The Press: A Complete Account

Although there are nearly 300 correspondents from 19 nations accredited to Korea, the London Communist Daily Worker last week boasted that it was "the one newspaper . . . able to give a complete account of what is really happening." Basis for this all-sweeping statement: Worker Staffer Alan Winnington is the only English-language correspondent with the North Korean army.

Britons were hardly surprised that the "complete account" of 40-year-old Correspondent Winnington, a British Communist since 1934, sounded as if he were covering an entirely different war. His "scoops" were splashed across the Worker's Page One under such streamers as: "U.S. Belsen in Korea," "Americans Drove Women to Pits of Death." In one village, wrote Winnington, 7,000 people had been "butchered . . . under the supervision of American officers . . . Great ditches like those of Belsen were used to try to hide the traces of the massacre."

But last week Winnington did have a beat, of sorts; he gave the names and cabled long quotes from American prisoners whom he had supposedly interviewed. The "quotes" turned out to be such a faithful parroting of the Worker's propaganda line, notably against Air Force bombings, that they could just as well have been composed in the Worker's London office. A private from Texas was quoted as saying he had "only one complaint and that is against Uncle Sam's Air Force ..." A major from New Hampshire, reported Communist Winnington, said he felt that "we [prisoners] have been treated better than we deserve. Food good, medical care fine, ten cigarettes a day, we can use the piano and we are safe from everything but our planes." A corporal from Missouri, reported as having been captured after two companions refused to surrender and were killed, was quoted as saying: "I reckon they believed that they would be shot in the back of the head like MacArthur said. Well, we were not. That was just his way of trying to get us to fight."*

In other parts of the world, the Communist press was having no such freedom.

¶ In Western Germany, Allied authorities slapped a go-day suspension on the Stuttgart Volksstimme, the eleventh Communist paper closed this month for violating Occupation Law Number Five, which prohibits acts prejudicial to the "prestige or security of the allied forces."

¶ In Japan, following General MacArthur's suspension of Akahata, leading Communist newspaper, Japanese authorities closed down 1,092 Communist newspapers and periodicals.

¶ In Australia, Publisher William Pardon Burns of the Communist Sydney Tribune was sentenced to nine months in jail for sedition. The Tribune had urged Australian seamen to boycott cargoes for Korea.