Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  When the first soldiers of the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were deployed to the Middle East the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG) began building a specialised mobile recording studio that could accompany troops to the warfront. The large studio van was based on the existing ABC mobile unit – it was slow, cumbersome, and weighed almost four tons. Unsurprisingly, it was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ by the members of the field unit, and would prove difficult to transport and impossible to get anywhere close to the frontlines in the Western Desert of North Africa. The interior of the van was fitted out with two fixed recording turntables, amplifiers, two portable recorders and other equipment for recording. Cables, around 200 metres long, enabled microphones to be taken anywhere outside the van to feed a reporter’s commentary, interviews or actuality sounds back to the van. Sapphire needle cutting heads cut tracks in large, soft acetate-coated discs that were prone to wear on playback. The ABC team in the field had to be efficient and disciplined in listening back to tracks or in dub editing onto other discs, as the tracks would become noisy after even three playings.

  A smaller utility truck was supplied for everyday use and this could be easily taken into the field with the portable recording gear, and would prove much more useful on the frontlines.

  ABC correspondents with each field unit were not accredited as war correspondents to cover news; they were designated as observers tasked with making recordings – including their own feature reports. The ABC general manager, Charles Moses, initially wanted the Middle East field unit to also cable news back from the warfront for ABC news bulletins, but that did not prove possible. The restrictions imposed by the newspapers, on whom the ABC still relied for a significant amount of news, the limited format of news bulletins, and the limitations on communications from a warfront on the other side of the world, meant the focus would be on recording longer reports, actuality broadcasts and interviews.

  The photographer and filmmaker Frank Hurley was chosen as the broadcaster for the ABC field unit, but Hurley was then transferred to lead the Official Photographic Field Unit. It was a stroke of luck for the young Chester Wilmot who was called in to replace him.

  Chapter 3

  OUT OF A QUIET HARBOUR INTO A HEAVY SEA – THE MIDDLE EAST FIELD UNIT

  On 22 September 1940, people lined the wharves at Fremantle, cheering the departure of a convoy of troop ships as it set sail for the Middle East. A military band played, streamers flew in the breeze and there were cheers from the wharves and from the departing Diggers as the dark-grey and black painted ships pulled away from the shore and slipped from the harbour. Nine hundred and fifty soldiers were packed onto the overcrowded Dutch ship, the Indrapoera, and as it ploughed through the rough waters, many were sick, fouling the decks and companionways.1

  The ABC war correspondent Chester Wilmot had been miserably seasick a few days earlier while recording a story on board another ship before the convoy sailed – now on board the Indrapoera he reckoned that he was proof against almost anything and he didn’t turn a hair in the heavy seas of their departure. Sailing with Wilmot were the other members of the ABC field unit: ABC producer in charge of the unit, Lawrence Cecil, radio technicians Bill MacFarlane and Leo Gallwey, and engineer RJ Boyle.

  Before embarking, the ABC field unit had spent time making recordings with the soldiers of the AIF in the camps around Perth, and they would now spend almost a year and a half with the Australian troops on the battlefields on the other side of the world. At the outset there was very little to guide them in facing the fears and responsibilities of reporting from the frontline. They followed in no one’s footsteps – they were the first Australian radio correspondents to go to war.

  They left in high spirits but Wilmot noted in his diary that they were sailing ‘out of a quiet harbour into a heavy sea and that seemed to symbolise the troubled international waters into which we were sailing’.2

  Chester Wilmot was just 29 when he became the ABC’s first war correspondent. A solidly built man, with a forceful intellect and character, he studied law, history and politics at the University of Melbourne, wrote for newspapers and wrote and broadcast commentaries for the ABC. The year after he graduated he travelled overseas on a debating tour to Asia, North America and Europe, and during his 19 months away also broadcast commentaries of the cricket Test matches in England for the ABC. In 1938, Wilmot was in Vienna when German troops marched in ahead of the annexation of Austria, and later that year he saw the forces of Nazism at work in Germany itself. At the Rally for Greater Germany on the massive Nazi Party rally grounds at Nuremberg, he watched Hitler address the party faithful with messianic fervour – it was, he observed, ‘the time when pilgrims from all parts of Germany come to worship their lord and Fuhrer’.3 His stay in Germany at the time of the Munich crisis left him in no doubt about the danger posed to the rest of Europe, and with a deep sense of the failure of British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and the policy of appeasement.4 Wilmot believed that war was inevitable, however he was unsure what effect it would have on his own life. ‘I seem to have regarded it as something that was going to happen in the world . . . but not to me . . . as though I were going to be free to make my own way uninterrupted and settle down into a nice comfortable bourgeois niche.’5

  Chester returned to Australia, where he worked as an articled law clerk, spent some time writing broadcast propaganda for the Department of Information and continued to write and broadcast commentaries for the ABC. His skills as a journalist and his broadcast abilities were already obvious, and the ABC general manager, Charles Moses, viewed him as one of the ABC’s ‘outstanding descriptive broadcasters’.6 Wilmot trained in the militia with the Melbourne University Regiment, where he enjoyed the comradeship but felt restless, and was frustrated and discouraged by the lack of direction in the training. When the offer finally came to be a war correspondent he welcomed the role: ‘I feel that I have a job to do which the government thinks I can do better than other available people . . . My only hope now is that we shall be able to do such a good job that any possible critics will be silenced by the weight of the work that we do.’7

  At the end of August 1940, Chester was travelling across the country by train to join up with the field unit in Perth. His sweetheart, Edith Irwin, sent him a telegram en route, with the message: ‘Keep your finger on the pulse of the world. Australia expects etc. . . . Hitler little knows what’s coming. Darling I think you are wonderful.’8 Lawrence Cecil, the radio producer and officer in charge of the field unit, met Wilmot when he arrived to join the rest of the team encamped with the troops of the AIF. Chester thought Cecil looked not unlike the lion in The Wizard of Oz and ‘liked him immensely right from the jump’. Cecil was more than twenty years older than Wilmot, grey-haired and distinguished looking: ‘a really delightful man with a quiet manner and a great interest in the welfare of his men’.9 Wilmot observed that Cecil, the former thespian, still had something of the actor in his manner and bearing, though he was ‘not a poseur’. Of the other members of the field unit, the technician Bill MacFarlane would work most closely with Wilmot and Cecil. The 26-year-old MacFarlane had worked with Wilmot before on broadcasts for the ABC and Wilmot was pleased to work with him again.

  Along with the camp recordings before their departure, Wilmot and Cecil recorded a story of an Australian minesweeper in action off the West Australian coast – the only encounters on the day were with a few whales, but it was a good test and provided a colourful radio feature with the sounds of the minesweeper in action and Wilmot’s commentary.

  Settling In – Palestine and Egypt

  The convoy arrived at Suez in October via the Red Sea, where the ships were expecting an attack by Italian planes. Wilmot planned to do a broadcast from the bow of the Indrapoera in the event of a raid, but the passage through the Red Sea was uneventful. Months later, by then a veteran of air raids, Wilmot recalled that day in the Red Sea in one of his many letters to Edith – ‘all the afternoon before the expected su
nset attack, I was not at all my best self. I was definitely on edge . . . in fact I was scared, because I didn’t know what it would be like.’10

  At El Kantara on the Suez Canal, Cecil disembarked and crossed the Sinai to the army base at Beit Jirja in Palestine to make arrangements for the arrival of the unit and to meet the Australian commander, General Blamey, who would authorise the operation of the ABC team. As evening fell that day, Cecil was in his tent writing his first letter to the ABC since his arrival – airmail letters were the main means of communication with the ABC – and by the light of an oil lamp he sketched out his plans to record soldiers’ messages to their families back home, and the enthusiastic response he had received from the first soldiers he had talked to.11 Voices from Overseas would record the voices of around 8000 Australians serving overseas and it would be one of Cecil’s major tasks.

  Within a few days he met up with Wilmot and the rest of the unit as they docked at Haifa and finally off-loaded Jumbo the studio van, the utility truck and all their gear. Wilmot wrote to his family about the Jewish settlements, Arab villages and the city – Tel Aviv – they passed along the coast southwards to the camp at Gaza. He had expected Tel Aviv to be a ‘great modern city’ but instead it was a ‘twentieth-century ghetto – transferred from Europe and set down in the hot Palestine coast. The streets are narrow and crooked and they just teem with people’.12 They set up camp at the Base Depot at Beit Jirja just outside Gaza, the transit point for newly arrived troops, and waited for an opportunity to go into the field with the Australians.

  At that stage, Lawrence Cecil was the only member of the Field Unit with battlefield experience. Cecil was the senior ABC drama producer in New South Wales and had been a stage actor in England, the United States and Australia, but he was chosen to head the field unit as much for his military background as for his extensive broadcast experience. A captain in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in the First World War, Cecil had been wounded and awarded the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry for action at Frémicourt, when he ‘covered the retreat of the battalion with his Stokes mortars firing his last round when the enemy were close upon him. He then joined the battalion, assisted in the reorganisation, and fought every foot of ground with the utmost courage.’13

  There was no doubting Cecil’s courage or fundamental decency but despite Chester’s liking for the older man, some of Cecil’s decisions and his inertia frustrated Wilmot, who wrote to his father that the ABC producer was a ‘tired man . . . He always thinks in terms of the difficulties not in terms of overcoming them.’14 This characterisation of the generally well-intentioned Cecil does not take account of the hard work and the rigours of his time in the field over the coming year. Nevertheless, his management of the field unit and his own recording priorities sometimes obstructed Wilmot’s reporting plans. The engineer with the field unit, RJ Boyle, was a senior PMG officer and a stubborn, difficult and abrasive character, sensitive to his status within the unit. He vehemently rejected any involvement by Cecil or Wilmot in technical matters and refused to acknowledge Cecil’s position as leader of the unit, which was required by the Army accreditation under which it had to operate. With Cecil lacking the necessary toughness to manage the conflict, it was an almost impossible situation. Luckily, Boyle would spend his time on base, managing the radio receiving station at Gaza with the other technician Leo Gallwey, rather than in the field with Wilmot or Cecil.

  Colder winter weather arrived as the Field Unit moved into a simple, five-room concrete block house at Gaza that would become a permanent base. The house, rented from a local Arab landowner, had a garden plot and was only around 500 yards from the sea. Wilmot did a quick sketch of the layout of the house for his diary.15

  Boyle erected aerials and set up the receiving equipment to pull in ABC radio broadcasts from the AWA transmitter at Pennant Hills in Sydney. It had been intended to on-pass the broadcasts through long cables and speakers to the troops in the surrounding camps, but this proved impractical and, instead, radio news received at the Gaza base was taken down in shorthand and then sent to Jerusalem to be broadcast by the Palestine Broadcasting Service.

  The members of the unit were accorded the privileges of army officers and Cecil arranged batmen and a cook for the ABC house – army drivers were also provided. Wilmot would come to admire the unaffected bravery and resilience of Australian soldiers but he had no illusions about their behaviour – ‘I don’t wonder the Arabs feel sore about the way the Diggers behave,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘There have been some ugly incidents.’16 The night before Wilmot and his companions moved into the Gaza house Australian Diggers robbed an orchard belonging to the Arab landlord and beat his watchman. And there were other, more disturbing stories of violent behaviour by Diggers circulating, including the shooting of a villager.

  By the time the field unit base was established in Gaza, troops of the 6th Australian Division, who had been training in Palestine, had already moved to the Helwan camp in Egypt on the western side of Cairo. Italy had significant forces in the Libyan end of the Western Desert, the expanse of mostly stony soil and patches of sand17 stretching westwards from the fertile fan of the Nile Delta around Cairo. The closest Italian forces in Egypt were some 400 kilometres from the Delta around Sidi Barrani.18 From there, Italian forces stretched back to the west in a chain of coastal defences, at Sollum and then into Libya, at Bardia, Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi.

  With the utility truck and portable recording gear, Wilmot, Cecil and MacFarlane set up an advance base at the village of Ikingi Maryut, a staging camp for Allied troops on the edge of the Delta a few kilometres from the coast and not far from Alexandria. Ikingi Maryut was a summer refuge for wealthier Egyptians and Wilmot and his companions were billeted in a pleasant house.

  . . . we have plenty of water from an artesian well . . . about an acre of garden with wattle trees, olive trees and river oaks, there is a nice verandah in front and I am working out here now, climbing up the front of it are bougainvillea plants well in bloom . . . This will be a very good base for us to move from when we want to go forward and we can come back here every few days to despatch records.19

  Wilmot was soon impatient to get to grips with the work ahead of him, but without an easily available electrical supply to charge the batteries for the recorder he had been limited to only a few hours recording a week: ‘it is very frustrating especially as I am the sort of person who must work at full pressure or not at all . . . I doubt if I have ever been fitter in my life – and if only I was working really hard I’d be perfectly happy.’20

  The press correspondents at Ikingi Maryut sent their copy by landline to Cairo where it was typed out again before being censored. All recordings made by the field unit at Ikingi Maryut and in the field in the Western Desert had to be hand-carried to Cairo for censorship and delivery to Australia. The return trip between the Delta and Cairo was at least 400 kilometres across hard, dusty roads. Recordings were despatched by plane to Australia and some were played over a radiotelephone link to the BBC in London, but Wilmot would also sometimes read his scripts from the radio studios of the British-controlled ESBS, the Egyptian State Broadcasting Service, for direct transmission to London for the BBC and the ABC. Stories transmitted via the BBC were included in BBC news bulletins or Radio Newsreel, which included audio recordings of correspondents’ despatches from the field, and picked up by the ABC for use in its own programs. Wilmot later estimated that nine out of ten of his despatches sent this way would actually reach the ABC.21

  In December, Cecil and MacFarlane were near Mersa Matruh, a town along the coast from Alexandria and on the road heading west towards the Libyan border. Mersa was a departure point for roads leading into the Western Desert and a way station for many of the field unit’s travels. In the middle of a fierce sandstorm, Australian soldiers gathered in a dugout where MacFarlane set up the microphone to record Christmas greetings to their families back home. It was a far cry from recording in the towns and cities of Austra
lia.

  Bill MacFarlane had grown up in Melbourne, where he became a skilled PMG radio mechanic with experience working with ABC mobile recording and broadcasting units. His work with the field unit overseas created the first Australian field recordings of Australians at war. In his mid-twenties, black-haired and bespectacled, the practical-minded, unexcitable MacFarlane was a painstaking technician and proved very adaptable in the challenging conditions of the desert. In the sandstorm at Mersa Matruh, while Cecil handled the microphone in the dugout, MacFarlane battled valiantly with the recording gear in the covered back of the utility truck as the vehicle swayed in the wind and sand filled up the grooves on the recording disc as soon as they had been cut. Wilmot later described the sandstorms of the Western Desert as ‘thicker than the worst London fog. You could not see a man ten yards in front of you, and even the sun was browned out’.22

  Itching for a Chance – Bardia

  This will be the Australians’ first big action in this war and the men at the front are itching for a chance to show their worth.23

  The British campaign in the Western Desert began with the capture of Sidi Barrani in December, after which Wilmot joined the Australians of the 16th Brigade on the plateau outside Bardia.

  The utility truck with Wilmot, Cecil, MacFarlane and the driver set out from Ikingi Maryut to Bardia on roads made muddy by rain and then on tracks dried by the sun, where the passage of the truck left long clouds of dust trailing in its wake. As during many of their trips in the Western Desert, the truck staggered under the weight of everything they would need: ‘recording gear, turntables, amplifier, inverters, batteries, records etc, food and water for three weeks, petrol, blanket, pick, shovel, etc. for we had to be independent of the Army’.24