Abstract
As Ray Moseley observes in the foreword to his superb book about the men and women who covered what he calls “the greatest story of all times”, their vivid contemporary dispatches and colourful post-war memoirs provide a unique contribution to the historical record. While military histories tend to focus on the broad sweep of tactics and strategy that have won or lost decisive battles, he concerns himself with the individual newspaper reporters, magazine writers and radio broadcasters from a score of different countries whose work reflected the hazards on the frontline. Death rates among Second World War correspondents, Moseley points out, were proportionately higher than in some Allied combat units, with Russians topping the body count.
The legendary Russian reporter Vasily Grossman did survive, filing a macabre despatch about the German retreat from Moscow, when the roads were littered with frozen German corpses. “Practical jokers arranged the bodies on their feet or their hands and knees, making intricate, fanciful sculpture groups”.
An experienced war reporter himself, Moseley has a fine eye for the details that will stick in the reader's mind. Take the experience of Richard Dimbleby, folding his substantial frame into an RAF Lancaster in January 1943 to become the first BBC correspondent to be present on a raid over Europe. He described how the glowing incendiary bombs raining down on Berlin resembled “great incandescent flower beds”. So frightened was he that when the aircraft turned for home, he threw up copiously: despite that, Dimbleby volunteered for 20 more RAF missions.
The great American radio reporter Ed Murrow was in another Lancaster over Berlin that got trapped by searchlights, its pilot throwing the aircraft this way and that to escape the flak. Understandably terrified, Murrow kept on working doggedly, recording the sight of the fires below “spreading just like butter does on a hot plate”. As Moseley notes, Murrow's bosses at CBS tried without success to prevent their most famous correspondent from taking part in more raids over occupied Europe.
O'Dowd Gallagher of the Daily Express was aboard the cruiser HMS Repulse when it was sunk by a swarm of Japanese warplanes off the coast of Malaya. Unable to swim, Gallagher smoked a last cigarette before jumping into the sea. Coughing up thick black fuel oil while clinging to a lifebelt, he was hauled aboard a small boat by two of the Repulse's crew. When they learned he was a journalist, one said: “Ere, give us a good write-up, won't yer?” Undaunted, Gallagher went on to report from the war in Burma, arriving to witness at close quarters a devastating Japanese air attack on Rangoon.
Among the women correspondents who feature in the book is Martha Gellhorn, whose courage, stamina and fierce competitiveness often kept her ahead of male counterparts. During the battle of Arnhem, she was heading for the frontline without press accreditation papers when military police detained her as a suspected spy. Gellhorn was hauled up before the American general James Gavin, who gave her a mild lecture. “His indulgence evidently owed something to her physical attractions,” Moseley writes. When the pair's paths crossed again in Paris they began a passionate affair.
In the era of portable satellite phones, a correspondent like the BBC's Jeremy Bowen can report directly from the battle for Mosul, but for the majority of the journalists featured in Moseley's densely researched account − 50 pages of footnotes, vast bibliography and a proper index – the first obstacle to getting their stories out were the military censors, whose “approved” stamp was essential for stories to be transmitted. Anything considered unhelpful to the war effort, especially where it concerned Allied setbacks, was likely to end in the wastepaper basket. Nothing much changes: when I was embedded with the Desert Rats during the first Gulf war, the British censors binned a report of mine about British troops mocking the martial qualities of their Arab allies.
To his credit, Moseley does not duck the leading question, posed previously in the late Phillip Knightley's definitive work on war correspondents through the ages, of how well the journalists he writes about did their job when objectivity was required. “Critical analysis of the reason for defeats was generally missing,” Moseley concludes, “largely because of the censors, but also to some extent because of restraints correspondents imposed upon themselves”.
Living cheek by jowl with the fighting troops, depending on them for supplies and transport, let alone protection on the battlefield, forged close bonds that journalists were sometimes reluctant to break. Put another way by John Steinbeck, who reported on the war in Italy for the New York Herald-Tribune: “It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies”.