RECORDERS OF WAR
By J. L. BODSON APIN grown rusty from old age fastens into my war corre- spondent's licence a typed slip addressed to the Chief of the General Staff to military commanders saying "Officially accre- dited war correspondents in uniform will come round during the battle. It is their job. They must be allowed to go where they want so long as they do not interfere with the battle." Whether there is a little unconscious irony in the last four words I don't
know. The date of that typed slip is January 31st, 1941. It was
issued, as the note adds, because during the Battle of France cer- tain formations ordered us away at the very time when we ought to have been offered co-operation. No British—or any other— correspondent was at Dunkirk. We had been shipped home just before. Since then (though from time to time complaints are made that the authorities fail to keep pace with needs of transport, field equipment and transmission of despatches) correspondents have been getting along better and, on the whole, well. So well, indeed, that I observe that General Eisenhower recently ordered that war correspondents shall
not, in future, be allowed to go in advance of the armed forces. They have done this more than once. They were the first into one or two Abyssinian towns ; they were the first to link the Eighth and Fifth Armies in Italy. Only by the grace of God did a car carrying an American correspondent and me not drive inadvertently into the German lines near Evreux in June, 1940. I am no exponent myself of going in advance. Accident, however, can cause it to happen. In the Western Desert, where nothing but good compass reading would find the way, and in Burma when the Japanese were striking across from Pegu to cut the Rangoon-Prome road, running into the enemy was always a possibility. We carried arms more than once in self-defence, although the law was against it. Some of my more intrepid colleagues, however, are not to be kept back from adventuring forth—racing ahead to capture towns if they get the chance, but only, of course, when the enemy are ready to surrender. And just as the correspondents have been the first in, so they have sometimes been among the last out. William Munday, unhappily killed in Italy this autumn, was among the tanks forcing
their way through the Japanese on the road from Rangoon to the north on the day the demolitions were blown. I, with my customary caution, had left Rangoon the day before. Some correspondents were captured in Tobruk, others deep in the Western Desert. A good many have made hurried and almost last-minute retreats in this war from France, from Greece, Crete, Singapore, and only by good fortune are casualties not greater. Alas! even so, they are bad enough—eight killed, twelve wounded, eight prisoners of war, and five missing. Bernard Gray, of the Daily Mirror, lost his life in a submarine ; one or two have been killed in aircraft crashes and some by cannon fire from tanks, among them A. B. Austin, of the Daily Herald, who wrote such a fine account Of the raid on Dieppe.
It is a different war for correspondents from the last ; there are not many activities nowadays that one or other of the correspondents has not shared. Quite a number have gone on bombing raids—some to Berlin (among them Stewart Sale of Reuter's, later killed in Italy) ; others in Middle East. The indomitable Fred Bayliss, a movie cameraman, burly and jovial, went several times on air raids over the notorious Halfaya Pass before he was killed in an air crash. Edward Ward, of the B.B.C., flew through the flak to Benghazi before he was captured in the desert. Another of my friends—he was a correspondent turned fifty—joined a raid on Benghazi to "restore his nerve," as he put it. He said bombing Benghazi (the R.A.F. called it "doing the mail run ") worked like a charm! I shouldn't recommend it myself. Another correspondent—Roderick Macdonald, I think it was—parachuted down into -Sicily, was cap- tured and escaped the same day. O'Dowd Gallagher, of the Daily Express, a South African Irishman, was there when the 'Prince of Wales' and ' Repulse ' were sunk in the China Seas, and was making illuminating notes till the moment he was pitched into the sea. James Holburn, of The Times, shot down and wounded in the desert, said to me : "It wasn't so bad—once you realise you can do nothing about it and the end seems certain you stop worrying and become quite calm." William Forrest, of the News Chronicle, who had already seen war at close quarters in Spain and Poland, was wounded in the head during the Tunisian campaign. He had spent weeks in Tobruk during the siege. The Poles were there and when • Forrest was arrested by them for not knowing the pass- word, he tried a few words in Polish to convince them of his friendliness. But they only replied: "Password, pleasse! " Willie then went a step further—he recited to them a small Polish poem that usually brings tears to their eyes. But the result was the same : "Password, pleasse! " He sighed and gave it up and allowed himself to be marched off to company H.Q. to prove his identity.
Not in history, I imagine, has a war been witnessed by so many writers and cameramen (though even so a good deal of it has eluded us. Nobody, for example, was at the naval battle of Matapan- but it wasn't our fault ; the correspondents were left behind.) In the Great War, the Western Front had no more than five or seven British correspondents, among them Philip Gibbs, who, day after day and pretty well year after year, went back and forth through the shelled areas to the trenches to find his material: Henry W- Nevinson, while deputising for Gibbs, found himself .so firmly in the thick of it that a score of German soldiers surrendered to him— they thought him a General. Gibbs, at the age of sixty-three, wiry, looking more fragile than he is, and as keen as ever to put our soldiers' achievements before the world, was with us in Arras in 1939, finding, like the rest of us who had been in the war of twenty- odd years earlier, that the terrain was a land of ghosts. Among these were Skene Carling of Reuter's, Douglas Williams of the Daily Telegraph, F. G. H. Salusbury of the Daily Herald, Brian de Grineau, the artist of the Illustrated London News, drawing among the winter mud his fingers blue with cold, and Ward Price of the Daily Mail. Evelyn Montague, of the Manchester Guardian, was moving over ground his father, the late C. E. Montague, had trod in the last war. Montague and I shared the same bed in Boulogne when we were being bombed. We thought we knew something of bombing, but how little we knew !
Since then British correspondents have burned in the desert, struggled through steamy Pacific swamps and frozen on the Northern convoys to Russia—Russia where Alexander Werth, Paul Winterton and Philip Jordan, among others, have distinguished themselves.
Today we have twenty-two British Commonwealth writers and four broadcasters in North Africa and Italy, an equal number in the Middle East, eight or nine with the Fleet, twelve or fifteen from Britain now in India and the neighbourhood of Burma, a similar number in the Pacific and several at Chungking—not fewer than eighty or ninety all told. Most of them have made close acquaint- ance with hunger, thirst, heat, cold, dirt, mosquitoes and the normal hazards of war. But none of them, I think, would pretend he has shared in anything like equal degree the dangers and hardships of
the true front-line soldier. The correspondent often experiences a greater variety of danger (for many a man has risked death in the air,
with the Fleet and with the land forces), but usually his excursions are brief—he goes into danger to gather his material ; having gathered it he withdraws somewhat to write his dispatch. Those of us who have been both soldiers in the last war and correspondents in this know which is the lighter burden. Correspondents' per- sonal adventures are of no importance except in so far as they throw light on what the troops are doing and enduring, and few, I imagine, like to see much attention drawn to them by their newspapers.
One thing we have done in this war which British correspondents did not, I think, do in the last—that is, establish some power of criticism of the quality or amount of tanks, guns, aircraft, &c., and of general- ship and of the conduct of the war. From the region of Singapore after it had fallen, from Burma, from the Western Desert on several occasions, and after the Tunisian campaign was ended, despatches were written (although not invariably published) drawing attention to shortcomings and limitations, and setting out, so far as the writers could, the lessons to be learnt. In acting thus they were in line with a tradition—not always maintained, however—which began at least as early as when Sir William Howard Russell, The Times correspondent in the Crimea, exposed mismanagement there ninety years earlier, an exposure which led to Florence Nightingale going out. In war, nothing is ever good enough ; the war correspondent can be a kind of watchdog.
If I have said little or nothing of correspondents' despatches, it is because these have spoken for themselves. Their writers have been working under difficult conditions often enough—when tormented by flies, when the heat has been such that men have once or twice written naked, or when the cold has been so intense that sense of touch was almost lost ; and they have been written in motor-cars on the move, in aircraft, in vehicles at night blacked out by blankets and raincoats, in the open air with typewriters perched on knees or on boxes or mounds of earth or otherwise. The quality of the work has varied, but the best of it compares well, I think, with that of past wars. Space in British newspapers is short and despatches that are brief can be more welcome than those very lengthy. For this reason, among others, messages have sometimes lacked that portrayal of our men's life and their character and their humour, a portrayal that seems desirable since men and not automatons are fighting this war.
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