“Japan Calling”: An Australian Quisling

Australians are being forced to live unnatural lives, forced to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others. For Washington, we Australians are nothing but a sub-state and for London we are still a colony. National independence is our only salvation.
Alan Raymond, “Australian Affairs”, Radio XMHA, Shanghai, August 1944

At the height of the Japanese invasion scare of early 1942, the new Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, promised the assembled members of the House of Representatives, “We shall stand no Quislings, whether they come from the highest or the lowest.” Noted, and mocked, amongst both his Labor and conservative peers for his long-winded pomposity, Forde was referring to the recent arrests across the continent of those associated with the “Australia-First” movement, thought to be complicit with a threatened Japanese penetration of Australia. The minister’s rhetorical flourishes were stimulated on this afternoon of March 26 by the presence in the chamber of a distinguished guest, US General Douglas MacArthur, who later concluded that Australians would be formidable allies if they could fight as well as they could argue.

Yet Forde the mock-hero was looking in the wrong place for any Australian Quislings—they were not at home under the ministerial nose, but already waiting in the bosom of the enemy. Had the minister followed the common practice of tuning in to foreign short-wave radio, he would have heard an announcement from the Reich broadcasting service in Berlin on March 12, amidst the wave of arrests and internments-without-trial, that an “Australian Independence” movement had been formed in distant Shanghai (under Japanese occupation) and that this organisation would approach Tokyo in order to secure a separate, lenient Australian-Japanese peace, given that Australia had been unwillingly “dragged into the war by Britain”. This German report was soon picked up by Rome and Vichy radio, as well as by the security services in Australia intercepting messages from an Italian agent, and eventually by the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, which told its readers on March 16 that the Japanese had now recruited a “Quisling to Betray Australia”.

This unlikely “Quisling” was Alan Willoughby Raymond, an expatriate journalist and adventurer, who had based himself in China since 1931 and was now enjoying the extensive patronage of the Japanese Imperial Navy amidst the nervous, genteel poverty of the wartime Shanghai demi-monde. 

Raymond’s story is another of those buried amidst the treasures of the National Archives in Canberra, one of the untold accounts of a keen amateur punter who backed the wrong side in the greatest war that history has seen. This personable, clean-cut renegade with a Don Ameche moustache was born in Melbourne in 1909 of English parents who had migrated in the 1890s. After growing up in Sydney, the sixteen-year-old returned to his home town to take a job with G.J. Coles. Transferred back to Sydney in 1928, Raymond was too adventurous for the Depression-era, moth-eaten Australian retail trade and in 1931 he took ship for Shanghai, as exotic a destination as a young man could wish for at that time.

In China’s largest city, Raymond gained employment with and eventually managed the Shanghai Marble Company. This position necessitated extensive travel through the Far East (or “Near North”, as more perceptive Australians, Prime Minister Lyons amongst them, already called it) including Japan and her imperial territories on the Asian mainland, recently acquired chiefly at the expense of a desiccated China. This journeying left him with a “very favourable impression of the Japanese people”, as he tactlessly described his impressions in a postwar interrogation.

This unusually settled period for Raymond in the 1930s proved merely to be the beginning of his troubles. Even though the young manager had only one vice, it was the all-encompassing one of gambling, especially horse-racing (although he also dabbled in the stock market). He was soon involved with certain “irregularities” at the local racing club as both a trainer and a jockey, which resulted in his forced resignation and his “posting” at the Shanghai Club for unpaid debts. This kiss-of-death for an expatriate climaxed a period in which he had already lingered on the margins of Shanghai social life by unwisely preferring the company of “low Chinese women, Japs and Germans” to that of “Britishers”, as the security services bluntly described his infringements. Raymond himself later suggested that his choice of companions had been a reaction to the ubiquitous British attitude “of superiority and condescension” towards Australians, a common enough experience in those years.

The troubled punter was also subsequently warned off racing courses in Macao and Hong Kong. He beat a hasty retreat back home in December 1939, where he tarried chiefly in Sydney, probably mixing with the sympathetic Australia-First circle based around the radical, or reactionary, Publicist newspaper (although security later searched in vain for evidence of a connection) and scribbling for the Bulletin on “Business Robbery”, having recently gained short-term employment as a clerk with the Sydney Stock Exchange. Raymond’s application at this time for a position as an Australian Trade Commissioner in East Asia was wildly ambitious and predictably unsuccessful; wartime Sydney was not to his liking for long and his pro-Japanese sentiments were not well received outside the circles of the radical Right. Like many a returned expatriate, Raymond no longer understood his own country and he had returned to Shanghai by July 1940, now describing himself as a journalist. Opposed to Australian involvement in the European war (and under the shadow of compulsory service in the Militia) he claimed to prefer “a quiet detached life” in the Orient. It was not to be quiet for long, or very detached.  

Some months after his return, the aspiring scribbler turned his back decisively on his imperial bed-fellows (and the Shanghai Club) and formed an “Independent Australia League”, keen both to discard the shackles of Empire and to evade his personal debts. The patronage of the Japanese occupying authorities in the birth of this League was undeniable, even though Japan was not yet at war with the British Empire. The aims of the organisation were markedly similar to those of the soon-to-be-purged Australia-First circle back home—a mixture of a desire for “national independence” from an interfering Britain alongside a curious, contradictory wish for a closer association with the emerging powers of Germany and Japan. This was all innocent enough (at least in cosmopolitan, polyglot, occupied Shanghai) until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, shortly after which the League transformed itself into a “Break Away from Britain Movement” and was allegedly attracting a membership of several hundred expatriates—it was this organisation that Berlin now endorsed alongside Tokyo.

Raymond’s moment in the sun had arrived as he had presided over the movement’s foundation meeting at the Palace Hotel, where a handful of Australian businessmen gathered, along with a solitary Japanese, a single Englishman and a lost Swede. Members of these collaborative organisations were said to be enjoying extra rations in the straitened city and being given access to broadcasting facilities. By this time Raymond had burned all his Australian bridges by evacuating his mother to China and leaving behind a Queensland fiancée, who was later tracked by the Security Service. That same service was still at a loss to explain the attitude of Raymond and his collaborators, although it thought he might be evading military service—the Australian delegation in Chungking simply thought he was a renegade “Eurasian”. Both intelligence analysts and diplomats chose to ignore the self-explanatory calls that the break-aways soon made for a separate, honourable peace, quoting the veiled threat of General Tojo himself that Canberra would be wise to do so, but the renegade was now ready to give his analysts further, detailed food for thought. In March 1942 he began a series of regular articles in the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury (“An Aussie’s Point of View”) and after the Japanese seized the city’s broadcasting facilities he began to broadcast from Shanghai radio to listeners across the region.

This particular “Aussie” (now enjoying liaisons with Russian women as well) had a point of view that coincided remarkably closely with that of the Japanese naval authorities who continued to lobby for the “southward” expansion that had long been opposed by the Japanese Imperial Army. The 1942 readers of the Post saw every Allied move in the region diminished and denounced, every Japanese move lauded and explained as the actions of a nation seeking to establish its “Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, which the “Aussie” urged his homeland to join. The victory of Japanese arms, whether in Burma or Malaya or New Guinea, whether against the Dutch, the Americans, the British or even the Australians, was celebrated, including the Japanese “victory” at the naval Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942. This supposed victory signalled the “Dawn of a New World Order” in East Asia in which Japan demonstrated her benevolent intentions to develop the recently conquered colonies of South-East Asia. Even the celebrated Japanese mini-submarine assault on a converted Sydney harbour ferry in May-June of the same year was taken as evidence of the courage of Japanese servicemen (which it undoubtedly was), without any expression of sympathy for the twenty-one naval victims.

It was not coincidental that Raymond’s articles sometimes appeared near coloured depictions of a stern Japanese soldier astride a map of China, the “Guardian” behind whom sheltered the huddled masses of Asia, an image accompanied by his assessment that change was in the air. On July 6, 1942, Raymond accordingly concluded that “Evolution decrees that the obsolete order of things must give way to the new, or adapt itself as conditions change.” This transformation had already occurred in Europe, he thought, where Nazi Germany’s leadership had led to the “consummation of a new era in thought and scientific practice which has been dawning on the world for the last few centuries or more”. Those back home who shared his views were already behind barbed wire, but to him they were prescient martyrs of a “popular movement” who had been arrested in an attempt to stifle an inevitable national uprising and the rise of an irresistible patriotic push: “The arrests are creating widespread consternation in Australia and the authorities fear that the movement has gained a firm footing throughout the country, particularly in Melbourne.” This assessment of May 27, 1942, was delusory (“Australia-First” numbered fewer than 100 members), but once its author placed himself behind the microphone, and once the war turned against imperial Japan in 1943, it was joined by other similarly deluded sentiments. 

The Australian audience of the Shanghai Post was restricted to a handful of unimpressed intelligence analysts, but once Raymond began to broadcast from the appropriated Shanghai facility “Radio Station XMHA” his “point of view” reached a wider audience, including the relatives of the nearly 15,000 Australian POWs taken at Singapore in February 1942 who security feared were listening in the hope of obtaining news of their loved ones. By 1943, Raymond had secured a regular audience for his 7.10 p.m. broadcasts, which began with “a few messages from internees”, and even those relatives who listened in vain for news of individuals received assurances that these guests of imperial Japan were being well provided for, a propaganda line that he insisted upon in the Post for some time—as the recipient of Japanese sustenance himself, the broadcaster may have accepted the assurances of his Shanghai friends too uncritically.

By May 1944, the Security Service feared that Raymond and others had secured a “tremendous audience” in Australia through this network of POW relatives now that over 22,000 diggers were in Japanese captivity, and consequently encouraged the Department of Information to conduct a survey of listeners. No survey of the Australian community in Shanghai was now possible, although security remained confident of the loyalty of “99 per cent” of them; however accurate that analysis might have been, it was the disloyal 1 per cent who were now behind the microphones and the number of Australians still collaborating with the Japanese in Shanghai was assessed by one American escapee at the “appalling” level of over 300.

Raymond’s “Australian Affairs” broadcasts were now closely monitored back home by a security service keen to identify collaborators and keen to ensure a level of postwar vengeance. There was a lot to listen to—even when the reception was assessed as “very bad”, the content was assessed as worse, despite the charm of the habitual broadcast introduction and conclusion of a kookaburra call (the late, unlamented W.J. Miles of the Publicist newspaper had employed this native bird as his symbol and styled himself the “Sydney Kookaburra”). The presentation was professional enough—Raymond had at last found something he was good at—and the subject matter wide-ranging and relentlessly optimistic even though the offensives of Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur (the denounced “foreign commander” of Australian troops) were steadily reducing the territory of the Japanese empire.

Although Raymond’s focus remained on “East Asia”, the “unwarranted and superfluous war” in Europe could not be overlooked, and in September 1943 he was still condemning British intervention over the German invasion of Poland. Although Prime Minister Menzies had privately conceded in 1939 to High Commissioner Bruce in London that “nobody really cares a damn about Poland as such”, the official line had been different and was now further condemned by Raymond. Once the successful Normandy “D-Day” landing in June 1944 seemed to settle the fate of one of the powers that had invaded Poland at that distant time, Raymond could only console himself with the thought that at last the “brilliant strategy of Hitler” would now be evident to all—the Führer had been planning for such a day for one and a half years, so the Australian listeners were told, and the Germans would now accordingly prove their mettle. Few outside Hitler’s inner circle accepted such logic; even fewer shared the faith that Raymond placed in Germany’s celebrated “miracle weapons” a fortnight after the invasion. That the Allies were already planning for a postwar, post-New Order Europe was undeniable even to an observer in Shanghai, and his wonder at the advent of the marvellous Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter in September could not alter that new balance.

Raymond nevertheless remained confident that Germany was an enormous, unassailable “fortress” as late as October 1944, but it remained one without a roof, as some of the 10,000 Australian members of the RAF Bomber Command reminded German civilians and war workers every night. Miles, the editor of the Publicist, had sarcastically urged future Australian aviators in June 1938 to “Blow them all—all the non-combatants—to bits, you heroic bombers! Leave not a baby of them!” but he had not lived to see his tongue-in-cheek prediction realised.

The road of the East Asian “New Order” was no less rocky and Raymond bemoaned the “unnecessary” fighting “between neighbours” that was occurring at Finschhafen and Lae on the north coast of New Guinea in October 1943, praising the fighting quality of both Japanese and Australian soldiers, concluding that “statesman-like” conduct by Australia beforehand could have avoided such bloodshed. This may have been an arguable case in 1941, but it was not one that Australian listeners cared to hear in 1943. They were already focused on what was coming, a future that “Radio Station XMHA” warned in August 1944 would constitute an “American century” of world rule dominated by US (Jewish) financiers such as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who was currently presiding over an International Currency Conference intended to cement the supremacy of Wall Street. The ailing “New Order” in both East and West was already helpless to prevent these developments—Raymond had to satisfy himself at the time of “D-Day” with commemorating the first anniversary of the Japanese return to (puppet) China of the Shanghai international settlement, hardly a pressing issue for his Australian audience.

The Shanghai broadcasts assumed an air of petulant futility as 1944 slid into the final year of the war. Raymond praised the Japanese, Burmese and “Free Indian” defenders of Burma and regretted the continuing AIF contribution to the broader struggle on behalf of British and especially American imperialism. By October 1944 he could see no point in Australia continuing in the struggle against Japan, but the Allied strategists clearly could.

Raymond’s announcement of the formation of an “Australian-Asiatic Association” in January 1945 was, by his own admission, too late. This association was formed, he told his New Year listeners, to promote an “understanding” between Australia and the Asian nations (“our Asiatic neighbours”), what he described as “good-neighbourly relations”; to this end, he admitted the support of the Japanese authorities in Shanghai. The whole enterprise, like the League and the Break Away Movement, came to nothing and in retrospect could either be regarded as a risibly belated initiative or as one ahead of its time, given the desire that Australians soon developed for just such cordial, regional relationships. Whether Raymond was thus a fossil or a pioneer remains debatable, although this sole broadcast in favour of the Association implied the former.

No amount of false confidence over the air waves about Japanese prospects in the Philippines campaign (January 1945) or about their determination to defend Okinawa—and Shanghai—to the last (July 1945) could disguise the reality of defeat for everything the League, the Movement and the Association seemed to stand for. When atomically-pulverised Japan followed conventionally-pulverised Germany into unconditional surrender in August, Raymond gave a farewell broadcast shortly after the cessation of hostilities and then disappeared.

Now it was time for this apostle of “good-neighbourly relations” to explain himself, if he could be found. Having listened to his broadcasts for over three years, the Australian Security Service and the Commonwealth Investigation Branch were keen to give him a further hearing, most likely in a court of law once he had been charged with treason, an option considered by the Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra. By January 1946, the CIB’s contacts in Shanghai had found him and placed him under surveillance, crisply noting that Mr Raymond was “not thought to be desiring repatriation”. Although still at straitened liberty, the broadcasting career of this “Aussie” seemed over. He was now described by the new Australian Legation in the city as “unemployed” and studying psychology at St John’s University, expecting to graduate in January 1946. Despite this back-handed diplomatic assessment of the value of a degree in psychology, the discipline was of obvious benefit to a propagandist, especially one who seemed determined to continue his activities in the newer world order.

Two news broadcasts were soon monitored from “Radio Station XORA” at Shanghai in March 1947 and three of the four detained monitors from the old XMHA station identified the voice as that of Raymond, who had apparently found new masters amongst the officials of the restored, ruling, Chinese nationalist party, the KMT. This identification focused the minds of the Australian security services wonderfully and once the restored Nationalist Chinese military police finally began to arrest “British collaborationists” in May 1946, the case of Raymond was revisited. The Australian Legation expressed its willingness to offer assistance in the arrest of a “notorious” Australian citizen/British subject by the Chinese authorities and his trial under Chinese law, looking forward to a subsequent deportation to Australia. The former “collaborationist” and “traitor of the worst kind” (as one Australian diplomat termed him) remained an habitué of the declining Palace Hotel, now cavorting with Chinese friends, and this behaviour was taken by some of those who had endured Japanese internment as a galling insult.

Yet here Raymond benefited from the absence of Australian diplomatic clout and independence that he had long decried—the Australian officials in Shanghai could do nothing about him; the British were reluctant to intervene in the case of an Australian, despite the lobbying of the legation to do so; the Chinese would not co-operate without the assistance of the British. There was no question of unilateral action by the British, conscious as they were of the dangers of any infringement of newly-restored Chinese sovereignty (especially in historically sensitive Shanghai). Raymond therefore benefited from an Australian inability to persuade the British to set aside what were assessed as “absurdly touchy” Chinese sensitivities. It was as if the war had never been.

This comic-opera farce amidst Shanghai’s swansong continued in December 1946 when Raymond was interrogated by Captain W.R. Blackett of the Australian Security Service on his home patch. The man in the hot seat attempted to soothe the captain by recalling the 1941 assurances of his Japanese naval patrons that they had no intention of “invading” Australia, although he also recalled their warnings that some military action against the north of the continent may follow any incursion southwards. Following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Raymond and his friends consequently thought it best for Australia to declare its independence of Britain, hence the formation of the “Independent Australia League” and the associated “Break Away” organisation trumpeted in Nazi propaganda. Raymond expressed no regrets, remaining convinced that his broadcasts were not “propaganda”, and claimed that he had always prayed for an Allied victory, presumably at the chapel of St John’s University, where he had sharpened his understanding of the human mind. If Raymond’s account of his religious piety was accurate, then he had spent six days a week working for a Japanese victory, but only one praying for an Allied victory. Nevertheless, he was left unmolested in China’s largest city and may have finally been able to enjoy the “quiet detached life” that he said he had sought since 1940, at least until the fall of Shanghai to the Chinese communists in May 1949.

The fate of Alan Willoughby Raymond thereafter remains unknown, but this was one “Quisling” who had escaped the firing squad of the Norwegian original and the hangman’s rope of the most famous Axis broadcaster of them all, William Joyce (“Lord Haw-Haw” of “Germany Calling”). Raymond was only one of the handful of Australians who collaborated with the Axis cause in those grim years, but he was saved from any sense of contrition by his gambler’s instinct, managing to escape the wrath of his compatriots in the same audacious way that he had evaded the sanction of the Shanghai Club. That club at least had the decency to ostracise him; Canberra simply buried him in the archives, alongside many others who had behaved similarly. This particular “Aussie” had benefited from the “lethargy” of the “most ignorant of all modern nations”, as he had described their homeland to his listeners. The kookaburra’s laugh had proved an appropriate farewell clarion call.

This article includes some material from Dr David Bird’s forthcoming book The Nazi Dreamtime, which also deals with other Australian “Quislings” at home and abroad, both high and low.