Chester Wilmot

Reginald William Winchester Wilmot (born June 21, 1911 in Brighton , Australia , † January 10, 1954 over the Mediterranean) was an Australian war correspondent who reported for the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War . After the war he wrote an extensively researched book about the liberation of Europe. Wilmot died in a plane crash .

Chester Wilmot, 1911-1954

Working life

Chester Wilmot attended Grammar School in Melbourne , then Trinity College, also in his hometown, and earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Law degree. As head of a student team, he traveled 'almost all over the world' from 1937 to 1939. After the outbreak of war, Wilmot made himself available to the Australian Broadcasting Organization as war correspondent for the Middle East and New Guinea (1940-1942). He reported from North Africa, Greece and Syria. 1941 took part in the battle of Tobruk, the Operation Crusader and reported afterwards from the Pacific theater of war. He messed with a general who appeared to be incompetent and lost his accreditation. In 1943 he made the documentary film "Sons of the Anzacs". In 1944 he accompanied the British 6th Airborne Division to Normandy as a correspondent for the BBC during Operation Overlord and was on the road with British and American troops during or shortly after the fighting. He reported from the western theater of war until 1945 and represented the BBC as a special correspondent during the main war criminals trial in Nuremberg (1945–46).

In 1947, Wilmot was commissioned by the Australian government to write the official history of the Second World War, including the fighting in North Africa and, from 1944, in Europe.

Standard work The struggle for Europe

In the foreword to the German edition of Struggle of Europe , Wilmot describes his competence in providing evidence of acts of war and his position as a scientific historian:

“In describing this campaign and its strategic and political backgrounds, I tried to record and interweave the events both on the inter-allied and on the German side, so that the reader can read every move and counter-move in the offices and headquarters as well as every movement and counter-movement can follow on the battlefields and thus gain an essential and, I hope, balanced overall picture. "

“At the end of the war, most of the documents of the German government and the Wehrmacht fell into the hands of the allies. I was in a good position to refer to the most important of these papers and, moreover, to be able to supplement them with verbal and written statements from many leading commanders and the senior staff officers of the Wehrmacht. "

Sourcing sources in war

Chester Wilmot interviewed the following commanders personally or received the interrogation protocols:
(The information relates only to the period of the fighting to break out from the Normandy landing head in July and August 1944.
The page numbers of the German edition in brackets)

• Günther Blumentritt (General) , Chiefs of Staff of Army Group B and the West High Command via Field Marshal Günther v. Kluge
  on the reaction of v. Clever things on the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 . (397)
• Fritz Bayerlein (Lieutenant General) , Commander of the Panzer Training Division: "Questioning by the American Army." (413)

Wilmot: “On July 28th, I counted 19 Bayerleins tanks on the road to St. Gilles that had been bombed or abandoned. In St. Gilles there were another 3. In this section alone, the Panzer Training Division lost half of the operational tanks that it had at the beginning of the day. ”(Note 2, p. 413)

• Walter Warlimont , General, Deputy Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff in v. Smart headquarters. (423)
• Schalck, commander of the 272nd Infantry Division, on Sepp Dietrich's statement on July 20 (assassination attempt) (441)
• Heinrich Eberbach , General, minutes of the questioning by the British Army. (454)

Documents including:

• Telephone diary of the 7th Army - quoted among others: August 6, 1944, 10 p.m. (424) and August 8, 1944, 6.45 p.m. (426)
• Document collection v. Tempelhoff, e.g. E.g .: telex from Kluge to Jodl, August 10th and 11th, 1944. (439)
• Captured operation orders, e.g. B. by Paul Hausser , General of the Waffen-SS, dated v. August 18, 1944.
• Allied Armies Operations Research Department Report No. 2 to the Falaise Cauldron . (448)

Sourcing sources after the war

Wilmot, who attended the most important sessions of the Nuremberg Trials for the BBC , notes in Appendix B of his book that the processing of the documents of the German government and the military “probably would have been delayed by years if it hadn't been for the necessity , to gather evidence on the trial of the major war criminals, which began in Nuremberg in November 1945. ”All documents (including those not presented in the trial) were subsequently published by the printing house of the United States government. In 1947 the “Führer Marine Conferences” (with Karl Dönitz ) were also published. When the Dönitz government was captured on May 23, 1945, Speer personally gave Wilmot his collection of files. “… In the winter of 1945–1946, thanks to the support of General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery, I was able to travel unhindered through the American and British occupation zones, interview the officers of the units and units in question, and check my records.” Finally writes Wilmot: "Almost every page of my book testifies to the generous and valuable help that I have received."

Wilmot's over 800-page work was published in England in 1952 under the title Struggle for Europe ; the first German-language edition was published in Zurich in 1955.

With access to the documents on the German side, which were soon extensively available after the Nuremberg trials, and his good relationships with the highest command posts of the Western Allies, Wilmot had the basis for an almost complete description of the events in the western theaters of war with a detailed overview 1940 and with a focus on the planning, preparation and execution of the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 until the end of the war in 1945. Wilmot's "Material Situation" also enabled him to give detailed descriptions of the war economy on both sides and the pros and cons of strategic aspects, such as the To analyze contradictions in the ideas of Eisenhower and Montgomery .

The unique source material that Wilmot had at his disposal - Liddell Hart and ET Williams, Montgomery's news chief, worked on him - makes his work, which has remained largely unknown in Germany, not only a fundamental 'collection of material' - it still forms in his analysis today a basis for evaluating the struggle for Europe.

His work was honored in England: "The Struggle for Europe". When it appeared in 1952, it received favorable reviews and is valued by military historians. John Keegan wrote: “Wilmot effectively invented the modern method of writing contemporary military history.” (“Wilmot basically invented the modern method of writing contemporary military history.”)

The 1955 Zurich edition was followed by publications in Germany in 1957 and 1963.

Demise

Wilmot was killed in a plane crash on January 10, 1954. He was on board a de Havilland DH.106 Comet , which crashed over the Mediterranean near Elba on the flight from Singapore to London . Wilmot left a wife and three children.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe . Book guild Gutenberg, Atrium-Verlag, Zurich 1955, p. 249 note.
2. ↑ Chester Wilmot: Der Kampf um Europa , author's foreword to the German edition, March 1953, p. VI.
   Note: 'German edition' here means the edition by Atrium-Verlag, Zurich 1955.
3. ↑ Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe , Foreword, P. VI / VII
4. ↑ Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe , Appendix B, p. 785.
5. ↑ Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe , p. 791.
6. ↑ Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe , p. 792.
7. ↑ Chester Wilmot: Allies Handed Stalin His Victory , Life Magazine, March 10, 1952

literature

• Chester Wilmot: The Struggle For Europe (written in part by Christopher Daniel McDevitt), 1952. Reissue: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, Ware, Hertfordshire, 1997.
  ISBN 1-85326-677-9 .
• Chester Wilmot: The Struggle for Europe . Book guild Gutenberg, Atrium-Verlag, Zurich 1955, translated by: Hans Steinsdorff.
• Australian Dictionary of National Biography
• Biography at the Australian War Memorial
• Obituary, The Times , January 13, 1954.
• Chester Wilmot , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 28/1954 from July 5, 1954, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)