Dispatches from the Front*

“Call them out ... Dunkirk, Tobruk, Alamein, the delaying action in Burma, the last stand at Sollum… Call them out, and then add Moro River …

The attacking Canadians beat two of the finest German divisions that ever marched.” 

Matthew Halton reporting from the ruined town of Ortona, where 2,400 Canadians were killed or wounded. December 28, 1943

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David Halton begins his book Dispatches from the Front with a story from 1987. The author recalls a journalism student heading into the CBC Archives to research an individual she and most of her classmates had never heard of. That would be Halton’s father, Matthew. Matthew Halton is considered to be one of the best war correspondents of World War II.

In his preface, David Halton describes his father as “a more or less forgotten name for all but survivors of the war-time generation.”

I’ll admit to knowing very little of the Toronto Star/CBC journalist. Several years ago I heard a tape of some his dispatches. The reports were riveting and the reason I put Dispatches on my must read list.  I re-read it earlier this month.

Halton, the son, has written an extremely well researched, objective memoir 

of his famous father. It helped fill in some holes in this baby boomer’s understanding of the Depression and Second War history. 

Here are a few facts I gleaned from the book.

1. In a two-month period in the fall of 1933 Halton wrote 30 reports from Germany. Now known as the German Reports, they “chronicled almost every defining aspect of Nazi Germany.” They told truths that most other media were ignoring. Halton held back most of these reports until he was out of the country in order to avoid the harassment from authorities that other journalists were experiencing.  For example, on Oct. 16 he wrote: “Germany is literally becoming a laboratory and breeding ground for war, unless I am deaf, dumb and blind.”

2. Later that October, Halton observed: “The terror goes on unremittingly in the form of a deliberate and implacable intention to wipe the Jews out of the economic and social life of Germany.” 

3. Beginning in 1936, Matthew Halton was critical of then Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) Neville Chamberlain who was later to be Prime Minister. By December of 1939, Halton called for new leadership “who has not only cool determination but also some high strategic vision.” In his view, that new visionary leader was Winston Churchill. Halton’s viewpoint was a controversial one. Churchill had many critics including Mackenzie King. In a diary entry, our Prime Minister described Churchill as “one of the most dangerous men I have ever known.”  King who had an extended 75 minute meeting with Hitler in 1937 described the German dictator as having a very nice sweet (smile) and as “one who truly loves his fellow man.” 

4. But Matthew Halton wasn’t always right in his analysis. For example, Halton   was sympathetic to the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps too sympathetic. The war correspondent gave undeserved credit to Barcelona authorities for giving fair trails. However, as the younger Halton notes: “Organized religion was banned in Barcelona and hundreds of priests were summarily executed in Catalonia and dozens of churches burned down.” 

5. Matthew Halton interviewed and/or hobnobbed with many of the most famous people of the time. They included Albert Einstein, Haile Selaise, Gary Cooper, Paul Robeson, Lord Beaverbrook, Grey Owl (Archie Belaney) and the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) to name just a few.

6. Interestingly, we learn that Halton never interviewed Churchill, as the British politician “saved his insights for newspaper articles, which paid him well.”

7. While seldom there, Matthew Halton was proud of the fact that he hailed from Pincher Creek, Alta. Talking in a London nightclub with the Prince of Wales less than three years before he became king, Halton was impressed with the prince’s “informality and desire to shed the stuffier traditions of the monarchy” as well as Edward’s love of the Alberta foothills. The Prince owned EP Ranch near Pekisko Creek, only 150 kilometres from Pincher Creek.

8. Unlike some war correspondents, Matthew Halton actually reported from the front lines. In the desert war in Alamein, with the Canadian forces landing in Sicily, D-Day and many other theatres of war, Matthew Halton was in the thick of it.

9.  The CBC required that sound could not be dubbed in with a voice track unless the reporter had actually been at its source.  That made Matthew Halton’s coverage unique and “more authentic… than some radio and television war reporting today,” wrote David Halton.

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*Dispatches from the Front Matthew Halton, Canada’s Voice at War by David Halton is published by McClelland & Stewart.