Voices from the Air (25 page)

John Hinde was born in Adelaide in 1911 and as a young child lived on campus at a private girls' school founded by his
mother. When he was older he boarded with one of the master's families at St Peter's College in Adelaide. He lost a year at school while he recovered from the injuries he sustained in his car accident, and this delayed his entry into university, where he began by studying medicine. Hinde was now married – ‘it was a silly marriage, it was much too young,' he said later, and as the marriage failed he dropped out of university and became a journalist. In Sydney, Hinde met and later married another young journalist, Barbara Jefferis, who would become a well-known Australian author. After several stints on Sydney newspapers, Hinde joined the ABC in 1940 as a journalist for the
ABC Weekly
magazine and then as a member of the ABC News staff: he was one of Frank Dixon's senior writers. At that time, the ABC News operation in Sydney was in Market Street, part of the ‘rabbit warren of offices that had once been her Majesty's Theatre'.
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Hinde found it a strange place, with only around half a dozen people and a studio, but he came to love working in radio news.

One of his first assignments as a war correspondent in the Sydney area was following the Japanese midget submarine attacks in the harbour. Hinde remembers that the ABC actually hired a ferry for him, Frank Dixon, and senior journalist Warren Denning to watch the sunken submarines being raised from the bottom of the harbour. ‘The second day I was alone, because there was a slight lop on the harbour and Warren managed to get violently seasick in a ferry on the inner harbour. So I watched the subs being brought up and wrote great notes and thought we'll get some sort of a story out of it. But we were never allowed to publish anything except the bare facts.'
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Hinde's war since then had been mostly spent as a correspondent at GHQ in Brisbane and sometimes in Port Moresby.

At dawn on 22 April, the American convoy of more than 200 ships and 50,000 troops surprised the Japanese garrison at Hollandia. From the deck of a warship, John Hinde watched as the glare of Japanese shore lights was overtaken by the first light of dawn and then by the flash and thunder of the bombardment from the Allied armada. ‘Breath-taking arches of rocket fire' were followed by bombing runs by Avenger and Dauntless dive bombers from the aircraft carriers and suddenly huge columns of smoke and flame arose from Japanese fuel and supply dumps on the beaches. Hollandia was captured with few casualties and on shore Hinde saw his first Japanese – two frightened prisoners.

They seem determined not to show it, but their hands shake a little and their eyes have a curious submissive pleading look for everyone they pass. They are halted near me. Under international law I'm not allowed to question them in any way but I give one of them a cigarette. His eyes become more humble than ever. He bows twice rapidly, bows again when I light it for him. He doesn't smile.
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Further on, past more shattered remains of the huge Japanese supply dumps, he sees his first dead Japanese. ‘He lies quietly face-down, his forehead resting easily on one hand; but the top of his head is gone and there is a gaping wound under his left shoulder.'
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Hinde walked up the track from the landing point, heading for Hollandia itself, about 12 miles away. After a few miles' hard trekking, he sat down for a rest and leaned against a rock beside the track. Ten minutes later, having decided instead to take a boat round the coast to Hollandia, he headed back the way he had come. Within a hundred yards he was passed by
some American soldiers and almost immediately afterwards he heard shooting behind him on the track. ‘I went back to see what had happened and they'd shot a sniper in a tree across the track, just a neat 50 yards from where I'd been sitting in full view. I don't know why he hadn't shot me. I was alone. He could have just picked me off.'
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Fire Down Below
was a report by Hinde (written several months later) about his experiences on the beach at Hollandia, two nights after the landing. A tired Hinde had returned to the main beach with several other correspondents, where they camped for the night at the centre of a supply dump – a line of American and Japanese stores that stretched along the shore for around three kilometres. They were eating a meal with the men of an American shore battalion and around 100 local villagers were also camped nearby when they heard the sound of a plane.

The buzz of talk all along the beach died down. Even the natives stopped to listen. We could hear the undulating note of the engines out over the bay. It seemed too late for one of our own carrier based dive bombers to be out. Then suddenly a Bofors gun opened up from an anti-aircraft emplacement right beside us. It was the only gun that fired, and that made our sector the unhealthiest place on the beach. The bombs were probably already on their way as our group made for the slit trench. They came in without a sound and bracketed us – one about 20 yards each side of the trench. Concussion shook the wits out of us and when we came to, a pile of ammunition on our left was ablaze . . . It was pretty bad out of the trench. Bombs and shells were exploding at the rate of roughly one every two seconds, and the shrapnel was thick, though at that range most of it was passing overhead. The pressure wave of the original
bomb had nipped off the crest of the parapet at my end of the trench and slapped my head like something solid. It left me confused, and when I really came round I was racing up the beach bent double, carrying one corner of a stretcher. All around the cry was going up for doctors . . .
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The wounded were treated in scratch dressing stations by untrained men until medics could make their way around the burning, lethal dump. Various parts of the dump along the beach exploded throughout the night, letting loose a ‘storm of rockets and tracers and metal fragments'. Fuel fires raged and Hinde saw ‘a single 50 gallon drum hurled intact straight out to sea. It turned over and over like a giant depth charge, and burst right at the end of its flight in a horrid ball of flame and sooty smoke'. The next morning a large explosion flung a foot-long metal fragment two miles out to sea, where it landed on a Higgins boat. Hinde was ‘scattered mentally'
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after the blast, which damaged his hearing and one of his eyes, leaving him with problems that would plague him for many years. He was chain smoking at the time – up to 100 cigarettes a day – in part to cope with the stress.
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The dump burned for four days and all his kit was destroyed. Several months later he drew up a list of the lost items for a compensation claim. It covered all his equipment such as his typewriter, and his personal possessions and reading matter – including, appropriately, a copy of Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

Shortly before the Hollandia operation, Hinde had undertaken his first operational assignment: covering the unopposed
American occupation of Emirau Island, north of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago.

Emirau was essentially a sideshow, but as GHQ correspondent, it fell to John Hinde to make the most of the story, However, he could only get as close as Guadalcanal in the Solomons, and it proved a depressingly frustrating first operational assignment, as his plans for a shortwave voice channel and other avenues for filing his stories all fell apart. ‘I broke my blank heart to get this out today',
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wrote Hinde to a colleague at the ABC. The voice link failed, his credit authority to send telegrams was not recognised and he was coming to the realisation that there was no hope of making any recordings at Guadalcanal.

I'm a little browned off at the moment. When I come out I hope to bring some recordings with me . . . As a matter of fact I don't really believe any more that anyone has a recorder on this island. Or if they do have one, it doesn't work. Or if it works I won't be allowed to use it except while I'm standing up in a hammock drinking gin through a straw. (That would be something to do with malaria control.) The enclosed script will be stale by the time it reaches you; but someone might like to use it just the same. It was a good script this morning and would have fitted nicely into News Review, with a few handy bits for the news department as well. When I think about it I would like to cry; but it makes my face blotchy.
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The typically acerbic yet humorous letter from Hinde could not disguise his desperate disappointment, yet the trip to Guadalcanal did unearth a remarkable story from Bougainville.

John Hinde's script
Journey Across Bougainville
, voiced in his later recordings with an engaging and patient tempo that suited the narrative of the tragic story, was perhaps his most memorable wartime tale. It was the story of Siti Korovulavula,
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a Fijian infantry lieutenant, and an American pilot, Lieutenant Chuck Cross, who were stranded in the heavily forested interior of Bougainville after their light plane ran out of fuel and crash-landed. Their tragic journey across the Japanese-occupied island and Siti's thirty-two days in the jungle was a tale of courage, endurance and remarkable compassion.

Lieutenant Cross had had no jungle experience and so he asked Siti to take complete control. But first, he made one tragic decision. He decided that they had landed on the east side of the island when actually they were on the west.

‘If we're on the east side,' Siti decided, ‘we keep the ocean on our left and then we'll be heading south. Sooner or later we're bound to find a familiar land mark.' And so they set off heading north instead of south, and from then on their daily story was one of storms and fog which made it impossible for them ever to check their position with the sun. For days they climbed precipitous shoulders with the fog swirling round them, shivering with the cold of the 5,000 feet altitude. There was water everywhere. It rained endlessly, and every valley was noisy with streams that made their going still harder. They could find no food in the mountains and every day found them getting weaker and weaker. Down on the coast they might have found food but they knew there were Japanese on the coast as well, and so they stuck to the mountains.

After a time Lieutenant Cross became ill. Siti carried him part of each day, and the rest of the time Cross got along as best he could, leaning on Siti's shoulder. On the sixth day, living on nothing but water, Cross fell exhausted. Siti decided the only thing to do was to start a fire by friction. The fire would warm their soaked bodies and it would also give them a chance to eat, because Siti had discovered some bush taro – a species that is poisonous unless it is cooked.

On the ninth day of walking, crawling and sliding through the hills the weather cleared a little and Siti climbed a tree to make a survey. What he saw brought him down thunder-struck and shaken.

From his tree he'd seen Buka Island across the passage at the north end of Bougainville. For the first time the two men realised that they had been heading north instead of south. Now they were on the fringes of the main Japanese stronghold in the northern Solomons. Behind them the clouds lifted slowly and in the dim distance they saw 10,000-foot Mt Balbi – an active volcano – sending up its plume of smoke close to the spot where they had crashed. As a landmark, it was nine days too late.

The two men just sat for a while and then they turned back over the terrible country they had just crossed. The American grew steadily weaker and for five days Siti carried him almost every yard of their journey. On February 9th – fourteen days after the crash – they reached the foot of Mt Balbi and then the American boy decided be could go no further. He was crying by that time with weakness and discouragement. Siti said, ‘I can carry you some more' and he picked up Cross, but found his own knees were buckling under him. He tried again but he couldn't manage it and after a while he found that both of them were crying.

In the end, they managed to talk it over and Cross forced Siti to go on ahead . . . By the 11 February Siti was so weak that he often had to sit down on the slopes and slide. On the 11th alone, he fell into five streams, and once the same day he fell over a cliff and down a waterfall. Other days were nearly as bad, and I don't believe that any ordinary man could have even kept moving, let alone held his sense of direction.

And yet at the end of all these weeks without food, the battered Fijian lieutenant climbed a hill and saw what appeared to be a coconut tree on another hill two miles away.
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After ‘32 days of hell' Siti reached safety, but later search parties failed to find any sign of Lieutenant Cross.

The hard-working Fred Simpson saw little of his family in 1944 as he reported from New Guinea. In May, he was in Port Moresby when one of his daughters, Claire, was given approval to travel to the United States to further her career as a violinist. International civilian travel was difficult during the war but the conductor Eugene Ormandy wanted to bring Claire to Philadelphia, from where she would go on to the Juilliard Graduate School, and after graduating, to an international career in London. From Port Moresby, Fred sent Claire his blessings and a bible with a note that read:

. . . this in common, we all must have the energy to seek beauty and strength wherever it can be found – and whatever the cost – and to know it when we find it.
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It was a touching note from Fred, who had encouraged the same discipline and strength in his daughters – his ‘family of artists' – that he also demanded of himself in the field as a war correspondent.

The Australians now pursuing the Japanese along the New Guinea coast had reached Madang and by June 1944 were close to taking Hansa Bay, a major Japanese base between Madang and Wewak. Fred Simpson was in the field with the troops when they heard that a group of Indian POWs had escaped from the Japanese and were somewhere in the jungle ahead of the Australians. The Indian soldiers had spent six weeks on the move through the jungle and, when they were finally found, they were ill and exhausted.