Voices from the Air (4 page)

By the time the field unit base was established in Gaza, troops of the 6th Australian Division, who had been training in Palestine, had already moved to the Helwan camp in Egypt on the western side of Cairo. Italy had significant forces in the Libyan end of the Western Desert, the expanse of mostly stony soil and patches of sand
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stretching westwards from the fertile fan of the Nile Delta around Cairo. The closest Italian forces in Egypt were some 400 kilometres from the Delta around Sidi Barrani.
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From there, Italian forces stretched back to the west in a chain of coastal defences, at Sollum and then into Libya, at Bardia, Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi.

With the utility truck and portable recording gear, Wilmot, Cecil and MacFarlane set up an advance base at the village of Ikingi Maryut, a staging camp for Allied troops on the edge of the Delta a few kilometres from the coast and not far from Alexandria. Ikingi Maryut was a summer refuge for wealthier Egyptians and Wilmot and his companions were billeted in a pleasant house.

. . . we have plenty of water from an artesian well . . . about an acre of garden with wattle trees, olive trees and river oaks, there is a nice verandah in front and I am working out here now, climbing up the front of it are bougainvillea plants well in bloom . . . This will be a very good base for us to move from when we want to go forward and we can come back here every few days to despatch records.
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Wilmot was soon impatient to get to grips with the work ahead of him, but without an easily available electrical supply to
charge the batteries for the recorder he had been limited to only a few hours recording a week: ‘it is very frustrating especially as I am the sort of person who must work at full pressure or not at all . . . I doubt if I have ever been fitter in my life – and if only I was working really hard I'd be perfectly happy.'
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The press correspondents at Ikingi Maryut sent their copy by landline to Cairo where it was typed out again before being censored. All recordings made by the field unit at Ikingi Maryut and in the field in the Western Desert had to be hand-carried to Cairo for censorship and delivery to Australia. The return trip between the Delta and Cairo was at least 400 kilometres across hard, dusty roads. Recordings were despatched by plane to Australia and some were played over a radiotelephone link to the BBC in London, but Wilmot would also sometimes read his scripts from the radio studios of the British-controlled ESBS, the Egyptian State Broadcasting Service, for direct transmission to London for the BBC and the ABC. Stories transmitted via the BBC were included in BBC news bulletins or Radio Newsreel, which included audio recordings of correspondents' despatches from the field, and picked up by the ABC for use in its own programs. Wilmot later estimated that nine out of ten of his despatches sent this way would actually reach the ABC.
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In December, Cecil and MacFarlane were near Mersa Matruh, a town along the coast from Alexandria and on the road heading west towards the Libyan border. Mersa was a departure point for roads leading into the Western Desert and a way station for many of the field unit's travels. In the middle of a fierce sandstorm, Australian soldiers gathered in a dugout where MacFarlane set up the microphone to record Christmas greetings to their families back home. It was a far cry from recording in the towns and cities of Australia.

Bill MacFarlane
had grown up in Melbourne, where he became a skilled PMG radio mechanic with experience working with ABC mobile recording and broadcasting units. His work with the field unit overseas created the first Australian field recordings of Australians at war. In his mid-twenties, black-haired and bespectacled, the practical-minded, unexcitable MacFarlane was a painstaking technician and proved very adaptable in the challenging conditions of the desert. In the sandstorm at Mersa Matruh, while Cecil handled the microphone in the dugout, MacFarlane battled valiantly with the recording gear in the covered back of the utility truck as the vehicle swayed in the wind and sand filled up the grooves on the recording disc as soon as they had been cut. Wilmot later described the sandstorms of the Western Desert as ‘thicker than the worst London fog. You could not see a man ten yards in front of you, and even the sun was browned out'.
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This will be the Australians' first big action in this war and the men at the front are itching for a chance to show their worth.
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The British campaign in the Western Desert began with the capture of Sidi Barrani in December, after which Wilmot joined the Australians of the 16th Brigade on the plateau outside Bardia.

The utility truck with Wilmot, Cecil, MacFarlane and the driver set out from Ikingi Maryut to Bardia on roads made muddy by rain and then on tracks dried by the sun, where
the passage of the truck left long clouds of dust trailing in its wake. As during many of their trips in the Western Desert, the truck staggered under the weight of everything they would need: ‘recording gear, turntables, amplifier, inverters, batteries, records etc, food and water for three weeks, petrol, blanket, pick, shovel, etc. for we had to be independent of the Army'.
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Cecil set up camp in a cave in the side of a wadi (a ravine or valley) along the coast from Bardia. He wrote to the ABC: ‘I am in a dugout in a wadi a mile or so from Sollum. Mr Wilmot and I have been within 9 miles of Bardia and that means a few miles only, 3 or 4, from the enemy's outposts . . . we spent Christmas night and half that Boxing Day in a small hole in the plateau near the front line but all was quiet.'
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The unit had been trying to record the sound of an Italian air raid and had been waiting unsuccessfully for three days down by the jetty at Sollum harbour when they were caught in the middle of a raid while returning to their camp.

We had come from the top of the escarpment down the long steep wandering road into Sollum & turned into our wadi when the Itis' Flying Circus appeared. Five bombers and thirty-one fighters. Bombs were dropped on the road we had just left. AA guns fired & six of our fighters appeared. A dogfight & our gear all packed up in the truck!!! We have been depressed ever since.
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Wilmot wrote his stories in the cave at Sollum, below the escarpment and the nearby plateau. The landscape of the plateau where the Australian soldiers were camped was dead flat. ‘There's not a tree, not a really distinguishable feature to guide you – it's just like being at sea – nothing breaks the line
of your vision across it, except the curvature of the earth.'
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In the biting cold, Wilmot shared meals of bully beef around the camp fires and his report described the conditions and the mood of the Australian soldiers before their first battle.

They've trenched small dugouts about seven feet long and five feet wide with a bank of earth and stones around them. In these they are pretty safe against anything but a direct hit and they are protected from the wind, which is unpleasant by day and bitterly cold by night. If you can get down below ground level, you can keep fairly warm, but on the flat it cuts through greatcoat and balaclava like a rapier . . . It's not easy waiting around in the dust and cold – waiting for something to happen – spending their days and nights in shallow dugouts – unable to show a light or even have a fire at night. But they are taking it well – they grumble as usual . . . they're confident without being cocky – they're hard and they've got more than a year's solid training behind them. They know that they may have a fairly tough job ahead, but they are ready for it.
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To his great frustration, Wilmot was ordered to Palestine by General Blamey to record a speech by the visiting Minister for the Army, Percy Spender, and was not there for the beginning of the attack on Bardia on the morning of 3 January 1941. Cecil and MacFarlane were on the plateau in the early hours before dawn to record the sounds of the opening barrage. It was cold and clear, and the stars were bright in the sky when they looked for a location to set up the recording turntable and gear. They needed light to see by when operating the cutting stylus on the record, and in the blackout conditions of the battlefield they found a protected spot in an old Roman
cistern, about ten feet deep, and lowered the gear into the hole by rope. Cecil then climbed out to await the opening shots.

I stood on top of a mound and searching, gazing around for movement, either of tanks, guns, troop carriers or any vehicle that might suggest preparation for advance, to catch a glimpse of a light that might be a gunner making a final observation but all was still and quiet . . . It was 5.30 am, a pause of some seconds and then many guns belched forth long tongues of vivid flame . . . Guns from behind and others to my right and still more further left belched forth their charges till a semi-circle of flashes rent the horizon and the air was filled with the bark of the near guns with those in the distance merging into one long continuous roar.
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The news of the Australian capture of Bardia was reported on ABC radio on 4 January.
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Wilmot raced back from Palestine and arrived after the fall of the town but in time for the last day of fighting, and to speak to officers and soldiers for his account of the three-day battle against the entrenched Italian defences of pill boxes, concrete trenches, minefields and artillery along the 27-kilometre Bardia perimeter.

All round the perimeter, except in the south, the attacker had to advance against these defences over the open plateau for at least 1000 yards, without a shred of cover . . . even before the barrage started our troops had moved up in the darkness to within 1000 yards of the wire in the west. When it did start there was a concentration in this area on the wire and the first posts we intended to attack. Under cover of this artillery fire our troops crept forward – the
barrage lifted and our engineers blew a gap in the wire and let the infantry in . . . Because of the covering fire provided by the tanks and their own Bren Guns these forces were able to get right up to these forts – attack them from the rear and charge them with bayonets and hand grenades. In two hours these troops advanced four miles and took every objective. The key to this advance was speed and the fact that not even machine gun or shellfire checked our advance. The men weren't reckless, they were just determined to get there . . .
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In the mopping up of the last Italian resistance Wilmot also saw some of the fighting – probably his first experience of battle – and he then made his way into the town. ‘When we drove into Bardia early on Sunday morning we were greeted by three Diggers racing triumphantly down the main street on captured Italian horses. One of them looked magnificent on a huge white charger and wearing a general's cap and uniform and a pair of terrific silver spurs.'
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Australian troops had played the key role in the battle, which also involved British artillery, armour and naval and air bombardments. One hundred and thirty soldiers of the 6th Division had been killed for the taking of the town and the capture of 40,000 Italian prisoners.
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Wilmot's broadcasts were authoritative accounts of the first morale-boosting victory for the Australian forces, but his own eye-witness descriptions of later battles would add immeasurably to the impact of his reports.

Covering the battlefield required constant travel between units in the daytime, and the greater risks of driving at night across the desert: ‘finding the way back to headquarters, continually getting lost and with no lights whatever, always the danger of dropping into a deep shell hole, trench or down
a wadi, to safeguard against which one member would often walk in front, muffled up to the eyes to protect himself against the bitter cold of the Libyan winter night.'
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Cecil and Wilmot were travelling around 250 kilometres a day when Cecil wrote to the ABC: ‘We badly need another vehicle. The roads are appalling and the distances great. Instead of us being able to halve the time by CW going one direction and myself another to collect information we must go together.'
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Wilmot despaired of the arrangement that shackled him to Cecil and wasted so much time but his work rate was prolific: in the four days after Bardia he gathered material, and wrote and recorded four 15-minute talks for the ABC and one 8-minute and three 4-minute talks for the BBC.

I used to chase material all day – type nearly all night and then record in the early morning. The units from which I had to get my material were scattered over a 15-mile front connected only by rough tracks – because I am an official correspondent I am obliged to be scrupulously careful in my facts – consequently I had to check and counter check.
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