Voices from the Air (30 page)

Lennard returned to Singapore with the first of the nurses and the other women.

When the nurses arrived in Singapore and were taken to the hospital full of AIF men who had been in prison camps in Malaya, there was a heartrending scene. As the nurses, some human skeletons and others like old women barely able to walk, shuffled up the stairs, there were cries from the men: ‘Give us guns. Let us at these B's.' Some AIF hospital patients, obviously becoming hysterical, had to be controlled.
¹⁶

Bullwinkel arrived in Singapore wearing the nurse's uniform in which she was shot, and as she smiled, she showed me the bullet holes in her dress. She said ‘The Japs never even gave us needle and cotton.
¹⁷

The women in the prison camp at Loebok Linggau had already been contacted before the arrival of Lennard and Flying Officer Brown, but the action by Lennard and Brown ensured the
earlier release and treatment of the women. It was characteristic of Lennard's bloody-mindedness, his wilfully stubborn pursuit of a story, and a particular outraged sense of compassion for the plight of the nurses.

Lennard's historic reporting from Singapore included the Japanese surrender ceremony, in which radio listeners in Australia heard him describing the scene just before the historic words by Lord Louis Mountbatten. He also broadcast other talks from the press ship at Singapore, however some of his news coverage and longer copy for Talks never made it to air. His cables were so ‘profuse and frequent' that they were delayed in transmission and sometimes hours out of date. In addition, the ABC's limited and largely inflexible news programs could not handle the kind of coverage he was providing. The ABC news compiler who had complained about Lennard's copy, informed the News editor, Frank Dixon: ‘With our scrappy bulletins we cannot handle anything like the length in which he is sending these takes – although they are of great general interest.'
¹⁸

It was too much for Lennard and his frustrations boiled over in a cable to Dixon.

Worked under impossible conditions here first few days. No food, not even bed. Long cables intended for your perusal and handover to Molesworth. Surely subs are able to take a news paragraph out of them. I am incapable of doing impossibilities.
¹⁹

Singapore was Lennard's last major assignment and within a few months he had returned home to Sydney and to the routine work of the ABC newsroom.

It was an uncomfortable seat but the view for Frank Legg was as good as that from the royal box at the theatre – and the scene below him on 2 September 1945 was history in the making. Legg was seated elbow to elbow crammed together with around fifty other correspondents on a gun turret of the battleship USS
Missouri
, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Just below him on the small veranda-deck of the battleship, Japan was formally signing the document of surrender, ending the war in the Pacific.

The two generals, gaunt skeletons from Japanese prison camps, placed themselves, at attention, one on either side of the vacant chair. MacArthur strode forward, sat down, and taking up a pen, with a flourish signed the Allied copy of the surrender.
¹

The weeks leading up to the historic moment on board the
Missouri
had been frantic ones for Legg and Bill MacFarlane. Legg was the only ABC correspondent at GHQ in Manila
and covered all the final announcements from MacArthur's headquarters.

On 30 August Legg and MacFarlane touched down at Atsugi airfield, south west of Tokyo. Bill MacFarlane set up the recording equipment on the tarmac and Legg began recording the first Australian radio interviews of the occupation of Japan. They drove east to Yokohama and set up in the Bund Hotel, where they covered the GHQ communiqués and recorded interviews with the Australian C-in-C, General Blamey, and General Percival, the British commander in Malaya, who had been freed from a prisoner of war camp only weeks earlier.

On the day of the surrender, MacFarlane was not allowed to bring his recorder on board the
Missouri
and Legg, who may have hoped that his luck as a correspondent was finally going to change, arranged for a complicated means of recording his report and getting it back to the ABC.

The return journey after the ceremony would allow me forty-five minutes to type my eye-witness account of the proceedings. From the wharf a jeep would drive me to a GHQ press building, which by then would have been commandeered by the Americans, where MacFarlane would set up his recorder while the censors were dealing with my copy. Then I would record my story, take it by jeep the ten miles to Atsugi air-strip, and hand it to a courier who would be ready to board a plane, which would fly the story to Okinawa, nearly a thousand miles south of Tokyo. At Okinawa another courier would ‘rush' my recording by jeep to the beach, from where a landing-barge would chug out to the GHQ press ship,
Apache
. From
Apache
, at a suitable time and on a suitable wave length, the ABC's own story of the surrender would be shortwaved to Sydney.
²

It all went to plan and the recording of Legg's report was handed over to the courier at Atsugi air-strip . . . after which it disappeared, never to be found. Legg's recorded story that day of the Japanese surrender was never broadcast on the ABC. On a final assignment of such historic importance it was yet another blow for Legg and MacFarlane, after the misfortune that had dogged their earlier assignments. It may have been some solace that Legg's news story, which was cabled as copy soon after the ceremony, did make it to the ABC.

Shortly after the formal Japanese surrender at Tokyo, local surrender ceremonies took place throughout the Pacific theatre between Japanese and Allied field commanders. On 11 September, Fred Simpson and Len Edwards were at the surrender ceremony at Kuching on the Sarawak River in Borneo. Their recording of the event on HMAS
Kapunda
was broadcast on the ABC a month later. ‘This is the ABC Field Operations correspondent at the surrender formalities on the foc's'le of HMAS
Kapunda
off Pending in the Sarawak River.
³
Simpson's voice described a simple scene with the Allied commander Brigadier Eastick seated in front of a small table with the Union Jack in front of him. Fred's commentary continued and, understanding the importance of radio at such an event, Brigadier Eastick then took the microphone. ‘Major General Yamamura, you have come on board HMAS
Kapunda
today for the purpose of formally surrendering to me, as the representative of Major General Wootten, the General Officer Commanding the 9th Australian Division . . .'

After the formal surrender documents were read, Simpson then described the final signing: ‘The ghost of a smile plays
around the mouth of Major General Yamamura at one of the things that do occur – his pen wouldn't write, and it blotted, and as it blotted that was the time for him to smile. He is now signing the three documents.'
⁴

Later the same day, Simpson watched another ceremony at Kuching.

At a quarter to five on the afternoon of the eleventh of September, Brigadier Eastick told internees of Kuching prison camp that they were free people. There was cheer upon cheer. Women wept and men struggled hard to suppress their emotions . . .
⁵

Simpson and Edwards began recording messages home from the prisoners to be broadcast on the ABC, and on the first day alone, they recorded messages from one hundred people. Simpson and Edwards would report other stories in the aftermath of the war, and would go on to cover the Allied occupation of Japan.

M
ore than three and a half years after Rabaul fell to the Japanese, Australian troops landed to take back the town from a defeated empire. The Allied strategy through the war had been to isolate the Japanese base at Rabaul, and when the occupying forces landed on 10 September, they found around 100,000 Japanese at Rabaul itself, and 40,000 more on the surrounding islands.

‘We have unbottled a mess of ugliness by our entry to Rabaul,'
¹
wrote John Thompson as he saw the destruction wrought on the town and heard the tales of the ‘cruel suffering' of prisoners of war and internees under the Japanese. This was the aftermath of war and, though it was confronting work, it was a different role from the ABC's combat reporting of the last five years. Thompson himself described his role at Rabaul as a ‘post-war correspondent'
²
– he had left the army only days before the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and less than two weeks before the announcement of the Japanese surrender.

John Thompson
was a gentle, literary man, a broadcaster and an accomplished poet. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne University, he spent several years in England, where he published his first book of poems in 1935, but it was a hand-to-mouth existence. Tall and handsome, he became an occasional bit-part actor to make more money, but he hated acting and was considered too tall for film roles. While in England, he married another young Australian, Patricia Drakeford Cole, and just before the outbreak of war in 1939 they returned to Australia.

The English tones of his voice, probably accentuated by his time in England, landed him a job as an ABC announcer in Perth. Thoughtful, idealistic and left-wing, John and Pat had been appalled by the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, and back in Australia they became what Pat later described as a couple of ‘inefficient Communists'. John enlisted in the army at the end of 1942, refused the opportunity to become an officer and spent time as an inept radio mechanic with an Army radar unit before he was transferred to Army education, where he was much more usefully and happily employed making radio programs for the troops.
³

In mid-1945, the ABC director of Talks, BH Molesworth, asked Thompson to return to the ABC as a war correspondent. Thompson described his time in the army as ‘most unwarlike', and he did not obviously fit the mould of war correspondent. He was not a newsman or a commentator, nor a knockabout bloke or adventurer, but he was a fine broadcaster and producer, and a talented writer with an intelligent and curious mind. He had been happy working with Army education, but he accepted the offer, with characteristic honesty, replying to Molesworth, ‘I . . . hope you will be pleased with my work . . .'
⁴

Thompson's poetry did not dwell on his experiences as a war correspondent but from his own time in the Army he drew affectionate portraits of the soldiers on the home front. ‘Ours is a troop-train, packed with lean wry lads who play cards, yarn, smoke.'
⁵
There were no grand heroics in Thompson's few poems of wartime but they had a reflective tone. The soldiers were ‘the mild men of the army' who seldom talked of war: ‘the task which clamps its dumb monotony on the weeks and years and will not let them go.' In his poem
Troops
, Thompson's soldiers, holding fast to precious photographs and waiting for each letter from home, were imbued with a sense of loss – ‘for much of which they dream changes or disappears'.
⁶
It seems an appropriate perspective for a correspondent who would cover the aftermath of the great cataclysm of the war.

When the Japanese signed the surrender document in Tokyo Bay at the beginning of September, Thompson was in the field, preparing to go to Rabaul. In this part of the Pacific theatre, where so many Australians had fought and died, he found many of the battlefields already much changed.

All over the world and at all times, in peace and in war, places of arrival and departure have one thing to be said for them. They can be places of intense boredom, especially in war, but all things human come together within them.

Lae is one of those places that strikes one that way now.

It is Lieutenant General Sturdee's headquarters and the centre of widespread organisational work, but an ocean of water has hurried down Butibum Creek since the hard times when Australian patrols fought their way from the ranges and Allied bombers bashed enemy shipping in the bay. The streams of transport planes moved into
other skies a long time ago, as we count time these days. Sleepy Moresby now can hardly believe that a checking point once recorded the passage of eighty thousand trucks in a single day. Nadzab was cleared, widened, and crisscrossed with roads and airstrips to become perhaps the biggest airbase in the South West Pacific, but the jungle is creeping in from the sides and springing up from the abandoned ground; the natives are returning; there's nothing at Nadzab now.

At Finschhafen they tell you ‘There's nothing at Finsch now.' It's the same at Lae.

But Lae is a point of arrival and departure. There's everything there, even when they say there's nothing . . .

For many months to come men will be passing through Lae, idling and yarning and speculating for a week or two before their ship or plane carries them away to the south. Track by track, site by site, the marks of the South West Pacific armies will disappear.
⁷

On 6 September, Thompson recorded the Rabaul surrender ceremony on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS
Glory
, which formally put 140,000 Japanese troops under Australian control in preparation for their eventual repatriation. Thompson later recalled that the Allied commanders mistrusted the Japanese so much that they would not take the carrier nearer than 60 miles to Rabaul. Four days later, he came ashore at Rabaul, not long after the first Australian troops.

I began my first notes . . . seated on the wing of a wrecked Japanese serial thirty nine fighter bomber adjacent to the beach sands where landing craft were driving in with men of the 11th Division.
⁸

It was a smooth and uneventful landing. A mile and a half from the beachhead towards Rabaul, a young boy was throwing down green coconuts from the tops of the trees and Thompson shared one with some of the heavily laden soldiers in the scorching heat. As he walked along the road, he was assailed by the cloying smell of rotten food, mouldy clothing and what he suspected was the odour of death. The harbour was ‘piled with rust-red wrecks, some with funnels sticking out of the bay, others with their bows on the beaches and their hinder parts submerged in deep water. The young jungle is crowded with crashed aeroplanes, overturned trucks and wrecked cottages.'
⁹

Thompson's poet's eye saw incongruence and contrast in the scenes around him: ‘. . . the intoxicating hibiscus flourishes in all kinds of unlikely places and over everything rise the headless stems and stumps of battle-beaten coconut trees'. The Japanese too had left their mark on the landscape – they had dug miles of tunnels into the hillsides, laid out extensive gardens to grow food and set up camps inland from the wrecked town, which had been the target of countless Allied air raids. ‘I saw for myself,' wrote Thompson, ‘that everything above ground was extremely formidable or skilfully camouflaged. The concrete water tanks . . . have been turned into blockhouses with slits at every approach and the ground is studded with heavily timbered pillboxes and holes that appear to lead into defensive hideouts. One gets the impression that Rabaul might easily have proved another Okinawa.'
¹⁰

A small group of Allied prisoners of war who had been freed from Rabaul before the landing had told war correspondents that ‘there was much weeping among the Japs when they knew that Japan was defeated and one fanatic cut his throat in the centre of the parade ground when the Emperor's acceptance was made public to the troops'.
¹¹
Driving out of town,
Thompson found that ‘Japanese in work parties in trucks and in small encampments became fairly numerous when we left the last Australian patrol behind. They stared at us woodenly and some saluted'.
¹²
There was little trouble for the occupying Australians and within two days of the landing, Thompson reported that ‘there have been no incidents and the remaining Japs in our area are being shepherded gradually southwards'.
¹³

Fewer than 2,000 Australians from the 2/22 Battalion and other units had garrisoned the harbour town when it was captured by the Japanese, and there were now none left at Rabaul. Hundreds had escaped after by way of gruelling journeys across the island of New Britain, 160 had been massacred by the Japanese at Tol Plantation, and hundreds more had died in the sinking of the prison transport ship the
Montevideo Maru
, or been shipped to Japan. As a result the prisoners of war and internees that Thompson saw at Rabaul were Indian soldiers or Chinese.

One of the first things we saw when we got near the Indian camp was a small party of men in turbans standing around a newly filled in grave. Another poor chap gone, wasted by malnutrition or broken by disease or both. The camp a few hundred yards further on was strung out along the road in the bottom of a valley. Tall trees admitted sunshine only in patches. We were taken to meet Colonel SM Ishaq of the Hyderabad State Forces . . . He had seen some of his men killed with spades and others tied to trees for twenty-four hours without food. They were not treated as prisoners but slaves.
¹⁴

At the camp for Chinese civilian internees, twelve miles into the Japanese lines, Thompson noted that ‘the difference was
unmistakable between the open cheerful faces' of the liberated prisoners and the impenetrable looks of the Japanese soldiers.

Hundreds of Chinese men and women, boys and girls, the very old and the very young, rushed from every direction. The clearing was packed with laughing exultant people. It was extremely moving. The constraint from which our coming has released these people has lasted a long time.
¹⁵

Even before he arrived in Rabaul, Thompson believed that it would quickly stale as a source of news, and he was keen to follow up with another assignment. Rabaul was effectively the sum of his role as a war correspondent – it did not last long and his next assignment was to cover the political forces unleashed by the war in one of Australia's closest neighbours. In November, after a roundabout route via Ceylon, he arrived in Java, where the backwash from the war was being felt in the nationalist conflict and political struggle for Indonesian independence. Thompson returned to Australia several months later.