TELEGRAM FROM GUERNICA: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent
by Nicholas Rankin
Faber £14.99 pp256
Whether you are a war junkie or jaded from the coverage of the current fighting, you should find plenty of value in this mettlesome biography of a star reporter from the years leading up to the second world war. As well as filing reports for various newspapers, notably The Times and The Daily Telegraph, George Steer wrote eight books during a career as a war correspondent that spanned six years. For the next four, as a soldier, he directed his formidable brain to the task of special operations.

Many of the features of the conflict in Iraq (bombing civilians, chemical weapons, psychological warfare) find resonance in the period of Steer’s work as a war correspondent. Starting in Abyssinia, where theItalians dropped mustard-gas bombs that killed thousands, continuing through the Spanish civil war, during which the Germans perfected their technique of terror-bombing civilian populations with thermite incendiary bombs, and not forgetting Stalin’s campaigns against the Finns, Steer recorded the horrors of this new phase in warfare, in which breaking the spirit of the civilian population became a military objective.

The son of a newspaper editor in South Africa, Steer was a scholar at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he earned a double first in classics. This classical education stood him in good stead when he came to write The Tragedy of Guernica, his authoritative report for The Times. As Nicholas Rankin explains, the emotional impact of his report “comes from its refusal of overt emotion”. Evelyn Waugh, another reporter of the Abyssinian conflict, was jealous of Steer’s educational credentials and his status as a Times correspondent. He referred to him scornfully as “the colonial” and mocked his “affinity . . . for those nimble-witted upstarts who formed the Negus’s entourage, like himself African born, who had memorised so many of the facts of European education without ever participating in European culture”. How wide of the mark this criticism is becomes apparent from reading just a couple, any couple, of Steer sentences.

In 1940, Steer returned to Abyssinia, where he took over the Ethiopian Forward Propaganda Unit, pioneering the recruitment of deserters from among the Eritrean supporters of the Italians. Later, as leader of the Indian Field Propaganda Unit (IFPU), Steer’s targets were Japanese soldiers who had been brainwashed to resist surrender, Indian troops who were tempted to desert and fight against the British for independence, and Burmese tribesmen recruited by the Japanese. Since many of the Japanese soldiers were peasant conscripts, Steer understood that there was little point in remonstrating with them about the political course of the war, so his units “played sentimental Japanese music and used poems in the leaflets to induce homesickness”. In Burma, a broadcasting unit under Steer’s direct command was able “to control and extricate our own troops embedded in enemy positions”. The troops in question were members of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and their commanding officer could communicate with them in Welsh over Steer’s loudspeaker.

By December 1944, Steer was growing weary. The frustrations of military service had “abraded his intelligence and imagination”, and a shortage of troops was retarding his psyops programme. Then, on Christmas Day 1944, near the IFPU’s training camp in Bengal, he was driving a jeep with seven passengers when it went out of control and crashed. Steer was killed instantly. It was an inglorious and prosaic end to a 10-year career of war experience.

Steer was one of those men who, as his wife realised, “would never get other countries out of (his) head”. He was an adventurer, although not foolhardy, and his curiosity was wedded to a capacity for analytical thought as well as felicitous expression. He befriended the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I (who became godfather to one of Steer’s sons) and the Basque leaders, but he was no sycophant. His empathy with ordinary people suffuses his writings. He was a master of coruscating prose description, his every sentence conveying an exquisite sense of rhythm, and his every judgment a shining humanity. He has found a worthy biographer in Rankin.

Rankin has had little to work with in the way of Steer’s private papers, so it is quite an achievement that he has been able skilfully to weave together passages from Steer’s several books with other sources and with his own judicious observations. Yet the reader does not feel remotely short-changed. Nor do you feel that there are too many of Steer’s own words here; this should leave you yearning to explore the original texts of Caesar in Abyssinia and A Tree in Gernika.

Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of £11.99 plus £1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Read on... websites:
www.spanish-fiestas.com/art/picasso-guernica.htm
Steer’s report on Guernica

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Sarah Palin and the Palindromes: 7 extraordinary connections
• Physics for Future Presidents: The Podcasts
• 10 Books Not To Read Before You Die