Alan Moorehead's tribute to the fighting man
If you've read Rick Atkinson's masterful Liberation Trilogy, you'll have at least a passing knowledge of Alan Moorehead's status as one of the great war correspondents of his time.
Atkinson leans heavily on Moorehead's reporting throughout all three volumes, and repeatedly praised the Australian correspondent in interviews promoting the series: "I think Alan Moorehead is fantastic, and I use him a lot," Atkinson told Roll Call in 2013.
Born July 22, 1910 in Melbourne, Moorehead moved to London in 1937 to join the Daily Express and ended up covering the war from North Africa on through to V-E Day.
In addition to his newspaper work, Moorehead published a trilogy of his own on the North African campaign during the war, then followed up in 1946 with Eclipse, his brilliant chronicle of his experience from Sicily through the end of the war in Europe.
The final chapter includes Moorehead's attempts to wrap his mind around everything he has experienced in five and a half years of covering war. In the end, he pays tribute to those who did the fighting.
As a correspondent following the armies round the world through ten campaigns one has seen an immense change take hold of the soldier, the ordinary man and woman in the war. The clerk from Manchester and the shopkeeper from Balham seemed to me to gain tremendously in stature.
You could almost watch him grow month to month in the early days. He was suddenly projected out of a shallow materialist world into an atmosphere where there really were possibilities of touching the heights, and here and there a man found greatness in himself.
The anti-aircraft gunner in a raid and the boy in the landing barge really did feel at moments that the thing they were doing was a clear and definite good, the best they could do. And at those moments there was a surpassing satisfaction, a sense of exactly and entirely fulfilling one's life, a sense even of purity, the confused adolescent dream of greatness come true.
Not all the cynicism, not all the ugliness and fatigue in the world will take that moment way from the people who experienced it. Five years of watching war have made me personally hate and loathe war, especially the childish wastage of it. But this thing -- the brief ennoblement inside himself of the otherwise dreary and materialistic man -- kept recurring again and again up to the very end, and it refreshed and lighted the whole heroic and sordid story.