The Old Army Game

Military expediency collided head-on last week with the U.S. public's right to know the truth.

In the bitter confusion of the German breakthrough the Army clamped down a censorship thicker than the pea-soup fog that shrouded the great German counterattack. Communiques were as much as 48 hours behind the event. When they came they were meager and vague. Correspondents blew up.

The Army's explanation: the situation after the breakthrough was so "fluid" that detailed stories would jeopardize plans for meeting the German offense. Correspondents said it less politely: the First Army had been caught with its pants down and the high command was trying to cover up. In a stormy session at Supreme Headquarters they told General Eisenhower's press chief, Brigadier General Frank ("Honk") Allen what they thought of SHAEF's news blackout.

Portly, senatorial George Lyon, veteran newspaper editor and OWI man, supported them. Lyon rumbled: "SHAEF's policy on this matter is stupid. . . . Everybody across hell and 40 acres knows what's going on. The American people are entitled to know. . . ."

In Washington, the War Department took the view that the newsmen had lost their heads; censorship, imposed by Generals Bradley and Hodges, was justified by the circumstances. Younger officers, however, conceded that if the public relations people had played fair and sensibly in the past, had not withheld news which had no real security angle, then in this crisis they could have got prompt cooperation.

MacArthur's Communiques. Europe was not the only place where Army Public Relations had a public-relations problem. From the other great theater of Army operations, communiques passed along by General MacArthur's loyal press chief, Colonel LeGrande A. Diller, had aroused deep doubts--in the New York Times's military expert, Hanson Baldwin, among others--about the General's accuracy in reporting the facts. A recent communique asserted that during the Leyte campaign the enemy had "sustained 82,554 casualties." On the basis of the document itself, that precise-sounding total was 58% estimated. U.S. casualties were reported at a ratio of one to every 38 Japs. Newsmen on Leyte reported the ratio as one to 31. The discrepancy was not clearly explained.

MacArthur communiques sometimes pose a problem in semantics. Isolated phrases can be easily defended: the overall effect, especially to the uncritical reader, has sometimes been rosier than the cold facts warrant. On landing at Morotai: "This would cut off and isolate the enemy garrison in the East Indies . . . sever the vital supplies to the Japanese mainland of oil and other war essentials."

At the Leyte landing: "The strategic result of capturing the Philippines will be decisive. . . . The Dutch East Indies . . . Borneo, Malaya and Burma will be severed from Japan proper. . . . To the north, either flank will be vulnerable and can be rolled up at will." Two months ago a communique claimed: "The end of the Leyte-Samar campaign is in sight."

From the beginning of the war the Army's public relations have often been far from candid. Samples were the story of the tragic shooting down of U.S. airborne troops by friendly antiaircraft batteries off Sicily which the Army and the Navy covered up for eight months; the Patton soldier-slapping affair, suppressed until it had built up so much steam it almost blew the dome off the Capitol. Another sample was the sour finale to Merrill's Marauders (TIME, Aug. 14). A more recent one: the handling of the production-slump story, which, instead of rousing the public to greater effort, provoked controversy and mistrust. A continuing one: overoptimistic sounding-off by various brass hats.

Who Is to Blame? General Marshall's press chief, Major General Alexander D. Surles, maintains fairly close liaison from Washington with Allen, Diller, all other public relations officers in the field. But theater PROs get their orders from theater commanders, each of whom is boss in his own bailiwick. Washington would no more think of releasing anything which General Eisenhower had put a block on, or of pulling down anything which General MacArthur had put a balloon to, than it would think of rewriting the Ten Commandments.

The old Army game of passing the buck has to end somewhere. Overall Army policy is made in Washington by War Secretary Stimson, and General Marshall, Hap Arnold, other members of the General Staff.

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