Alaric Jacob - War Correspondent

War Correspondent

Jacob was in London until May 1941 when he set out as a war correspondent for the Daily Express. He sailed to Cairo, taking the long sea voyage via Cape Town. The next two years he spent with the 8th Army in North Africa, initially covering the Siege of Tobruk and Operation Crusader. He was withdrawn from Tobruk shortly before it fell to the Germans, and was posted to Teheran where he received permission from the Soviet Embassy to visit the Red Army in Azerbaijan. He returned to Egypt for the first and second Battle of El Alamein, and then went to India. In India, he covered Wingate's first 'Chindit' expedition in Burma and the circumstances of Gandhi's fast. From Persia he went on to Russia for four months covering the Battle of Kursk and Stalin's counter-attack. He described his experiences in A Traveller's War published in 1944.

After Christmas leave in England at the end of 1943, Jacob set out again with his wife for the Soviet Union in January 1944 on board a ship of the Arctic Convoy. They spent the remainder of the war in Moscow and covering the advances of the Red Army in Odessa, the Crimea and through Vitebsk, Minsk, Poland and on to the fall of Berlin. He published A Window in Moscow in 1945. His experiences made him sympathetic towards the Soviet regime and he stayed in the Soviet Union, on and off, until the start of the cold war in late 1947. His wife Iris had become a Communist and her ideas strongly influenced him. He suspected that her membership of the Communist Party worked against him even when they were separated.

In 1949, Jacob published Scenes from a Bourgeois Life, an semi-autobiographical novel and an apologia for the paradoxes and anomalies of his career. As an English traditionalist, he disapproved of "ribbon development" and the displacement of the old order by the nouveaux riches. He also showed a contempt for the pursuit of wealth through industrial capitalism and his appreciation for, what he saw as, the achievements of the Soviet Union. It also detailed his amorous adventures, and his marked contempt for Cyril Connolly, wallowing in self-pity in The Unquiet Grave and other "stay-at-home intellectuals with comfortable jobs in the BBC" while Soviet heroes fought the Battle of Stalingrad.