war correspondents

war correspondents have existed for as long as newspapers have been printed, but the first to be given the designation was William Howard Russell who, in 1854, began reporting the Crimean war for the London Times. During the Second World War the US alone fielded 1,646 accredited correspondents, including 127 women, and the numbers world-wide during the war has been estimated at 10,000.

On both sides the truth was suppressed and correspondents, knowingly or not, fuelled their countries' propaganda machines. One of them, the American novelist John Steinbeck, later wrote that ‘we were all part of the war effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it…we wrote only a part of the war but at that time we believed, fervently believed, that it was the best thing to do’ (Once There Was A War, New York, 1958, p. xviii).

Nearly every national newspaper had accredited war correspondents at the front—as did agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press—though in the UK the Daily Worker was refused facilities in case the interests of the Communist Party were put before the security of the state. Allied correspondents had to agree to submit their copy for military censorship before they could become accredited to formations taking part in the fighting. They were the élite. Some, such as the Australian Alan Moore-head, who reported the Western Desert campaigns, and Ernie Pyle, the American journalist who lauded the ordinary GI, became household names. It was a risky business: 37 US correspondents, including Pyle, died, and 112 were wounded; by July 1941, 29 German reporters and 4 radio journalists had been killed; and 33 Japanese reporters perished in the Philippines in 1944.

Allied war correspondents were civilians in uniform; they wore no badges of rank, but the Geneva Convention entitled those captured to be treated as captains. The Convention's rules forbidding war correspondents to bear arms were often ignored: one British journalist, during the Italian campaign, took temporary command of a platoon and there are numerous examples of similar incidents. Soviet war correspondents, not restricted by the Convention as the USSR had not signed it, automatically served as combatants and over 400 were killed in action (see also USSR, 10).

The tone of American and British reporting was more realistic than in the First World War. Censorship was more relaxed in the USA than in the UK—though the truth about the losses at Pearl Harbor, accurately reported in Japanese newspapers, was rigorously suppressed. Roosevelt's caveat, that news issued under the American War Powers Act ‘must be true and must not give aid and comfort to the enemy’, was an accepted guideline on both sides of the Atlantic where newspaper censorship was self-imposed. But it did not prevent confusion, serious breaches of security, and double standards, and only occasionally did the truth emerge before the censors could get at it. So total was censorship for Allied newspapermen during the fighting that led to the fall of France that neutral correspondents turned to German communiqués, and to the output of Goebbels's Propaganda-Kompagnien, for accurate news which Allied statements failed to provide. These propaganda companies did not employ civilian correspondents. Instead, Goebbels recruited into them all available journalists, war photographers, and radio announcers. They were 12,000 strong at the height of the German–Soviet war, and produced graphic copy in their ‘Front Reports’ as they rode with the victorious Wehrmacht in tanks, flew in their aircraft, and dropped with their parachutists, a form of co-operation which the Allies soon adopted. However, once the war turned against Germany, Goebbels's dictum that ‘news policy is a weapon of war: its purpose is to wage war and not give out information’ was rigorously applied.

Only the Japanese public were less informed than their German counterparts when victory turned to defeat, for the Japanese government controlled the press totally and organized it for war. Its Cabinet Information Bureau dealt with civilian matters such as controlling the press and disseminating information on the war was left to the press department of the Japanese Imperial HQ (see Japan, 5(a)). This ‘deployed its own war correspondents and occasionally drafted civilian reporters for on-the-spot coverage of military operations’ ( B. A. Shillony, Politics and Culture in Wartime Japan, Oxford, 1991, p. 94), and its vice-president, along with the official spokesmen for the army and navy, briefed the press, broadcast, and wrote leading articles for the newspapers. Many intellectuals (bunkajin) were drafted as war correspondents who served in a propaganda corps similar to the Goebbels's Propaganda-Kompagnien. This had groups attached to Japanese armies during the China incident and the Pacific war which propagated cultural policy, such as introducing the Japanese language in place of English, and assumed responsibility for cultural and academic institutions such as the Raffles Museum in Singapore.

During the Finnish–Soviet war the USSR would not let any foreign correspondent near the fighting, and alone among the belligerents was, during the German–Soviet war, as secretive in victory as it had been in defeat. The best-known Soviet war correspondent was the virulently anti-Nazi writer Ilya Ehrenburg, but there were also a number of novelists and poets— Konstantin Simonov and Mikhail Sholokhov among them—who had their articles published in the official organs of the Communist Party. Their style was literary and as censorship was total they became expert at writing atmospheric pieces that were long on sentiment and short on facts. There was no tolerance for anyone who deviated from a total commitment to the communist cause. Ehrenburg told a British correspondent that in wartime all objective reporters ought to be shot. Foreign correspondents, who were accredited to the Soviet foreign office not to the Red Army, were only rarely allowed anywhere near the front. After much haggling, one party was allowed to watch the arrival of US bombers at Poltava after a shuttle bombing operation, but mostly correspondents were forced to glean their news from officialcom muniqués. The British correspondent Alexander Werth, being Russian-born, could at least detect their nuances, and was able to differentiate between ‘fierce’, ‘stubborn’, and ‘heavy’ fighting when a particular battle was described.

The finest war reporting of the German–Soviet war, ‘perceptive, analytical, and accurate’ ( P. Knightley, The First Casualty, London, 1975, p. 255), probably emanated from Curzio Malaparte, who worked on the Eastern Front for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. He alone was able, though not without trouble, to recount truthfully what he saw and have it published at the time.

On one occasion at least correspondents did have a profound and genuine effect on the course of the war that transcended their propaganda functions. This was when 120 US correspondents reported the progress of the battle of Britain, and then of the Blitz. These reports, which included Ed Murrow's famous radio broadcasts, confirmed that the UK was standing firm. They helped swing American public opinion away from the neutralist lobby (see America First Committee) and enabled Roosevelt to enact the destroyers-for-bases' agreement and then Lend-Lease. See also press.

Bibliography

Collier, R. , The Warcos (London, 1989).
Mathews, J. , Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis, 1957).
Wagner, L. , Women War Correspondents of World War II (New York, 1989).