Australian War Reporters- John Hinde, Chester Wilmot and More Besides

Tony Hill is the managing editor of ABC News 24, the ABC’s television news channel. As an ABC foreign correspondent in Indo-China/South East Asia and the Middle East he covered major stories such as Tiananmen Square and the first Gulf War. Tony Hill is also the author of Voices From The Air which records the heroic efforts made by Australia’s war correspondents in World War II – especially in the Pacific war at a time when audio visual technology was in its infancy and radio had replaced newspapers for speeded up news.  On Wednesday 1 March 2017, Tony Hill joined Neil McDonald to discuss the men who recorded some of the most daring news in Australia’s history.

AUSTRALIAN WAR REPORTERS – JOHN HINDE, CHESTER WILMOT AND MORE BESIDES

TONY HILL 

There is a combative relationship today between the media in the United States and Donald Trump … and “fake news” and “truth” are terms in common use.

Chester Wilmot – as Neil McDonald’s book shows us – exemplified the commitment to truth. He paid a price for that but was more than vindicated as one of the greatest correspondents and chroniclers of World War II.

The military regulations for press covering World War II recognised the unavoidable tension in the relationship between correspondents and the military – They said, “the essence of successful warfare is secrecy. The essence of successful journalism is publicity”. Anyone working in the news media knows that this dynamic in the relationship between those who hold great public responsibility and the media is fundamental to what we do.

The war correspondents of the time acknowledged the need for censorship, but they regularly, and rightly, contested the limitations on their reporting. However, they generally also saw their role as part of the war effort. The reporting of some correspondents was also coloured by a soft propaganda and patriotic language – not too surprising given the times, the Australian lives that were lost and the very real threat to Australia’s own security.

Sixteen ABC war correspondents covered World War II – including 14 reporters and two sound technicians (two other sound technicians/engineers played a smaller role in the Middle East). They were all men.  Since then some of the most distinguished ABC foreign correspondents and reporters of war and conflict have been women, but at that time, while some women worked in news roles for the ABC, none were accredited to report from the field.

Wilmot’s talent and reputation rightly stands tall among the ABC correspondents, but every one of them has a remarkable tale – in some ways it is a story of ordinary men in extraordinary times, but the times made them exceptional. In reviewing Voices from the Air, Barry Oakley described them as those “unstoppable men” – and it sums them up very well.

John Hinde who would later go on to become a well-loved and respected figure as the ABC’s film reviewer for many years, was injured in a bombing raid on the beach at Hollandia. There’s no doubt thereafter that he suffered from PTSD and in the last days of his coverage of the Philippines campaign, he believed every day that he was going to die.

Haydon Lennard, the first ABC newsman sent into the field for the Pacific war was badly burned in a plane crash in New Guinea in which two war correspondents for the newspapers were killed. Yet he was back in the field six months later. All of the correspondents suffered malaria or dengue fever and a host of other illnesses – but they kept on going, criss-crossing the battlefields of World War II, from one campaign to the next.

Many of them narrowly escaped death from shellfire or snipers and one of them, John Elliott, became the first ABC correspondent to die in the field, when he was killed at Balikpapan very near the end of the war. But, inevitably after the war, some of the others who survived also died much too young as a result of the effects of their wartime service. For many, relationships suffered and marriages failed and post-war life was often challenging.

They had varying talents and skills: print journalists newly converted to the demands of radio, broadcasters and radio technicians; among them were soldiers, an Olympic boxer, a poet, a morning radio show host, a champion athlete; big drinkers, big characters; quiet men and shy men.

They were also notable in other ways – they were the first war correspondents for the young national broadcaster – the first Australian radio correspondents to cover Australians at war – and they contributed to the ABC’s overall coverage of the war and the public trust in the ABC as a source of news.

World War I had been a newspaper war – the papers were the only real source of news for the Australian public. By the time of World War II, although still a relatively new medium radio was already an established fact of life for many Australians with more than a million radio licenses for Australia’s population of just seven million people.

Radio brought a new immediacy and visceral understanding to events on the frontline – for the first time the sounds of war: the crash and boom of gunfire, the voices of Australian soldiers on the frontlines; and the voices of war correspondents reporting from the battlefield, were broadcast into Australian homes. There was a reach, and a power and immediacy to radio’s coverage of the war beyond that of the newspapers.

In 1947, built in significant part on the success of its coverage of the war, the ABC news service was established – independent of the news from the newspapers on which it had in part relied. This was the beginning of what is now the ABC News service of today. This first group of war correspondents were also pioneers in the use of new technology and extending the capabilities of reporting from the field. The large disc recorders and the other equipment used to record sound in the field and weighing up to 200 kilograms are primitive and unbelievably cumbersome by comparison with today when better sound and more creative editing can be achieved with one iPhone.

The recording gear travelled many thousands of miles in a utility truck across the harsh landscape of the Western Desert, with Wilmot and his colleague, Lawrence Cecil. The ABC field units recorded in caves in wadis, in shell-holes and in gun pits; during sandstorms that filled the grooves of the records with dust as each track was being cut; in the snow and bitter cold of Greece that so hardened the recording surfaces of the discs that the technician Bill MacFarlane had to hug them to his chest under his greatcoat to make them soft enough to record.

They recorded under the hail of small arms fire and exploding shellfire, and under the rattle of falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns; they recorded on land and at sea, including on board a cruiser during a fierce air raid on Alexandria Harbour. In the Pacific war they carried the recorders in jeeps, on the backs of tanks and with the help of local porters; they waded ashore at night from landing craft, with the equipment on their shoulders, in pitch black lit only by the flash of lightning from tropical storms; and they slogged through thigh-deep glutinous mud to the frontlines of the pestilential coastal battlefields of Papua. Strange fungus grew inside the equipment, metal quickly corroded and white mould appeared within days on the surface of discs … and everything took time, time to move the gear, time to record and then to send the story back home.

At Labuan in Brunei Bay in 1945 the correspondent Frank Legg and the technician Bill MacFarlane planned a ground-breaking recording of the naval landing – they arranged for the jeep carrying their recording equipment to be the first one off the landing craft. That first jeep drove straight off the craft into 14 feet of water and the equipment was never seen again – it was the only vehicle in the convoy to be lost.

The logistics of working in the field and delivering the stories could be heart-breaking. Despatches from the correspondent John Elliott in the Philippines were disrupted by Japanese raiding parties that cut the wire carrying his reports to the radio ship. Recorded discs sent off through Army channels disappeared from existence. Despatches sent by shortwave were not received due to poor reception. And censorship cut the heart out of some stories or banned them all together. While the access of the correspondents to the battlefield was extraordinary – they often travelled with the troops and sometimes carried weapons in defiance of all the rules and conventions of war – they were also limited by their accreditation that placed them under military authority. The freedom of operation for the correspondents of the ABC – as the national broadcaster – was sometimes more constrained than for the papers – at least in the eyes of the military – and the ABC was aware that its reporting could have broader implications.

During one row with the ABC, the Director General of Army PR disingenuously emphasised the public importance of the “reliability and authenticity” of the ABC’s reporting from the field. It was a bogus complaint but the integrity of the reporting was important to the reputation of the broadcaster and its ability to hold its own in the political currents of the time. The perception of “fake news” would have been damaging to the ABC’s infant news service.

Bill Marien, a stubborn and occasionally hot-headed man of Irish-Italian heritage, fought bitterly against Army PR accusations of inaccuracies and misleading reporting. After covering the capture of Lae in 1943, he also opposed the Army’s efforts to direct his movements in the field to the areas and the campaigns that they wanted covered. “I am not a soldier,” he argued in a heated disagreement with one Army PR officer. This and other rows were probably a factor in his decision to leave the ABC and report the closing campaigns of the war for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Frank Legg rowed with the Army over its supposed manipulation of the coverage of New Britain and limitations on his ability to work as he saw fit. Another ABC correspondent Raymond Paull joined with a group of war correspondents fighting Army PR over censorship and a range of grievances during the Aitape campaign. As a result of this and some public statements he made about the row, Paull was not sent back into the field.

The Pacific war saw a great expansion of ABC correspondents in the field – reporters worked with field units recording sounds and reports onto discs and others filed news copy from the frontlines and forward HQ. This greatly expanded war coverage meant that ABC correspondents were there throughout, and at the beginning and the end of the major campaigns. Singapore is a good example.

Henry Stokes was a Reuters correspondent during the Spanish civil war and was an acquaintance of Kim Philby, the notorious double-agent but then also working as a correspondent in Spain. Stokes shared hotels in the Balkans with German officers whose boots he saw outside their rooms each night waiting to be cleaned and polished for the morning. He was evacuated from the debacle of the Greek campaign together with Wilmot and other correspondents in 1941 and the following year was the ABC correspondent in Singapore when the Japanese invaded the Malay Peninsula. Stokes was with the Australian headquarters staff at the front during the first heavy Japanese bombardment of the Australian positions. He escaped the island on the night that the British blew up the radio transmitters and arrived in Java on board a British naval patrol vessel the day before news of the surrender came through. Stokes was both privately and publicly critical of the British failure in Singapore that led to the capture of many thousands of Allied soldiers – including 15,000 Australians.

In 1945, Haydon Lennard arrived in Singapore with Mountbatten’s fleet for the liberation of the island. His first shortwave broadcast from Singapore carried a message from the commander of the Australian POWs in Changi prison. The message read in part “it has been a long wait but now in our relief we are jubilant and grateful”. Lennard went on to track down the survivors of a party of Australian nurses whose ship had been sunk fleeing the Japanese invasion in 1942 and who were being held in a prison camp somewhere on the island of Sumatra – and to tell the story of one of the more infamous episodes of the war, the massacre of 21 of the nurses by Japanese troops on Bangka Island. He flew to Sumatra, commandeered a car and then a train from the recalcitrant Japanese still on the island and evacuated the nurses and other women in the poorest health, including Vivian Bullwinkel, the sole survivor of the Bangka Island massacre.

Reporting the news and the stories of Australians at war was the focus for the correspondents but their personal stories and their reporting against formidable odds is a compelling story.

Few television viewers in the 1980s and 1990s were aware that the somewhat pixie-ish but crusty John Hinde known to them as the ABC film reviewer had been there to watch Macarthur’s historic steps onto the beach at Leyte in 1944 – fulfilling his promise to return to the Philippines. They would not have been surprised to know just how jaundiced was Hinde’s view as he watched Macarthur repeat the landing several times for best effect.

The heroic Australian push that drove the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track was reported for radio by the ABC correspondent Dudley Leggett – a champion athlete of supreme fitness who struggled as the soldiers did with the daunting conditions of the terrain, and who would die at a young age only four years after the war from meningitis contracted during his service in New Guinea.

One of the oldest ABC war correspondents, Fred Simpson, spent long periods in the field with the diggers in New Guinea, reported on the bloody fighting against the Japanese and listened to the tales of atrocities recounted by the POWs. Yet, in 1946, when reporting from post-war Japan he sought out the families of the Japanese midget submarine sailors who had died in the attacks on Sydney Harbour and presented them with a recording of the funeral service held for their sons in Australia.

John Elliott, an Englishman and Olympic boxer, soldier and adventurer, covered the Philippines campaign for the ABC. His death in 1945 was the end result of a chain of missed opportunities and fateful decisions. He resigned from the ABC but agreed to stay on a little longer; he then agreed to cover one more campaign; he then missed his flight home from Balikpapan and stayed one more day; and he was then shot and killed by mistake by an Australian Bren gunner, who from a distance, mistook his American cap for a Japanese soldier’s.

Wilmot aside, the tales of the ABC correspondents have remained largely untold – they are part of the story of Australians at war.