Colin Smith

Who is Colin Smith?

Colin Smith is a British foreign-affairs journalist and military historian. He was born in Birmingham, England in 1944. For 26 years he worked for The Observer newspaper, of which he was an Assistant Editor, mainly reporting on wars and trouble spots from all over the world starting in 1971 with the Bengali uprising in what was then East Pakistan. He visited Cambodia and Vietnam during the closing stages of American withdrawal and remained in Saigon after Vietnamese communist forces entered the city. Later he mainly covered the Middle East, based first in Nicosia, then Cairo and Jerusalem and spending a considerable amount of time in Lebanon.

He reported on the first Gulf War, entering Kuwait City with the US Marines, the siege of Sarajevo, and the massacres in Rwanda. He has twice been named International Reporter of the Year in the British press awards and once runner up. His books include fiction and non-fiction among them "The Last Crusade", a novel set against the backcloth of General Allenby's 1917 campaign against the Ottoman Turks in Palestine which resulted in the capture of Jerusalem.

In 2005 Viking Penguin published his "Singapore Burning". It is an unusual account of the fall of Singapore to Japan's General Tomoyuki Yamashita in February 1942 in that it concentrates on the bitter rearguard actions Australians, UK British and British Indian Army troops fought down the Malayan peninsula in the two months that preceded the surrender and takes a more sympathetic view of the British commander Arthur Percival than is usually the case. It was generally well received, with some lavish praise for its writing and research. However, some Australian critics took issue with his allegations that the speed with which Yamashita overran Singapore itself - it took exactly a week - can be explained by the mass desertion of Australian troops.