Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  The ship was crowded ‘with hundreds of civilians: Greeks, Jews, Americans, British, all sorts of people and their dogs, their cats, their pet birds, their bedding, their suitcases and all sorts of odds and ends. A seething humid mass, all battling for the best positions’.73

  They sailed after midnight just before an air raid that sank any remaining ships in the harbour. There were 300 soldiers, 250 refugees, 130 German prisoners and a dozen war correspondents on board. The ship survived several bombing raids on the short journey to Crete, the last one just as the passengers were being taken off to go ashore.74 Wilmot had been under fire numerous times and had been scared many times during the six months or so that he had been in the field, but he wrote to his family:

  I do know this – that the prospect of being shelled or bombed is far more alarming than the actual thing. The unknown and unexperienced is worse than the reality.75

  One of the war correspondents evacuated with Wilmot was Henry Stokes, a Reuters correspondent who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the conflict in the Balkans. Wilmot later wrote a reference for Stokes and on his return to Australia, Stokes would become a war correspondent for the ABC in Malaya in the last months before the fall of Singapore.

  The earlier ship carrying Cecil, MacFarlane and the ABC truck had fourteen alarms on the journey to Alexandria and was bombed and machine gunned; two passengers were killed and six others were injured. Cecil was slightly wounded by a piece of shrapnel from machine-gun fire.

  I was out in the open when the ship was machine-gunned. A burst hit the deck directly in front of me, where there was a case of bully beef, and scattered fragments in all directions. I felt a sudden sting in the wrist and realised it was bleeding. Whether this was caused by a splinter of explosive bullet, or an undignified scrap of bully beef tin I am unable to say, but the machine-gunning was the cause.76

  Wilmot’s main focus on his return to Egypt was scripting his reports on Greece and analysing the failure of the Greek campaign. ‘The lesson of the campaign I think is this. Not even the best troops can hold a numerically superior enemy without adequate air support – and at no time did the Anzac and British troops in Greece have this.’77 He urged more air support for the troops in the Middle East and returned to a similar theme in a broadcast on the subsequent defeat in Crete. ‘The main thing that the Greek and Cretan campaigns teach us is that troops on the ground cannot hold positions in the face of continuous strafing from the air.’ He criticised ‘the strange lack of foresight’ by the Allied command and stressed the need for hard work and ‘clear original thinking’.78 Some of his stronger comments were censored, and an even more critical script on Crete that drew clear conclusions about the lack of planning and preparation was completely barred.

  Wilmot showed his report on Crete to senior commanders and to other correspondents. ‘My piece on Crete is still under fire, but everyone who was in Crete to whom I show it says that it is right.’79 He then met General Wavell, the commander-inchief: ‘he is much shorter than I thought – had thin grey hair brushed straight back – a square rugged jaw and a swarthy jowl. An accident has put his left eye out of action and it lurks deep in its socket with an eye-lid drooping over it . . . but he makes up for this with the steely glint he gives you with the other eye . . . I’m afraid that all told he rather mopped me up.’80 While Wilmot was disappointed in Wavell and his own failure to more strongly argue his case with the C-in-C, he was also disarmed by Wavell’s frank acceptance of responsibility for Greece.

  [Wavell said:] ‘I agree with most of what you say, the facts are true, the criticism is mostly fair, though I don’t think you’ve quite appreciated my difficulties . . . you are giving away information of propaganda value to the enemy, if not military value. I agree with what you say in general. I realise I should have foreseen the things you mention – but I didn’t and those I did foresee I couldn’t do anything about because I didn’t have the equipment.’81

  Wilmot had a jaundiced view of the actions in Greece of the Australian commander, General Blamey, though this was not explicitly expressed in his reports,82 and he was critical of the ‘Headquarters’ lifestyle of some of the Allied command in Cairo, including Blamey. An ABC Commissioner, SJ McGibbon who was visiting Cairo was also disturbed by what he saw of the ‘old men’ of Cairo and their social life and afternoon siestas. In Chester’s view Cairo was a distraction from the real business of the war and he preferred the challenges of the frontline, despite the very real discomforts. He wrote to Edith at the end of May, about a month after his return from Greece:

  I’m afraid that Cairo depresses me – the heavy humid air of the Delta hangs a pall of sloth and inertia over everyone – it saps your mental energy and slows down your physical responses and it takes more will power to keep yourself working here than it does even out in the desert. When there are cool easy ways of being leisured it’s very easy to be tempted and to fall. Out in the desert it’s not hard to keep going through the heat of the day – there are no cool rooms – no beds with cool white sheets where you can have a siesta – no hotel lounges where you can sit in the late afternoon and have tea – there are no swimming pools at the Gezira Club to tempt you to while away the afternoon . . . and when night comes . . . you turn in early most times . . . you perhaps have to cook your dinner in the dark – hiding the primus in a kero tin in the front of the car – but after you’ve eaten and washed up it’s usually about 10 or 10.30, so you go off to bed and get up at dawn and write your story.83

  The inability of the field unit to despatch reports directly and immediately to Australia was frustrating for Wilmot – and to a lesser extent Cecil. The field unit, being observers, did not have the right to use the faster priority cables used by the press for their news despatches. Daily news was not in the field unit’s brief but Wilmot’s reporting was focused on the immediate turn of events in the war, and he was chafing against the lack of a direct radiotelephone link back to Australia, and against some of the features that the field unit was expected to provide: ‘a newsman must be his own boss. I can’t be expected to cover the news front and do serious commentary if I have to go off and do interviews and features and odds and ends like that.’84 By contrast, the BBC had a more news-focused role, and its reporting aimed at expanding on the daily news through programs such as Radio Newsreel, to which Wilmot also contributed. Wilmot noted the difference between himself and Cecil, who adhered to the field unit’s accreditation as observers (features) rather than war correspondents (news – mostly the preserve of the Press).

  . . . if there is one thing he won’t own up to being it’s a war correspondent . . . somehow to him it just ain’t nice. I fully agree with him that it is highly desirable to dissociate yourself from the press, but I still find it desirable to get news out to Australia before it’s dead.85

  Regardless of their different approach, Cecil supported Wilmot’s representation to the ABC about the problems in filing stories, but there was no easy solution. Without a direct radiotelephone link to Australia, the field unit airmailed its recorded discs or relied on the BBC using the items in its own programs broadcast for reception in Australia. Cecil estimated that about four out of five items sent in this way were actually used in BBC programs and could therefore be picked up by the ABC.

  A Warship in Action – HMAS Perth in the Mediterranean

  With Bill MacFarlane back on base in Gaza, at the beginning of June 1941 Wilmot, Cecil and the other technician, Leo Gallwey, boarded the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth at Alexandria. Cecil recorded messages for the ‘Voices from Overseas sessions with about 150 sailors, who queued eagerly for the chance to speak on the radio to their families back home. An air raid struck that night as the ship lay in harbour at Alexandria with dozens of other warships – and the ABC was there to record the attack.

  . . . the guns on the ships in the harbour opened up and hell was let loose. There were hundreds of guns firing on land and sea and the air quivered with their thunder . . . and
when our own four-inch guns joined in the barrage the whole ship shuddered and the air seemed to rush past you. You felt dwarfed by the immensity of the forces that were let loose all round you.86

  The ships in the harbour escaped unscathed from the bombs dropped during the four-hour raid – but Wilmot watched the destruction rain down on the shore: ‘Most of them fell among the helpless people in the city and casualties were heavy. They started some fires and before long a heavy dull red pall of smoke hung over part of the city – it was also a pall of death.’ Hundreds of people were believed killed in the attack on the city, which was the first large-scale raid on Alexandria. Both Wilmot and Cecil recorded descriptions of the raid, passing a microphone back and forth between them as they watched from the bridge, and Leo Gallwey operated the disc recorder from a small room below – but whenever the Perth’s guns fired the ship shook and the recording needle leapt off the record, and broke. Chester commented on the difficulties of recording in a later article for the ABC Weekly.

  We’ve now made recordings in tents and dug-outs in the Western Desert during sandstorms – in a cave in Sollum – in a wadi outside Tobruk in between our guns and the Italians’ – in an abandoned Italian fort outside Derna with birds chirping on the roof. Dogs barking and sheep and goats careering and threatening to overturn the mike anytime. We’ve made recordings in rooms of the Hotel d’Italia in Benghazi, the famous Shepherds in Cairo and on the roof of the Australian Comforts Fund Hotel in Alexandria. All these have caused their special problems, but nothing has ever caused so much concern as trying to record on a warship in action.87

  The cruiser was undergoing repairs even before the raid, having been damaged by German aircraft as it was evacuating troops from Crete.88 Cecil and Wilmot recorded interviews with the officers and crew about their time in the Mediterranean since arriving in December. They almost certainly wrote a script for the crew, based on the sailors own words, as the field unit often did for the more structured features. The voices of the crew ranged across deck, engine room, crow’s nest, wireless office and gun crews.

  Soldiers, not Mountain Goats – Syria and Lebanon

  With the Allied invasion of Syria and Lebanon on 7 June 1941, the field unit finally gave up its advanced base at Ikingi Maryut on the edge of the Nile Delta from where it had covered the fighting in the Western Desert. Cecil moved the unit’s equipment back to Palestine, to the permanent base in the house at Gaza. A few days after the campaign began, Wilmot and MacFarlane followed the Australian troops of the 21st Brigade, who were pushing north along the Lebanese coast towards Beirut. From an observation post overlooking Sidon on Friday 13 June, Wilmot watched Vichy French air raids on Allied naval ships and on the Australian forward positions, which suffered heavy casualties.89 Again, Wilmot’s reporting was detailed and accurate but did not suggest the scale of the losses by the Australians. Censorship, and pre-emptive self-censorship, meant that Australian casualties might be generally acknowledged but were often not detailed in reporting.

  Cecil had joined Wilmot by the time Sidon was captured and, while the Navy was still shelling some French rearguard positions on the far side of Sidon, they entered the town with the leading handful of troops to an enthusiastic welcome and an embarrassing case of mistaken identity.

  To the crowd, Lawrence with his silver hair curling up round his cap was at least a Brigadier . . . and I presume I was taken for his ADC . . . we held our heads high, waved back and did our best to uphold the honour of the AIF. But we kept getting out of step. Lawrence was an officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps last war and it’s famous for its extra-short snappy step. I learnt a swinging 30 inch step with the Melbourne University Rifles and somehow we never can keep in step.90

  They eventually convinced the Chief of Police that they were not the official party come to accept the surrender of the town. Wilmot was sensitive to the problem – he wrote a different story of the surrender of Sidon for the BBC without these details. This was the report that troops in the Middle East might pick up on shortwave. He explained why in his later ABC broadcast.

  In this war certain correspondents have been vying with each other in claiming that towns have surrendered to them . . . That was one reason for drawing the veil . . . but the other was the feeling that after the troops have been fighting their way in, it’s hardly fair for a couple of correspondents to flaunt the fact that they got the welcome the troops deserved.91

  Chester took his Sidon recordings and the scripts south to Jerusalem for censorship and tried several airfields to find a plane to despatch the recordings to Cairo, picking up yet another story on an Australian squadron as he went. He was back in the north the next day. By necessity, he had become very quick at writing. ‘One thing I have found is the speed at which one can learn to work – I used to toil for hours at scripts I now write in less than an hour.’92

  Australian troops on the inland advance were trying to retake the fort on the razor-backed ridge at Merdjayoun and Wilmot spent several days observing the Australian attacks. It was rough terrain. ‘We were told of a stretcher bearer who was 24 hours getting a wounded man out. . . . when you start wondering why the Australians didn’t make short work of Merdjayoun, it’s as well to remember that they are soldiers and not mountain goats.’93

  After Merdjayoun was captured on 24 June, Wilmot went in search of some of the Queensland troops who’d taken part in one attack the previous week. The field unit truck was pulled up by the side of the road while they listened to the BBC news from London on a radio set ‘scrounged’ by Cecil’s batman. Chester described the scene in his report:

  Arabs crowded round us and in a moment or two we found ourselves joined by a party of Diggers who came bowling down the road on some very fractious mules. We found they were some of the Queenslanders we were on our way to see. And so here we are now parked by the roadside – our recording gear is set up in the porch of an old Arab inn – round the microphone are Diggers and Arabs, goats, donkeys, mules, camels, dogs and even one bright young Syrian with a four foot brown snake.94

  The Queenslanders had used the captured mules and donkeys to bring in supplies to Merdjayoun – ‘the mules had to pick their way along goat tracks and between huge rocks – so close together that at times the saddles got stuck’.95 The Diggers recorded their accounts for the microphone, recounting one key action in which French tanks trapped the Queensland troops against the fort at Merdjayoun.

  The tanks started hunting us and succeeded in rounding up small parties. I was with a crowd of 19 who were cut off. We hid in an old stone house and luckily the tanks didn’t see us. But the mortar bombs were landing all round us and nearly wrecked the house . . . we decided to run for it – five at a time . . . I was with the first five, and we got away, but I’m sorry to say the 14 chaps we left behind didn’t.96

  As with many of the recordings sent back to the ABC throughout the war, the names of those interviewed were provided on the script so the ABC could check the latest casualty lists before airing the broadcast.

  On the morning he left Merdjayoun, Chester woke at 5 o’clock before the sun had risen to burn away the mist from the cliffs and ridges that had demanded such endurance and sacrifice from the Australians. He made a poignant observation in his diary.

  26 June 1941 Hard by where we’d slept were two graves of Diggers who had been killed only the day before . . . a neat cross edged with black marked the grave of Private RC Smith and [a] cruder one the grave of LWC Bevan. Smith is the third brother in the same family to be killed in action – he has three more brothers in the AIF.97

  On 6 July, Wilmot was writing to Edith from an observation post less than three kilometres from Damour, on the coast road south of Beirut: ‘the Wilmot corpse is tucked away between a couple of rather substantial rocks on top of a hill’.98 Shells from the Navy just offshore whistled past so loudly overhead that he had to shout for Cecil to hear him a mere 15 yards away, and he had just killed a snake in a dry well behind him – ‘a bloke d
ied of snakebite here the other day – so you’ve got to be careful’.

  Chester was thinking about the presentation of his reports. His parents had heard one of his reports from Damour and thought he had been speaking too quickly, but he explained that describing a battle at a distance was rather dull and speaking quickly helped to build up the excitement. Wilmot was an experienced descriptive commentator at sporting and other events even before he became a war correspondent, but he was aware that the nature of combat reporting required some adjustments.

  His reporting at Damour continued the approach of his own eye-witness reports and narratives using information from the soldiers who’d taken part in the fighting.

  During the last two days I’ve been over the area of the most serious fighting with men who were in the action. They’ve told me how a West Australian Battalion had to fight its way across the river and had to climb the walls of terraces eight and ten feet high before they reached the start line for their real attack . . . after this they had to get through the barbed wire. The entanglements weren’t very strong but they were swept with machine guns. At one spot a platoon of 23 men reached the wire. The platoon commander went forward to cut it; he was shot; the platoon sergeant went up . . . he was wounded . . . and so it went on, 17 men were killed or wounded before they could make the breach. What tremendous courage it must have taken to go forward when you’d seen five, ten or fifteen men fail in the attempt.99

  Damour was the last significant action for the Australians in the Syrian and Lebanon campaign.100 A ceasefire came into effect on 12 July. Lawrence Cecil had now fetched Jumbo from Gaza as the better roads in the north were more suited to the big studio van. He entered Beirut with the Australian troops and recorded the actuality of the arrival. Wilmot was ill with dysentery and Cecil had sent him to Haifa to rest but he came to Acre for the formal signing of the Armistice with the Vichy forces on 14 July before going into hospital at Gaza.101