Less than a Documentary?

Anyone attempting a documentary on the battles on the Kokoda Track and the Beachhead in 1942 can draw on an extraordinary visual record. Damien Parer, one of the greatest cameramen of the Second World War, filmed much of the fighting withdrawal, while his friend and colleague, George Silk, left us a series of invaluable stills of the Australian attacks on the Japanese fortified positions at Gona and Buna. Moreover, Parer was able to film the earlier attempts to air-drop supplies for the AIF battalions that were to be sent to relieve the hard-pressed 39th Militia battalion fighting the Japanese at Isurava. (A close examination of his footage does much to solve the mystery of how the supplies disappeared. They are clearly falling into the jungle.) Shortly before he left to accompany the 2/16th and 2/14th battalions up the Kokoda Track, Parer filmed burning planes on the airstrip after a Japanese air raid that had caught the US aircraft parked wingtip to wingtip. The damage caused a fatal four-day delay in supplying the relief force. Parer caught up with the troops in time to film the belated supply drop at Myola and to record their advance as far as Eora Creek. In addition Parer and his friend, the ABC correspondent Chester Wilmot, had been enlisted as liaison officers by the Australian Commander, Lieutenant General Sydney Rowell. All of which makes Parer’s Kokoda footage a unique historical source.

From the perspective of a newsreel producer or a documentary film-maker, however, there are problems. Parer did not get to Isurava—the Australians were already withdrawing when the correspondents reached Eora Creek. He also missed Brigade Hill, the other great hard-fought engagement on the track, during which the Australian brigade headquarters was nearly overrun. Indeed there is no action in Parer’s Kokoda film. This was quickly remedied by the newsreels. At Cinesound, for what became the Academy Award winning newsreel Kokoda Frontline, Ken Hall got his editor, Terry Banks, to cut in a sequence Parer had staged some months earlier recreating a raid on Salamaua by the 2/5 Independent Company. As a result, an exploding hut and the shot of John Tilbrook firing a Bren gun from the hip became part of Australia’s visual memory of Kokoda, even though these events bore little resemblance to anything that occurred on the track in August and September 1942. These re-enactments, which were based on Parer’s interviews with participants shortly after the raid, are valuable evidence of commando tactics against the Japanese in the Salamaua area; and with an effrontery that even now seems truly breathtaking, Hall used the footage in another newsreel, this time about the commandos, that told the story much as Parer intended.

In this Hall was very much a man of his time. “Documentaries” made during the war, such as the acclaimed Desert Victory, are filled with wrongly attributed and staged footage. At 20th Century Fox, H.G. Guinness and his editor Alec Ezard used the Salamaua sequences much as Cinesound did for their rival newsreel The Road to Kokoda. Hall argued (as he did later to me) that he was making propaganda, not a historical documentary, and undoubtedly as a propagandist Hall served his country well.

There is less excuse for Don Featherstone’s 2010 documentary Kokoda from the book by Paul Ham, which was broadcast on the ABC on April 22 and 29. Certainly the film includes well-executed re-enactments, so that we don’t have too many action shots from God-knows-where representing events that were not filmed. For me, honest reconstructions are infinitely preferable to distortions of archival footage. But Featherstone incorporates shots from other Parer films to represent action on the Kokoda Track and the Beachhead. One can forgive the siren from Tobruk in the sequence showing an air raid on a ship in Port Moresby harbour—it was inserted into the newsreel by Ken Hall—but not the use of the funeral of the NCOs killed during the attack on the Timbered Knoll from Parer’s Assault on Salamaua edited so that it appears to have been on the Beachhead, or a shot from that same attack to portray action on the Kokoda Track. Quite apart from anything else, the men in the latter shot are wearing berets, which were not worn on the track and are quite rightly not to be seen in Featherstone’s re-enactments. Less egregious, but still unfortunate, is the cutting together of footage from Assault on Salamaua and from Parer’s film of his own and fellow correspondent Osmar White’s journey to meet up with the 2/5th Independent Company so that it all seems to be taking place on the Kokoda Track. On the other hand, Featherstone’s use of Parer’s film of the 2/14th and 2/16th battalions climbing the Kokoda Track and the cutting together of shots of supplies being pushed out of air transports to accompany Chester Wilmot’s description of his experiences during a similar flight show how original footage can enrich a film like this when it is used accurately and with imagination.

The re-enactments are on the whole quite effective and seem to be mainly based on the oral history. An unfortunate exception is the staging of the death of Colonel Owen of the 39th Battalion. Having him shot down on the skyline may look spectacular, but the colonel was hit while standing instead of crouching in a foxhole. Another is stating that Colonel Ralph Honner’s description of the 39th Battalion at Isurava came from his journal. Certainly he was an eyewitness. Honner was the battalion’s last and greatest commander, and he did write detailed accounts of his adventures to his wife, but the description comes from an article Honner wrote after the war. I suggest some re-editing before the film is released on DVD.

Nevertheless, Kokoda integrates the memories of participants plus commentary by experts—Professor David Horner (of course), Michael McKiernan, Paul Ham—with the actuality footage and re-enactments to illuminate both the experience of battle and the political issues. Particularly fine is the way one of the best relief maps I have ever seen has been employed to portray the dispositions and the tactics. The film concentrates on the experiences of certain key figures to illuminate the narrative. Focusing on Chester Wilmot enables Featherstone to portray how the campaign was being reported using well-staged re-enactments of the great reporter making his broadcasts. The image of Wilmot typing beside the track during the withdrawal as we hear his famous dispatch “and our troops were forced to withdraw” was, for me at least, very moving. (I was consulted about this scene. One of the producers wanted to know if Chester had a typewriter on the trail and what brand he used. I told him he did have a typewriter that he left for the staff at Brigade HQ when theirs had been lost as a result of enemy action, and the brand of machine Wilmot used in the Middle East. This was my only involvement in the production.)

Unfortunately Kokoda fails to do justice to Wilmot’s full role in the campaign. Chester was not disaccredited as a war correspondent by the Australian Commander in Chief, Sir Thomas Blamey, because he supported 21st Brigade commander, Arnold Potts, as is shown in the film. He almost certainly supported Potts, but this would have been when he briefed Rowell and the divisional commander “Tubby” Allen. Wilmot was disaccredited because of his support for Rowell when the general was relieved by Blamey. Moving from observer to participant, Chester had taken the issue to Prime Minister John Curtin. (So extraordinary did this seem fifteen years ago that when I gave this material to Chris Masters for the Four Corners documentary “The Men Who Saved Australia”, Chris would not record the narration describing the meeting until I could assure him I had sighted the ABC memo in Australian Archives confirming Wilmot’s appointment with Curtin.)

Wilmot is the only media figure portrayed in Kokoda even though the film includes descriptions of the alleged apathy of the Australian public when the war was just on our doorstep. Wilmot’s broadcasts were important in shaping public perceptions of the campaign, but so were Osmar White’s despatches for the Melbourne Sun that were syndicated nationally. White himself can be glimpsed in some of the misattributed footage but that is really not good enough. Above all there was Kokoda Frontline with Damien lecturing Australia about its complacency as well as defending General Rowell. A full treatment of the role of the media in this period needs a program to itself, but you really can’t portray the Australian public’s reaction to the Kokoda battles adequately without mentioning Kokoda Frontline or Osmar White’s despatches.

Kokoda’s treatment of Sir Thomas Blamey’s now infamous speech at Koitaki when he virtually accused “the men who saved Australia” from the 21st Brigade of cowardice—“the rabbit that runs is the rabbit that gets shot”—is much better. For years apologists for Blamey insisted he had been misunderstood. It was not until Peter Brune’s examination of all the evidence in Those Ragged Bloody Heroes that the full implications of Blamey’s conduct were exposed. In 1995 Chris Masters used some powerful interviews to tell the story for the first time on television. Now Featherstone dramatises not just the event itself but the effect on the men when they next went into action, combining re-enactments and some telling interviews.

For the first time justice is done on television to that other hero of the Kokoda battles, Major General Arthur “Tubby” Allen. As the film shows, he resisted pressure from MacArthur and Blamey to sacrifice his men by rushing the counter-attack across the Kokoda Track, insisting that low casualties were not a sign that his men were failing to press home their attacks. Surprisingly Lieutenant General “Ned” Herring’s inept conduct of the battles on the Beachhead is not mentioned even though his failures are discussed at length in Paul Ham’s book.

For all its flaws Kokoda is an accomplished documentary, but not only does it fail to make adequate use of the visual evidence, far too often this evidence is distorted. However it is possible to use film sources accurately and make even more effective documentaries. Sometimes these become works of history in their own right: Chris Masters and Jacquelyn Hole’s “The Men Who Saved Australia”, first broadcast in 1995, certainly did.

Here I should reveal my own interest. I was one of the program’s researchers, and my book War Cameraman: The Story of Damien Parer was one Chris and Jacquelyn’s references. The film also investigated some of the original written sources as well as the visual and oral history. The result was important new discoveries. Jack Sim of the 39th Battalion revealed that as well as congratulating the men when they were relieved at the Menari parade, Honner had gone further.

I can’t remember his exact words but I’ll always remember what he meant and what he implied,” Sim told an off-screen Chris Masters, “when he said ‘You are all Australians and some of the things you’ve been through you must forget. Some of the men who were with you, you feel have let you down. But they didn’t. Given different circumstances they’d be just the same as you.

Honner was referring to the tragic 53rd Battalion, who had broken on the right flank. He was preparing the men for a time when some of the 53rd might join the 39th. (They did, and were with the 39th when they captured Gona.) The interview with Jack Sim was intercut with Parer’s film of the parade that showed how cruelly the battalion had been depleted during the fighting at Isurava. The sequence with its accurately attributed original footage and perceptive interviewing made an important contribution to Kokoda studies.

Nearly as impressive was the placing of re-enactors in khaki uniforms in the dark green foliage of the Kokoda Track so that their cinematographer, the late Brett Joyce, could repeat, in colour, black-and-white shots of Parer’s that tried to demonstrate how easily the khaki stood out in the jungle; in Chester Wilmot’s words, “like the field grey of a German officer’s uniform against the desert”. Joyce’s colour shot made the point even more emphatically than Parer could, showing us why the correspondents were campaigning so hard to get the troops jungle green uniforms.

But above all in Masters and Hole’s program the viewer encounters the “men who saved Australia”. Using Peter Brune’s contacts, plus quite a few of their own, Jacquelyn and Chris assembled officers and men from the battalions who took part in the fighting and persuaded them to tell their stories. Then they wove the interviews into the narrative. It was oral history at its best, documenting superbly these men’s experiences. This material is even more important now that many of these extraordinary Australians are no longer with us.

Shaun Gibbons and Stig Schnell’s Beyond Kokoda, first shown on the History Channel last year and re-broadcast for Anzac Day this year, may not reach quite those heights, but by linking extended re-enactments of the main battles with interviews from surviving participants plus Parer’s Kokoda film Gibbons and Schnell provide us with a series of invaluable insights into the experiences of the troops on both sides during the Kokoda fighting and beyond. The relief map may be not quite as good as the one in Kokoda, but the re-enactments plus the animations clarify the intricacies of the engagements described so carefully by Peter Brune in A Bastard of a Place and Those Ragged Bloody Heroes.

These re-creations are shot in a style very similar to that of the American director Samuel Fuller. A veteran who served in Europe in the Second World War, Fuller knew that an infantryman’s experience of battle was confined to his foxhole, what he could see of the enemy and his buddies beside him. Fuller therefore used very tight framing and often extremely long takes for films like The Big Red One and Fixed Bayonets. Gibbons does much the same for his re-enactments (although he doesn’t employ long takes) and the technique is even more effective in portraying jungle fighting than it was for Fuller’s studio recreations of Europe and Korea. The interviews are not as powerful as Masters and Hole’s—for one thing their subjects are a lot older—but they are very impressive and the gentlemen have a great story to tell.

Both Kokoda and Beyond Kokoda make a serious attempt to encompass the Japanese experience using re-enactments and interviews with participants, some of whom describe their suffering and their regret when they had to kill their Australian enemies. This Japanese perspective was one of the important contributions of Paul Ham’s book, and these sequences are very effective in both films. Still, after studying the Japanese record of barbarity in the Pacific War for nearly twenty-five years I can’t help feeling a certain scepticism at these belated expressions of remorse, if that is indeed what they are. Don Featherstone too seems to have been rather over-impressed by Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima for the scenes at Japanese HQ. Were there that many banzai moments affirming loyalty to the emperor? At Iwo Jima there seems to have been only one. Wisely, Gibbons stays away from Japanese headquarters and concentrates on the men in the field.

Both “The Men Who Saved Australia” (which the ABC has still not released on DVD) and Beyond Kokoda are considerable achievements. For me, good as Kokoda is at times, these two are better. Don Featherstone never seems to have realised that the images taken by men like Damien Parer are historical sources that are equally as important as the written records. There is nothing wrong with employing analogous footage when there is no surviving visual material, to give the viewer an idea of how a certain event might have appeared. But it should be labelled as such, or obvious from the context. Using shots taken elsewhere, sometimes nearly a year later, to portray events in August–December 1942 may be effective but really is only historical fiction. Indeed Kokoda works quite well as drama but is somewhat less than a documentary.