War Report

The War Correspondent's View of Battle from the Crimea to the Falklands

Whenever man has gone to war in modern times there has been no shortage of men and women to write about his exploits. They were known as war correspondents, a type of journalists whom General Wolseley called 'the newly invented curse to armies'. This study of the war correspondent's view of war traces the story from Russell's pioneering work for The Times in the Crimea to the assorted press, radio and television journalists who accompanied the British task force to the Falklands in 1982.

In particular, it investigates the lives and careers of six of the greatest war correspondents of all time: G W Steevens, who accompanied Kitchener to the Sudan and who introduced the 'colour story' to war reporting; Edgar Wallace, the future thriller writer who scooped the rest of the world at the end of the Boer War; Charles á Court Repington, the military correspondent who exposed the scandal of the shortage of shells in 1915; Claud Cockburn, a communist who adopted a self-confessed partisan approach during the Spanish Civil War; Chester Wilmot, perhaps the greatest of radio war correspondents who brought the Second World War into the living-rooms of Britain; James Cameron, a pacifist who uncovered stories of atrocities in Korea and who demanded to be published and damned. There also includes a discussion on the problems of using television to cover modern war.