In 1944-45 Moorehead followed the British Army’s assault on Italy and Germany from the Allied landings to the heart of darkness at Belsen.

As The African Trilogy (1944), they were hailed as a classic of war writing. For almost three years he followed the fortunes of the British Army in North Africa, working under enormous pressure to refashion his dispatches and diaries into volumes covering the war’s three phases: Mediterranean Front (1941), A Year of Battle (1943) and The End in Africa (1943). Some Australian colleagues, envious of his success, felt that he had abandoned his Australian identity, along with his accent. He was twice mentioned in despatches for his courage under enemy fire and was soon widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent British war correspondent. His editor saw no signs of brilliance in Moorehead’s work until the war in North Africa galvanised his prose into a dramatic and poetic style combining a sharp, bird’s eye view of campaigns and battles with empathetic and detailed observation of fighting men and their commanders. This, his deepest friendship, was later celebrated in a memoir A Late Education (1970). They conspired to be sent to Cairo as accredited war correspondents covering the new Mediterranean front. Leaving Rome for Athens before Italy entered World War II, Moorehead befriended the Oxford-educated Englishman, Alex Clifford of the rival Daily Mail. Their partnership produced three children and twenty-two books, and survived his serial infidelities. Lucy was to become his best critic, and a proficient editor, secretary and business manager. He was transferred to staff and sent in 1938 to Paris and then in 1939 to Rome, where he married English-born Martha Lucy Milner, women’s fashion editor at the Express. In 1937, working as a stringer for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express in Gibraltar, he reported the Spanish Civil War and Mediterranean tensions.

Shortish, dark and handsome, he was anxious to escape what he believed to be Australia’s derivative and petit-bourgeois culture, and to make his mark in England having saved £500, he sailed in 1936. Reporting taught him to write rapidly and arrestingly, on demand. Educated at Scotch College (1916-26), which he remembered with a ‘sense of loathing’, and the University of Melbourne (BA, 1933), where history and English were his enthusiasms, Alan joined the staff of the Melbourne Herald in 1933. Alan Moorehead, by Herald and Weekly Times, c.1962Īlan McCrae Moorehead (1910–1983), journalist, war correspondent and historian, was born on 22 July 1910 at Canterbury, Melbourne, youngest of three children of Victorian-born parents Richard James Moorehead, journalist, and his wife Louisa, née Edgerton.

Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead