Voices From the Air: The ABC war correspondents who told the stories of Australians in the Second World War

By Tony Hill

With the outbreak of the Second World War, a new breed of reporters joined the ranks of war correspondents - and through the reach and power of radio Australians back home heard their voices and their stories shaped from the sounds of battle, out of the white noise of the ether.
Australian forces defended our long shoreline against the threat of invasion and more than 500,000 Australians went into battle overseas. They fought on the dusty soil of the Middle East and North Africa, in the snow-topped hills of Greece, on the beaches of the Pacific and in the sweltering jungles of Malaya and New Guinea. And the first ABC war correspondents were on the frontlines with them.
The story of these correspondents is a story of Australians at war and a tale of personal struggle, humour, tragedy and achievement. From Chester Wilmot's gripping accounts of the Siege of Tobruk to Dudley Leggett trekking with the diggers through the mud of the Kokoda Trail, Haydon Lennard helping to free Australian nurses from a Japanese prison camp and John Elliott's shocking death in the final campaign in Borneo, ABC correspondents shared the highs, lows and the dangers of the frontline with the troops. And the photographs of the correspondents in the field and the ephemera that has survived: the torn pages, blotted, crossed out and hastily typed scripts that are reproduced in the book bring these experiences to life.
Tony Hill's own experience as a foreign correspondent led him in search of the first ABC war correspondents and to a compelling and largely untold story. He is passionate about telling this story of the war; about a remarkable group of men and how they reported from the warfront; how they changed the reporting of war and how the war changed their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460706374

Tony Hill

Tony Hill is the managing editor of ABC News 24, the ABC's television news channel. As an ABC foreign correspondent in Indo-China, South East Asia and the Middle East he covered stories such as Tiananmen Square and the first Gulf War. He was also head of the ABC's foreign news operations and its network of correspondents and overseas bureaus. He lives in Sydney.

Book preview

DEDICATION

To the families of the ABC war correspondents

To Gillian and Emma

EPIGRAPH

‘I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all. To men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea that only voices out of the air can reach them.’

King George V, Christmas Empire broadcast, 1932

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Introduction

  1  Beginnings

  2  These Ingenious Instruments – Mobile Recording Units

  3  Out of a Quiet Harbour into a Heavy Sea – The Middle East Field Unit

  4  War on the Horizon – Australia

  5  Malaya and the Fall of Singapore

  6  The Home Front – Australia

  7  Back from the Unknown – Timor

  8  Done Soon and Damn Soon – Port Moresby

  9  Simply As I Saw It – Kokoda

10  They Went Through Hell – The Battle of the Beachheads

11  The Other Side of the Mountains – New Guinea 1943

12  Along the Coast – New Guinea 1944

13  This is the Thing that’s Going to Get Me – The Philippines

14  A Question of Necessity – New Guinea 1945

15  Three Pieces for Oboe – Borneo

16  Most Profuse and Frequent – Singapore

17  Surrender

18  A Mess of Ugliness – Rabaul

19  War Crimes

Epilogue

Resources and Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

Photos Section

About the Author

Copyright

PREFACE

In the 1920s and 30s, radio was a revolutionary phenomenon in a troubled world – it defied the endless gulfs of distance, crossed impassable borders and spoke to people and nations with the profound impact and compelling intimacy of the human voice.

The title Voices from the Air reflects something of the seemingly miraculous reach of radio in the years before the Second World War, when it was breaking down the isolation of Australians within their own vast land and connecting them with the wider world.

With the coming of war, radio was on the frontlines and the air waves carried the voices of war correspondents and the sounds of the distant battlefield into Australian homes. The reports of a new breed of radio correspondents heard from the white noise and the static brought a powerful immediacy to the stories of the war.

The original scripts and letters written in the field by this group of ABC war correspondents were my starting point almost two decades ago, when I was searching the ABC Archives for some connection to my own experience as an ABC foreign correspondent: who were the earliest ABC correspondents and what challenges had they faced? The documents from the Second World War were a rich source of information and in 2004 I included some of them in an exhibition about the ABC’s foreign correspondents, but it was the barest sketch of the work and lives of the first ABC war correspondents.

The correspondents’ scripts tell part of the tale. They are more than just the first draft of history: they tell the story of reporting from the war zone. Mistakes are roughly overtyped and corrected by hand, the blue pencil of the military censor scores through lines and paragraphs, and official red-ink stamps decorate the sheets. Each is a chart of the correspondents’ thinking, the construction of each story, and the filter of censorship . . . and it suggests that there is a story to be told beyond the reports themselves.

The letters and diaries in the archives tell a more personal tale of the correspondents caught up in the extraordinary events of that time, and shed more light on the men themselves, as well as on the devastating events they reported.

In writing their stories, I have mostly not tried to adjust for the sometimes narrow view of eye-witness reports or contemporaneous letters. Reporters in the field frequently had incomplete information, or were unaware of the broader conduct of the war. As events developed, their first reports were often updated in the ongoing coverage, or through the revisions of later scholarship, but I have used their reports and letters largely as they were filed, broadcast or written at the time. This is a series of snapshots. It is not a military history, and does not cover all of the Second World War, only some of the key campaigns reported by ABC correspondents. Similarly, it deals with the issues that arose for ABC correspondents but it is not a history of war reporting.

I have used edited extracts from their original reports or transcripts and these have also been edited for grammatical purposes, much as the sub-editor or producer would have done before broadcast. In the case of some cables or telegraph messages, the telegraph language has been edited for meaning and sense. But as much as possible I have used the correspondents’ own words, from their despatches, scripts, letters and diaries, to tell the story of their work in the field.

INTRODUCTION

On a cold Boxing Day morning in 1940, ABC war correspondent Chester Wilmot was eating a bully beef breakfast with Australian soldiers on a wind-swept plateau outside the Libyan town of Bardia. Huddled around the winter fires, it was a long way from the warmth of the Australian summer and the comfort of family and friends left behind only a few months earlier. At the time, Australians had yet to fight a battle in the Second World War – the battle for Bardia, would be the first for the soldiers and for Wilmot as correspondent.

Wilmot’s reporting from Bardia and in the year that followed was ground-breaking, and as it mapped the dusty roads and trackless desert of the warfronts of the Middle East and North Africa, it charted a path for other ABC correspondents to follow. In all, thirteen war correspondents would report for the ABC over the next five years, and their experiences and those of the men who worked with them, are part of the story of Australia’s war.

As Wilmot camped with the soldiers outside Bardia that Boxing Day, Australians back home in Sydney were flocking to the premiere of the film Forty Thousand Horsemen, which immortalised the First World War cavalry charge by the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in Palestine. A little more than two decades since the last ‘war to end all wars’ and Australians were once again at war in the Middle East.

In this war, more than half a million Australians would fight on foreign battlefields. They fought far from home in North Africa and the Middle East, in the Mediterranean, in Greece and with the RAF in Europe. When the war brought the threat of invasion to Australia’s shores, they fought in Malaya, in the ‘green hell’ of New Guinea, on the beaches and hinterlands of the Pacific theatre, on the seas and in the air and against direct attacks on the Australian coast.

News from the Allied warfronts, and the stories of Australians at war, far and near, were of vital interest for families and everyone at home. In the First World War newspapers had been the only source of news and information but now radio was a part of Australian daily life. By 1941 there were more than a million licensed radios for the population of seven million, delivering news with an immediacy unmatched by the newspapers.

The war was a coming of age for the young national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and it led to the creation in 1947 of an independent ABC news service. However, while newspapers drew on a long history of war correspondents, the ABC – and radio – had no such tradition at the outbreak of the war. The ABC had a limited news service, a small but growing team of journalists recruited from newspapers and only a few ‘Talks’ (current affairs and features) broadcasters working in the field. There was no role of broadcast journalist or reporter experienced or equipped to cover a war.

The thirteen ABC war correspondents who reported from the battlefields overseas were: Chester Wilmot, Haydon Lennard, Dudley Leggett, Bill Marien, Peter Hemery, Henry Stokes, Raymond Paull, Fred Simpson, Frank Legg, John Hinde, John Elliott, John Thompson and Talbot Duckmanton. They were generally either newspaper journalists working in the new field of radio news, or broadcasters. They developed skills suited to the demands of radio reporting, which included transitioning from the written to the spoken word, from reporting designed to be read on the page to that destined to be heard,¹ and the art of descriptive, factual voice reports. They honed these skills in their despatches and stories of Australians at war, and in the process, they helped to shape the role of the broadcast reporter and the development of an ABC news service that became, and remains, a strong and trusted voice for Australians.

Working closely with the thirteen reporters were five other men. Lawrence Cecil led the first field unit in the Middle East, and the technicians Bill MacFarlane and Len Edwards were the sound recording magicians on the frontlines with the reporters. (Another technician, Leo Gallwey, and an engineer, RJ Boyle, also travelled with the field unit in the Middle East. As they did not play as large a role in reporting from the field and there is less known about their work, it has not been possible to cover them in any detail in this book.)

ABC war correspondents covered two roles with specific accreditations: correspondents and observers. Correspondents reported news and filed immediate despatches, while observers were attached to ABC mobile field units that created recordings of reports from the warfronts, actuality (recordings of the actual sounds) of war, and interviews with Australians at the frontline. War correspondents were journalists from the News department and observers were broadcasters from the Talks department. (The technicians who operated the recording equipment were also accredited as observers.) In the Pacific war the roles sometimes overlapped: the journalists recorded voice reports, actuality and interviews and the broadcasters filed news despatches. The distinction mattered little to the audience and they are all regarded generally as war correspondents, and are described as such in this book.

In reporting from the frontlines, war correspondents took many of the same risks as the soldiers whose stories they were reporting. Some of the ABC correspondents were injured, many suffered from illnesses such as malaria, dysentery or dengue fever that would affect their health in the years to follow, and there was one ultimate casualty during the war itself: the correspondent, John Elliott, was killed while reporting one of the final campaigns.

All accredited correspondents wore uniforms with their own shoulder tabs or badges and were effectively under military authority. Military Public Relations controlled travel in the war zones but even so, the war correspondents’ movement with the troops and their access to the battlefield was extraordinary by the standards of today. Their letters and diaries show that almost all of them on occasion carried a weapon in the field, against all regulations and conventions of war, but in keeping with a general expectation of correspondents living and travelling with the troops in such close proximity to combat.

Every despatch and story, whether from General Headquarters or from the field, was censored. The military regulations for press accompanying a force in the field acknowledged the inevitable tension between correspondents and the military: ‘The essence of successful warfare is secrecy. The essence of successful journalism is publicity.’² There was universal acceptance of the need for censorship, but at times war correspondents fell foul of the censors or disputed onerous restrictions.

Reporting was based on information from official and unofficial military briefings and the communiqués released at GHQ, the correspondents’ own eye-witness accounts and newsgathering, and interviews with the troops. An element of soft propaganda, patriotic language and stereotypically racial or even racist characterisations of the enemy coloured some reporting but this was generally unremarkable at the time and in a war that posed a very real threat to Australia itself. Reporting was not only about informing the public: the correspondents also had a role in supporting public morale – something that was widely understood.

The graphic carnage of the battlefield was tempered in much of the reporting, however the repeated, commonplace exposure to violent death challenged the resilience and descriptive skills of the correspondents who reported it. Common themes were the courage of the Diggers and individual stories that humanised and illuminated the bigger story.

The ABC teams in the field in Australia and overseas were also pushing the boundaries of recording technology. Travelling with cumbersome recording equipment and recording the sounds of battle added a layer of difficulty to the challenges and risks of reporting the war. The radio mechanics or technicians, Bill MacFarlane and Len Edwards, developed a genius for trouble-shooting and recording under conditions from sand storms to monsoonal rain to the thunder and shrapnel of artillery fire. However, technology and communications often determined the successes and failures of the ABC war correspondents as much as their own reporting skills. Communications by telegram, cable, shortwave, radiotelephone and airmail were frequently unreliable, sometimes nightmarish and occasionally heartbreaking.

The wartime experiences of the eighteen men who covered the battlefields for the ABC are the stories of the first Australian war correspondents of the broadcast era. Both women and men have covered war and conflict for the ABC since then, but at the time there were no women accredited as ABC war correspondents reporting from the field.

The War Correspondents

The commentator and broadcaster Chester Wilmot became the ABC’s first war correspondent. He reported from the battlefields of the Middle East, North Africa, Greece, and New Guinea, including the Kokoda campaign.

Lawrence Cecil was a radio producer and actor who headed the first ABC field unit, working with Chester Wilmot from the end of 1940 until the beginning of 1942.

Bill MacFarlane operated the sound recording equipment for the first ABC field unit with Chester Wilmot and Lawrence Cecil. He went on to work with Wilmot and many of the other ABC correspondents in the Pacific war.

Leo Gallwey made some recordings with Chester Wilmot in the Middle East and many recordings with Lawrence Cecil. RJ Boyle was the engineer operating the ABC radio receiving station in Gaza. (Gallwey was often working on base at Gaza with Boyle and their roles receive passing mention here.)

The first ABC newsman to become a war correspondent was Haydon Lennard. He reported from New Guinea and other areas of the Pacific and South East Asia theatres, and covered the liberation of Singapore.

Henry Stokes was a former news agency journalist who covered Malaya and Singapore for the ABC and the BBC and escaped Singapore just before the island fell to the Japanese.

The first bombing of the Australian mainland at Darwin was reported by Peter Hemery. Hemery spent considerable time as a war correspondent in the Top End of Australia and later in New Guinea.

A former newspaper journalist, Bill Marien reported for the ABC from mainland Australia, the Japanese-occupied island of Timor, and covered many of the key battles of the New Guinea campaign.

Dudley Leggett was a broadcaster and supervisor of ABC field units as a war correspondent in Australia and New Guinea. He covered the final stages of the Kokoda campaign.

John Hinde was one of the earliest ABC war correspondents reporting from GHQ (General Headquarters). He covered campaigns in New Guinea and was with MacArthur’s force for the invasion of the Philippines.

No other ABC correspondent spent as much time with Australian troops in the field in the last two years of the war as Fred Simpson. Simpson’s reporting included the campaigns in New Guinea and Borneo and the occupation of post-war Japan.

Frank Legg was a popular ABC broadcaster who fought in North Africa and then returned to the field as a war correspondent in the Pacific war. He reported from New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines and covered the Japanese surrender in 1945.

The technician Len Edwards followed Bill MacFarlane into the field where he worked with the reporters covering the war. He was on the frontlines of the Pacific war and adapted recording equipment to work in the demanding conditions of the battlefield.

An ABC news journalist who served as an Army Education officer, Raymond Paull became a war correspondent during the New Guinea campaign. His reporting included the landings on the coast of Dutch New Guinea.

A former champion boxer and sports journalist, John Elliott served in the army in North Africa and joined the ranks of ABC war correspondents in 1944. He reported from the Philippines and Borneo, where he was killed at Balikpapan in 1945, the first ABC correspondent to die in the field.

John Thompson was a poet and broadcaster who became a war correspondent in time to cover the surrender of the Japanese forces at Rabaul. He went on to report on the postwar political upheaval in Indonesia.

Talbot Duckmanton was the last ABC war correspondent appointed in the Second World War. He reported on the first Australian trials of Japanese war criminals at Morotai.

Chapter 1

BEGINNINGS

When the ABC was created as Australia’s national broadcaster in 1932, radio’s ability to deliver voices from the air was still a modern marvel, little more than a decade old.

The wireless revolution was a wondrous technical sleight of hand that had wiped away the poles and wires of the telegraph: ‘The wire telegraph is a kind of very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and he is meowing in Los Angeles. Radio operates in exactly the same way, except there is no cat.’¹ More than anything, radio was the ‘magic medium’ of communication in which sound and the human voice were delivered, instantly, to a mass audience.

In the years immediately following the launch of the ABC in 1932, music dominated the commission’s radio broadcasts, and information programs such as talks, specialist programs and news took up only about a quarter of the air time.² However, in the times of crisis and war of the 1930s and 40s, radio communicated immediately and directly with a public thirsty for information, it was an essential source of news, and it brought the sounds and voices of the great and terrible events and human dramas of the time into millions of homes.

Governments knew the power of radio to communicate and to connect with the public, and world leaders increasingly used it to talk directly to their people and to the rest of the world. The voices of political leaders heard on radio had an immediacy, a force and a personal appeal beyond that of the printed word, and created a new dynamic for leaders in shaping the events of the time. Radio was a powerful tool for persuasion and propaganda, as well as a means to inform and entertain.

In its first year, the ABC appointed a London representative, Arthur Mason, who sourced music, cultural and entertainment programs from the BBC, arranged visits by musicians and talks by leading figures. Through the London office and the broadcast relationship with the BBC, the ABC broadcast talks by British political leaders, from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who apologised for not having the time to ‘put some polishing touches’ on his speech, to Labour leader George Lansbury, who gave an ‘ardently socialistic confession of faith’, and leading Conservative politician Lord Lloyd, who argued for longer air-time.

Efforts were made to attract leading thinkers and literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, not always with great success.

Dear Sir, Mr Bernard Shaw asks me to say that as he has never visited Australia, and has not made any special study of it beyond its remarkable backwardness in dramatic culture. He does not feel qualified to undertake a broadcast, though he is much gratified by the invitation. Yours faithfully, Blanche Patch, Secretary.³

Within a few years the ABC was rebroadcasting speeches by leaders including Adolph Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, President Roosevelt and others.

News from Abroad

In the beginning, the ABC broadcast a limited amount of news from the newspapers. The newspaper proprietors saw radio as a rival and, at first, the ABC was restricted to using two hundred words of news from the papers each day and to broadcasting bulletins well after the papers had hit the streets.

The ABC appointed its first journalist in 1934 and a federal News editor, Frank Dixon, two years later. Dixon built up a small team of journalists and began to expand the sources of news, though the papers and other constraints still limited the ABC’s news role. Australia’s geography, so far from the centres of world power and sources of news, and the tensions and turbulence of the 1930s, meant that reliable news from overseas was critical to the ABC news service.

During the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the ABC arranged with its London representative, Arthur Mason, for a telegram service of developments and official statements, and the following year it employed an experienced journalist, Hugo Jackson, as a news correspondent in London. Jackson began by taking news from the London newspapers but also provided some coverage of major news events, giving the ABC a limited means of independent newsgathering overseas.

By 1937, with growing instability in Europe and Japanese aggression in Asia, the ABC engaged freelance correspondents overseas to provide news and commentaries, which were then read by ABC commentators or announcers in the studio. A correspondent in Germany, GH Morison, sent the ABC a monthly airmail letter on German financial and political issues, including Hitler’s mounting campaign against the Jews.

Persecution of the Jews is once again in full swing in the Third Reich. Not, however, in a form likely to attract the notice of people paying a short visit to Germany whose good opinion is desired. But ruthless in character and unrelenting in rigour all the same, condemning the victims – as it is intended to do – to take flight or suffer slow extermination . . . as no publicity is ever given such matters in Germany, little stir is created in the Reich and only the faintest echoes heard in foreign countries. But the rigour of repression never relaxes. The Jews are leaving Germany as fast as they can. They have no choice. The Hitler regime has firmly resolved that none shall remain.⁴

In the Asia-Pacific region, the ABC appointed a string of local correspondents and commentators, including some working on newspapers in the outposts of British imperial or commercial influence. The assistant editor of the North China Daily News in Shanghai, RT Peyton-Griffin, worked under the eye of Japanese military censors to send cables on the Sino-Japanese war.

BREATHLESSLY AWAITING JAP STATEMENT POLICY VIS A VIS CHINA EXPECTED TODAY – DECIDING WHETHER PEACE STILL POSSIBLE – ALTERNATIVELY FURTHER EXTENSIVE WARFARE . . . STILL UNBELIEVED JAPAN ISSUE FORMAL DECLARATION WAR.⁵

An Australian academic, Peter Russo, began writing commentaries for the ABC from Tokyo, where he was a professor in English at the Tokyo University of Commerce.

Nazi Fifth Column activities in Japan have been intensified since the collapse of France . . . Nazi ‘tourists’ who have been hibernating in Shanghai are now pouring into Japan . . . and promoting whispering campaigns which are beginning to have telling effects.⁶

Other correspondents provided commentary and occasional news from elsewhere in the Far East, and the author and journalist, Guenther Stein, mailed the ABC scripts for talks from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong today is like a beleaguered fortress, at the mercy of Japan’s military. If you approach or leave the British colony by boat, it is likely that you will meet one or two, or even more, of those numerous Japanese men-of-war which are silently moving just outside the narrow limits of British territorial waters . . .⁷

The journalist, publisher and radio executive in Manila, Carlos P Romulo, was engaged as the ABC’s correspondent in the Philippines from 1939 until the end of 1941. He later won a Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting and became Philippines foreign secretary and an international statesman. SA Wykes, the editor of the Sunday Times, Singapore, filed reports for the ABC on events in Malaya.

Europe in 1938 was a continent in crisis – Germany annexed Austria, Czechoslovakia was carved up under the Munich agreement and the Nazis launched the bloody Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. At the height of the tensions over Czechoslovakia, cables from London kept the ABC supplied with news, and ahead of the newspapers. The ABC General Manager, Charles Moses, wrote to Arthur Mason:

. . . on a number of occasions your messages arrived many hours ahead of the publication of the same news in the daily papers, and that as a result, we were able to give listeners the latest information the whole time the stations were on air.⁸

The London Bureau

London was a clearing house for world news and news of the worrying events in Europe in the lead up to war. The ABC’s London office and its correspondent, Hugo Jackson, would be a major source of news throughout the war years. Jackson had left London after the First World War to come to Australia, where he became editor of a regional newspaper and then a writer and commentator on foreign affairs for The Age under the by-line of ‘Scrutator’. He returned to London to be closer to events in Europe and to continue his specialist writing on international affairs. When he started work for the ABC, he was on the payroll of AAP, the news agency owned by the Australian newspaper proprietors, and the arrangement was kept secret because of the difficulties between the commission and the newspapers over access to overseas news.

In 1939 Jackson was reporting to the ABC that events in Europe were moving with such terrible speed that it was not clear where and when the next blow to European security would fall.⁹ That year the ABC struck a deal with a small news agency, the Exchange Telegraph news service, and obtained a news tape machine for the London office, giving the ABC an independent source of overseas news. An ABC news bureau under Jackson was then set up in cramped quarters in News Chronicle House at 72–78 Fleet Street, in premises sub-let from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

On 1 September 1939 an urgent cable from the London office arrived at the ABC, with news heard over German radio.

ACCORDING BERLIN WIRELESS STATION HITLER THIS MORNING ADDRESSED PROCLAMATION GERMAN ARMY – QUOTE – POLISH STATE REFUSED FRIENDLY OFFER ADDRESS THEM APPEALED FORCE ARMS INSTEAD – GERMANS POLAND BRUTALLY PERSECUTED – INTOLERABLE FRONTIER INCIDENTS – IN ORDER END THIS INTOLERABLE MADNESS I NO OTHER CHOICE THAN ANSWER FORCE WITH FORCE.¹⁰

Soon afterwards further news came through that Germany had invaded Poland, and two days later on 3 September 1939 Britain and Australia were at war with Germany. With the declaration of war, Hugo Jackson and other staff in the London office were often working at night, to feed news to the ABC’s news bulletins in daytime Australia, and night-time work continued at other times throughout the war. Arthur Mason wrote of the strange world in which the ABC office now worked.

Blacked-out from the first, London by night is the densest pall of impenetrable gloom ever known . . . Not the tiniest hint of light is allowed to peep from a building, and all of London’s sprawling immensity of mile upon mile of buildings has simply ceased to exist as such by night . . . And a silence as deep as the darkness envelops the city. The roar of London-by-night is lost to us.¹¹

During the Blitz, staff in the London office who could not get home slept on camp stretchers. On one occasion, the news office was damaged by a German bomb, but no one was hurt, and an emergency news operation was re-established within a few hours.

Hugo Jackson was ‘one of the most dependable and wide-awake foreign correspondents’, according to an ABC news bulletin compiler in Sydney, and he worked with little let up for much of the war in order to provide news for the ABC’s bulletins. In 1944 the constant work took its toll – Jackson was struck down by influenza and then pneumonia. He recovered, however, and was out of hospital by the time of the Allied invasion of Europe.

News reports from London and from elsewhere during the war were communicated over cable, using the undersea cable telegraph service; by wireless telegraph such as the Beam Wireless service carried by radio signals; by radiotelephone that transmitted voice by shortwave for connection with a telephone service; and by airmail.

In addition to its own news from London, the ABC rebroadcast news bulletins from the BBC and took overseas news from other sources such as the British Official Wireless Service, which provided official government news. By 1940, the ABC had six news broadcasts a day, the first at 7.45 am and the last at 11.30 pm, but it also broadcast talks, features and commentary programs. These programs were already using recorded actuality – the real sounds of events and everyday life – and the voices of broadcasters recorded in the field, and the technology to make these recordings away from the studio would soon be used to bring the world of the war directly into the homes of Australians.

Chapter 2

THESE INGENIOUS INSTRUMENTS – MOBILE RECORDING UNITS

The 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 . .