Voices from the Air (12 page)

We made the dangerous Banka Straits for a night passage. In the day time, as the Straits were the only passage for evacuating vessels, all ships were subject to Japanese dive-bombing. Again we escaped, though ships before us and after us had been attacked. The last 150 mile run to Batavia was anxious as there have been heavy torpedo sinkings in and around Java waters. We anchored overnight – Feb 13/14 – and after waiting about for instructions and pilotage, threaded the minefields into Batavia harbour about 4 pm in the afternoon, the 14th. The next day news came through that Singapore had fallen.
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On 15 February, the British commander in Singapore, General Percival, surrendered. From Batavia, Stokes sent a cable to TW Bearup back in Sydney.

EYE ARRIVED BATAVIA YESTERNIGHT PROPOSE ONCARRYING HERE PENDING YOUR INSTRUCTIONS
ENDEAVOURING ARRANGE DIRECT BROADCASTS MEANTIME CABLING. CAN YOU ARRANGE FUNDS. KINDLY INFORM WIFE MY SAFETY. MY CABLE ADDRESS CARE GOVERNMENT INFORMATION BUREAU BATAVIA OR HOTEL DES INDIES. STOKES
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Stokes stayed a few days in Batavia but he believed that it would also fall before very long. He advised the ABC that, in view of the latest developments, he would return to Australia as soon as transport was available. He left soon afterwards. A little over a week later, the Japanese landed on Java and by early March the Dutch had surrendered.

Henry Stokes's account of the escape to Java was sent to the ABC in a long cable from Batavia. It was held up for some time by the censors but still made ‘quite a good story' according to Frank Dixon.

Throughout his time in Singapore, Stokes had been officially accredited by both the ABC and the BBC, but confirmation of his ABC accreditation as a war correspondent had failed to make it through the Army channels to the military PR in Malaya. This put some limits on his ability to cover the Australian operations but, by the last few weeks, such technicalities would have hardly mattered. He continued to harry the ABC and the Malaya Command PR about his Australian accreditation almost until his last day.

B
y early 1942, the home front was a critical area of concern. War correspondents were appointed to cover Allied General Headquarters (GHQ) and in the north of Australia – North Queensland and the Northern Territory, which were seen as vulnerable to attack and were strategic locations for military bases and operations.

Peter Hemery was in an undignified squat ‘paying his daily tribute to nature'
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when he heard the muffled sound of antiaircraft fire followed by the crump of a bomb exploding. Wearing only his shorts, he scrambled to the shelter of a slit trench from which he watched the white clouds of ack-ack shells bursting around Japanese planes as they dropped their bombs on Darwin. It was 19 February 1942 and the first Japanese attack on mainland Australia.

The harbour at Darwin and the flat coastal plain around the town were the most northerly staging area for Australian and Allied forces and closest to the Japanese offensives in
the archipelago across the Timor Sea. The limited antiaircraft defences at Darwin were little protection when the Japanese planes bombed the town, the ships in the harbour, the aerodromes and the RAAF base in two separate attacks, an hour apart. It was devastating – a great deal of the town was destroyed or damaged and at least 243 people were killed, and hundreds wounded.
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Coming only days after the fall of Singapore, it was a severe blow to Australia's sense of security. Faced by an apparently unstoppable Japanese advance to the north, the cities and towns of Australia's long and largely unprotected coastline now seemed even more vulnerable.

In his report recorded several days later, Hemery told how he watched a RAAF Kittyhawk fighter engage the Japanese planes: ‘Right over our heads the dogfight came, and they couldn't have been flying at more than a hundred feet when I saw the white jets of tracer hit our plane.'
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(He later spoke to the pilot, who was forced down into the sea but survived by clinging to a submerged mangrove tree.) As soon as he could, Hemery made his way to a position from where he could see the harbour.

There was an ear shattering roar as a tenacious Nip scored a direct hit on a vessel loaded with flammable material. A two thousand foot column of smoke whooshed into the air, spreading a pall over the town. You could see pieces of wreckage from the explosion falling for what seemed quite a time afterwards.
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Parts of this description were cut from the recording, presumably by the censor. In all, eight ships in the harbour were sunk. Hemery described the damage to hospitals and the post office, and 20-foot-deep craters where buildings had stood
just minutes before. He was on the wharf when a ship moored alongside exploded, but this description was also censored. So too was his description of the damage to the RAAF base, which was the target of the second attack.

Most women and children had been evacuated from Darwin in the months before the attacks but the Japanese raids sparked fears of an invasion and many more people now fled south towards the town of Katherine.

Like a scene from a newsreel was the road south from Darwin after the first raid. Pausing only to collect blankets, and the barest essential personal belongings, many of the civilian population evacuated as best they could. Some had cars and trucks, some had bicycles, some went on foot.
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There was some chaos amid the evacuation, more than Hemery's report described at the time, but the raids were not the prelude to an invasion of Australia, instead they were apparently pre-emptive strikes as part of the imminent Japanese invasion of Timor, around 700 kilometres to the northwest. The government suppressed news of the true casualties at Darwin and Hemery's report said only that the casualty list was not complete. He wrote later in his unpublished memoirs that the true story of the first Darwin raid should have been told to the Australian people. They had a right to know, ‘Surely the Australian people could have taken it.'
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The raids on the 19 February were the worst mainland attack of the war, but Darwin was hit by a further 63 raids between February 1942 and November 1943. Other towns on the far north coast were also bombed and at least 70 people and possibly more were killed in a raid on Broome on 3 March 1942.
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Peter Hemery
had arrived in Darwin a couple of days before the Japanese raids, travelling part of the way on a train he nicknamed the ‘Mechanized Monstrosity', carrying troops and other passengers from Adelaide. Hemery was 28 years old, well groomed, outwardly confident with a restless and impatient character, and was already a skilled broadcaster. He had trained in architecture but gave it up for his real passion: writing and producing for the theatre and broadcasting. He had written and produced radio plays, and was an announcer and an ‘actuality broadcaster' with the ABC, broadcasting descriptions of public marches, races and exhibitions and creating feature recordings of news events. Hemery became studio manager for the
Argus
newspaper chain's radio station, 3SR, in Shepparton in regional Victoria, and later married Norma Turnbull, the beautiful young daughter of a prominent Shepparton family, owners of a fruit-growing business in the Goulburn Valley.

In 1939 he returned to the ABC as an Outside Broadcasts officer. There he put his broadcasting flair to use in actuality broadcasts, from the skies above, flying aboard RAAF Wirraways, to the underground depths of Victoria's Wattle Gully gold mine. His work also included some spot news and documentary production – he was not a news journalist by training but he had a broad range of skills and was a very good storyteller. The ABC had planned to send him to Malaya with a field unit, to join Henry Stokes, but the plan was abandoned once Hemery reached Darwin. He was initially disappointed not to be nearer to the action.
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When the Japanese raid struck Darwin, Hemery's recording gear was still in a goods carriage somewhere on the rail line far to the south. The technician, Ed Jinks, had returned 500
kilometres to the rail head at Birdum to try and track it down. The senior ABC observer with the unit, Dudley Leggett, was also several days behind Hemery and Jinks on his way to Darwin, and Hemery was on his own when the attacks happened, with no means of recording the attack or a report. However he did manage to send a press cable to the ABC with news of the raid.
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Upon his arrival, Dudley Leggett commandeered an abandoned car to carry the recording equipment – an unreliable V8 sedan he nicknamed the ‘old green grass-hopper', which sported a number of bullet holes and seemed ready to fall to pieces at any moment. The field unit of Leggett, Hemery and Jinks moved to a military camp in the bush outside Darwin where other war correspondents soon joined them. The ABC crew tried to listen in to the ABC's national programs and their own recordings in the Sunday morning field unit session but radio reception was sometimes patchy in the far north and their radio set was unreliable when working on batteries. Leggett made light of the conditions in the ‘benighted and besweated land' of the Northern Territory: land of sweat, dust, mosquitoes, sand flies and poor food. But he had only recently returned to the ABC after duty with the militia force and he felt for the long-serving troops in the north, and the gulf between their daily lives and the relative normality of life at home, carried in music and sound over the radio. ‘And what are the feelings of the lads when they turn the knob and tune in some crooning dude indulging in flights of romantic fancy. Need I endeavour to detail them? Need I say how they ache for just one day at home? . . . I don't begin to think on the chaps overseas and especially the POWs.'
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The technician, Ed Jinks, had retrieved the recording equipment by the time of the third raid on Darwin.

The first indication of a raid was the appearance of the planes diving from height out of the clouds. Mr Hemery and Mr Jinks were on the road in a nicely exposed position at the time and naturally made a bee line for some cover in the scrub. As soon as they had reached reasonable cover they set up the gear and made a cut. By this time the planes had wheeled and raced back overhead towards their target.
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Unfortunately, the recording of Hemery's commentary failed to pick up the noise of the ack-ack guns but he added the voices of four section commanders from the anti-aircraft batteries to go with his commentary. It started a pattern of long days and frequent alerts.

The recording at Fixed Defences was made at 11 pm. By the time we had driven home – travelling at that hour of the night with dim lights, varying road conditions and avoiding Army trucks in the pall of dust – it was midnight. Mr Jinks cleaned the discs. I had four hours' sleep and then out to the 'drome with the discs. Yesterday, the area appeared to be extremely air conscious and there were five alarms which took up the better part of the day.
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By the end of February, Japanese forces were close to victory in the Philippines; they had captured Ambon, Borneo, the Celebes and Sarawak; their troops had invaded Timor; Rabaul was in their hands; Singapore had fallen; and the invasion of New Guinea seemed certain.

Japanese midget submarines had attacked Sydney Harbour, killing 21 Allied sailors, and there were very real fears in the coastal cities to the south, but Australia's first defence was
stationed in the north. As a result, correspondents could not give their location in their reports, instead referring only to being somewhere in the north or at an advanced base.

Dudley Leggett
's main role in Darwin was to co-ordinate the work of the field unit. Leggett was a vital and handsome man, a Sydney University blue in athletics and rugby, and later a champion athlete at the state level. He had been known as the ‘Footballer Parson' during his days playing rugby as an assistant Presbyterian minister in country New South Wales. He left the ministry but continued to play fullback for club rugby in the city and at state level. Dudley married Dawn Lightfoot, a singer and musical theatre and radio performer, a couple of years after he joined the ABC, where he became an announcer and sporting commentator, and was one of the radio broadcasters at the 1938 Empire Games. He was capable, conscientious and determined and was later put in charge of all ABC field broadcasts. He went into the Australian Militia Force early in the war and when he was called back to become a war correspondent in Darwin his role with the field unit was essentially administrative: liaising with the ABC; arranging the logistics of accommodation, transport and recording supplies; and sending off the recorded discs and scripts. It was not the most satisfying work and it was certainly not the best use of his potential as a broadcaster.

At the end of April, Leggett was recalled from Darwin to be the observer on a field unit in Queensland, where there was a build-up of troops, and training and operational bases. GHQ in Melbourne would soon move to Brisbane, and Townsville was already developing into the most important air base in the
north and a key forward area for the Allied forces. At the same time as Dudley was assigned to Brisbane, Chester Wilmot was also heading back into the field.

After his return from the Middle East, Chester Wilmot married Edith Irwin, the young woman whose letters had helped sustain him during the long months overseas. However, he spared little time from writing and broadcasting. In the four months following his return, he broadcast 29 talks, 11 news commentaries and 5 national talks for the ABC, and 13 news commentaries for the BBC. In the Middle East he'd already fallen foul of General Blamey, the Australian commander-in-chief. Wilmot believed that the C-in-C was both incompetent and corrupt, and Blamey had barred some of Wilmot's scripts.

The ABC was very happy with Wilmot's outstanding reporting from the Middle East and in early 1942 appointed him as its chief war correspondent for the Pacific theatre. Wilmot would now be working more closely with the federal controller of Talks, BH Molesworth, known to some as ‘Moley'. Wilmot's work in the Middle East had been done largely in isolation from ABC management, with Lawrence Cecil acting as the go-between with the acting general manager, TW Bearup, but he had been reporting for Talks programs run by Molesworth. Molesworth would be the main contact and support for the field unit correspondents throughout the Pacific war.