Voices from the Air (9 page)

The enemy has tried to drive them out, to starve them out and to bomb them out, but he's failed. Here the AIF and the British and Indians who've fought with them, have waged one of the greatest defensive actions of all time. Technically invested, they have broken out in punishing raids so often since May the enemy has been far more on the defensive than we have. It may be too much to say that the men in Tobruk saved Egypt in April and May when we were deeply involved in Greece and Crete, but they certainly made a major Axis offensive against Egypt impossible . . . But the men of Tobruk have given us more than time . . . they've given the world an example of firm courage and unbreakable spirit at a moment when the fortunes of war seemed to be turning against us.
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Soon after he arrived, Wilmot went out to one of the hotspots, the Salient – an area of flat land held by the Germans that bit into the line of the Allied perimeter where ‘the German line and ours is a series of machine-gun posts and weapons pits dug from the open desert. In parts the two lines are under 200 yards apart, and though there isn't the continuous line of trenches that both sides had in the last war, here for the first time in this war you have Australian and German troops facing each other across a narrow strip of “No Man's Land”.'
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Wilmot gave an atmospheric picture of the Salient in that early night-time visit to the frontline with BBC war correspondent Edward Ward and some British and Australian officers.

After about half an hour's bumping along we got to a bit of a hollow – the furthest forward the vehicles could go. A chink of light from a hole in the ground beckoned us to company headquarters. We lifted a ground sheet and dropped down a man-hole that led into an old water-cistern – roughly pear-shaped and about 30 feet long. Through a fug of cigarette smoke and dust the light of hurricane lamps lit the cistern. Fellows were sitting around eating and talking. Their evening meal had just arrived and they were busy making the most of it. It was the same meal we'd had earlier – bully beef stew with potatoes and onions; boiled rice and tinned apricots; tea – a pretty good feed – in the circumstances. It was pretty warm in the cistern but at least you could have a light there. There were sticky flycatchers hanging from the roof, but they hadn't been able to do anything about the fleas. I realised that after I'd been there a few minutes.

From the cistern we took another guide and went on about half a mile to the forward posts. As usual in the desert where there are no landmarks the guide took a sig. [signal] wire in his hand and we followed the track to the first post easily. It was one of the concrete posts the Italians had built. Down inside it some men were sleeping in the corridor; up on top men were manning every fire position. Further on still we came to a post right in the salient – one that the Australians had had to dig themselves. It had been hard work for the post could only be dug under cover of darkness – it had been some job getting down through the rock, sand-bagging the fire positions and wiring the post round. But by hard work and ingenuity the men had made themselves as comfortable as you can be in a shallow trench that's continually swept by drifting dust. On the way up
and on the way back every few minutes enemy flares lit up the plain and half a dozen times bursts of machine gun bullets sang past. Probably they were much further away than they seemed, but we went to ground just in case. Altogether it was a quiet night, but very often the men who carry the ammo, rations and water forward from company headquarters to the frontline posts run into a little local hate, but somehow or other they manage to get through, for the posts in the salient must be kept supplied.
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Bill MacFarlane was forced to return to Gaza for repairs to the recording gear before they could begin the major recordings covering the previous five months of the siege. With MacFarlane away, Wilmot made plans for recording actuality of the sounds of battle in Tobruk, as well as his stories on the defence of the garrison. It was impossible to get the recording equipment to the front lines of the Salient. Vehicles could not get within 1000 metres even at night and the equipment was too heavy to carry.
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Wilmot wanted to record actuality of a dive-bombing attack by enemy planes and had been scouting out locations down by the harbour which he planned to try once MacFarlane returned. He wrote to Cecil, who was up north in Syria recording soldiers for the ‘Voices from Overseas' programs: ‘Had a hell of a raid here yesterday – 75 planes . . . 40 bombs in our wadi . . . one ten yards from the tent . . . four, thirty yards away. Twenty-five holes in the tent . . . I wasn't here and luckily we have the gear stowed away in a pretty safe place.'
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MacFarlane returned to Tobruk a few weeks later. Wilmot had been ill, and he was frustrated at having no recording gear and angry at delays and censorship from the Tobruk command. He wrote a letter to his friend, Major George Fenton, the
military censor in Cairo. Chester complained about delays in the passing of scripts at Tobruk and what seemed like some inane objections from the fortress HQ. He was also angry at the blocking of his story,
In a Dug-out in Tobruk
– ‘I have showed this to half a dozen platoon commanders and serjeants [sic] and they have all agreed that it is typical and true . . . so does the Brigadier who commands the sector. My feeling is that direct writing is what is wanted these days.'
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Part of the script re-created the casual conversation of the three men in the cramped dug-out and described the conditions on the frontlines: wounded unable to be brought back for treatment until after dark, cramped conditions, flies and fleas, dull rations and the boredom and ‘nervous strain of holding the most vital part of the perimeter, where the pressure's greatest'.
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Wilmot and MacFarlane set out to record the sound of air raids and dive bombing, and set up the recording equipment in an unused weapons pit near a gun position on the south side of the harbour. ‘Fifty yards away on our right is a Bofors gun manned by a crew of Scotsmen; 200 yards to the north is the harbour dotted with the hulks and masts of wrecks and a half a mile away across the water is the shell-and-bomb-torn town of Tobruk – target of more than 100 serious air raids a month for the past five months.'
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Chester and Bill's gun pit was built up with rocks, and partly roofed over with boards donated by the Scottish Bofors crew for protection against shrapnel from the ack-ack fire bursting right above them. In the cramped space MacFarlane slept between the batteries and the recording gear. To guard against the noise of the wind, the microphone was put in a box
frame covered by a blanket and hung from a beam at one end of the pit. Wilmot sat roped off in a little pen just over a metre from the mike so that his voice didn't drown out the important background noise of the air raids.
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He drew a sketch of the pit in a letter to Edith.

Chester Wilmot sketch of gun pit at Tobruk Harbour – ‘A. Batteries B. Recorder C. Amplifier D. Bill (not quite so recumbent as that) E. Box with mike in it F. Chair (nice soft bucket seat from a bus) where I sit while waiting G. Rope to keep me away from the mike H. Board'

For two weeks in September, Wilmot and MacFarlane recorded the sound of air raids from the pit by the harbour – and Chester would spot for planes with his binoculars. As bad luck would have it, there were no Stuka dive bomber raids with the blood-chilling, wailing siren that Chester wanted to record: the Tobruk air defences had gradually neutralised much of the effectiveness of the German dive bombers.
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However, Chester and Bill also made recordings with their neighbours, the Scottish crew manning the Bofors, with whom Chester shared a bottle of whisky – the first scotch the gunners had seen in many months.
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It required skill to operate the recording gear in the field, particularly during the raids, and Chester paid deserved tribute to Bill MacFarlane's abilities.

Working under these conditions Bill MacFarlane has an unenviable job. Cutting discs for broadcasting is no easy matter any time but when it comes to setting up the gear and cutting the discs by the light of an electric torch shaded by a khaki handkerchief, you need great skill and patience. Just as difficult is the problem of judging just how loud a certain explosion is going to be. He has to sit with his hand on the controls ready to fade down as soon as the extra loud whistle of a bomb tells him that the burst will be too loud to record at normal level.
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By now, they had been through many raids and bombings. There had been 25 air raid warnings and 15 planes had dropped bombs in the previous 24 hours when Chester wrote to Edith:

I find I only feel exhilarated – I feel much as I would if I were waiting for a 120-yard hurdle race to begin or for a Test broadcast to start. I don't feel scared in the ordinary sense at all. Six months ago I should have been scared stiff but now it all seems rather remote – what's happening round me doesn't seem to have any personal relationship with me – I am a spectator looking at something going on.
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An earlier, nerve-wracking visit to the perimeter at night also prompted Wilmot to reflect that:

. . . this is very trivial compared with what the troops go through, but there's this point . . . it's extremely good to
make yourself do things like that when you don't have to. An ordinary Digger has to go back for rations or with a message . . . well, that's that, the decision is made for him . . . but when you haven't got to do something, the decision you make to do it, is very good for your Character, I'm sure.
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Wilmot recorded his series of programs on the siege and defence of Tobruk, including the Easter Battle and the Battle of the Salient. He spoke to senior officers and soldiers, got their stories in their own words and scripted it for them to read on the recordings, and this also provided the starting point for the book he wrote after returning from the Middle East, which was the first definitive account of the siege.

Around the end of September Wilmot and MacFarlane made some battle recordings that again extended the ability of radio to create an actual sound-picture for the audience at home. One battle recording was from a frontline post, tunnelled into the side of the escarpment overlooking the road to Derna. The recording gear was inside the tunnel and the microphone was set up in an open, sand-bagged machine-gun pit on the slope outside, overlooking the enemy positions on the plain below. For one report MacFarlane recorded Wilmot's talks with the soldiers of the post and the ‘whine and crump of shells and the swish and crack of bursting mortars which fell around the post'.
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In another, called ‘Sound and Fury', Wilmot delivered his commentary over the sound of the guns, giving the listeners in Australia a vivid, real-time picture of the battle.

Wilmot: Now our artillery and machine guns have opened up and all round us we can see the flashing of guns on the
horizon . . . the enemy's mortars have opened up and they have been landing some mortars not very far away from us. I don't know how far away – how far away would it be? Sergeant: About 300 yards.

Wilmot: . . . I won't speak for a moment or two so that you can actually hear something of what I can hear in this forward machine-gun post . . . that was a mortar . . . that was another mortar – they seem to be landing in the wadi not terribly far from us. Just now the bursts of tracer fire as they hit a rock and started to ricochet and go along the flat . . . it suddenly seemed to sweep up in the air in a slow sweeping curve . . . that was a ricochet then, ricking from quite close to us . . . that was another mortar . . . and there's another one coming – blew in a little bit of sand on us then but it is probably some hundred yards away.
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In his time at Tobruk, Wilmot noted that he had been granted exceptional access to official documents and to talk to officers and men. However, in October 1941, his last month in Tobruk, he wrote again to George Fenton to blow off his anger at changes to his scripts by the Tobruk command: ‘The most petty, the most petty-fogging and the most petulant use of the blue pencil that I have ever met.'
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One of his scripts took 22 days to be approved, though the average time was about two days and generally any news despatches for the BBC were passed quickly.
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Fenton proved more than just a friend to Wilmot, and Cecil was also deeply grateful for his help. In Cairo, Fenton would receive the recorded discs from Wilmot in Tobruk or Cecil in Syria and Palestine, unwrap them, listen to them for censorship, re-wrap them and despatch them to the BBC or the ABC. He also re-directed messages and mail to the dispersed members of the field unit.