Voices from the Air (17 page)

At midday on 3 November, Leggett watched a simple ceremony take place.

A tall flag pole stands at the tip of the village. A native boy climbed the flag pole and ran some signal wire through the pulley at the top. Then the Australian flag, which had been dropped from an American plane, was hauled up. Once again the Southern Cross floated over the valley and as it stirred lazily in the warm air the commanding officer formally announced the re-establishment of Australian authority here.
³¹

An emaciated man was brought in to Kokoda village on a stretcher, one of the many who had been forced to work as carriers for the Japanese. Dudley reported: ‘Along the track we had found a number of these natives starving and showing signs of ill treatment, bayonet wounds and so on.' But now the local people of Kokoda emerged: ‘Natives were coming from everywhere, bringing their families out of hiding . . . there was no doubting their joy at being back. They were sticking flowers into their woolly hair, through the holes on their ear lobes and nose and through the plaited bands they wear around their
arms and legs.' Another ceremony was held to honour the local carriers who had been essential to the Australian campaign, carrying supplies and shouldering the wounded on stretchers.

Dear Mr Bearup,             Written from Kokoda 4.11.42

For some time it was a little difficult to know whether to continue here with the troops or return to Moresby . . . The
SMH
man did turn back but that was early owing to the strain of [the] trip on his legs and Reading, the
Truth
and
Mirror
lad, gave up at Myola. I came on and have been followed at intervals by Courtenay of the London
Sunday Times
, both of us arriving here with advance headquarters. The difficulties of getting material back have been great. Eventually I endeavoured to meet the situation by giving eye-witness material and certain official attitudes in a form which might, with rewriting, be used for news and commentaries.
³²

The airstrip at Kokoda was re-opened within a matter of days and Dudley flew back to Moresby to write his scripts. After the horrific three-week trek across the ranges, the return flight took little more than half an hour. The Japanese were now dug in at Oivi and Gorari but by the second week of November the weary Australians, backed by American bombing, had captured both villages. Hundreds of Japanese were killed. Both forces had been exhausted by the Kokoda campaign and many of the remaining troops were ill, however battle had yet to be joined for the beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda on the coast.

T
he yellow glow of a hurricane lamp pushed back the midnight darkness in the war correspondents' house at Port Moresby, where Dudley Leggett was handwriting a note to Molesworth at the ABC. It was early November 1942, barely a few days since Leggett's return from Kokoda, and there had been little time for rest after his weeks with the Australian troops on the track. He had sent off some discs to the ABC that evening – interviews with three Australian soldiers who'd escaped from Rabaul – and his note to Molesworth provided the details of the recordings, and his latest travel plans.

Leggett was hoping to return to the New Guinea north coast, where fighting had begun in the final stage of the Papuan campaign – the battle for the beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda. But he had a detour to make before he went back north.

The defeat of the Japanese on the mud-mired terrain of Milne Bay, on the eastern tip of Papua, after almost two weeks of fighting, denied Japan a strategic naval and air base that could have posed a new threat to Port Moresby and northern
Australia. Army public relations had the authority to determine where the ABC field unit travelled and what campaigns it covered, and it was keen to have the story of Milne Bay recorded for the radio audience back in Australia.

Early in the morning, after just a few hours' sleep, Leggett, Len Edwards and the recording gear flew out on a B-17 bomber to record interviews with the officers and men at Milne Bay. They would find themselves stuck there for the next few weeks while the fighting intensified at the Papuan beachheads on the north coast.

A few days earlier Haydon Lennard had arrived in Moresby where he found Dudley Leggett busy and preoccupied in the immediate aftermath of his Kokoda experiences. Impatient as ever and quick to go his own way, Lennard made plans to provide news cover of the beachheads. Moresby had changed dramatically in the months since he had last been there – the build-up of troops and increased pace of military activity was noticeable – but he found familiar frustrations in filing copy. ‘The delay in getting copy to the mainland down to Brisbane and through GHQ to Sydney is so great that I'm afraid any operational copy from me is going to arrive well behind the stuff from GHQ. It therefore seems that the best thing to do is to get out on the frontline stories as much as possible.'
¹
Lennard filed very little copy in his first week in Moresby and he was soon on the move.

I am leaving tomorrow morning Tuesday by air for Kokoda and may be away with the forward troops for some weeks. I propose joining the Brigades pushing down towards Buna and hope to be in on the ‘Buna kill' when the Americans and Australians attack the town. I should be able to get some first-rate stories.
²

On 11 November he hopped a plane from Moresby to Kokoda and then travelled onwards with the Australian troops to the beachheads. Unfortunately, none of Haydon's news reports from this campaign have survived, and Dudley Leggett's scripts and letters provide most of the surviving record of ABC coverage.

With Leggett unable to get the ABC's recording gear transported via Moresby and by air over the mountains to the beachheads, the ABC made the misplaced suggestion that he should use the hiatus in his reporting to record something ‘light' with the troops for the After Dinner Show on ABC radio. Leggett rejected the request out of hand: the present temper of the troops made the idea untenable.

It is impossible for anyone who has not been here with them to appreciate their feelings about the living and fighting conditions in New Guinea. Not only are they caustic enough in their comparisons between life in Australia and their existence here and about what they believe to be the failure of the people in Australia and in rear military areas to appreciate their conditions, but they already have a contempt for war correspondents in general and for the inaccurate stories appearing in newspapers under the names of these correspondents.
³

Australian and American troops were fighting in hellish conditions in the sodden tidal strip around the three beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda. Heavy rain, oppressive, suffocating heat and leaden humidity blanketed the swamps, thick bush, jungle and patches of tall Kunai grass, broken in some areas by narrow coconut plantations.
⁴
Gona was the first to fall and on 9 December. Lieutenant Colonel
Ralph Honner of the 39th Battalion sent a simple message to Brigade Headquarters: ‘Gona's Gone'.

Milne Bay was a largely unwelcome sojourn for Leggett as he and Len Edwards recorded interviews and stories of the battle that had been fought more than two months earlier. In the oppressive and pestilential climate Edwards found some relief in the frequent downpours, stripping off for a shower bath in the rain. A quiet man, Edwards would retreat to his tent when he felt in need of ‘spiritual food' and listen to music on the recorder turntable – Tchaikovsky's
Pathetique
symphony,
Goin' Home
and
O Promise me
, and he would write to his ‘Missus' back home.

The weather was unsettled in mid-December when the corvette, HMAS
Broome
pushed its way through the seas along the coast of Papua, from Milne Bay to Buna. Leggett and Edwards had finally managed to get passage to the beachheads where Haydon Lennard was already filing news copy. Edwards remembers landing with Australian troops near Buna and ‘carrying the gear ashore through waist deep water on a black night lit only by a fierce tropical thunderstorm'.
⁵

The next day Edwards dried out the gear and set up the recorder under a waterproof sheet alongside a slit trench. From then on, it was a never-ending battle to keep the equipment dry and prevent electrical shorts, and to combat the rust that formed on the recorder cutting head and the strange white powder that grew on the surface of the discs.

They soon moved up to the frontline with Len going on ahead with the gear. The Army dropped off the equipment at a place where the smell from the nearby bodies of dead Japanese was overwhelming and Edwards twice had to run for cover
from fierce sniper fire. They moved camp and set up with Haydon Lennard. Later that night Len had time to be alone. ‘Sat on the beach in the moonlight for a while thinking of home and missus. If only all this were over and I could get back for a while. Gee, I do miss that girl. All day the wounded have been coming back from the front, some of them terrible sights to see. This war is certainly hell. It's hard to believe that civilisation could sink so low as to make all this hellish mess.'
⁶

Dudley Leggett was ill with malaria but working as much as he could while Edwards sorted out some of the necessities of life, building a washstand with a tin hat for a basin and a table for Dudley's typewriter. Later on, operating from Buna would be much less challenging – by then it would be one of the staging points for a formidable Allied military operation and on one occasion when Edwards arrived without spare needles for the cutting head of the disc recorder, he was only mildly inconvenienced. ‘It was just a matter of going back to the airstrip, hitching a ride back to Moresby, because there was a continuous shuttle service across the mountains and getting the cutters and coming back. It was all done in a few hours.'
⁷

In December, Australian troops had reinforced the American forces at Buna and Australian infantry and light tanks were fighting their way in from the east against determined Japanese resistance. Leggett reported several times on the extensive Japanese defences he saw as the Australians captured more and more ground. ‘When I looked over those positions the next day I found that the area was literally pockmarked with his pillboxes. They are not built with concrete or steel, but they are well dug in with roots with heavy logs and sand, and had a number of entrances.'
⁸

The heavy demand on jeeps carrying ammunition, food and wounded made it difficult to move the equipment around the
frontline. However, in the days before Christmas, using Papuan carriers and a jeep, Edwards and Leggett brought the portable recorder to the front, at the edge of the airfield east of Buna. Their nights were broken by shellfire. ‘Very weird crouching in a slit trench working the recorder in the moonlight with shells crashing and whistling over our heads,' wrote Len in his diary.
⁹

On Christmas Eve they woke to the sound of tank engines warming up. Carrying the recorder on the back of one of the tanks, they set up in a shell hole to get the best sound and Leggett recorded several real-time commentaries.

The attack has started. That's the first small arms firing we've had this morning. The tanks moved out of their cover in the undergrowth of the coconut palm plantation just after first light, moved about two to three hundred yards down towards the creek along the new Buna aerodrome, which is on our side of the creek, moved to the bridge, across that intending to go forward this time to lead our infantry against the Japanese defences. There's been quite an outburst of automatic fire and just before we were able to get the recording going the Japs sent over three or four of his mortar bombs and one landed about 40 yards down towards our left.
¹⁰

Len Edwards was recording Dudley's commentary and the sound of the gunfire and the mortars when they found themselves too close for comfort. Edwards thrust himself into the mud as five shells landed nearby.

24 December 1942
Had the wind up properly and was all set to clear out in a hurry – curse the recorder. However
they let up and in a few minutes I started recording again. Got some of the shots passing overhead. Things quietened down after a while & I took the opportunity to pack up and clear out. I never want to get any closer to this ruddy war than where we got this morning.
¹¹

That night Edwards and Leggett were shaken awake by the crash of bombs falling. Len grabbed his tin hat and dived into a slit trench. As he went, he saw Dudley, shocked into action and doing the same, but stark naked. It provided a rare moment of laughter afterwards.

On 1 January, Leggett positioned himself to watch the final stages of the fighting, which he recorded later in his story,
Buna Busted
.

The sun had been up an hour when I slid off the bonnet of an American jeep loaded with ammunition and continued my way along the side of the aerodrome to a tall gnarled tree 500 yards from the Japs' pill boxes at the end of the runway. This tree had been an observation post but it had changed hands. Our artillery fire control officer was up on his platform by his telephone and I clambered up the Japanese-made ladder to my look out just below him, some 70 feet from the ground. The artillery officer was on the phone to his guns directing their fire and reporting progress.
¹²

Artillery and mortars firing smoke bombs laid heavy fire on the Japanese pill boxes and trenches in the coconut plantation next to the airfield.

We saw one and then two tanks moving slowly between the palms surrounded by a thin veil of smoke as they fired point blank into the enemy's pill boxes with their cannons and as their gunners turned their heavy machine guns on targets they'd picked out. Behind the tanks came the infantry cautiously taking cover behind the coconut tanks or close up to the tanks . . . Tanks came out to refuel and replenish ammunition and others went in. Progress reports came in on the telephone line that the enemy were trying again to set fire to the tanks with improvised Molotov cocktails and small land mines on sticks, but the tanks and infantry were now ready for this and closely supported one another. While this was going on walking wounded began to make their appearance on the track passing our lookout. American and Australian stretcher bearers were bringing back stretcher cases, jeeps were taking ammunition and food up forward and fifty yards away just off the track seemingly unconscious of the noise and activity around them two Americans stood bareheaded while a padre knelt by an open grave and read the burial service.
¹³

The next day ‘saw the finish' as the tanks and infantry moved in on the last Japanese defences. Leggett again watched from his lookout as tanks fired shells into the pill boxes.

Then our infantry were seen moving up behind the tanks. Five took shelter behind the foremost while one ran forward with something in his hand that glinted in the sun. That was the tin container of the engineers' improvised bomb. He reached the pill box hurled the bomb inside and then ran to safety. We waited. Nothing happened and then the pill box was hidden by a cloud of sand and smoke
and less than two seconds later the roar of the explosion reached us in the tree. As the tanks and infantry moved from pill box to pill box this was repeated and soon it became difficult to see clearly through the drifting smoke from bursting bombs and burning pill boxes. But before this happened I saw one of our infantry clap his hand to his shoulder and retire behind a tank, where one of the others seemed to bandage the wound for him.
¹⁴

With word that American troops had captured the Buna headland the fighting was over and Leggett walked through the coconut plantation where some Australian soldiers were picking off Japanese snipers and others were resting among the devastation and carnage. That night Leggett wrote his story of the battle – and a letter to Molesworth: ‘Imagine me typing this and the accompanying script by the light of a torch bulb and crouched in a three-foot-six slit trench to shade the light, at the same time trying to shelter from rain. It's a queer life.
¹⁵

Buna was the first time since the Middle East and North Africa that the portable recording equipment had been used on the frontlines of an active ground battle. The conditions couldn't have been more different from those in the Western Desert. Leggett wrote again to Molesworth, this time from Dobodura, inland from Buna: