The BBC tried to maintain two men on the spot to cover the Western Desert campaigns and Middle East affairs generally. One was normally in Cairo at General Headquarters, and the other forward with the Army, and every few weeks they exchanged duties. Richard Dimbleby was one man of this pair for over two years, and for part of that time he had to tackle the total job singlehanded.
Of all warfare, desert fighting is the most bewildering. Few writers have ever described it adequately. With no natural boundaries to define the field of battle and to limit its movement, the action is liable to swing one way or another, and all too often it is impossible for any observer to say which side is on top. To this basic anxiety for the Western Desert correspondent was added the dilemma confronting the war reporter everywhere. Should he make his way to a forward position so that he could describe an engagement which he had seen with his own eyes, or should he base himself further back at some headquarters – Division, Corps or Army – at which he could be given frequent briefings on the changing position over an extensive part of the battlefront? If he went forward, he might well find himself watching a local episode totally unrepresentative of the larger action. He certainly stood a good chance of missing the most important story of the day, since nobody could tell in advance where the really significant things would happen. On the other hand, if he covered the day’s events from some headquarters, he was wholly dependent on second-hand information. He had no means of checking the accuracy of what he was told. There were times when some of the information filtering back to these headquarters was sadly over-optimistic if not misleading. In either case the risk remained that a favourable picture one day might be completely and unpredictably reversed the next in the fluid circumstances of desert fighting.
In this situation the BBC man was uniquely vulnerable. Correspondents writing for newspapers were safeguarded by the fact that it was six weeks before their despatches were seen by the men whose exploits and experiences they chronicled. It took that long for a London newspaper to travel out to Libya, or Tripolitania, and in such a lapse of time news became history. A press report, overtaken and perhaps made to look foolish by subsequent events, caused no more than a wry smile when it finally got back to the Army. Many things would have happened in the meantime to put it into perspective.
Not so, however, with the broadcaster. It usually required twenty-four hours for his despatch, recorded on the spot, to be sent back hundreds of miles to Cairo, to pass through the censors, to be transmitted by beam radio to London, and finally to be broadcast by the BBC’s shortwave services and heard throughout the Desert Army. When it was written, the story might well have sounded a well-justified note of optimism. But if in those intervening twenty-four hours things had gone badly, with fortunes perhaps reversed, there was little understanding on the spot for the unhappy BBC reporter. With some in the Army he became discredited, and sometimes confused and dispirited fighting men tended to find an outlet for their own understandable dejection in voicing harsh judgments against him. They are not too much to be blamed because they had no idea of the problems of radio reporting. The circumstances were inescapable, and the BBC war correspondent had to do his best in spite of them.
From Alamein onwards the situation was eased, because although there was severe fighting there were no more major British retreats. But Richard Dimbleby’s years were the pre-Alamein years, when success and defeat alternated alarmingly, depressingly and often inexplicably. We were ‘up in Benghazi for Christmas and back at Tobruk for New Year’ as it used to be said. So Richard became the innocent victim of factors for which he was not responsible and which he could do little to improve. His reporting throughout was totally conscientious and honest. He never spared himself in his efforts to give as faithful a picture as his own very shrewd and experienced observation, and his sources of information, would permit. Those sources were responsible, even if they let him down at times, because he enjoyed the confidence of the top command. Yet in the end, by the summer of 1942, it had to be recognised that in his own interests the time had come to withdraw him from the Western Desert and bring him back to London.
It was cruel luck, because the tide was so near the turn, and it fell to others, myself among them, to report the unbroken success story of the Eighth Army in the Montgomery era. But Richard took the blow philosophically, and, bitter as it must have been, he never showed his feelings openly in any way.
I was in the correspondents’ room on the day when he returned to Broadcasting House for normal duties. It was a routine day, with not a single assignment of interest in the diary. The best job that could be offered to him was a visit to Salisbury Plain to report on a demonstration of Army cookery. The BBC’s most experienced war correspondent, a man with a hard-earned and well-deserved national name and reputation, was asked to cover a story which would hardly excite a junior reporter. Yet he went off cheerfully, without question or comment.
This was the spirit in which he faced the two years of waiting, until D-Day brought him back, now as an Air Correspondent, into the forefront of active war reporting again. The prospect in June 1942 must have seemed bleak to him. Yet the period which followed was one of immense value. In it, Richard undertook occasional assignments of major importance such as his bomber flight over Berlin. During his spare time he stumped the country as a speaker in immense demand at armament factories and savings bond rallies up and down Britain. Most of all, he was helping to plan the BBC coverage of the great culminating phase of the war in Europe and to train the colleagues who would then be working with him.