Witness to War -- Episode Three

 "The last war was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth.  Any writer who said otherwise lied."

- Ernest Hemingway

EPISODE THREE:

The Price of Silence

World War I

            By the time the First World War rolled around in 1914, the military had realized that one way of imposing censorship was to absorb the correspondents into the military machine.

            The result was effective, but led to a disastrous silence.

            Only six British correspondents were allowed at the front during the World War I.  They wore uniforms and were given the rank of Captain, provided servants and guides and lived with the General Staff.

            The British needed the support of a queasy public unsure about the war, so they developed a propaganda machine so successful that it later served as the model for Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister.

            The British first dehumanized the Germans by calling them Huns and planting false stories about murders and mutilations of children.  British newspaper editors became willing allies in this deceit. 

            When America entered the War, the British and the French convinced General Pershing to use the censorship system.  The result was a totally controlled press.

            Even the famous Richard Harding Davis, whose yearly earnings of over $32,000 made him the highest paid correspondent in the world, couldn't buck the censors.  After a year of waiting to visit the front, he went home.

            Because of this rigorous censorship and sanitized reporting, it remains impossible to determine the real number of casualties in World War I.

            Most believe that the French lost about half a million men in the first four months of the war and over 5 million by 1918.

            The Allies lost over 600,000 men in one battle, the Somme, and more British officers died in the first few months than in all wars of the previous 100 years.

            The Germans faked their casualty figures, too.  By the best estimates, at Verdun alone 325,000 Germans were killed or wounded.  They stopped counting after that.

            Ernest Hemingway summed it all up: "The writers either wrote propaganda, shut up or went home."

            Keith Murdoch, the father of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, proved to be one of a very few correspondents willing to challenge the censors' grip.

            He arrived at Gallipoli to cover the British attempt to capture

Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the War. He soon found out that General Ian Hamilton, the commander, had bungled the mission.

            When Murdoch smuggled his report out of the country, Hamilton wired ahead to have him arrested at Marseilles. Murdoch was jailed and his dispatch was confiscated.  After his two day incarceration,  he went to London and dictated a story from memory.

            Hamilton was relieved of his command and the troops were evacuated from Gallipoli.

            Historians believe that the censored reporting of World War I helped perpetuate accounts of tragic mass slaughter.

            The German public was equally ill served by its own press. German readers were told that their armies hadn't been defeated in the field,  but were tricked by the Russian Communists and the Jews.

            Thus, a silenced press helped Hitler use these charges to justify his quest for power.