Delays Explained

In the past two months the center of the military world has been, for most U.S. newspaper readers,* North Africa. Delays that readers might have condoned at any other time they could not stomach now. So when North African news lacked timetable punctuality, and then was sporadic and stuttery when it came, they felt cheated.

Complained the New York Daily News: "The London newspapers are daily scooping the world, enjoying breaks on stories of from six hours to as many days." Columnist-Radio Commentator Cal Tinney complained that the North Africa war was being fought "in a journalistic vacuum."

It was true that the story of the North African fighting was not being fully told. But it was truer that the delays were definitely not the fault of the 40-odd correspondents (most of them Americans) covering it. They have been doing their job--281,000 words were filed from Algiers in the first 13 days of the invasion--in the face of double difficulty.

Communications. There has been a bottleneck in communications from French North Africa. Messages are sent to the U.S. via London. In peacetime the channels were sufficient; war overloaded them. The Army, starved for communications of its own, could not provide extra facilities for newsmen. Because military messages always have rightful priority, correspondents' dispatches have had to wait and the correspondents have been limited to 200 words nightly.

If they wish to write more than 200 words, they can send their dispatches by the even more uncertain courier planes that, since the invasion (Nov. 7-8) shuttle back & forth between Algiers and England.

Said Chicago Daily News Correspondent Victor Gordon Lennox in a Dec. 5 dispatch from London: "Already one correspondent has returned to London ahead of two messages he dispatched before leaving. . . ."

Censorship. Most of the correspondents are with the Allied forward units in Tunisia. They write their dispatches and have them censored in the field, then send them by courier to "AF HQ" at Algiers. Dispatches are stamped "censored at source," wait their turn for cable space, are then sent to London.

Once in London, British dispatches can be printed almost right away, but U.S. messages have to be fowarded by cable or radio to New York and be censored again there.

News-hungry U.S. citizens, their appetites for North African news still unsated, might well marvel that in the face of these difficulties they had received any detailed North African news at all.

* News agencies, Associated Press, United Press and International News Service picked the invasion of North Africa as 1942's top news story.

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