Censorship Takes Anzio

On the Anzio beachhead last week the U.S. and Allied press won a minor counterattack but they were losing a major battle against brass-buttoned censorship. The Army had served notice that it could make correspondents hew to the official line of what is good and what is bad battle news.

On the British invasion base, the Allied press lost a major engagement: its freedom of expression on Allied diplomatic and political policies. British stripe-trousered censorship moved in to judge what shall be sweet and what sour about Allied relations.

Brass Hats. The Anzio press corps fought an extraordinarily hot engagement (punctuated by a bombing alert) against General Sir Harold R.L.G. Alexander, who accused the correspondents of "blowing hot and cold" in their reports of the month-long beachhead battle. The doughty commander of Allied armies in Italy charged the newsmen with "alarming the people" by switching from overoptimism to overpessimism, was "very disappointed that you should put out such rot." Day before, as a penalty for "such rot," his staff had cut the correspondents' use of the beachhead's radio to Naples, by which the Allied press had received fast, on-the-spot reportage.

The newsmen told the General that no beachhead reporter had been responsible for the confusions over Anzio. Correspondents had conscientiously written what they had seen and what they had been told of the battle. They reminded the General: 1) that a BBC broadcast, day after the Jan. 22 landings, had been responsible for too much cheer by reporting that "Alexander's brave troops are pushing towards Rome . . . should reach it within 48 hours"; 2) that the subsequent gloom, when the German counterattack was conscientiously reported, had not been helped by official statements at home. Up spoke the Chicago Daily News'?, belligerent William Stoneman: "The biggest scare of all was given by the President of the United States."

Day after the dressing-down, the newsmen's rights to the radio were restored (they had been unable even to tell of its denial to them until after the Alexander meeting). But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Before he gave back the radio, the General had made plain that he expected strict adherence to the military line. Over the newsmen was the threat that their stories, censored for fact at the source, would be recensored at Naples to jibe with Army policy. That policy obviously would be to even up the bad with the good, to emphasize the hunky-dory.

Secretary of War Stimson, who held to his record of whitewashing the Army, was no help. Elmer Davis went through his routine of trying to see what he could do. But at week's end, over all the protests, the fact stood clear: the military was moving to dictate the interpretation of events. TIME'S Will Lang cabled from Anzio: "The press, which has campaigned since the war's beginning for rapid release of the worst as well as of the best news, has received a definite setback. The trend is to controlled censorship, to the Army's doctrine of its vested interest in the news" (TIME, Jan. 24).

Striped Pants. On the London-Washington diplomatic political front, tight censorship was a fait accompli despite the U.S. State Department's denial that it had anything to do with it. The hard fact was that only the official view of events affecting the future of the world could now be safely sent from London.

The British Foreign Office's censors are two retired diplomats: 1) Sir Robert MacLeod Hodgson, 70; 2) Sir Reginald Hervey Hoare,* 62. Said Sir Robert at his small wooden desk at the Ministry of Information: "They think we are interfering old fogies, but we are not. Our job is to see that stories are not cabled that are likely to stir up discord between the Allies."

*Distant cousin of Britain's Ambassador to Spain, Sir Samuel Hoare.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.