Wilfred Graham Burchett

Australian journalist. Well known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies. He was the first foreign correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and he attracted controversy for his activities during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Burchett was born in Clifton Hill, Melbourne in 1911 to George and Mary Burchett. He spent his youth in the south Gippsland town of Poowong. Poverty forced him to drop out of school at an early age and work at various odd jobs, including as a vacuum cleaner salesman and an agricultural labourer. In his free time he studied foreign languages. In 1936 Burchett left Australia for London. There he found work in a travel agency which resettled Jews from Nazi Germany in British Palestine and the United States. It was in this job that he met Erna Hammer, a German Jewish refugee, and they married in 1938 in Hampstead. In 1940 Burchett began his career in journalism. His freelance reports of the revolt against the Vichy French in the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia helped him gain accreditation with the Daily Express newspaper. He spent the remainder of the war in China and Burma and also covered General Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign. He was the first Western journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped, arriving alone by train from Tokyo on 2 September, the day of the formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. His Morse code dispatch was printed on the front page of the Daily Express newspaper in London on 5 September 1945, entitled "The Atomic Plague", the first public report in the Western media to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout.His report is more fully recorded in his book, Shadows of Hiroshima. Burchett's reporting was unpopular with the US military. US censors killed a supporting story submitted by George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, and accused Burchett of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda. William L. Laurence of The New York Times dismissed the reports on radiation sickness as Japanese efforts to undermine American morale, ignoring his own account of Hiroshima's radiation sickness published one week earlier. In 1951, Burchett travelled to the People's Republic of China as a foreign correspondent for the French Communist newspaper L'Humanité. After six months in China he wrote China's Feet Unbound, which supported the new Chinese government of Mao Zedong. In July 1951, he and British journalist Alan Winnington made their way to North Korea to cover the Panmunjom Peace Talks. Subsequently, Burchett was accused of concocting the allegation that the USA was engaging in "germ warfare", perhaps inspired by a science fiction story by Jack London. However, this has been decisively refuted by his former colleague and veteran anti-Communist, Tibor Méray, in his critical memoir on Burchett. Burchett visited several POW camps in North Korea, comparing one to a "luxury resort", a "holiday resort in Switzerland", which angered POWs who had been held under conditions that violated the Geneva Convention. Historian Gavan McCormack writes that Burchett regretted this analogy, but argues that the factual basis of the description was confirmed by POW Walker Mahurin. Similarly, Tibor Méray reports a "Peace Fighter Camp" which had no fences. Burchett achieved a major scoop by interviewing the most senior United Nations POW, US General William F. Dean, previously believed dead. In his autobiography Dean entitled a chapter "My Friend Wilfred Burchett" and wrote "I like Burchett and am grateful to him". He expressed thanks for Burchett's "special kindness" in improving his conditions, communicating with his family, and giving him an "accurate" briefing on the state of the war. In his study of war correspondents, The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley wrote that "in Korea, the truth was that Burchett and Winnington were a better source of news than the UN information officers, and if the allied reporters did not see them they risked being beaten on stories". In 1956 Burchett arrived in Moscow as a correspondent for the National Guardian newspaper, an American radical leftist weekly. He received a monthly allowance from the Soviet authorities and for the next six years reported on Soviet advances in science and the rebuilding of the post-war Soviet economy. "... a new humanism is at work in the Soviet Union which makes that peddled in the West look shabby," wrote Burchett in one dispatch; "its all-embracing sweep leaves behind no underprivileged". His work in the Soviet Union also gained him notoriety in Britain, with many of his stories being reprinted in the Daily Express and Financial Times. In 1963, two years after the Sino-Soviet split, Burchett wrote in a letter to his father that the Chinese were "one hundred per cent right", but asked him to keep his son's views confidential. During the latter years of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), although Burchett was now over 60, he would travel hundreds of miles, huddling in tunnels with NVA and Viet Cong soldiers, while under attack by US forces. Burchett published numerous books about Vietnam and the war during these years, and later. In 1973 Burchett published China: The Quality of Life, with co-author Rewi Alley. In Robert Manne's view this was "a book of unconditional praise for Maoist China following the Great Leap Forward and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution". In 1975 and 1976, Burchett sent a number of dispatches from Cambodia praising the new government of Pol Pot. In a 14 October 1976 article for The Guardian (UK), he wrote that "Cambodia has become a worker-peasant-soldier state", and because its new constitution "guarantees that everyone has the right to work and a fair standard of living" it was, Burchett believed, "one of the most democratic and revolutionary constitutions in existence anywhere". At the time he believed his friend, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was part of the leadership group. As relations between Cambodia and Vietnam deteriorated, however, and after Burchett visited refugee camps in 1978, he realised the true situation. He condemned the Khmer Rouge and they subsequently placed him on a death list. Burchett met and married his first wife Erna Hammer, a German Jewish refugee, in London and they married in 1938. Divorced in 1948, he married Vesselina (Vessa) Ossikovska, a Bulgarian communist in December 1949 in Sofia. They had two sons. Both were denied Australian or British citizenship, along with their father, at the request of Sir Robert Menzies in 1955. George Burchett had just been born in Hanoi, and grew up in Moscow and in France. He currently lives in Hanoi and has edited some of his fathers writings and produced a documentary. Burchett was the uncle of chef and cookbook writer Stephanie Alexander. Burchett moved to Bulgaria in 1982 and died of cancer in Sofia the following year, aged 72. His legacy has continued to excite controversy to the present day. Journalist Denis Warner remarked: "he will be remembered by many as one of the more remarkable agents of influence of the times, but by his Australian and other admirers as a folk hero". A documentary film entitled Public Enemy Number One by David Bradbury was released in 1981. The film showed how Burchett was vilified in Australia for his coverage of "the other side" in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and posed the questions: "Can a democracy tolerate opinions it considers subversive to its national interest? How far can freedom of the press be extended in wartime?" In 2011 Vietnam celebrated Burchett's 100th birthday with an exhibition in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi.