John Bierman

John Bierman, who has died aged 76, was one of the last of a generation of buccaneering reporters and writers who pursued successful careers across the media. Newspaper reporter, editor, radio correspondent, television "fireman", documentary maker and, finally, acclaimed historian, Bierman excelled at each, in a working life that reached back to the days of plate cameras and reporters in trilbies.

He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely read and civilised man. A friend recalls him in a hotel room in some colonial outpost where a big story had broken, stripped to his underpants and fuelling himself with beer as he fired off copy in perfectly rounded sentences to papers and radio stations across the globe. An imposing presence with a craggy, lived-in face - more John Wayne than Gregory Peck - he did his national service as a Royal Marine commando and parachutist. The "wings" on his broad chest caught the eyes of the girls.

His big stories as a BBC TV reporter included a 13-minute, mainly ad-libbed, report from Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 (which won a Cannes TV Festival award), the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. His final incarnation as a historian was pursued in the Mediterranean calm of a Cypriot farmhouse - he liked to describe himself as a "palm-tree man". The military historian Sir John Keegan wrote of Alamein: War Without Hate (2002), which Bierman co-authored with fellow journalist Colin Smith: "Few historians write as fluently as they do; few journalists achieve their standards of accuracy and inclusiveness."

Bierman was born within the sound of Bow Bells in London. His father, an antiques dealer, beat a hasty exit, and his mother, who ran a dress shop, paid attention to her son only when in funds. Largely raised by his grandparents, and evacuated from London during the second world war, he had, therefore, a peripatetic childhood that ideally prepared him for life as a globetrotting reporter. His love of the English language was acquired young. Despite attending 16 schools, he had a sound basic education, and could recite long passages of poetry.

He revelled in the bohemian London of his youth - the story goes that Dylan Thomas was once sick over his new suede shoes - and he knew the music hall songs of the era. At the time of his death, he was engaged on a memoir of this period with the working title Guttersnipes.

Bierman learned his craft the old-fashioned way, in the provinces. In 1954, he took off for Canada, where he worked on several papers and married. Back in England, he became a Fleet Street sub-editor on the Mirror and the Express, rising rapidly to the Express backbench, where senior subeditors called the shots. The hours were long, and the after-hours spent in the then newspaper fashion of drinking till the morning buses rolled.

In 1960, Bierman was headhunted by the Aga Khan to found and edit the Nation, in Nairobi. Those four years were among his happiest professionally. A colleague recalls: "John was a great editor - driving, dynamic, young, assured, foul-mouthed, contemptuous of settlers, frightened of nobody, a marvellous design man and an elegant writer." He next moved to the Caribbean as a managing editor.

He returned to England in the mid-1960s just as the BBC was recruiting experienced print journalists to stiffen its staff of largely university graduates - "all rather posh men", according to Mike Sullivan, another of the hard-bitten tribe who joined when Bierman did. Sullivan thinks Bierman found performing for the camera hard, but he was energetic, intrepid and - as ever - fast and accurate. But his talents did not include office politics: old BBC sweats still tell of Bierman almost climbing over desks to throttle - usually terrified - executives whom he regarded as nincompoops.

During the Indo-Pakistan war, he met Hilary Brown, a Canadian journalist. It was - in Brown's words - love at first sight, "one enchanted morning across a crowded press conference". Brown became Bierman's "pigeon", ferrying his film in a battered taxi driven by a man high on hash across the Khyber Pass to Kabul. Five years later, she became Bierman's second wife. Her career took off, and Bierman followed her postings. Wherever they pitched up, he always got work as a writer or editor.

Bierman's breakthrough book was Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg (1981), which brought to international attention the then largely neglected story of the Swedish diplomat who rescued Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Bierman's words are inscribed on Wallenberg's statue in central London: "The 20th century spawned two of history's vilest tyrannies. Raoul Wallenberg outwitted the first but was swallowed up by the second. His triumph over Nazi genocide reminds us that the courageous and committed individual can prevail against even the cruellest state machine. The fate of the six million Jews he was unable to rescue reminds us of the evil to which racist ideas can drive whole nations. Finally, his imprisonment reminds us not only of Soviet brutality but also of the ignorance and indifference which led the free world to abandon him. We must never forget these lessons."

"Dammit all," Bierman would joke, "these are the most enduring words I've ever written, and there's no byline."

One of Bierman's books - The Heart's Grown Brutal, a thriller set in Northern Ireland - was written under the pseudonym David Brewster; he was still on the BBC staff and not supposed to moonlight. In all, he published eight books (two written with Smith), continuing to work after a kidney (donated by his son Jonathan) transplant in 2002. Despite a later heart bypass, arthritis and damaged nerves in his neck which made writing torture, he stayed at his keyboard. He told an interviewer: "Working, in the sense of writing books, I shall do until I drop because it is my life."

Bierman himself was of Ukrainian/ Jewish stock, but totally secular. Despite having lived and worked in Israel, he did not darken the door of a synagogue until he attended a friend's wedding late in life. He is survived by Hilary and Jonathan, and by two daughters and a son from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

· John David Bierman, journalist and author, born January 26 1929; died January 4 2006

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