Voices from the Air (15 page)

Haydon Lennard
was in an angry and bitter mood after witnessing some of the early Japanese air raids on Port Moresby in February 1942. It was the same month as the fall of Singapore, the first air raids on Darwin, and the invasion of Timor . . . and the war had now reached Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea, facing the Australian mainland. The state of military un-readiness at Moresby was perilous and the harbour town was poorly defended. ‘If one thinks too much of the whole rotten show,' wrote Lennard to Frank Dixon, ‘the prospects become almost terrifying . . . Unless something is done soon – and damn soon – it will be the same old story. Complete Jap mastery of the air and the virtual murder of good proud fighting Australians.'
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Lennard was the first ABC newsman appointed as a war correspondent and the first posted to the Pacific theatre, and he arrived in Moresby just a few days after the first Japanese air raids at the beginning of the month.

Even then, the harbour and the town were edged by airfields – the main one at 7 Mile – but there were no fighter
squadrons, the only air defence was a few anti-aircraft batteries, and the militia forces garrisoning the town were relatively few in number and poorly trained and equipped. One of Lennard's main tasks at the time was reporting the air raids on Moresby and he expressed his disgust in his letter to Dixon.

This area must be defended. It's far better to fight the Japs in the north where they can't get food and have no great cities to lay waste. Once they get through here there'll be no stopping them. But to stop them the men here must have something to fight with. Here's an example. Not one of the hundred or more Jap planes which have been over Moresby has been attacked by a fighter. A few ack-ack shells are merely thrown into the air.
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A squadron of Kittyhawk fighters arrived in late March and Moresby would later be transformed into a huge military base for the campaign in New Guinea, but apparent confusion and mismanagement marked the first weeks. Lennard could not report this at the time and even though there were relatively few casualties from the Japanese bombing of Moresby his bitter memories of the episode remained with him all his life. The poor training and equipment for the militia force resonated with Lennard's own experience in the militia a decade earlier, and at Moresby he found himself instructing some of the younger soldiers in the basics of how to shoot a rifle. Many had little experience other than as labourers, unloading ships in the harbour.

Frank Dixon had plucked Lennard from his role compiling news bulletins in the ABC Sydney newsroom to send him to Port Moresby. Dixon believed the immediate threat to Australia posed by Japan required a news correspondent rather
than a correspondent filing radio talks, such as Wilmot had done from the Middle East. In Dixon's calculations, a newsman could send a dozen cables a day if necessary whereas a radio correspondent could only deliver one talk a day and with no guarantee it would make the deadline.
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As a journalist, Lennard was in a reserved occupation and Dixon had already obtained his exemption from military service, but Lennard made a strong appeal to be released from the ABC to join the RAAF. Dixon was reluctant to let him go. Lennard had proven to be reliable and conscientious in radio news and it seemed that Dixon liked Lennard's somewhat maverick energy as well as his undeniable skill as a journalist.
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And there was another likely connection – like Dixon, Lennard had a country background and experience on country newspapers. Lennard was born in Sydney but grew up in the Riverina, where his father was a school headmaster and later an inspector of schools. He started his career as a cadet journalist in the New South Wales town of Albury before moving to newspapers and news-agency work back in Sydney.

As a young man in Albury, Lennard himself appeared in the papers when he was charged with taking bets in the bar of the Albury Hotel. He admitted to the charge but was acquitted on a fine technicality. According to Lennard's colleague in the ABC Sydney newsroom, John Hinde, Haydon had ‘a talent for getting into trouble'. Wiry and dark-haired, he had a quick, occasionally volatile temperament and competitive instincts that sometimes put him at odds with ABC colleagues. Dixon opposed Lennard's release to join the Air Force – instead, Lennard went on to the RAAF reserve list and, at the age of 32 and with the well-developed skills of an experienced radio news journalist, was posted to Port Moresby as a war correspondent.

At the time, the handful of war correspondents in Port Moresby were based a few miles out of town, with the Australian administrative headquarters. They were quartered in an old plantation house and worked out of a grass-thatched hut, from where they made several trips each day to the town and harbour, and to the various military units.
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Lennard spent several months in Moresby providing the first regular news copy for the ABC from an overseas warfront. His copy was often held up until after each day's official report of the air raids had been written by Air Force officials in Moresby and received by the Air Board in Melbourne. Lennard was characteristically free with his opinion.

I consider this shows a hopeless disregard of the work expected of war correspondents. The officials concerned in many cases are incapable of quick thinking and I am sure their reports are hours in preparation. Moreover they invariably show a great respect for slit trenches during an air raid and are some of the first to get in and the last to leave.
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Port Moresby was an early test of censorship in the Pacific war. The field censors for all branches of the military at Moresby reviewed correspondents' despatches for security before they were sent back to the mainland, where they might also be subject to publicity censorship, which reviewed reporting on the grounds of the effect on public morale or the war effort. In April, publicity censors raised concerns about some despatches from Port Moresby – even though the despatches had already been censored and passed by the military censors in the field. The issue of supposedly ‘irresponsible and speculative reports by Press Correspondents at Moresby' went as high as the prime minister and the Advisory War Council.

The Army had no complaints about the reporting from Moresby. In an early (unsent) draft letter from the Army to the Advisory War Council, the Secretary of the Army explained.

The only complaints which have been received regarding the reporting of the Army activity at Moresby have been from the correspondents themselves and the General Officer commanding, who complain that amplification or alteration by commentators, official or otherwise, of despatches already censored at Moresby have compromised local security.
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Among the problems were ABC commentators who had identified Lennard's location by describing him as ‘our special representative at Port Moresby', and who had also broadcast the location of Australian air activity in New Guinea. Lennard had diligently avoided mention of place names and had to ask the ABC not to add any information to his reports in the newsroom in Canberra or Sydney that might breach censorship requirements. The Army appointed a director general of public relations, Errol Knox, who introduced a system of deputy assistant directors of public relations (DADPR) to be based in the field with war correspondents throughout the war: ‘. . . any difficulty which has arisen through lack of control of correspondents in operational areas will now be obviated by the DADPR'.
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The territories of Papua and New Guinea on the island of New Guinea and the port of Rabaul on the island of New Britain were Australian mandated territories with Australian and local communities, and therefore more than just locations of strategic importance. The fall of Rabaul in late January came as a major blow. The news was reported as information
came to hand over the following weeks but a more complete, official story was blocked from release until early April.

‘It might be a bit long for a news session but it could make a good commentary,' Lennard suggested in a letter to Frank Dixon, which he attached to his Rabaul script. His story of the Battle of Rabaul began:

After more than two months' anxious silence and anxious waiting on the part of hundreds of Australian families the story can now be told of the heroic fight of the Rabaul garrison – the Japanese conquest of the town – and the adventures of young Australians who escaped after struggling for weeks through dense jungles.
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The censors – either field censors or publicity censors – struck out several parts of Lennard's report, including comments from an Australian army captain who took part in the fighting against the Japanese. Around 400 men escaped inland and crossed the island: ‘The journeys through dense treacherous jungles to the comparative safety of coastal beaches were made by men suffering from starvation and thirst and racked with fever.' Lennard's story did not mention the tales of atrocities by the Japanese, although his news despatches may have done so, and some accounts of these were published in newspapers.

Lennard's work became a daily routine of reporting on bombing raids against Japanese positions on the other side of the Owen Stanley mountain range and the continuing raids on Moresby. And he had his first experience of malaria.

I've had a fairly decent dose of the fever in the last few weeks and the copy may have suffered as a result but I'm
OK again now and have been getting plenty through in the last few days. Am also covering the BBC. Best Wishes. The bombing's merely a daily incident now.
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By the end of April Lennard was back on the mainland – it had been a relatively brief assignment at Port Moresby for the first ABC news correspondent in an overseas warzone, but had proved very successful. He now split his time between Moresby and Townsville – the northeastern Allied headquarters covering New Guinea, Pacific island groups and most of Queensland. He was providing the ABC with an unprecedented amount of its own news copy from the field and his ‘colourful, up-to-the-minute' stories were adding immediacy to news bulletins. Frank Dixon wrote to TW Bearup that Lennard had already provided more real news of the New Guinea campaign than the broadcasting units had provided during the entire war.

Observers were familiar to the ABC audience because of their voice reports from the field but a news correspondent filing copy, such as Lennard, remained virtually unknown. Lennard's by-line was now used on many of his news stories in recognition of the value of his reporting and to raise his profile with the military, whose co-operation was essential for correspondents in the field.
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Newspaper correspondents already enjoyed an occasional by-line for their reporting
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and with Lennard the ABC began the practice of by-lines for other ABC radio news correspondents.

O
ne day late in August 1942, Chester Wilmot was standing on a spur of the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea, looking down into the deep valley leading to Kokoda, thousands of feet below. ‘Somewhere under those treetops in the dark damp forest Australian and Japanese troops were fighting desperately for possession of this track. It didn't look much to fight for . . .'
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The month before, the Japanese had landed at Gona on the north coast of New Guinea. The beachheads of Gona, Buna and Sanananda led to the Kokoda Trail – the tortuous track across the Owen Stanleys to Port Moresby. Within days of the landing at the beachheads the Japanese encountered the small Australian force holding the end of the Kokoda Trail. The Kokoda campaign had begun. Over the next four months more than 600 Australians would be killed and more than 1600 wounded, in the fighting on the mountain track.
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Chester Wilmot and other correspondents would fight their own battle to tell the truth of the Australian withdrawal in the Kokoda campaign. Chester wrote, ‘I've tried to tell this story simply as I saw it.
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A few days after the first clashes on the New Guinea north coast, Wilmot had left his colleague Dudley Leggett in Townsville and flown to Moresby, followed a week or so later by Bill MacFarlane and the recording gear. As Wilmot headed north, the ABC began moving other pieces on the board of its expanding coverage of the war. MacFarlane's colleague the technician Len Edwards took up the recording duties in Townsville with Dudley. GHQ had also moved closer to the active battlefronts and relocated from Melbourne to Brisbane and Haydon Lennard soon took up the post of war correspondent at MacArthur's headquarters.

The night before Wilmot arrived in Port Moresby the town had its seventy-fourth air raid.

. . . you'd hardly have thought it was a much bombed town as our flying boat scudded to rest on the harbour that afternoon. Over on a coral reef near the shore there was the wreck of the
Macdhui
, but that's the only ship in the harbour the Japs have sunk. At the wharf Australian and American troops were busy unloading a large supply ship and looking from the harbour Moresby seemed to have suffered little damage. Tobruk was much the same. When you looked at it from across the harbour you couldn't pick out many blitzed buildings. It was only when you got closer that you could see the scars. But in Moresby there are comparatively few scars.
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Wilmot began to gather news of the campaign developing at the far end of the Kokoda Trail and it was not necessarily in line with the communiqués from GHQ. He sent a cable to the ABC challenging a GHQ report that the Japanese held the north of the Owen Stanley Ranges and the Australians
the south. Chester was speaking to the New Guinea Force command in Moresby who had hotly denied the report – maintaining that, at that stage, the Japanese had only a narrow toehold on the coast and were still battling with the Australians for the village of Kokoda in the northern foothills leading into the mountains. Frank Dixon held back Chester's report and passed it to the censor, who also passed it to GHQ, which then banned it. Wilmot's role, according to GHQ, was ‘to send news and not comment on official and background information released from General Headquarters'.
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GHQ's public representation of the Kokoda campaign was to be a source of fierce controversy with correspondents and the Australian command.

An early report from Wilmot for the BBC emphasised the difficulty for any force intending to reach Port Moresby through the mountains. ‘Of course there's no habitable area in the world that's impassable to determined troops, but certainly the country between Kokoda and Moresby is not the kind of country through which a large force could fight its way.'
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He added, ‘that's how it looks at present, anyway'. The battlefield in New Guinea not only challenged the training and tactics of the Australian forces, it also posed new challenges for reporting, different from any Wilmot had experienced in the Western Desert. The frontline here was on the other side of the Owen Stanley Range and the terrain in between was a seemingly insurmountable barrier for the heavy equipment of the recording unit.

At present we are separated from the enemy by sea or mountains. In this island warfare it will seldom be possible for us to get near enough to the front to make actuality recordings or even interviews with troops who have done
the fighting. It will seldom be possible for our observer to record his despatches.
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The mountainous terrain prevented Bill MacFarlane and the recording gear from accompanying Chester on the Kokoda Trail. On 19 August 1942 MacFarlane drove Wilmot, cinematographer Damien Parer and newspaper correspondent Osmar White to the foothills of the Owen Stanleys. From there, Wilmot, Parer and White set out on foot for the frontlines and to meet up with the troops of Maroubra Force. Wilmot's reports from the Kokoda Trail were recorded after returning to Port Moresby.

The first day out we climb the range behind Port Moresby in a truck and cover more ground in three hours than we'll travel in the next three days on foot. Moresby's dry and dusty but as soon as we start walking we come into thick wet forest which gets thicker and wetter the higher we climb. At the top of our first climb we can see the series of ridges that we've got to climb mounting up till they end in the 13,000 foot Mt Victoria with its head in the clouds.
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Ahead lay days of walking, steep slippery gradients and hard climbing. ‘You could never get up this spur with a pack on your back if it weren't for the stairs the engineers have cut. You curse the steps for their tiring monotony . . . and unconsciously you find yourself counting them . . . 1000 . . . 2000 . . . 2001 . . . 2002 . . . 2003 . . . I'll go crazy if I count any more.'
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Osmar White was both impressed and amused by Wilmot's headlong approach to the daunting ascents and descents of the
track and observed that the fat was disappearing from ‘chubby Wilmot before our eyes.' Downhill, Wilmot took great strides that left the others trailing far behind. Going up the next hill they would catch up to the exhausted Wilmot who was now blowing hard and cursing. Wilmot's all-or-nothing approach would have felled a lesser man. ‘He was the wrong build for this sort of work,' wrote White, ‘but the right temperament. He was still grunting, cursing and whistling at the end of the day – and still travelling.'
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Several days on, the party reached Eora Creek, just behind the frontline, where the wounded lay on stretchers on the ground and army doctors operated in a grass hut. Wilmot observed: ‘There are no refinements about war in the New Guinea mountains. It's war which demands a degree of courage, endurance and sacrifice greater than has been demanded of any Australian troops in this war. These men have to fight the enemy and nature too, but in courage, endurance and sacrifice they've lacked nothing.'
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Further on, Chester passed Australians of Maroubra Force returning from the front.

Coming back is a line of troops who have just been relieved after a month's hard fighting near Kokoda. They are tired, muddy and unshaven but they've done a grand job and earned their rest.

There are wounded too. We've been passing them in ones and twos for several hours. They must be going through hell on this track. Specially those with leg wounds. Some have been hit in the foot and they can't even get a boot on but they're walking back over root and rock and through mud in bare feet, protected only by their bandages.
Here's a steep pinch and a wounded Digger's trying to climb it. You need both hands and both feet, but he's been hit in the arm and thigh. Two of his cobbers are helping him along. One goes ahead, hauling himself up by root and branch. The wounded Digger clings to the belt of the man in front with his sound hand, while his other cobber gets underneath and pushes him up. I say to this fellow that he ought to be a stretcher case, but he replies . . . ‘I can get along. There's blokes here lots worse than me and if we don't walk they'll never get out.'

But they are being got out . . . now and then we pass a stretcher case. The stretchers are only two saplings with a blanket between them and sewn up with lawyer vine. But they do. It's hard enough to keep your feet with only a pack and a rifle on your back. It's a miracle how they carry those stretchers. But they get through, even though it takes ten men all day to move one stretcher case back three or four miles. But the troops up forward are holding on giving them time to get all the wounded out.'
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In his search for Brigade HQ, Chester could eventually go no further. ‘There's heavy machine-gun fire from just over the ridge and every few seconds the valley rumbles with the crump of mortars. And the Brigade major says . . . “It's no use your going forward Chester . . . we're coming back.”' In his script,
And Our Troops Were Forced to Withdraw
, Wilmot described the the camp that night.

. . . all through the night a stumbling procession moves back in dribs and drabs along the track – occasional stretcher cases – ammunition parties – troops withdrawing . . . Dawn – and there's machine gun fire from across the valley
from where Frank was yesterday . . . enemy machine gun fire and still no word. Mid-morning . . . and up the track comes a Digger stripped of arms and webbing . . . he's been travelling all night with the news that the companies are safe . . . they'll be in this afternoon.

Then another message . . . the Nips have hoisted their flag on the ridge where we were last night and a patrol reports they're swarming over it in hundreds. ‘We'll turn the fighters onto them,' says the Brigade Major as he goes to the phone and dictates a signal asking for air support. We wait and wait . . . straining our ears for the drumming of engines. There's not a cloud and the fighters'll have an open go if they come soon . . . At last . . . we search the skies . . . but there's only one plane . . . a reccy to see if the weather's clear . . . and our hopes fall . . . by the time he can get back and the fighters can get here it'll be clouded over. Slowly we see our hopes fade as the clouds come down and shield the enemy. Things are still going his way. He got in first . . . he has the numbers . . . and now he's getting little breaks like this . . . but he's still paying for every yard he advances . . . he's still being fought all the way by men who hate withdrawing and refuse to admit defeat. Even though they're being forced back they're determined, cheerful and unconcerned. You can drive men like this back but you can't conquer them. Nothings tests troops as much as a withdrawal . . . and they're standing this test. But neither they nor you want any more talk about ‘glorious withdrawals'; that's why I've tried to tell this story simply as I saw it.
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As the desperate fighting withdrawal by the Australians of Maroubra Force continued along the Kokoda Trail, Wilmot returned to Port Moresby to write his stories of Kokoda for the
ABC. Wilmot told the New Guinea Force Command his view of the factors behind the withdrawal and wrote a report for the Australian commander in New Guinea, General Rowell. It was clear to Wilmot that the New Guinea Force had been let down by the most senior levels of Army command. His report concluded that the Japanese had outfought and outmanoeuvred the Australians largely because of their superior numbers, implying that GHQ, Land Headquarters and New Guinea Force HQ had underestimated the Japanese threat on the other side of the Owen Stanley Ranges. Wilmot later expanded on this in another document on the campaign.

The recent success indicates that if the troops sent to the Owen Stanley Range in August had been properly trained, acclimatised and equipped and if they had had adequate air support, the withdrawal and the consequent considerable losses of valuable personnel need never have taken place.
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Wilmot saw no lack in the bravery and endurance of the troops, and his report for the New Guinea Force commander was well received by General Rowell and senior commanders but the Australian commander-in-chief, General Blamey, ordered all copies recalled from circulation. Blamey also blocked several of Wilmot's initial scripts on the Kokoda campaign, including
And Our Troops Were Forced to Withdraw
. Wilmot was advised to submit scripts that, among other things, did not ‘refer to anything that might tend to lower the confidence of our troops in their weapons, equipment, supply organisation etc', and that contained ‘no implied criticism of military direction or training methods that would tend to lower the confidence of our troops in their commands with consequent impairment of our morale'.
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While Blamey apparently acted in response to the criticism implied in Wilmot's analysis, delays and cuts to Wilmot's scripts imposed by GHQ also reflected the different views between New Guinea Force in Moresby and GHQ in Brisbane.

The material which is being cut at GHQ is always authoritative and the line I have been taking in criticism has been adopted after consultation with senior officers here. General Rowell has been granting me a private interview at least twice a week, so that I have the full background. In view of this it is unfortunate that so little is getting through from here and that the News Service is forced to rely on despatches from GHQ which have frequently been inaccurate enough to warrant New Guinea Force protesting to GHQ about the ABC broadcasts.
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The control from the top was increasingly tight and the ABC correspondent at GHQ, Haydon Lennard, remarked: ‘It seems to me that General MacArthur has decided to force more and more releases from his own headquarters and to restrict the activities of correspondents not directly under his control.'
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