Voices from the Air (5 page)

Just over a fortnight after Bardia, the Allied forces were ready to attack Tobruk, the harbour fortress next in the westwards string of coastal Italian strongholds. Wilmot was contemplating the risks ahead of him as he wrote to his parents from outside the Tobruk perimeter.

Our troops are attacking Tobruk tomorrow – I am going in with them as close up as I can get – that's my job – I can
only speak of what they go through if I go through it with them as much as I can. If anything should happen – don't reproach me – we all knew that if I did this job properly I would have to take the risks of an ordinary soldier. My conscience wouldn't be clear if I did less than that – I am doing that and I hope that by doing so I am doing my part in this war. God bless you all and keep you as he has kept us all these many years – I have no regrets.'
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The battle, when it came, was one of the most stirring days Wilmot had ever experienced. It was a still night with a bright moon in the early hours of 22 January when he drove around the Australian lines outside Tobruk: ‘occasionally a short burst of machine-gun fire or the roar of an odd gun reminded me that I was at the front and from time to time I could hear the rumble of motor lorries and tanks which were moving up to the assembly areas behind the start line.'
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Most troops were still asleep but meals were being prepared and by four o'clock RAF bombers were attacking the town and Italian antiaircraft fire was lighting up the night sky. The recording unit was set up in a gully near the British artillery positions when the main barrage began just before six. ‘There was a doomsday thunder and lightning – the whole rim of the horizon flashed as guns roared and then came the sound of the explosions in Tobruk. They rumbled across the plain and were amplified by the hills south of the town until even the ground around us seemed to shake.'
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Wilmot covered most of the battlefield in the course of the day. He observed the artillery barrage, then by dawn he was with the troops in the eastern sector ‘still putting up strong fire with mortars and machine-guns to keep the Italians occupied'. He went with a transport column through the wire
on the frontline and came upon an Italian post just as it was being smoked out of concrete dugouts. He drove on to other posts captured by the Australians and as he moved northwards bombers overhead were fired on by Italian anti-aircraft guns and he passed long lines of marching prisoners. From a hill in the afternoon he watched as Australian infantry attacked two enemy positions and at the end of the day he was with the most advanced troops close to the town of Tobruk itself: ‘already the Italians were burning their petrol dumps and blowing up their ammunition and all night long fires blazed and the flash and roar of explosions told of more sabotage. The battle for Tobruk was as good as over and as we went back to our dug-out in the dark we had to edge our way past thousands of prisoners who seemed to be pleased that it was.'
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The following morning in Australia the BBC radio news opened with the plain statement – ‘Tobruk has fallen.'
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Being close to the frontline and the fighting gave Wilmot first-hand knowledge of the battle and the terrain. It also imposed greater risks. At Tobruk, his fears before the battle seemed to be grounded in part on his acceptance of the unavoidable lottery of the battlefield, where anything could happen, and on his determination to place himself as close as possible to the action. In the end, Wilmot had to accompany Lawrence Cecil in search of the best spot to record the opening barrage, which prevented him from going in with the first troops.

In Tobruk they set up base in a stone-walled enclosure just over a metre high and about 3 metres square, with a roof made up of their tent and Italian blankets to block any light from leaking out at night. Here they recorded Wilmot's despatches. As a broadcast correspondent, Wilmot found his task was more complicated than a print journalist's.

The pressman has a big advantage over the broadcaster . . . he doesn't have to carry round the same amount of gear . . . he can thrash off a story in cablese and that's that . . . but the broadcaster has to take his gear with him . . . has to write a finished script . . . rehearse it . . . and then get up early next morning and record . . . pack and move on. It's a much bigger job and there's also this – a censor can cut a piece out of a censored message . . . and it won't spoil it . . . the correspondent needn't worry so much about the censor – even if a bit is cut out it won't matter . . . but a record once cut can't be censored easily . . . I have therefore to comb every sentence for possible infringements . . . because even though in relay to the BBC offending parts can be cut out, the cuts destroy the continuity.
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The logistics of delivering stories also tried the endurance, patience and organisational skills of the Field Unit. To despatch the recordings from Libya and the Western Desert, a member of the Field Unit would drive up to 800 kilometres to Cairo, and then back again – taking them away for several days at a time – but at Tobruk they found an alternative.

. . . the RAF came to our rescue and one of the communications flight planes carried the records from their forward aerodrome to Cairo, thereby solving a considerable part of the problem. But of course the records had still to be brought from the frontline to the Drome, often rattling and bumping across desert country and over roads that would test the most skilful drivers.
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At the beginning of February 1941, Wilmot and MacFarlane were on the road to Derna, camping first in an inn that had been turned into a field hospital, and then in a mosque. At night, Wilmot typed his scripts for the BBC by the light of a hurricane lamp in their truck, with his typewriter balanced on his knees. The Italians abandoned Derna, and Wilmot and MacFarlane left their car where the road had been blown and walked the last two miles into town with Australian engineers, just a couple of hours after the first infantry. Chester observed:

Right through the town we found things strangely intact. The Italians had set alight the barracks and the ordnance store, but the power station and the flour mill were all ready to start operations at once. I saw one house bolted and shuttered with blinds drawn just as if the owner had gone off for a week's holiday . . . There is barely a sign of warfare in this Lotusland town.
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Wilmot gathered the story of the attack on the heights that commanded the town and wrote his reports. Paper for scripts and letters was in short supply through much of the war. As a result, correspondents scrounged whatever paper they could, and one of Wilmot's Derna scripts was typed on the back of letterhead from a local Italian maritime agent. Italian battlefields would sometimes be littered with paper left by the fleeing troops and Wilmot noted later in his report on the battle at Beda Fomm that British troops there were scavenging among millions of pieces of paper.

Chester had friends and acquaintances in the Australian units and among the press contingent, and he wrote to his
father that he was also developing contacts among the officers and commanders.

. . . wherever I go . . . I run into people I know and I think that there is barely a unit in the desert where I don't know someone who can help me . . . I have spent a lot of time in the last six weeks in getting to know these people and I find it is worthwhile, and I am now in the happy position of being able to approach the leading staff officers in all Brigades in the desert and at Headquarters and I am usually told a lot. At no time have I ever found difficulty in moving round the lines – except for one occasion when I was stopped at the last minute from going out on a fighting patrol because they thought it was too dangerous . . . but ordinary facilities for news garnering have been very readily provided here and I have had a number of lucky breaks.
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One such lucky break, and Wilmot's own initiative, had ensured that he was the first war correspondent into Derna. The next day, following advice from a contact, he was the only correspondent with the Australians in the southern sweep against the Italians on the escarpment at Giovanni Berta, and again entered the town ahead of the press. He was making his own luck. ‘Breaks like this you only get if you have first made contacts with people who trust you enough to put you in the picture.'
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At the camp in the wadi at Sollum, Cecil had endured more than two weeks of a severe gastric illness, but had continued working. The almost constant travel in desert conditions was now affecting Wilmot's throat and nose, and some of his recordings were sounding nasal in tone. For weeks he seldom achieved more than four or five hours' sleep a night. He gathered material for a story during the day, wrote it at night and then he
and Bill MacFarlane recorded it early in the morning in order to catch a plane from the nearby RAF airfield. Nevertheless, he was very fit and his solid, robust physique was coping well with the rigours of reporting, though his friend Harold Austin thought that Wilmot's technique for going to ground during a bombardment could clearly do with some improvement: ‘he says I am the best target the enemy has in the AIF . . . my posterior sticks up no matter how I flatten myself.'
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Wilmot was now becoming desperate at Lawrence Cecil's decisions about the movement and recording priorities of the field unit. ‘I have complained to him about the output of the unit and told him I think the commission will be dissatisfied . . . it is my reputation that is at stake in all these talks and if the stuff doesn't appear they'll think I can't turn it out.'
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Wilmot now made a point of operating separately from Cecil in the field.

Cecil's time was partly occupied with the administration of the field unit and its liaison with the Army, and he was still distracted by the dysfunctional relationship with Reg Boyle, the PMG engineer at the base receiving station in Gaza, who oversaw the unit's equipment and maintenance.

Soon after the fall of Tobruk Cecil had left Wilmot and MacFarlane and set out to ‘hitch-hike' back to the base at Gaza for discussions with Boyle and the Army. It provided one of the few talks that Cecil wrote. ‘. . . recent experiences lead me to believe that the Middle East and particularly Palestine must be the home of hitch-hiking; that is judging by the calm assured manner in which the citizens, Jews and Arabs, expect to be conveyed about the country free of charge. They will hail any type of vehicle whatsoever, the General's car or a private brougham, a lorry or perhaps a tank.'
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Hitching lifts by truck, ship and train, Cecil made it to Gaza. Coming back through the Western Desert the familiar
sandstorms slowed and sometimes stopped the truck convoy in which he was travelling, and three days later in Libya on the way to Benghazi his truck skidded in the rain and rolled over down an embankment. He escaped dazed and with minor cuts but nothing worse. Cecil arrived at Benghazi soon after it was captured and the next night, when Wilmot had returned from the battlefield, Cecil, Wilmot and MacFarlane had dinner at the restaurant Alberto Italia while an air raid was under way.

The next day Cecil had to turn around yet again and return to Ikingi Maryut. When his almost non-stop travel finally halted, he had had been travelling for three weeks and had hitch-hiked 4000 kilometres.

Wilmot and MacFarlane spent just four days in a ‘pretty little villa on the sea' in Derna, before they set out towards Benghazi. The first campaign in Cyrenaica, the Italian colony covering the area from Bardia to Benghazi, was coming to an end. Chester and Bill followed the British and Australian advance through the Italian farmlands towards Benghazi. Wilmot wrote: ‘All along the road white flags flew from the houses – and peasants stood in the doorways and waved or else came out with cups and bottles of wine for the troops, and many a brawny Australian hand was lightly brushed by an Italian woman's lips.'
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Wilmot believed the Italians in Cyrenaica saw ‘only ruin for themselves in Mussolini's grandiose ambitions', and he compared the warm welcome from the Italian and Arab villagers to his experience in Vienna in 1938 when he had seen Hitler's troops march in to ‘sullen looks and forced greetings' from the Austrians.

The ancient land that was now a modern battlefield was rich in interest for Wilmot, the reporter and historian. Passing through the ancient Greek and Roman town of Cyrene, he took time to marvel at the view over the ruins of the Sanctuary of Apollo, perched on an escarpment that fell away hundreds of feet to the farmland below. In his later report, Wilmot described the more prosaic scene that night after the capture of the town of Barce, as tired soldiers huddled around fires against the cold – ‘that night the rain came down in torrents . . . and the campaign which had started in dust was ending in mud'.
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After repairs to a broken spring on the ABC utility truck, Wilmot and MacFarlane hurried over the muddy, boggy roads in the wake of hundreds of army trucks, only to reach Benghazi and find the Italians had already fled. The Australian forces continued beyond Benghazi in pursuit of the remnants of the Italian 10th Army but the Italians were finally caught by British armoured units which struck across country to intercept them. Wilmot recorded several reports on the campaign for Cyrenaica, including the exploits of the British units who defeated the Italian tank force and army at Beda Fomm. ‘When I drove over the battlefield a few hours after the fight ended there were wrecked tanks along the road and belongings strewn beside them as far as the eye could see. At one knoll I counted 26 field guns and dozens of Italian tanks which we had shot up. There was wreckage everywhere.' Wilmot recounted the story of the capture of the Italian force as told to him by a British commander. ‘It was just luck,' the commander told Wilmot. ‘If we'd been a little earlier, they might have been warned and stayed back in Benghazi . . . if we'd been a little later, we might have missed them.'
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