Mark Bourrie - The Fog of War: Censorship of Canadas Media in World War II

The Fog of War

MARK BOURRIE

THE FOG
OF WAR

Censorship of Canadas Media
in World War Two

DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
D&M PUBLISHERS INC.
Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley

Copyright 2011 by Mark Bourrie

First U.S. edition 2012

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Douglas & McIntyre
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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-949-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-950-1 (ebook)

Jacket design by Peter Cocking
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

For Bob Vezina: soldier, journalist, and friend, and to Paul Quilty, mentor.

CONTENTS

IN TIMES OF TOTAL WAR, when the survival of the state and Canadian society is at stake, the media face political and social pressures to conform to the governments versions of reality. Journalists usually censor their own work to make sure it doesnt cause trouble for the government, the military, and the arms industries. Reporters and editors also know the information they gather can be very valuable to the enemy. In 1939, most of Canadas journaliststhe ones who didnt rush to join the army, navy, and air force to fight accepted the idea that German agents would paw through their articles looking for secrets. The thought of Nazis reading the Globe and Mail or the Halifax Herald might seem ludicrous now, but in World War Two, this country was an arsenal of democracy with access to many of the Allies most potent secrets, including the workings of the atomic bomb. We sent hundreds of thousands of men overseas, built the fourth-largest navy in the world, supplied our allies with weapons, trained tens of thousands of pilots, and gave shelter to some of the refugees from Hitlers war.

Our soldiers, who were to die in Western Europe at rates higher than Germans and Russians on the Eastern Front, were often crowded by the thousands into the great liners of the day, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth to go overseas, offering targets that caused Pavlovian responses in German U-boat captains. Halifax and Sydney were the assembly points for the great convoys of soldiers, weapons, fuel, and food that kept Britain and Russia in the war. Every scrap of information, from convoy routes to routine weather forecasts, was useful to the men who were determined to sink the convoys.

We were attacked. The enemy assaults on Canada were minor, and, in the case of Japanese fire balloons, somewhat silly. Still, for at least a year, people along the British Columbia coast had a reasonable terror of bombardment and invasion by the Japanese, while, through the entire war, Canadians living on the Atlantic coast were in an active military theatre, much more than many of them knew. Hundreds died in U-boat attacks in Canadian and Newfoundland waters, submarines hunted all of Canadas Atlantic coastline, and Allied ships and planes hunted the subs.

For the sake of the war effort, the press had to keep military secrets. Most journalists also believed they had to show their patriotism, that they bore the same home-front responsibilities as the bureaucrat, the munitions worker, the farmer, the kid collecting scrap metal and bones for the war effort. Their children, close relatives, friends, and neighbours were in the armed forces, along with hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. Reporters and editors, who usually talk a good fight about censorship, were actually quite willingsometimes even eagerto be guided by the strong hand of government. Often, with the dampening of competition caused by censorship, it was in their commercial interest to join with their colleagues in ignoring news. They turned a blind eye to many of the social issues on the home frontdrunkenness, an explosion in incidences of venereal disease, juvenile delinquency, family breakdownand ignored signs of bureaucratic incompetence and corruption. Canadian journalists were so pliant, in fact, that penalties for real resistance to censorship are difficult to determine because so few writers and editors on English-language papers tried to blatantly evade the rules.

The Canadian government censored the news for two main reasons: to keep military and economic secrets out of enemy hands, and to prevent civilian morale from breaking down. Ottawa was prepared to ignore most one-time breaches of the censorship rules, especially when they were honest mistakes. The French-language press realized quite quickly that Mackenzie Kings Liberal government was not up to starting fights that could rip the facade of public solidarity in wartime Quebec. On paper, the Canadian censorship system, backed by the War Measures Act, was among the most draconian media-control mechanisms among the Allied countries. In reality, only the fringe Communist Party and ethnic presses suffered serious penalties.

There is a stereotype in the public consciousness of censors as being bureaucratic news-killers armed with blue pencils making arbitrary decisions that are invariably against the public interest. The Second World War censorship system in Canada as well as the censors themselves were far more complicated and much more nuanced. First, all of the front-line censors and most of the managers of the system were high-ranking journalists who still had respect for their craft and its ability to act for the public good. Through the war, they did not seek to increase their powers. Canadas press censors, like most citizens and people in the political class, believed a well-informed public was a bulwark of democracy. During wartime, politicians and military generals make mistakes. Factories make bad weaponry. People, including the countrys military and political leaders, would do a better job if they knew their mistakes might be put in front of the public.

On the battlefield, the enemy is bound to make breakthroughs. From 1939 until the fall of 1942, the Axis was deciding where the war would be fought and how. They won almost every important battle, and few people realized that, in fact, the European war had been decided outside Moscow in the early winter of 1941, or that the Japanese lunge through the Pacific was 5,000 miles wide and an inch deep, without the industrial or manpower resources to take on the United States military. Most of the censors wanted to allow enough negative coverage in newsreels to keep people worried on the home front. The threat of military failure or even defeat made people more likely to accept rationing, overtime shifts, bond drives, family stresses, long separations from loved ones, even conscription. A public kept in a world of constant happy news would be overconfident, complacent, and less likely to accept the privations that come with war. But military intelligence officers and government officials thought the censors had a duty to help them manipulate morale by killing all types of bad-news stories. As chief English-language press censor Wilfrid Eggleston pointed out time and again in letters to government officials, the military, and some journalists, the suppression of bad news creates a fools paradise, one in which people would eventually learn the truththe way the French did in 1940, when, despite the make-believe world concocted by the heavily censored press, the Nazis showed up at the door. Suppressing stories about shoddy war equipment didnt make that material any better, Eggleston argued. Spiking stories about domestic dissent actually caused long-term political problems because society cannot develop lasting, solid consensus without free debate. Any decisions made with faulty information could hurt the war effort. Rather than adopt the customs of Ottawa and build a censorship empire, Eggleston and his colleagues fought back when cabinet ministers and top journalists wanted to entice them into taking complete control of the media. But the censorship system was politicized. Conservative newspapers were more likely to criticize and embarrass Mackenzie Kings Liberal government, and the censors at first overreacted to political criticism of the King regime. As the years went by, the censors realized they needed to work at being non-partisan.