to take some of the ash away in tins. Now it is at the Gokoku Shrine at Kochi, so at least I know my old friends are resting safely back at their home with their families."
In 1994, Japan's ambassador to Papua New Guinea, Tadashi Masui, told Nishimura that while his government appreciated his work, it wanted him to hand over his collection of bones as a symbolic gesture to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war the next year. Nishimura agreed, only because he felt the ambassador implicitly assured him Japan would make every effort to identify the remains, which amounted to more than 200 bodies. Instead it cremated and interred them at Chidorigafuchi Cemetery in Tokyo.
"Throughout all these years, there were many setbacks," Nishimura said. "But the biggest obstacles were put in my way by Japan, which showed either neglect for the thousands of young men who died in its name, or deceit. It brought tears to my eyes to think that my country could do this."
Eventually, after he became ill and returned to Tokyo in late 2005, the government cremated the rest of the skeletons he had retrieved and sent the ashes to Chidorigafuchi.
As many Australians will still feel the Japanese were a "barbaric enemy, and they were. They had an uncommon bloodlust and their treatment of POWs was appalling. I'm not trying to dress them up as anything else. But, in Nishimura, they may possibly find a Japanese soldier to empathise with. If nothing else, he certainly took the concept of 'mateship' to another level."
The Japanese lost about 13,000 soldiers on the Kokoda Track and the beaches to the north. That was more than three times the number of casualties suffered by the Allies, who lost 3095 Australian and American soldiers between them.
But monuments to the Japanese dead are few and most are in disrepair. So in 1989, Nishimura erected his own at Efogi - to all soldiers killed at New Guinea. The stone, in Japanese kanji characters inscribed by monks from Tokyo's Zenshoan Temple, reads: "To The Loyal War Dead."
Strangely, it was this tribute that prompted the Kochi-New Guinea Association of war veterans to eject Nishimura from its ranks, for acting without authority. As his lifelong friend and fellow New Guinea veteran Sadashige Imanishi said before his death last year: "We don't tolerate unique people very well in Japan."
Nor does Nishimura have much time for Japan: he feels the country that he loved has lost its soul, and is "a country in name only". Foreigners might see a nation with a profound sense of its own distinctive culture, he said, but that impression was "merely a facade".
Young Japanese thought more about Western fashion, phones and iPods than their own history: "Soon I will be gone, and others like me too. Who will be left to remember?"



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