The Press: False Armistice II

The nation's newspapers had been warned: V-E day will be official only when it is announced jointly by the Big Three. Yet many of them, on Saturday, April' 28, broke out their blackest type. The Chicago Times took up its entire front page to say: VICTORY EXTRA. GERMANY QUITS. The Knoxville Journal spread one. word ten inches deep:

SURRENDER.

Their authority for this was a bulletin which the Associated Press (but no other press association) carried:

BULLETIN

SURRENDER

SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 28 (AP) GERMANY HAS SURRENDERED TO THE ALLIED GOVERNMENTS UNCONDITIONALLY, AND ANNOUNCEMENT IS EXPECTED MOMENTARILY, IT WAS STATED BY A HIGH AMERICAN OFFICIAL TODAY.

An hour and a half later, when President Truman said it wasn't so, recriminations began. Editors and broadcasters who had gone off halfcocked, blamed it all on the A.P. So, gleefully, did the U.P. and I.N.S., which have long smarted under the A.P.'s boast: the Byline of Dependability. The A.P. blamed it all on the "high American official"—Senator Tom Connally (see U.S. AT WAR).

Newspapermen would long debate how much of the blame belonged to the A.P. The red-faced A.P. treasured one technical defense: it had not sent the Connally story out as a flash (as such news deserved, if the A.P. were unreservedly vouching for it) but only as a bulletin. And the bulletin carried a hedge, "announcement is expected momentarily," which did not justify the unqualified headlines.

Yet the Atlanta Constitution, which had rushed out with an extra, front-paged a story: "How sweet is revenge, and at last after nearly 27 long years the United Press and Roy Howard are tasting it." Actually, much as the U.P. tried to talk up the "false reports carried by the Associated Press," the bulletin was far from being as bald and blunt as Roy Howard's famed unequivocal cable from France Nov. 7, 1918, that set off a day's celebration of the "false Armistice": URGENT ARMISTICE ALLIES GERMANY SIGNED ELEVEN MORNING HOSTILITIES CEASED TWO SAFTERNOON.