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BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
Frontline to frontpage from ABC This week we look at war reporting - past and present. We track the development of Australian frontline reporting and speak to war correspondent Michael Ware from Time Magazine and Kate Adie from the BBC. The Media Report: 25 April 2002 - Frontline to the front page [This is the print version of story  ]
Mick O'Regan: Welcome to The Media Report. As today is Anzac Day, this edition of the program is all about the journalists who report from the front line. War correspondents, whose job it is to make sense of the conflict for those of us back home. Australia has produced a number of celebrated war correspondents: men like Charles Bean, whose accounts in World War I effectively created the Anzac ideal. To George Johnson and Damien Parer in the Second World War battles of North Africa and the Kokoda Track. And we'll also speak to a current correspondent, Michael Ware, who's been reporting on the Afghanistan conflict for Time Magazine. This week we'll explore their stories here on The Media Report. TRAD JAZZ VERSION OF 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary' Mick O'Regan: The role of journalists during wartime is now commonplace. People expect news from the front, and in these days of satellite television and round-the-clock broadcasting, every detail that passes the military censor and some that don't, are beamed into the lounge-room. But it wasn't always like that. Peter Stanley is the Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Peter Stanley: Well arguably I suppose, Australian reporters first went to war in New Zealand in the 1860s and The Sydney Herald would publish reports from its man on the Waikato. But formally I suppose, it goes back to 1885. There were Australian war correspondents with the New South Wales contingent to the Sudan in 1885. One of them, I think his name's Lambie, was actually wounded, and of course Australians have reported the world wars and every minor conflict in the 20th century. Mick O'Regan: So these were people who were dispatched from Australian publications specifically to report for those Australian journals? Peter Stanley: Yes, that's right. I think the first, well certainly Banjo Paterson for example, was sent by The Sydney Morning Herald I think, and The Argus, to report the war in South Africa, not just people who were on the spot who wrote letters back to newspapers, which is probably what happened in New Zealand, but reporters who were sent specifically to report the war back home. Mick O'Regan: Now was a particular style evident, ever, in the Australian correspondents? Peter Stanley: I think the style has always reflected the tenor of reporting at the time. For example if you look at Banjo Paterson's dispatches from South Africa, they're very long, they're very wordy, they're very detailed and descriptive, and really I suppose they're idiosyncratic in the sense that he wrote what he wanted to talk about. If you contrast that with today's reporting, of course it follows the style of reporting today. It's crisp, it's punchy, it's opinionated. The style of war reporting essentially follows the style of reporting of the period. Mick O'Regan: Now one of the most famous Australian war correspondents, was C.E.W. Bean, who had a lot to do with the reporting of Australians at Gallipoli. Can I get you to explain what Bean did and why he became such a seminal figure in war correspondents? Peter Stanley: Yes, Bean's an interesting example of a journalist who turns his story and creates history by being a journalist. He was appointed as official correspondent, and in fact was elected by members of the Australian Journalists' Association, so he already had some standing amongst his colleagues, and he was elected to represent them with the sailing of the First Australian Imperial Force in 1914. Bean put his foot in it to the extent in Egypt, by reporting what he regarded as the truth over Australian soldiers contracting venereal disease, and got himself into bad odour with the troops. But he retrieved that reputation on Gallipoli. He landed on the very first day, and stayed on the Peninsula for the next eight months, and in fact was wounded on Gallipoli. And it was his dispatches back to Australia which shaped the way Australians began to understand Gallipoli while it was happening, and eventually of course, he wrote his history, and that has given us an enduring impression of what Australians did and in fact he can be regarded as the originator of the Anzac legend. Mick O'Regan: And to the extent that that Anzac legend has become a very important part of Australians' self-identity and our notion as resourceful, capable people, is it fair to say that that nation-building myth really grew out of Bean's writing? Peter Stanley: Yes, very much. There's arguments which flow back and forth on this. I mean for example, on the Peninsula, Bean edited The Anzac Book, and it was believed, because we have the rejected manuscripts, that it was argued for a while that Bean shaped very consciously the sorts of qualities that he wanted the Anzacs to be seen as possessing. And the Anzac legend was a work of design on his part, and it was a creation, a myth. I don't know that that's entirely true; I think one of the things those reporters had was a very strong devotion to telling what they saw as the truth, and I think it's galling to say this to many historians, but I think the Anzac legend in its pure form in Gallipoli, is a lot the way Bean represented it. But nevertheless, I think it's true he did shape it very consciously. And for example his whole history is structured as a kind of a meditation on what it means to be an Australian and how Australians reacted to the first great challenge they faced as a nation. So to that extent, Bean was an artist and not just a reporter. Mick O'Regan: So what does that say, do you think, about the way he perceived the role of a war correspondent, that it was a question of telling the truth as he saw it, or do you think he had other objectives, for example, to encourage more volunteers to join the overseas forces to fight for Australia? Peter Stanley: Yes, I don't think he ever saw his role as crudely as that. And I think Bean is interesting, not just because he's perhaps the greatest exponent of the art, but also he's the classic in that I think he went through a process of disillusionment. His devotion to truth shows in that reporting of VD statistics, and he was debagged by soldiers, they condemned him. On the Peninsula, I think you see him reporting what he saw, but always with the knowledge that the censor was looking over his shoulder and he felt greatly constrained by that, so his long dispatches published in The Commonwealth Gazette and in many newspapers, you have to read between the lines to get to the reality, and he often writes in the sort of high diction of style, so that men fall, or sacrifice, rather than killed and die. But the disillusionment I think comes in that he lives right through the war on the Western Front, and saw the reality of it to the point where he became oppressed by the deaths of those 60,000 Australians, and determined to create some sort of lasting memorial to them, and that's the Australian War Memorial. And I think he became very, very restive with the impositions that censorship placed upon him, and increasingly felt that he couldn't tell the truth, which I think is one reason why his history is as detailed as it is, that he felt there he could at last reveal the details that he wasn't able to tell as a correspondent. Mick O'Regan: Peter Stanley, from the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. By the time the Second World War arrived, the technology available to journalists changed the nature of their work. World War II also brought the fighting closer to home: Darwin was bombed, and young Australians were pitched into a ferocious battle against the advancing Japanese on the Kokoda Track in Papua-New Guinea. Damien Parer: Eight days ago I was with our advance troops in the jungle, facing the Japs at Kokoda. It's an uncanny sort of warfare, you never see a Jap even though he's only 20 yards away. They're complete masters of camouflage and deception. I should say about 40% of our boys wounded in those engagements haven't seen a Japanese soldier, a live one, anyway. Don't underestimate the Jap, he's a highly trained soldier, well-disciplined and brave, and although he's had some success up to the present, he's now got against him some of the finest and toughest troops in the world. Troops with a spirit amongst them that makes you intensely proud to be an Australian. I saw militiamen fighting over there, fighting under extremely difficult conditions, alongside the AIF, and they acquitted themselves magnificently. Mick O'Regan: The stirring words of Australian film maker, Damien Parer, as he introduced his film Kokoda Frontline, in 1942. Parer was among a number of Australian correspondents who became known internationally during the Second World War, as historian Peter Stanley explains. Peter Stanley: The Second World War's correspondents are a group of men, and they're almost all men, of almost as great stature, I mean think of names like Chester Wilmot and George Johnston and Osmer White and Alan Moorehead, and some of those men, Chester Wilmot and Alan Moorehead especially, attained international reputations, and it's curious, because in the Second World War the correspondents didn't seem to be nearly as preoccupied with making and creating and justifying an Australian national identity in this world war. And Chester Wilmot, for example, again did a bit of a Bean in that having been alienated from the Australian theatre by the antagonism of General Blamey, went on to write The Struggle for Europe, which is still I think the classic account of the allied victory in the West in the Second World War. So in a sense, Chester Wilmot is the Bean of the Second World War, but in a different sense, in that he didn't say things about Australia but in fact had a global stage on which to write. Mick O'Regan: Do you think the nature of the war correspondents' work changed when the conflict in the Second World War actually physically became close to Australia? I think particularly of the campaigns in the Pacific and especially in the Kokoda Track in Papua-New Guinea, when that fighting was being conducted, did the role that the war correspondents took on, did that become more militarily or politically significant? Peter Stanley: It did, but I think the change had happened earlier. The First World War was a great education of the world in the power of propaganda, and the First World War's efforts at propaganda were amateurish compared to the Second. And the Second of course, included the tools of the newsreel and the wireless broadcast. So you see the Second World War being much more sophisticated in the use of propaganda by all combatant nations, principally the Germans of course, Goebels was a master. But the allies were no slouches either, and they incorporated their war correspondents much more closely into the military machine. So for example, George Johnston, who reported from Papua in 1942, had already I think become a tool of the army's propaganda machine, even before the Japanese entered the war. But when the Japanese entered the war, journalists and film makers like Damien Parer, became much more intimately acquainted with the winning of the war and not just the reporting of the war. So George Johnston's stories from Papua, I think George Johnston walked over the line and stopped being the reporter and became an agent of propaganda. Damien Parer I think, part of the genius of Damien Parer is that he was able to straddle that line and for example, at the start of Kokoda Frontline, he makes a very direct appeal to the viewer saying This is the story of the place where your boyfriends and your brothers are fighting, and is clearly intimately supporting the war effort. But he's also able to maintain a distance from it, in order to report literally the truth of what you can see by his selection of shots and by his craft as a film maker. So Damien Parer uses the new technology of the Second World War, and perhaps does for it what Bean had done in words in the First World War. Mick O'Regan: And was it important that it was a popular war, that it was the war against fascism, that it was a war in a way, the war effort united the community, did that notion of a popular war, a people's war, change the role of the correspondent? Peter Stanley: It did, although you'd have to say that the First World War was popular as well. I mean although the First World War people had misgivings and of course the conscription referenda bitterly divided Australia, but nevertheless the war remained essentially a popular war. The Second World War I suppose even more so, was a completely united effort, and to an extent that would have made correspondents lazy or perhaps simply compromised them totally, in that there was no critical or negative reporting of the Second World War while the war was on. It simply wouldn't have been allowed, and although it's an irony, though the democracies were fighting for freedom in order to achieve that victory, they had to impose quite stringent constraints upon news media. So in fact the Second World War, it's a good job it was popular because opposition would simply not have been countenanced. Mick O'Regan: Dr Peter Stanley from the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. GUNFIRE Geoff Hughes: The big problem here is that you can't go forward if you want to get out, and you can't go back. If you go forward, that's where the fire fighting is right now, you've got a bad chance up there. If you go back, they've got mortars which come right over behind the people they're fighting because they don't want the mortars to hit themselves. And if you go back in a car or anything like that, they're prime targets. So I'm just going to have to wait for a break. None of the soldiers here speak English, and although some do speak a little bit of French, so it's very difficult to know what exactly is going on and what's going to happen next. Mick O'Regan: That was Geoff Hughes, reporting from Cambodia in 1975. The Vietnam War and the related conflicts in Cambodia and Laos, divided public opinion on a huge scale. Popular mobilisation and the impact of television reporting combined to once again alter the nature of the war correspondent's work. Peter Stanley: I think again we need to look at the context of the reporting in Vietnam. Because again, there'd been a technological revolution, and of course television is the new ingredient for Vietnam. And a new medium which controls over it hadn't yet been established. And also remember that Vietnam for virtually all combatants, except the Vietnamese, was not a total war, it wasn't a war in which the nation had to achieve control in order to win victory, as the Second World War had been. And so the gaps that both the technology and if you like the politics opened up, allowed correspondents a freedom to be critical of a war in which there was no single Australian line. This was a war which some Australians supported strongly, a war which other Australians opposed bitterly, and correspondents acted in the gap opened up between those poles. And so in the 1960s and early '70s, that medium and reporters with those various views were able to present those various views to their public, and to become a part of the debate which Australians engaged in, right through the Vietnam commitment. So in many ways the post '45 period is more interesting, because it's full of diversity and opposition and controversy. Mick O'Regan: Peter Stanley, Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Mick O'Regan: Kate Adie was a foreign correspondent for the BBC during some of the most significant moments of the past 20 years, including Tianenmen Square and the war in Bosnia. Donna McLachlan spoke to Kate Adie about her experiences as a correspondent, and whether it was difficult to prepare for unpredictable situations. Kate Adie: I think that people should be realistic about, particularly as a journalist, what you're going to see, or might see. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got before I went off to a major conflict was to go and look at the row upon thousands of rows of graves in Northern France, in the poppy lands, and it is a stunning and terrible sight. Very beautiful, and very, very moving, and very terrifying, of the hundreds of thousands who died in the First World War. And to understand that that can happen and within living memory still. So you need a kind of sense of what you might be going into, and that terrible deeds might be done, and you need to understand history. And if you are prepared, then it is less of a shock to you when it happens. You cope better and you work better, because you do go to report, you don't just go to emote and say Gosh, I find this terrible. You go there to report and to find the facts and say What's happening? If you don't do that sort of preparation, then it comes as a terrible shock to you, dreadful. People do dreadful things to each other, man's cruelty is remarkable. You then have to do repair work. Now a lot of the emphasis these days is on what I think is repair work, you know, the counselling, the people coming along and saying Well there, there, you've got to work this through. Well most people are pretty resilient. I just believe that for journalists in particular, that if you knowingly go off to be a journalist for a start, you're going to see traffic accidents, you're going to interview people whose relatives have just died, it happens in the course of the most small-time weekly newspaper you're going to have to do that. You have to be realistic, think in advance, and then I think you cope better. And on the whole, if you have close friends, colleagues, you talk about things, you don't keep things buried within you after you've seen them, you shouldn't need too much repair. Donna McLachlan: How do you gather the facts as such a small crew in often what is such a difficult circumstance? Kate Adie: I think you have to be realistic and say that you will never get the full picture. You present a sliver, a little glass piece of the kaleidoscope, a tiny little prism in which you may see the greater all, but you may not, it may happen that you're on a hillside and there's a lot of banging and there's a lot of smoke and there are tanks moving around, and you then discover that that's the only place where it's happening in 400 square miles of the country, just one little incident. Or else you may be sitting in a cornfield all day and nothing happens and you say it is peaceful, and there may be mayhem and hell going on 25 miles away. But you have no way of knowing. So you have to always admit that you will only ever manage to report a little bit of what is going on, and with luck and a following wind, and modern technology, you may well be able to fit that into a wider picture with other reports coming in from elsewhere. But it's a big but, a big if. You can actually land yourself in trouble, and you have all the time to remember that you are only reporting a sliver of what is going on. Your own experience. Donna McLachlan: Now I well remember your reports from Tianenmen Square, and they really were gripping. In the face of fear, how do you continue to report? Kate Adie: You get a grip on yourself. I mean it's a professional thing. Put it this way: If you're a sister in charge of an accident in an emergency unit and a traffic accident comes in one night with small children, and there is absolutely no point in the sister, the nurse in charge, falling to her knees and sobbing with the grief and terrible-ness of it all. You have a job to do. You have little people to patch together. So you get on with it. That doesn't mean you're hard-hearted, or you don't have any reaction or response, you have a job to do. Not quite as edifying as the reporter who actually has to see it and says These are the facts, how did it happen, who's involved, could we actually understand how it came about, and you then have to do the report. It's not entirely a noble calling, but I think it's justified. I think that you do have, I would argue that there's a justification for telling other people what happens in their world, maybe so that it doesn't happen again. But whatever that may be, I think you have to be able to justify what you do, and in that you put your own personal emotions aside for the duration of when you're reporting. Mick O'Regan: The BBC former foreign correspondent, Kate Adie, speaking with Donna McLachlan. Finally, to a current war, and a journalist very much at the front line. Australian Michael Ware is Time Magazine's reporter in Afghanistan, and for 3-1/2 months was based in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the former base of the Taliban. I asked him if he thought the amount of restrictions on reporting presented a key challenge for the correspondent. Michael Ware: Absolutely. I found half my energies were devoted to not just figuring out how I could obtain information and stay alive, but to calculating ways to outflank the Pentagon, and their public affairs officers and the cordons that they put in place to prevent journalists getting information. So much so, to the extent that often, and particularly during this three-week battle for Shahikote I adopted Afghan dress. Mick O'Regan: What, you actually put on Afghan clothes? Michael Ware: Yes, I grew a beard over the 3-1/2 months that I was away, and I learnt enough Pashtu to be able to talk my way through a checkpoint. I could say Hallo, go through the greetings, I could tell you where I'd been, I could tell you where I'm going, I could tell you what tribe I am. Mick O'Regan: Now this may fool a person from Minnesota or California, but you're obviously not going to fool anyone who's a born and bred Afghan. Michael Ware: Well actually I did. In fact at one checkpoint encircling the battlefield, and I just spent my whole time circumnavigating the battlefield for three weeks, just prodding and probing each time looking for a way in, getting closer and closer to the battle, getting further than anyone else had gone each time, and at one of these checkpoints, a commander came over and I simply say Hallo, and go through the greetings, and then I shut up, because I can't really carry on much more of a conversation. And my translators and others with me continued the conversation. So I just blend into the background. And he insisted that I was actually from his tribe, and at one point I had to speak English for him, so that he could accept that I was in fact a foreigner. So if I just played it very low key and tried to blend in with whoever I was with, I could often get away with it. So what I would do is go to a checkpoint and we would just pose as villagers heading home or heading out to our fields, or doing something else, and so we would be allowed to slip through. And really, that's the only way I could get in to the front line at Shahikote. Mick O'Regan: What would the American military authorities do if they found you using subterfuge to get closer to the front lines? Michael Ware: Well they tell you very much that you're risking your life, because they immediately suspect that you're foreign Al Qaida, because the Al Qaida was made up of a lot of nationalities, as you can imagine, so it immediately raises the suspicion that you are Al Qaida. And I was questioned a number of times. In fact on one occasion special forces held me at gunpoint and grilled me and stripped our vehicle before finally releasing me. In fact they said to me that this is a battlefield, there are only two types of people in this area: one is combatants, the other are prisoners. Which one do you want to be? Mick O'Regan: And what did you say? Michael Ware: I said Well I'm a journalist, and I'd just like to be here. And they said, We've given you your choices. If you don't leave, we're going to start shooting. Mick O'Regan: Now is that indicative of their attitude generally? Michael Ware: Absolutely. Specially the special forces. Their role in Afghanistan is primarily to seek out the enemy, that's through long-range surveillance and reconnaissance missions, and then to lead Afghan troops in either covert or overt operations to attack any enemy concentrations that they find. So you would have to deal with the media cordon, then you would have to deal with the special forces who are out doing their own thing, and invariably my mission editorially, was strikingly similar to theirs. I would be pursuing a lead on the location of Mullah Amar or a certain concentration of enemy troops, so I would be looking to find a particular Taliban commander, for example. So I would be going to the district, asking questions, searching, searching, which in turn they were doing as well. So frequently our paths would cross, and particularly near the battlefields. So when I was attempting to go to Shahikote after encountering these people on a number of occasions, I found ways to avoid them, and the only way that I finally got into the thick of the fighting in the valley floor itself, was to break through the cordon, once again cross that desert plain and then driving up winding mountains, ravine, each corner stopping to check what was ahead, looking for signs of ambush, slowly moving up. Eventually I came across a Mujahadeen convoy of maybe 20 or 30 vehicles that itself was heading deeper into enemy territory. They too had stopped because Al Qaida was seen on the ridges preparing ambush, So I simply drove up and attached our vehicle to the end of their convoy. Mick O'Regan: How long can you subject yourself to that level of anxiety and expose yourself to that constant danger? Michael Ware: It's a question I'm constantly asking myself. It is extraordinarily taxing. Physically and mentally. I lost significant amounts of weight. Mick O'Regan: How much? I mean you're not a big person now. Michael Ware: No, in 3-1/2 months I lost 23 kilos. Mick O'Regan: 23 kilos? Michael Ware: Yes. That's due to a lack of food, or very poor food, and not constant illness but frequent illness. There's the enormous mental drain. Apart from trying to achieve simple things, and in a war zone and particularly in Afghanistan, nothing is ever simple. There was that constant drain of just trying to get things done, and then overlaying all of that is the security concern. You have to be alive and alert 24 hours a day, watching your back at all times, constantly surveying the circumstances around you to pick up any hint that the mood's about to change, or that something is not right. Mick O'Regan: And you're not armed obviously? Michael Ware: No. I never carried a weapon although there was frequently made available to me. Mick O'Regan: Do other journalists carry weapons? Michael Ware: Some did, not many. Mick O'Regan: Like hand guns or something? Michael Ware: Hand guns, or maybe you'd have a Kalishnikov in the vehicle. I certainly always knew where a weapon was if we'd turn to a worst case scenario, but I never ever carried one or had one in my possession. What you would do if you were heading to a particular place or area that was extremely dangerous, you would obtain gunmen to go with you. Now when I was going to areas where no journalist had been that was still Taliban controlled areas where fighting was still going on, and there was token Afghan government troop presence, token meaning that they'd have a garrison in this town that they'd established two weeks ago, but they can't leave that garrison and in fact they don't control anything. When I was going to those places, sometimes I would have to take what would roughly equate to an infantry section, which is the basic building block of a military unit. Mick O'Regan: That's about ten people? Michael Ware: Nine to ten men, that would include at least one, maybe two, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, that would have one, preferably two PK heavy machine guns which is a section weapon, and then obviously Kalishnikovs and grenades. That kind of a force would have to travel with me, a vehicle in front, a vehicle behind, and at least one or two troops in my vehicle. That kind of a force if we were ambushed or seriously attacked, they would not be able to repel or defeat the attack. But it's just in the hope that in such a situation in the instants that we would have, we could throw up enough fire to be able to turn around and get the heck out of there. Mick O'Regan: Which I have to say strikes me as a very good idea. Time Magazine correspondent in Afghanistan, Michael Ware. Guests on this program: Michael Ware Correspondent, Time Magazine Peter Stanley Senior Historian, the Australian War Memorial Kate Adie BBC correspondent Presenter: Mick O'Regan Producer: Caroline Fisher © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation |