Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Photographs
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by John Pilger
- Foreword by Gavan McCormack
- Introduction
- 1 The Atomic Plague [1945]
- 2 With Mick Griffith to the Plaine des Lacs [1941]
- 3 Who is Wingate Anyway? [1944]
- 4 The Trial of Cardinal Mindszenty [1951]
- 5 Liberty in Eastern Europe [1951]
- 6 The Microbe War [1953]
- 7 Koje Unscreened [1953]
- 8 The Ball-Point Pen Murders [1954]
- 9 South of the 17th Parallel [1955]
- 10 Front-Line Village [1959]
- 11 Welcome Home [1961]
- 12 Gagarin: The First Interview with Western Journalists [1961]
- 13 Virgin Lands [1962]
- 14 Lilac and Outer Space [1962]
- 15 War Against Trees [1963]
- 16 The Tragedy of South Vietnam's Ethnic Minorities [1964]
- 17 Interview with General Vo Nguyen Giap (April 13, 1964)
- 18 A Fortified Hamlet [1965]
- 19 Patriots & Mercenaries [1965]
- 20 At Ground Level [1966]
- 21 A Spurned Olive Branch [1967/1977]
- 22 Personal Leader [1968]
- 23 The Tet of Peace [1973/1977]
- 24 ‘Something from Nothing’ Township [1976]
- 25 Evaluating the Past [1976]
- 26 Mercenaries: British Export Model [1977]
- 27 The Geneva Conference [1978]
- 28 How to be a Good Khmer Rouge [1981]
- 29 China Prepares to Attack Vietnam [1981]
- 30 Afterword [1983]
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Who is Wingate Anyway? [1944]
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Photographs
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword by John Pilger
- Foreword by Gavan McCormack
- Introduction
- 1 The Atomic Plague [1945]
- 2 With Mick Griffith to the Plaine des Lacs [1941]
- 3 Who is Wingate Anyway? [1944]
- 4 The Trial of Cardinal Mindszenty [1951]
- 5 Liberty in Eastern Europe [1951]
- 6 The Microbe War [1953]
- 7 Koje Unscreened [1953]
- 8 The Ball-Point Pen Murders [1954]
- 9 South of the 17th Parallel [1955]
- 10 Front-Line Village [1959]
- 11 Welcome Home [1961]
- 12 Gagarin: The First Interview with Western Journalists [1961]
- 13 Virgin Lands [1962]
- 14 Lilac and Outer Space [1962]
- 15 War Against Trees [1963]
- 16 The Tragedy of South Vietnam's Ethnic Minorities [1964]
- 17 Interview with General Vo Nguyen Giap (April 13, 1964)
- 18 A Fortified Hamlet [1965]
- 19 Patriots & Mercenaries [1965]
- 20 At Ground Level [1966]
- 21 A Spurned Olive Branch [1967/1977]
- 22 Personal Leader [1968]
- 23 The Tet of Peace [1973/1977]
- 24 ‘Something from Nothing’ Township [1976]
- 25 Evaluating the Past [1976]
- 26 Mercenaries: British Export Model [1977]
- 27 The Geneva Conference [1978]
- 28 How to be a Good Khmer Rouge [1981]
- 29 China Prepares to Attack Vietnam [1981]
- 30 Afterword [1983]
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Burchett left Australia in August 1941 armed with a typewriter and a camera to travel the Burma Road into China and cover the Sino-Japanese war.
The morning after Pearl Harbor he interviewed Chou En-lai in Chungking. When he cabled his story to the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the reply was blunt – ‘Uninterested in Chinese Communist pronouncements’. But London's Daily Express was interested, and Burchett thus became a war correspondent for one of the world's leading dailies.
In early 1943 he was in an Indian hospital recovering from wounds received when Japanese Zeros strafed the sampan in which he was travelling on the Mayu River in Burma. This was when he first heard of Major Orde Wingate. By then he had developed a strong distaste for the ‘Colonel Blimps’ and colonial types in the higher ranks of the British army. Wingate, on the other hand, was a maverick with a strong anti-colonial stance and a taste for guerrilla warfare.
They became friends and Burchett spent several weeks with him gathering material for his book Wingate Adventure. Wingate died in a plane crash before the book was published and Burchett was re-assigned to cover the war in the Pacific.
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- Rebel JournalismThe Writings of Wilfred Burchett, pp. 17 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007