Mum on Malaya

Up the Narrows of New York Harbor one drizzly morning this week stood a hulking grey battleship. Convoyed by Coast Guard craft, she cast anchor at the Government Anchorage, hard by the Staten Island ferry pier. Palm Sunday passengers noted the flag fluttering at her stern: the British ensign. Around 11 o'clock, half her crew went ashore for liberty, and Manhattanites soon knew what ship she was. On the seamen's flat-cap ribbons was the gilded legend: "H.M.S. Malaya."

Malaya's men were willing to talk. They had fought the Jutland veteran as Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville's flagship in the Mediterranean fleet's spectacular show at Genoa on Feb. 9. Malaya, a sister of Queen Elizabeth, had lately been on convoy duty in the Atlantic. A 20-ft. gash in her port side, they told a Herald Tribune reporter, was the mark of a German torpedo in a submarine attack, the night of March 20. With her convoy of 20 merchant vessels apparently on a safe getaway, repairs—reporters guessed#151;under the provisions of the Lend-Lease Act.

Not only did riders on the Staten Island ferry have a good look at her close up but the German consul had only to look out of his office building on Battery Place to see her riding at anchor. But many a U.S. newspaper reader heard nothing about it, for, after the Lend-Lease Act was passed, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox appealed to the U.S. press not to report the movements of British vessels putting into U.S. ports.

In a wire note to editors, Associated Press memoed the fact that a British battleship was off Staten Island, told editors it was sending out no story. Most Manhattan newspapers were mum. Exceptions were the Herald Tribune, which ran a photograph and story on Page One, the tabloid Daily News, which front-paged her in an airview photograph.

Day after the Malaya put in, Frank Knox issued a statement: "I wish to commend the action of the press associations, newspapers, broadcasting companies and photographic agencies who have cooperated. . . . It is true that many people can see these ships as they arrive. ... It is also true that enemy agents can report these movements; but it seems to me only sportsmanlike that the keen American press refrain from giving a report of these ships for it the benefit of press's Britain's enemies. ...." As it was, the press's self-censorship merely concealed from the U.S. public a fact that was not even mildly camouflaged from German officials, whom the U.S. Government allows to operate in Manhattan as representatives of a "friendly nation."