Let us begin with a question: why should you read a book by an author long since dead about a war fought more than half a century ago?
The answer is not simple. I could say that Alan Moorehead was a fine writer and you will be able to see in this first-hand account of the Allied victory over Germany a popular historian warming his skills for a long list of distinguished works that were to follow: among them, Gallipoli, The Russian Revolution, the White Nile, the Blue Nile, and the Fatal Impact.
I could say that Moorehead’s story of the Normandy invasion, the drive across Europe, the collapse of the Germany army, and the last days of the war are military history at its most compelling. Or that Moorehead’s pen portraits of Allied leaders like Montgomery and de Gaulle are superb. Or that his honest eye for some of the seldom mentioned aspects of war--the joys of looting, the pleasures of power--are a delight. But these are minor matters. We have to look deeper to see why this book is a masterpiece.
It is difficult to grasp the scale of the Second World War and the influence it had on our civilisation. From the skies over Britain to the icy vastness of the Russian plains, from the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of Burma and the Pacific Islands, armies the size and fire-power of which the world had never seen before fought terrible battles of survival. Before it was over, every major power in the world had been dragged in and some sixty million people were dead, on average more than 25,000 for each day of the war.
What Moorehead attempts to do in this book is nothing less than to make sense of all that. He felt that the Allies fought a just war but in describing it he strives to present a balanced picture, avoiding the patriotic posturing of many of his contemporaries. He is aware of what war does to people--soldiers and civilians alike. He does not ignore the horror or the heroism. He understands the glory of victory and the ignominy of defeat. But what he really wants to know is: what on earth is this all about? What moves men and nations to risk everything for an ideal. His theme is as universal as the desire to explain our presence on this planet.
It is clear to me that it was Moorehead’s destiny to find himself in the summer of 1945 sitting in Jevington, Sussex, with his old notebooks and copies of his dispatches, probing his memory and tackling this ambitious task. He had left his home town, Melbourne, in 1936 as part of an inter-war wave of Australian journalists seeking fame and fortune on the old Street of Adventure.
He landed a job with the Daily Express as a foreign correspondent. (The owner, Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian, had a soft spot for journalists from Commonwealth countries.) Moorehead reported from Paris, got out ahead of the Germans and in 1940 had the lucky break all journalists deserve--the legendary Arthur Christiansen, with one of those flashes of inspiration that editors are sometimes capable of, sent him to cover the war in North Africa.
In today’s nuclear age it is hard to convey how the desert campaign of 1940-43 was regarded. Yes, it was only a sideshow. Yes, men got killed. But in those gloomy early years of the war when victory was by no means assured, it had--dare one say it--an old-fashioned glamour with none of the intense fury and hatred that existed on the European fronts.
In the desert, each side respected the other. The British borrowed the Africa Korps’ song, Lili Marlene, and made it a hit; Erwin Rommel, the German commander, became “the Desert Fox” and won Churchill’s admiration (“May I say across the havoc of war, a great general”) and the British commander, Bernard Montgomery, was “Monty” to everyone and a genuine hero-figure.
Covering this campaign changed Moorehead for ever. His life took on a new vivid sharpness, an intensity he had not known in peacetime. He had the intelligence and the education, plus the detachment of being an Australian, to know that he was playing a part in a great historical event--the last throw of a once great warrior nation in the advancing twilight of empire.
He wrote about the British in a manner the British themselves could never have done. “These odd, gawky officers with their prickly moustaches, their little military affectations, their high-pitched voices and their little jokes from the world of Mayfair and Ascot, kept bringing their men up to the enemy, and the men, because they were the picked soldiers of the regular army and native Englishmen and Scots, did exactly as they were told. [They] stood through this maelstrom as a rock will stand against the sea.”
There was never any doubt either with the Daily Express or Moorehead himself that he would continue with the British army as it invaded Sicily, the Italian mainland, then fought its way north towards Rome. And it was in this campaign that he began to feel his way towards an explanation of the glory men find in battle. “As he goes up to the front [a] man has to say: ‘Now I gamble everything. I put all my life and everything I have hoped to do and all that part of everyone I love--I put all this in the way of death. I stake it all.’ Then later when you see the man return safely he appears to have gained in stature. He has been up to the edge and looked over and come away. There is tide upon tide of happiness as he takes back his life and all the things he hopes to do with it. And having regained what he stakes he seems to be a more considerable being, and to have gathered some profit from the risks he took.”
Moorehead had no intention of stopping. He had been seduced by the freedom enjoyed by war correspondents. Soldiers, no matter what their rank, were small parts in the huge war machine. Moorehead went virtually where he liked, following what he considered to be the story, forging his own fame, seeking his own destiny.
He landed with the Allies in Normandy and hurried towards Paris, anxious to see if his pre-war home there had survived, fascinated to learn how the French had coped with the German Occupation. Moorehead’s account of this alone is worth the price of the book because he sorts out the truth from the propaganda--propaganda that, incidentally, has survived to this day.
“Europe was a workable proposition under Nazi rule,” he admits. “Up to 1942, three-quarters of the Allied propaganda about starving Europe, Europe under the Nazi boot, was purest nonsense. Europe was doing very well.” Questioning the French, Moorehead found that life in Paris under German rule was not only possible, it was profitable if you collaborated a little.
So he asks why then were the Germans so hated and decides it had to do with freedom. “We, the conscious or unconscious propagandists on the Allied side, had been writing and broadcasting this sort of stuff for years. Freedom of speech. Liberty for the Press. Now suddenly it was come true.”
When he wrote this line he suddenly felt, probably for the first time since the beginning of the war, some hope for the future. He realised that whatever choices people might have for rebuilding the post-war world--and in this he proved to be absolutely correct--they would not put up with restrictions on their right freely to express their views. “The very naivetZ of this argument had blinded a good few of us to its force... It was difficult to believe that the issues could have become so primitive. And yet here it was. At the end of the first week after we arrived twenty newspapers had been rushed into the street. All Paris began to talk.”
At that stage Moorehead, along with many others, thought that one last push and Germany would collapse. Writing about this mistaken belief after the war he noted how similar the British and the Germans are--they both adore defeats. “Dunkirk will remain in the English mind long after Tunis is forgotten. The siege of Stalingrad will rally future generations of German children long after they have found the 1940 advance into France rather a bore.” So as he entered Germany with the Allied troops, Moorehead realised that the Germans were preparing for the greatest act of national immolation in European history--”They would go gloriously and desperately to their utter defeat.”
It would have been easy for him to have written propaganda clichZs about the beastly Hun but his honesty would not let him, and he embarked instead on an immensely complicated relationship with the defeated Germans, full of loose ends and contradictions leading nowhere. “As soon as you discovered evil and malice in one place you were immediately confronted with kindness and genuine innocence in another.”
He did not lose his eye for those gems of behaviour the recounting of which enlivened his writing and brought a human touch to his reports, like the German businessman who announced that the Russians were looting his shop and would the English soldiers please come and see that they did it in an orderly manner.
And he did not conceal from the reader that he was often up for a little looting himself, especially food and wine. He claims that a colleague coined a cynical misquotation--but one suspects that it was Moorehead himself--”Dine with the right and vote with the left.” So it should not surprise us that Moorehead and his colleagues enjoyed the services of an Italian butler, Augusto, and dined when they could by candlelight in fine old houses on what Augusto could loot, toasting each other with the choicest clarets from abandoned cellars.
It is time to confess that this book and the earlier African Trllogy changed my life. Just after the war I was working as a copyboy on the Sydney Daily Telegraph. When things were quiet, the copyboys would gather around the desk of Sam White, who was later to find fame as Beaverbrook’s man in Paris, and try to prise war stories out of him.
“Don’t you little bastards ever read a book?” Sam asked one night. “For Christ’s sake get hold of anything by Alan Moorehead and bloody well leave me alone.” I did, and that was it for me. I had to get to Britain. I wanted to follow in Moorehead’s footsteps. It took me seven more years to come to London and then it was Moorehead’s books that sustained me in my first bitter years, freezing in cheap bedsits and stringing out a living as a correspondent for an Australian newspaper group.
I watched Moorehead’s success from afar, desperate to talk to him but feeling that although we were fellow countrymen it would be an intrusion. Then he moved to Italy, suffered a cruel stroke and died before I managed to meet him. So I write here what I would have said to him, that this account of the Allied victory over Hitler, of those many battles with strange names now dim in memory, is a triumph, an inspired, sustained piece of writing by a master of his craft.
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