No News

In the London office of the New York Times one day last week a little bearded man stood glaring at a cablegram. Twenty hours earlier the British liner Athenia, with 300-odd American war refugees aboard, had been torpedoed off the coast of Scotland. In the dead of night, as the news reached London, correspondents, scenting the biggest German "atrocity" story since the sinking of the Lusitania, had descended on cable companies, roused up nodding operators to file their dispatches. It was now late afternoon, and the message in Times Correspondent Frederick T. Birchall's hand (from his home office) read:

"Nothing arrived in time to catch today's edition. Still receiving copy noon our time. When did you begin filing?"

Not negligence but censorship had caused Timesman Birchall to miss his deadline, along with other U. S. correspondents in London. Since the day war began, censors have been reading all news that goes out of Britain by radio or cable. They find little to suppress, but cause long delays that madden newswriters in hours of crisis. The night the Athenia went down they were all in bed. had to be routed out and brought blear-eyed to their posts before reading could begin. By that time radio commentators had got their own texts censored, had told late listeners in America the whole story.

Headquarters of the British Ministry of Information is a tall, white stone building in Bloomsbury (taken over from the University of London), a mile away from Fleet Street. Here are issued all official press bulletins. A teletype printer flashes them to newsrooms and agencies in Fleet Street. But most reporters, British and foreign alike, get their news direct from the mimeograph, write their copy in the great hundred-foot-square entrance hall of the Ministry, gas masks slung over their shoulders as they work, surrounded by thick mugs of bitter India tea.

The censors, 100 middle-aged gentlemen with blue pencils, sit in a room in the basement. Copy goes down to them by pneumatic tube. Cable dispatches they read and then pass on by teletype to cable offices. For correspondents who prefer to do their work in their own offices (and for laymen sending private messages) another 100-odd censors are on duty at the telegraph and cable companies.

Day after the Times rebuked its crack London reporter, Frederick Birchall and some 30 other correspondents gathered in the big, cream-walled conference room on the first floor of the Ministry to recite their grievances. Director General Eric Drummond Lord Perth (who later in the week became Advisor on Foreign Publicity and was succeeded by Sir Findlater Stewart) and his Chief Censor. Admiral Cecil Vivian Usborne, heard them patiently, anxious to satisfy the men on whose work depends the U. S. public's opinion of Britain's war. They agreed to appoint more censors, keep them on duty 24 hours a day. Another proposal--that radio broadcasts be delayed until newsmen had time to file their stories--was held over for consideration.

Even more disturbing than the lack of censors was the virtual absence of any news whatever from the Allied fronts. Reporters, barred for the present from the scene of war itself (though a limited number are expected to go later), were dependent on brief and cryptic official communiques. Europe had some 10,000 newspapermen covering the war (including A. P.'s 664,* U. P.'s 500, something like 7,750 men employed by foreign agencies) and most of them had nothing to report. Result was that they picked up rumors where they could. All week long, as the French Army advanced cautiously into no-man's-land between the Maginot Line and Germany's Westwall. dubious tales of major battles impending or in progress went across the Atlantic.

In France even weather reports were suppressed, lest they give enemy airmen valuable information. Classified advertising and crossword puzzles were barred from French newspapers to keep spies from printing messages in code. The French press contained little except official bulletins, stirring appeals, atrocity stories and reports from the front that were obviously cooked.

In totalitarian Berlin, however, where press restrictions had seemed intolerable in peace time, correspondents were free to cable whatever they pleased. They were bound by a system of responsibility: no censor touched their copy, but if they sent dispatches which the Ministry for Propaganda considered false or damaging they could be denied access to news sources or expelled from the country. The German Army was conducting a few picked reporters on tours of the war area in Poland. Consequently most of the authentic war news that reached the U. S. came from Berlin and told of German victories.

Not only correspondents in Great Britain were complaining of the war's coverage. In the House of Commons Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had to face a barrage of questions from honorable members who were worried by the scarcity of news. Mr. Chamberlain promised that he would "try to deal with the matter." London's own newspapers, galled by the censorship yoke, were loudly critical. The London Times blamed the Ministry for "a series of muddles and blunders" which, said the Times, the Prime Minister did not deny. Said the News Chronicle: "News is flooding out of Berlin into all neutral countries, and the press of those countries is almost without news from London."

Instead of relaxing British censorship, at week's end the Government had clamped it down tighter than ever. News-pictures could not be sent by mail or wireless, cable transmission of wirephotos was restricted. No photographs of any kind could be imported into Britain. Most of the war pictures printed in U. S. papers were being taken by German Army cameramen, released by the Ministry for Propaganda in Berlin.

On the news-front too it looked as if the Germans, at least for the moment, had outmaneuvered France and Britain. Warned by the failure of their tactics in the last war, this time the Germans were putting all their resources at the disposal of news-writers, while the Allied propaganda machine was at a standstill, tangled in the barbed wire of official secrecy and confusion.

*Not 110, as TIME said in its issue of Sept. 4, listing only full-time staff writers trained in the U. S., omitting correspondents resident in Europe.

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