What Price Secrecy?

Four days before the Navy announced the sinking of the Wasp, the small-town Plymouth (Ind.) Pilot scooped the world by casually breaking the news in a front-page interview with a home-town survivor of the lost carrier. The sailor was abruptly whisked away by Naval authorities. Elderly Pilot Editor Samuel E. Boys got a blistering Navy rebuke. Possibly Sam Boys's slip expedited Navy's official communique admitting the loss of the Wasp. But the hopeful impression got around that Navy's relatively fresh report about the Wasp (coming only 41 days after its loss) marked a new deal in Navy news. Bolstering that impression was the Navy's prompter announcement, within a week, of the loss of yet another (unnamed) carrier.

Such reassurance was desperately needed. U.S. reaction to the bitter, confused news from the Solomons had undermined faith in the frankness of Army & Navy communiques (see p. 77). Confidence in Government news slumped to an all-time low; and with it, the pangs of Army & Navy censorship hit home again like a fierce stab of chronic appendicitis.

Once, after a hard fight for a sensible, democratic censorship, newsmen had been reassured by the appointment of Byron Price as head of the Office of Censorship. When able Elmer Davis took over as head of OWI last summer, with executive powers straight from the President, newsmen believed that the military news jam would be dynamited. Yet within the last weeks have come some of the war's worst examples of inept, demoralizing suppression of war news.

> The Navy waited 65 days to announce the loss of the cruisers Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria, although Australia waited only ten days to admit the loss of the Canberra, sunk in the same action. Since the Japs had announced sinking four cruisers the loss of the three ships was almost certainly no secret except to the U.S. people. Still more disturbing, the announcement appeared to have been timed to coincide with good news of the sinking of six enemy ships which followed next day. Thus the suspicion inevitably arose that the Navy's previous long delays in announcing sinkings may not have always been justified by reasons of military security.

> Where Tokyo broadcasts forced the Army to admit, after six months, that the Japs had captured four flyers of Brigadier General Doolittle's raiders, the War Department defended the delay in the name of military security. But the national reaction was nevertheless one of chagrin at having been played for suckers. Newsmen had to keep silent while London originated the first story that U.S. troops had landed in Liberia, that U.S. tank crews were operating in Egypt, that Mrs. Roosevelt was going to Britain.

> Though they know about many weaknesses in the U.S. war effort, newsmen have been obliged to wait until they could report the facts circuitously as they come out of Congressional committee hearings and reports.

Few Washington correspondents blame Elmer Davis for his failure to prevent news suppression. He has tried hard, against tough opponents, to relax what he politely calls "the ingrained habitual reticence of the services." That he has not got further is not for lack of a liberal charter: the President himself had long since declared that censorship must be "in harmony with the best interests of our free institutions." Newsmen recalled that George Creel, in World War I, had found himself up against like reticence in Army & Navy. He won out only partly because of his own forcefulness; more important, Creel was able to thaw out military news because he got the unequivocal backing of Woodrow Wilson.

Newsmen implicitly accept the need for a wartime censorship but do not like the notion that a tighter censorship is justified by military defeats. Victories have never created censorship trouble. The test of a sound censorship is how it copes with bad news.

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