Murray Sayle, the widely admired Australian-born journalist, died at the end of last week, at the age of eighty-four. Sayle was part of a generation of antipodean writers, including Clive James and Germaine Greer, who came to London in the decade after the Second World War. He rose to prominence as a reporter for Harold Evans’s London Sunday Times in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies. While at the paper, he displayed both fearlessness (sailing solo across the Atlantic, climbing Everest) and a penchant for the scoop: he tracked down Che Guevara in the Andes and scored an interview in Moscow with the spy Kim Philby. Sayle also covered the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the war in Vietnam, and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
When the Times refused to publish his report on the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland, in 1972, Sayle left the paper and moved to Japan, where he lived for the next three decades. From Japan, Sayle contributed several long pieces to The New Yorker, including the Letter from Hiroshima “Did the Bomb End the War?,” from 1995, which questioned the military necessity of employing the atom bomb against the Japanese and argued that fear of a Soviet invasion—and not the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—prompted Japan’s surrender:
Which was the crisis that Hirohito and his divided Cabinet believed now made the Emperor’s personal decision necessary—the atomic bombs, Soviet intervention, or the worsening situation as a whole? Certainly the new bombs added to Japan’s woes—along with the ongoing sea blockade, “conventional” firebombing, burned-out cities, total enemy control of sea and air, the shelling of ports by battleships close in-shore, mass hunger, and the promise of a meagre rice harvest. A small provincial city had been largely destroyed, by fire, and another partly destroyed. But then so had Japan’s capital, Tokyo, and the B-29s, still eliminating such “productive enterprises” as Japan “had above ground,” were doing so at least as effectively as atomic bombs could. The war had continued despite the fire raids; the new atomic weapon did not interfere with the Army chiefs’ military plans, or change their indifference to civilian casualties. The Soviet intervention, however, demanded a new consensus, because it made the existing consensus inoperative. And—a point implicit in much of the leadership’s discussion—the bombs promised only to kill more Japanese, whereas the Soviets, possibly allied with local Communists, threatened to destroy the monarchy, which almost all Japanese, and certainly those in the government, viewed as the soul of the nation. A surrender with some guarantee for the Emperor thus became the best of a gloomy range of options, and the quicker the better, because every day that passed meant more gains on the ground for the Soviets, and thus a likely bigger share of the inevitable occupation. Recognition that a surrender today will be more favorable than one tomorrow is the classic reason that wars end.
Sayle’s cultural knowledge of his adopted country is evident in his 1996 article about Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and the sarin nerve-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. Sayle also contributed two articles about the Japanese royal family and an investigation of the downing of KAL 007 by the Soviets.
As many of the British obituaries have noted, Sayle enjoyed two late-life vindications, when his report on Bloody Sunday was finally published in the London Review of Books and when his autobiographical novel about Fleet Street, “A Crooked Sixpence,” which had been suppressed in the U.K. for fifty years because of a libel action, was re-released to critical acclaim. The New Yorker, reviewing “A Crooked Sixpence,” in 1963, spotted the author’s gifts early on, saying that it was a “dispassionately cheerful” book and that Sayle wrote with “gaiety, pity, and humor.”