Voices from the Air (21 page)

Hemery headed back to Moresby with the usual surreal episodic hops of wartime travel. From Nadzab, with wounded awaiting evacuation at the airstrip and flights over the mountains turned back because of bad weather, he dog-legged on a flight to Dobodura. That night he had the luxury of a swim in the river and sat outside in the dark evening to watch a film – the ‘indecently sexy' Rita Hayworth in
You Were Never Lovelier
. The next day amid a competing tangle of transport priorities –
cargoes of aero engines, wounded soldiers, and mail – he caught a plane to Moresby with the wounded. After his time on the frontlines at Finschhafen, his spirits appeared to drop as he arrived to find the ‘usual dead atmosphere' back in Moresby.

Under the ABC's plan for coverage of the New Guinea campaign Dudley Leggett was not only a reporter but also the de facto administrative head of the group of Moresby-based ABC correspondents. Despite occasional bouts of illness, Dudley kept himself very fit and his daily calisthenics in the showers were an affront to one of the less energetic correspondents in the press quarters. In November, hundreds of Diggers at Moresby were entertained by the exploits of a keen few who competed in a sports carnival staged in the broiling New Guinea heat. Sport was still a part of Leggett's life and rare surviving film footage shows him competing in the high jump and winning the competition with a precise and lithe scissor jump over the bar.

Leggett's direct responsibility in Moresby was field unit recordings, liaison and co-ordination with the ABC, and with the Army. Haydon Lennard had arrived with GHQ when it moved up from Brisbane for a brief period, and Bill Marien, Peter Hemery and the shortwave correspondent, Gordon Williams, were also variously in Moresby or in the field. If Lennard was not in Moresby, Leggett would channel news despatches as well as talks from the correspondents in the field back to the ABC. Sometimes he would re-write shorter versions of correspondents' reports and record them to be broadcast with the news bulletins. Neither Peter Hemery nor Haydon Lennard had particularly welcomed Leggett's
arrival and the rivalry between Hemery and Lennard made for a complicated brew of personalities. In one instance the competitiveness between Hemery and Lennard resulted in them both undertaking assignments on air raids over Rabaul and filing almost identical stories.

Leggett and the technician Bill MacFarlane were now coordinating the recording of voice reports by the others and Leggett was also recording his own interviews and stories. Half of the group could not be accommodated at headquarters and were living four miles away. Communication from the field was slow and on some assignments, like Hemery's coverage of Finschhafen, there was no contact for many days. Many seemingly routine but important things, like the logistics of recordings and a lack of typewriters, began to wear on Leggett's patience.

. . . when much of the material cannot be recorded until late in the day – until all facts are gathered in – and maybe three people are waiting to record – and some coaching is necessary for Lennard for example – and all three screaming for the wrath of heaven on those responsible for delaying the typewriters etcetera – cadging typewriters, thieving paper, carbon and what not – well it's FUN . . . not to speak of terse wires about routing recordings through Brisbane when the slaves in New Guinea are trying to get the discs on the air in the quickest possible time, for after all that is the essence of our business, Did you say I am liverish? Well, that's a mild expression.
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The sentiments undoubtedly also reflected his frustrations over more serious problems. Despite the continuing fighting and the opportunity of stories in the north, the output of the unit
was limited by ‘poor communications from the forward areas, inability to get the recorder forward, inadequate transport in Moresby's large area, and the paucity of material in Moresby'.
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Dudley's heart seemed to be closer to the soldiers in the field than with the growing frustrations of co-ordinating the work of the field unit and he now asked to be released so he could return to the army. In the middle of October, the ABC general manager, Charles Moses, approved his return to active service.

Around the time that Leggett left the ABC, Peter Hemery also departed. Hemery admired the scale and resources of the American side of the war, and preferred the less bureaucratic approach of the American networks and agencies. He felt that his ambitions had been frustrated in working for the ABC, and he pushed beyond the acceptable boundaries in filing despatches for the American news agency, INS. He also experimented with taking photographs in the field for publication, and this also had pushed the limits of his accreditation. Nowadays Hemery would be considered a versatile multi-media reporter, but at the time his impatience and pride did not help his case with the bureaucracy. Hemery felt that he had convinced the director general of Army PR, Colonel Rasmussen, to accept his INS work, however Rasmussen wrote to Charles Moses that it had resulted in ‘a perhaps unintentional colouring of Mr Hemery's despatches to emphasise the American angle, with consequent playing down of the Australian side'.
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This is not supported by a reading of Hemery's scripts, but his actions had certainly breached his accreditation.

The ruling is definitely given that accreditation of a national organisation may not be used to supply, on a profit-making basis, information to a commercial news circulating organisation.
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Hemery returned to Sydney, and the ABC told him that he would be recalled to a position of Talks Supervisor in Brisbane. He had already spoken to the head of US public relations, Colonel Diller, about accreditation as an INS correspondent and the stage was set for a confrontation with the ABC. After a stormy meeting with Moses and other senior ABC managers he resigned.

The departure of Leggett and Hemery forced some changes in the ABC's team of war correspondents. The ABC's controller of public relations, Syd Deamer, a former newspaper editor under both Keith Murdoch and Frank Packer, had been put in charge of ABC wartime coverage, which included Talks, run by BH Molesworth, and Frank Dixon's News department. Deamer put the Talks producer and broadcaster Fred Simpson in the senior field unit role to replace Leggett. Like Leggett, Deamer had been impressed with Bill Marien's human interest reporting and with his first voice reports for the field unit, and he put Marien in to replace Peter Hemery doing voice recordings.

Tensions within GHQ between MacArthur's office and the Australian command now played a part in a fresh row with Army PR. Colonel Rasmussen complained to the ABC of the effect on soldiers in the field of inaccurate statements supposedly from Marien and Haydon Lennard using ‘imaginative descriptions fabricated at a great distance from the scene of the action'.
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Rasmussen claimed that Army PR and command officers in the field were ‘most anxious to establish the reliability and authenticity of the ABC news broadcasts'.
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As Chester Wilmot had found with some of his fellow war correspondents in the Middle East, exaggeration and
inaccuracy could destroy the credibility of a correspondent with the troops, and with Army command. Rasmussen complained to the ABC about reports by Marien and Lennard describing 2000-feet-high, ten-feet-wide razor-backed ridges and deep mud on the battlefield around Sattelberg on the Huon Peninsula. In September, at the time of the original complaints about Lennard's reports from GHQ, Marien had written to the Federal news editor, Frank Dixon (the underlinings are Marien's) – ‘There
have been
inaccuracies but we are not the only offenders.
Everyone who is represented at GHQ shares in them
. . .
Lennard is definitely not at fault
.'
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The ABC accepted the need to specify in broadcasts whether a correspondent was reporting from the field or from GHQ, but it also identified GHQ as the source of the inaccuracies. It pointed to almost identical descriptions of Sattelberg in the newspapers which, like Marien and Lennard, had taken their information from GHQ and official sources. Bill Marien got his information about ten-feet-wide ridges from the deputy assistant director of public relations in the field, George Fenton, who had also censored his copy. In a confrontation at the field HQ, Marien rounded on Fenton: ‘For Christ's sake, George, don't give me that. Do you think I just airily picked the distance of ten feet out of the air?'
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Fenton acknowledged his own liability in censoring the copy.

Warren Denning was filling in as News editor during an absence by Frank Dixon and warned Deamer of the broader background to the row.

It seems fairly well established that there has been a clash between General MacArthur and [General] Sir Thomas Blamey, and we must take care to see that our correspondents are not made chopping blocks because of
it. It is in the nature of broadcasting that our stories come right back to the men concerned while the incidents are still fresh in their minds; if the same men see newspapers at all, it is usually so long after the event that they are not so conscious of what they regard as inaccuracies.
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In the following months, Bill Marien continued to report from Port Moresby and from the mainland. In February, his dispute with George Fenton re-surfaced when Marien claimed he had been the subject of ‘vilification' in letters by Fenton. Fenton had seemed supportive of the war correspondents with whom he worked, rather than confrontational, but whatever the truth, Marien now had a head of steam and it was almost certainly correct that there had been ‘ill-will' between them. In a letter to Charles Moses, Marien said he had heard that the rash of complaints about alleged ABC inaccuracies ‘all found their source in one brigade commander of the 9th Division'. Marien told Moses that he had since had further arguments with Fenton over public relations ‘exceeding their responsibilities in regard to the ABC', and that these were the reason for the supposed vilification.

Marien was in prickly mood and felt moved to defend his record, which included his six months in Darwin, his trip to Timor, and the campaigns at Nassau Bay, Mount Tambu, Salamaua, Lae, the Markham and Ramu Valleys, the Finisterre Ranges, and the landings at Cape Gloucester. He had flown on ten operations in Liberators, Mitchells, Beaufighters and A-20s, and had been on operational raids with PT boats during which they were bombed, shelled and strafed. He wrote to Moses, ‘I am proud of that record and I am jealous of it. So much so that I have risen up on my hind legs even at the suspicion of it being attacked.'
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In April 1944, Marien covered the American landings at Aitape on the New Guinea coast, sailing on the American flagship, the USS
Blue Ridge
, and going ashore with American soldiers from a floating dock. He raced back to Moresby to file his story. On the flight back over the Owen Stanley Ranges from Finschhafen, bad weather forced his Douglas transport plane to climb to 17,000 feet, where the portside engine cut out. The pilot found a break in the clouds and the engine came back to life, enabling them to land safely and for Marien to file the first eye-witness account of the landings.

Marien returned to Sydney and a few months later he resigned from the ABC.

Haydon Lennard had been back and forth between Port Moresby and Brisbane with GHQ several times in 1943 but by the end of the year he was restless and wanted a change from the continual grind. ‘The GHQ job in New Guinea is no soda,' he wrote to Frank Dixon, ‘it's a twenty-four hour job seven days a week.'
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Lennard had recovered from the debilitating episodes of malaria that he had suffered earlier in the year and he now wanted to return to reporting from the field.

When the ABC discussed its options for stepping up its New Guinea coverage with Army public relations, George Fenton said he thought Lennard was the best choice for field work. He told Dixon that the soldiers in the field did not like correspondents who spent too much time with the senior command officers, but they liked Lennard as he mixed with the men and understood them.
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Lennard was soon sailing with a convoy heading for Arawe and the first Allied landings on the Japanese-held island of
New Britain. On 15 December, he watched from a landing craft off Orange Beach as destroyers and Mitchell bombers pounded the Japanese defences. It was the biggest operation he had covered since the fighting at the beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda a year earlier. The main force was ashore and Lennard was in the trees just behind the beach when Japanese planes appeared overhead.

For 5 minutes Orange Beach and the nearby bay became a hell hole. In a few seconds bombs and tracer bullets were tearing a mad pattern through the coconut grove where the main body of troops had gone ashore. I dived behind a fallen coconut tree – a poor shelter but the only one in sight – and watched the gunners open up as Zeros and dive bombers came into the attack. It is remarkable how quickly you dive for cover – there's no loss of time in finding where to go – in a split second everyone is flat on the ground – some in holes, half behind trees, some in shell holes or bomb craters. I'm sure all are scared but some show it and some don't. And when the bullets start to hit the ground there is that awful feeling that they are coming straight for you – that maybe they will cut right across the spot where you are lying. Then as the fighter bomber roars overhead, you hear the ear splitting crunch of a bomb falling 20, perhaps 25 yards away. The crack as they go off shakes the ground, the air, the trees – everything that is around, and you thank your lucky stars that it's not your turn . . . That is what the boys on Orange Beach had to endure a few hours after they had fought their way ashore.
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