Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  There were no Cats back to Leyte and the commander of the landing force, Brigadier Dunckel, put Elliott up at his house, where they had dinner together. Dunckel had been wounded in a kamikaze attack on the landing fleet and he had a dressing on his head and wounds to his hands as he talked to Elliott over their meal about the limited Japanese resistance. Elliott was impressed by how ‘game and undaunted’ Dunckel was, despite the obvious discomfort of his injuries. ‘As you may imagine, surrounded by Japs, we expected everything to happen. Nothing did, however.’21

  The Americans were now moving on from Leyte and Elliott was with them when they landed on the main island of Luzon, and began the fight across the Luzon Plains to Manila, about 200 kilometres to the south. By the end of January 1945, he was reporting from the battle for Clark Field, the major Japanese base, 60 kilometres from the capital.

  We were in the north-west corner of Clark Field and voices were drifting down from Battalion Command Post, which was a hole on a bank of the Bamban River, near one of the bridges that the Japs had blown up as they retreated. Far behind, American mobile ‘Long Toms’ were shelling the Japanese positions in the caves and tunnels that pockmarked two hills on the left and right, about two thousand yards away. Shells were bursting on the hillsides like crackers smashing against a wall . . . Keeping watch, Lightnings and Thunderbolts droned overhead, directing their fire on the caves and tunnels. Nearby Jap snipers were pinging away. Everyone, unless on the move, was under cover.22

  A Smaller Stalingrad – Manila

  By early February American troops were on the outskirts of Manila, but Japanese troops were holding out in parts of the city. Elliott had seen a lot of violent death as a soldier in the Middle East and, over the last few months, as a war correspondent for the ABC, but there was one event in Manila that truly shocked him. One night in a hospital tent, Elliott met a badly injured Irish-Australian priest, who told him of the appalling Japanese massacre of almost 70 men, women and children at Manila’s de la Salle College a few days earlier. The next morning, Elliott made a long detour around Japanese-held parts of the city to the deserted grounds of the shell-shot college.

  Near the main building, the sour dreadful stench of the dead reached us. The sight that met my eyes was more utterly ghastly than I could possibly have imagined. The stench grew worse and worse, as in the dim light of the large hallway beneath the main staircase – the floor of which was covered in mud and blood – I saw at first around the floor three bodies, all bearing gaping wounds, sword slashes and bayonet thrusts. Halfway down the bloodstained stairs was another corpse. Unable to bear the stench of this slimy staircase after the sight of those fallen, tragic figures, I moved along a corridor, passing rooms and wards utterly wrecked, and climbed up another staircase with the overpowering odour of death everywhere. It couldn’t be avoided. Neither could the sight of blood. It too was everywhere – dark patches where bodies had lain. I came to the door of the chapel, where there was another corpse, this time a woman. At the end of the chapel there was a somewhat large and rather beautiful altar. The centre of the aisle was smeared with deep, red stains and in the corner beside the altar were the bodies of a man, woman and child – possibly three years old – all jumbled, one upon another, with sword slashes and bayonet wounds gaping.23

  It was an unusually graphic report for radio and Elliott began with a warning to listeners to switch off if they were unable to listen to an account of ‘one of the most horrible merciless actions of slaughter’. The victims – almost half of whom were believed to be women and girls – had been given refuge in the college buildings. An enraged Japanese officer entered the college with 20 soldiers, fired his revolver and then began slashing with his sword as the soldiers attacked using bayonets and rifles. The Irish-Australian priest, Father Cosgrave, told Elliott of one soldier bayonetting a child not two years old, and of mothers pleading futilely with the shouting soldiers for the lives of their children, – all of the children were killed without mercy. The Japanese returned one more time to continue the killing and then tried to destroy the chapel. Cosgrave was one of the first to be attacked, bayonetted twice in the chest, and after recovering consciousness he hid behind the chapel altar with two others until the Americans arrived four days later. The slaughter was only one of many atrocities during the battle for control of the city, that collectively became known as the Manila massacre.

  The bloody urban fighting for Manila was very different from the warfare waged elsewhere in the Pacific. Elliott reported that acres of the business district of Manila had been deliberately destroyed by the Japanese. ‘Nothing remains but steel and broken concrete skeletons, between which the wood-paved streets are still smouldering. There are acres with the dreadful overpowering odour of the dead, buried under tons of twisted girders and split masonry.’24 Much of the fighting was now around the Japanese stronghold in the ancient walled city of Intramuros in the centre of Manila.

  Driven back towards the Intramuros along the southern side of the city, the Japanese in fortified buildings, trenches, pillboxes, bunkers, barricades, employing dual-purpose guns, mortars, machine guns and small arms, are defending every inch of the way. The Americans are advancing building by building, an advance of a city block being a big thing. In fact the Battle of Manila is Stalingrad all over again but on a smaller scale.25

  Several thousand soldiers and Filipino civilians were trapped inside Intramuros. For several days Elliot watched for movement inside the walls, from his observation post at the top of a burnt-out battered skyscraper on Avenue One, which he compared to Melbourne’s Collins Street or Sydney’s Martin Place.

  Yesterday and today, from a lofty observation post about 500 yards away from the Intramuros walls on the other side of the Pasig River, I’ve watched American heavy artillery at point-blank range pounding at these massive walls . . . The Intramuros water supply has been cut off but it’s reported that the Japs are using wells inside the walled city. The fate of the civilians trapped inside the Intramuros may be tragic . . . Three days ago loudspeakers were set up on the banks of the Pasig River and the hopelessly trapped Japs were offered an honourable surrender; but there was no reply . . .26

  The American shelling of Intramuros eventually prevailed with the deaths of thousands of Japanese and the destruction of much of the ancient walled city. Around 100,000 Filipino civilians died in the fighting for Manila.

  While the battle continued, European, American, Canadian and Australian civilian internees were rescued from internment camps around the city. Elliott accompanied American forces to rescue over 2000 internees from the Los Banos camp, which was around eight kilometres inside Japanese-held territory. Elliott went in on an amphibious tank with a force of tanks, field artillery, infantry and paratroops on the successful mission. He reported the moving scenes when the tanks in the rescue force rolled through the gates of the camp and were greeted by the internees. For Elliott, the gratitude of the prisoners was one of the most genuinely touching things he’d ever seen. They were at first stunned by the suddenness of the assault, then delirious with joy, though still ‘somewhat incredulous that we’d come to take them away’.27 Among the first people he met were internees from Scotland and Adelaide, who kept shaking his hand over and over.

  Wireless messages, copy and scripts from Elliott and other correspondents filing to Australia were being sent from Manila via the Press Wireless service at Los Angeles, then on to RCA Communications in San Francisco or the Beam Wireless service in Toronto for final transmission to Australia. For news flashes, reports were sent to the radio ship via a landline from Manila, but it was not very reliable and on one occasion was out for three nights, apparently cut by Japanese infiltrating the American lines. Some of Elliott’s voice broadcasts also did not get through to the ABC.28

  Most correspondents had pulled out by the second week of March and Elliott felt the Philippines campaign was then in ‘the throes of such anticlimax that it seems hardly worth discussing now’.29 By the time he retur
ned to Australia not long afterwards, he had lost around 20 kilograms in weight over the course of his months in the field.30

  The challenges facing Australian correspondents like Elliott were considerable: communications were difficult; the American news agencies had many more men in the field – AP had ten and UP had seven; the Press Wireless service carrying all press messages gave priority to clearing American Press copy ahead of all others; and correspondents had a hard time getting field stories. Despite this, the director of MacArthur’s GHQ public relations office, Colonel Diller, believed that ‘the work and behaviour of Australian correspondents provided for the Americans an example in reasoned, objective war reporting’.31

  Chapter 14

  A QUESTION OF NECESSITY – NEW GUINEA 1945

  Late 1944 saw the start to a series of campaigns that would be the last major Australian combat operations of the war. The offensives on Bougainville, between Aitape and Wewak in New Guinea, and on New Britain were followed by the Borneo campaign a few months later, in 1945. The necessity of the campaigns was questionable, as the Japanese in these areas were largely contained and unable to play an active or decisive role in the outcome of the war. But they ensured a visible combat role for Australia in the closing stages of the war, and in the case of New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville, ensured that Australian forces were actively engaged in operations to re-capture Australian territory.

  No Mopping-Up Operation – Bougainville

  ‘On a visit to the frontline today,’ wrote Haydon Lennard from Bougainville, ‘I found forward patrols digging weapon and sleeping pits on the edge of an evil-smelling swamp within a few hundred yards of the enemy. The holes quickly fill with water but somehow men manage to snatch a few hours’ sleep while mates stand guard with Bren Guns and rifles.’1

  In November, soon after Australian forces took over from the Americans on Bougainville, they launched their offensive against the Japanese. More than 500 Australians and close to 9000 Japanese died in the fighting and the war of containment on Bougainville that would continue until the end of the war. Bougainville was unfairly characterised in some of the public debate in Australia as merely a ‘mopping-up’ exercise, and when Haydon Lennard and other correspondents were given access to the island in January, his reporting seemed a deliberate counter to such criticism.

  I have just returned from the Solomons with the same message that I have always had on coming back to the mainland from the fighting front. The message is a simple one. It is one of admiration for the courage and sacrifice displayed by the Australians in yet another of those fierce jungle battles which never appear spectacular, yet demand some of the toughest fighting in the world.2

  Lennard’s reports, wired from Bougainville, recounted the fierce, small-scale clashes and difficult country that characterised the fighting on the island.

  Bitter fighting still in progress . . . as Australians move down the southern Bougainville coast. Recently three small Australian patrols fought a three hour battle with an enemy force entrenched in five well-concealed pillboxes. When the fight ended, seventeen Japanese had been killed or wounded and the remainder fled screaming into the jungle. Casualty figures of this nature give no idea of the bitterness with which jungle clashes of this kind are fought. To reach the enemy, small patrols of sometimes only three men leave the perimeters and disappear into the jungle where they wade waist deep through mud and swamps or cut their way through jungle so dense it is only possible to see a few yards ahead. Any advance along a beaten track merely invites death from enemy ambush.3

  The war reporting by Lennard and other correspondents was framed by the understanding that it was, to some degree, part of the war effort to encourage public support for the men in the field. Lennard’s despatches from Bougainville gave a realistic picture of the campaign while the storytelling renewed the narrative of New Guinea: of Australians battling a harsh terrain and a dangerous enemy, leavened by the occasional uplifting anecdote about Australian humour in the face of adversity.

  Although the fighting is tough and the men at times receive little sleep they never seem to lose that sense of humour that is typically Australian . . . During one wild night skirmish a major dived into a hole and yelled out ‘Hell, shift over, give me a bit of room.’ To his amazement a four foot six Jap decamped smartly into the jungle darkness. I don’t think the major will ever live that one down. His men have been at him ever since.4

  Many Small Frustrations – Aitape – Skirmishing With Army PR

  At the beginning of 1945, war correspondents, including Raymond Paull and Frank Legg, took up arms against Australian Army public relations in two separate clashes over censorship and control of reporting.

  Ray Paull and a handful of other war correspondents arrived at Aitape on the New Guinea north coast in late December, eager to report on the renewed action by Australian troops. The soldiers of the 6th Division were taking over the Aitape– Wewak sector from the Americans, whose capture of Aitape had been covered by Haydon Lennard a few months earlier. The Americans had since settled for containing rather than pursuing the remaining Japanese, but General Blamey decided that the Australians would clear the enemy from the coastal areas and the Torricelli Mountains that stretched from Aitape to Wewak. Paull summarised the campaign in one of his despatches from Aitape.

  The southern slopes of the Torricellis are fairly densely populated. Many villages are grouped together surrounded by well cultivated gardens and connected by tracks across the knifelike ridges. In country of this nature the bulk of the fighting is being done by patrols which forage in search of the Japanese while the Japanese forage for their next meals. This patrol fighting however is whittling away the enemy’s strength in twos and threes, in twenties and thirties.5

  It was incremental progress and the reporting was piecemeal but there was a larger objective: the commanding officer at Aitape briefed the correspondents on the intention to compel the Japanese to fall back on Wewak, where they could eventually be dealt with. As a result it was important that reporting avoid any mention of Wewak. The correspondents – Ray Paull, Don Angel and Jim Fitzpatrick of the Department of Information, Kim Keane covering the evening papers, and Gordon Holland covering the morning papers – all complied with the request and kept references to Wewak out of their reporting.

  However, Paull and the other correspondents felt strongly that they were ‘being prevented from giving a true picture’ of the operation, and they were soon at odds with Army public relations and other censorship restrictions. Correspondents were only notified of strict censorship of place names and locations a couple of weeks after they arrived in Aitape and on the same day that GHQ finally released the official communiqué. References to coastal activity by troops was banned and Army PR was highlighting the actions in the mountains, but even then the restrictions on what could be reported was very limiting and stories were ‘badly mutilated’ by censorship. Correspondent movement was becoming ‘more and more restricted’, correspondents had to report each day to Army PR and a new order from the director general of Army PR, (now) Brigadier Rasmussen, required correspondents’ private and professional mail to be censored.6

  It was a row compounded of many small frustrations but, overall, was seen by the correspondents as an attempt by PR to ‘discourage, harass and hamper’ them in order to more tightly control reporting. Army PR characterised the row as the correspondents being unwilling to accept the hardships of the mountains. The newspaper correspondent, Kim Keane, angrily rejected the claim. ‘That is a flat lie and a dishonest one,’ he wrote to the associate editor at the Melbourne Herald.7 The correspondents bitterly resented the imputation, given the time most of them had already spent on operations with the troops. They made numerous trips into the field along the coast, sometimes without escort, and on at least one occasion with each man armed with an Owen gun, due to the close proximity of the Japanese. They had at first been given .38 revolvers but there was no ammunition for the handguns, and the brigade q
uartermaster sergeant told them ‘he did not think we should go forward into sniper country with a weapon we could only throw at the enemy’.8

  On 19 January Ray Paull set out by jeep for the 2/11th Battalion HQ, which was then moving up into new positions on the coast and after a while he was dropped off to make his way alone along the beach. At one point while following the signal lines to HQ, he was caught in incoming surf, submerged to the shoulders and forced to cling to the lines to stop being washed out to sea. He then spent three days at Abau, where fighting between Australian and Japanese patrols were sometimes as close as 300 metres from the camp. On this and other trips into the field, Paull said that forward combat troops often asked why the Aitape operation was being played down in the newspapers, which were being dropped into the forward area each day by plane.

  Kim Keane wrote to the Herald. ‘I don’t think you could have had a bunch of us come here keener than we were to give the troops and the papers the best possible run. We still go ahead, but some of the things inflicted on us have been woeful.’9 Keane pointed out the minimal assistance from PR for the correspondents in their assignments with the forward troops, that PR officers themselves had stayed back from the front, and that Paull had gone into the field without escort, even while he was unwell.