‘[Doug’s communiqués] bewilder the public by making it impossible for them to reconcile such a series of crushing victories’
—Sir Keith Murdoch and Warwick Fairfax, in a letter to Curtin
Days before Blamey left for Port Moresby, the international press reports were as hysterical as they were inaccurate. Their confusion did not help the mood of defeatism. No paper reported the true state of the Japanese and their near-exhausted supply lines at Ioribaiwa; no paper found anything to praise about Potts’s delaying tactics.1 On the contrary, ‘Another Singapore’ was about to engulf Port Moresby. The American newspapers suggested that Australian troops were to blame for the likely fall of Port Moresby, and that only American reinforcements could save the day.
A New York Times editorial (22 September) warned that the Kokoda campaign bore a disquieting resemblance to the disastrous defence of Malaya; that the Japanese, without risking a battle, had driven the Australians back.The Herald Tribune (22 September) criticised the leadership of the Australians, who were forced to surrender their positions in the Owen Stanley Ranges. The article concluded that the troops lacked adaptability— and no explanation would excuse the loss of Moresby. Earlier, the Chicago Daily Tribune (11 September) said the Australian soldier had been driven back by an enemy with fewer advantages, and that American reinforcements were needed. A leading column in the Washington Post (19 September) reported the crisis in the Owen Stanleys under the headline, ‘Another Malaya’.
A trawl through Australian newspapers suggests that civilian Australia lived in fear and ignorance. When in doubt—as they so often were—the Australian press exaggerated the danger to the Australian mainland. Or they underplayed the fighting conditions. Little of the true horror of this war permeated the public mind. Hugh Dash of theDaily Telegraph described the withdrawal as ‘Lilliputian…the fighting has never exceeded the limits of sniping duels and patrol ambushing’.2 This was a direct echo of MacArthur’s communiqué. The victory at Milne Bay was trumpeted; but a smokescreen hung over the war along the Kokoda Track. Not for years would the Australian public learn the truth.
There was no television, of course. Censorship laws of almost totalitarian severity throttled the local press. In September, the Japanese were 25 miles from Port Moresby, yet most Australians went about their lives in sanguine ignorance. Very little news—and only that of a vague and dreamlike quality—survived the censors’ pen.
Osmar White, Chester Wilmot and other correspondents reported as accurately and bravely as they were able (after the war, White wrote a brilliant memoir). They were at the front line briefly—and none witnessed the battles of Isurava or Brigade Hill. Nobody outside a closed military circle saw Wilmot’s series of blistering critiques. Damien Parer and George Silk, the officially approved photojournalists (and the only two photographers on the track) took superb sequences of footage and film, which were subject to intense scrutiny by censors. Their brilliant imagery was sanitised; the bodies of dead Australians were excised from Silk’s harrowing photographs.
A glimpse of the spectacular cock-ups, the breathtaking incompetence, the squalid treatment of the militia and the sheer horror of this war would await the correspondent Raymond Paull’s Retreat From Kokoda in 1958, a well-written, deeply partisan treatment (and thinly disguised apology for Rowell). Dudley McCarthy’s encyclopaedic official history,South-West Pacific Area—First Year, appeared a year later. Blamey commissioned his own brief pamphlet,The Jap Was Thrashed, a self-celebration cobbled together by his PR team. David Horner exposed the breakdown in command in his magisterial Crisis of Command (1978) and in High Command (1982). Many battalion histories appeared, but they tended to be privately published and thinly circulated among families. Not until Peter Brune published Those Ragged Bloody Heroes in 1991 did Australians hear a word from the ordinary soldier about his experiences.
MacArthur bludgeoned the first casualty of war beyond recognition. The Australian civilian’s notion of Kokoda groped about the dimly lit world of ‘Doug’s Communiqués’. The Allied supreme commander decreed in May 1942 that war correspondents must write only what his daily summaries contained. They were reduced to the supreme commander’s copy boys. All articles passed through two censors, one in New Guinea and one in Australia. Criticism of commanders, any speculation, unauthorised photos, and even hostile cartoons, were banned. These conditions did not apply in Britain and America; only the Australian Government acquiesced.
Doug’s communiqués usually stated that ‘Allied’ or ‘American’ soldiers were doing the fighting, when in fact no American soldier saw combat until mid-November. Battles fought entirely by Australians were Allied even when only a few American engineers were present in the rear. The battles of Isurava, Brigade Hill and Ioribaiwa were described as mere patrol skirmishes. MacArthur would not dignify the Japanese advance as a land invasion, so little had he credited its chance of success. The truth ran a distant second to the importance of preserving MacArthur’s reputation.3 His press officers had mastered the art of spin long before the grubby practice reached its apotheosis in the early twenty-first century.
Australia’s media laws were so strict that Captain Henry Steel, an army public relations officer based in Townsville, took the unprecedented step of complaining on the journalists’ behalf. He protested that his office was superfluous under such a regime. With extraordinary effrontery he told Blamey that the censorship regime had ‘decimated’ the media’s efforts to present an honest picture of war: ‘No correspondent is serving the vital function he is supposed to be, by simply repainting the daily communiqué. If his activity is to be limited to that, there is no need for his presence here.’4
In disgust, foreign correspondents left the country, to work in comparatively liberal America and Britain. Irvine Douglas, London editor of the Australian Associated Press, described Australian censorship as ‘the most dangerous in the world, outside the Axis countries’—a rather disturbing irony. Australian censors had ‘poisoned’ the outlook of foreign reporters to the Allied war effort. ‘Australia’s name has suffered very badly,’ he wrote.5
‘The fact is it is useless our writing anything,’ remarked an exasperated Melbourne Herald journalist, on his return from New Guinea, ‘unless it conforms to the communiqué though the communiqué be false.’6
Reports were held up for days or weeks, and stamped, ‘To await release with appropriate communiqué’.
Furious editors wrote to their readers in self-exculpatory tones: ‘MacArthur should tell America—and us!’ thundered the Daily Telegraph (7 August 1942): ‘The Australian people are perplexed,’ it said, ‘because the meagre and platitudinous communiqué tells so little.’
Again, on 10 September, the paper railed at the censorship regime: ‘Thoughtful people feel that something important is pending or happening. Communiqués, which give the impression the fighting is confined to small patrols, do not…put the facts adequately…All the signs suggest that the enemy is developing a big operation against Port Moresby…’7
A fortnight later one of Doug’s communiqués contradicted the paper. The editor was ropeable: ‘One week [Australians] are told that the Owen Stanley Range is impassable. The next week they learn that the Japanese have crossed the range’. His readers, he mourned, were very upset at such ‘inconsistency between prophecy and fact’.8
This frustrating situation drove editors mad. Some decided to take political action. A furious Ralph Simmonds, editor of the Herald, pleaded with John Curtin several times between August 1942 and June 1944 for the right to send photographers to film the war.9
Only Damien Parer and George Silk—the brilliant, if heavily censored, official photographers—were allowed in the combat zone. The Government upheld the ban, sniffily concluding: ‘Press photographers concern themselves with subjects of transitory importance, which are likely to win popular appeal, while Official War Correspondents…are imbued with the necessity of building up a permanent pictorial record of war…preserved for posterity in the Australian War Memorial.’ This was mere obfuscation—and arrant nonsense.10
Heavyweight media identities entered the fray. Warwick Fairfax Snr, managing director of the Sydney Morning Herald, and Sir Keith Murdoch, press baron and former government censor, sent a list of heated demands to the Prime Minister on behalf of the Press Advisory Committee. They called for an end to the disastrous ‘cumulative effect’ of communiqués that led the public further from the truth, day after day, week after week. ‘They bewilder the public by making it impossible for them to reconcile such a series of crushing victories.’ Murdoch and Fairfax insisted that criticism of the war was ‘a fundamental democratic right’.11
The concerns of the press barons were ignored—even criticism of the censorship laws was censored. A cartoon in Smith’s Weekly—depicting the shocked reaction of members of a gentlemen’s club who had just learnt of Australian Federation—was disallowed. ‘This…can only be ascribed to a humourless and pedantic outlook, such as [we] would not have expected to find outside Germany or Japan’, said Fairfax and Murdoch.12
Curtin was unmoved. He supported the generals’ wishes to ban ‘blanket speculation’: a catch-all phrase that pretty much outlawed any reporting of the war, if the censors so wished.13 It was a shameful resort to totalitarian press control.
One voice calling for more media openness came from an unusual quarter: Curtin’s own Minister for the Army, Frank Forde. After his return from New Guinea, Forde couldn’t help noticing the distortion of the news: ‘One of the outstanding conclusions of my visit,’ he mused, ‘is the lack of really authentic news…I have no hesitation in stating that an incorrect impression has been created in the minds of the public in Australia’. No doubt he also observed that the white things in the sky were clouds.
Forde proposed to remedy the situation. He recommended the appointment of an official government reporter of the calibre of Charles Bean (the legendary Australian World War I correspondent and historian). Blamey contemptuously slapped down the idea, thereby underlining the powerlessness of the Minister for the Army in times of war.14
Ironically, the Government itself was left in the dark. MacArthur’s censorship regime had in fact frozen out the chief censor and therefore the Australian Government—from access to the truth, a sign of how far the generals controlled the dissemination of news: ‘The Government has been considerably embarrassed,’ Forde wired Blamey, ‘by the absence of reliable news from the battle fronts apart from your official communiqués.’15 No reports on the land operations had reached the War Cabinet, the Prime Minister observed on 14 October. Curtin, like the nation’s newsmen, was at times dangerously out of the loop.
Forde was told to act. But how? Australia’s Minister for the Army didn’t exactly thirst for facts about his army. A fortnight later, in no apparent hurry, Forde wrote a meek letter to Blamey. It revealed the staggering ignorance of the War Cabinet about the state of Australia’s troops: ‘…it would be appreciated,’ Forde pleaded, ‘if you could furnish me with your advice as to the possibility of supplying all periodical despatches, say weekly, of the progress of [the war in New Guinea].’16
The Japanese press was tightly controlled, with threats of automatic gaol sentences and closure of newspapers to those who transgressed. The staggering irony was that totalitarian Japan did have a war correspondent at the front lines: the brilliant reporter and closet pacifist Okada Seizo. Okada slogged over the mountains—‘embedded’ is not the word—with Horii’s troops right into the combat zones. He walked over Brigade Hill and reached Ioribaiwa.
Okada’s dispatches were heavily censored, of course, but later he wrote an unsparing account of the collapse of the Japanese army, called Lost Troops.17 Here is what he said of the state of the Japanese army as they approached Ioribaiwa:
We had lost a considerable portion of the troops wounded or killed in action. Besides, a growing number of men were suffering from malaria, colonitis, weakness of eyesight amounting to night blindness, pneumonia and other fevers of undetermined causes, nervous breakdown, diet deficiency diseases, fainting—illnesses brought about by insufficient supplies…extreme shortage of food, exhausting march…and other indescribable hardships under which we had been marching along.18
Okada despised militarism, and said so out loud during his interview with Benson, when the missionary was imprisoned at Buna (at first Benson assumed this was a trick, then realised Okada was sincere).
It is safe to assume that had Okada been an Australian reporter, his accreditation would have been promptly denied. Indeed, in their effect on news availability, Japanese censorship rules did not differ much from those in Australia. The citizens of both countries were utterly ignorant. The only real distinction lay in the fact that a Japanese editor faced harsher punishment than his Australian counterpart—possibly several years in gaol—for a breach.
The Japanese censors banned troops from writing in combat zones. The army virtually dictated the few postcards that got through. The Japanese soldier was not allowed to mention anything that suggested his location, including ‘climate conditions, lack of food, use of terms such as “coconuts” and “natives”’. He was permitted to write: ‘(a) Am fighting south of the Equator. (b) The enemy is weak. (c) Am fighting fiercely. (d) Living under conditions similar to those of the regular residents. (e) Am safe and happy.’19
In any case, most troops conformed willingly. Exultant Emperor worship was a common theme of letters home: ‘I shall smilingly undertake the Emperor’s great mission. Long Live the Emperor!’ and ‘The sacred souls of my dear comrades who died became the hallowed guardians of the country…’20
In a twist of the knife into the demoralised army, the regime refused to allow the soldiers’ families to write to them, except under very strict circumstances. ‘No mail from home. Why don’t letters come?’ wrote one soldier at Ioribaiwa. ‘I have the right to receive mail from the homeland. I’ve written home but not a single reply!’
Most soldiers received nothing for more than a year, and letters tended to arrive months old, torn and opened. ‘Received postcard and did not recollect the sender’s name,’ remarked one soldier in Papua on reading his mail.21
A remarkable letter by a twelve-year-old girl to her brother did reach him at Buna on 15 October. The little girl wrote:
In the place, where you are now there will be plenty of pineapples, bananas, coconuts and other fruits, I think. I want to go and see the South Seas myself sometime. Our teacher always says to us…that we must study well so that we can all go South to teach when we have grown up. Where you are, there will be not only various kinds of fruits, but also various kinds of animals, I think. What kinds of animals are there?22