William Howard Russell, the first war correspondent, described himself as ‘the miserable parent of a luckless tribe’. Not so luckless: among his offspring have been Churchill, H. H. Munro (Saki), Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, and Evelyn Waugh, who all honed their imaginations, literary ability, and knowledge of human nature, as well as their reputations, as war correspondents.
Russell (c.1820-1907) reported on the Crimean war for The Times and went on to report on the Indian Mutiny, the American civil war, the Paris Commune, and the Zulu war. His career coincided with the beginning of the golden age of the war correspondent. This was a result of the near-simultaneous appearance of the railway and the telegraph, combined with a massive expansion of the popular press which benefited from the technological advances because it could get reporters where they were needed, get their copy back quickly, and therefore sell more newspapers.
Before the Crimea, newspapers tended to print the generals' or admirals' official despatches: both Trafalgar and Waterloo were reported in this way. In the middle of the century, newspaper editors experimented with luring junior officers serving with a military force to file copy between their other duties, but this was unsatisfactory. It clearly conflicted with military regulations and the military ethos, and the officers did not know how newspapers worked or what made a good story. The Times tried Lt Charles Nasmyth first and then, in February 1854, sent staff reporter Russell out with the Guards.
Russell found the British army in an appalling state and almost immediately asked his editor, John Delane, ‘am I to tell these things or hold my tongue?’ War correspondents have wrestled with the same question ever since. The solution arrived at was for Russell to file everything and those despatches which Delane judged unsuitable for printing were circulated to the cabinet. In spite of Delane's tact and circumspection, Raglan accused Russell of breaches of security. On 23 October 1854, for example, he recorded the number of guns, ammunition requirements, and a shortage of round shot, a report which the Russian embassy undoubtedly telegraphed from London to St Petersburg the day it appeared.
Russell is often credited with alerting Britain to the appalling conditions of the wounded at Scutari, leading to the intervention of Florence Nightingale, but in fact this honour goes to Thomas Chenery, The Times's constitutional correspondent. Crimea was the first campaign in which the British army had been subject to independent scrutiny, and they did not like it. In an attempt to counter the perceived ‘negative’ coverage, the government sent the war photographer Roger Fenton, who produced comforting images.
The Crimea was thus the birth of modern war reporting and official responses to it. Raglan's successor issued the first military censorship order on 25 February 1856, forbidding publication of details of value to the enemy and authorizing the ejection from the theatre of war of correspondents who transgressed. By the time his order reached Britain hostilities had ceased, so it did not become an issue.
The American civil war, only five years later, showed how the idea of ‘independent’ coverage had taken hold. There were 500 correspondents on the Union side, fewer on the Confederate, but this was still an enormous expansion in such a short time. There were now 50, 000 miles (80, 450 km) of telegraph wire in the theatre of war, making coverage more extensive and immediate. But few of the correspondents distinguished themselves, neither those from the Union or Confederate states—who were biased in the extreme—nor the foreign reporters, including Russell and Clemenceau of Le Temps, although Russell was alone in reporting the first battle of Bull Run as a Union defeat, for which the Union promptly turned against The Times. None of the reporters melded coverage of day-to-day detail with an awareness of the gigantic political, economic, and historic forces at work around them, ultimately the test of a great war correspondent.
The following years, until WW I, probably marked the zenith of the war correspondent. Between 1880 and 1900 the number of newspapers in Britain doubled, and the continued improvement of communications, combined with the slow introduction of organized censorship, helped. So did the fact that the wars did not directly affect or threaten Britain or the USA, and often took place in wild and exotic places—a situation repeated a hundred years later. War correspondents themselves took risks and paid with their lives. Mark Kellogg, of the American agency Associated Press, died at Little Bighorn and Frank Le Poer of The Times died with Gordon.
The Franco-Prussian war witnessed the beginning of ‘pool’ arrangements, where journalists agreed to cover for each other. Archibald Forbes of the London Daily News and George Smalley of the New York Tribune made such an arrangement. By this time, newspapers were prepared to pay a fortune to get a story. Smalley telegraphed his account of the battle of Rezonville/Gravelotte and then sent the works of Shakespeare in order to deny the sole telegraph office to his competitors, a telegram which cost $5, 000.
The tragic events in the Balkans from the late 1870s provided opportunities for disturbing talents, much as they did more than a century later. H. H. Munro (Saki), the epitome of conciseness, reported from the Balkans for the Westminster Gazette. Forbes reported the atrocities that led to outrage over the Bulgarian massacres, and gained a ‘scoop’ when he was the first reporter to send news of the Russian victory at the battle of the Shipka Pass in 1878. He rode for three days and three nights to reach the telegraph office at Bucharest. He could hardly stay awake, but claimed that he ordered a bottle of champagne and, suitably refreshed, telegraphed four columns which appeared the next day. Soon afterwards, he was back in action, dodging the enraged Zulu survivors as he rode through them to the telegraph office to report the battle of Ulundi.
Churchill, who both fought and reported from the Sudan (see Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns) and the Second Boer War, trod a dangerous path by mixing being a serving officer with being a war correspondent. When he was hired by the Morning Post to report on the latter, he was paid £250 a month, believed to be the highest sum ever paid until then for a journalistic assignment. In November he went on his fateful ride on an armoured train into Boer territory and when it was ambushed he played an active role in its defence. After the Boers captured the train, he was lucky not to be shot as a civilian taking an active military role, but this did not stop him asking the long-suffering Boers to release him because he was a journalist and not a soldier, and soon he escaped, making news and reporting it at the same time. On 26 December Buller wrote to Lady Londonderry that Churchill had turned up again, revealing a common military attitude to war correspondents: ‘I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper. We are very short of good men, as he appears to be, out here’. Churchill then became a lieutenant in the South African Light Horse, but Buller allowed him to remain a correspondent. Not only did he fight in the battles of 1900, he also continued to report on them for the Morning Post.
An outstanding war correspondent of this period was the Italian Luigi Barzini, who reported the Boxer rebellion and the Russo-Japanese war. Barzini's reporting did not focus on heroics or adventure, but only on slaughter. He took 700 pages of notes on the latter conflict, which he correctly appraised as being of immense significance for the development of warfare with its extended and static fronts, battles continuing for many days, the vast numbers of troops involved, and the increasing dominance of technology.
When Russell died in 1907, he believed that increasing military censorship had already killed the profession he had helped to found. The Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 introduced a system of severe censorship whose legacy lingers to the present. Newspaper proprietors accepted the new controls on the altar of total war and co-operated in disseminating government propaganda. The Times, for example, accepted that its role was to increase the flow of recruits and was not receptive to reports giving unpleasant accounts of what happened to recruits after they become soldiers. At first, there were no official war correspondents but in June 1915 five official war correspondents, wearing officers' uniforms without badges and insignia but with green armbands and the nominal rank of captains, arrived in France. They wrote stoically about life in the trenches, but kept quiet about the slaughter.
On the eastern front, Valeny Bryusov, the Russian symbolist poet, followed the Russian forces into Germany in 1914 as special correspondent for the newspaper Russkiye vedomosti. Based mainly in Warsaw, he reported Russian successes and how the ebb and flow of the armies reflected the continuous or cyclical nature of European history. It was on this front that the best British war correspondent from this period emerged, Morgan Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian, who did not suffer from the same constraints as his colleagues on the western front. He filed reports of some of the first large-scale Russian desertions, in August 1917, and sent the first account of the Bolshevik seizure of power in November. He stayed on, in spite of the difficulty the Guardian had supporting him because the Bolsheviks closed all the banks. He said he decided he was in the middle of ‘perhaps the biggest thing that had happened to the world’, and that it was worth risking his life to stay on.
Even when reporters managed to get a ‘scoop’, newspaper editors were reluctant to publish. Immediately after the Armistice five American reporters succeeded in getting into Germany and arranging an interview with FM Hindenburg. They were met by his COS, who said he had ‘just lost a world war’ and had a headache. By the time the story was sent, it was considered ‘stale’ and was never printed.
Other people's wars were easier to report objectively. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia was covered by Evelyn Waugh, and the Spanish civil war by Drew Middleton and Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and by Hemingway, who pioneered a new style of reporting, still trying to be objective, but siding openly with one side. This style of reporting, in which the public is told about every facet of the war and especially its effects on the individual, is essentially that used by the media today. The war also saw the first and so far the greatest woman war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, unfairly overshadowed by her brief marriage to Hemingway.
During WW II correspondents were more tightly controlled than ever, although there was some splendid reporting, especially from Edgar Snow and Alexander Werth of The Sunday Times and Curzio Malaparte of Corriere della sera, reporting from the USSR. Well-known war correspondents like Hemingway and Gellhorn were courted by the US generals, most of whom realized they had to play to a domestic audience. Patton nearly saw his career truncated by war correspondents who blew up the incident where he cuffed a shell-shocked soldier out of all proportion, while Clark was amazingly indiscreet in his efforts to get his photograph into the newspapers. MacArthur systematically used war correspondents to influence policy, a technique that boomeranged on him later in the Korean war, and so did Montgomery, to the fury of his C-in-C Eisenhower.
The individual war correspondent's freedom to report and his or her ability to encompass the events of a war were both under threat from greater military and state control and the scale of operations. Furthermore, other media, more immediate and more graphic, had now entered the fray. During WW II radio reporters played an important part in conveying the immediacy of events to listeners at home. CBS reporter Ed Murrow did much for the British cause in the USA by conveying sympathetic understanding of Britain's plight under air attack, and BBC correspondents like Richard Dimbleby—who flew more than twenty combat missions and was the first reporter into Belsen—brought the war home in the most vivid way. Even in the Falklands war of 1982, by which time TV had already established itself, it was Brian Hanrahan's radio account of an air attack flown from a British carrier—‘I counted them all out, and I counted them all back’—that caught the mood of the moment.
Although Vietnam produced some first-rate print journalism (Michael Herr's book Dispatches has proved remarkably durable) it was, in the main, a television war. The future Gen Colin Powell recalled the impact of watching, as a staff college student in the USA, the fighting in Saigon during the Tet offensive, and one of the war's most painful images was that of a tearful Vietnamese girl running, naked, with napalm burns. More recent conflicts have been flashed to peaceful living rooms with remarkable speed and impact. On the one hand TV pictures of famine in Somalia helped persuade the USA to intervene there, while on the other harrowing shots of a dead American being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu brought pressure for withdrawal. During the Gulf war Baghdad-based TV reporters broadcast with cruise missiles streaking past and anti-aircraft fire illuminating the sky behind them, while the BBC's Kate Adie, with her trademark pearl earrings, reported from amongst troops waiting in the desert. After WW II, with the increased number of small wars reported by war correspondents from nations not directly involved or whose interests were not directly threatened, the war correspondent, whether print, photojournalist, or TV, once again had more freedom. However, the spread of TV coverage, with large, well-organized, and well-resourced teams and TV crews, had an ironic spin-off. The writing correspondent, alone and armed only with a notebook, became more vulnerable to charges of spying than the large and very obvious TV crews. The introduction of satellite telephones in the 1990s made his or her job easier, however, and writing correspondents can get to places and report faster than TV which also needs time to edit broadcasts and facilities to transmit. Correspondents like the Independent's Robert Fisk still provide lone, courageous, and sometimes politically unwelcome reporting, in the best war correspondent tradition.
Bibliography
- Gellhorn, Martha, The Face of War (London, 1993).
- Knightley, Phillip, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker (London, 1978).
- Royle, Trevor, War Report: The War Correspondent's View of Battle from the Crimea to the Falklands (London, 1987)
— Christopher Bellamy/Richard Holmes
