The WWII-era journalists who risked, and lost, their lives for a story

Five reporters willingly rolled the dice of fate in 1943 for the kudos of one of the biggest stories of their careers … but three of them rolled death’s heads.

Australian war correspondent Norman Stockton, at right, interviews General Scanlon (centre) of the USAAF, at an RAAF base in Australia, during the Allies’ 1942 bombing campaign against Japanese bases on New Guinea and New Britain

In December 1943, five reporters agreed to risk their lives by flying aboard RAF Lancaster bombers on a deadly raid on Berlin. Two of them were veteran war correspondents wrote for Australian newspapers: Norm Stockton for the Sydney Sun, and Alf King for the Sydney Morning Herald. Their reach was far broader than that, for their stories would be carried by newspapers throughout the world. Also flying were two Americans – the famous radio reporter, Ed Murrow, and a brash young man starting out on his journalistic career, Lowell Bennett – while the fifth man was Norwegian poet, Nordahl Grieg, for whom the war had become personal after the Nazi invasion of his small country.

The Berlin raids were one of the biggest stories of the war, so all of these reporters could expect to see their first-hand news reports given top billing on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The oldest man to fly on the raid, 46-year-old Alf King was a senior journalist who held the post of London editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. He had served in the first war, enlisting in the 1st AIF in 1915, and finishing as an artillery lieutenant in the 1st Australian Division. Returning to “civvy street” he took up journalism, and by 1929 was posted to London as senior reporter.

His seniority meant he did not need to personally take the risk of accompanying a bombing raid, but when the chance came he nonetheless jumped at it, pulling rank on the junior reporters in the office by taking the spot himself.

His colleague, Norm Stockton, was also a mature man, 39 years old and with a wife and child waiting for him back home. He had reported from Hong Kong on Japan’s atrocious war in China for a range of papers including the South China Morning Post, Melbourne’s Argus and London’s Daily Express. He had a brush with death in November 1939 when the British airliner he was travelling in was attacked by Japanese fighters off the coast of Vietnam. He moved to the Philippines shortly before the Japanese invaded in December 1941, launching the Pacific War.

He fled the Philippines for home, and by early 1942, was accredited with General Macarthur’s GHQ to report on a war moving so rapidly that it now followed him to the gates of Australia.

He took the opportunity to obtain first-hand war stories from American bomber crewmen flying from Townsville on raids to Japanese occupied Rabaul, but writing about the exploits of others wasn’t enough: despite his previous close scapes Stockton wanted not merely to write about air combat, but to write first-hand by experiencing it himself. And so he got himself appointed to London to report on the European war for the Sydney Sun.

He moved to Britain to get himself closer to the fighting, and jumped at the chance to board the bomber. He died in a disintegrating Lancaster over Berlin, before being able to file so much as a word.

Alf King was luckier. He got home safely from the fateful raid to file a story which was syndicated to papers throughout the world. He reported the view from the cockpit, saying the pathfinders’ target indicator flares “stood out like beacons” against the backdrop of flak, fires, flares and searchlights, and that the resultant bombing appeared “superb in the savage beauty of its light”, with the huge “blockbuster” bombs exploding in “mushroom-like glows” among the buildings 6km below, while the showers of incendiary bombs lit up the streetscapes “in fantastic alphabetical designs”.

Alf King.

King’s gushingly positive reporting did not deviate from the Air Ministry’s expected public relations script – which was after all the reason why the five journalists had been invited aboard bombers in the first place.

The American, Ed Murrow, seemed more awestruck by the cataclysmic violence over and upon the tormented city, dubbing the scene he saw an “Orchestrated Hell”. Like King, he had survived to tell the tale. The two other reporters weren’t as lucky: they, like Stockton, were shot down, crashing to earth upon the well-defended soil of northern Germany.

It was a heavy toll. But all five had willingly rolled the dice of fate for the kudos of one of the biggest stories of their careers, and three of them had rolled death’s heads.

Their story, which we are now telling in our new book, came to me through my colleague, Thorsten Perl, a native of the Berlin region with a particular interest in the fate of Nordahl Grieg, the Norwegian who, post-war, was elevated to the status of defacto national poet.

Perl closely followed the story of the Norwegian search for traces of their hero’s Lancaster among the freshwater lakes around Berlin, and when it was found and identified he attended the dedication ceremony for the newly erected Nordahl Grieg memorial.

In the process of seeking, finding and commemorating, Thorsten collected a compendious archive of research material. He sought out an English speaking author to turn the project into a book, and we connected after he read the dedication in my previous book on the bomber war, RAAF Bombers Over Germany 1941-42. Our new book, Dispatch From Berlin, is thus the product of a transnational collaboration, framed by both Australian and German perspectives of those awful events 80 years ago.

Dispatch from Berlin, 1943: The story of five journalists who risked everything
By Anthony Cooper, with Thorsten Perl
NewSouth, Nonfiction
320pp, $34.99