No Time for Comedy

Last week U.S. censorship produced the following absurdities:

>The authoritative, bi-monthly Army Ordnance, edited by and for Army officers, appeared with a mass of "secret" facts & figures on aircraft production, the performances of new weapons, other military data which the War Department had consistently asked the press not to report.

> The Detroit News and Secretary of the Navy Knox's Chicago News printed a report that Chrysler Corp. had taken a $100,000,000 contract to build a bomber engine plant in Chicago. Scooped correspondents besieged an officer responsible for such announcements. Said he: "Even if it's true, you can't print it," ignoring the patent fact that it had just been printed. The War Department then retreated to a second line: okay, the contract is news, but don't use the name or type of engine Chrysler is to build. Lieut. General William S. Knudsen characteristically ignored this piece of policy, told Chicago reporters that Chrysler was to go into production on twelve-cylinder, air-cooled Wright engines ("the biggest motors we have").

> An ill-worded Washington communique announced that a battalion of Marines and bluejackets "has been organized" to fight under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines. Hasty radio flashters and headline writers in early editions misinterpreted this incidental intelligence, gave the impression that fresh reinforcements had actually been sent into Luzon, and sent a false wave of hope and reassurance sweeping across the U.S.

The Case for Secrecy in vital matters is simple, convincing, unquestioned by the U.S. press. Is there a further case for an absolute, rigid, blanket policy of secrecy, extending to facts which on their face do not seem vital, in many instances have been already printed? The Army & Navy hold that there is such a case:

>The prodigally democratic U.S. had very few real secrets left to keep when it went to war. Many, various and almost uncontrollable were the channels through which U.S. enemies could get vital wartime facts (insurance reports, sometimes to offices abroad, requiring detailed data on experimental aircraft, ships, etc.; Patent Office reports, available to all comers at 10-c- per copy; Congressional hearings, secret and unsecret, from which waves of gossip flowed to every legation and foreign listening post in Washington).

>When and if enemy bombers visit the U.S., their pilots will need to know a very few, simple facts about their objectives. By actual experiment, a group of Army officers in Washington demonstrated that from pre-war stories, pictures, advertisements in the U.S. press, they could compile a frighteningly complete dossier on nearly every vital military objective in the U.S.

> If the U.S.'s biggest club in World War II is production, the head on the club is surprise production--a total output which will exceed anything the enemy has reason to expect, in much less time than he would normally expect. Moral: why tell the Jap (as he was told last week) that the U.S. is upping its output of long-range bomber engines?

Mad Hatters. For the initial reason that this argument had never been authoritatively, succinctly presented to the U.S. press as a whole, the press had no quarrel with it. But the press did have a vexing, immediate quarrel--not with the principles, but with the application of U.S. censorship to date.

Army & Navy officers who understood the problem, wanted to solve it effectively. But confusion--in part inevitable at the beginning--within and between Army, Navy and civilian agencies delayed a sensible solution.

Manifest absurdities baffled them, enraged correspondents and editors. Example: the impression that local information printed in (for instance) the Los Angeles Times would not help the enemy, but on an A.P. wire or in the New York Times would lose the war. Official excuse for this policy is that isolated publication is harmless, country-wide publication is harmful since it leads to summaries of local items. But enemy observers can still buy and digest local newspapers, or hire a clipping bureau to do the job.

British Parallel. Long before the U.S. entered all-out war, U.S. Government observers had closely studied, fully reported on British censorship. To correspondents familiar with British practice, Washington seemed to have adopted most of Britain's early mistakes, learned precious little from her hard-won experience.

The British press and U.S. correspondents in London went through the same agonies, frustrations, absurdities which afflicted the U.S. press last week. Now, after almost 30 months of instructive war, the London censorship by-&-large works smoothly, effectively, reasonably for press and Government.

Backbone of the British system is the fact that the Army, Navy, Air Force no longer have the primary responsibility for dealing with the press; that job belongs first of all to an agency (Ministry of Information) set up and empowered to do the job and nothing else. The military services still issue their own communiques, have their own facilities for direct contact with the press, but the M.O.I, is the central agency. Many a Washington correspondent balks at such a system in the U.S., fears that centralization would bar newsmen from effective contact with the Army & Navy. In Great Britain, the opposite happened: once M.O.I, was well established and intelligently staffed (after a prolonged period of bungling), London newsmen had easier access to the services themselves than they ever had before.

But the biggest secret of reasonable censorship in Great Britain has nothing to do with organization. The British, after many a false start, simply learned to follow a simple, reasonable rule: that a military secret, subject to censorship, was something the enemy presumably did not know. Once he did know it, the fact could be printed. Example: the British press and London correspondents for weeks sat on the story that the R.A.F. had put four cannons in Hurricane fighters, released the news soon after the first cannon-Hurricane was shot down intact by the Germans.

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