Voices from the Air (28 page)

It was the end of Paull's role as a war correspondent and though the ABC followed up the correspondents' complaints, it was to little effect.

There is no doubt that in the last couple of months there has been mounting resentment among War Correspondents, including ABC men, over what they claim to be the unfair restrictions placed upon them at the instance of Brigadier Rasmussen. Rasmussen's reply in most cases has been that for reasons of security, censorship and other restrictions have been imposed by the Commander-in-Chief.
¹⁷

Australian troops captured Wewak about two months after the correspondents at Aitape had returned home. The Australian actions along the coast had developed into a determined advance and it was now a clearer story that could apparently be told with fewer restrictions. In mid-April, Fred Simpson travelled from Aitape by barge along the coast, joining up with the troops pushing towards Wewak. ‘For the fighting troops who have had to fight their way to where I am at present, the going has been tough.'
¹⁸

Simpson was unable to travel with any recording gear but sent despatches on the Australians' progress from several points along the way and, at this later stage of the campaign, his scripts included some details of places and distances that would have been censored from correspondents' scripts a couple of months earlier. Close to Wewak, he was listening to the radio for wider news of the war.

It doesn't look like being a quiet night. Again our artillery start searching. But it's seven o'clock, time for the news, and news is good. It looks like the end of the war in Europe. No, we don't hear anything about Wewak. This hellish business doesn't make headline news.
¹⁹

Following the capture of Wewak on 10 May, he wrote to Molesworth.

To say that it has been bitterly hard is rather to understate it. It has meant day by day marching with full pack, and climbing, well it's hard to believe . . . Sometimes I thought I should never get through. However, I'm well, and managing to keep the old malaria suppressed sufficiently to get by.
²⁰

Fighting was continuing around Wewak and on 14 May Simpson was again with the Australian soldiers as they fought for control of a ridge marked on the maps simply as 701. Hill 701 was part of the chain of ridges overlooking Wewak and was held by concealed Japanese positions and snipers.

Here it comes. There's the sound and explosion of the enemy automatics. Around where we are, the white blood of the trees spatters as the bullets penetrate deeply into the tall trunks. How can men live through the hail of lead. They do. There is the answering fire of Brens, Owens and rifles. Men kneel behind trees and crawl forward on their bellies. But the terrible volume of enemy fire does not seem to slacken.
²¹

Simpson made a point of being as close to the fighting as possible for his reporting, so that he heard the whine and tearing sound of artillery shells overhead and felt the ground shake as they hit and as the tops of trees crashed to the ground.

Again there is the call for stretcher bearers. Many urgent and serious calls this time. A runner now with the call from the OC for more ammunition. A few yards from the starting
point and one of the carriers is shot in the back – his task falls upon other shoulders. That enemy sniper is somewhere in the dense overhead foliage – he cannot be found.
²²

His report of the encounter at Hill 701 concludes simply ‘the courage of these men is beyond exaggeration.' A second report describes the trek later that day through the failing daylight and into the long hours of night, with the native stretcher bearers and soldiers, taking the wounded back from the frontline.

Everybody's cigarettes and everybody's water bottle are for everybody else. Already we can see there is little hope for some. The doctor is here and the splintings are being fixed. To those that need it the hypodermic is being administered. It is necessary relief from pain. It is nearing darkness too . . . We move forward through the glutinous mud and a step at a time. As we move, we pass back the word to the man immediately following – ‘Moving forward a little' – then – ‘Stop behind'– and so it goes on. Above the noises of the night jungle there is the moan of one of our seriously wounded. We doubt if he will make the journey. We feel for guidance to the signal wire at our feet. We cannot see – we slip and slide everywhere . . . The upward trek begins. We must climb like animals on all fours . . . It seems hours before we make the top. Willing hands lift us over the last few yards.
²³

Len Edwards had now joined Simpson and they recorded the actuality of bombing strikes and artillery fire on the ridges above Wewak. This was the last Australian campaign on the island of New Guinea and ABC listeners back in Australia heard the sounds of battle, and the voices of the spotters at
infantry headquarters talking over signal wires to the artillery command post, reporting the success of the attacks.

Simpson and Edwards were camping in a tent at the Wewak airfield, recording Fred's stories and interviews with soldiers when, one morning, Japanese guns opened fire from the nearby hills. ‘And the first thing that happened was that the tent was blown to smithereens and also the equipment was blown to pieces.'
²⁴
Simpson yelled for Edwards to jump into an old shell hole and when they emerged they found the amplifier for the recording kit had been completely destroyed and other equipment damaged. Simpson cabled the ABC:

RECORDER SMASHED SHELLFIRE ALSO PERSONAL EQUIPMENT STOP EDWARDS SELF OKAY STOP USEFULNESS HERE ENDED EDWARDS MUST RETURN SYDNEY STOP HEAVY EQUIPMENT LAE USELESS OUR PURPOSE . . .
²⁵

Some time later, Edwards arrived back in Sydney to replace the damaged equipment. Simpson believed the only real value of being at Wewak now was to record interviews with the soldiers but he no longer had any recording equipment. His ability to provide news was hamstrung by the competing stories being sent by Army PR which were available for use by any of the papers or radio stations. He wrote (in capital letters emphasising his feelings): ‘it is impossible for me to cover news from this area, since PR make direct use of army channels, and I assume it arrives in Sydney at least forty-eight hours before correspondents can get stuff out.'
²⁶
He also pointed out that, ‘We cannot compete with GHQ as another factor in the situation, although time and again their stuff is inaccurate.'

F
rom May to July 1945, Australian forces carried out three major landings at Tarakan, Labuan and Balikpapan, with the codenames of OBOE. The Borneo Campaign did nothing to advance the final defeat of Japan and was a costly loss of Australian lives, but with MacArthur and the Americans now carrying the war towards Japan itself, it captured the valuable oil fields on Borneo, freed prisoners of war and civilian internees and gave Australia a high-profile combat role in the last months of the conflict.

Frank Legg and Bill MacFarlane boarded HMAS
Manoora
at Morotai as the invasion force assembled ahead of the assault on Tarakan. Legg had in mind a complete recording of the amphibious operation from the planning stage to completion and he was very upbeat when he wrote to Molesworth at the ABC to ‘be ready for what will probably be the best stuff I'll ever do'.
¹
Through the assistance of Navy PR and mates in his old battalion, the 2/48th, which was part of the landing force,
he made arrangements to land the imperturbable MacFarlane and the recording equipment in the fourth wave so that Legg could be recording on the beach ‘two hours after the first Australian set foot on Tarakan'. Legg wrote optimistically: ‘If all goes according to plans, not only will I see more than any other correspondent, but we'll have the equipment where it's never been before – & our actual recordings should be very close behind the newspaper despatches.'
²

General Blamey's off-the-cuff address to the troops was one of the first things recorded by Legg and MacFarlane. ‘You are going to have another run. I know you got very, very tired of waiting in Australia, and it is very boring to go on with too much training. But you are really going now, for the first time since we left the Middle East, on to foreign soil again.'
³

On 1 May, Legg went ashore at Tarakan with members of the 2/48th, following the platoon led by Tom ‘Diver' Derrick, who had been awarded the VC at Sattelberg. ‘Pin-points of light erupted all along the shore-line, where bombs burst, and great mushrooming clouds of black smoke poured skywards. Soon a dense pall hung over everything, punctured by sheets of orange and yellow flame.'
⁴
Legg met up with MacFarlane amid the confusion on the beach but they could not set up the recording gear in the mud, oil and slime. Instead they cadged a lift in a jeep from the 2/48th and, in the partly destroyed concrete shell of a radio station, began recording.

Hello everyone. I'm broadcasting to you, very appropriately, from what was, until about three hours ago, the radio station on Tarakan, off the coast of Borneo. Tarakan is ours! We landed this morning at 0815 hours, and the situation is now thoroughly under control . . .
⁵

Legg handed over the recorded discs and his despatches to Army PR and he and MacFarlane commandeered a native handcart to carry the recording gear to the frontline HQ. It was only later that they found out the Japanese had planted explosives throughout the building where they had made their first recording. On 3 May the GHQ communiqué released the news of the Tarakan landing and Legg continued to record and file despatches.

I am sending this message at half-past six on Saturday evening, and I've just witnessed the capture of Rippon Ridge on the other side of the Tarakan airstrip, which means that the main objective of this campaign, the capture of the strip, has been accomplished in four days from the landing.
⁶

Legg advanced with an Australian platoon towards Rippon Ridge immediately after its capture. He was given the task of carrying the walkie talkie and something even more important, the platoon's priceless ration of tea. They advanced slowly through the grass, lifting their feet high over trip wires that might be connected to mines. Legg wrote down family messages from a platoon holding the airstrip and included them in his recording sent that night, which was broadcast two days later. It was one of the few recordings to actually get through.

Up to the capture of the airstrip, on 5 May, I had despatched nineteen quarter-hour recordings, covering every phase of the planning, execution, and success of the campaign. By 10 May, the ABC had received one solitary disc, containing General Blamey's address of 25 April, followed by the story of the capture of the airstrip. My cabled news despatches
had come through all right, but I had been ‘scooped' by every other correspondent.
⁷

The disastrous delay in delivery of Legg's discs through the Army channels was topped by a lack of resources available to PR, which restricted the support they could provide in the field. The complicated requirements for recording in the field made the ABC a logistical headache for Army PR officers, but by contrast, Legg found Navy and RAAF PR very helpful. However, he was also pushing boundaries: one of his letters was censored to remove references to the base at Morotai; a script in which he argued that more air and naval support should have been used at Tarakan was cut so severely that it could not be used; and he then wrote a scathing but deliberately self-defeating script entitled
Why I sent Such Brilliant Recordings from Tarakan
. As everything seemed to be going wrong, the ABC's Bob McCall intervened and advised Legg to recapture his usual sense of humour.
⁸

The next landing was on Labuan Island in Brunei Bay, on 10 June, and Legg again had a brilliant plan for covering the operation. He arranged for the ABC recording gear to be on the first jeep put ashore from the landing craft (LST), about three hours after Legg and Bill MacFarlane had gone ashore to catch up with the first assault waves.

On the beach we were greeted with the news that everything was going perfectly, except for one LST that had ‘landed' in the wrong place. When the first jeep had driven down the ramp, it had disappeared into fourteen feet
of water. They had managed to fish the driver out, more dead than alive; then the LST had reversed, and beached at the right place. The jeep was the only vehicle in the convoy to be lost.

Bill grinned. ‘Bet some bloke whose gear was in that jeep is as mad as a rattlesnake now,' he remarked.

‘You blokes probably know him,' our informant said, ‘seeing you're war correspondents. That jeep was the one with the ABC's recording gear in it!'
⁹

It was crushing news but Legg carried on, sending his first news despatch of the 9th Division landing in Brunei Bay.

Our troops landed on both sides of the tip of Brunei Peninsula, the southern arm of Brunei Bay, and also adjacent small island of Muara which overlooks these beaches. Simultaneously another force from Ninth Division landed on the southeast tip of Labuan Island off the northern arm of Brunei Bay. Thus a pincer movement has begun, aimed at securing the whole coastline of Brunei Bay and thus placing the only good harbour, and certainly the biggest in Borneo, at the disposal of British, Australian and American fleets and seaplanes.
¹⁰

John Elliott was not one to miss the opportunity to report a major military operation. Four hours after the first landing and with Legg already ashore, Elliott flew in from GHQ in Manila by RAAF Catalina flying boat. As the plane came down to land, he observed: ‘. . . it was easy to see that this time it was an AIF show, Diggers' hats and jungle green were dotted all over Brunei Bay'.
¹¹
Elliott joined the command ship, where: ‘Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead chatted to his artillery
chief and brigadier and puffed his cigar like a man smoking with a deep inner satisfaction.' It was clear that the commanders were elated with the progress being made. Australian troops pushed inland under blue skies and a hot sun and Elliott went ashore to talk with the soldiers, but did not meet up with Legg and he returned to Manila to file news coverage.

Later on the day of the landing, Legg sought out an American Public Relations Officer he knew was aboard one of the ships and swiftly arranged a flight on board a Catalina to Manila. The six-hour flight the next day took him over North Borneo and the islands of the Philippines, above the former battle fields of Bataan and Corregidor, to touchdown late in the afternoon on the waters of Manila Bay. He wrote his talks during the flight, had them passed by the GHQ censors that evening and the next morning broadcast five stories to the ABC by shortwave, before catching up with John Elliott, who walked with him through the battle-scarred city. Legg then returned to Brunei.

Twenty-four hours after the 9th Division had entered Brunei Town, Legg and other war correspondents travelled by barge along the wide jungle-fringed river, to the native quarter of the town where stilt houses were built over the water. Amid the scattered destruction of the European quarter, Australian troops were brewing tea with the bodies of dead Japanese nearby. The sound of mortar fire could be heard from the hills overlooking the town, where the Australians were still pursuing other enemy troops. As he was leaving the town Legg had the most pleasant experience of all his time on Brunei. ‘Passing a humble native house I came on a young-old Malay of very serious mien. He bowed, and although it was well on towards evening, wished me ‘Goot morning.' I grinned and replied ‘How do you do?' Whereupon his face broke into a
broad smile and he said, surprisingly, ‘Be happy . . .'
¹²
Legg remained in Borneo until he returned to Manila for his next major assignment, the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.

More than 300 Australians were killed in the capture of Tarakan and Brunei Bay, with fighting continuing on Borneo in some areas until the end of the war. The final major operation of the Borneo campaign was the landing at Balikpapan on the east coast of the island.

Regret to inform you John Elliott, War Correspondent representing Australian Broadcasting Commission, killed Balikpapan three July.
¹³

On 3 July 1945, John Elliott became the first ABC correspondent killed in the field. His death was the end of a chain of events: of fateful decision, missed opportunity and tragic misfortune.

In April, while back in Australia on leave from Manila, Elliott made the decision that would eventually send him to Balikpapan. He had resigned from the ABC to take up a job with a newspaper but, at the ABC's request, he agreed to stay on for the Borneo campaign. He then returned to Manila.

On his return journey, Elliott immediately noticed the changes at work in the late stages of the war. Army PR sent him up on a Priority Three movement order though ‘actually, north of Townsville, a 3 Priority is about as useful as a dog's licence'.
¹⁴
At Biak, he found Priority Three ticket holders ‘milling helplessly around', still waiting for a flight after three weeks in limbo, but a call to the American PR chief, Colonel Diller, got him aboard a plane. In Manila, he found the prices
for food sky-high – ‘it's like Russia all over again' – and parts of the city much changed.

There's still no glass in the scorched steel window frames of our office in Manila, blasted with the rest of the city when the Japanese High Commander in the Philippines, bested by General MacArthur at every point in the game, ordered the city to be levelled to the ground and then fled north to Formosa. Two months ago, looking up from my typewriter, I stared at a mountain of smouldering rubble, concrete, stone, and twisted steel, marking the spot where once had been the city square and its blocks of offices. The air was sickly with the smell of the dead trapped beneath the wreckage; a thick dust covered everything. Overhead whizzed a barrage of American shells on their delicate mission of blasting out the Japs from Intramuros, while sparing the civilians penned inside. Today everything is peaceful. Outside our window, MacArthur's car stands parked on the levelled square – that hill of rubble has long been devoured by bulldozers, and the view unfolds of a sluggish, yellow river, and beyond emerald lawns I can see the crumpled wall and crooked spires of the wrecked Spanish city.
¹⁵

At that stage of the campaign, Elliott reported that the Americans had killed around 138,000 Japanese in the Philippines, more than 30,000 in the last six weeks alone, and speculation was now focused on MacArthur's next move. Allied bombers had caused great damage to Japan's supply convoys between Okinawa and Borneo and the Japanese in the island archipelagos south of the Philippines were now contained. Singapore remained in Japanese hands but Rangoon had been re-captured by the British, and the Japanese were
under pressure in China. The momentum in the war was pointing towards Japan itself.

Elliott had access to reliable shortwave transmissions for sending his stories to the ABC, but correspondents were now in search of new stories or new angles on the war. Elliott wrote several reports about life in Manila under the Japanese occupation: Filipino vaudeville shows with comedians who mocked the uncomprehending Japanese in Tagalog; and the change in fortunes of the newspaper, the
Manila Tribune
, forced to become a mouthpiece for Japanese propaganda. He also mentioned the tale of a tall, red-haired American radio commentator, Bert Silem, who was ‘halfway through his broadcast when the Japanese bombers knocked out the radio station' in 1942. Three years later, a gaunt, emaciated Silem was freed from the Santo Tomas concentration camp and immediately went back to work. ‘At the microphone again, Bert Silem began: “As I was saying before, when I was so rudely interrupted . . .”'
¹⁶

At this time, Elliott also reported the story of a transport plane that crashed in a hidden valley in the remote and almost inaccessible mountains of New Guinea. The valley could be reached only by a high, narrow mountain gap and was nicknamed Shangri-La. Three of the twenty passengers on board the plane survived, and Filipino medics and workers were parachuted into the valley to effect a rescue. A small airstrip was cut into the valley and a glider was landed. The survivors were eventually rescued in a daring operation in which the glider was ‘snatched into the air again by the grab-hook of a low-flying plane'. Elliott's report included the transcript of the walkie-talkie conversation between an American combat reporter in the plane and the team on the ground.