What Is Truth?

To the newsmen who covered it, the climax of the sorrowful story of Exodus 1947 was hard going. No story from Germany since the Nuernberg trials had drawn so much manpower: 135 correspondents from a dozen countries converged on Hamburg as three ships from southern France, and their cargo of 4,400 Jews (TIME, Sept. 15), neared port. It was the kind of story that is toughest for reporters who try to be careful, dispassionate observers. Inevitably, each brought his prejudices, emotions and loyalties along, and the press coverage showed it.

Bumbling British officials did their best to foul up the coverage. They issued conflicting orders, misinformed the press about arrival times of the ships, and herded reporters and photographers into wire cages away from the gangplanks. (They were afraid, they said, that if the Jews saw a lot of newspaper people around they would feel encouraged to get violent.) The 15 photographers, assigned to an impossible spot from which to shoot, told P.R.O.s that they might as well bar all cameras. So their cameras were barred, and a British Army photographer was the only one allowed to take pictures.

Battle Pitch. What happened at last week's debarkations depended on what paper you read, and what country you lived in. From behind the burlap screens on the cages, American reporters saw "pitched, bloody battles." Over vivid A.P. and U.P. dispatches, many a U.S. paper used such headlines as TROOPS WIELD CLUBS TO EMPTY SHIP. From behind the same screens, British reporters saw British troops using restraint, helping old women and children down the gangplanks and generally behaving like gentlemen. A typical British headline (in the London Daily Telegraph-): JEWS USE BOTTLES & CLUBS ON TROOPS. The Evening News admitted that there had been fighting aboard the Runnymede Park. But debarkation from the Empire Rival, it reported, "was characterized by good spirits on the part of both the escort troops and the Jews. As they left the ship many Jews thanked the soldiers for 'hospitality.'"

Before long, the reporters at Hamburg began getting frantic "call-backs" from their home offices. On both sides of the Atlantic, editors wanted to know which version of the facts was right. A lively argument ensued: the Americans accused the British of playing the story down, and the British accused the Americans of whooping it up.

On the American side, there was no unanimity. Without meaning to distort the news, A.P. and U.P. had heightened the disorder simply by covering the facts in approved police-reporter fashion, stringing them together in the order of the excitement they contained. In the New York Times, Correspondent Edward A. Morrow also wrote of truncheons and firehoses. But he took pains to say that the soldiers "kept their tempers and followed orders to use a minimum of force."

No More Bumping. Lord Beaver-brook's London Daily Express ran the most fascinating story of the gruesome week. One refugee, it reported, "was trailed by the feet down the 30-ft. gangway, his head bumping as he went. This caused a group of American Jewish correspondents to hurl themselves against the wire netting around the press enclosure shouting protests. They were rebuked by a correspondent from the United Press, who told them: 'Remember you are here as reporters, not as sympathizers or propagandists.'

"But the protesting group at once sat down to type thousands of words accusing the British of brutality." Troops, added the Express, had since been instructed "on no account to drag objectors down the gangplanks by the legs." But what seemed to scandalize the Express was not the dragging, but the fact that the U.S. reporters had made a scene.

By week's end, the Jews and the press had moved out and the Hamburg docks were quiet. On that, at least, all witnesses were agreed.

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