The Press: MR. KNOX’S CENSORSHIP

The Battle of Crete last week reached Puget Sound. The Bainbridge Review (a suburban weekly, brightly edited by young Seattlites) burst out with a banner headline: REVIEW VIOLATES A NATIONAL CENSORSHIP. Prefacing its editorial with the statement, “For several weeks now the Review has been torn between a normal desire to obey an unofficial Government censorship and what we feel deeply to be a solemn duty to our readers,” the Review announced that the British battleship Warspite was in the Bremerton Navy Yard near Seattle for repairs. The Review’s reasons:

1) “America is not at war.”

2) “The entire population of Bremerton, figuratively, need only look out the window and see the ship lying there. Many Islanders have seen the vessel, either enroute to Bremerton or in port. Thousands of Seattle residents know where she is. British tars freely move about, telling frankly where their ship is and what she went through at Crete. There isn’t a foreign agent who hasn’t already told his Government about the Warspite”

The Review airmailed a copy to Navy Public Relations in Washington, D.C. Said its editorial:

“America should not fear the future. Large numbers of Americans, however, do fear the future. Wild, unconfirmed rumors —on which a censored press is silent—engender that fear. Largely their fear is based on their lack of knowledge. …

” Other censorship incidents of the week:

> One egregious piece of misinformation about the British Navy was published last week by the New York Times, which labors scrupulously to satisfy Secretary Knox. It published a picture of a British sailor being invalided home (he came into New York Harbor aboard the Empress of Asia) and captioned it “a bearded British tar whose ship was sunk in the Battle of Crete. . . .” All readers who glanced at the nameband on the sailor’s hat (see cut, p. 45) got the erroneous information that H.M.S. Warspite had been sunk in Crete.

> At Sand Point Naval Air station on Lake Washington, Seattle, one grey afternoon last week the Navy fired four revolver shots that splattered dangerously close around a speedboat carrying Seattle Times Reporter Paul O’Neil and crack Photographer Harold F. Smith. Excuse was that they slipped in too close to Navy hangars while maneuvering for pictures of one of the Soviet planes carrying the Russian flying mission. The photographer had to get between the plane and the land in order not to get the naval station, a “naval secret,” in the background of the picture. When the occupants of the boat nastily surrendered, the Navy could not agree how close in shore they should not have come (one officer said 100 yards, another 50 yards; State patrolmen said the boundary was farther out in the lake).

The men whose lives were endangered shuddered and held their peace, but Seattle Post-Intelligencer Publisher John Boettiger, son-in-law of the President, next day let go a full broadside against Secretary Knox. That incident, said he, “culminates a long series of incidents of officiousness, stupid regulations and a lack of cooperation, which would seem to indicate that the United States Navy … is trying deliberately to alienate the American press. . . . Since Mr. Knox became Secretary, and as a result of his woefully misguided orders affecting the press, the popularity of the Navy has diminished dangerously. It is ironical that Mr. Knox, a newspaperman, should thus betray the American Navy and the American press.”