Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  American and Australian planes joined in the artillery and naval bombardment of Japanese positions and Lennard flew over the frontlines in one of the small American Piper Cubs that carried supplies and evacuated wounded from tiny airstrips hacked out of the jungle. The plane was sometimes flying at little more than fifteen metres above the thick trees and undergrowth and Lennard was mystified why the Japanese did not shoot at it. He was told that any shooting inevitably brought down a heavy hail of American artillery fire in response. Another task for the small planes was to lay signal wires over the tops of the trees, dropping the weighted end of the wire over the side of the plane and unspooling the wire from a reel tied to the side. In this way, they laid the communications channel for HQ to get in touch with units out in the jungle.60

  By the end of July, Lennard was reporting that the Japanese had withdrawn from some of their frontline positions and that it was now doubtful whether even fifty Japanese remained in those areas, from the thousands who launched the initial attack on 11 July.

  These fifty are completely cut off and are wandering starving and exhausted in the jungle morass behind our lines. Prisoners being captured are in a pitiful condition, covered in sores from jungle rot. They have been without food for four or five days . . . one prisoner I saw last night being treated in an American frontline hospital had rubbed dirt in his wounds and sores – believing that this would help his injuries . . . Bombing of Japs is still going on right from Wewak up coast to Driniumor. Pilots in low-flying aircraft over Wewak area say that carnage there is incredible and report that the whole area is polluted with the stench of dead Japs and rotting supply dumps. Crows and other birds of prey are swarming over the area creating a danger to aircraft as these scavengers rise from the dead below.61

  With more correspondents in the field, the co-ordination of their sometimes overlapping responsibilities to file for news bulletins and Talks programs became more complex. In April 1944, Frank Dixon complained to the Controller of public relations, Syd Deamer: ‘the arrangement by which war correspondents supply material to both news and talks is not working satisfactorily as far as the News Department is concerned.’62 However, there would continue to be some cross-over in correspondent roles through to the end of the war and the greater number of correspondents in the field provided the ABC with its own independent and more comprehensive war coverage.

  Chapter 13

  THIS IS THE THING THAT’S GOING TO GET ME – THE PHILIPPINES

  The air was often hot and still at Hollandia when John Hinde was making recordings late in 1944. As he sat before the microphone he thought he must look like a medieval saint, with his head surrounded by a huge globe of flying ants glowing in the lamplight, and to finish his recording he would fling a jacket over his head and speak through a gap in the cloth.1

  The ABC had begun to gear up for the next phase of the war. Fred Simpson was reporting from New Guinea with Len Edwards and the field unit, and Haydon Lennard, Ray Paull and Frank Legg would all return to the field in the coming months. In September, John Hinde covered the American landings on the island of Morotai, in the Halmaheras, which would become an important base for MacArthur’s offensive in the Philippines. At Hollandia where Hinde recorded some of his stories the radio voice-channel at the GHQ base could now provide immediate reports from the forward areas, though the shortwave reception for some of his Talks stories was unreliable and some scripts were cabled to be read by an announcer in the studio back in Sydney. One of Hinde’s surviving scripts told the tale of a village priest on Morotai. The people of the village close to the expected American landing area had retreated inland for safety, tasking their priest to stay and welcome the Americans. The priest was asked by the Japanese why he alone was left in the village and he replied simply that he was waiting for the Americans to arrive. The Japanese beat him and told him that the Americans would never come, but he replied that he had been told to stay. The Japanese beat him again and ordered him to resist the Americans, but he insisted that it was his duty to welcome them to the village.

  When he was unconscious, the Japanese threw him into a shed and locked the door. He lay there in the blood and dirt all day and the next morning there were guns and he saw the Japs running and somehow he found strength to break the lock of his door and weak and bloody and uncertain on his feet he was the first man to welcome us to Morotai.2

  From Jungle to Green Fields

  From Morotai, eyes were now on the Philippines, and within a few days, squadrons of American ‘Black Cats’ – the black painted, night-raiding, Catalina flying boats – had arrived in Morotai harbour. The Cats began reconnaissance flights over the Philippines and John Hinde flew on a night mission to within 300 kilometres of Manila.

  We came back with one lonely bullet hole in our tails and for me an imperishable memory of the big planes standing on one wing while our guns blazed and tracers lit up the holds of Japanese ships in the dark sea below. Memories of wild cursing over the intercom system as a lone Japanese plane crossed our bow and loosed a stream of fire at us, but perfect team work and an utter disregard for the risk and loneliness of that nightlong trip.3

  Hinde later reported that in the first fortnight of their operations from Morotai, the Cats sank or crippled one hundred thousand tons of Japanese shipping – fifty-one ships.

  In recent months, Hinde had been travelling a lot between GHQ in Brisbane and New Guinea, and was now working out of the main forward base at Hollandia. The Morotai landing was his first major operation since he narrowly survived the air attack on the beach at Hollandia in April, and he was still experiencing some after-effects of the blast concussion, including hearing problems. On his return from Morotai he cabled Molesworth of the Talks department. ‘Please pass message to wife. I’m fine, back at base, writing, miss her deeply, continually.’4 He had returned from the Morotai beachhead having had little sleep in the previous six nights to find the other ABC correspondents had gone elsewhere, and he was now covering the GHQ daily conference on his own. Hinde was exhausted and strained when he cabled Molesworth again a few days later, saying that he was verging on hospitalisation from lack of sleep and suggesting that ‘News treats its next man better’.5 Frank Dixon may have had little appreciation of the continuing effects of the April bombing on Hinde’s health and responded firmly to Hinde’s remarks, but plans had already been put in place for more support in the American theatre, and another correspondent, John Elliott, joined Hinde in Hollandia in early October.

  On 27 October 1944, John Hinde wrote the opening lines for his latest report – ‘This is John Hinde reporting from Leyte Gulf, where the first battle of the Pacific Fleet has been fought and won in the past forty-eight hours.’6 The naval Battle of Leyte Gulf, from 23 to 26 October, crippled the Japanese fleet and secured the American invasion of the Philippines. John Hinde was on board the American and Australian convoy and landed sometime after the first amphibious assault on 20 October. ABC reports said later that his tank landing craft was hit five times by Japanese fire and then became stuck on a sandbank for almost 50 minutes.

  MacArthur had stepped ashore on Leyte, and Hinde had watched his stage-managed return to the Philippines with a critical eye for the American theatrics. Hinde was depressed, and probably suffering post-traumatic stress, though it would not have been recognised at the time. His wife Barbara had given birth to their daughter, Rosalind, a couple of months earlier and he felt keenly that he had a responsibility to stay alive, but ever since the concussion at Hollandia he had been feeling unwell and somehow fated.

  Somebody was going to bop me off anytime. I felt that I wasn’t going to come through this war – a sort of deep anxiety or something. I was suffering from a quite acute form of déjà vu, of knowing, not so much that I’d seen things before but that I dreamt them the night before. A couple of dive bombers would come out of the sky and come down and suddenly I’d know for certain that I’d dreamt this the night before and I’d think this is it – this is the thing t
hat’s going to get me.7

  During the decisive day of the naval battle, he was at the rough airfield at Tacloban on the island of Leyte, waiting through the daylight and the darkness and ‘hours of terrific tension’, as the news that would determine the fate of the Philippines campaign trickled in.

  All day, carrier planes had been coming in to find a landing spot on half-finished Tacloban Field, because the decks of their carriers had been damaged and they had no other place to go. At dusk, eleven of them winged in, flashing wing and tail light in spite of enemy planes that had kept us on continual alert all day. I watched them circle the field and watched the lights being brought into place along the strip. And because of the worry of the day I found myself deciding childishly that, if they all got down safely, everything would come out alright. In thirty five minutes they were all down. News of the victory reached us about two in the morning. Up till then we’d been sleeping on and off watching the vast fire on the seas in Surigao Strait, and wondering if it was one of ours or one of theirs. It was one of theirs, probably the battle ship that was left blazing down there only fifty miles from our beachhead. The Japanese fleet had come as close as that, and then had turned back, crippled.8

  Hinde covered the invasion and the first days after the landing. Some of his reports over shortwave radio from the Philippines were picked up for the ABC by the AWA radio receiving station at La Perouse in Sydney and at times they came in quite clearly. He typed some of his Philippines scripts on board the American radio ship from where he broadcast, and on one occasion the sound of bombs falling beside the ship hit with a thump like wool bales being dumped overhead and knocked the typewriter out of his hands.9 On other occasions, the blast of shells going over the ship would also cause the typewriter to jump from under his fingers.

  The campaign in the Philippines had a different feel from the earlier campaigns. In a news despatch a week later Hinde remarked on the difference in warfare for troops used to the mountains, jungles and coastal swamps of New Guinea.

  Up here in Leyte, American forces have broken suddenly away from the jungle. Today they’re fighting in green fields, through a country dotted with towns and laced with good roads, and the people they’re now fighting for know what the war’s all about and welcome the returning forces as liberators. The troops know now that they’re in a new kind of war. They’ve had flowers strewn at their feet as they marched through streets hung with flags – and that is a very surprising event to men who are used to going out into the jungle and talking to a tree when they want a change of scene.10

  Hinde returned to Hollandia on board a Catalina flying boat but his ear trouble now needed urgent treatment and he soon returned to Australia to recover. The Philippines was his last field assignment as a war correspondent.

  An impatient John Elliott, newly arrived from Australia, had been left behind at Hollandia when the warfront and the American invasion fleet with John Hinde swept northwards to the Philippines. The US Pacific Fleet was only a day away from the amphibious landings at Leyte, as Elliott tried to make his own travel plans to catch up with the action as soon as possible. Apart from one other war correspondent covering the GHQ communiqué for the newspapers, Elliott was the only correspondent left at Hollandia, and within a day or so, the daily communiqué would also cease as the remnants of the forward GHQ followed MacArthur’s progress north. ‘It’s been heartbreaking staying here,’ wrote Elliott.11

  In one way or another, Elliott lived most of his life on the frontlines of adventure and great challenge. He was born into a poor London family in 1901 and records show that for a brief period, at the age of nine, he was admitted to St Olave’s Workhouse for the poor. As a youth he served in the British Merchant Navy in the First World War, when he lost part of the thumb on his left hand in an accident, but it did not stop him from becoming a champion middleweight boxer. In the mid-1920s he was twice English amateur middleweight champion and he won a silver medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics. He fought in America and in Australia, where he had five bouts – he won four and lost his last, against the Australian heavyweight champion, when the blood from a cut on his eyebrow prevented him from seeing.12 In 1927, after retiring from the ring, he settled in Sydney where he became a sports writer for the newspapers and married a New Zealand actress, Helga Johnson, but only three years after their marriage Helga died from cancer and Elliott returned to London.

  In the late 1930s Elliott was managing director of a small manufacturing company. He kept writing as an occasional contributor to newspapers and from early 1939 until the start of the war he was working on motion picture scripts. When the Soviet Union invaded Finland he travelled out with a British volunteer force – British Volunteer Aid – to fight the Soviets, and apparently joined the Finnish Air Force for the Winter War. The war in Finland was over within a few months and it seems he then spent some time in 1940 in Scandinavia and possibly contributing articles to Fleet Street newspapers. After Finland turned to Germany for military support, Elliott left Helsinki near the end of the year on a hard and perilous journey13 via Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Manila, eventually returning to Sydney in February 1941.

  Elliott now joined the AIF, serving in the Middle East as a staff sergeant and the assistant to the official war correspondent, Ken Slessor. He wrote a number of stories for Slessor, who described him as a first rate newspaperman. Slessor found that Elliott’s strong, six-foot-tall solid frame and his life as a boxer and a soldier were belied by a gentleness of manner, however photographs of Elliott and what is known of his life suggest an adventurous spirit and a confidence earned through challenges and hard experience. At the end of the Middle East campaign he returned to Australia, where he looked for opportunities as a war correspondent, eventually becoming a roving correspondent for the ABC. The security assessment for his correspondent’s accreditation investigated allegations of supposedly pro-Nazi sentiments, but these apparently arose from his criticism of the Allies for their failure to support Finland against the Russians. References for Elliott said he was ‘extremely British in his out-look and disagrees with any totalitarian form of government’.14 The security report on Elliott concluded: ‘He is evidently a voluble type of man with decided views and makes no secret of the fact that whilst he admits the fighting qualities of the Russians he does not consider that their form of government would be desirable or suitable to other nations.’15 Elliott spent his first few months as a war correspondent in the relative backwater of Darwin, before he was sent to join John Hinde covering the American campaign in the Philippines.

  Mud, Mud, Everywhere

  On 20 October, the day that MacArthur stepped ashore on Leyte, John Elliott left Hollandia on board a landing craft as part of the first big convoy for the Philippines following the invasion. When he arrived with a small party of other war correspondents, the Americans were in Tacloban and he reported that everything in the town was under control, with the exception of a little white pig running about on the main street, dodging the army jeeps. Elliott accompanied American patrols through villages where they were greeted joyfully by swarms of small children. However, the campaign was far from easy for soldiers or war correspondents and at least three correspondents were killed in the early stages of the invasion, including the American photographer Frank Prist, who was well known to the ABC correspondents from the campaign in New Guinea.

  Hinde had now left the Philippines, heading back to Australia. The shortwave correspondent Gordon Williams, who had also come in with the Americans, was ill and likely to be recalled, and Elliott was carrying the main ABC coverage of the campaign. He was already feeling handcuffed to reporting the daily GHQ communiqué, and he wrote to Molesworth that he was effectively leg-roped to base camp.16

  By the end of November he wrote again.

  Getting transport to go places is also very difficult. They just haven’t the jeeps to spare; and it often happens that on the day there is a jeep with a few hours off, the roads are either too s
wampy, or under fire. The only stories worthwhile coming from the line are written by those who go up, and stay up. With a communiqué to attend to, that is not possible, even if they had sufficient appeal to ABC listeners.17

  There were frequent air raids and Elliott wrote his stories, had them censored and then taken out to the radio ship, generally for sending as wireless text messages. He was still trying to get to the front and return the same day in time for the communiqué, but his two most recent attempts failed and he returned to camp, dead-tired and plastered with mud. In another letter to Molesworth a few weeks later his patience had all but run out.

  This is the most miserable, godforsaken place ever. Mud, mud everywhere. During the past few weeks, the 7 pm conferences have been very much delayed. Sometimes they’d start at 9.30, sometimes 10.30, once as late as midnight. On this occasion we left for home at 1.30 am, wading in the dark, through knee-deep mud to our quarters, there to be kept awake by wretched alerts, and spasmodic anti-aircraft fire until dawn – when the racket of trucks, tractors, and voluble Filipinos took over.18

  The Americans landed on Mindoro Island on 15 December and Elliot finally escaped from advance GHQ. He had arranged to send news flashes over the shortwave voice channel from the radio ship at the next beachhead, but there was no radio ship at Mindoro and he was stuck there for several days before managing to get a story out. Elliott arrived over Mindoro in a Catalina flying boat ‘just in time to see the last of the infantry scampering inland’.19 Eager to get ashore, he transferred from the Cat to a landing craft, but slipped into the sea, fully laden with his kit, and had to be hauled from the water. On shore, RAAF engineers unloaded bulldozers, graders and other heavy equipment to build the airstrips critical to MacArthur’s strategy out of the sloping landscapes of high tiger grass. Elliott reported: ‘[they] are working like men inspired. Mindoro is due for five or six months more dry weather and they are trying to race the clock to give MacArthur dry airfields on the dry side of the Philippines from which to hit at Japan.’20 As pleased as he was to be there, Elliott found that the Australians building the airstrips were also pleased to have the ABC there to tell their story.