Richard Dimbleby (1) (1913–1965)

One of my childhood memories is of sitting at the family dining-table on a winter's day in 1965, watching the coffin of Sir Winston Churchill being borne downriver. The commentator was Richard Dimbleby, by then a familiar senior broadcaster who took the microphone on big state occasions. This was his last; before the year was out he would be dead himself, too early, at the age of 52. He isn't forgotten today; his name lives on in the Dimbleby lectures, among other things. But his sons, David and Jonathan, both broadcasters, are better known now than he is, and if he is remembered, it is either for his commentary on state occasions, or for his wonderful April Fool "spaghetti harvest" broadcast in 1957. This is a pity, because he was a cracking war reporter.

The title The Frontiers are Green refers to the green fringes of the Mediterranean theatre of war. Dimbleby recounts a series of extraordinary journeys to the fighting front. He goes to Greece, where an under-equipped but determined Greek army is pushing the invading Italians out of their country and liberating Albania. He goes south, and reports on the savage battle for Keren in what is now Eritrea. Both were important battles often forgotten, at least in Britain; to read this book is to feel them being brought vividly alive. In between he makes a tense journey through Vichy Lebanon and Syria into Turkey.

As the book comes to an end he is with British troops facing defeat, having been driven back nearly to Alexandria. It is, he observes, not often that a book ends with its heroes facing defeat. "But this one must." In fact, the Brits had been forced back to a place that we remember now not as a place of defeat, but of victory; El Alamein.

Dimbleby went on covering the war and was eventually the first journalist into Belsen. That isn't in this book, which finishes in 1942. Yet it is a valuable historical document, for two reasons. One is that journalism is the first draft of history, and if you want history, The Frontiers are Green is packed with it. It's the sort of book that some wretched academic will one day make their name by rediscovering. They will then tell us that we have got it all wrong about the Middle East theatre, or have misunderstood the true role of Turkey. Never mind. Because even more important, somehow, is this book's immediacy; it reminds us that the war was fought not in black and white as we see it now, but in colour.… (more)