In England at that time, Wilmot was indeed famous. His most recent book, The Struggle for Europe (1952), had been an instant hit, with presales of eighty thousand copies – not counting the American market. A German edition was due for publication at the time of his death. But, in his homeland, Wilmot’s reputation was firmly entrenched by an earlier success: Tobruk 1941 was first published by Angus & Robertson in 1944.

Wilmot began working in journalism while studying at Melbourne University. With the outbreak of World War II he joined the ABC’s Broadcast Unit and sailed for the Middle East in September 1940. He covered the campaigns in North Africa, the debacle in Greece and the savage war against the Vichy French in Syria before rejoining the besieged forces in Tobruk.

Australian, British, and Indian troops had held the town of Tobruk, the deep-water harbour and its defences, since January 1941. Since April, they had defied Rommel’s Africa Corps at every turn, and they were required to hold out for months more. When Wilmot arrived by sea (the ‘bomb alley’ run from Alexandria), he was fully aware of the strategic and symbolic significance of Tobruk at that moment. Without first taking Tobruk, Rommel could not push on to Suez, and while he was halted there, ‘leg-roped’, the defenders bought time for the Allied mobilisation in Egypt – preparations to repel the Axis forces, render Egypt secure and retake the top of Africa.

The symbolic significance was no less powerful than the strategic purpose. As yet, German forces were unchecked on land, ‘from Poland to the Pyrenees, from Norway to North Africa’, as Wilmot writes. Then came the siege of Tobruk. The importance of holding the fortress and the harbour was common knowledge to Allied forces in every theatre of war. Churchill understood the moment. ‘The whole empire is watching,’ he wrote to Major-General Leslie Morshead, the Australian commander inside the fortress.

The Text Classics 2017 reissue of Tobruk 1941 by Chester Wilmot, introduction by Peter Cochrane (Text Publishing)Wilmot and the Broadcast Unit shipped into Tobruk in early August 1941. The battle for the fortress had become something of a stalemate, Rommel having been repeatedly repelled by the defenders. But this was no ordinary stalemate. Morshead had determined at the outset that ‘no-man’s-land would be our land’. Raiding parties went out almost nightly, striking at Axis positions in the desert, while German artillery and aircraft pounded the defenders by day and by night. Nowhere inside the fortress was beyond the reach of Rommel’s guns or Luftwaffe bombs.

Wilmot went to work immediately, recording broadcasts with officers and troops for the listeners at home. They recorded in the township, on the harbour and on the ‘Red Line’ in the ‘coverless desert’, the outer perimeter, a semicircle of barbed wire and dug-in fortifications about fifty kilometres in length, a bloody arc, where raids with grenade and bayonet seemed never-ending.

Some of Wilmot’s contemporaries – Alan Moorehead, Quentin Reynolds, and others – were busy writing memoirs at this time, accounts of their adventures at war. But, as his notebooks indicate, Wilmot had something more substantial in mind. He wanted to write about the action, not the correspondent. He had quickly decided he would focus on Tobruk alone. As his biographer Neil McDonald writes in Valiant for Truth (2016): ‘In the closed world of the desert fortress, he had been able to research earlier events in the siege, not just as a broadcaster but also as a historian.’

At Melbourne University, Wilmot had absorbed the craft of historical enquiry under Professor Ernest Scott, along with the necessity for original research and the importance of masterly narrative. Like Charles (C. E. W.) Bean, the official historian of the first Australian Imperial Force in the Great War, Wilmot was committed to giving voice to the ordinary soldier. Inside Tobruk, he was everywhere, talking to the fighters, sharing their hardships and some of their perils, jotting his impressions in his notebooks, the notes taken down in his own, self-styled form of shorthand.

His democratic nature and his gift for the demotic fed naturally into his broadcasting and his writing, as did his belief in seeing for himself: ‘If you are to describe accurately and graphically the actions in which the troops take part,’ he wrote to his father, ‘you must see the ground over which they have to fight, and you must see the positions from which they are fighting.’ Some of the best writing in Tobruk 1941 comes from the ‘Salient Scenes’ chapter, where he reports from the trenches and dugouts on the front line – the burning heat, the flea-infested sand, the rumble of guns, the evening ‘hate’.

In addition to his notebooks, Wilmot had at his disposal a small archive of original sources: his full dispatches, his broadcast scripts (the uncensored copy), captured diaries, and officers’ reports to which he had access (thanks to Morshead), as well as his own record of interviews with the rank and file, the officers and the commander himself.

But the opportunity to work this rich material into book form did not arise until 1943 when, unexpectedly, Wilmot had time on his hands. It arose principally because he was never merely a reporter and he was quick to become an activist. From the outset, he was a military analyst, a historian and a correspondent who believed it was his duty to reveal hard truths when leaders failed their men.

In Cairo he had spoken out against the leisurely hours kept by sections of the British officer class while soldiers were fighting for their lives in the Western Desert, and men and women were working long and perilous shifts in targeted war industries in Britain. And from Kokoda (where he went after Tobruk) he was critical of high command for failing to supply the men on the Track with the proper equipment, suitably camouflaged gear and adequate supplies. His criticism of the Commander-in-Chief of the AIF, General Sir Thomas Blamey, made him a political target.

The ABC supported their man throughout the dispute, but Blamey was quick to cancel Wilmot’s accreditation as a war correspondent. Absurdly, Blamey called Wilmot ‘a dangerous subversive and a communist’, and refused to reinstate him. Late in 1942 Wilmot was grounded in Sydney, with time to reflect, and to write. Had he remained in the field, we might not have his classic.

Wilmot tackled Tobruk 1941 as he did everything else – at full throttle. The ABC’s Head of Talks, B.H. Molesworth, provided him with a secretary and an office from where he continued to prepare regular broadcasts and to shape his drafts for the book. He was a fluent writer, brilliantly synoptic and gifted with the power of vivid description. The chapter on the Battle of the Salient, about twelve thousand words, was drafted over four days. By night he worked on the manuscript in his digs at the University Club. ‘What a sweat – the first continuous account,’ he wrote to his family.

In addition to his own papers (notebooks, scripts, correspondence, photostatic copies of select records and so on), he now had access to Australian War Memorial files, housed in Melbourne, and he was gathering further evidence from participants. Whenever possible he caught up with veterans of Tobruk, and he sought reports and copies of correspondence from both officers and men.

Wilmot’s account begins with the seizure of ‘the fortress’ in January 1941, and concludes with a moving Epilogue: a summary of the global significance of the Allies’ triumph, followed by the transcript of his own broadcast from the closing ceremony in the desert cemetery, his tribute to the feat of arms and the dead.

From the escarpment to the south comes the occasional thunder of guns; along the road from time to time trucks, armoured cars and tanks roar past on their way to or from the front; half a mile away troops are shaking out their blankets. The ordinary life of war goes on while we are gathered to do homage to those who have found peace only in death ...

In Tobruk 1941, Wilmot’s roving eye blends coverage of fast-moving raids and battle with rich social observation, and melds the local story with its global implications. His narrative is punctuated with biographical cameos and excerpts from interviews with the men of the garrison, so the vernacular figures prominently in an erudite text. He is the educated Australian who can lapse into pub-yarn mode, his manner easy, his intellect sharp. He is both military analyst and social historian, providing eyewitness accounts of combat and conditions in the fortress, covering themes such as food, fleas, health, work, sport, concerts, and other entertainment. He is pioneering a new form of military history, blending a cool dissection of material realities with a record of battle and striking descriptions of everyday life.

Chester Wilmot (National Library of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)For the Allied writer and broadcaster, German diaries and other documents seized in the field or taken from prisoners must have seemed like gold. Wilmot quotes them liberally and to great effect. A classical allusion in a German tank commander’s diary delighted him: ‘Our opponents are Englishmen and Australians. Not trained attacking troops, but men with nerves and toughness, tireless, taking punishment with obstinacy, wonderful in defence. Ah well, the Greeks also spent ten years before Troy.’

Wilmot’s biographer tells us that his principal reader of the manuscript was Mervyn Scales, a documentary-film producer who was also staying at the University Club. Scales was a stickler for accuracy, and he was happy to read excerpts and talk them over each evening. Wilmot’s friend the photographer Damien Parer, who had been in Tobruk as an official Department of Information cameraman, also ‘read bits of it and was most helpful’, and Wilmot sought the advice of his friend and mentor Charles Bean, who was just a tram ride away in Chatswood.

Bean’s influence certainly registers in reflective pages where Wilmot writes about the Australian national character and the qualities of the Digger, of men forged in the bush tradition, notably the harsh conditions of the outback. Wilmot is not inclined to an explicitly racial interpretation of the struggle, but he does follow Bean in seeing the Australians as men of dash and daring, and the British as steady and dogged, noting how formidable was this compound of national types. As ever, his sympathetic eye conjures the best in both. But only in the closing scene, in the cemetery, do we learn that ‘Mohammedans’ (Indian cavalrymen) also died in the siege and were buried in a corner of their own.

In other ways, too, the book is a creature of its time. Wilmot evades the appalling effect of war on civilians. Non-combatants hardly register. There is a moment when ‘the Senussi were looting the town’ of Barce, near Benghazi. There is a helpful ‘Arab’ who figures momentarily in the retreat to Tobruk, and there is a passing mention of ‘9000 Arab civilians’ who lived in a ‘native village half’ a mile north of the harbour, but nothing on their fate.

Nor does the text dwell on death. Tobruk 1941 was completed in 1943 and published while war still raged. Wilmot was a committed anti-fascist, bent on victory. This was no time to dwell on the carnage of war. The word ‘blood’ does not appear in the text and wounds are rarely described; the dead, never. The needs of citizen and soldier morale sanitised the narrative in this regard. For action after action, he cites casualty numbers as he must, and then moves on, the enthralling sweep of the narrative concluding with his moving paean to the fallen.

Tobruk 1941 established Chester Wilmot as the pioneer of a new kind of military history and one of the great chroniclers of twentieth-century war: it is among the supreme achievements of modern wartime writing. Wilmot would later remark that it was the crucible which eventually forged The Struggle for Europe, described by the distinguished war historian John Keegan as ‘the supreme achievement of Second World War historiography’.

More books were planned, including a volume of Australia’s official history of the war. What might have been ...