Voices from the Air (8 page)

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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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 died 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.
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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.
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Over the next couple of months Cecil made many trips through Lebanon and Syria, mostly with the second technician, Leo Gallwey. Jumbo struggled on the road from Beirut which rose up from sea level in a rapid ascent, thousands of feet into the Lebanon Mountains, but it plodded on, and Cecil recorded interviews and gathered many more messages from troops and officers for ‘Voices from Overseas'. By early September he had recorded 3000 voices and was feeling fed up, but still
had many more to record back in Palestine and elsewhere in the coming months. He was aiming to record soldiers from all three Australian Divisions – the 6th, 7th and 9th. It's unclear how many actually got to air but by the end of September, 500 had been broadcast, arousing wide public interest.
¹⁰²
The Red Cross also copied many of the messages to provide to the families of the soldiers. In some brief surviving film footage shot by Damien Parer, Cecil can be seen recording some messages from Syria, including this one:

Hello Sydney, this is Jack Robertson sending a cheerio call from Syria to mother and family at Bondi Junction and also daughter Shirley . . . all OK, having a great time, wish to be remembered to all friends. Aussie girls and Aussie beer are still our favourites. Cheerio, hope to be home soon, good luck and keep your chin up. Known through the Middle East as Honest John – rather amusing to the boys at Bondi Junction – and I've only got one red mark in me pay book!
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In August, Cecil recorded the voices of soldiers all the way up to the Turkish border where he parked the truck right on the frontier to record some Diggers: ‘. . . it was very interesting, I placed the microphone in Turkey, sat on the barrier and the men standing in Syria spoke their messages to their homes in Australia. From where do we say the messages come? Turkey or Syria? They were recorded in Syria but they spoke into Turkey.'
¹⁰⁴

In April 1941, when Rommel was advancing through Cyrenaica, Allied forces were pushed back east and the Australian
9th Division and part of the 7th Division were withdrawn to Tobruk. In Wilmot's book on Tobruk, one of the Diggers he quoted on the withdrawal across the desert to the seaside fortress was Frank Legg. Legg was an ABC broadcaster and writer who enlisted with the AIF and, following his return from the Middle East, became an ABC war correspondent covering the Pacific War. In Libya, Sergeant FH Legg was serving with the 2/48th Battalion of the 9th Division. ‘We came to Tobruk in pretty poor shape. For eight days and nights we'd been out in the desert on the move (chiefly in the wrong direction) and always on the verge of action but always denied the opportunity of “having a go”.'
¹⁰⁵

The siege of the Australian troops at Tobruk lasted from April until August. Wilmot arrived by ship in Tobruk harbour in the second week of August, just as a night-time air raid began. In one of his first reports, he described a harbour by then well-used to air attacks.

. . . above us were enemy bombers and bursting ackack shells. Three sticks of bombs fell while we were unloading – two on shore – one in the water near a ship. We ducked our heads for a few seconds as the near ones whistled down, but no one stopped work for a moment – sailors and troops went on unloading cargo quickly and quietly.
¹⁰⁶

The garrison had famously endured much throughout the long months of 1941, as Wilmot reported for the BBC. ‘They've got no time for heroics and little chance of comfort and relaxation. They're doing a hard, boring job with a patient cheerfulness. But it isn't comfortable conditions and easy living that makes them patient and cheerful. It's because they've got guts and
are prepared to take life with a philosophic “well what the hell anyway.”'
¹⁰⁷
These first observations about the besieged town were aimed in part to counter widely varying reports of conditions at Tobruk: either ‘Dust, Dive Bombers, Derelict ships and Death' or the ‘gay life' of a garrison with concerts and football matches. His later reports would paint a detailed, more accurate picture.

Wilmot and Bill MacFarlane set up camp in Wadi Auda, a ravine cutting into the edge of the coastal escarpment at Tobruk. It was the only wadi with trees and their tent was surrounded by palms and near a brackish spring. The tent was dug down into the ground and anchored with a low wall of soil and rocks. Chester wrote to his family that it was safe against anything but a direct hit from a bomb, and its double thickness canvas was apparently proof against ack-ack splinters.
¹⁰⁸

The Germans were bombing the town when Chester wrote his first letter from Tobruk to his family. He could hear the drone of aero engines high above, then the heavy thump of bombs bursting over the nearby hill and the sharper sound of ack-ack, as he mused about conditions in the besieged fortress, and about the character of the Aussie Digger.

. . . the worst thing about Tobruk is that there's no escape from war here . . . the men in hospital have been bombed . . . men in swimming have been machine gunned . . . men in the rest camp have been shelled . . . men spelling on roadwork have been bombed . . . and in all cases there have been casualties . . . but they still go on as though the war were hundreds of miles away. The more I see of the casual, happy-go-lucky, what-the-hell attitude of the ordinary Digger, the more I realise what a wonderful bloke he really is. Henry Lawson's theory
that the only thing that matters in life is ‘Mateship' is proved over and over again here. These men hanging on under pressure for months on end, working day after day at the same old things, digging trenches, laying mines, putting in barbed wire, carrying rations, mending roads and so on, or else just sitting cramped up in weapons pits in the salient, waiting, waiting, waiting while the sand and dust drifts over them . . . the thing that helps them stick it is their mates . . . I rather think that when they get into action it isn't so much the cause they're fighting for that keeps them going; it's the fact that they mustn't let their mates down. Diggers will go back through hell to get a wounded cobber back, they'll risk anything to give support to their pals.
¹⁰⁹

Wilmot qualified this view of the Australian soldiers: ‘In some ways the ordinary Digger is a bit of an undisciplined bastard when he's on leave.' The reference almost certainly understated Wilmot's true feelings about the unruliness and violent behaviour of some Diggers but he wrote that he was prepared to forgive them anything ‘after seeing the way they come through a tough spot. It's true they're a bit cocky . . . but they've got something to be cocky about . . . they're not smart soldiers, but they know how to fight.'
¹¹⁰

Lawrence Cecil had suggested that Wilmot write the full story of the defence of Tobruk and Chester began to research the siege and the key battles. He had the support of the Tobruk commander, General Morshead, and access to the garrison files and reports, and he spent a lot of time at the Fortress headquarters reading and talking to those who'd been there throughout. He was given a place to work in the office and a car to get to the units dispersed around the town and the
defensive perimeter. An initial report,
The Holding of Tobruk
, outlined some of the key actions and gave an overview of the five months of the siege.