War reporter Chester Wilmot blazed trail for military historians

Australian journalist Chester Wilmot reported on the biggest event of his time, and became part of the story.

War correspondent Chester Wilmot broadcasts from an observation post on the roof of a home in The Netherlands in 1944. Picture: Getty Images

On the morning of January 10, 1954, BOAC flight 781 took off from Rome airport bound for Heathrow on the final leg of its journey from Singapore. It veered west over the Mediterranean but at 10.51am the aircraft suffered an explosive decompression at altitude.

A group of startled Italian fishermen saw the remnants plunge into the water adjacent to the island of Elba, location of Napoleon’s first exile. All passengers and crew were killed. This included an internationally known Australian, the BBC journalist Reginald William Winchester Wilmot, aged 42, who had been in Australia on ­assignment.

Wilmot was Melbourne-born, captain in his final year at Melbourne Grammar School, a graduate in arts and law from the University of Melbourne, where he was president of the students’ representative council and participated in inter-varsity debating.

Wilmot developed a taste for foreign travel and had visited Germany during the Munich crisis. As a young man he had great energy, physical presence and a vibrant voice with what was once called an educated Australian accent.

Wilmot’s life was cut short, yet his achievements are astonishing. In a competitive field he was ­probably the most illustrious Australian correspondent of World War II, a broadcaster unrivalled in ­Australia and then Britain, a ­highly professional journalist who, in a national crisis, became a ­participant.

He was a man ahead of his time: an Australian patriot yet an internationalist who won fame in reporting on wars in three different theatres — Africa, the Pacific and Europe. He learned quickly and made a transition to which many journalists aspire but few attain: he matured into a formidable ­historian.

In 1952, Wilmot published his epic The Struggle for Europe. Churchill’s memoirs aside, it endured for some years as the finest book written on World War II. Wilmot changed our understanding of the war with his thesis that flawed military tactics by the US had allowed the Soviet Union to dominate central Europe postwar, thereby shaping the rest of the 20th century.

The Observer said of his book: “The work of a great historical narrator, holding its place not unworthily by the side of Churchill.”

His work is dated these days yet it remains a masterpiece. If there is a greater nonfiction book written by an Australian I am yet to discover it.

The cemetery on Elba is on the southern side of the island. At one point you drive through a boulevard of eucalyptus trees as fine as ever existed in this country. On the marble monument to the victims of the BOAC Comet crash are 36 names, the third last being “Chester Wilmot”. There are abundant fresh flowers in the Italian tradition. The afternoon summer sun is intense in an Australian way.

Wilmot worked as an ABC correspondent covering the campaigns in North Africa, Greece, Syria and then Tobruk. With the Japanese threat to Australia he became the ABC’s principal correspondent in the Pacific covering the New Guinea campaign.

After a confrontation with the Australian commander of the Allied land forces, General Sir Thomas Blamey, Wilmot had his accreditation as a war correspondent cancelled.

Based in Sydney, Wilmot then wrote the first of his two books, ­Tobruk 1941, dedicated to the commander of the 9th Division “General Morshead and his men”.

Wilmot subsequently worked for the BBC, covering the advance of the Allied ­armies from the D-Day landings at Normandy to the German surrender.

I want to offer three cameos of Wilmot — at Tobruk, in New Guinea and in Europe. I pay tribute to historian Neil McDonald, who, along with Peter Brune, wrote the excellent 2016 biography of Wilmot, Valiant for Truth, on which I have drawn.

Chester Wilmot, left, with CEW Bean in 1942. Picture: courtesy Jane Wilmot Crane

World War II was a newspaper and radio war. Wilmot’s guiding principle was authenticity and being on the spot. He said the main task in covering troops was that “you must see the ground over which they have to fight and the positions from which they are fighting, otherwise you have no idea what really happens”. This involved risks and took courage.

It meant Wilmot knew the ordinary soldiers and developed a remarkable relationship with them. Yet he had the journalist’s lust for power — Wilmot developed personal relationships with a number of commanders and they took him into confidence to an extraordinary extent.

So Wilmot operated on both ends of the story — with the men and with the generals.

As McDonald argues, the foundations for Wilmot’s success lay in his 1941 coverage of the AIF in North Africa, Greece and Crete. This is his description of the soldiers’ life in Tobruk: “They have to man their posts and drive their ­vehicles without windscreens and work on improving their defences, sandstorm or no sandstorms … Bully, bread and margarine are the basic ration … on 99 days out of 100 there is no beer to be had in ­Tobruk … everyone I’ve asked says if he were given a choice of a beer or a bath he’d choose the bath … with tea and water you can shake your thirst but unless you can deal with the daily accumulations of dirt, you haven’t much chance of holding at bay the army of fleas the Italians left behind them.”

The defence of Tobruk fell largely to the Australians under Lieutenant-General Leslie Morshead’s command. Morshead knew the key to success was to seize the tactical offence by patrolling and dominating no-man’s land. Wilmot said of Morshead: “He inspired everyone in Tobruk with the firm conviction that there could be no yielding; that if every man fought without flinching, the garrison was invincible.”

Wilmot, far left, witnesses Field Marshal Montgomery, right, reading the terms of Germany’s surrender. Picture: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images

Wilmot ends his Tobruk book with his broadcast of Morshead unveiling a memorial to the troops left behind: “Here beside the road that runs from Bardia to Tobruk the smooth brown sand of the desert is broken by 800 white crosses and the mounds of 800 graves … In the west the sun has just set but the sky is still streaked with light and a restless wind sweeps a fine dust-cloud across the cemetery. From the escarpment to the south comes the occasional thunder of guns; along the road from time to time trucks, armoured cars and tanks roar past on their way to and from the front; half a mile away troops are shaking out their blankets.

“This will be a simple ceremony. Here within the sound and range of enemy guns anything elaborate would be out of place. There is to be no display, no pomp and ceremony, no glittering uniforms, no regimental bands, no speeches, just two chaplains in khaki, one bugler and a hundred men … Some of the graves are not yet completed. Some are only mounds of earth ringed with rough rock.”

After returning from the Middle East, Wilmot married Edith Irwin at St Peter’s College Chapel in Adelaide. Chester wore his war correspondent’s uniform and Edith a tailored suit. Following the Japanese landing in New Guinea, Wilmot arrived in Port Moresby in late July 1942 as ABC correspondent, encountering a military headquarters consumed with delusional confidence. A few days later a seasoned commander, Lieutenant-General Sydney Rowell, was appointed to command all forces in Papua and New Guinea.

Rowell and Wilmot knew each other well from their time in the Middle East and Greece. Wilmot admired Rowell but distrusted the competence and integrity of Blamey as Australian commander.

The Australians were engaged in a desperate fighting withdrawal along the Kokoda Track. Wilmot, with cameraman and photographer Damien Parer, had made an exhausting trek to the front. As he approached brigade HQ, Wilmot passed the straggling troops of the 39th Militia Battalion now being relieved. His broadcast said:

“There are wounded, too. They must be going through hell on this track, especially those with leg wounds. Some have been hit in the foot and they can’t even get a boot on … Here’s a steep pinch and a wounded digger’s trying to climb it. You need both hands and feet but he’s been hit in the arm and thigh. I say to this fellow he ought to be a stretcher case, but he replies, ‘There’s blokes here lots worse than me and if we don’t walk they’ll never get out.’ ”

McDonald says that while Parer’s film Kokoda Front Line revealed to authorities and the Australian people the horrific conditions, it was Wilmot’s reports that first seeded such awareness. He captured the tragedy of the withdrawal: “Nothing tests troops as much as a withdrawal … you can drive men like this back but you can’t conquer them. Neither they nor you want any more talk of ‘glorious withdrawals’. That’s why I’ve tried to tell this story simply as I saw it.”

In early September 1942 the Australians had suffered further setbacks and the Brisbane HQ of General Douglas MacArthur, ­supreme commander of Allied forces, became alarmed. On the night of September 17, MacArthur applied pressure in a conversation with prime minister John Curtin. Although a foreign general, MacArthur had been appointed by the Labor government as supreme commander of all Australian forces. Bowing to MacArthur, Curtin ordered Blamey to New Guinea.

Wilmot broadcasting from Tobruk, 1941, taken by Bill MacFarlane. Picture: courtesy Jane Wilmot Crane

MacArthur told Curtin that Blamey must go in order to “meet his responsibility to the Australian public”. Military historian David Horner has observed that Blamey’s position was at risk.

Facing this dilemma, Blamey took charge of the New Guinea operation and sacked Rowell as commander. Rowell and Wilmot were united in their repudiation of Blamey’s action and their belief that Blamey’s mistakes were central to the military setbacks in New Guinea. In his penetrating observations on New Guinea, Wilmot said: “The situation, which resulted in the Japanese getting to within 35 miles of Port Moresby, appears to have been one which should never have arisen if enough troops, adequately trained and equipped, had been sent to New Guinea in time.”

This was a critique of Blamey. And Blamey was now gunning for Wilmot, whose criticism he could not stomach. Wilmot and Rowell met in Sydney on September 30. Wilmot subsequently had a meeting with Curtin in which he ­attacked Blamey.

Professor JDB Miller, then a young man in the ABC newsroom, saw Wilmot after the meeting. Miller said: “He’d (Wilmot) been to see the prime minister … Curtin had given him a very good hearing but had said of Blamey: ‘We must either back him or sack him — and we can’t sack him.’ ” 

It was a predictable outcome. Wilmot had been brave, naive, driven by faith in Rowell and his abiding concern for the war effort. He had crossed the boundary for a journalist. He was neither the first journalist nor the last to become a participant.

I would not criticise him. Wilmot’s critique of Blamey had much validity given the decision to reinforce Port Moresby after the Coral Sea battle with forces mainly from poorly trained militia.

On November 1, Blamey summoned Wilmot to his tent and withdrew his credentials, thereby terminating Wilmot’s career as an Australian correspondent. Wilmot wrote to his father: “I had to choose between doing what I thought was right and risking my job — and doing what I knew to be cowardly.”

Wilmot said of Blamey: “In two years I have heard him denounced in the strongest possible terms in messes and private conversations by senior officers who had no interest in supplanting him, by junior officers and by ordinary Diggers.”

Facing a highly charged situation, the ABC stood by Wilmot as an employee. The ABC’s general manager Charles Moses applied for re-accreditation on Wilmot’s behalf. Moses was rebuffed by Blamey. Eventually, the BBC offered Wilmot a position with War Report, the team of broadcasters assembled to cover the invasion of Europe.

Wilmot would now cover the biggest story on earth for the greatest broadcaster.

US General Dwight D. Eisenhower was supreme commander of the Allied forces and his senior commanders included British General Bernard Montgomery of El Alamein fame and General Omar Bradley commanding the US forces. With Montgomery’s support the BBC had elaborate plans to cover D-Day. Wilmot was accorded a pre-eminent role. Experienced BBC reporter Frank Gillard described his colleague: “I found him very congenial, cordial, talkative … intellectually, in terms also of courage and bravery and determination, he was head and shoulders above most of us.”

Wilmot would accompany the divisional headquarters of the British 6th Airborne’s glider operation and land in France behind enemy lines on D-Day. It was a hazardous assignment. Wilmot’s report from the glider is one of his most famous: “Over the coast we run out of cloud and there below us is the white curving strand of France and, mirrored in the dim moonlight, the twin ribbons of water we are looking for — the Orne and the Canal … We are floating in a sky of fathomless uncertainty … As the ground rises to meet us, the pilots catch a glimpse of the pathfinders’ lights and the white dusty road and the square Norman church-tower beside the landing zone … The soil of France rushes past beneath us and we touch down with a jolt on a ploughed field. It is 3.32am. We are two minutes late.”

After landing, Wilmot recorded: “We could hear Germans shouting excitedly at a church nearby, starting a car, driving furiously off. A quarter of a mile from us a German battery was firing out to sea.” German tanks were just down the road from where Wilmot took shelter. In coming hours and days he provided first-hand accounts of brutal fighting.

According to McDonald, Wilmot provided more than 100 dispatches covering the Battle of Normandy during the seven weeks after D-Day. He established a relationship with Montgomery and his intelligence officers that would prove to be decisive. The commander was now briefing Wilmot about the campaign.

In coming months, Wilmot accompanied Montgomery’s drive across France, the advance into Belgium, on to Brussels. His prowess as a war correspondent reached its zenith amid close-quarter reports of fighting. But his strategic sense also deepened. As the Allied armies advanced, tensions grew at the political level between the “big three” — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin — and among the American and British commanders. The issue was: who would dominate postwar Europe?

In The Struggle for Europe, Wilmot provides a brilliant analysis of conflicting American and British military cultures and the interaction between their commanders. On May 4, he broadcast the surrender of the Germany military leaders to Montgomery. It was the Russians, however, who took Berlin. There wasn’t a single Allied soldier in the city.

Postwar the Wilmots lived in Britain and Chester worked on the book, published seven years after the war’s end. From its opening sentence the reader is in the hands of a master narrator who advanced a thesis of historical import.

Wilmot argued that Stalin, possessed by a “grand strategy that ­remained constant”, had out­manoeuvred Roosevelt to make Russia the dominant power in ­Europe. He documented the astonishing extent of American goodwill and naivety towards ­Stalin. “Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist,” Roosevelt said. His administration believed there would be no major postwar differences with Russia. Eisenhower said both America and Russia “were free from the stigma of colonial empire-building by force”. Roosevelt felt there was no problem he and Stalin could not solve man-to-man.

In contrast, the president was ­obsessed about Churchill’s efforts to re-establish the British Empire. He told his son the British “must never get the idea we’re in it just to help them hang on to the archaic, medieval Empire ideas”.

Roosevelt, in planning the postwar world, was more suspicious of Britain than of Russia. On this basis FDR made extensive concessions to the Soviet Union, both in Europe and Asia.

The associated folly documented by Wilmot was the American divorce between military and political ends, in contrast to Churchill and Montgomery. Wilmot captured the American military ethos in the liberation of Europe: “The aim should be victory, nothing else. Since America fights for no political objectives except peace, no political directives should be given to American commanders in the field.” This doctrine, Wilmot argued, came from the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, General George C. Marshall.

In contrast, Wilmot said, once military victory was assured, ­Stalin’s main aim was less Hitler’s defeat than getting his army into the heart of Europe. He said that when the war in Europe ended, Poland — the cause of Britain’s war declaration — was “in the grip of another alien dictator ... Berlin, Prague and Vienna as well as every capital in East Europe were again in the possession of a single power” — this time the Soviet Union. Wilmot argued that Marshall’s philosophy meant the Allied military effort was devoted to an assault on Germany from the west and the “neglect of opportunities” in the Mediterranean and the Balkans.

He concluded: “The two most serious miscalculations of the Second World War both concerned the Soviet Union: Hitler’s miscalculation of Russia’s military strength and Roosevelt’s miscalculation of Russia’s political ambition. It was these two errors of judgment which gave Stalin the opportunity of establishing the ­Soviet Union as the dominant power in Europe.”

For the book Wilmot was briefed at length by Montgomery. British military historian John Keegan said Wilmot “effectively invented the modern method of writing contemporary military history”. Montgomery felt it vindicated him in his differences with the American commanders. Yet the book was applauded on both sides of the Atlantic. It was flawed in a number of respects but its central thesis, I believe, was correct and has been vindicated and ­recycled in the decades since publication. The Struggle for Europe is a classic in a genre: a journalist’s coverage evolving into an historian’s project.

As a war correspondent Wilmot was a pioneer who worked under pressure and strove for excellence. There is a compelling quality to his coverage that transcends the generations. He should not be lost to history. The nation remains in his debt — as journalist, broadcaster, historian, an Australian who went out and left his mark on the world, a man who saw the sweep of history but never forgot the worth of the ordinary soldier.

This is an edited version of Paul Kelly’s address this week to the CEW. Bean Foundation Annual Dinner, titled: Chester Wilmot: War Correspondent, Historian, Interpreter of Worlds.