"The first casualty when war comes, is truth," said American Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917, and in his history of war journalism, Phillip Knightley shows just how right Johnson was. From William Howard Russell, who described the appalling conditions of the Crimean War in "The Times", to the ranks of reporters, photographers, and cameramen who captured the realities of war in Vietnam, the book tells a story of heroism and collusion, censorship and suppression, myth-making and propaganda. Since Vietnam, Knightley finds, governments have become much more adept at managing the media, and in new chapters on the Falklands, the Gulf War and the former Yugoslavia, he concludes that the war correspondent's role as a seeker of truth is now in jeopardy.