Lost colleagues

The war reporters who made greatest sacrifice

- BY SIOBHAN MCNALLY

Winston Churchill famously declared that “a free press is the sleeping guardian of all other rights that free men prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny”.

Filing copy from battlefields to produce that free press is a perilous job, and war correspondents are the most courageous of messengers, willing to risk life and limb in the pursuit of truth and a great headline.

During the Second World War, most war reporters travelled with military units and radioed in their heavily censored reports from enemy territory while dodging shell fire.

It was not a job for the faint-hearted yet thousands of British and American war correspondents - including some who became household names like Alan Whicker, Richard Dimbleby and the US's Walter Cronkite - braved the dangers to file articles and news reels for people at home.

Sadly, 69 never made it back. Among those who gave their lives for a free press were two Mirror men, Ian Fyfe and Bernard Gray. In the 1940s, the Daily Mirror was Britain's biggest-selling newspaper and particularly popular with our boys at the front.

The Mirror spoke for the ordinary man and woman in the street and on the battlefield and sought to hold the wartime government to account.

Twenty-six Mirror staff were killed in the Second World War, most in the line of duty fighting for their country.