Eyewitness by Garrie Hutchinson

Author:Garrie Hutchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2011-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

SURRENDER AND AFTERMATH

The Liberation of Paris

Alan Moorehead

Alan Moorehead claimed he couldn’t spell, typed with three fingers, suffered from vertigo and wanted to be a literary writer, not a mere journalist. He was both. He was of a generation which fled provincial Australia of the 1930s for the wider world – but never really escaped. His wartime writing, especially the three books about the desert campaigns published as African Trilogy , and the account of the end of the war, Eclipse , is amazingly vivid and well written.

Moorehead was born in 1910 in suburban Melbourne, studied at Melbourne University where he sold paragraphs to Table Talk and the Herald – his great juvenile scoop was selling exam results for publication in the Herald , paid for line by line. He vowed to leave the country when he had saved £500, which he achieved in 1936.

Moorehead got his start by wangling a job as a temporary correspondent in Gibraltar, before moving to Paris, and finding his way to Egypt during the phony war period in 1940. He found his métier in the desert, writing for the London Daily Express.

The real reason why the war correspondents did rather better in the desert than anywhere else was that the issues were so simple. There were no distractions, no cities, no railroads, shops, cinemas, markets, farms, children or women. There was no fifth column, and there were no politics. We never saw money or crowds or animals or hills and valleys. We saw the arching sky and the flat desert stretching away on every side. Consequently we saw the small incident (as distinct from the set-piece battle) achieve a significance it would never have in Europe or the tropics, and we saw it clearly, we saw all round it, we knew its beginning and its effect.

Moorehead reported from Bardia after it was taken by the Australian 6th Division in January 1941:

Australians, cigarettes in the corner of their mouths and steel helmets down over their lined eyes, squatted here and there among the prisoners, or occasionally got to their feet with a bayoneted rifle and shouted, ‘Get back there, you,’ when some Italian started to stroll away. These men from the dockside of Sydney and the sheep stations of the Riverina presented such a picture of downright toughness with their gaunt dirty faces, huge boots, revolvers stuffed in their pockets, gripping their rifles with huge shapeless hands, shouting and grinning – always grinning – that the mere sight of them must have disheartened the enemy troops. For some days the Rome radio had been broadcasting that the ‘Australian barbarians’ had been turned loose by the British in the desert. It was a convenient way in which to explain away failures to the people at home. But the broadcast had a very bad effect on the Italians waiting in Bardia for the arrival of the Australians. I saw prisoners go up to their guards to touch the leather jerkins our men were wearing against the cold. A rumour had gone round that the jerkins were bulletproof.

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