Voices from the Air (13 page)

Wilmot and Dudley Leggett drove north to Queensland together, visiting a number of military units en route. Leggett stayed on in Brisbane, where his aim was to record interviews and actuality of the activities of the Australian and
American forces in the north. Despite his experience as an announcer and sporting commentator, and as a co-ordinator of the work of mobile units, Leggett was still learning the skills of reporting and pacing his voice on extended stories: ‘my experience in these matters is not what it will be',
¹³
he promised in a letter to Molesworth. He found the Navy very shy of talking to reporters and the RAAF had a clear ‘aversion to correspondents'.
¹⁴

He was energetic, eager to cover meaningful stories and very conscious of his responsibilities to the ABC – and was frustrated by the little he had achieved so far for all his spade work. Wilmot's friend, George Fenton, who had been the military censor in Cairo, was now with Army public relations in Brisbane. Fenton and others counselled Leggett to have patience: ‘They have pointed out that it is most important to know your area and the troops and their commanders in the area before anything flares up, which is true, for familiarity and confidence have played an essential part in the success of Mr Wilmot's work.'
¹⁵

Wilmot moved on to Townsville at the end of May, with a recording unit and his colleague from the Middle East, technician Bill MacFarlane. The town around Castle Hill and straddling Ross Creek, and the promontory that pushed the port and its wharves out into the harbour, were guarded by searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries. Guns and barbed wire protected the town along The Strand, the foreshore strip that faced the waters of the bay and the Coral Sea.

Most of the other war correspondents were bunking at the Queens Hotel, but there was no correspondents' mess at the hotel and no workshop for MacFarlane's equipment. Drawing on his experience in the Middle East, Chester had arranged other digs for himself and Bill MacFarlane.

The manager of the Commonwealth Bank, whom I chanced to meet the day after we arrived, has leant us his garage as a storeroom and workshop and has given us sleeping quarters – a dressing room, which I use as a study also, and part of a sleep-out. The main object in living here is that the house is situated right on top of a hill that commands a view of the harbour and the town. We have the gear set up ready to record 24 hrs a day just in case there should be a raid. Actually this is the only spot in Townsville which gives us an all round view and is near the guns.
¹⁶

The news journalist in Townsville, Haydon Lennard, was staying in the Queens Hotel with the main press pack and was disgusted to find that someone had broken into his room and stolen his clothes and his radio. Lennard was protective of his area of coverage and was concerned that he didn't end up playing ‘second fiddle to Wilmot' but they apparently rubbed along with little trouble. Lennard had spent several months in Port Moresby covering the first Japanese air raids and was now alternating between there and Townsville, sharing coverage with his friend Barry Young from the
Daily Mirror
.

Port Moresby and Papua would soon be the latest frontline for Australian troops. It was a month since the Battle of the Coral Sea had prevented a Japanese invasion of Port Moresby and in a month's time the Japanese landings on the north coast of Papua would herald the beginning of the Kokoda campaign. In the meantime, Wilmot was unwell and returned to Melbourne for treatment for his hay fever and Dudley Leggett replaced him in Townsville – with the hope of releasing more of his pent-up energy. Leggett quickly found some of his reports from Townsville were blocked but then the same information was released by GHQ. Despite the undoubted
aggravation this caused, Leggett was a broadcaster rather than a journalist and he was less interested in some of the more heated rows over censorship.

I've never heard so much haggling as has gone on or rather as goes on between the pressmen and censors. Not that I've been out of it entirely myself but I've been keeping out of most of it and I'm not interested in trying to push through material which may be dangerous. Some of these fellows are a little too concerned about their reputations and consequently are inclined to forget the security aspect.
¹⁷

Late on the night of 25–26 July, a small group of Japanese planes bombed Townsville. The bombs landed in the water of the harbour and there were no casualties. Dudley was anguished to hear that his news telegram to the ABC was held up and did not make the main evening news the next day, and apologetic that an attack of nerves had blighted his voice report recorded several hours later – ‘it was incredibly bad and I am dismayed at the whole thing'.
¹⁸
Molesworth later advised Dudley to commit his story to a script immediately a raid was over and while it was still fresh in his mind.
¹⁹
Wilmot arrived back in Townsville and for the final night-time raid, he and MacFarlane were well positioned on a hill above the town to record the defensive fire against the lone raider. In Bill's recording of Chester's commentary you can clearly hear the deep, stuttering fire of the ack-ack guns in the background.

The plane is held in the lights absolutely dead above us and it's heading out now westwards right above the town. The searchlights are holding it absolutely perfectly in their beams from all sides and at the moment I can see one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, more than a dozen searchlights. It's making the most extraordinary pattern as the plane heads out westwards but the plane is so high up that the ack-ack shells are not bursting anywhere near it . . . it's been hit by tracers from one our fighters, yellow tracers are streaming past it and there's one hit the tail of the plane, I can see a burst of light stream from it . . . well now the plane is moving away . . . it seems to me to be losing a little height but is continuing on its course well out to the westward.
²⁰

Within hours of recording the Townsville raid Wilmot was on a plane to Port Moresby, soon to head into the Owen Stanley Ranges with the Australian troops on the Kokoda Trail. Bill MacFarlane also headed to Moresby. Leggett stayed in North Queensland and was joined by Len Edwards, the young PMG technician from Tasmania.

This was the first major assignment for
Len Edwards
, and he worked with Leggett for several months, as Dudley recorded interviews and provided news coverage from Townsville on the bombing campaign against the Japanese in New Guinea and Papua. It was also the first real opportunity for Len to use his technical skills and versatility on coverage of the war. Edwards was born in Hobart in 1916 and was a keen ham radio operator. He was fascinated by radio and radio technology and was broadcasting on an experimental radio licence until just before the war, when amateur radio activities were closed down. In 1939 he was working at the ABC's Hobart studios as a PMG radio mechanic, or technician, and was one of the first to use
the new acetate disc recorders. ‘I was one of the fortunate ones and became hooked.'
²¹

While working on a PMG experimental radio link and also at the cable station in the remote town of Stanley, he used his spare time – and the PMG workshop – to build his own audio disc recorder and microphones. He joined the ABC field teams in 1942 and inherited responsibility for Jumbo, the studio van that had come back from the Middle East with Bill MacFarlane and Chester Wilmot and was now based in Sydney. When Dudley Leggett encountered Edwards, he was immediately impressed. ‘I consider myself extremely fortunate to have him. It is a pleasure to work with him. He is most reliable, conscientious and adaptable, and his recordings appear to be of excellent quality. He is very interested in his work and eager to get further forward and produce the maximum number of recordings.'
²²

Not long before, the ABC had appointed its first war correspondent covering GHQ in Melbourne, a former newspaper journalist named Bill Marien, who had joined the Commission only a month or so earlier. Marien attended the twice-daily news conferences at GHQ and filed news reports for the ABC on the official communiqués and on other stories gleaned from the GHQ round. Marien was soon sent to Darwin as a news correspondent, joining Peter Hemery. He was replaced at GHQ by John Hinde, a former newspaper journalist who had become one of the senior members of Frank Dixon's small news team at the ABC.

In July 1942, Douglas MacArthur moved GHQ to Brisbane and Hinde travelled north on the train carrying the American general and his staff. Hinde's career as a war correspondent
almost came to an early and inglorious end when he breached the security cordon around MacArthur's carriage during a night-time stop at Albury, and narrowly escaped being shot.
²³
GHQ was a critical assignment for ABC war correspondents: it provided the official reports of the war each day and much information was only released at GHQ or at the advanced GHQ in the forward areas. Hinde explained the daily process at GHQ for war correspondents as

. . . covering the HQ press conferences every morning and sending a story back based on the communiqué, which wasn't as totally routine as it sounds, because you got a lot of background information at the same time and a lot of continuity, so you could tell a certain fact of the story of the war from there, rather better than from anywhere else, although it did tend to be the MacArthur view of the war, in which the Australians didn't appear much.
²⁴

GHQ proved a thorn in the side of correspondents in the field as stories they wrote on military operations could not be released before the official GHQ communiqué. GHQ releases often failed to tell the full story, which was a further challenge for correspondents trying to navigate the twin rocks of propaganda and censorship. After spending much of the first half of 1942 in Port Moresby or Townsville, Haydon Lennard joined the hothouse of MacArthur's headquarters when he took over as GHQ war correspondent.

. . . the job's been very strange and not too easy mainly because I was a stranger in a strange land but I think I've overcome that now. I find that if I am to stay here there's a lot of hard work ahead getting known and gaining
confidences. There's a big mob of war correspondents in the place and they're all at the same game.
²⁵

It was constant work. ‘At the moment we are being called to conference at any hour of the day or night. This morning we were summoned two hours before the normal time. Last night I received a call at half-past nine and was working re-writing and recasting stories until nearly midnight. So was every other correspondent.'
²⁶

Gordon Williams, the correspondent for the overseas shortwave service, was working with Lennard at GHQ in the latter part of the year and they were relieving each other whenever possible to share the workload. Lennard quipped to Frank Dixon that ‘Williams believes that his present job could not be carried on indefinitely under present conditions “unless by a circus elephant with insomnia”.'
²⁷
Lennard enjoyed being at the centre of official information at GHQ, but while the practice of tightly controlling information for release through GHQ rather than at field headquarters benefited the GHQ correspondents, they did not get the independent background and context that correspondents could get in the field.

At various times in 1942, the ABC had correspondents stationed at GHQ, and in New Guinea, northern Queensland and the Northern Territory. At one point three field units were in operation at the same time but the longest, most sustained coverage by a field unit was in the far north around Darwin.

Peter Hemery covered the Top End for eight months. He was in Darwin for many of the air raids that followed the first attacks in February. The newspaper correspondent Allan
Dawes described Hemery as ‘the only man I've met who really went around looking for air raids, for example, before they were actually on – studying weather conditions, and the probable track and tactics of the bombers, so that he might secure a grandstand seat of sorts for a recording.'
²⁸

Hemery covered the raids and crafted colourful on-thespot and soft propaganda stories that actively highlighted the daring and successes of Australian, American and Dutch East Indies fliers defending Darwin and operating against Japanese targets in Timor and elsewhere to the north. In July, he was staying with an American Kittyhawk fighter squadron – the 9th Squadron of the US 49th Pursuit Group.

I woke with the first streak of dawn. For a minute, I couldn't figure out what had happened. The world was just one earth shaking roar of sound. Then, I realised. I was living with a fighter squadron. The noise was the engines of better than twenty-five Kittyhawks warming up. A thick dust haze swirled among the scrub gum from the combined slip streams.
²⁹