Noel Monks

Noel Stephen Monks (born December 18, 1907 in Melbourne , † June 18, 1960 in London ) was an Australian journalist.

Life and activity

Monks grew up in Tasmania . He was educated at St. Virgil's College in Hobart . At sixteen he ran away from home and went to sea for a year. Then he returned and finished his school career. He then spent two years in the Merchant Navy and later joined the Australian Navy.

Around 1930 Monks turned to journalism. He initially worked for the Sun newspaper in Melbourne. After he had come to the conviction that he would not be able to make the great career he was aiming for in his profession in his home - geographically far removed from the "big world events" - he moved to Great Britain in 1935, which at that time as a journalist The center of the world was: In January 1935 Monks traveled from Melbourne on a liner to Great Britain, where he earned the passage by working as a crew member on this ship. In London he soon found a job with the Daily Express newspaper .

In 1935 Monks traveled to Abyssinia / Ethiopia to report on the increasing tension between this empire and Italy under Benito Mussolini, which was on an aggressive foreign policy course . At this time Italy was sending ever clearer signals that it was striving to expand its African colonial empire at the expense of Abyssinia by annexing parts of this state - or even the entire state. Since the Express refused to finance this trip, Monks went to Abyssinia as a freelance journalist.

In October 1935, Monks in Abyssinia witnessed the Italian invasion of the country that finally took place, which led to the Abyssinian War, about which he wrote reports for the newspapers News of the World and the Melbourne Herald, as well as for a news agency. He then went back to Australia for a short time, but soon left the country again, as the "fame" he had acquired through his reports from Africa, contrary to his expectations, did not open the door to a leading journalistic position for him there.

In May 1936 Monks returned to London, where he returned to the service of the Daily Express .

Activity as a reporter from the Spanish Civil War

From 1936 Monks reported for the Express from Spain as war correspondent on the civil war that broke out there that year . His sympathies were - partly due to his Catholic faith, which he believed to recognize in the political orientation of the nationalists and in the goals they declared to pursue - initially the war party of the "nationalists" under Francisco Franco , while he was the republicans refused. However, within a few months of his arrival in Spain, he fundamentally changed his mind and ended up facing Franco and his supporters with sharp disapproval. Nevertheless, he reported equally on the atrocities of war perpetrated by both sides.

Monks was eventually expelled for his attempts to undermine the censorship by the press inspectorates that the nationalists had set up in the part of Spain they controlled to monitor and control the reports of foreign war correspondents. He then traveled via Gibraltar to the Republican-controlled area of ​​the country and reported from there.

At noon on April 26, 1937, Monks visited the Basque city of Guernica , which a few hours later was largely destroyed by air bombardment by the German Condor Legion, which supported the Spanish nationalists . Monks was the first foreign war correspondent to arrive in the devastated city. His vivid description of the horrific conditions he found in Guernica, published the following day in the Daily Express , was one of the first descriptions of the process to be received worldwide. He was instrumental in making the name of the city synonymous with the horrors of modern war. Together with the reports of a handful of other reporters who arrived in town with him on the same day ( Mathieu Corman , Christopher Holmes , George Steer ), Monks' portrayal had a major impact on the image of contemporaries and posterity - especially of historical specialist literature the whole process. In addition, elements of his report are reflected in Pablo Picasso 's work of the same name, Guernica , which artistically processes and reflects the horrors of the destruction of the city and which is one of the most famous works of art of the 20th century.

In March 1937 Monks was in Seville arrested by Nationalist troops after an authored by him report on the country's troop deployment in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the nationalists - a fact which the nationalists and the Italian Government officially strictly denied - by the editors of Express from Accidentally published under his name instead of under a different name or anonymously. He was then accused of circumventing censorship, which the nationalists viewed as a crime equivalent to espionage. Monks was eventually even brought before the leader of the nationalists, Franco, who revealed to him that he would be shot. However, this did not happen. Instead, he was expelled from the country.

Further career

Around 1939 Monks moved to the Daily Mail as a journalist . After the outbreak of World War II , Monks first reported as a correspondent from Paris , where he was accredited with the British Expeditionary Corps. The book Squadrons Up, in which he reported on his missions as a companion in the Royal Air Force in 1939, became the first book about World War II published during the war to achieve bestselling status.

At the end of the 1930s Monks came - probably due to critical reports about the warfare of the Spanish nationalists in the Spanish civil war and his reports about the secret support of the nationalists during the civil war by the fascist dictatorships - in the sights of the police organs of the national socialist Germany, which him as important Classify target person: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht SS special commandos that followed the occupation forces were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1942 he stayed again in his Australian homeland, which he left again due to difficulties with the local censorship authorities.

In 1943 Monks then took part in the Allied invasion of Italy as a war correspondent in the troop units led by George Patton . In 1944 he reported on the Allied landing in Normandy .

After the Second World War, he reported on the Korean War . The last war Monks reported was Malaya in 1956.

family

Monks was married to the journalist Mary Walsh since 1938 , who later left him for the American writer Ernest Hemingway . The marriage was divorced in 1945. Subsequently, in her third marriage, Walsh became Hemingway's fourth wife.

Fonts

• Taking Off! Our Airmen in the Making , 1939.
• Eye-Witness , 1959.

literature

Obituaries :

• Mercury obituary on June 20, 1960.
• Obituary in (Melbourne) Herald, June 20, 1960
• Obituary in (Melbourne) Advocate 7 July 1960.

Secondary literature :

• Fay Anderson / Richard Trembath: Witnesses To War: The History Of Australian Conflict Reporting , 2011.