Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  Leggett sent back a report from Myola, warning Australians not to expect a ‘quick, easy expulsion of the Japanese from the Owen Stanley Range’, and indeed the fighting beyond Myola, at Templeton’s Crossing and then at Eora Creek, would be some of the bloodiest of the Kokoda campaign. In the week-long battle at Templeton’s Crossing, almost 70 soldiers from the 25th Brigade were killed and more than 130 wounded.25 Leggett moved up with the Australians, and on 22 October arrived at Eora Creek, where the Japanese had dug in on the high ground.

  When Wilmot had reached Eora Creek almost two months earlier the Australians were starting their agonising withdrawal but Leggett was there for the bloody battle to drive the Japanese out of the mountains. Chester was now back in Port Moresby covering daily news and at the end of October he received one of Leggett’s despatches, which he voiced on his behalf, identifying Leggett as the correspondent.

  I saw their well-dug holes by the side of the track as I came on to Eora Creek. There the enemy had taken up their strongest natural defence line since our troops contacted him three weeks ago . . . As I came down the track, the enemy was ranging on the crossing with his 75 mm mountain gun. On the Friday and Saturday this gun and his heavy mortars continued at regular intervals to harass movement along the track and to search out our positions.26

  Chester’s reading of Dudley’s report recounted in general terms the advances by Australian patrols and the fighting over the coming days but it concluded before the Japanese quit Eora Creek.

  This is a stern fight and nature cannot be fought without appreciable casualties and carrying of wounded back along the trail adds to the problem of supply as it takes eight native carriers to bring back one stretcher case. This fighting may be on a very small scale compared to other fronts but men of the AIF say that these conditions are the worst they’ve experienced. The troops are a week’s backbreaking walk from the road-head near Moresby and they are facing real hardships. Fires are prohibited because they give away positions and so the forward troops have nothing hot to eat or drink and this makes the monotony of the diet even worse. It rains every day, says Leggett, and we sleep often cold and damp but you can at least roll up in a blanket and groundsheet at dark and try to sleep if you’re in reserve. But our troops may be out for five days at a time, scrambling, toiling, crawling over tangled mountainsides in rain and cold without blankets during bitterly cold nights – even if they do get a chance to lie down. They have to move carrying several days’ hard rations and ammunition and every second they carry their lives in their hands as they stalk their stubborn cunning enemy. And yet with all this our men are optimistic and determined to win.27

  The conclusion of the report, added later by Wilmot, gave the news that the Japanese had withdrawn from Eora Creek – ‘these troops of ours are showing qualities which would move mountains’. In his report broadcast almost two weeks later Leggett described how Eora Creek was captured.

  . . . after probing and locating his defence line, cutting out his snipers, driving in his forward machine gun posts, infiltrating through his lines with strong fighting patrols, we finished him off with a two-company bayonet charge which, under cover of concentrated automatic fire and grenade attack, swept down through his position from the crest above . . . an outflanking movement that had only been accomplished by a three day exhausting detour and three thousand feet climb through terrific country. In the ten days I was with our frontline troops, talking to the wounded coming out of the line and to the gaunt bearded patrols returning from five days and nights of skirmishing in rain and cutting cold, I marvelled at the powers of human endurance and the unquenchable spirit of these weary men.28

  Again, reports at the time did not give any figures for the casualties but battalion reports record that close to 100 men of the 16th Brigade were killed and almost 200 wounded at Eora Creek.29

  When Dudley Leggett had set out with a group of other war correspondents they had been told that the Japanese opposition would be negligible – it had proved otherwise and Dudley was still in the mountains with the advance troops and pushing onwards, despite the lingering effects of his early attack of dysentery. At long last, on the morning of Monday 2 November, Leggett and some Australian soldiers emerged from the trees above the little village of Deniki, leaving behind the cold and damp and the oppressive shade of the Owen Stanleys. Dudley described the scene that lay before him.

  . . . there two, three thousand feet below . . . to the east, to the west and the northwest, the Yodda Valley was sprawling in the brilliance of the tropical sun. And in the centre of the valley floor some three or four miles away in a direct line was a small light green and yellow rectangle . . . the Kokoda air strip.

  An Australian colonel commanding the advance troops turned to Leggett:

  ‘Well, there it is . . . only another three or perhaps four hours and we’ll be there. My forward patrols slept in the rubber last night just this side of it and this morning they lit a fire on the air strip to call us in.’

  The Australians had moved into the village of Kokoda the night before to find that the Japanese had already left.

  As the long line of weary mud-caked green clad troops emerged one by one from the shadows of the tree-lined trail their eyes brightened, smiles of relief and achievement lit up their drawn faces and there were cries of ‘You beaut’, ‘Whacko boys, there she is’, ‘It won’t be long now.’30

  A few hours walking down greasy trails, through jungle-like forest and native gardens, and they reached the rubber plantations on the plateau at Kokoda. Kokoda village ‘wore an air of destruction and decay’ and bore the signs of Allied bombing and strafing. The foundations of the Resident Magistrate’s house had been shattered, wrote Leggett, and the ‘skeleton of the roof rested drunkenly on its side’; bomb craters marked the ground; weapons pits ringed the edge of the plateau, tunnels and dugouts ‘honeycombed the sides’ and a large Japanese air-raid shelter stood in the centre of the village. There were many Japanese bicycles: ‘a child’s pedal motor car towed by one of these bikes provided free rides for troops who had almost forgotten what any kind of conveyance looked like.’

  At midday on 3 November, Leggett watched a simple ceremony take place.

  A tall flag pole stands at the tip of the village. A native boy climbed the flag pole and ran some signal wire through the pulley at the top. Then the Australian flag, which had been dropped from an American plane, was hauled up. Once again the Southern Cross floated over the valley and as it stirred lazily in the warm air the commanding officer formally announced the re-establishment of Australian authority here.31

  An emaciated man was brought in to Kokoda village on a stretcher, one of the many who had been forced to work as carriers for the Japanese. Dudley reported: ‘Along the track we had found a number of these natives starving and showing signs of ill treatment, bayonet wounds and so on.’ But now the local people of Kokoda emerged: ‘Natives were coming from everywhere, bringing their families out of hiding . . . there was no doubting their joy at being back. They were sticking flowers into their woolly hair, through the holes on their ear lobes and nose and through the plaited bands they wear around their arms and legs.’ Another ceremony was held to honour the local carriers who had been essential to the Australian campaign, carrying supplies and shouldering the wounded on stretchers.

  Dear Mr Bearup, Written from Kokoda 4.11.42

  For some time it was a little difficult to know whether to continue here with the troops or return to Moresby . . . The SMH man did turn back but that was early owing to the strain of [the] trip on his legs and Reading, the Truth and Mirror lad, gave up at Myola. I came on and have been followed at intervals by Courtenay of the London Sunday Times, both of us arriving here with advance headquarters. The difficulties of getting material back have been great. Eventually I endeavoured to meet the situation by giving eye-witness material and certain official attitudes in a form which might, with rewriting, be used for news and commentaries.32

  The air
strip at Kokoda was re-opened within a matter of days and Dudley flew back to Moresby to write his scripts. After the horrific three-week trek across the ranges, the return flight took little more than half an hour. The Japanese were now dug in at Oivi and Gorari but by the second week of November the weary Australians, backed by American bombing, had captured both villages. Hundreds of Japanese were killed. Both forces had been exhausted by the Kokoda campaign and many of the remaining troops were ill, however battle had yet to be joined for the beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda on the coast.

  Chapter 10

  THEY WENT THROUGH HELL – THE BATTLE OF THE BEACHHEADS

  The yellow glow of a hurricane lamp pushed back the midnight darkness in the war correspondents’ house at Port Moresby, where Dudley Leggett was handwriting a note to Molesworth at the ABC. It was early November 1942, barely a few days since Leggett’s return from Kokoda, and there had been little time for rest after his weeks with the Australian troops on the track. He had sent off some discs to the ABC that evening – interviews with three Australian soldiers who’d escaped from Rabaul – and his note to Molesworth provided the details of the recordings, and his latest travel plans.

  Leggett was hoping to return to the New Guinea north coast, where fighting had begun in the final stage of the Papuan campaign – the battle for the beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda. But he had a detour to make before he went back north.

  The defeat of the Japanese on the mud-mired terrain of Milne Bay, on the eastern tip of Papua, after almost two weeks of fighting, denied Japan a strategic naval and air base that could have posed a new threat to Port Moresby and northern Australia. Army public relations had the authority to determine where the ABC field unit travelled and what campaigns it covered, and it was keen to have the story of Milne Bay recorded for the radio audience back in Australia.

  Early in the morning, after just a few hours’ sleep, Leggett, Len Edwards and the recording gear flew out on a B-17 bomber to record interviews with the officers and men at Milne Bay. They would find themselves stuck there for the next few weeks while the fighting intensified at the Papuan beachheads on the north coast.

  A few days earlier Haydon Lennard had arrived in Moresby where he found Dudley Leggett busy and preoccupied in the immediate aftermath of his Kokoda experiences. Impatient as ever and quick to go his own way, Lennard made plans to provide news cover of the beachheads. Moresby had changed dramatically in the months since he had last been there – the build-up of troops and increased pace of military activity was noticeable – but he found familiar frustrations in filing copy. ‘The delay in getting copy to the mainland down to Brisbane and through GHQ to Sydney is so great that I’m afraid any operational copy from me is going to arrive well behind the stuff from GHQ. It therefore seems that the best thing to do is to get out on the frontline stories as much as possible.’1 Lennard filed very little copy in his first week in Moresby and he was soon on the move.

  I am leaving tomorrow morning Tuesday by air for Kokoda and may be away with the forward troops for some weeks. I propose joining the Brigades pushing down towards Buna and hope to be in on the ‘Buna kill’ when the Americans and Australians attack the town. I should be able to get some first-rate stories.2

  On 11 November he hopped a plane from Moresby to Kokoda and then travelled onwards with the Australian troops to the beachheads. Unfortunately, none of Haydon’s news reports from this campaign have survived, and Dudley Leggett’s scripts and letters provide most of the surviving record of ABC coverage.

  With Leggett unable to get the ABC’s recording gear transported via Moresby and by air over the mountains to the beachheads, the ABC made the misplaced suggestion that he should use the hiatus in his reporting to record something ‘light’ with the troops for the After Dinner Show on ABC radio. Leggett rejected the request out of hand: the present temper of the troops made the idea untenable.

  It is impossible for anyone who has not been here with them to appreciate their feelings about the living and fighting conditions in New Guinea. Not only are they caustic enough in their comparisons between life in Australia and their existence here and about what they believe to be the failure of the people in Australia and in rear military areas to appreciate their conditions, but they already have a contempt for war correspondents in general and for the inaccurate stories appearing in newspapers under the names of these correspondents.3

  Australian and American troops were fighting in hellish conditions in the sodden tidal strip around the three beachheads of Buna, Gona and Sanananda. Heavy rain, oppressive, suffocating heat and leaden humidity blanketed the swamps, thick bush, jungle and patches of tall Kunai grass, broken in some areas by narrow coconut plantations.4 Gona was the first to fall and on 9 December. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner of the 39th Battalion sent a simple message to Brigade Headquarters: ‘Gona’s Gone’.

  The Field Unit at the Beachheads

  Milne Bay was a largely unwelcome sojourn for Leggett as he and Len Edwards recorded interviews and stories of the battle that had been fought more than two months earlier. In the oppressive and pestilential climate Edwards found some relief in the frequent downpours, stripping off for a shower bath in the rain. A quiet man, Edwards would retreat to his tent when he felt in need of ‘spiritual food’ and listen to music on the recorder turntable – Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique symphony, Goin’ Home and O Promise me, and he would write to his ‘Missus’ back home.

  The weather was unsettled in mid-December when the corvette, HMAS Broome pushed its way through the seas along the coast of Papua, from Milne Bay to Buna. Leggett and Edwards had finally managed to get passage to the beachheads where Haydon Lennard was already filing news copy. Edwards remembers landing with Australian troops near Buna and ‘carrying the gear ashore through waist deep water on a black night lit only by a fierce tropical thunderstorm’.5

  The next day Edwards dried out the gear and set up the recorder under a waterproof sheet alongside a slit trench. From then on, it was a never-ending battle to keep the equipment dry and prevent electrical shorts, and to combat the rust that formed on the recorder cutting head and the strange white powder that grew on the surface of the discs.

  They soon moved up to the frontline with Len going on ahead with the gear. The Army dropped off the equipment at a place where the smell from the nearby bodies of dead Japanese was overwhelming and Edwards twice had to run for cover from fierce sniper fire. They moved camp and set up with Haydon Lennard. Later that night Len had time to be alone. ‘Sat on the beach in the moonlight for a while thinking of home and missus. If only all this were over and I could get back for a while. Gee, I do miss that girl. All day the wounded have been coming back from the front, some of them terrible sights to see. This war is certainly hell. It’s hard to believe that civilisation could sink so low as to make all this hellish mess.’6

  Dudley Leggett was ill with malaria but working as much as he could while Edwards sorted out some of the necessities of life, building a washstand with a tin hat for a basin and a table for Dudley’s typewriter. Later on, operating from Buna would be much less challenging – by then it would be one of the staging points for a formidable Allied military operation and on one occasion when Edwards arrived without spare needles for the cutting head of the disc recorder, he was only mildly inconvenienced. ‘It was just a matter of going back to the airstrip, hitching a ride back to Moresby, because there was a continuous shuttle service across the mountains and getting the cutters and coming back. It was all done in a few hours.’7

  In December, Australian troops had reinforced the American forces at Buna and Australian infantry and light tanks were fighting their way in from the east against determined Japanese resistance. Leggett reported several times on the extensive Japanese defences he saw as the Australians captured more and more ground. ‘When I looked over those positions the next day I found that the area was literally pockmarked with his pillboxes. They are not built with concrete or steel, but they are wel
l dug in with roots with heavy logs and sand, and had a number of entrances.’8

  The heavy demand on jeeps carrying ammunition, food and wounded made it difficult to move the equipment around the frontline. However, in the days before Christmas, using Papuan carriers and a jeep, Edwards and Leggett brought the portable recorder to the front, at the edge of the airfield east of Buna. Their nights were broken by shellfire. ‘Very weird crouching in a slit trench working the recorder in the moonlight with shells crashing and whistling over our heads,’ wrote Len in his diary.9

  On Christmas Eve they woke to the sound of tank engines warming up. Carrying the recorder on the back of one of the tanks, they set up in a shell hole to get the best sound and Leggett recorded several real-time commentaries.

  The attack has started. That’s the first small arms firing we’ve had this morning. The tanks moved out of their cover in the undergrowth of the coconut palm plantation just after first light, moved about two to three hundred yards down towards the creek along the new Buna aerodrome, which is on our side of the creek, moved to the bridge, across that intending to go forward this time to lead our infantry against the Japanese defences. There’s been quite an outburst of automatic fire and just before we were able to get the recording going the Japs sent over three or four of his mortar bombs and one landed about 40 yards down towards our left.10

  Len Edwards was recording Dudley’s commentary and the sound of the gunfire and the mortars when they found themselves too close for comfort. Edwards thrust himself into the mud as five shells landed nearby.