Monty's fighting Editor

Probably the only editor in uniform who has attacked his own Government again & again and got away with it is Captain Warwick M. J. Charlton, editor of the British Eighth Army News. Last week he had left Italy (where the Eighth is stalled) to serve under his old boss protector, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, now preparing to attack the Continent.

Eighth Army News, the testy, griping pal -in-print of the "desert rats" who followed Monty from Egypt to Italy, was born in September 1941, during the siege of Tobruk. When General Montgomery arrived in Egypt to take over the Eighth he quickly recognized the battle weariness of his men, found it "important that the troops know what is going on in the world and have a place to air their problems."

To tall, slim, 26-year-old Captain Charlton, onetime London Daily Sketch-man, Monty gave free rein and backed him up when the War Office was howling for the suppression of the paper, and even Winston Churchill was making known his disapproval.

Monty Delivers. Until Tripoli's capture, Charlton got out his News on captured Italian mobile presses (once he used Italian prisoners' maps for paper). He dressed up his sheet with German propaganda pictures. Monty himself at times delivered bundles of the News in his command car.

Editor Charlton prodded soldiers to write him letters about the slow mail service, editorialized on it, finally stirred the House of Commons to action. There was a campaign on the low pay of British combat troops--and Parliament moved again. Charlton (and soldiers' letters) beefed about the India-tobaccoed V-cigarets which even the Italians rejected. Thence forth only British smokes were sent over seas.

Charlton turned his typewriter against British entertainers who visited troops for only three weeks at a time. His special target was Britain's middle-aged comic music-hall darling, Grade Fields. White hall's brass hats rushed to defend her, demanded that the News be suppressed, declared that Winston Churchill "felt it unfair" that Gracie "should have been singled out." Monty was told that "certain other articles have not met with his [Churchill's] approval."

Monty Defends. As the Eighth advanced, Charlton established other papers for rear areas (also printed in Italian for the natives) : the Crusader, Tripoli Times, Syracuse News. In these and the Eighth's News he jumped from the military into the political field. He roasted the U.S. for not imprisoning more Fascists in Italy, criticized the unchecked Italian profiteering, the kid-glove treatment of King Vittorio Emanuele. Last October Charlton's News attacked Mihailovich's conduct in Yugoslavia. Again Parliament seethed, later came around to switching sympathies (and supplies) to Communist Mar shal Tito.

That cost Charlton most of his press freedom--by policy censorship imposed from England. Through all this, Monty defended Charlton, gave only one censorship order: that there be no criticism of U.S. Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. in the soldier-slapping incident: Even the News's protector has not escaped its editor's barbs. Captain Charlton wrote Monty's first Order of the Day in the desert. Thereafter the General wrote his own, but Charlton edited some of them. Said the Captain of the General: "He kept using the same old trite phrases."

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