Voices from the Air (3 page)

T
he mobile technology that freed radio from the confines of the studio opened up the world to program makers and the audience. The ability to record voices and sounds in the field would revolutionise the work of radio and the reporting of war. ‘These ingenious instruments . . . are going to allow us to speak to you with our own voices', the Captain of HMAS
Perth
would later marvel, as he recorded an address from his ship at war in the Mediterranean.

The radio revolution gathered pace in the 1930s as broadcasters in Europe and North America used new mobile technology for innovative broadcasting to engage audiences, and to extend the reach of newsgathering.

Mobile broadcast vans brought public events into the homes of millions, transmitting live from the field, and in the United States, much more so than anywhere else, news was a priority. NBC ran a fleet of mobile broadcasting cars and reporters that covered news and major events, and they promoted the speed and mobility of their coverage.

North. East. West. South . . . N.E.W.S. . . . from all four corners of America, ‘spot news', ‘eye-witness accounts', ‘statements of the participants' . . . are brought to you over NBC coast-to-coast networks with the speed of light. Covering major events at their source is possible because NBC maintains a speed fleet of Mobile Units in key cities, tuned up and ready to ‘take the air' at a moment's notice.
¹

It was one of NBC's Mobile Units that broadcast the famous eyewitness account of the
Hindenburg
disaster in 1937, when the German commercial airship caught fire and crashed at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

But broadcasters were now also using mobile recording studios to record in the field for later broadcast, as well as the broadcast units that transmitted live from the field. The new mobile recording technology, untethered from the radio studio and live broadcast schedules, opened up almost limitless opportunities to create actuality broadcasts of people, places and events, and a new, more intimate experience for the audience that made them feel as if they were there, on the spot. Listeners heard the voices, sounds and descriptions of events at home in Australia, and then, within a few years from the wider world came the actuality and stories of Australians at war.

In 1935 the BBC launched a Mobile Recording Branch with a single mobile studio in a Morris Commercial van, which was nicknamed, ‘The Flying Squad'.
²
In Germany, the RRG (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft), the national network of broadcasters under the Nazi government, made great use of mobile recording and broadcasting vehicles and by 1938 it had 45 in operation.
³
The ABC acquired its first mobile recording unit in 1939. The chrome green, three-ton studio van, based in Sydney, recorded sound onto discs, and was probably the first
of its kind in Australia. ABC news coverage at the time was limited and restricted to specific bulletins, and there was no wish for live broadcasts from the field into news programs, but the recording van opened up new possibilities to record sound at the scene of important news events.

An early test came with a news story on the night of 4 July, when a fierce fire broke out in Kilner's warehouse in the inner-Sydney suburb of Camperdown. Two hours after the fire broke out, the mobile unit had returned with actuality recordings from the scene, which were broadcast at 11.20 pm. (Haydon Lennard, the journalist on duty who wrote the news bulletin that night, would later become one of the ABC's war correspondents in the Pacific.) However, at times, the usefulness of the mobile unit on news stories was questionable.

‘There seems to be cause for concern regarding the relative immobility of the Mobile Unit,' wrote the exasperated officer in charge, Dudley Leggett. ‘It appears to be impossible to get it moving at a moment's notice in the event of an emergency . . . someone would have had to telephone a commentator, the driver, Mr Croot, and then a senior officer of the Postmaster-General's department. The latter, apparently, would then have to arrange for a car to pick up the mechanics, some of whom, it appears, are not connected by telephone . . . It would be ludicrous in the event of a major catastrophe.'
⁴
Notwithstanding this unpromising early experience of mobile recording units, Leggett would eventually go on to use portable recorders on the battlefronts as a war correspondent for the ABC.

In practice, the first mobile recording unit was used overwhelmingly by other parts of the ABC, such as Talks, rather than News. The unit travelled around the country recording actuality, interviews and talks at factories, banks, markets and racecourses. It set up microphones on golf courses,
on Aboriginal stations and at ocean terminals for the arrival of opera singers and film stars from overseas. For one major recording, the PMG (Postmaster-General's Department) apparently ran eight miles of landlines down the main drive of a coal mine so that microphones could record the sounds of miners, drilling and explosions. The novelty of actuality broadcasts even promoted some feature coverage in newspapers, with headlines such as ‘Eavesdropping on City Life – Mobile Radio Studio Hears Wonderful Things'.
⁵

Actuality reporters were the reporters who gathered and recorded the sounds and voices in the field, conducted the interviews and provided commentary and reporting. Sounds were recorded in real time together with a commentary, or were edited in later. War correspondents would have to develop similar skills – writing scripts to be spoken rather than read, that engaged the audience thousands of miles distant from the events they were describing. They would develop descriptive reporting skills, as the eyes and ears of the audience on the battlefield – and they would use their own first-hand experiences to illustrate and illuminate the experiences of the soldiers and the conditions at the warfronts.

Within a few months of the declaration of war, the BBC had its first war correspondents and recording units in the field. Richard Dimbleby was recording on-the-spot descriptions and reports in France with a brief to ‘tour camps and billets and travel up and down the line to capture for listeners, in a way that has never been done before, graphic sound-pictures of the life of the men at the Front – sound-pictures in which the voices of the men themselves may be heard, as well as authentic sounds of their environment'.
⁶
Dimbleby's recordings were intended to be used in BBC news programs, but the BBC also planned more elaborate recordings for feature programs.
Throughout the war, the BBC's Radio Newsreel program gave a prominent platform to the first-hand voice reports of correspondents ‘backgrounding the news of the day and bringing a new immediacy to radio news'.
⁷

ABC mobile units that operated in the field during the war became generally known as field units. The ABC made the decision to send its own field unit to accompany any Australian troops that might be sent to the battlefronts, and by early 1940, the plan was set for a recording unit with two observers. In a report to the commissioners of the ABC, TW Bearup, the ABC's federal superintendent, noted that radio was known for being on the spot at world events and he advised the commission that it had a national responsibility to inform the people, through making war recordings for broadcast.

The proposed ABC field unit would also help fulfil the role of the national broadcaster in publicising and explaining the war effort, and to maintain public support for the war.

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.

O
n 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.
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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.

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 sunset 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.