"Triumph for Censorship"

ARMY & NAVY

"Triumph for Censorship"

The most extensive maneuvers of the world's most powerful Navy continued last week somewhere within 5,000,000 sq. mi. of seaway at the top of the Pacific Ocean. But for all the nation that owned the Navy knew about them, the operations might as well have been held on the dark side of the moon. Greatest hardship fell on the U. S. Press, which grudgingly observed that the maneuvers were "a triumph for censorship." For lack of specific information, correspondents in Honolulu (those aboard the Fleet were virtually incommunicado) sent off tantalizing, imaginative tales about an expected "mass attack of 400 planes on the island of Oahu," revealing that the "entire civilian population of Hawaii" was being hypothetically "enlisted for defense" against a vague "attacking fleet." The Navy's secrecy reached its climax and the frenzy of the Press grew greatest when a force of 43 planes was dispatched on a 1,200 mi. mass flight from Hawaii supposedly to Midway Island. Whether it got there or not, the Navy would not say.

First to part the maneuvers' heavy veil of censorship, as it turned out, was Death. Steaming into Pearl Harbor, some 60 assorted U. S. war vessels would not tell where they had been or where they were going, but announced that during the week a flyer had been killed taking off from the Saratoga, one man had been fatally injured in a collision between the destroyers Sicard and Lea.

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