Weller's War by George Weller

Author:George Weller [Weller, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45224-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

XI

The Defense of Australia

By his own admission, Weller arrived in Australia scared and filled with “guilt about the people left behind.” (At least one colleague “escaped and went home to suicide.”) From mid-March 1942 until the end of November 1943, Australia was his base of operations, even though he was in New Guinea for much of that time and traveled extensively through the Pacific islands. Thus for the next three chapters this book leaps around within those twenty months.

Weller seems to have produced Singapore Is Silent by August, before his first assignments in New Guinea. His 1942 datelines show that he made a long journey—almost fifteen thousand miles—around the circumference of Australia, writing all the way. “I've tried to cover more ground, both tactically and physically, than any other correspondent in Australia,” he wrote in a September letter to a friend. “This trip made me the first to make the full swing around the continent, just as I was the first to visit New Guinea's Milne Bay.”

For the Allies, Australia was the final fortress that had to be held at all costs, and the Americans poured everything they could into its defense. “A chaos that had to be experienced to be believed and even then could not be understood,” Weller characterized it at the time. Shortly after he arrived, he was able to send in the earliest meaningful reports of the dramatic Battle of the Java Sea, which saw the Houston and thousands of tons of other Allied ships sunk in the first all-out naval action of the war in the Pacific.

This chapter concludes with the story that earned Weller a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting: the account of an emergency appendectomy performed by a pharmacist's mate on a U.S. submarine, the Seadragon, while in enemy waters. In those days, submarines routinely did not have a doctor on board and might be at sea for a couple of months. (Much to Weller's dismay, the episode, along with his dialogue, was used without payment or even acknowledgment in a Hollywood feature film, Destination Tokyo [1943]. There was also a TV adaptation by Budd Schulberg.) The operation took place in September 1942; the award-winning article was published three months later. Weller, in Perth, heard about the story from a Navy commander, and was led to the captain and the crew, whom he had reenact the surgery several times over so he could get all the details right.

When he learned, a few months later, that he had been awarded the Pulitzer, he didn't feel triumphant—thousands of miles away, in the midst of war, it didn't feel like a victory. But one lesson of getting the story in port in Australia was that the best “adventure” he could've found had found him, in a most unlikely way.

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