Weller's War

by George Weller

  The Malays and the Chinese loaded what they could on bicycles or wagons and disappeared humbly rubberward. Only the Eurasians and the native clerk class of pen-pushers went toward Singapore, sometimes by train, sometimes in wheezing automobiles. A slightly intoxicated middle-aged English planter was driving a low-slung black roadster around in circles in a deserted village crossroads, muttering to himself. “Which way to the front, boys?” he cried. “That way or that way?”

  “That way,” the retreating party answered, pointing toward Singapore.

  “I doubt it,” he said under his breath. Seeming to remember something, he got out and bent his flushed face over his gasoline gauge and peered at his tires. “Wife and kids left long ago,” he said out of the corner of his mouth to nobody in particular.

  Malaya was prepared for only one kind of attack: a full-scale offensive by an old-fashioned armada of destroyers, cruisers, and dreadnoughts entering Singapore's mine fields. It seemed impossible that the enemy would refuse to do the act which every preparation had made perilous for him, and would seek another way.

  A delaying action like the British withdrawal through the Malay Peninsula deserves to be called deliberate only if the delay is fully exploited. The Greek campaign may be considered a delaying action for the defense of Crete, just as the withdrawal across France may be considered a delaying action for the defense of England. But England could have been taken then had the Nazis dared, and Crete was taken. Is the history of Allied defeats one of withdrawal where the defenders have failed to exploit the interval they have gained?

  Americans have hitherto understood politics as a science of relationship between peoples. Strategy, inseparably connected with formations of land and water, has always remained vague and abstract in their minds. At the Imperial conference in June, 1918, at which the British Empire decided the apportionment of colonies when the Germans were to be defeated, there was no American representation. Thereafter at the peace conferences Woodrow Wilson, while giving away to Japan without protest the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall archipelagoes—thus creating between America and the Philippines the screen of Japanese defenses that were to make MacArthur's pleas for help unanswerable—spent his time quarreling over Papua with the adroit William Hughes, Premier of Australia. “You don't understand Papuans, Mr. President,” said Uncle Billy. “They don't want plebiscites. Up in Papua, people eat each other.” Wilson, whom Uncle Billy once described to Chicagonews as “a man of mulish obstinacy,” knew as little of his country's political stake in Asia as most of his countrymen did a generation later.

  PROBLEMS OF CENSORSHIP

  Having been to the jungle front, one saw the inevitableness of the British retreat. Nowhere was the withdrawal disorderly or panicky. But the movement was too fast to offer any truly delaying resistance to the Jap.

  Now Chicagonews experienced a sensation strange to a war correspondent—he did not wish to meet the leaders of his own forces. In a way, they were speaking to him, as to the public, through the communiqués. Understatement depends for its force upon there being somewhere a catalytic agency speaking the whole gravity of the situation. At Singapore this should have been the correspondents. But it was too late for plain speaking; it could no longer be allowed with safety to the forces.

  The British generals were not actually as much like ostriches as they seemed from afar. But when the Japs hit, it was too late for the truth to keep Singapore free.

  The reluctant recognition that Malaya could not be reinforced and Singapore would probably not hold must have been made in the first fortnight of January, when General Pownall was transferred back to Java, there to submerge quietly and perhaps not wholly reluctantly beneath new Allied staff announcements and the reshuffle of the Southwest Pacific Command. There was a feeling for a newspaperman that those who were intelligent knew that Singapore would be lost and could not say so, those less intelligent thought it might be held and would affirm it with a confidence far out of proportion to their actual beliefs, and the Governor would simply predict it would be held. Under these circumstances it became embarrassing to visit Singapore's leaders—embarrassing because their views could not be expressed in print without adding to the spirit of error which characterized much journalism in wartime, and betraying the journalist's obligation to the people he informs. It is not much better to be silent than to lie. But when all tongues are bound by crisis, and there is no hope of revealing the truth even if one hears it, perhaps it is a little better. The “Singapore will be held” of the military changed, as it always does, to “Singapore must be held.” Generals and admirals, quite properly, sometimes say retreat but never say surrender.

  What was the use of visiting public men with the appetite of journalism when they too were imprisoned in a situation where they could not speak the truth without being accused of pessimism or defeatism? Let them alone with their consciences, their deciphered signals, their dossiers, and their in-baskets and out-baskets. Men at work, do not disturb. Wavell himself never gave a press conference or even received formally any newspapermen. One or two who knew him, like the sensitive and courageous Ian Morrison of the London Times, stole a word with him when he came up from Java briefly to visit the front. He was noncommittal. It was against the code even to say he was in Malaya until after he left, and unlawful to quote him. Wavell was serving as the boy at the dike while waiting for the United States to take over the Pacific, and he knew it. As the retreat went on, the amount anybody could truthfully say shrank in proportion with the distance between the “line” and the Strait of Johore.

  There was a discussion by correspondents with the military after the causeway was blown, when the red-balled bombers began to appear daily and nightly. General Percival2* said: “Today we stand beleaguered in our island fortress”—he did not speak of siege. The censors hated the word, saw that inevitably it would be used, and were determined to hold it off, as though it were Japanese, to the last minute.

  Nearly every ship that left southward was bombed. The air was completely in Japanese hands. Yet the censors still blue-penciled “siege.”

  At this time the Japanese used to threaten to drop parachutists on Singapore Island; they never did so, but only because they were moving southward too rapidly by other means. Today any area, whether surrounded by water or land, is fortified only when it has both fighter and interceptor aircraft. The land or sea approaches had become the equivalent, after Crete, of the portcullises of the castle. It is always possible to scale the walls downward with parachutes as one once scaled them upward with ladders. But there were words that Singapore dreaded, and one was siege. To the censors this still meant a surrounding. The earthbound military refused to realize that when you have lost control of the air on all sides you are surrounded.

  After the causeway was blown, the troops having retreated across it, there was a conference which would have made Noah Webster smile in the pressroom at the tall Cathay building—the thirteen-story Cathay riding the sea of Oriental three-deckers. “Can we refer now to the ‘siege of Singapore’ as having begun?” the correspondents wanted to know. The army's strategist-lexicographer hesitated. The enemy were mounting artillery in Japanese estates on the shores of Johore; it was a matter of hours, perhaps minutes, before the very room in which the correspondents were sitting, fully exposed to observation posts, would be under Japanese shellfire. But had Singapore's siege begun? The military censor did not like to think so.

  “I still don't like that word,” he said. “I still don't think it's justified.”

  There was a burst of expostulation.

  “But surely you can't deny that we are besieged,” said someone.

  “Besieged, yes,” said the military censor, “but I object to the noun ‘siege.’”

  “We cannot say that ‘the siege of Singapore has begun.’ Can we say that ‘Singapore is now besieged’?”

  The censor nodded. “Yes, I will pass ‘besieged.’ But I still don't like the word ‘siege.’”

 
At least one newspaperman who missed the conference, and could not seem to get the hang of this rule even after his colleagues patiently explained it to him, led his dispatch off with “The siege of Singapore has begun.” The next morning, when shells were dropping on the island, he received his censored carbon back, and it read “The besiegement of Singapore has begun.” Naturally “besiegement” was changed in London and New York back to “siege,” the cable editors reasonably considering that this was a time for plain language.

  Perhaps more frankness of mind would have helped, and perhaps not. The British still seemed to believe that they were bluffing the Japs. As the conservative Straits Times rudely put it, they were not successfully bluffing even themselves. There was also a latent and baseless fear of Malays and Chinese running loose in race riots if the truth were told them. Actually, during Singapore's disintegration nothing unlawful occurred beyond petty pillage that would be normal in any country under the same circumstances, and an ordinarily well-disciplined Malay policeman whistled at a white woman. Singapore's Asiatics were ready to face the truth.

  Considering into the bargain the Eurasian air-raid wardens and bank clerks, the Chinese and Hindu debris-cleaners, the blood-givers of every race and age, and considering the great swarm of the bereaved through the heavy bombing raids when Singapore was provided no fighter defense whatever and the official figures for a single raid were 453 dead and 1100 injured—considering all this, the balance of behavior is so far on the side of the Asiatics that nothing more can be said.

  It is difficult to mention the military, naval, and RAF censors temperately. They held the correspondents' noses fast to the grindstone of the communiqués, even when the communiqués were two to three days behind the facts. The idea was that if a place was admitted lost, the enemy would move through it faster and with less caution. It was not an imaginative concept.

  It was never clear whether the military censors were superior to the Governor's two civil appointees, Duckworth and Fearon, who topped the staff of robot censors beneath. Some were ferocious; a particular practice was to cut the leading paragraph off a narrative then send it 10,000 miles away to enter the newspaper office headless, its statement of topic, place, and circumstances amputated, a victim of amnesia.

  The newspaperman's malady is to accept the inhibitions of a bad censorship and to discourage himself by precensoring his work. A good correspondent has a lively sense of responsibility, but guards himself against any feeling that he is an apologist, whether for groups, officials, or attitudes. The Singapore censorship made semiapologists out of a great many through fear of being disaccredited by the London War Office, an ever-present weapon on British territory.

  The first of many disagreeable events was the imprisonment of Thomas Fairhall, a thirty-year-old correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, who on Christmas Eve was thrown into jail for some observations about the military situation he had received on a visit to Australian troops. The message had been censored both militarily and politically, and passed. But after an inquiry from Canberra, the military used several Intelligence officers to induce him to name his source. Fairhall refused, and was released on Christmas afternoon.

  Next, the War Office ordered Major Fisher to disaccredit E. R. Noderer of the Chicago Tribune, who describes himself as “a little guy with glasses.” An energetic reporter, after covering Dunkirk from the German side he left Berlin for Cairo. In Malaya, Noderer managed to get bombed and machine-gunned more than almost any other correspondent. It was embarrassing for Major Fisher to have to tell him the War Office had deprived him of the privileges of the war zone. Everyone, even the censors, did his best to try to persuade the War Office to forgive the isolationist Chicago Tribune, but the War Office did not forgive. The reasons given for Noderer's dismissal were that he had never reported to the Cairo authorities (not true), that his Iran dispatches were unfavorable to British interests, and that press accommodations were overcrowded. The reasoning was like Singapore itself: inept, but hopeless to correct. No pleas had any effect. The London order stayed, as London's orders do.

  There were at the time twenty-nine radio and newspaper correspondents in Singapore, of whom seven were feeding American outlets. Thus the United States, vital as its interests were in Singapore, received its non-British information through seven fallible human beings: Noderer, Harold Guard of the United Press, Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press, Till-man Durdin of the New York Times, Cecil Brown of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Martin Agronsky of the National Broadcasting Company, and George Weller of the Chicago Daily News.

  Then came the third step: Cecil Brown, who served Life magazine and was correspondent for Newsweek as well as for the C.B.S., a regularly British-accredited correspondent who had suffered expulsion from Italy for his struggles against the censorship there, also found his accreditation canceled.

  All three cases were thrusts at American information, because Fairhall's newspaper had entered into an agreement with Time. This move left four American newspapermen and one broadcaster providing news from Singapore. There was still the question of whether America should send naval help in spite of Britain's loss of air control over Malaya. Following Pearl Harbor, America was no longer neutral, but a full-time belligerent; the obligation of informing the American public honestly was getting greater as the quantity of news shrank and the quality deteriorated.

  Brown, a tall and likable drink of water, pressed a little too hard on the weak spots to be popular with the authorities. He had gone on a gratuitous lecture tour of British jungle camps before the war and made a characteristic journalist's mistake of trying to mend matters by working upon the military rather than the public. So much depends in military life upon morale that criticism is liable to wound some frail characters. After the line began falling back, some officers who returned from the front thought his predictions too exact to be innocent. For a time Brown teamed with Odie Gallagher of the Daily Express in trying to break through with tidings of what was happening. Gallagher finally gave up and went to Burma; Brown remained. Living with him and Martin Agronsky at the home of two men of the Texaco Oil Company, Chicagonews followed their querulous battle and listened for the snap as each nerve string parted. Brown and Agronsky got along well enough with Duckworth and Fearon, but with the subordinate censor they were similar to caged animals trained by torture. In this censor's office there was a kind of hurricane fence erected from ceiling to wall. The censors, who included several women, were locked in. Their desks were at the end of a great dark room artificially illuminated even by day. Through the fence one saw only women, pencils upraised to pounce.

  When Brown and Agronsky tried to write tame pieces they would have to wait for the underling censors to communicate with superiors. This exasperated them. Often in the afternoon they could be seen clinging to the hurricane fence—their wailing wall—pleading for someone to listen to their troubles. Agronsky, a heavily built athlete, looked like a distraught orangutan; Brown resembled, stretched against the wire, a Russian wolfhound. “Can't someone come to the screen and talk this over in a friendly way?” Agronsky would cry in forceful Brooklynese. Not a head would turn. Brown would drop his long arms from the bars of the cage and moan: “It's no use, Martin, it's no use. Forty million listeners don't matter. They just don't matter.”

  It was never possible to ascertain exactly why Brown was disaccredited. Nobody claimed he had tried to evade censorship. His messages went under the eyes of the authorities; they had been responsible for what he was allowed to say. A strong hint was dropped that he was being punished for matter whose submission indicated he was not disposed as he should have been. Not all the correspondents, not even all the Americans, rallied to his defense; there was no aggressive defense even from his home organization. Brown's expulsion coincided with a severe article in Life, passed by censorship, in which he described the Malayan campaign. It was evident Singapore would fall, and the authorities might more adroitly have held their move against him. But they
did not, and said that curbing him had been under consideration for weeks.

  A publisher had already signed Brown for a book on his Far Eastern experiences, and Chicagonews saw him off in a Qantas flying boat. In Batavia the Dutch authorities, exercised about his effect on morale, would not consent to his broadcasting. From Soerabaya Brown flew to Darwin, then back to the United States. The free press in the Empire were more eager than any American organization to hear his story; both the Express and the Sydney Telegraph offered him a chance to tell his side, and even to pay him. Not wishing to have a succès de scandale, he refused.

  A year before, under the misapprehension that American diplomats were qualified to regulate the country's press, Duckworth—a man of integrity—had come to an understanding with the U.S. consul general by which American correspondents, in return for having their dispatches discussed rather than censored without right of appeal, were to hold secret all matters concerning the Singapore censorship. None of the correspondents in Singapore had ever heard of this agreement.

  Military censorship always ends by being political. Since in a military sense Singapore had very little to conceal except the location of its big gun emplacements, its ammunition stores, and its gasoline dumps, and was, in the plain words of the Straits Times, “a bluff,” the censorship had to be turned around and begin by being political in the guise of being military. In other words, it had to sustain the illusion that Singapore was adequately fortified. This meant no one could say that Singapore was not adequately fortified. Perhaps one might do a little guarded carping, but an out-and-out flat denial that worthwhile defenses existed was out of the question.

  Censorship was necessary before the war ever opened, not to conceal what was there, but to simulate what was lacking. A censorship is supposed to keep political criticism under control. Is there any point at which a correspondent would be hauled before the authorities for being too optimistic? It never occurred to any correspondents in Singapore to attempt this unusual experiment by filing a dispatch that outbuttered the most complacent greasers of public opinion, that brought together all the paper armies, typewriter machine guns, and handout airplanes used to pooh-bah the enemy and insomnify the public. Perhaps they should have done so.