Book description
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.
Trevor Royle is a respected historian of war and empire. His other
books include the ground-breaking
Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854-1856
, the bestselling
The Best Years of our Lives
and a series of books covering each of the Scottish military regiments.
