Witness to War - Episode One

 

"Telegraph fully all news you can get and when there is no news, send rumors."

- Wilbur Storey, Chicago Times

EPISODE  ONE:

Dispatch From Danger

The Crimean War to the Civil War

            The first episode tells of the creation of the war correspondent through the story of a now obscure Irish journalist, William Howard Russell, who was sent to cover the Crimean War for the Times of London.

            Russell's account of the 1854 war spawned the poem the "Charge of The Light Brigade'' and gave newspaper readers the first glimpse of what life was like on the battlefield.

            He became overwhelmed by the plight of the troops, and reported how officers arrived at the front with French chefs, servants, good wine, their hunting dogs and shotguns, with some even bringing their wives, while wounded troops didn't have beds to lie upon.

            At the same time, the discipline was so strict that soldiers were flogged for having their top buttons undone.  Russell was shocked but didn't know if he should, "tell these things or hold my tongue."  

            He decided to report what he saw, and his stories began to reflect the despicable conditions imposed on the soldiers and the deficiencies of command.  The official outrage this engendered was not directed at the military, but at Russell. Prince Albert , the husband of Queen Victoria, launched a counter-propaganda effort to discredit "that miserable scribbler," as he called Russell. 

 

            Public support began to sag, and the government found it hard to convince mothers to send their boys into the breach.

            To counteract  Russell, the British government enlisted the support of an young nurse, Florence Nightingale, and shipped her to Crimea with a corps of well-scrubbed helpers and a photographer to record dashing officers, sanitized battlefields, and happy troops to show the public that everything was fine.

            But with Crimea the war correspondent had arrived.  When the American Civil War broke out five years later, Russell went to America and was joined by more than 500 other correspondents on the Northern side alone. Among them was  Matthew Brady, who left one of richest collections of war photographs ever assembled, though printing photographs in daily newspapers was still a generation away.

            After studying the slave market, Russell was disgusted with the South and firmly in the North's camp.  He minced no words, however, and his reporting of the Northern rout at Bull Run angered the Union Army and led to his banishment from later battles.

            The Civil War firmly secured the existence of the war correspondent.

            As Russell put it, "a luckless tribe was born."

            The names that would follow him include:  Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Winston Churchill, H. G. Wells,  Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Andre Malraux, George Orwell, John Reed, Lowell Thomas, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Edgar Snow, Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer, Walter Cronkite, and Irwin Shaw.