Voices from the Air (16 page)

MacArthur's GHQ spokesman, Colonel Diller, consistently downplayed the size of the Japanese force and the nature of the task in the Kokoda campaign and, according to Wilmot, it was only pressure from the Australian HQ that eventually resulted in more accurate communiqués.

However, Wilmot's experience in the Middle East and now in New Guinea had convinced him that General Blamey did not have the confidence of many of his senior commanders, or the troops. While in the Middle East, Wilmot had also begun looking into rumours that the Army was being grossly overcharged in a contract to supply movies for the troops, and
that Blamey had corruptly benefited from the deal. In late September, Wilmot returned to Australia, where he met the prime minister and made known his concerns over the conduct of the New Guinea campaign, and Blamey's suppression of criticism.
¹⁸

Wilmot returned to Port Moresby but the Kokoda campaign would be the end of his time as an ABC war correspondent. Things came to a head at Blamey's headquarters in Moresby on Sunday 1 November, when Blamey sent for Wilmot. Among those present in the room was George Fenton, of Army Public Relations, Wilmot's friend from the Middle East. Wilmot detailed the conversation in a later confidential report to the ABC. According to Wilmot's account, Blamey accused Wilmot of raising allegations about him during a conversation in a Melbourne restaurant.

It was reported to me then that you had alleged that there had been improper dealings by me in the case of a motion picture contract in the Middle East and that I had benefited financially from these dealings. You also alleged that I had improperly interfered in stopping the court-martial of an officer.

Blamey had then sent a mutual friend to talk to Wilmot about the allegations and ‘to assure you that these allegations were unfounded'. Blamey said the mutual friend had reported back that ‘you accepted my assurance and would not repeat these allegations'.

Wilmot did not recall the supposed restaurant incident, and had a different recollection of the conversation with the mutual friend. He also told Blamey that he had no recollection of later
talking about the conversation with three other people, as charged by Blamey. Wilmot's report of the meeting concluded:

General Blamey: Will you say that you did not discuss this matter with anyone?

Chester Wilmot: No, I cannot say that.

General Blamey: Well, that is all. You have endeavoured to undermine my authority as C-in-C. That is a serious matter. We should give thousands of pounds to have someone in your position in Japan trying to undermine the C-in-C there. Your accreditation to Allied Land Forces is forthwith cancelled. You will return to Australia at once. Fenton, will you please make the necessary arrangements. Good morning.
¹⁹

In his report to the ABC, Wilmot condemned what he called Blamey's tactics of ‘surprise – stampede and guillotine' and the fact that he had no chance to hear the details of what he was alleged to have said and to adequately consider a response.

The basic reason for the conflict is a difference of opinion on a matter of principle. I have always stood up for the right of correspondents to make informed criticism of military affairs and general administrative matters affecting the troops. To me and other correspondents General Blamey has insisted that there shall be no such criticism.
²⁰

Blamey had, somewhat controversially, sacked General Rowell as New Guinea Force commander, and Wilmot believed that his friendship with Rowell also made him suspect in Blamey's eyes.

Wilmot concluded that ‘the basic freedom of correspondents in General Blamey's command is at stake. If this is unchallenged
he has succeeded in placing himself above criticism.' Despite this, Blamey won the battle with Wilmot, who could no longer report as a war correspondent in the South West Pacific Area and returned to Australia.

The month before, in October, the Japanese advance along the Kokoda Trail had been halted at Imita Ridge, only a few kilometres from the road leading to Port Moresby. The Japanese were exhausted and had run out of supplies, and the fighting would now turn against them. At this stage Wilmot had not yet returned from Australia for his confrontation with Blamey in Moresby, and Chester's colleague Dudley Leggett headed into the mountains with the Australian soldiers who were pursuing the retreating Japanese troops back through the Owen Stanleys.

After just a few hours of walking on the punishing track, Leggett's knees were aching and quivering from the ‘jar and strain' of maintaining his balance, descending and climbing the steep ridges. On the second day he fell ill with dysentery, but after an overnight rest he forced himself on and caught up with his companions. Dudley Leggett was very fit – only a few years earlier he had competed in decathlons and pentathlons and at the Australian Athletics Championships, and in his rugby playing days, the
Courier Mail
had described him as a ‘splendid physical type'.
²¹
But his fitness was now being severely tested by the Kokoda Trail; and for the Australian soldiers, pushing forward through the mountains ahead of him, conditions were even more serious. Dysentery and physical and mental exhaustion wasted the soldiers of the 25th Brigade who were hounding the Japanese back through the mountains.
²²
The bodies of Japanese left behind in the speed of their retreat were
found at various points along the track – so too the bodies of Australians at places like Brigade Hill, where they had died in the fighting of the Japanese advance only a month earlier . . . and some others which bore witness to Japanese atrocities, bodies bayonetted and mutilated. Leggett's reports did not describe the full grim reality found along the track and many of the bodies seem to have been already buried by the time he passed.

From Ioribaiwa to Kokoda the trail is one of bloodshed and anguish imprinted on the memory of our troops. One can follow the struggle of the last three months by decaying equipment and the graves of the fallen. Rusting shallow Australian steel helmets, the high crowned basinlike Japanese helmet, rotting tunics, stray boots, Japanese two-toed rubber shoes, Jap rifles, Australian rifles, pieces of machine guns, grenades, live ammunition, empty shell and cartridge cases, the brass metal strips of the Jap 310 Woodpecker or Hotchkiss type machine gun. The graves of Australians are identified by a rough wooden cross bearing name, number and unit or the simple epithet, ‘an unknown soldier'. Japanese graves are marked by a piece of planed sapling, inscribed in Japanese characters, either driven into the ground at the head of the mound of earth or lying along it.
²³

Leggett arrived at Myola, high up on the watershed of the Owen Stanleys and a location for supply drops from Allied ‘biscuit bombers'.

Everyone who has written about the conditions here feels impotent to do it adequately. The mud on the Myola track defies imagination. We walked through clutching mud as
near as nothing to our knees and then slush and slime to the top of our boots . . . But at Myola we saw the sun. There are two huge shallow basins of marsh and dry ground covered with coarse grass.
²⁴

Myola and the dry lake beds covered in Kunai grass had been a supply base and were now also a hospital and command centre. The Australians had caught up with the Japanese and from Myola they moved on to attack the enemy at Templeton's Crossing.

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.'