The Press: Censorship Fantasia

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A group of crack Washington correspondents last week practically blew the roof on censorship. They had just finished a 24-day tour of leading war plants as guests of the National Association of Manufacturers. Their wrath was aimed not at N.A.M. but at the six Army officers who accompanied them as censors (of the one Navy censor who went along they thought better).

Said the Chicago Sun's W. A. S. Douglas at the N.A.M.'s farewell dinner in Buffalo: "Our office has wasted its money and we have wasted our time on this trip, because of the censorship. I have been reduced to a practice for which I have little talent, namely that of writing trivia."

Said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Richard L. Stokes: "I have seen things on this trip that would inspire and electrify the country, but everything inspirational that I have written was cut out by the censors."

Words, sentences and paragraphs, said the correspondents, were altered or deleted at will by the censors, with frequently bad-tempered admonitions that military orders were not to be questioned.

Conflicts between the traveling censors and the local public-relations officers at ordnance plants were frequent.

Typical censorship ineptitudes that haunted reporters:

> In Dayton correspondents were allowed to describe in detail a .50-caliber machine gun. Two days later, at an ordnance plant, no mention was allowed of the caliber of cartridges for these same guns. In two other plants mention of the guns' caliber became taboo.

> At one plant no objection was raised to saying that the Bell Airacobra was driven by Allison liquid-cooled motors; but at Bell Aircraft itself the engine could not be named.

> Told that one plant was so secret they could not even say they had seen it, let alone its product, correspondents a few days later beheld the selfsame product, in color, peering out of a full-page ad in the Satevepost.

> They found that local newspapers repeatedly carried full stories that were forbidden nationally.

> In Akron, where the biggest tangle came between censors and correspondents, complete censorship was imposed on statements by rubber experts that Washington had given deceptive estimates of future synthetic rubber production.