Edward Ward: The BBC man who was captured by Rommel

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At the start of World War Two BBC journalist Edward Ward seemed destined to play a key role in the coverage of the conflict. But after reporting from Finland, France and Greece he spent much of the war in German captivity after being captured by Rommel's troops in the desert, writes Simon Elmes.

"Hello BBC, this is Edward Ward reporting from…"

The name's not familiar, and the style speaks of another, long-ago era of news. Yet in his day - more than half a century ago - Edward Ward's was one of the most distinguished voices among the BBC's remarkable canon of frontline reporters who rose to prominence in the late 1930s and through World War Two.

Ward had been Reuter's news agency correspondent in China, and had done some announcing shifts at the BBC when the corporation's fledgling News Department sent him to cover the bitter and now long-forgotten Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

It had broken out in November 1939, when the USSR had invaded its neighbouring state, Finland. The eyes and ears of the world - and particularly of Britain - were, in that gloomy autumn, firmly locked on manoeuvres further south in Europe where the British Expeditionary Force was taking up positions to help defend France against Hitler's armies.

It was the time of the Phoney War, when very little action was in fact happening. From the front line of Finland's Winter War, though, came - crackly and distant - the vivid and incisive word-pictures of a keen young BBC reporter in his mid-30s, Edward Ward.

On-the-spot and personal, Ward's reports were remarkable for their use of telling, close-up detail that painted vivid images for a radio audience with no television to bring them live pictures. He was also one of a small group of BBC reporters to champion, early on, the use of the actual sounds of events unfolding before his eyes.

Astonishingly in today's breaking-news culture of instant and worldwide coverage, the BBC had, even 13 years after its first transmissions, not established a fully-fledged newsroom and corps of reporters.

This was the result of an uneasy relationship between the BBC and the news agencies who felt threatened by the upstart new medium of radio. By the mid-1930s, however, the great Richard Dimbleby (later the voice, famously, of the Coronation and Sir Winston Churchill's funeral) was one among a select few voices to clamour for proper on-the-spot reporting.

By the outbreak of WW2, the BBC newsroom was in place, and a team of increasingly experienced reporters, like Ward, were bringing the stories back to the audience at home with panache and colour.

After covering the battles of Suomussalmi and Lake Ladoga, Ward scooped the world with his report of the armistice between Russia and Finland in March 1940. From Helsinki, Ward was quickly despatched south to bring his sharp-eyed reporting to cover the action in France.

From Paris in spring 1940, as Hitler's armies defied the British and French forces drawn up along the Maginot Line by invading via the north, Ward filed a brilliant despatch that captured precisely the flavour of uneasy calm before the German army reached the city's gates.

Less than a month later, Ward was reporting from a very different, deserted French capital.

The German onslaught on Europe spread east and south, and almost exactly a year later, Ward found himself in another European capital telling a very similar story. Hitler's armies were threatening Greece, and after a vain attempt by the British to withstand them, the Allies were forced to withdraw.

In May 1941, Ward was in Athens to observe the evacuation with his classic mixture of wry humour and careful detail - which revealed to a home audience some of the pathos of the Allied retreat, yet without disclosing any sensitive detail (censorship was carefully applied to news reports from the war front).

Evacuated from Athens, Ward travelled ever south, across the Mediterranean, to cover the already burgeoning Desert War. With Hitler and Mussolini now allies - leaders of the Axis powers - Italy's North African colonies became enemy territory.

Egypt too was a crucial front for the Allies. Hitler sent his legendary commander Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps to take the battle in the sand to the Allies. And there - after a long and topsy-turvy fight - Rommel eventually met his match, as North Africa finally fell under Allied control.

But that was many months after Ward had met his own personal setback in the desert - one that was to cost him his reporting career for most of the remainder of the war. During a battle, Ward was captured along with others by Rommel's forces. His colleague in the press corps - New York Times man, Harold Denny - later described the extraordinary moment of the capture.

If Ward's reporting war was effectively over, he did however return to the airwaves to add a final - and very satisfying - full stop to his wartime story. He was imprisoned in the notorious Oflag XII B prisoner-of-war camp near Limburg in Germany.

On 31 March 1945, he was freed from the camp by advancing American troops. "They forced their way through a cheering crowd of PoWs and foreign workers" said Ward. "Relief lit up the faces of even the Germans. No more bombs - no more alarms for them."

Ward continued to report with distinction for the BBC, from the world's troublespots that flourished in the uneasy peace of the late 1940s and 1950s.

The Cold War had begun - wartime allies like the USSR and China were now the West's enemies - and so, there was Ward on the frontline, in 1956, of the Hungarian revolution that unsuccessfully challenged the Soviets' iron grip on the country.

Ward even found himself imprisoned once again, but in peacetime and without enemies at the gate, when he was marooned for a whole month by mountainous seas on the famous Bishop Rock lighthouse, where he'd gone to do a quick seasonal report for Christmas.

Edward Ward's is today a name rarely heard even among the broadcasting cognoscenti, but his reports still bear the stamp of clarity, courage, humour and colour that made them some of the BBC's most vivid reporting from the frontlines of 50 or 70 years ago. He died, aged 87, in 1993.

You can listen to War and Words on BBC World Service on Sunday at 14:05 or catch up on iPlayer.

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