Dying for the Truth

The Concise History of Frontline War Reporting

Paul Moorcraft

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473879171
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The role of war correspondents is crucial to democracy and the publics discovery of the truth. Without them, the temptation to manipulate events with propaganda would be irresistible to politicians of all hues.It starts by examining how journalists have plied their trade over the years most particularly from the Crimean War onwards. Their impact on the conduct of war has been profound and the author, an experienced journalist, explains in his frank and readable manner how this influence has shaped the actions of politicians and military commanders. By the same token the media is a potentially valuable tool to those in authority and this two-way relationship is examined.Technical developments and 24 hour news have inevitably changed the nature of war reporting and their political masters ignore this at their peril and the author examines the key milestones on this road.Using his own and others experiences in recent conflicts, be they Korea, Falklands, Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan, the author opens the readers eyes to an aspect of warfare that is all too often overlooked but can be crucial to the outcome. The publics attitude to the day-to-day conduct of war is becoming ever more significant and this fascinating book examines why.

Chapter 1

The Early Days of War Reporting

The famous British war correspondent Charles à Court Repington once remarked, ‘The history of mankind is the history of war.’ Warfare has been a permanent condition of human existence, rather than a temporary aberration from the supposed ‘normality’ or ideal of peace. Yet a fundamental point to remember is that the experiences of those who actually fought in battles and of those who merely read about them or watch them from afar have been quite different. The gap between image and reality is huge. In the process of description, the sheer brutality of warfare goes through a form of mediation, or filtration, that turns it into something quite different – an epic poem, a painting or, more recently, a film, a television documentary or a news report. Modern journalism is a relatively recent phenomenon. An eventual by-product of the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, newspapers, as we understand them today, began to appear several hundred years later. The mass circulation of newspapers is really a twentieth-century phenomenon, as, of course, is broadcasting and the cinema. Indeed, the arrival of these truly mass media is what distinguishes the twentieth century from all periods before it. Because the gap between image and reality has narrowed somewhat that does not mean that it has been eradicated. It is important to understand the historical antecedents of contemporary war reporting, not least because so many aspects of today’s military–media relationship were experienced long before the century of ‘total war’.

Shooting the messenger

According to some ancient sources, the Greeks disliked bad news so intensely that the runners carrying it from one point to another were sometimes murdered. Thus began a long history of ‘shooting the messenger’, a history that extends to the modern-day media, which thrive on bad news. It is frequently said that history is written by the victors and, usually, victory in war is the source of national celebration and commemoration of those who have lost their lives. In the classical Greek period scribes eulogised wars rather than reporting them, often many years after the event. So the surviving accounts are riddled with myth and propaganda and are based on oral tradition passed down through generations of storytellers. Written five hundred years after the event, Homer’s Iliad devotes more than half of its space to depictions of battles and the heroes who fought them. Together with his other epic poem, the Odyssey, Homer tells us less about the actual events of the Trojan War (indeed the war may not even have happened and ‘Homer’ may never have existed) and more about how later Greeks used this ‘event’ as the historical moment that defined their unity, culture and national character. Writing about the history of war is often more about the present than the past and, until the arrival of the war correspondent in the midnineteenth century, it was less a matter of record and more a matter of myth.

The Trojan War may not have happened. Homer’s Iliad was more myth making than historical record.

Virgil, writing in Latin at the height of Roman power, followed the Homeric tradition in his famous masterpiece, the Aeneid. The Asian equivalent, the Mahābhārata, reworked between 400 and 200 BC, describes the tremendous struggles that resulted from the Aryan invasion of the Indus Valley more than one thousand years earlier. Its one hundred thousand couplets make it probably the longest poem ever written (ten times the works of Homer combined). The Mahābhārata is also one of the greatest surviving accounts of primitive war, fought almost exclusively by foot soldiers armed with bows and arrows.

These were poetic interpretations of military history and popular myths, however, not factual reporting; they lack the authenticity and stylistic immediacy of eyewitness accounts. The Athenian historian Thucydides was a general who was exiled from Athens following his failure to prevent the city of Amphipolis falling into Spartan hands. Although his The History of the Peloponnesian War must also be treated with some caution given his background, the first-hand accounts he personally collected during the rest of the conflict in his history of the Athenians’ disastrous war against Sparta in the fifth century BC can legitimately be seen as a compelling forerunner of modern war reporting.

Military commanders themselves have written some of the most powerful and immediate war records. In 401 BC Xenophon led his army of Greek mercenaries in an epic retreat. His detailed description of directing his troops through the snows of modern Kurdistan contains ‘human interest’ details reminiscent, for example, of accounts of the Nazi siege of Stalingrad. Likewise, Julius Caesar’s understated style contains many of the elements of modern war reportage; for instance, in his description of his landing on British soil in 55 BC, he adds what journalists today would call a ‘sound bite’. The Roman landing force, accustomed to fighting on land, encountered stiff resistance from the natives massed on the beach. Caesar records the standard-bearer of the Tenth Legion shouting, ‘Jump down, comrades, unless you want to surrender our eagle to the enemy; I, at any rate, mean to do my duty to my country and my general.’

The Jewish historian Josephus, who sympathised with the Romans, indulged in what nowadays would be termed sensationalism. In his portrayal of the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, he writes in almost tabloid style of a woman, driven by hunger and anger at her inevitable death, committing a crime against nature: ‘Seizing her child, an infant at the breast, she cried, “My poor baby, why should I keep you alive in this world of war and famine?”’ Then she kills her baby son, roasts him, eats half of the body, and keeps the rest for a later meal. Although Josephus is considered an unreliable witness by modern historians, and the contemporary parallels should not be overdone, nonetheless elements of continuity stand out not only in the abiding fascination with the detailed horrors of war but also in the overall aims of the stories. Right from the outset, epic poems and prose chronicles of war had a political purpose: to bolster the authority of the current ruler, which, for both Virgil and Josephus, was the embryonic Roman Empire.

After the collapse of the centralising power of this Empire, myths and legends of military prowess became even more integral to the survival of warrior societies in the flux and chaos of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. A central core of early medieval war stories centred on the various versions of La Chanson de Roland, based on Roland’s defence of the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army as it marched through the pass of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in AD 778. Roland’s self-sacrifice in the fight against the ‘Saracens’ became the prime motif of chivalric literature and arguably the Arthurian legends. Roland and his men were probably killed by pagan or Christian Basques not Muslims, however. The battle assumed an inaccurate reputation as the major clash between Islamic and Christian forces. Charles Martel’s earlier defeat of invading Muslim armies in central France at the Battle of Tours in 732 has a far better claim to this accolade.1 The Muslim incursions into central France flowed from the amazing military expansion that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632. Except for night-fighting and rapid mobility, the small Arab armies had no tangible advantages over the more technologically advanced Byzantine and Persian empires. The Muslim military leadership was, however, impressive – within one hundred years Islam had conquered much of the known world. Hugh Kennedy’s book, The Great Arab Conquests, captures much of the drama, but it was Tom Holland’s iconoclastic work, In the Shadow of the Sword, that cast doubt on the provenance of many of the stories of the early Muslim period, not least because so few Arabs provided contemporary histories.

Muhammad died in 632 and within 100 years Arab armies had conquered much of the known world.

The Arab armies had no technological advantages but they outfought the two existing superpowers, the Byzantine and Persian empires. Hardly any contemporary Arab accounts survived.

In Anglo-Saxon and Celtic tradition bards accompanied warriors into battle to add firsthand piquancy to their prose and poetry. In an illiterate tribal society, the oral traditions recorded genealogical and political legitimacy as well as flattering princes with praise-poems. From these stories and myths emerged the Arthurian legends, that later melded into chivalric traditions based on Roland and other knights. In a historical example from a later period (1400–1409), Owain Glyn Dŵr led the last major Celtic rebellion against English rule in Wales, while his faithful bard Iolo Goch proclaimed his lord’s prowess.2

From Charlemagne to the time of Owain Glyn Dŵr, ‘war reporting’ consisted largely of heroic combats between individual knights or sagas of noble leaders spearheading competing armies. One of the last flowerings of this tradition was the papal propaganda to support the crusades in the Holy Land from 1095 onward. The Church fused religion and reportage to buttress Christendom’s wars with the Muslim world.3 The Islamic tradition did not undergo the renaissance and reformation that transformed Christendom. Although the influence of the popes lingered in some measure in the more secular age, and various later crusades were launched against the Ottomans, Latin Christianity receded from state authority in the West. Knights who had once worn the red cross became officers in national and imperial armies. Many of the old religious and chivalric traditions became redundant just as full plate armour was worn more as a matter of social prestige in the seventeenth century. Unlike the Islamic world, the separation of church and state in Christendom allowed for a modernised international and secular political order, epitomised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, a period of some peace after the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War. The Church essentially gave up its attempt to control all civil society as law replaced divine sanction. The temporal power of the papacy, accentuated by the Crusades, eventually shrunk to the tiny Vatican City, the only church state left in Europe.

Much of medieval warfare was recorded by bards as single combat between kings and princes. Iolo Goch faithfully recorded the last uprising of the Welsh, led by his master, Owain Glyndŵr, at the start of the fifteenth century.

Despite four major crusades and a series of smaller ones, Christian control of the Holy Land lasted just two centuries.

The Crusader castles were built to last – this is the Krak des Chevaliers castle in northern Syria, controlled by the Knights Hospitaller. It fell to Muslim forces in 1271. (Author, Paul Moorcraft)

As the honour of individual swordsmanship gave way to the more mechanical and massed warfare of the bullet and cannonball, the annals of war became less heroic and the literature began to present more realistic portrayals of combat. In 1609, for example, Samuel Daniel wrote of ‘artillerie, th’ infernall instrument, new-brought from hell’ in his account of England’s Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. His readers were perhaps as appalled by his detailed descriptions of the human impact of the latest engine of war, artillery fire, as modern generations were affected by written and photographic accounts of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Improving technology was bound to influence not only warfare but also the means of reporting it. In the mid-fifteenth century, Johann Gutenberg pioneered printing by movable type, and this revolution, by initially producing more accessible Bibles, changed not only religion but also government and commerce. Printing prompted the Reformation and the beginnings of the press; the first newspapers written in English appeared in the 1620s. Spurred by demand for news during the Civil War, fourteen newspapers were on sale in London by 1645. Many of the early newspapers were highly polemical, and successive governments imposed restrictions on them.

A tax on paper limited many eighteenth-century newspapers to four pages; also a tax on advertisements and a stamp duty were imposed. Some of the local information was founded on gossip and imagination or copied from rival publications. Writers lifted international news from foreign journals or based their accounts on travellers’ letters and reports.

If sometimes newspapers said too much editors were fined and imprisoned; at other times they said too little. The British forces’ defeat at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 received little coverage in British papers, and the few that did mention it declared it an English victory. Soldiers fought this bloodiest battle of the Anglo-American War of 1812 more than two weeks after a peace settlement had been concluded in Ghent. Some journalistic ignorance might be excused, however, as news then travelled at a slow pace. English newspapers were too concerned with the escape of Napoleon and the events that culminated in Waterloo to be diverted by embarrassing American victories in faraway places. As ever, the press processed news that immediately concerned its readers.

Continental Europe enjoyed a period of relative peace for the rest of the nineteenth century. True, revolutions and short wars broke out, though nothing to compare with the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic conflicts. This ‘Long Peace’ and the spread of the industrial revolution spawned a series of media advances. In the newspaper industry, mechanical typesetting was developed in 1838 and the rotary press in 1846. These technologies, combined with linotype composition, devised in 1844, would allow 30,000 copies of a newspaper to be printed in one hour. Early newspapers were composed of dull, dense columns, although magazines were spiced by artists’ impressions of wars. In the late 1830s Louis Daguerre developed photography; John MacCosh, a Scottish surgeon in the Bengal Army, used an improved process known as the calotype. MacCosh was one of the first war photographers, managing to take small portraits of officers and men during the Second Sikh War (1848–49), but it was technically impossible to reproduce these pictures in newspapers. It was not until 1880 that a photograph printed by the halftone method (in the New York Daily Graphic) allowed the slow phasing out of the laborious process of engraved wood block and line drawings.

Rapid printing was all very well, but how could foreign news be transmitted more effectively from faraway war zones to newspaper offices? Previously, messages depended on the fastest horse or sailing ship. Balloons had been tried, and in 1832 an English paper, the True Sun, carried news of French troops moving on Antwerp with the headline of ‘Just arrived by a carrier pigeon’. Pigeons could travel at 35 miles per hour; the newly invented steam trains were reaching speeds of 50 miles per hour. What accelerated communications in the nineteenth century – with a similar effect to that of computers in the late twentieth century – was a process that could send information at 186,000 miles per second: the telegraph.

In 1844 Samuel Morse, an artist and portrait painter, opened the first telegraph line, between Baltimore and Washington. One early witness of the first telegraphic transmissions declared: ‘Time and space are now annihilated.’ In 1851 a submarine cable linked Britain and France, and a line spanned the Atlantic successfully in 1866.

Surprisingly, many of the early war correspondents seemed extremely reluctant to use the telegraph; the same could be said for Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876. Bell himself refused to have a phone in his study as he said he found it distracting. Moreover, most of the colonial war reporting in the second half of the nineteenth century took place far away from telegraph lines and certainly far from the newfangled telephone. Journalists either undertook long journeys by horse (or camel) or used despatch riders. This, of course, added much colour to their often highly personalised accounts of colonial warfare. By the end of the century, radio developed from the wireless telegraph invented in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi. I grew up with the Marconi story, as I lived close to where, on 13 May 1897, the Italian Nobel laureate sent the world’s first ever wireless communication over open sea. The experiment, based in South Wales, witnessed a message transmitted over the Bristol Channel from the small Flat Holm island to Lavernock Point near Penarth, a distance of 3.7 miles. The message read ‘Are you ready?’

Allied to inventions in printing, photo reproduction, telegraphy and radio were important social developments in Europe and North America: urbanisation, the extension of the franchise, compulsory education and, hence, improved literacy. The expansion of rail networks and later development of the petrol engine enhanced distribution of newspapers. The age of mass newspaper circulation had arrived. So, too, had an electorate, especially in Britain, that was high...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Early Days of War Reporting
• Chapter 2: The World Wars
• Chapter 3: The Cold War
• Chapter 4: African ‘Sideshows’?
• Chapter 5: Europe’s Wars: Civil Conflicts and Terrorism
• Chapter 6: The Middle East and Afghanistan
• Chapter 7: The Long War
• Chapter 8: The Rise of the Islamic State
• Chapter 9: The Mechanics of Reporting Peace and War
• Chapter 10: The End of Heroes?
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography