G. L. Steer (1909-1944) was one of the great war correspondents of
the twentieth-century. Born in South Africa, educated at Winchester
and Oxford, after an apprenticeship in journalism he went to
Ethiopia in July 1935 to cover the forthcoming Italian invasion. He
remained loyal to the Ethiopians and their emperor, Haile Selassie
'till the end' and helped in the latter's restoration to his throne
in 1941.
Two of the three books G. L. Steer wrote about Ethiopia and the
Italian occupation - Caesar in Abyssinia and Sealed and Delivered -
are reissued in Faber Finds. He also wrote the official history,
The Abyssinian Campaigns. His masterpiece, The Tree of Gernika, is
reissued in Faber Finds as well.
The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War is a first-hand
account of the struggle of the Basque Autonomous Republic in the
Spanish Civil War, from the burning of Irun to the fall of Bilbao.
During this campaign Steer filed his most important dispatch about
the destruction of Gernika (Guernica) by Nazi aircraft.
In the Second World War G. L. Steer worked as an army intelligence
officer: he died on Christmas Day 1944 when he crashed an
overloaded jeep in Bengal.
Nicholas Rankin worked 20 years for BBC World Service, winning two
UN awards and ending up as Chief Producer. His previous books
include biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and the
war-correspondent George Steer, Churchill's Wizards, a study of
camouflage, deception and black propaganda in both world wars, and
Ian Fleming's Commandos, the history of a WW2 naval intelligence
unit. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives
in London and Kent.
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