Roderick Macdonald’s final despatch from the battlefields of southern Italy relayed the monumental news on the front pages of newspapers across Australia on May 19, 1944.

“The grimmest of all battles that has been fought in this Italian campaign is ending this morning,” Macdonald told his readers. “Cassino, fought for and defended for weary months with unparalleled bitterness, is isolated.”

That morning, just two days short of his 32nd birthday, the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent was moving with Britain’s advancing Eighth Army forces when his jeep came under German artillery fire. Macdonald and his travelling companion, British journalist Cyril Bewley of Kemsley newspapers, sought shelter in a field and stepped on a mine. They were both killed instantly.

At a well-tended war cemetery 140 kilometres south-east of Rome on Sunday, where Macdonald is buried alongside 12 Royal Australian Air Force servicemen, the correspondent’s bravery at the front line, which saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Italian campaign, was remembered.

Marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, where the Allied forces suffered 55,000 casualties during a bloody four-month campaign, was General Sir Patrick Sanders, the UK Army’s Chief of the General Staff. Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, laid a wreath where more than 4000 Commonwealth soldiers are buried.

Air Vice-Marshal Di Turton, Australia’s first female military representative to NATO and the European Union, read a short citation in Macdonald’s honour.

“By his journalistic enterprise, personal courage and willingness to accept all the risks faced by the troops whose battles he so faithfully recorded, he won a worldwide reputation early in the Second World War,” she said.

Macdonald, a product of Sydney’s Scots College who had joined the Herald as an 18-year-old, earned widespread acclaim for his graphic reporting where he took repeated risks to get eyewitness stories of the battle.

In July 1943, he wrote a vivid account of his adventures with British glider-borne troops during the invasion of Sicily. It was the first occasion on which any war correspondent had accompanied troops on an airborne invasion.

Towed from North Africa by night in a wind of almost gale force, his glider landed in a crisscross of German searchlights and a torrent of tracer bullets and shelling. They crashed badly, which severely bruised and shook the crew, and sought shelter beside the Syracuse Bridge. They then advanced, carrying their own wounded.

After swimming across a canal, Macdonald came upon a number of wounded soldiers, and it was while he was treating them with field dressings that he was captured by the Italians. He was rescued within hours by advancing British commandos, later boasting he was shortest-held prisoner of war of any other journalist.

“I know that the pilot of my glider was sweating with concentration,” Macdonald wrote. “Yet he and all the others I encountered during the grim 15 hours until our units linked up with the Eighth Army fought doggedly against fantastically long odds and against an enemy who had heavy weapons and unlimited ammunition.”

Following his exploits, he was officially notified that he was entitled to wear the red beret of the glider troops.

Macdonald’s story was featured on the front pages of some of the English-speaking world’s greatest newspapers.

Britain’s minister for information, Brendan Bracken, would call Macdonald’s story “a fine piece of reporting”.

“It deserved the prominence given to it in the press and on the radio. I am glad that the risks of the first British glider troops in action have been shared, by one of the Australian war correspondents, who have never lacked courage and audacity in reporting the war,” he said.

Twenty-three Herald correspondents reported on World War II. When Macdonald, the son of independent NSW MP for Mosman Donald Macdonald, died, he was the second man lost in action within a year. His colleague, Bill Munday, was killed by shellfire near the south-west Italian city of Salerno the September prior and Macdonald – who was unmarried – took his place.

He’d had narrow misses before. In Burma, he had a hairbreadth escape from capture by the Japanese. In Africa, he was once halted just in time while driving about 50km/h towards the German lines. Later, in Sicily, he received head injuries when his car collided with an army truck.

By the end of 1943, the Allied advance north into Italy had forced the Germans back to the fourth and best fortified of their defensive lines. The Gustav Line, defended by 15 Nazi divisions armed with small arms, artillery, machine guns, minefields and barbed wire, spanned from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic Sea, along the Garigliano and Rapido rivers on the west and on the Sangro river on the east of the Italian peninsula.

At the centre of the line, blocking the route to Rome, was the town of Cassino, dominated by the mountain of Monte Cassino with its 1400-year-old Benedictine abbey. The abbey, once the Catholic Church’s greatest monastery, had been evacuated by the Germans following the Allied landings. Both sides had assured the Vatican that it would not be put to military use or attacked.

But on February 15, 1944 – amid intelligence Hitler’s forces were occupying the monastery for use as a key observation post – Allied bombs rained down on much of the structure, reducing it to rubble.

“Are ancient and beautiful monuments and works of art by masters worth preserving at the cost of soldiers’ lives?” Macdonald had asked in a despatch that week. “It has become apparent since that day on the Italian front when we saw the last hours of the great Cassino Abbey, its chapels and ramparts crumbling under hundreds of our bombs, that not everybody agrees with the principle of military necessity justifying their destruction.

“It must be remembered that the same high command which decided that the capture of the Cassino position could be achieved without attacking the monastery later reversed its decision, and considered that the position could be captured if the monastery was bombed. The command was wrong in both cases.”

On the day Macdonald was killed, a Polish and British flag were raised over the ruins.

His death was acknowledged in public statements by then acting prime minister Frank Forde and NSW premier Sir William McKell, who described him as a “most capable pressman and a charming personality”.

Born in Argyllshire, Scotland, Macdonald had emigrated with his parents to Australia aged two. He went to England after four years at the Herald to gain overseas journalistic experience, later travelling extensively in South Africa and New Guinea.

On his return to Australia, he worked at Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Brisbane’s Courier-Mail before rejoining the Herald in 1941. Soon afterwards, he was appointed correspondent to cover the war in Chongqing, in south-west China, where he pleaded for allied aid. He later produced a graphic account of the British retreat in Burma, of which he had a first-hand experience after the fall of Singapore.

He was then transferred to North Africa, where he made the long journey to Algiers by mule, truck and plane, via Tibet, Karachi, Cairo and Khartoum.

It was in Tunisia he first met the famed American newspaper correspondent Ernie Pyle, who became a national folk hero by reporting on the average soldier in World War II. Pyle would write after Macdonald’s death that his friend “Mac” had meant “much to many of us who marched with the wars in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy”.

“Just after Tunis fell he came down with a savage recurrence of malaria and spent three weeks in a hospital,” he wrote in his book Brave Men. “For days he lay listless, with strength enough only to get up for meals. The sun was broiling and he would strip down to his shorts and lie there in the hot sand, baking his body a sleek brown.

“Gradually life began to flow into him again, his face filled out, the glaze left his eyes, and the famous Macdonald smile and Macdonald barbed retort began to return.”

Pyle said Macdonald had “everything to live for, and he loved being alive”.

“He was young, tall, handsome, brilliant, engaging. He had a sensitive mind, and he would have been a novelist had there been no war,” adding that among Americans, Macdonald was “the best-liked ... correspondent I have ever known.”

David Woodward, a war correspondent for The Guardian, described Macdonald on his death as “hard as nails”.

“But he had none of that superficial toughness. All of the correspondents who knew Roderick will be very, very sorry that they will never go on a story with him again.”

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Reuters correspondent Desmond Tighe wrote that Macdonald was “one of the most lovable war correspondents and often participated in the most dangerous assignments”.

“He died as he would have wished,” he said. “Right in the front line.”

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