Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Graham Burchett (16 September 1911 – 27 September 1983) was an Australian journalist known for his reporting of conflicts in Asia and his Communist sympathies. He was the first foreign correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and he attracted controversy for his activities during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Burchett was born in Clifton Hill, Melbourne in 1911 to George and Mary Burchett. He spent his youth in the south Gippsland town of Poowong. Poverty forced him to drop out of school at an early age and work at various odd jobs, including as a vacuum cleaner salesman and an agricultural labourer. In his free time he studied foreign languages.

In 1936 Burchett left Australia for London. There he found work in a travel agency which resettled Jews from Nazi Germany in British Palestine and the United States. It was in this job that he met Erna Hammer, a German Jewish refugee, and they married in 1938 in Hampstead.

In 1940 Burchett began his career in journalism. His freelance reports of the revolt against the Vichy French in the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia helped him gain accreditation with the Daily Express newspaper. He spent the remainder of the war in China and Burma and also covered General Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign.

He was the first Western journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped, arriving alone by train from Tokyo on 2 September, the day of the formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. His Morse code dispatch was printed on the front page of the Daily Express newspaper in London on 5 September 1945, entitled "The Atomic Plague", the first public report in the Western media to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout. On this "scoop of the century" his byline was incorrectly given as "by Peter Burchett". His report is more fully recorded in his book, Shadows of Hiroshima.

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