press

press. Despite a shortage of newsprint, newspapers and magazines continued to be published in every country during the war years. The civilian press of the belligerents was part of the propaganda war; the armed forces newspapers boosted morale at the front; and the clandestine press of the various resistance organizations in occupied countries played an important part in keeping in contact with the civilian population and disseminating information not otherwise available (for propaganda and underground press see subversive warfare).

The number of newspaper titles published diminished in all belligerent nations as the war progressed, as did the size of those which survived, but circulations often increased. In the USA, where 135 newspapers were lost; the circulation of the rest jumped by 10 million to 50 million despite the competition created by broadcasting. UK newspapers increased their circulation from 19 million in 1938 to 24 million in 1945, though most were reduced to four pages. Only The Times and the Daily Telegraph chose to print six pages and take a 25% reduction in their print run. Germany, which had the largest press in the world in 1932 with 3,362 newspapers, had only 2,200 by 1939 and a mere 779 by 1945. In 1943 alone 950 were closed, including the famous Frankfurter Zeitung, and all cities of 100,000 or fewer were limited to a single newspaper. Nevertheless, the total circulation of the survivors increased from 19.8 million in 1939 to 25 million in 1945, 82.5% of it being devoted to Nazi publications. However, by the end of the war German newspapers were just single sheets of official communiqués and obituaries.

Japan, which in 1941 ‘possessed one of the most sophisticated mass media networks in the world’ ( B.- A. Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, Oxford, 1991, p. 91), did not have party or government newspapers. Most were privately owned and these backed the government for patriotic not political reasons. After the China incident began in 1937 they were strictly controlled by long-established censorship laws and new laws were introduced in 1941. Provincial newspapers began to be amalgamated in 1940 so that they could be controlled more easily, and to save paper. Nevertheless, at the start of the Pacific war the Japanese press had a daily circulation of 19 million, ‘an average of more than one newspaper per household’ (loc. cit.).

Censorship was total in Germany and Italy. It was total, too, in the USSR, where 2,700 out of 8,789 publications were lost when the Germans invaded in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), and in the occupied countries of Europe. A notable exception was Denmark where the Germans laid down certain censorship guidelines but left them to be implemented by the Danes. German occupying troops could not be criticized but the Danish Nazi Party could be, and was. The general tone of the Danish press did much to foster Danish resistance to the occupation which grew steadily throughout the war.

Of the neutral European countries Sweden had no censorship, but Switzerland was forced by Nazi pressure to introduce a law against anyone publicly insulting a foreign state. The press of both countries reported the deportation of Jews (see Final Solution), Swiss newspapers doing so as early as August 1942. (Their plight seems to have been first mentioned in newspapers published in Slovakia in March 1942.) Despite censorship the newspapers of Axis countries were a useful source of information, as were those from neutral countries, and the British Political Warfare Executive had analysts at the British embassy in Stockholm who read them all; an aircraft flew their reports to London weekly.

Censorship was so strict in Paris before the fall of France in June 1940 that one paper protested by printing scissors on a blank column on its front page. Censorship was self-imposed in both the UK and USA, but a number of newspapers were forcibly closed on both sides of the Atlantic: Charles Coughlin's Social Justice in the USA and the Communist Daily Worker (for nineteen months) in London were two examples. The US press spoke out more often against the government than the British did against theirs, and the Daily Mirror was severely castigated by other London newspapers, and threatened with closure, when it stepped out of line by doing so. Security was of paramount importance and few reports from war correspondents escaped the censor. But in June 1942 the Chicago Tribune published a report that could have betrayed US knowledge of the Japanese naval code (see ULTRA, 2); and in November 1940 the London Evening Standard reported the capture of a German weather party (see meteorological intelligence) which might have warned the Germans that their Abwehr hand cipher had been broken.

Bibliography

Hohenberg, J. , Free Press, Free People: The Best Cause (New York, 1973).
Olson, K. , The History Makers (Baton Rouge, La., 1966).