The Aussie samurai Gallipoli war hero spy - Part 1

its hazards. He was shot and wounded eighteen times at Gallipoli.

a frailia at Gallipoli. His story is told in a new book called The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli by Ryan Butter. But Ryan also describes Harry as the anzac hero betrayed by his nation. Today, in part one, we'll hear the story of Harry's early life in Japan and his outstanding bravery at Gallipoli. Make sure you come back for part two on Thursday to hear what Harry did in the Second World War, including being sent to Japan as a spy.

Ryan believes he's uncovered a grievous historical wrong involving the Japanese secret police and a cover up by the Australian government. Here's Ryan to tell the story. Welcome back to the podcast, Ryan.

the newspapers. And that was because he was the first soldier act Glypoli from Australia to win the Distinguished Conduct Medal, which at that time was almost a proxy for the Victoria Cross.

He left before the baby was born, and he'd had a history of frequenting the bars of ille repute in Melbourne, and we know all this from the divorce papers that Ellen filed that even on the night of his wedding he was off in the bars and cavaulting with prostitutes. So he flees the marriage, and he flees Victoria and

he ends up in Tokyo. He gets up to Japan in eighteen sixty seven, and it's a really interesting period in Japan because it's basically the dawn of the Meiji era, where it's Japan's coming out of isolation, forced out of isolation by the Americans who sort of go to Japan through Commodore Perry and say, we want to sign these treaties. We want you to open up your ports, and if you don't, we're going to go to Tokyo and burn

it down. So they kind of had no option. But what the Japanese wanted to do, and what they'd seen happening in Asia was that this colonization of the Western powers of Asia, and they said, we don't want that to happen to us. We don't want our people being exported for labor. So to prevent that, we need to modernize. And so when William Henry arrives in Japan, it's at the start of this modernization phase. But of course it also upsets the local Samurai because they're losing their power

as the class system gets wiped out. Everybody's equal, which means the Samurai have lost a lot of their privilege and power. Now to modernize, the Japanese said, we need the English language. So there was all these people sort of three or four thousand, they say, English teachers that were either in Japan or went to Japan, and William

Henry reinvents himself as an English teacher. So when he first arrived in Yokohama, he was working on a dairy, but he then becomes an English teacher and marries one of his students, a sixteen year old Say Kitagawa, who was also from a samurai family and is the mother of Harry Frame. And then Harry gets born in eighteen eighty. Eight months later his father dies, and so you can

imagine he's half Australian, half Japanese. He's got two older siblings, a brother and a sister, and he's being raised by a single mother. What also happened was that when William Henry married Say, he never got the marriage ratified by the British consul. Or the British consul knew that he was already married back in Australia, so they refused to

ratify the marriage. So what that meant was that Say lost her Japanese citizenship when she married a foreigner, but she never gained British citizenship, and so Harry never had British citizenship or Japanese citizenship at that point. He would regain his Japanese citizenship later, but that made life quite difficult for them. So a few years later, Say remarries and she marries a really interesting gentleman called Mugo Hiko Koba.

Now he was also a samurai, and he'd been involved in a sort of an anti emperor group, and he was involved in a rebellion. He was part of an assassination group in the Shinpuran rebellion. But after that he's found religion and he became a member of the Anglican Church.

And so Harry had this unusual upbringing with the stepfather being raised on the one hand as a samurai under the Bashido Code, which was quite a strict upbringing, but obviously couched in these values of loyalty and honesty and bravery. But he was also raised in the Anglican Church in the Japanese version, Christianity had only just not long before been permitted again in Japan after being outlawed for two

hundred years, so they were persecuted as Christians. And then he also had a fair skin, a father who was a cat, so his upbringing was quite difficult in Japan.

previous samurai. But it's all about resilience in the children. And there's these stories of how the parents would make the children walk across snow for a couple of miles to get to school, kind of like the old stories that our grandparents tell us here without the snow, but it's kind of testing these children and making them stay up all night reading. It's yeah, but I think it

was more about the value system more than anything. And what's really interesting is that Harry embodies these and the values that he embodies of this loyalty, this courage, this bravery, which then come out at Gallipoli are very similar to some of the values that we sort of think of as the Anzac values that came out of Gillipoli. But in Harry's case, they were very much instilled from a young age under the Bashido code and being raised as a samurai.

he says. But actually he takes to wandering, as he says to Charles Been, and he signs up onto sailing ships and he works for a long time as a ship's cook, and he sails all around the world. And we have his seamen's log book from about nineteen oh two to nineteen twelve, and we don't have it between eighteen ninety six and nineteen oh two, but it's very possible. And the story that he always told that he'd actually fought.

He fought in the Mexican Army under Porfiitio Diaz, and he also went down to German East Africa and fought for the Germans there. So it was almost like a soldier of fortune. And he has these little gaps in his seamen logs book where he looks like he's taken off for a little bit, you know, some of his cruises were three weeks and was he went all over the world. He was India, West Indies, Argentina, Peru, China.

He'd sailed all over the world. So in nineteen oh six he marries Edith May, and she's an english woman. At that time there was a large population of Japanese at Middlesbrough and they were there in the shipbuilding industry after Japan and England had signed a Treaty of Commerce and Navigation. So he marries Edith May, but he only stays about three weeks and then he's back on the ships and he's just constantly sailing, and over the next couple of years he's probably only at home for a

couple of weeks at the time in nineteen eleven. He finally lands in Australia in late nineteen eleven, stays a

couple of months and then returns to England. At some point in nineteen thirteen, he again comes back to Australia and without Edis May, he's just by himself, but he's still married and he ends up at glenn Innes and I don't know how we ended up at glenn Innis, but when World War One breaks out, he's actually a horse breaker and he's breaking in horses in Glen innis so obviously a very talented guy and that he could

sort of turn his hand to different things. Goes down to Sydney, signs up and then he's in October he's on the SSA freak heading to to the Middle East into Egypt, whether than deployed to Glipoly.

that he was everywhere. He was running around, he was taking water to advance positions, he was rounding up shirkers as they were called, or stragglers, which I think is a bit harsh because honestly, it was absolute chaos on the beach that morning. In the first few days, he was holding different positions, he was fighting, he was going back, he was taking weapons and tools to people that was

sort of stranded. There was no firing line. It was sort of like all patches of men just trying to get up the get up the slopes, but Harry was kind of everywhere. And it was for that efforts on the first morning he won his Distinguished Conduct medal. And what had happened. He'd gone ahead, he'd found a trench which was full of Australians and they'd been cut off and they were held down by enemy fire and they couldn't move, and they'd run out of water. It was

obviously quite hot. They were in a pretty desperate situation and they're at the point where they either have to surrender or be killed. And so Harry jumped out of the trench, ran back down to the Australian positions in behind, got water, got tools, went back up and relieved that position.

That allowed them to hold that position. That position then became Quinn's Post, and Charles been rite later that Quinn's post was the most advanced Anzac position and it was kind of the key to the whole defenses, and that position would never have been held without Harry Freem and his efforts on that morning and the end of that

afternoon to do that. Once the once that initial landing and invasion went into trench warfare were then his talents as a scout really came about, and the troops knew him as the Mexican scout now because he'd fought in Mexico. He quickly got rid of his sort of the Australian Army issue paraphernalia. And by that I mean he stopped using the rifle, the three or three rifle, and he wore two revolvers, one on each hip. He had a third revolver under his arm pit. He had a bowie

knife tucked down into his boot. He wore a straight brimmed hat, he didn't have sort of the slouch hat with the one side up, and he wore a bandanna, a really distinctive blue and white bandanna that a lot of souliers mentioned if they saw Harry Freeman always had on his bandanna. Now, his role as a scout at Gallipli was every night he would crawl out of the Australian trenches and he would map and sort of reconna the Turkish trenches where the guns were, where the troop

strength were. And you can imagine how dangerous that was going out up to the sides of the trenches. He referred to himself as a peeping tom and that he'd sneak up on his belly and peer over into the Turkish trenches at night. Now obviously not with its hazards. He was shot and wounded eighteen times.

but wasn't taken out. He was finally taken off the peninsula during the loan Pine attacks in August. He participated in them, but he was not in the actual fighting. He participated in digging communication trenches up to the newly

held positions after the initial Loan pine attacks. But then when that was settled into those positions, he was again up out of a trench looking for machine gun inmplacements when he got hit by seventy five millimeters shell smashed his shoulder, fell back into the trench, broke his collar bone, and that was his war over.

glenn Innis, so everyone's very proud of him. And then when the soldiers come back a lot of people are talking about him. People being interviewed, they mentioned him. There's a story that he was actually captured by the Turkish troops one day. He was going into the trenches and he got captured, and as he's being led back away from the front, he breaks free, shoots the guards that are escorting him back, and makes it back to the

Australian lines. And so that story is told by another soldier to a journalist when he gets back to Australia. But also any attack that was going to take place, the generals would come to Harry and say, you know, what's the best way to do. How do we go? What's the land like? Because he knew that land between the Australian trenches and the Turkish trenches so well. It's known as no man's land and that was his area. So he was front and center of all the planning

and all the sort of intelligence work on Gallipoli. Later on, when Charles Bean's running his history of World War One, he actually writes to Harry and says, can you draw me a map of the Turkish trenches of this particular section where he was operating, And Harry was able to draw that. So soldiers talk of the word freme, of the name Freme being a household word at Gallipoli. He

was that well known. And what's really interesting, he was known by the soldiers, but he was also known by the generals, and as you can imagine, the British Australian generals and the rank and file, there's always those tensions when you talk about the history of Gallipoli.

and he kept in touch with him. And I've actually been really lucky enough. There's a lady, Susan McGregor who holds Harry's personal collection and his handwritten letters from Charles Bean to Harry after the war, and it's my dear Harry and my dear Frame, and he's very highly regarded.

Sea Cook, ex Horse Break, et cetera. But at the same time, because of what was happening with Japanese relations. There was the Australian Intelligence School and they recruited Harry to teach Japanese to their offices. So he was kind

of living a double life very early on. So by day he was sort of at the Soldier settlement and then he'd catch the train down from Bathist where it was, and then he was teaching Japanese to the Australian intelligence officials because and this was about nineteen sixteen nineteen seventeen.

Because even though Japan was an Australian ally during the First World War and the ship that Harry sailed on to the Middle East was actually escorted by a Japanese warship, by nineteen sixteen nineteen seventeen, Australians feared a Japanese invasion and so it was quite unusual for it would have been an unusual situation for Harry to come back to Australia, the country he had fought for, and the fear was that japan were about to invade, even though they were

an ally. To give you an idea of how difficult it would have been for Harry coming back to Australia in nineteen sixteen with the fear of Japanese invasion. Was that during the debates around conscription, both sides of the debate, the ones that wanted conscription and the ones that didn't, all used Japan as an argument. So the ones that wanted conscription said, We're going to be invaded by Japan at some point, so we need to send as many people to help Europe now so that when Japan invades,

they'll help us in return. And the ones who are against conscription said, Japan's going to invade, why would we send people over to Europe. We need everyone here at home. So for Harry, he's probably thinking, you know, I've been raised in Japan, where I was kind of an outsider as a foreign having a foreign father, and now I'm back here and I've sort of sacrificed such a lot for the Australian Army at Gallipoli, and now I'm also on the outside back in Australia. So it would have

been a very difficult time for him. So he had to, I think create another identity for himself, and I think that identity was Harry Frame.

strange intonation of speech. Now, obviously he had a strong Japanese accent. Japanese was his first language. He learned English later. I've seen his written English and you can see that it's not his first language. The way he writes, the shape of his characters is very much influenced by Japanese writing, and he sentence structure. It's very much he is a second language English speaker.

Harry's dream at Gallipoli was to become an officer. And when he got taken off the peninsula injured, he went back to London to recover and he started a letter writing campaign to the commanders of the first Battalion that he was in and other generals, and a lot of them wrote back in support and saying he was the finest soldier they had at Gallipoli and he should be given a commission, he should be an officer. The men

loved him, they would follow him. But there's one really interesting letter from General Walker, who was in charge of the ANZACs, and he wrote a letter of recommendation to Cyril White, who was also one of the ANZAC commanders, and said, you know, Harry wants a commission. He deserves one and we should give him one, but godly another general won't want to give one to a Mexican. And so he had this, you know, the perception that not

that he was Japanese. They got that wrong, but they wouldn't give, you know, an officer's commission to a Mexican. So we had that and he never did get the officer's commission, which was which was a real shame because he wanted to Even when he was back in Australia, he wanted to go back over because they said, you'll only get an officer commission if you're back in the field, and so it was his desire to get back into

the field. And he actually got out of the hospital in London, stowed away on a ship to Egypt, got back to the camps, but then was put back into the hospital and sent back to Australia against his will.

scheme for the New South Wales government. And what they were doing is they were basically siphoning off funds to build the soldier settlement houses. The men were working growing fruit to sell to Sydney, but they were never told how much their fruit was being sold for. They were never told how much they owed. So the scheme was you'd be given your block of land, you'd sell fruit, and then some of that money would go to pay off the land, and over thirty years, kind of like

a mortgage, you'd pay it all back. But they were selling the fruit, but they weren't ever told how much money they owed when they'd be out of debt or anything. So at that stage all of them walked off the land,

including Harry. Harry then goes up to Armored to another soldier settlement scheme and it's the same situation in that quickly he discovers there's corruption and he denounces this corruption up there and in that case, what they were doing the new South Wales minister who was in charge of it, a gentleman called Ashford. They had commissioned the construction of

these cold storage rooms for the fruit. Well it was going to be another four years before there were any fruit from these fruit trees, but they commissioned them because then the soldiers would then have to pay them off, and then they took the money that they were going to get from it. So very corrupt. Harry denounces it, and it goes to a royal commission to investigate these all the soldier settlement schemes, and it finds out that

this corruption is rife. But what's really interesting, and I think it's interesting, Jen, how we think about the ANZACs now and they're rightly revered for what they did and

what they went through. But at the time, when you read through the old newspapers, the soldier settlers were kind of doubted and they were sort of, oh, these guys have got it easy, and now they're complaining and there's all these well they don't even look that damage, you know, why aren't they at the war And a lot of the men that were coming back in sort of nineteen sixteen, nineteen and seventeen. They might have looked okay, but they'd

been gassed in the German trenches. So I had all these broken men sent out to these really rural areas. A lot of them have had experience on farms. The land wasn't great for what they were supposed to be doing, the growing of fruit and vegetables, and there was obviously deals being done by people selling land to the government, selling you know, friends in the government and getting that money.

And also that a lot of the women went out there with their husbands who had come back and found that the husbands were either depressed or violent or just not up to the work. And then there wasn't that much sympathy in the Australian papers for these men as well. You know, they've been given this land and they've got it easy. They don't mind drinking, but they don't want

to work hard. But it really wasn't that. But what was really interesting about Harry at Kentucky, and if you think about his birth back to Japan at the start of the modernization of Japan, Harry had that in him. So there's a lot of articles of the day that Harry was the first one to get radio. He was the first one to get the machine Deanery. He was trying to modernize and modernize all the time with machines. He was the first person in the area to get

a car, which he crashed a couple of times. He wasn't a great driver. But it's really ching that he that that that Japanese upbringing was always with him and he never turned his back on his Japanese ancestry, really embraced it as much as he could. And in the in the Kentucky Soldier Settlement community up near Armadale, he was a real leader and at any event, you know, there's always he was decorating the hall for the local

ball he was building the tennis courts. He was a leader of the RSL, He was a member of the local political party, the United Australia Party, so heavily involved. And the conclusion I came to about Harry during the Soldier Settlement, because it never made money a lot of the time he was starving, was that he need He really found an identity for himself at Gallipoli, and that identity existed as long as you know, the soldiers around him existed. And I think he really tried to hold

that community together. His wife, Edith May, came out and joined him in late nineteen nineteen and she lived up at Kentucky as well, and they had their first son, young Harry, who was born in nineteen twenty one. But then his wife fell ill at like maybe like a we know, not one hundred percent, but it seems like she went into a post natal depression and then in sort of a couple of years later, she went back to England with young Harry and left the older Harry

by himself at Kentucky. Oh no, so he didn't for the first couple of years, and that really affected him a lot. So when Edith May came back from England, Harry had hired a living maid, and it appears that when Harry was first in Australia he'd actually fathered a child to this lady. Her name was Josephine Clark, and so she reappears at Kentucky living in the family house with the son, which we assume, and there's not one hundred percent, but I'm pretty sure it was Harry's child.

So you can imagine this really difficult family situation. And then we start to lead into the depress years. There's no money, there's no fruit, and that goes on till about nineteen thirty four, when finally Josephine Clark leaves the family household, but by then Harry's had another daughter to her, and that's young Gracie, who Harry and Edith may adopt as their own. But Gracie grew up never knowing that her real mother was Josephine Clark. So really really tough times.

But I think what it demonstrates, Jen, is that today we revere the ANZACs, but when they came back, they had it tough. They had it really, really tough, and Harry's story is just one of many.

at Heraldsun dot com dot Au slash ibaw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. Even better, leave a review. It's one simple way you can help us get the word out to more listeners. Any comments or questions please email me at in black and white at Heraldsun dot

com dot au. Any clarifications or updates will appear in the show notes for each episode, and to get notified when each new episode comes out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast feed