Another spy, better funded with American $50 bills, headed straight for Ottawa, where he lived in a hotel for two years doing absolutely no spying. When he turned himself in, the censors kept the story out of the press, though it would not have compromised military security.

Obeying a whim of Winston Churchill's, Canada shackled some German prisoners of war; this led to a battle between hundreds of PoWs and Canadian militia in a camp at Bowmanville, Ontario. It was an extraordinary and embarrassing incident, and the censors clamped down hard on it.

In Western Canada, censorship silenced most reports of Japan's "balloon bombs." Japanese scientists had discovered the jet stream before the war. The military exploited it by building thousands of balloons, armed with incendiaries and bombs, and launching them against the West Coast.

The intent was to set fire to Canadian and American forests, but the censors were not about to let the Japanese know how well they were doing. (Not well at all, though a balloon bomb killed a pregnant Oregon woman and five children on a Sunday school picnic.)

B.C.'s zombie war

With the collapse of Germany, Canada's attention swung to the Pacific and the impending invasion of Japan. But this phase of the war would involve the "zombies" -- Canadian draftees who had been conscripted on the promise they would serve only in Canada.

Despised by volunteers and civilians alike, the zombies were shocked to learn they would be shipped to the Pacific. For a few anxious weeks in 1945, military camps in Abbotsford, Vernon and Terrace teetered on the edge of something like a civil war between zombies and volunteers, with both sides armed and trained for battle. In the end, it was a mere mutiny, and the Canadian public learned almost nothing about it until well after the war.

Bourrie's best chapter deals with Tommy Shoyama. A bright young man with a new BA in economics from UBC, Shoyama in 1938 found himself editing the New Canadian, an English-language paper for the Japanese community in B.C. After Pearl Harbor, the RCMP shut down three Japanese-language papers, leaving Shoyama as de facto spokesperson for thousands of Japanese Canadians who were being uprooted and scattered across Canada.

Shoyama himself ended up in Kaslo, still publishing his paper. The censors actually supported him, though they sometimes fought with him over particular stories (and about Japanese-language ads and articles they couldn't read). When Japanese Canadians were finally allowed to enlist, Shoyama was one of the first to join, serving in intelligence as a translator.

After the war, Shoyama went to work for Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, and eventually became deputy minister of finance in Ottawa under John Turner, Donald Macdonald and Jean Chrétien.

Has anything changed?

Bourrie's book of course raises questions about the present relations between government, military and media. The military are still reluctant to release any information at all; the government wants politically useful reports; the media struggle between getting stories out and supporting the troops.

Issues weren't clear-cut in the Second World War, and they still aren't. Lacking a censorship system to keep diplomat Richard Colvin out of the media, the Harper government had to resort to Peter MacKay's abuse and insults to try to discredit him. But the principle was the same as in the Bowmanville PoW battle and the zombie mutinies: protect the government and the military.

If the media in the Second World War were trying to do their bit, today's media don't want to seem disloyal either. But it's complicated -- Quebecers aren't the only ones objecting to our involvement in Afghanistan, and the present war is no existential threat to Canada.

If today's military reporting isn't transparent, it's at least porous. Imagine today's online technology in the 1940s, with the zombies in Terrace tweeting to the world about their grievances and Tommy Shoyama blogging about the injustice suffered by the Japanese Canadians. Imagine Ottawa trying to suppress news of the Battle of the St. Lawrence while people onshore were taking photos on their smartphones and uploading them to Facebook.

We see the equivalent in today's conflicts: digital snapshots of Abu Ghraib, diplomatic secrets released by Wikileaks, video clips from Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street. It's still possible to shut down an unwelcome story, but it's a lot harder than it used to be.

Mark Bourrie has given us a useful perspective on persisting issues of media freedom, as well as on how Canada fought on the home front -- with consequences that shaped the last 70 years.

[Check out more Tyee Rights and Justice reporting, here.]