Chester Wilmot was born in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton in 1911 and later graduated from the University of Melbourne. He became a war correspondent during the Second World War, working first for the ABC in Greece, Syria, Libya and New Guinea, and later covering the whole of western Europe for the BBC. He was noted for his remarkable ability to research and distil information, for the clarity of his despatches, and for his spirited, sometimes controversial, style. After the war he became a broadcaster, journalist and military historian. In 1954, at the peak of his career, Wilmot died in a plane crash.