Voices from the Air (29 page)

When non-stop flights began to China, Elliott grabbed the opportunity and spent two weeks in Chungking and
Kunming, sending wireless messages on the campaign against the Japanese in China and attempting to broadcast colour stories by shortwave. Chungking (now Chongqing) was the capital of Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist government and Elliott submitted a list of questions for the nationalist leader. Chiang Kai-Shek's responses, possibly drafted by the nationalist Ministry of Information, were eventually received by the ABC several weeks after Elliott's death. Elliott's trip cut across plans by Haydon Lennard who was waiting to visit China from his new base at South East Asia Command (SEAC) Headquarters in Ceylon. China was part of Lennard's SEAC beat and he was annoyed to find that Elliott's presence in China delayed his own trip. Elliott's next assignment was the quick dash from Manila to cover the Brunei Bay landings, also covered by Frank Legg.

As the Borneo campaign dragged on, Elliott had planned to finish up with the ABC on 21 June, but he again agreed to a request to stay on and cover the initial stages of the Balikpapan operation, codenamed OBOE Two (the OBOE operations were not undertaken in number order). He cabled the ABC from GHQ:

HAPPY COMPLY INSTNS [instructions] YOUR PR44560 OF 11 JUNE MY COVERING INITIAL STAGES OBOE TWO BEFORE RETURNING.
¹⁷

Troops of the 7th Division landed at Balikpapan on the south-east coast of Borneo on 1 July in the largest Australian amphibious assault of the war. John Elliott's first news despatch began:

At Balikpapan, the cobra rears its deadly head, crocodiles are common in the delta region but Seventh Division Diggers under the overall command of General MacArthur
hit it on July 1st, because Balikpapan is the most important oil port in the Far East; Balikpapan Bay affords a good anchorage for an almost unlimited number of ships and it's the most important oil centre nearest Japan.
¹⁸

Almost 230 Australians would die in the last major Australian combat operation of the war at Balikpapan, but Elliott was only covering the opening days and the ABC had plans to replace him with Fred Simpson, Len Edwards and the recording gear.

When Elliott arrived on D-Day from Manila he said he would stay only two days, then return to Manila. His idea was to collect enough data to make a few broadcasts and put them over from Manila. On the second day, however, he missed his plane by five minutes, so decided to stay another two days and get more material.
¹⁹

He was killed on the afternoon of the next day, 3 July. Elliott and a Department of Information correspondent, Bill Smith, had been with an Australian patrol when they were shot in error by an Australian Bren gunner. At the time, ‘everything was going like clockwork' and correspondents were moving about the front without restriction.

Both men were seeking names of troops in the forward area when they were shot down – Elliott getting material for his broadcasts and Smith for his Weekly Diary feature. For reasons unexplained they had wandered into enemy territory near where Jap snipers had been holding up our troops for some hours. They picked out a Jap shelter, sat down in front of it, and began exchanging notes and having a bite to eat. Just a few minutes before three Japs
were killed a few yards from where they were sitting. Smith had removed his slouch hat, but Elliott retained his American visor cap which, from a distance, looks very like a Jap cap. An Australian Bren-gunner, 700 yards away, saw two figures, was convinced they were Japs, and fired, killing both men instantly. He cannot be blamed for what happened. He was only doing his duty.
²⁰

Fred Simpson wrote to the ABC with some more details gleaned from conversation with a captain who had been on Balikpapan at the time. ‘Elliott and Smith were passing through a no-man's-land with a patrol. They stopped for a rest. Whether they fell behind the patrol, or whether the patrol went on is not clear.'
²¹
The official Army report said only that both men were killed in action.

Elliott and Smith were buried the next day at the Balikpapan War Cemetery by an Army chaplain, Alan Laing, who later wrote to the ABC.

On the day of the funeral I was at the cemetery to bury a lad from my own unit, Pte Wm Aitken of 2/1st Aust Pioneer Battalion, and the bodies of the two correspondents were brought along at the same time and at the same request of Capt Williams, the Press Relations Officer, I read the C of E burial service for them also. There was a very large gathering present, both of war correspondents and members of the Pioneer Unit who all joined in singing the hymns ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past' and ‘Abide With Me' at the beginning and end of the service.

In a short address I had the opportunity to speak of the loyalty and devotion of all three men to the cause in which they served, albeit in different capacities and I commended
them and their families to the care of God and the prayers of those present. There was a very reverent and solemn atmosphere throughout the service and I think that no one was not moved deeply by it.

Their grave, which they share, lies on the gentle slope of a hill about 300 yards in from the beach, a little north of the landing area.
²²

Following Elliott's death, Fred Simpson took over coverage at Balikpapan. With the troops of an Australian cavalry commando unit heading north towards Samarinda, Simpson could hear the tell-tale chatter of Bren Guns as soldiers cleared out Japanese positions from the rainforest edging the red-dust road.

‘Here are a small group of men on the side of the road. They are kneeling and I pause to think of the day, is it a weekday or Sunday, I should know better for divine service for these troops isn't a matter of any particular time or place. It's any time, any place.' With a little white cloth placed on an abandoned Japanese table, the chaplain offers a requiem mass for the dead ‘to the accompaniment of the boom of the twenty-five pounders and the whining whistle of the shells overhead as they tear towards the enemy positions.' Simpson listens as the chaplain tells the men: ‘The greatest consolation that you can give to the relatives of the men who have passed is to tell the wives and mothers of the comradeship and bravery of the men who have been your mates, remembering at the same time that they were the men of your regiment.
²³

Simpson remained in Borneo with the recording technician Len Edwards for the surrender of the Japanese at Kuching and to record interviews with POWs released from the Japanese prison camps.

I
n early 1945 Haydon Lennard became the ABC correspondent attached to Mountbatten's headquarters at South East Asia Command (SEAC) in Ceylon. Chester Wilmot had been destined for the role but was by then reporting as a war correspondent for the BBC in Europe.

In May, Lennard covered the capture of Rangoon. He provided some of the first recorded interviews with prisoners of war freed in Rangoon and his reports told of the destruction and filth in the wake of the Japanese occupation, and the clouds of DDT sprayed through the city to control the disease-bearing flies and mosquitoes. During his time at SEAC he also travelled to China – following immediately after John Elliott's trip – and drove along part of the reopened Burma Road.

The capture of Rangoon signalled that victory in the rest of the South East Asian theatre, including the liberation of Singapore, was that much closer. After three and a half years of war, the end came swiftly. In early August, America dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and soon afterwards Japan signalled its surrender.

At the end of August, Lennard was back in Rangoon to watch Japanese commanders in Burma sign a preliminary surrender agreement with the occupying British forces. He then sailed with the British fleet which arrived off Singapore on 4 September. The liberation of the island – the fall of which in 1942 had seemed such a hammer blow to Australian security – was now at hand.

On 5 September, Lennard began cabling a series of running stories, attempting to give the ABC an immediate coverage of the historic events. ‘Most profuse and frequent' was how an ABC news compiler plaintively described the flood of copy that was now coming in from the correspondent in Singapore.

Singapore today celebrated its first day of freedom in three and a half years by crowding the streets, cheering, and watching the Japanese being lined up before British Headquarters to receive orders.
¹

Lennard's despatches and the despatches of the newspaper correspondents were the first draft of the story of the liberation of Singapore, and the story of the island under Japanese occupation. These excerpts from Lennard's first cables have been arranged to give a feel for the sequence of events in Singapore.

FIRST WAVE OF OCCUPATION TROOPS LANDED 0500 HRS GMT.
²

THE FIRST CONTACT WITH THE JAPANESE IS TAKING PLACE ON BOARD THE CRUISER HMS SUSSEX WHICH WAS RECENTLY HIT BY KAMIKAZE BOMBERS AT
THE HEAD OF THE MALACCA STRAITS. THE FIRST TROOPS ASHORE ARE EXPECTED TO MAKE AT LEAST A TWENTY MILE TRIP FROM THEIR TRANSPORTS TO THE COAST BY SMALL LANDING CRAFT.

LANDING MAIN WHARF EMPIRE DOCK, TROOPS ARE DISEMBARKING FROM SMALL LANDING CRAFT AS COMBAT TASK FORCE. (THOSE) ROAMING SINGAPORE ARE ORDERED TO ASSEMBLE AT SINGAPORE FOOTBALL GROUND. THOUSANDS ARE EXPECTED TO BE IN OUR HANDS BY NIGHTFALL.
³

ENTRY INTO SINGAPORE WAS MADE BY INDIAN TROOPS WITH STREETS PRACTICALLY DESERTED APART FROM GROUPS OF NATIVES, MOSTLY CHILDREN, WHO GATHERED ON THE WATERFRONT AS A WELCOME PARTY. AT REGULAR INTERVALS JAPANESE GUARDS ARE POSTED ALONG THE STREETS AND A JAPANESE REAR GUARD PARTY IS STILL IN ENEMY HEADQUARTERS.
⁴

ARMED CLASHES BETWEEN UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT AND JAPANESE COLLABORATORS HAS BROKEN OUT OVER THE LAST FEW NIGHTS. SMALL PITCHED BATTLES HAVE BEEN REPORTED. A GENERAL WARNING TO KEEP OFF THE STREETS AFTER DARK HAS BEEN ISSUED PENDING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF FULL MILITARY CONTROL.
⁵

The priority for Lennard was news of the Australian POWs. Liberation became revelation as the full story of life under Japanese occupation could now be told. Lennard reported that there were approximately thirty-five thousand Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees in Singapore, still awaiting release. Changi was the largest camp.

Dutch and British comprise the bulk of the six thousand men inside the high walls of Changi Prison today. Approximately three thousand AIF personnel are located in native grass huts outside the gaol walls. They feed from one makeshift kitchen. Officers live in concrete coolie lines, four sharing each tiny room, and in small wooden huts outside the gaol. Other ranks sleep on platforms made from split bamboo. They have no beds and many are without blankets.
⁶

Total AIF deaths reported but not officially accepted or substantiated is approximately five thousand four hundred and fifty-four – that is from total AIF force of nearly twenty thousand captured in Malaya and Netherlands East Indies. AIF records office states that no estimate can be given as to casualties suffered by large forces of AIF taken from Singapore to other parts of the Far East and South East Asia since 1942.
⁷

One of the first Australian POWs Lennard met was a former newspaper journalist and now a public relations officer who had been interned in Changi prison camp, Captain Maurice Ferry. Ferry had been writing the story of the Australian POWs during his imprisonment and he recounted the shocking tale of the thousands of Australian and British troops sent from Singapore to work on the Thai–Burma Railway. Ferry told Lennard and other war correspondents of the forced march of more than 300 kilometres from the railhead in Thailand to the jungle work camps.

There can be only one title for that march – it is the worst journey in the world. Hundreds of men collapsed on the first night and thereafter we toiled through the jungle in
teaming monsoonal rain with half of the men being carried or dragged along tracks by their comrades. Frequently we walked through water up to our waist and at night had to prop exhausted men up against trees to stop them drowning. Half the men were without boots before half the journey was completed.

The camp in which we were to live presented an appalling scene. Clustered on a steep hillside was a crude collection of roofless native huts, and it was here that cholera began to spread rapidly. One day after our arrival so many were dying that it was necessary to build funeral pyres to get rid of the dead, and those fires never stopped burning. They were still alight four months later. At least two hundred died from the dreaded disease but worse was to come. Though every man in camp had dysentery – and there were no exceptions – the Japanese put us to work, in spite of the protests of medical officers, carrying baskets of rock and heavy logs for building the railway embankment and road. It rained every day yet we worked fourteen hours a day – leaving camp in the morning in darkness and arriving back late at night. We never saw the sun in our camp for months. We arrived back in camp at night with nothing to do but sit up with rain capes over our heads trying to keep dry.

Wounds from Japanese boots, cuts from their whips quickly turned into huge tropical ulcers which completely encircled men's legs. Australian and British doctors in desperate attempts to save lives, were forced to hack off limbs with ordinary hand saws, but most men operated on in this manner died. The scenes in the hospital wards were indescribable. There were men suffering Blackwater Fever, malaria, ulcers, scabies, dysentery, and some were swollen
to enormous proportions from Beri Beri . . . The death toll mounted each day and by the time we got out of that horror, thousands of men had died in the camps along the jungle railway.

Eventually, following continued protests from our doctors, the Japanese agreed to move the sick to a new camp. They did this in open trucks and one in which I travelled had six dead when it reached its destination. The Japanese refused to allow burial en route. In all, hundreds died during the journey, and at each new camp each morning there was a stack of bodies outside each hut waiting to be carried to a communal fire. At one stage out of nineteen hundred in camp, including six hundred Australians, there were fewer than one hundred men fit enough to do camp duties of cremation and cooking. Sick, emaciated men lay on bamboo slats in gloomy huts too weak to brush off flies that tortured them, and I saw hundreds of men too weak to lift a spoon, being fed in the arms of their comrades.

Ultimately there was such an intense air of melancholia over the camp that the Australian doctor in charge walked through the wards, shouting ‘For god's sake men, fight for your lives. If you can't fight for yourselves, fight for your women and children. Don't leave your bones in this accursed country.'
⁸

In one of his first despatches from Singapore, Lennard reported the news that Australian women nurses were in a prison camp near Palembang, on the island of Sumatra. It had been known for a couple of years that a group of nurses was being held in
a camp somewhere on the island but a rescue attempt had not been possible during the war. Lennard now confirmed that the nurses were the only survivors of a group of 65 from the SS
Vyner Brooke
, which had been sunk by the Japanese while fleeing the fall of Singapore.

APPROX. THIRTY-FIVE AIF NURSES ARE NOW IN PRISON CAMPS AT PALEMBANG IN SUMATRA. THEY ARE SURVIVORS OF THE FORCE OF NURSES WHICH LEFT SINGAPORE ON FEB TWELVE FORTY TWO (CORRECTED), THEIR SHIP BEING TORPEDOED IN THE JAVA SEA. CONDITIONS IN THEIR CAMP ARE SAID TO BE BAD.
⁹

Lennard had long been interested in the story of the
Vyner Brooke
and the fate of the nurses, and he had picked up more information since his arrival in Singapore. However, more than a week after the liberation of the island, the organisation for the Repatriation of Prisoners of War and Internees (RAPWI), set up to recover, care, and account for POWs, was still dealing with the thousands of POWs on Singapore itself. RAPWI told Lennard they were unsure of the exact location of the prison camp but Lennard believed he knew enough to try to find them. He cabled the ABC the names of all 65 of the nurses who had been on board the
Vyner Brooke
, to be held until he could confirm the names of the survivors, and he then arranged an RAAF flight to Palembang. His following reports on the nurses were sent in a stream of cables.

PROCEEDING SUMATRA IN EFFORT EVACUATE PARTY AUSTRALIAN NURSES. HAVE FILED STORY OF OFFICIAL REPORT. ALSO TWO LISTS NAMES ALL WHICH MUST BE HELD UNTIL RELEASE OK.
¹⁰

Several officials travelled with Lennard on board the plane but attempts to find out the location of the prison camp from the Japanese at Palembang were unsuccessful. Lennard and a Flying Officer Brown commandeered a Japanese car and drove around 200 kilometres to Lahat, where they finally found out that the prison camp was at Loebok (now Lubuk) Linggau, another 160 kilometres away. While the war was over, the disarming and containing of Japanese forces was still underway and Lennard and Brown found themselves mired in lengthy negotiations with the Japanese. Late at night, after five hours of talks at Lahat, they again set out – Brown by road with a fleet of Japanese cars and Lennard by train. Lennard arrived at daybreak and then pushed on by truck to the camp. They had telephoned ahead to say that they would take all the sick women and children from the camp and Lennard found the women waiting, some of the sick already loaded into vehicles.

The move to the special hospital train was made over a muddy jungle track in heavy rain but even the stretcher cases were so overjoyed at their liberation I am sure they would have got up and walked the twelve miles from the camp if no transport had been available. We outfitted one carriage in the train with mattresses, pillows and sheets which we also commandeered off the Japs. When I saw the dreadful state of the some of the women, I realised this afterthought was one of the luckiest moves we made.

As I was leaving this horror camp, the last words of the British woman doctor in charge were ‘Thank god, you've cleared all the sick out of the hospital.' Brown arrived with cars in time to transport the last of the patients from the camp to the train. We set out with sixty-two on board –
the critically ill, five children, including an orphan who had been picked out of the sea, and the nurses.
¹¹

Lennard found the scenes inside the camp sickening and he was shocked by the emaciated condition of the women, and by how few of the nurses from the
Vyner Brooke
had survived.

Out of a party of sixty-five nurses which left Singapore, only twenty-four still alive. Twelve missing, believed drowned, twenty-one massacred by the Japs, eight died in prison.
¹²

Lennard could now tell the story of the nurses after the sinking of the
Vyner Brooke
. They were among a larger group which had landed, exhausted, on the beach of Banka Island.

Twenty-one Australian nursing sisters were murdered by the Japanese on Banka Island off Southern Sumatra shortly after the fall of Singapore. They were lined up on the beach with their faces to the sea and mown down in cold blood. The tragic story was released today with the rescue of survivors from a foul prison camp in the heart of Sumatra.
¹³

The Japanese had slaughtered a group of around 50 men further down the beach and then returned to the nurses and the other survivors.

The Japanese returned, some wiping blood from their bayonets. They then lined up the remainder of the service personnel, including the nurses, and ordered the party to walk towards the water, facing the sea. A soldier with a tommy gun ordered open fire and the nurses, civilians and merchant seamen were shot down.
¹⁴

The only survivor of the massacre was Sister Vivian Bullwinkel.

Bullwinkel was shot through the thigh, fell into the sea and was washed out thirty yards where she was left for dead by the Japanese. She staggered shore wards amidst the bodies of her comrades and then wandered in the jungle for two weeks before giving herself up through hunger and exhaustion. The whole story of the massacre has since been kept the closest secret because of fears that the Japanese would murder her as an eyewitness to their shocking atrocity.
¹⁵